unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Salim Ismail is a co-founder & partner at Exponential Venture Capital, founder of OpenExO, founding Executive Director at Singularity University, and an author. His latest work is, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it).

Greg and Salim discuss Salim’s shift from focusing on exponential technologies to organizational design as the main bottleneck to organizations adopting disruption. He traces the idea to his experience leading innovation at Yahoo, where disruptive ideas were rejected by a corporate “immune system,” and to building Singularity University with a tiny team, which led him to study fast-scaling unicorns and develop the Exponential Organizations (ExO) model. 

They also talk about how legacy firms optimize for predictability and efficiency, making them hostile to disruption, and why change must often happen at the edge via spin-outs (e.g., Nespresso, Google X, Apple teams). Salim argues that AI agents will replace much middle management coordination (60–80% in 5–7 years), making judgment and accountability scarce, reshaping universities and expertise, and accelerating permissionless, low-cost innovation and startups.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Is the end of middle management coming?

30:59: Middle management does two things: it takes decisions from above and cascades them down, and it takes information from down and feeds it up. Okay? It's all coordination, and AI can do all that coordination at a hundred X faster, cheaper, more accurately than a human being can do it. Erik Brynjolfsson, I think, has the best frame for it. He calls it white-collar drudgery, right? Nobody needs to be assembling sales report from five regions and then passing it up just to the chief sales officer. Nobody really wants to be doing that, but somebody's got to do it. And there's that whole human hierarchy and coordination function in Cosian thinking. AI replaces most of that, so we think middle management evaporates by about a sixty to eighty percent level over the next five to seven years.

The world is driven by disruption, not efficiency

13:39: Today the world is not driven by efficiency and predictability, it is driven by disruption... Human hierarchical structure does not work in a world that's changing quickly. And as AI comes along, it breaks it completely.

Innovation has to happen at the edge

19:40: You've got to spin off. That's the only thing to do it. So the only solution to this, and I've looked at the innovation process of probably, I've been in the boardroom of probably two hundred of the Fortune five hundred over the last decade. There's only one path, which is you do disruptive things at the edge away from the mothership and let that become the new gravity center. That's it. That's the only way you can make it work.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Coase Theorem

Manu Chandaria

John Seely Brown

Valve Corporation

Geoffrey Hinton

Moore's Law

Vitalik Buterin

Byzantine Fault

Guest Profile:

SalimIsmail.com

LinkedIn Profile

Wikipedia Profile

Social Profile on X

Singularity University

Exponential Venture Capital

Open ExO

Guest Work:

Amazon Author Page

Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)

Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact

Exponential Transformation: Evolve Your Organization (and Change the World)

Massive Transformative Purpose — The Heartbeat of Every ExO - Medium Post

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Sangeet Paul Choudary

John Hagel III

Pascal Finette

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Carlos Escapa is a venture partner at Across Legal and Masia VC, an AI expert, investor, and former technology leader at Meta and Amazon AWS. He is also the co-author of The AI Driven Business: Leading, Competing and Thriving in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Greg and Carlos discuss why AI adoption is primarily an organizational and talent challenge rather than a pure technology play. Carlos argues companies need a “talent flywheel” to complement their  “data flywheel,” CEO-led change, and strong data culture; many pilots fail when organizations can’t adapt roles, workflows, and governance. They discuss continuity vs discontinuity in AI (transformers and reasoning as shifts), agentification vs automation, and the risks of vibe coding: including security, maintenance, and tacit-knowledge dependence. 

Carlos emphasizes that value accrues mainly to applications powered by proprietary data and better data infrastructure (catalogs, access, ontologies), not necessarily frontier model vendors, and has an optimistic view on the relevance of enterprise SaaS due to efficiency and cost. Their conversation also highlights burnout, mental health, and the need for more humanistic workplaces as AI scales.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Is AI really a technology problem?

02:29: AI is not so much a technology play. When we talk about digital transformation, we say that in our classes, right? It is much more of a mindset, and getting an organization and people prepared for the adoption of the technology is something where most companies lag behind. And, you know, truth be told, when you have such new technology as AI, and big data have been, it takes a while for the organization to catch up.

