View From The Top

David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, was the first person in his family to go to college. Born to blue-collar parents in Baltimore, Maryland, he didn't set out to be an investor. “I was always interested in politics,” Rubenstein tells Sanil Rajput, MBA ’26, in a conversation recorded live at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Though he got his JD from the University of Chicago, “I wasn't really interested in the law, and the law wasn't interested in me,” he says.
A roundabout series of events resulted in a job advising Jimmy Carter; that role, in turn — and the abrupt end of it when Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan in 1980 — would eventually lead him to private equity.
“I struggled for a while to get a job,” Rubenstein recalls. “Because when you're out of power in Washington, you're a dead man.” After reading that a former Treasury secretary had turned $1 million into $80 million in 18 months on something called a leveraged buyout, Rubenstein co-founded Carlyle in 1987.
“‘When you're getting kicked out of town, get out in front and pretend you're leading a parade,’” he says, quoting former Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen. “What does that mean? It means take advantage of the situation you find yourself in. If you're getting kicked out of town, say you're leading a parade. If you're in Washington, D.C., say you understand companies heavily affected by the federal government better than the guys in New York do.”
Today, Carlyle manages several hundred billion dollars and has offices in more than 30 countries. Rubenstein has since become a prolific philanthropist, interviewer, and as of 2024, owner of the Baltimore Orioles.
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Daniela Amodei and her brother Dario lead Anthropic, one of the world’s biggest and most influential AI companies. It wasn’t in her career plan. “I really think of myself as a generalist,” Amodei tells Gintare Zukauskaite, MBA ’26, in a conversation recorded live at Stanford Graduate School of Business earlier this year. “If you were to look through my background, you would be like, ‘What is this lady actually good at? She doesn’t have a law degree. She’s not a computer scientist.’” But, she continues, “The ability to be curious and learn across a lot of disciplines and to have a strong foundation of wanting to have impact, regardless of the area that you’re working on — I think that’s an underrated quality.”
Almodei says that Anthropic is founded on "radical" responsibility and transparency. Asked about her decision to leave OpenAI and co-found Anthropic, she says, “We were running towards something versus running away from something. We had this vision in our heads of wanting to create an organization where the values that matter to us around safety and around responsibility were at the forefront of what we were doing.”
The best piece of advice she’s ever received came from a friend and mentor she turned to during that turbulent time: “You already know what the right answer is.”
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When Demis Hassabis pitched DeepMind to a few venture capitalists back in 2010, the business plan was almost comically audacious. “Step one: Solve intelligence. Step two: Use it to solve everything else,” he recalls in a conversation at Stanford Graduate School of Business with Stanford University President Jonathan Levin. “And people were quite confused. But we really meant it.”
Sixteen years later, the “broad arcs” of that plan have gone “unbelievably well,” says Hassabis, a chess prodigy turned video game developer turned neuroscientist turned Nobel Prize-winning AI pioneer. Today he’s on a mission to create “the ultimate tool for science,” building on his decision to give away AlphaFold, the groundbreaking AI system that predicts the structures of proteins. The future, Hassabis says, is just around the corner: “Ten years from now, I think we’ll realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now.”
AI@GSB, the Dean's Applied AI initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), and Stanford Medical School hosted a conversation with Demis Hassabis, Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, on the frontier of artificial intelligence and what it means for how we live, work, and flourish.
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Citi is one of the most important financial institutions in the world, moving $5 trillion a day across more than 100 countries. Jane Fraser has run it since 2021, when she became the first woman to lead one of America’s “Big Four” banks.
In a conversation with Sanil Rajput, MBA ‘26, on View From The Top: The Podcast, Fraser opens up about prioritizing her personal life, pursuing skills and relationships over job titles, and what she learned from the former CEO who tore up her career development plan. “Go the unorthodox path,” she says. “Because — surprise, surprise — you will get the job if you have the skills to be successful in it.”
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Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki was building a 3D, multiplayer, cloud-based world before almost anybody had thought about the metaverse. In a wide-ranging conversation with Jeremy Tepper, MBA ’26, on View From The Top: The Podcast, Baszucki describes how he created a company that’s become a household name. “My job is a constant re-architecture of myself,” he says.
From outlasting competitors like Minecraft and Fortnite to prioritizing the safety of Roblox users, Baszucki says he sees challenges as opportunities. “We really are, arguably… the future of how you stay in touch with someone else.”
This conversation was recorded on November 18, 2025.
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