Bill Gurley: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love

Called the “Godfather of the Silicon Valley’s Indian Mafia” by Fortune magazine, Kanwal Rekhi’s successful journey through the top ranks of the tech world in many ways mirrors the rise of modern India. Now Rekhi comes to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to share his personal account of business leadership and of U.S.-India relations.In his rapid rise through the tech industry, Rekhi rubbed shoulders with luminaries such as Gates, Jobs and Ellison, and he would go on to advise presidents and prime ministers on culture-shifting policies. He is perhaps best know for his work inspiring and launching the careers of thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs, many of whom have become millionaires and even billionaires. He shares stories of his life, career, and outlook in his new book The Groundbreaker, reflecting on what it meant to be an American at the dawn of the digital age, what it means to be an American now amid massive change and uncertainty, and why he believes democracy is crucial to the role that entrepreneurs play in building a better tomorrow. Drawing on his roles as an advisory board member at Stanford’s Institute of Economic Policy Research and Rand Corporation’s Center for Asian Pacific Policy, Rekhi explores the precarious but interdependent relationships between the United States, India, China and Russia; and how competition and alliances might evolve in the future, especially between America and India; and why the cooperation of the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy is crucial to the continued balance of global power. Join us to hear Rekhi’s call to action—for dreamers, doers, and those brave enough to bet on themselves.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Enlightened Bottom Line, author Jenna Nicholas explores how businesses can align purpose and profit to create lasting social impact. Drawing on stories from investors, entrepreneurs, and wisdom traditions, the conversation will examine how leaders can integrate spirituality, purpose, ethics, and economic performance to shape a more just and regenerative future. She says participants will come away with an expanded sense of possibility for the intersection of purpose and profit and how each of us can lead from a place of meaning, wholeness and interconnection. Jenna Nicholas is an investor, entrepreneur, advisor, coach, speaker and author of Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing. She is president of LightPost Capital, an investment and acquisition firm, and CEO of Impact Experience. An active angel investor, she has backed multiple unicorns. A Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, Echoing Green, Stanford Social Innovation, and PD Soros Fellow, she holds a BA and MBA from Stanford University. Her work has been profiled in major media, and she speaks globally on regenerative economics and purpose-driven leadership. She is an active member of the Baha’i Faith. Joining us remotely for part of our program will be Wayne Silby, a pioneering social investor and entrepreneur, best known as co-founder and founding chair of Calvert Investments, one of the earliest and largest socially responsible investment firms in the United States, currently $45 billion in assets under management. He also helped launch Calvert Impact Capital, ImpactAssets, Calvert Social Venture Partners, and Social Venture Network, giving money and markets a conscience worldwide. Silby later co-founded SynTao and ZenFlo in China, advancing sustainable finance and mindfulness, and serves on several global boards. He holds degrees from Wharton and Georgetown Law. A Business & Leadership Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. OrganizerElizabeth Carney  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all make mistakes. What if we could learn more about what drives the mistakes and how they shape our lives? Come hear from two people who made live-defining mistakes as they share a profound—and entertaining—exploration of mistakes and the transformative power of confronting them.Michael Lynton and Joshua L. Steiner made mistakes that shaped their careers and lives, but it wasn’t until the pandemic-era isolation until these two longtime friends began to open up to each other about them. When Lynton was the CEO of Sony Entertainment, he greenlit a film that led to an infamous North Korean hack; meanwhile, a diary Steiner had kept as chief of staff at the Treasury Department became a focal point in the Clinton Whitewater scandal.Through a revealing examination of their own stories as well as candid interviews with influential figures such as Karol Mason, Joanna Coles, and Malcolm Gladwell and people from all walks of life, Lynton and Steiner discovered the hidden dimensions of mistakes and the universal struggle to move beyond them. Working with Alison Papadakis, director of clinical psychological studies at Johns Hopkins, they drew on relevant research and unpacked the difference between failures and mistakes, the different stages of mistakes, and how it’s possible to break the patterns that lead to misunderstandings and shame. They write about their discoveries in From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn’t Own You. This program contains EXPLICIT language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Food loss and waste account for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions and cost $1 trillion annually, according to the⁠ United Nations⁠. About a third of all food grown on the planet gets wasted, rather than eaten. In developing countries, waste usually occurs between the field and the store, due to poor infrastructure, lack of refrigeration, and broken supply chains. In rich countries, most waste happens after food reaches the store, where consumers don’t buy imperfect food – or buy too much and toss what they don’t get around to consuming. How much pollution, deforestation and starvation could be reduced if we got this problem under control? And how can new tech, including AI, be brought to bear on the problem? Guests: Matt Rogers, Co-Founder and CEO, Mill Industries; Co-Founder, Nest Page Schult, CEO, Topanga  Kayla Abe, Co-Owner, Shuggie’s David Murphy, Co-Owner and Chef, Shuggie’s