Latest news with #MastersofScale
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Block's CFO explains Gen Z's surprising approach to money management
One stock recently impacted by a whirlwind of volatility is Block—the fintech powerhouse behind Square, Cash App, Tidal Music, and more. The company's COO and CFO, Amrita Ahuja, shares how her team is using new AI tools to find opportunity amid disruption and reach customers left behind by traditional financial systems. Ahuja also shares lessons from the video game industry and discusses Gen Z's surprising approach to money management. Pentagon Pizza Index: The theory that surging pizza orders signal global crises What is a fridge cigarette? The viral Diet Coke trend explained 5 signals that make you instantly more trustworthy at work This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. This embedded content is not available in your region. As a leader, when you're looking at all of this volatility—the tariffs, consumer sentiment's been unclear, the stock market's been all over the place. You guys had a huge one-day drop in early May, and it quickly bounced back. How do you make sense of all these external factors? Yeah, our focus is on what we can control. And ultimately, the thing that we are laser-focused on for our business is product velocity. How quickly can we start small with something, launch something for our customers, and then test and iterate and learn so that ultimately, that something that we've launched scales into an important product? I'll give you an example. Cash App Borrow, which is a product where our customers can get access to a line of credit, often $100, $200, that bridges them from paycheck to paycheck. We know so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That's a product that we launched about three years ago and have now scaled to serve 9 million actives with $15 billion in credit supply to our customers in a span of a couple short years. The more we can be out testing and launching product at a pace, the more we know we are ultimately delivering value to our customers, and the right things will happen from a stock perspective. Block is a financial services provider. You have Square, the point-of-sale system; the digital wallet Cash App, which you mentioned, which competes with Venmo and Robinhood; and a bunch of others. Then you've got the buy-now, pay-later leader Afterpay. You chair Square Financial Services, which is Block's chartered bank. But you've said that in the fintech world, Block is only a little bit fin—that comparatively, it's more tech. Can you explain what you mean by that? What we think is unique about us is our ability as a technology company to completely change innovation in the space, such that we can help solve systemic issues across credit, payments, commerce, and banking. What that means ultimately is we use technologies like AI and machine learning and data science, and we use these technologies in a unique way, in a way that's different from a traditional bank. We are able to underwrite those who are often frankly forgotten by the traditional financial ecosystems. Our Square Loans product has almost triple the rate of women-owned businesses that we underwrite. Fifty-eight percent of our loans go to women-owned businesses versus 20% for the industry average. For that Cash App Borrow product I was talking about, 70% of those actives, the 9 million actives that we underwrote, fell below 580 as a FICO score. That's considered a poor FICO score, and yet 97% of repayments are made on time. And this is because we have unique access to data and these technology and tools which can help us uniquely underwrite this often forgotten customer base. Yeah. I mean, credit—sometimes it's been blamed for financial excesses. But access to credit is also, as you say, an advantage that's not available to everyone. Do you have a philosophy between those poles—between risk and opportunity? Or is what you're saying is that the tech you have allows you to avoid that risk? That's right. Let's start with how do the current systems work? It works using inferior data, frankly. It's more limited data. It's outdated. Sometimes it's inaccurate. And it ignores things like someone's cash flows, the stability of your income, your savings rate, how money moves through your accounts, or how you use alternative forms of credit—like buy now, pay later, which we have in our ecosystem through Afterpay. We have a lot of these signals for our 57 million monthly actives on the Cash App side and for the 4 million small businesses on the Square side, and those, frankly, billions of transaction data points that we have on any given day paired with new technologies. And we intend to continue to be on the forefront of AI, machine learning, and data science to be able to empower more people into the economy. The combination of the superior data and the technologies is what we believe ultimately helps expand access. You have a financial background, but not in the financial services industry. Before Block, you were a video game developer at Activision. Are financial businesses and video games similar? Are there things that are similar about them? There are. There actually are some things that are similar, I will say. There are many things that are unique to each industry. Each industry is incredibly complex. You find that when big technology companies try to do gaming. They've taken over the world in many different ways, but they can't always crack the nut on putting out a great game. Similarly, some of the largest technology companies have dabbled in fintech but haven't been able to go as deep, so they're both very nuanced and complex industries. I would say another similarity is that design really matters. Industrial design, the design of products, the interface of products, is absolutely mission-critical to a great game, and it's absolutely mission-critical to the simplicity and accessibility of our products, be it on Square or Cash App. And then maybe the third thing that I would say is that when I was in gaming, at least the business models were rapidly changing from an intermediary distribution mechanism, like releasing