Automation makes humans more vulnerable

22:20: The more you automate these low-level tasks, the more important it's going to be to drive what makes us really human, all this creativity, the ability to dream, and to do more together.

What can’t AI do?

23:02: Let's not exaggerate what artificial intelligence can do. It's a very limited technology. It is a wonderful technology, but it has a lot of limitations. And one of these limitations is that it does not understand cause and effect. When we have a world that is changing so rapidly, the sort of changes that we are experiencing at the moment are unprecedented in history.

Data culture drives AI success

27:30: The companies who have proprietary data are the ones that are making the biggest value capture in the market at the moment. But I think yes. So the answer would be yes, as long as they have the data culture inside of the company.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Satya Nadella

Vibe Coding

Marc Benioff

Amazon Web Services

Warren Buffett

SAAS - Software as a service

What is a Data Lake

Kimi K3

Jensen Huang

Guest Profile:

LinkedIn Profile

AAE Speakers Profile

Across Legal Profile

Masia VC

Guest Work:

The AI Driven Business: Leading, Competing and Thriving in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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672: Vivienne Ming - Robot-Proof Yourself: Navigating AI's Impact on Work and Life

487: Gary Marcus - Challenging AI’s Capabilities

497: Arvind Narayanan - Spotting The Difference Between AI Innovation and AI Snake Oil

476: Juan M. Lavista Ferres - AI's Potential for Positive Social Change

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If how much you learn is directly correlated to how much you fail, how do organizations crack the science behind using failure to their advantage?

Pascal Finette is the co-founder of Radical, an advisory firm that helps organizations turn disruption into competitive advantage. He’s also the author of several books including, Disrupt Disruption: How to Decode the Future, Disrupt Your Industry, and Transform Your Business and OUTLEARN: The Art of Learning Faster Than the World Can Change. 

In this episode, Pascal shares with Greg the lessons he picked up working for Mozilla, reframing failure as the “first attempt in learning,” the importance of psychological safety in the workplace, and what organizations can do to make learning cheap and fast. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Why assumptions fall apart

06:11: The challenge I have is that we build so much of our lives and our products and services we design on assumptions. And because we feel like it is too hard to test these assumptions, we just bake them in as factual knowledge. And then, once they hit reality, they do not survive the contact with reality, and they fall apart. So, it behooves us to figure out what our assumptions are and figure out a way to test those assumptions the quickest, cheapest, easiest way.

The formula for faster learning

07:55: The core formula in this book, ‘Outlearn,’ is very simple. It's the speed of learning is inversely proportional to the cost of failure. So make learning cheap, and you learn faster. To do that, and I think that is the big part, is you need to figure out what you are actually testing and break it down into smaller components.

On focusing on learning, not failure

11:17: Language is really important, and I think there is this piece where you want to slow down a tiny bit and just think about, "What did we learn?" instead of the failing part. Because learning anchors stuff in your prefrontal cortex, the creative part of your brain.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Firefox

Amy Edmondson

Obi Felten

Pandora (service)

Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary by Geoffrey Cain

Dashun Wang, Google Scholar

Guest Profile:

Staff Profile at radical

Professional Website

Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

Disrupt Disruption: How to Decode the Future, Disrupt Your Industry, and Transform Your Business 

OUTLEARN: The Art of Learning Faster Than the World Can Change 

960: A short book about the time you have left

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Even without the attention-consuming technology we’re immersed in today, humans have always been easily distractible. So what distracted the mindful monks of the past? And are there lessons from the monks’ practice that we can apply to today’s level of distraction?  

Jamie Kreiner is a history professor at UCLA and the author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. In the book, she details the strategies monks used to improve concentration and connects the past to the present – examining why the human mind has persistently been prone to wandering. 

Jamie and Greg discuss monks’ theories of distractibility and why concentration mattered for salvation, ethical obligation, and getting beyond self-fixation. The conversation also contrasts monastic aims with Stoicism and Buddhist mindfulness, and considers what modern people can learn from the monastic approach.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How monks managed distractions internally

23:02: This is a really basic but really profoundly smart way that monks tackled having thoughts they did not want to have. So rather than kind of ignoring them or hoping they are not real or just not paying attention at all and letting something fester and get bigger, you sort of act as a bouncer or a screener of anything that comes through, and you have to evaluate with each one, "Do I want this here? Is this a good thing?" And sometimes that can be really hard. Sometimes they thought that work of deciding whether something was good or bad was so difficult you actually needed to consult another person about it, like a mentor. We would think of it maybe as a therapist now, but they had a very different idea of what that kind of mentoring involved.

Books like technology can be distracting too

29:40: Books are really essential to that initial process of learning, meditating, and internalizing, and part of the memory training involves interacting with books in these ways. But it was also, like any piece of tech, distracting on its own.

How monks strengthened attention over time

26:59: Probably the most basic difference is that they just treated the memory like we would treat a muscle or something. It needed exercise, it needed training. You had to keep it in good shape if you wanted it to behave properly. So the memory for them was both a storage unit, but also a kind of construction site or toolkit that could work with the memories. It had to be a kind of exploratory place to build new ideas out of. So you would train the memory in two different ways. One was training it to store things that you actually wanted to retrieve. They knew it was really hard to get rid of memories, but if you kept stocking new ones that mattered or kept revisiting the ones that you thought were most important, that would more effectively, over time, edge out the things that you thought were intrusive. 

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Stoicism

Akrasia 

Monasticism

Guest Profile:

Faculty Profile at UCLA

Google Scholar Profile

Guest Work:

The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction 

Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West

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It might sound counterintuitive, but when it comes to the art of persuasion, using a logic-first approach is the last thing you want to do. This is because, in reality, every human being is wired to feel first, and reason later. 

Josh Bandoch is Senior Vice President for Policy Research at the Foundation for Research Into Equal Opportunity and has spent years becoming a master of persuasion. His latest book, How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion, is the ultimate guide to understanding the techniques that will actually move people, and the science behind why. 

In this episode, Greg and Josh discuss the critical role of emotional intelligence in effective persuasion, how to listen and engage with your audience, “the granny test,” and how Montesquieu’s teachings on particularism can apply to persuasion.  

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Research rigor isn't enough on its own

[05:44] We want to marry the IQ that the research rigor, the intellectualism gives us, you have to marry that with emotional intelligence. Because you could have the most rigorously researched paper in the history of mankind and if you deliver that in a way that is not emotionally intelligent, might or might be emotionally unintelligent, then it’s going to be counterproductive. So, you need to marry those two together and think about how you deliver this information in a way that your audience receives it warmly and they’re willing to actually do something that you want them to do with it. That’s where the sweet spot is.

Every human being is wired to feel first, and reason later. 

[05:12] All a billion of us are wired to feel first then reason. Sometimes it’s feel then reason. Sometimes it’s a feeling we never get to reasoning. And moreover, people who tragically suffer brain damage and lose the ability to emote, they actually see their reasoning impaired, which means that the logic-first approach to persuasion is actually illogical.

Why we can't stop talking about ourselves

[12:02] There are five aspects of our cognitive wiring that are foundational to persuasion that are central to the book. One is that it’s about them, not you, but we’re wired to think and talk all about ourselves, which isn’t persuasive. So, we’re wired to think and talk about ourselves. Talking about ourselves generates the same sensations in our brain as sex and money. It feels really good. And it’s just, it’s a survival mechanism. So, like if we don’t think a talk about ourselves, who’s going to? Quite possibly nobody. 

On what he thinks about AI being more persuasive than humans. 

[51:52] I’m open to the prospect that the average AI can be more persuasive than the average human because maybe the average human doesn’t bring the calm, or maybe there are some basic, sort of, persuasion tools that AI can use. I still don’t think, and I don’t think we’ll ever be at the point where the most persuasive AI is going to be as good as the most persuasive humans. And even if we are, it’s still the humans who are making the decisions. 

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Thinking, Fast and Slow

How to be more persuasive | Joshua Bandoch | TEDxIllinois Tech

Milton Friedman

Modes of persuasion

The Spirit of Law 

Immanuel Kant

John Locke

Guest Profile:

Vice President Profile at The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity

Professional Website

Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion 

The Politics of Place: Montesquieu, Particularism, and the Pursuit of Liberty

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