For show notes, related links, and episode transcript, visit climateone.org/podcasts. Highlights: 00:00 – Intro 04:30 – Matt Rogers on surviving Hurricane Andrews and his climate journey 06:30 – On the climate impact of HVAC and the creation of Nest thermostat 08:30 – On creating Mill food recycler and addressing food waste 13:45 – Partnership with Whole Food to recycle food waste and feed it back to chickens 17:00 – On AI as a tool for climate solutions 19:30 – Clean tech in Silicon Valley  23:00 – Matt Rogers shares his views on advocacy, philanthropy and impact investing 30:00 – Shuggie’s restaurant sources ingredients that would otherwise be wasted 37:00 – David Murphy makes the case for sustainable food and upcycled ingredients 40:00 – Page Schult on global impact of food waste 44:00 – Topanga’s work providing reusable food containers for college campuses 52:30 – Thinking about it circularity as systems change 54:00 – Role of AI in reducing food waste in commercial kitchens 58:00 – Climate One More Thing ********** Support Climate One by going ad-free! By subscribing to Climate One on ⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠, you’ll receive exclusive access to all future episodes free of ads, opportunities to connect with fellow Climate One listeners, and access to the Climate One Discord. Sign up today at ⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/ClimateOne⁠⁠⁠.  Ad sales by ⁠⁠⁠Multitude⁠⁠⁠. Contact them for ad inquiries at ⁠⁠⁠multitude.productions/ads⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who gets excited about going to an office meeting? Who dreads them? Rebecca Hinds, Ph.D., is an organization expert who has helped Fortune 500 companies fix their fractured collaboration efforts, and she says that meetings are broken. They are relics from a bygone era of top-down hierarchies and factory-like procedures—designed to issue orders, flaunt power, and keep the hierarchy intact. In today’s digital, collaborate-or-bust era, this model isn’t just inefficient, she says it actively harms employees and organizations.  She drew on decades of research and stories from leading companies like Google, Salesforce, Pixar, YouTube, and Dropbox for her new book Your Best Meeting Ever. She provides a blueprint to transform meetings from monotonous, soul-crushing time sinks into powerful tools for collaboration. Her secret? Treat them like products. Using seven product design principles, she says you’ll turn your meetings into well-designed products that actually drive work forward and serve your most important users—the people in your organization. She explains: Why every organization needs a “Meeting Doomsday” to reset collaboration, and how to strategically orchestrate one at your company. How to fix your communication system so meetings are a last resort, not a knee-jerk default. Which meeting metrics matter—and which do more harm than good. How to inject moments of delight into your meetings so people genuinely want to show up. When to integrate technology into your meetings so you enhance collaboration, rather than detract from it. Whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, join us to meet Rebecca Hinds and learn her ideas for challenging the existing norms and embracing new paradigms—so you’ll never dread another meeting again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Takes All Kinds”—An American Public Affairs Discussion and Demonstration of Journalistic Theatre Actor and playwright Dan Hoyle and his director, celebrated director/actor Aldo Billingslea, provide an inside look at the creation of their widely acclaimed new solo performance piece “Takes All Kinds.” Dan’s blog reminds the viewer that  ”I’ll be disappearing into these different characters and stories and you’ll be glad to journey there with me. They’ve been traveling with me these last couple years. I think they’ll stay with you too.” With “Takes All Kinds,” Hoyle and Billingslea use journalistic theater and embodied storytelling to portray powerful, funny and complex people caught in the social and political currents roiling our society. They create portraits of everyday Americans through moving and funny true stories of American democracy: school board showdowns in Florida, grassroots organizers in Atlanta, barber shops in Las Vegas, deprogrammers of violent extremists in Missouri and more. In this mostly offstage oriented “talk-back” presentation, listeners and observers will have an opportunity to explore with Hoyle and Billingslea how thousands of hours go into a little over an hour show. The artists’ view reveals (somewhat) the amazing mystery of live transformative theatrical narrative that has everyone laughing and pin-drop listening with the next moment. And always has the audience talking as they depart. Yes—it’s about politics, but could experiencing public affairs embodied theatre journalism bring people something they needed more than they realized?   “Stunning…something almost supernatural happens,” according to the  San Francisco Chronicle. Currently based at the Marsh Theatre, “Takes All Kinds” has toured elsewhere in California plus New York City, Charleston and Chicago, and will be heading to Idaho, Florida and more in 2026. About the Speakers Oakland-based Dan Hoyle is an actor and writer whose immersion research theater work has been hailed as "riveting, funny and poignant" (The New York Times) and "hilarious, moving and very necessary" (Salon). His solo shows, all originated at The Marsh in San Francisco, have played across the country at The Public Theater, Culture Project, Baltimore Center Stage, Berkeley Rep, Cleveland Playhouse, Mosaic Theater Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Portland Center Stage, Playmakers Rep, Painted Bride, Pure Theater and abroad in India, Ireland, Wales, Mexico, Canada and Nigeria. Aldo Billingslea (director) is a professor of theater at Santa Clara University (SCU). SCU’s associate provost for diversity and inclusion, and served as the vice president of the 100 Black Men of Silicon Valley; he's a board member of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, theatre program director for The222.org in Healdsburg, California.As an academic, he is a professor of American theatre from the Black perspective, acting styles, Shakespeare, and seminars on August Wilson. Billingslea is a lifelong professional actor featured in more than two dozen Shakespeare plays, productions of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Fences, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sydney Bernstein’s Window. He also worked at the American Conservatory Theater, the Aurora Theater, California Shakespeare Theater, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, and the Marin Shakespeare Theater. An Arts Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.  