Six lessons of Rapid Response for 2025

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1:22Hi all, Bob Safian here. Today we have a special episode highlighting some of our favorite moments from Rapid Response in 2024. While Rapid Response focuses on in-the-moment challenges, there are important lasting lessons embedded in each conversation. We've identified six key lessons from the year spanning tech, leadership, and creative solutions, illuminated by six memorable moments from guests like Will.i.am, Airbnb's Brian Chesky, and Salesforce's Mark Benioff. Together, these moments offer a foundation for dealing with our turbulent world in 2025. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Lessons of Rapid Response.

2:10Lesson number one, AI disruption is only getting started. Our first lesson comes courtesy of musician, entrepreneur, and personality Will.i.am. I sat down with Will in early September to talk about the launch of his AI radio product, Radio.FYI. But he also explored the still evolving ways that AI is redefining music, media, and business overall. And true to Will's nature, yes, we got some rhymes. Let's listen. you were the first one to tell me about udo which is this amazing ai-based music generator that you're investing i mean you prompt it creates an original song for you it's amazing now the record labels are suing it for infringement like how do you think about squaring this sort of awesome tech for creative work and the kind of creative work that underlies it that trains it how do you think about those things fitting say for example spotify had no users the record companies wouldn't have sued them so the reason why they sue them is because there's like growth the reason why they sued udio is because udio has growth so it's a good thing because that means they're going to come to some type of agreement faster and artists and how they trained their stuff on is going to be resolved.

3:36But we're in tricky grounds now. For example, let's say, for example, Prince was alive. And you went to Prince and said, hey, Prince, who's your inspiration? Prince is going to obviously tell you James Brown, Sly and Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix. If you would ask Michael Jackson, hey, Mike, who's your inspiration? Michael Jackson is going to say James Brown, Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr., and Gene Kelly. What they both have in common is James Brown. And it's clear that James Brown is their big inspiration. You can see it. So in this case, from human to human, we call it inspiration. Machines call it data set.

4:17And training, what you trained on. If you would ask, like, an artist, be like, yo, who's your inspiration? It's the same shit. Because we have a neural network, and that neural network was based off of our neural network. So now we're in a touchy ground here. because last time I checked, Prince did not give James Brown royalties because he was inspired by him. His pathways were a part of his data set. So that's where it gets blurry, where we are now. Do you use Udio? Is there something you use it for in your songwriting, in your process? no because Udio doesn't do black eyed peas right well you should be able to help him with that yeah but I don't want to help him with that the way I write music the AI doesn't write music like that is what I mean by that it doesn't do fusion right it can do like yo give me like trap it does that awesome it can do like jazz great but if the moment i'm like yo give me give me samba with a little bit of blues and a little bit of rock and a little bit of calypso it's not gonna do that right like it's better with pure flavors, right?

5:53Like more subtle flavors or creating new flavors, it just doesn't do that as well. Yet. Does that what people most misunderstand about AI, the yet? That, you know, like right now it can't do black eyed peas, but maybe it will be able to? This is the worst it's ever going to be because it just gets better from here. And that's being optimistic in every sense of the way. Ethically, morally, business practice, legally, you know, compensation-wise, this is the worst it's ever going to be. Being optimistic. Let's be optimistic that the greed that we don't lead, that the powers that be don't lead with greed.

6:49this is the worst it's ever going to be. That sentence is it. Let's be optimistic that the powers that be don't lead with greed. This is the worst it's ever going to be. Lesson number two, the intention economy is rising. The next lesson comes from Darreter Cedar, chief marketing officer of Autodesk, who talked to me from the glitz and glamour of the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, where the industry hands out top awards. I previously talked with Dara about Super Bowl ads, and from Cannes, she doubled down on the value of focus, that the story we tell our customers, our employees, and our investors requires intentionality and intensity, especially in today's marketplace.

7:37Let's cue the tape. When we talked about the Super Bowl, You and I talked about the Cerave ad with Michael Cera. Remember that one where we talked about it? That spot that was at the Super Bowl won. It won the Social and Influenza Grand Prix. Ogilvy, the agency that worked with Cerave, the brand on this, they got more than 450 content creators to fuel speculation around Michael Cera's potential involvement with the brand. So if you think about it, from day one, they were focused on the results because it's a world where you can get lost in the noise. Right. Michael Cera is just one of how many celebrities that show.

8:20I mean, every celebrity from Beyonce, right, to everybody was in a Super Bowl ad this past year. How do you make sure you get the ROI on that? They had a genius way for the brand to have seemingly organic conversations on the Internet around this campaign to really deliver results. The originality is so important. Things need to be original. So the other thing I'm seeing here is you can't just do what everybody's doing, right? One of the panels that I was on, someone said, we're moving from the attention economy to the intention economy because intentionality matters so much. And what we're seeing also get awarded are things that have never been done before.

9:02I like to call them MBDB. Show me the MBDB. Never been done before. We're kind of coming back full circle because there was a point where everything was about the creativity and no one really followed what was happening with the outcome. And then it was sort of like, well, if you tweak all of the, you know, levers, the technological levers, and you use the right data and whatever, that you can get the result. And it almost seemed like the creativity didn't matter. And what I'm hearing you say is like, we're finally realizing you got to pull these two things together to really get the bang out of it.

9:38Absolutely. The art and the science have to come together. The magic happens at the intersection of both. At the end of the day, one of the things I think is most beautiful about life is the story. And so as marketers, going back to our roots of telling compelling stories, that's how we become the trusted partner to our customers. We're inspiring them with real stories where we're forming true connections as opposed to just trying to interrupt them with a variety of ads. We're getting back to basics and technology is helping us propel and do that in more innovative ways than we've done before.

10:15Lesson number three, new talent is underestimated. Hollywood offers a fascinating lens for understanding marketplace shifts. The Anklers founder and CEO Janice Min came on to Rapid Response a couple of times to guide us through the ups and downs of the entertainment business, from awards shows and box office records to studio layoffs and industry infighting. We also talked about a platform she finds to be the most influential and the most underrated for a new generation. Here's Janice.

10:52some of the smartest people in town have said to me that what we're going to see in the next few years this is going to be the rise of the independence that the studio system it's like turning around ocean liner that where the engine's broken and that if the nimble upstarts will be able to move much more quickly i mean the way someone who had had visibility to paramount's books had described to me that even though you're seeing thousands of layoffs at Paramount, we've seen thousands of people laid off at Disney and Warner Brothers, that there's still so much more to cut because it's an infrastructure built for another era.

11:29And the fast-moving independents don't have that burden. I have to ask you about YouTube. YouTube fascinates me. It remains the most popular streaming platform for younger viewers, despite efforts by Netflix, Disney, Warner Brothers Discovery. Like, none seem to have an answer for YouTube's dominance. It feels strange to say it, but do we still underestimate YouTube? We totally underestimate YouTube. When you look at the amount of time spent on YouTube versus any other streaming platform, I mean, hands down, blows away everything. So they've captured the attention economy, as people say. I think it's hard for Hollywood to think about YouTube is anything more than promotion.

12:10You put your trailers on there, you do an announcement saying how many million views a trailer got. But boy, if you think about the levers that a YouTube can switch to turn that into a more premium experience, and I know they tried that and it didn't go very well, but they have so much data at their fingertips now. And also, So you're seeing this fundamental shift in the creator economy where creators used to think that Hollywood was the be-all, end-all. That if you became a really huge creator, you might get a show on Hulu or you might get a show on— That was the goal, right? That was the pinnacle.

12:48That was the goal. Yeah. And now it's not increasingly for people. You have Mr. Beast doing his$100 million deal with Amazon, and we'll see how that goes. But you also have one of the watershed moments for the creator YouTube Hollywood relationship. There are these huge YouTube stars named Rhett and Link, and they ended up with a deal with Warner Brothers Discovery to do a reality show. It came out, did not do well. They ended up doing basically a 20 minute video rebuttal to Hollywood where they fired Hollywood. And they said, this is what you don't understand. You don't understand how to talk to our audience.

13:24You gave us really terrible notes. your process is awful and we want to have nothing else to do with you and we are going to just talk directly to our audience now instead of through you and i think that's the opportunity when you were talking about the independence is that whole the direct-to-consumer fantasy of of you don't need the middleman and who are these old guy gatekeepers who are trying to tell me how to do my thing and you're seeing the most successful creators make like ungodly amounts of money in a way that Hollywood probably would not have made possible for them. We have three more lessons of rapid response, including how and why Airbnb backed into its most high-profile strategic investment of the year.

14:09That's after the break. Stay with us.

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15:50So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. Welcome back to Lessons of Rapid Response, spotlighting six of our favorite insights from the show in 2024. Before the break, we heard from Will.i.am about AI disruption, Dara Treseder about the need for intentionality, and Janice Min about the impact of new talent. Now we dig into three more lessons, starting with Salesforce founder and CEO Mark Benioff. Let's jump back in.

16:32Lesson number four, be bolder than you've ever been. I spoke to Salesforce's Mark Benioff to learn more about the company's big investment in AgentForce, an AI tool to help fulfill tasks on a user's behalf. But the key learning was less about technology than bold leadership. Mark admits his own shortcomings, crediting NVIDIA's CEO with inspiring him to go all in on AI years later than he should have. Let's listen.

17:06You've had to make several rapid responses over the last two years. Your co-CEO stepped away, you managed some layoffs, you restructured to enable the creation of Agent Force. How have you approached this phase of your leadership? So I've been the CEO of Salesforce for 25 years, and as we've grown from zero to now $38 billion in revenue this year, we're obviously the number one CRM, but also now the second largest enterprise software company in the world behind Microsoft. I would say, and we use this term for startups a lot, but it's true for big companies. And I think big company CEOs like me now don't think enough about this.

17:45And it's not exactly founder mode, which is this kind of funny buzzword term that's going around. It's pivot. You have to be ready to shift, to pivot, to evolve, to move forward, to make things happen. When you see that opportunity, you've got to go. And I think that not enough CEOs do it. I'll tell you at Dreamforce, Jensen Wong came, who you know is the CEO of NVIDIA. But it was interesting. I did a long conversation with him one-on-one, and my neighbor here is David Kirk, who was the chief scientist at NVIDIA, and helped create the GPU. That was 2009, 2008, 2009, 2010. Yeah, it was a video game company, or at least that's the way I used to think of it, right?

18:24That's right. Chips for video. These chips made triangles, all these graphics and things right on the chip level. But they didn't realize that when they built that technology that it would be able to be used, oh, for training models and making AI a little better. And in 2011 or 12, when Jensen saw really deep learning evolve out of Stanford for the first time, he made a pretty big decision that no one else made in the whole tech industry was, I'm going to pivot my whole company to deep learning. And by doing that, as these companies started to emerge and evolve, he would basically say, use my chip, use my chip, use my chip.

19:00And they found great performance building their AI capabilities using NVIDIA. And he became an expert in AI and became fascinated with that. I know that because I had that same knowledge and that same insight. And I saw that, but I didn't pivot my company at that point to that. And it's interesting. And I was doing the interview. I'm like, well, Mark, how stupid are you? Like you saw all that too, but you didn't do the hard pivot to deep learning. You did some things with AI and you built Einstein and you did this, but did you really do a hard pivot of the whole company to AI? No. However, why that's important right now is because as I kind of have looked at the last two years and how AI is kind of making a little transformation here with this next generation of capability we have now, that's when I saw the agent capability emerge that I said, oh, okay, you might not have done it in 2011, you had other things on your mind?

19:54No, no. This is the hard pivot where for the last two decades, you've built all the customer touchpoints, Mark. Now I'm talking about myself as third party. These are all your customer touchpoints. Why don't you hard pivot the company? And so that's why we've hard pivoted the company to agents and agent force. I even had an employee, a top engineering executive say, this is so big and so exciting, we should change the name of a company from Salesforce to AgentForce. I'm not convinced he's wrong, by the way. Lesson number five, hold up a mirror to yourself and to the world. In a political and economic landscape with so much uncertainty, we need to both keep learning and keep teaching.

20:43MidiHealth CEO Joanna Strober talked to me about how she raised$100 million to better serve women as they move through menopause. Joanna's journey included accepting a tough critique about her initial fundraising tactics in service of the larger purpose of her business. Let's listen in.

21:07I actually went to a pitch session a year ago before I raised this most recent round, And it was done by David Hornick. He did something called the Lobby for Women. And he was training women on pitching. He had venture people sitting in rooms, and you went in and you pitched to them. And you know what? The first two people that I pitched to were super nice. This is nice, great business, blah, blah, blah. The third and the fourth one were like, this is not going to get funding. You have not nailed your story. It is not big enough. You don't understand how to tell a story that is big enough. And they were really honest about what mistakes I was making.

21:50And I just remember driving home and I was just, wow, like that was very helpful. It was a little discouraging, but it was very helpful. And I think a lot of times women probably are like me. We're very practical. Then we're very thinking about our margins and we're thinking about, you know, the business that we're building. And, you know, one of these men is like, well, you're not telling me why you're going to be a$10 billion company. I was like, well, we could be. And he's like, well, you didn't tell me that in your story. And it was a little humbling, but it was actually incredibly helpful.

22:20I think a lot of times we don't tell the story, we women don't tell the story big enough. And I really did go back and say, look, every woman in this country is going through menopause, every single one of them. And if you look at what's going on in the country with the decrease in OBGYNs, half of the counties don't even have an OBGYN in this county. And in most of the other places, they have nine-month waiting lists. And then you look at the decrease in primary care, and you realize that we have a massive shortage in primary care. And so when you look at that, and you look at, we have this population, aging population of women, every woman in the country could be actually my patient.

23:01And so why am I only saying it's X size business when it really could be X times 100. And so I was actually, it was incredibly helpful. And it really helped me think about like, what does it take to build a big company? But I have this massive audience. I have actually a group of workers who really want to come work for us. We are also the recipient of all the burnout in the healthcare industry. So those women come to us because they want to provide care in a different way. So I don't know, for me in this last round, I was able to say, I think this can be a really big company. And I do truly believe this can be a really big company.

23:35And so it made the fundraising easier. Now we're just growing really fast. So now it's a different story because we're just able to raise money based on numbers, not necessarily just on telling a big story. Lesson number six, your best strategy may start with your gut. I spoke to Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky in June about the company's new icon experiences. It turns out the prototype for the program started with one-off initiatives that Brian wasn't even aware of and that he sort of backed into the strategy. His commitment came largely from his instincts. And even when financial numbers supported the idea, he invested in details well beyond what a numbers person would advise.

24:20Here's Brian.

24:2610 years ago, I remember I was with my co-founder roommate. And so we're living at this apartment that we started the company in. And we need to get some furniture. And of course, back then, IKEA would have been the place we would have gone. We get to an IKEA. We're walking down the hallway and we see a bedroom. Like, you know, those IKEA showroom bedrooms. I remember saying to him, like, wouldn't it be funny if we put this on Airbnb? be. It was like as a joke. And we started like talking about it internally, like a joke, like we're going to like list a night at the Ikea. Well, somebody in our Australian team, unbeknownst to me, hears about this idea and reaches out to like some marketing executive in Ikea.

25:06And they one day tell me like, Hey, we got the Ikea, this Ikea in like Sydney, Australia on Airbnb. So it gets listed on Airbnb and it becomes like a bit of a sensation. Then one day somebody our team says we have an idea to list blockbuster on airbnb and i'm like blockbuster i remember this i'm like i didn't think there were any more blockbusters used to be it's like actually it turns out there's one left in bend oregon so we put on airbnb it went all over the internet it got thousands of press articles probably got millions and millions of dollars with the press so then last year the barbie movies coming out i think it was mattel and warner brothers that reached out to us and they said, can we do like a promotion with Barbie?

25:47Because they were going to do a bunch of these like Barbie marketing activations. And so we said, sure. So we found a house in Malibu, in the hills of Malibu that looked a little like the Barbie house. And we basically like to the last detail, like really like every corner of the space, we recreated as if it was a Barbie Malibu dream house. That is your way to the last detail. To the last detail. As Charles Eames said, the details aren't the details, they make the design. And Walt Disney would look at the back of a trash can. And I do think that everything is just an accumulation of details. I think that's a good characteristic of design.

26:20So anyways, this Barbie house we put on Airbnb, it gets more press than the IPO. And we're like, what the hell? The universe is telling me that the world wants this. So there's not necessarily a strategy behind it. There's just a feeling that there's an opportunity here. At this point, it was purely a feeling. Like, in hindsight, we backed into a strategy. And sometimes things start with a strategy. Sometimes things start with, like, we need more engagement and we need blah, blah, blah. But I got to tell you, Bob, sometimes I honestly think the best ideas start with a vision. They start with an idea.

26:52They start with a feeling. And then you validate them by reverse engineering a strategy to make sure what you're doing actually makes some sort of modicum of business sense. So it's October. And I rallied the team together. It was only, like, six, seven months ago. and I said, we need to create a platform for Barbies. I want to be able to come to Airbnb and see a whole series of Barbies on the homepage. But I don't just want them to be stays because I want them to be experiences. In fact, I want all these to feel like they're experiences, not stays, because this is going to be a bridge to where we're going.