a game once and then selling it through a retailer, to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. And similarly with banking, people don't want to bank from 9 to 5, six days a week. They want 24/7 access to their money and the ability to, again, grow their financial livelihood, move their money around seamlessly. So, some similarities are there in that shift to an intermediary model or a slower model to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. Part of your target audience or your target customer base at Block are Gen Z folks. Did you learn things at Activision about Gen Z that has been useful? Are there things that businesses misunderstand about younger generations still? What we've learned is that Gen Z, millennial customers, aren't going to do things the way their parents did. Some of our stats show that 63% of Gen Z customers have moved away from traditional credit cards, and over 80% are skeptical of them. Which means they're not using a credit card to manage expenses; they're using a debit card, but then layering on on a transaction-by-transaction basis. Or again, using tools like buy now, pay later, or Cash App Borrow, the means in which they're managing their consistent cash flows. So that's an example of how things are changing, and you've got to get up to speed with how the next generation of customers expects to manage their money. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘We're on the cusp of more widespread adoption': Laura Shin on Trump, stablecoins, and the global rise of cryptocurrency
With the first family actively engaged in memecoin ventures, speculation about the future of cryptocurrency has never been hotter. Laura Shin, crypto expert and host of the podcast Unchained, reveals the sector's emerging economic, political, and geopolitical implications. Shin also provides context for why stablecoins are growing so fast and how the current administration is shaping the is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Starbucks just developed an ingenious way to add 15 grams of protein to almost any drink 5 ways to rewire your brain for happiness RIP to the almost future of computing: Apple just turned the iPad into a Mac You call yourself a no-hype crypto journalist, so can you give us a short, no-hype overview of where we are right now in crypto's evolution? Yeah, I would say we're probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number-one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. That has not been true of previous administrations. In fact, the Biden administration was probably, I want to say, actively hostile. I don't know if people will love that term, but that's probably a pretty accurate description. For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. This administration is more, not only open-minded, but even in some regards almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say. I think there's going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year, but then on top of it, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product-market fit. We're seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don't trust their local currency. It could be Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There are just a lot of places where people don't actually have a great way to save their money, and they maybe don't also have really great ways to send money across borders. So, stablecoins are fulfilling that role and Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the U.S. around stablecoins. For a layperson, someone not engaged in the crypto world, can you just explain what a stablecoin is relative to a memecoin, relative to whatever the portfolio might look like? Yeah, so a stablecoin is any blockchain-based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset—99% of all stablecoins are pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians, and it covers 2013 until 2018. Even at that time, people would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars. No matter whether they were European or Asian or just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars. . . . Here's a really simple example: There's a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mahboob, and she had this microblogging platform, and I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. They had a hard time paying them, because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don't have bank accounts, or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. So [the platform] set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them. One of the women was in an abusive marriage and saved up the Bitcoin and then used that to eventually divorce her husband, so that gives you some kind of agency. I have some close Turkish friends, and I think it was in 2018, the value of the lira was just going down and down. So it's like people in those places I think grasp these kinds of things a lot more quickly, like the value of crypto. Having a form of money that isn't influenced by a central bank, that's stablecoins. Because the stablecoins are generally linked to the U.S. dollar, it's a way to sort of have dollars without having dollars, right? Exactly. I mean, you're getting the stability of that U.S. market, which there's some irony in that, because of course one of the philosophical ideas around crypto is that it's not linked to a government, that it's separate. Now we're going to get really deep into this. So you're correct that this is people wanting U.S. dollars, which is a form of currency linked to a specific government, but of course the people who want those dollars are people who don't otherwise have the privilege of easily accessing them. Bitcoin, of course, existed before stablecoins ever existed. There have been times when the Bitcoin price would go up, and then it would crash for a little while, and then it would go up again and then it would crash, and so that's kind of when you started to see stablecoins also take off. A lot of people view Bitcoin as a good long-term investment, but on any short-term timescale, you don't really know where the price is going to be, so if you need the money on a shorter-term timescale, then you would probably rather have something more stable, and so that's where the interest in stablecoins came about. There's a reason why 99% of the stablecoins are denominated or pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, and it's of course because we're the global reserve currency, so there's a lot of safety there. Trump seems like he's done a full 180 on crypto. I mean, he said it was a scam during his first term and then supported it very strongly in his campaign. He's launched his own Trump coin three days before the inauguration. Do we know how much of Trump's crypto position is about political opportunity or financial opportunity, or some larger philosophy about markets? I don't think there's a larger philosophy. I think most people probably know what Trump's MO is. But let's just say he's president and he took a luxury jetliner from the Qataris, so whatever it is that you think that says about him, it applies to his activities in the crypto world. What I will say though, aside from his personal dealings, which by and large in my opinion, they're business dealings, things that would help his family or him. He launches this memecoin, which by the way, to make one of these things costs almost no money, so I just want to make that clear, and you're basically printing money out of thin air, right? But then on top of that, the people who got in very early, they just had some agreement where they had to hold their coins until whatever it was, 90 days or I forget what the number of days was. Now, fortuitously, when that deadline came, [Trump] announced that he was going to have a dinner, and in order to participate in the dinner, you had to be one of the top holders of this coin, so of course the price shot up right at that time when this unlock was happening for those insiders. Just note the timing there and put those two facts together and you can make your own conclusions, but, well, let me put it this way: Trump saw that the Biden administration alienated the crypto community. He realized these people have money and they hate the Democrats. . . . He said, 'I'm the crypto candidate,' and he even went to the Bitcoin conference last year. He made all these promises to the crypto community and Bitcoin communities. On top of that, people in his personal orbit, his family, realized this industry is going to get bigger, this industry's all about money, and so they have been taking advantage. So you will see, and this is very interesting, there were a number of people who were very passionately pro-Trump during the campaign, and then once the memecoin thing happened, because not only Trump, but also Melania launched a memecoin, and they were not happy about what he was doing. It was reported that their company, World Liberty Financial, was doing deals with different token teams where basically they were just exchanging money. 'I'll give you this amount of money if you buy the World Liberty Financial token, and we'll buy this amount of your token. I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine.' But people in the industry also kind of look down on that, because it's not organic. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
Business Wire
28-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
David Droga to Step Down as Accenture Song CEO, Appointed Accenture Vice Chair
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today announced that after a transformative tenure as chief executive officer of Accenture Song, David Droga has chosen to step down from day-to-day leadership of Accenture Song at the end of the fiscal year and take on a broader strategic role across all of Accenture as vice chair. On September 1, 2025, Ndidi Oteh will become CEO of Accenture Song. Oteh is currently the Accenture Song Americas lead. Since joining Accenture in 2011, Oteh has been a trusted partner to many of the largest and most innovative Fortune 500 companies, leading complex digital transformations and consumer growth strategies. Oteh will also join Accenture's Global Management Committee (GMC). Nick Law will become the new Song creative strategy & experience lead and will also join Accenture's GMC. His reputation as a leader and global design force has long been established. For Droga—who is widely recognized as one of the most influential creative leaders of the 21 st century—his decision to pass the torch marks the close of an extraordinary chapter in a storied career defined by creative excellence, leadership at scale and an enduring commitment to positive progress and stewardship. Since assuming the CEO role in 2021, Droga's impact was immediate, as he led Accenture Interactive through a period of rapid growth and bold transformation. He started by unifying over 40 acquisitions and groups under the name Accenture Song, and introduced a new operating model that integrated creativity, technology, design, AI, strategy and data into one connected platform. He also assembled a leadership team that became the envy of every holding company and consultancy firm. As Droga remarked on the 'Masters of Scale' podcast, 'We are in the business of scaling excellence to help our clients grow and stay relevant. You start by hiring experts, not generalists, and then build a culture of solving, not selling.' Within only four years, Song became the world's largest tech-powered creative company, growing from $12.5 billion to $19 billion in revenue (fiscal year ending Aug. 31, 2024). It also established tech-infused creativity as another core offering of Accenture, winning Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity every year, I-COM Data Creativity Awards, Red Dot Design Awards, Webbys and even its first Emmy. "David Droga has long been a singular force and a once-in-a-generation creative leader and business builder and he has lived our core value of stewardship and has developed the next generation of leaders who will build an even better Song," said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture. "He brings humanity, imagination, clarity, and confidence to everything he touches and helps redefine how businesses grow and connect. His brilliance is matched only by his generosity, integrity, and belief in others. As Accenture's vice chair, his legacy and impact will continue for our people, our work, and our purpose." Droga said, "It has been a privilege to be part of so many missions and cultures around the world. With such extraordinary leadership in place, it felt like the right time. I could not be more confident that Ndidi, Sean and Nick will continue building on Song's legacy of innovation, creativity, and performance. I am also deeply grateful for Julie Sweet's trust, our partnership, and what will be an enduring friendship.' Droga's impact across industries and continents is remarkable and enduring. As the founder of Droga5, he created one of the most admired and influential creative companies of the modern era. His eponymous agency earned 'Agency of the Year' honors more than 30 times and was twice named 'Agency of the Decade' by Ad Age and Adweek. It became known for work that was original, culturally resonant, and creatively fearless. Among his most iconic campaigns were those for The New York Times, the British Army, Under Armour, Marc Ecko, Meta, Game of Thrones, UNICEF, Amazon, the NSPCC, Puma, the New York City Department of Education, Tourism Australia, JAY-Z, JPMorgan Chase and Coinbase. These and many others helped redefine what advertising could be and should achieve in the digital age. Following its acquisition by Accenture in 2019, Droga5 became the creative cornerstone that would evolve into Accenture Song. "I honestly could not be more grateful for my career and the opportunities I've had," Droga added. "The people who believed in me, the talent I've worked alongside, the clients we've served, the trust, the ambition, the camaraderie, it's all part of me. After 30 plus years of leaping, I am ready to catch my breath. And being vice chair will allow me to do that, but also to contribute in new ways. I am also excited to spend more time suffixing: Thinking, daydreaming, advising, investing, giving, mentoring, exploring, learning, playing, appreciating, family-ing, sleeping-in-ing." Droga began his career in Australia at the age of 18 after receiving top honors at the Australian Writers and Art Directors School. By 22, he was executive creative director of the country's leading agency. He went on to lead award-winning agencies across Asia and Europe before founding Droga5 in New York in 2006. The agency was named after a laundry tag his mother sewed into his clothes at boarding school. In 2012, Droga was named Global Australian of the Year by for his contributions to business, culture, and international influence. He is the most awarded creative in the history of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the youngest recipient of its lifetime achievement honor, the Lion of St. Mark, at age 47. He has been inducted into multiple halls of fame globally and is widely considered one of the defining architects of modern marketing. He was among the first to champion viral, social, and earned media as central tenets of brand building. His work is studied in classrooms and boardrooms, featured in Harvard Business School curriculum, and included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. About Accenture Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world's leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 801,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world's leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at
Associated Press
28-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
David Droga to Step Down as Accenture Song CEO, Appointed Accenture Vice Chair
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 28, 2025-- Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today announced that after a transformative tenure as chief executive officer of Accenture Song, David Droga has chosen to step down from day-to-day leadership of Accenture Song at the end of the fiscal year and take on a broader strategic role across all of Accenture as vice chair. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: David Droga On September 1, 2025, Ndidi Oteh will become CEO of Accenture Song. Oteh is currently the Accenture Song Americas lead. Since joining Accenture in 2011, Oteh has been a trusted partner to many of the largest and most innovative Fortune 500 companies, leading complex digital transformations and consumer growth strategies. Oteh will also join Accenture's Global Management Committee (GMC). Nick Law will become the new Song creative strategy & experience lead and will also join Accenture's GMC. His reputation as a leader and global design force has long been established. For Droga—who is widely recognized as one of the most influential creative leaders of the 21 st century—his decision to pass the torch marks the close of an extraordinary chapter in a storied career defined by creative excellence, leadership at scale and an enduring commitment to positive progress and stewardship. Since assuming the CEO role in 2021, Droga's impact was immediate, as he led Accenture Interactive through a period of rapid growth and bold transformation. He started by unifying over 40 acquisitions and groups under the name Accenture Song, and introduced a new operating model that integrated creativity, technology, design, AI, strategy and data into one connected platform. He also assembled a leadership team that became the envy of every holding company and consultancy firm. As Droga remarked on the 'Masters of Scale' podcast, 'We are in the business of scaling excellence to help our clients grow and stay relevant. You start by hiring experts, not generalists, and then build a culture of solving, not selling.' Within only four years, Song became the world's largest tech-powered creative company, growing from $12.5 billion to $19 billion in revenue (fiscal year ending Aug. 31, 2024). It also established tech-infused creativity as another core offering of Accenture, winning Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity every year, I-COM Data Creativity Awards, Red Dot Design Awards, Webbys and even its first Emmy. 'David Droga has long been a singular force and a once-in-a-generation creative leader and business builder and he has lived our core value of stewardship and has developed the next generation of leaders who will build an even better Song,' said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture. 'He brings humanity, imagination, clarity, and confidence to everything he touches and helps redefine how businesses grow and connect. His brilliance is matched only by his generosity, integrity, and belief in others. As Accenture's vice chair, his legacy and impact will continue for our people, our work, and our purpose.' Droga said, 'It has been a privilege to be part of so many missions and cultures around the world. With such extraordinary leadership in place, it felt like the right time. I could not be more confident that Ndidi, Sean and Nick will continue building on Song's legacy of innovation, creativity, and performance. I am also deeply grateful for Julie Sweet's trust, our partnership, and what will be an enduring friendship.' Droga's impact across industries and continents is remarkable and enduring. As the founder of Droga5, he created one of the most admired and influential creative companies of the modern era. His eponymous agency earned 'Agency of the Year' honors more than 30 times and was twice named 'Agency of the Decade' by Ad Age and Adweek. It became known for work that was original, culturally resonant, and creatively fearless. Among his most iconic campaigns were those for The New York Times, the British Army, Under Armour, Marc Ecko, Meta, Game of Thrones, UNICEF, Amazon, the NSPCC, Puma, the New York City Department of Education, Tourism Australia, JAY-Z, JPMorgan Chase and Coinbase. These and many others helped redefine what advertising could be and should achieve in the digital age. Following its acquisition by Accenture in 2019, Droga5 became the creative cornerstone that would evolve into Accenture Song. 'I honestly could not be more grateful for my career and the opportunities I've had,' Droga added. 'The people who believed in me, the talent I've worked alongside, the clients we've served, the trust, the ambition, the camaraderie, it's all part of me. After 30 plus years of leaping, I am ready to catch my breath. And being vice chair will allow me to do that, but also to contribute in new ways. I am also excited to spend more time suffixing: Thinking, daydreaming, advising, investing, giving, mentoring, exploring, learning, playing, appreciating, family-ing, sleeping-in-ing.' Droga began his career in Australia at the age of 18 after receiving top honors at the Australian Writers and Art Directors School. By 22, he was executive creative director of the country's leading agency. He went on to lead award-winning agencies across Asia and Europe before founding Droga5 in New York in 2006. The agency was named after a laundry tag his mother sewed into his clothes at boarding school. In 2012, Droga was named Global Australian of the Year by for his contributions to business, culture, and international influence. He is the most awarded creative in the history of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the youngest recipient of its lifetime achievement honor, the Lion of St. Mark, at age 47. He has been inducted into multiple halls of fame globally and is widely considered one of the defining architects of modern marketing. He was among the first to champion viral, social, and earned media as central tenets of brand building. His work is studied in classrooms and boardrooms, featured in Harvard Business School curriculum, and included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. View source version on CONTACT: Tina Janczura Accenture +1 312 719 5608 [email protected] KEYWORD: NEW YORK UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: MARKETING DATA MANAGEMENT ADVERTISING DIGITAL MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY SOFTWARE SOURCE: Accenture Copyright Business Wire 2025. PUB: 05/28/2025 07:15 AM/DISC: 05/28/2025 07:13 AM
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
GE Vernova's CEO on thriving through tariffs and supply chain shifts
Amid tariff whiplash and the rejuggling of global trade, GE Vernova's CEO Scott Strazik is finding a way to stay 'relentlessly optimistic.' Strazik returns to the Rapid Response podcast to share how the company plans to continue its success as one of Wall Street's top-performing stocks, despite looming supply chain disruption and market unpredictability. Zillow turns full-blown housing market bear—just look at its new forecast Apple canceled 'Mythic Quest.' Then it did something unheard of in the world of streaming TV What's behind the rise in interim CEOs This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. This embedded content is not available in your region. GE Vernova is now one year into life as an independent public company, much to celebrate—your revenue rose to $35 billion. In 2024, GE Vernova was the year's fourth best performing stock. Again, a lot to celebrate. But in 2025, the external environment hasn't been as friendly. The Trump tariffs have everyone scrambling. How do you think about this moment? How do you think about it compared to a year ago at this time? Well, our end markets really haven't changed very much, Bob. I would start there. I mean, we continue to see very strong end markets in our larger core businesses and gas power, in our electrification and grid businesses. So, frankly, there's going to be moments of dislocation between the stock market and our end markets. It doesn't mean that depending on where the tariffs go, that doesn't create an opportunity for us to prove out our nimbleness and managing our global supply chain, and we're going to have to do that. But I think it's frankly an opportunity for us to demonstrate how much we've grown in our first year as a public company to be able to operate in this kind of environment. How do the tariffs practically impact your business? I mean, you're a global business, so changes in global relationships and reputation, all of that requires some adjustment. Yeah, I think even if you take a step back and think about some of the stuff I've talked to our investors about on where we want to make investments, we want to invest in our business where we can improve the durability or the resiliency of our supply chain, and that's simply because we have a lot of organic growth that's coming in our businesses, irrespective of any policy changes. Now, policies are going to change, they're going to evolve. This is going to force us to relook at where we source certain things. It'll force us to revisit our terms with some of our suppliers in different locations, but we know how to do that. So, we don't want to be too fast to respond as we're kind of trying to make sense of everything. But I'd also rather be a company that is quick on its feet. In this environment, President Trump announced the tariffs on a Wednesday afternoon after the market closed. Rest assured by Friday afternoon, our teams were actively working evaluation plans of what our alternatives are. Now, it doesn't mean within 40 hours you pull the trigger in a dynamic period of time. So, we're working it pretty hard right now to figure out what our alternatives are, and with a growing backlog, to the extent our backlog is growing so substantially, that also puts us in a privileged position with our supply base to come and say, 'Listen, this is what it's going to take to keep serving GE Vernova.' It's almost like there's been a pullback around the very idea of globalization that maybe it's not good to be a global organization. Do you think about that? Well, when I think about my first four months of the year. I mean, my first trip of the year was to Singapore and Japan, the first week of January. I had a great trip in the Middle East in February visiting Saudi, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. These are all important markets for us. I think we've got opportunities to serve these markets throughout, and we're going to work really hard to earn those opportunities. At the same time, long before announcements with tariffs, the reality is there has been an evolving shift with globalization. There's certainly been a lot of strategic moves towards concepts of decoupling from the Chinese supply chain explicitly. So, we've been working that over a long period of time. Now, the last week certainly has been broader than any one country, and with it, it forces you to really revisit it in an even more intimate way, what you do and where you do it, but we can do that. We're capable of taking that on, and I'm highly confident we can use this moment to make ourselves a better company for the long term. You have announced investing $600 million in U.S. factories yourself creating over 1,500 jobs. Yes. How much does GE Vernova need to be an American company? I would say more we need to be a local company for our local markets. I think in your bigger markets, you're going to have a local supply chain to serve that market, local teams to serve that market. We're a global company where, at this moment, one of our most important local markets certainly is the U.S., and that's why we're investing into that market. But we're not going to not invest in some of these other countries that are attractive and markets too to be local there. There's been some speculation that the speed with which U.S. manufacturing can ramp up to replace things that might have come from abroad, that that's going to take a while and there's going to be disruption. Is that something for your business that you see that you worry about, or is that part of the nimbleness, I guess, that you're talking about on the part of your team? We do have a fair amount of industrial footprint in the U.S. that allows us to build on existing assets. So, the $600 million investment is reinvesting in existing assets, 1,500 jobs to locations that already have the concrete poured. They already have the cranes. They already have the logistics with the railroad adjacent to the factory. So, we can move reasonably quickly. Now, to the extent the policy environment drives us towards greenfield investments to reindustrialize parts of our supply chain, that would take longer, truth be told. And that's a multiyear journey that, at this point, we aren't necessarily evaluating, but we will keep looking in that regard. But first and foremost, we're going to keep trying to eliminate waste in our existing processes and build upon the assets we have, and we feel like that can carry us for a period of time. Now, where we don't have it, as an example, we announced and closed an acquisition of a supply chain footprint from Woodward. That was a vertical supply chain integration of a small part of Woodward's business, but for our gas business, an important part of our supply chain where we thought it made more sense to just have that internal. How much do you tune your long-term decision-making when there's noise and change and pressure in the near term? We need to scrutinize how long the status quo is, for sure. And that can be hard to do in a volatile moment that we're in. But if nothing else, it gives us a chance to really challenge ourselves on what we have been doing, whether there's a different way to do it. And that's the way we talk about it internally is: 'This is an opportunity for us to really revisit past assumptions and think about how we can be better.' Now, in some cases, we may gain conviction with exactly the play we've been running. In others, there may be a better alternative. I mean, do you have, sort of, I don't know, leadership principles or lessons that you use as a touchstone when things do get volatile? Well, we're not going to suck our thumbs and cry on our beer as things kind of change. We want to use change as an opportunity to improve. In that regard, this moment when we're just reaching our one-year anniversary as a public company is a moment when I feel pretty confident we've got our feet on the ground, and we can play into this and use this moment of change to play offense on not just how we want 2025 to go, because we won't change 2025 in any material way certainly from a supply chain strategy, but we can use 2025 to challenge ourselves for the next decade, and that's very much what we're doing. This post originally appeared at to get the Fast Company newsletter:
