The Knowledge Project

Bill Gurley spent years on Wall Street, built his career as a partner at Benchmark, worked through Uber’s hypergrowth era, and now serves on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies complexity and systems thinking.In this episode, Bill shares the mental models he returns to most, including systems thinking, second- and third-order effects, and the importance of understanding both the...

Mark Pincus is the creator behind Farmville and Words with Friends. He built Zynga into one of the biggest gaming companies in the world and helped shape the early era of social products on the internet.In this conversation, he breaks down how great founders spot winning ideas early, why most startups build the wrong thing, and how products become part of people’s daily lives.He shares lessons...

Chung Ju-yung built Hyundai because he refused to be stopped.He is known for turning Hyundai into an industrial force that helped transform South Korea. The company built highways, ships, cars, and entire industries. At its peak, Hyundai accounted for 16% of South Korea’s economic output.This episode explores how Chung built Hyundai, how he helped power South Korea’s rise, and how hunger, guilt,...

Winston Weinberg is the CEO and co-founder of Harvey, the AI platform built for the legal industry.In this episode, Winston explains how AI is reshaping legal work, why judgment becomes more valuable as routine work gets automated, and how to build the prioritization muscle required to move faster, stay focused, and make better decisions when everything is changing.He also shares the operating...

The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder of OpenAI. This is the most detailed first-person account he has given of the 72 hours after Sam Altman was fired, how OpenAI started, and the future.Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to...

Mario Harik is the CEO of XPO, one of the largest trucking companies in the world, and leads a team of 40,000 people across a multi‑billion‑dollar operation. He started as employee #3, trained under Brad Jacobs (who’s built eight multibillion‑dollar companies from scratch), and has spent the last two decades turning engineering discipline, frontline feedback, and a deep belief in human potential...

Joe Liemandt quietly built one of the most successful software empires you’ve never heard of—then reappeared with a $1 billion bet that AI can make kids learn ten times faster and love school more than vacation. At Alpha School, students spend just two hours a day on AI‑driven academics, consistently score in the top 1% on standardized tests, and use the rest of their time to build real‑world...

Harrison McCain learned salesmanship by talking his way into a pharmaceutical job at 22, then spent five formative years under K.C. Irving, absorbing lessons in vertical integration, relentless deal-capture, and "management by suggestion." He quit with no plan, two newborn kids, and no income. His brother Bob noticed that New Brunswick potato farmers were shipping raw potatoes to Maine for...

Connor Teskey is the CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world’s largest investors, managing about a trillion dollars across infrastructure, power, real estate, private equity, and credit. In this exclusive interview, his first as CEO, we explore his approach to capital allocation, isolating variables, and building a business designed for long-term growth.Discover why effective...

Bill Marriott built the largest hotel company in the world. But he didn’t open his first hotel until he was 55 and he fought against it the whole way.In fact, the man that would go on to build the world’s largest hotel chain started with a nine-seat root beer stand in Washington, DC and a simple goal: serve people well and build something that lasts. In this episode of Outliers, we explore how...