Organizer: Anne W. Smith  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monday Night Philosophy focuses tonight on the political philosophical principles generated by George Hammond’s “Life is an Eternal Democracy” theory. His latest book, A Slightly Better Future: Short Term Fixes for America, Long Term Fixes for Democracy, details many incremental institutional improvements that could make democracies far more effective in the future. His ideas, based upon what we should have learned over the last 250 years, include a thoroughly revised democratic constitution, significantly redesigned political institutions, and several new forms of institutional checks and balances.  Fortunately, even amidst the current dismaying destruction of valued political norms, there remains a strong, sustaining undercurrent—the hope that all this institutional chaos will ultimately just remind us why compromise in the pursuit of consensus has been, and could continue to be, so productive in America’s political culture.  Join us to discuss political principles that are designed to promote a civilized future, using realistic 21st century political thought—and political hope. A Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. Organizer: George Hammond  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us to hear from renowned historian Frank Dikötter, who offers a commanding history recasting how communists seized power in China. In April 1927, soldiers and detectives descended upon the Russian Embassy in Beijing, revolvers drawn. An hour later, they emerged with a trove of documents, some of them partly damaged by Russians who had tried quickly to destroy them. In these singed and soggy papers was proof that Moscow, despite agreeing three years earlier not to “propagate communistic doctrines,” had, in fact, sent what amounts to millions in today’s dollars—along with shiploads of arms and advisors—to support nothing less than a revolution in China.  These findings are hardly ever mentioned by historians—until now. Dikötter says the history of modern China has long been framed as an organic enterprise, wherein Communists mobilized the “peasants,” took land from the rich and redistributed it to the poor. Drawing on the Beijing raid as well as several other overlooked archives, Dikötter's new book Red Dawn Over China reveals how unlikely a communist victory actually was, had it not been for massive financial and military support from the Soviet Union; a brutal war of occupation by Japan; severe miscalculations by the United States; and—most of all—the Communist Party’s unflinching will to conquer at all costs. Dikötter reveals how what began in 1921 with 13 delegates in a dusty room led to a red flag being raised over the Forbidden City in 1949, forever altering the course of history for a quarter of humanity and shaping the global balance of power as we know it today.  About the Speaker: Frank Dikötter is the Milias Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His books have changed the way historians view China, from the classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China to his award-winning People's Trilogy, a series of books that document the lives of ordinary people under Mao: Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe; The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957; and The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976. An Asia-Pacific Affairs Member-led Forum program. Forums and chapters at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums. Organizer: Lillian K NakagawaNotes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Life is a use-it-or-lose-it situation, says our speaker. Shouldn't you try to spend it doing something you love? Venture capitalist Bill Gurley has set out to teach people his ideas for how to find your dream job and avoid a career you’ll regret.  For lots of young people, career paths feel like conveyor belts—the next test, the next application, the next college—without a pause to ask what they really want to do with their lives. After Gurley went to college, he landed a job at a famous tech company. A dream job, right? But he was bored, so he took a chance and leapt into the unknown, eventually finding his place in the world of venture capital.  Such a result is rare. He says nearly six in ten people would do things differently if they could start over. So how can you avoid career regret? What can people at the top of their fields teach you about loving what they do? Gurley has assembled six principles to flourish in your chosen career, and he has explained it all in his new book Runnin’ Down a Dream. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The average American teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media—but what are the actual effects of all this screen time? How have online platforms shifted our ways of talking and thinking about society? About the nation? What should we do about it? Over the course of one day, students from three different Bay Area high schools are invited to question and sharpen their discourse skills while exploring these questions for themselves.  In the morning, speakers Myles Bess (Above the Noise, ONE Creator Lab) and Gabriela Nguyen (Appstinence) will engage with these topics and model respectful, productive dialogue, discussing their experiences and opinions to build an understanding of the issue, and each other. Students will engage in listening activities and evidence-based discussion groups covering news media, California privacy laws, and international attempts to address our changing world. This program is part of Creating Citizens, the civics education initiative at Commonwealth Club World Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices