Special Edition 2025 Highlights Episode Scaling Smart: Billionaire B2B Coaches Know About Growth

What if the clearest blueprint for the future of business wasn't from one voice but four? In the special edition 2025 highlights episode we revisit the most powerful insights from our top conversations this year spanning AI, wealth, creativity, and brand power. From predictive tech to cultural design 2025 has been shaped by leaders who didn't wait for change. They built it. The amount you can achieve today with a lean focused team is incredible. You can reach significantly more scale than an entire marketing division who doesn't use it. The wealthiest people in the world, they all follow the same framework, breaking in, building equity, and breaking out. We're in a rocket ship right now as we move into this act here. It is going to rapidly and continuously accelerate for the next several years. You need to know your why. Not just it's been a while since I've made a change or my business is struggling like you you need to have a reason why you would make such an investment in changing your visual identity system. Welcome to the Design Rush Podcast where we unpack how the world's top innovators reinvent design, business, and technology. I'm your host Kia Johnson and today we're diving into a special highlights edition featuring four of the most influential voices shaping what's next. Alex Banks, the AI strategist, rewriting how leaders think about technology. Imi Subyeski, the in-mega-wealth coach, guiding the world's top equity builders. Tom Butler, the Lenovo executive, ushering in the AI PC era and Karl Gerard's, the creator, forced behind the global identity of ladies and Pepsi-go brands. Together they reveal the ideas and the systems defining the next era of innovation. In this episode you'll hear how to scale faster with AI, pulled well through equity, not effort, designed brands that live meaningfully in culture and make smarter decisions in a world with speed and creativity. If you lead brand agency or tech team hit subscribe, the ideas in this episode will help you stay ahead of the people shaping what comes next. Well, hello everyone. My name is Alex Banks. I am the founder of the signal, a weekly newsletter that cuts through the AI noise to over 40,000 readers. I'm also the founder of Grow Hub, an AI writing tool to help busy professionals build their personal brand on LinkedIn. And I wanted to welcome you all to the design rush podcast. Alex, you've bought the signal into one of the most influential AI newsletters in the world. I mean, you're reaching over 40,000 industry professionals on over 1 million people weekly on social media. I mean, that is amazing. Now, AI itself is actually evolving at a frenzy pace and decision makers. I mean, you see, oh, as you see them, oh, as new agency leaders, they're actually being bombarded with AI trains, AI tools and like game-changing technologies every day. So if you were in their shoes trying to separate real AI opportunities from the hype, where would you start? You know, OK, this is this is such a good question. I think the foundational truth here is that you have to be a truth seeker in this world of AI and generative AI. There is so much noise and so much buzz around this ecosystem. You have to be incredibly discerning about where you get your information from, give that there is so much hype and a lot of jargon and noise thrown around in the online spheres. So, you know, if I was really trying to cut through that, you know, it's, it's, it's very important to seek out the truth through whichever platforms you hang out, right? That could be X, that could be LinkedIn, those could be digestible newsletters and finding the ones which you resonate with, right? One size isn't going to fit all and it's up to you as an individual to find that source of truth. As a busy professional, apply these tactics to your life in a really useful way. And I think these are these sort of overarching themes here. There are so many resources out there for you to to go and dry, so many courses, so many, so many products for you to sink your teeth into. And I think the real key is just getting stuck in, right? Just, just trying using these tools, seeing what you like, seeing what you don't like, whether that be the tone of Claude against the sort of cold or tone of say, chatchy PT, and just really being a discerning user. I think that's really the key takeaway that that us as individuals, as professionals must have, moving forward, because at the end of the day, there will never be a technology that will diffuse as fast as AI in our lifetimes and it's up to us to ultimately stay on that cutting edge there. What would you say is actually the single biggest misconception then that business leaders have about AI? Specifically in marketing today. Yeah, I think the biggest misconception would be that AI is a done-for-you solution. It's a click one button and your marketing strategy is set. I think it's such a big misconception where individuals often see it as an easy way out to hand over their creativity to AI, where in fact, here, the best solutions come from human creativity injected through AI, to which you can achieve an output that is far greater than if it was just you or the AI alone. I think that insight has to be imperative to help you define your strategy, to help you define where it is you want to position yourself as an enterprise, because at the end of the day, if you aren't paying attention to it, you will get left behind, but if you are doing too much, if you're handing too much over, that person will easily be found out. If that makes sense, for example, I spend a tremendous amount of time on LinkedIn and the inner flux of AI generated content from even executives. It is flooding my timeline and the comment section. So by being, as I mentioned previously, a discerning user of these tools, infusing your own stories, your notes, your insights, when you're playing around, when you're building campaigns, when you're building strategies, even writing a LinkedIn post for goodness sake, and actually getting something that is useful, unique, and perhaps blends insights across boundaries. And I think if you can do that, that'll set the stage very, very nicely for yourself and your company. We're seeing AI predict the customer behavior, and you were just kind of touching on that right now, before they even act, right? So some actually call this the holy grail of marketing. I mean, well, others actually call it a privacy nightmare. So from your perspective, to brands truly understand the magnitude. We are only scratching the surface of what is possible here, and the insights that we can generate and ultimately deliver in terms of you information that we're going to, that we're going to offer our customers, but also that we're going to receive, right? The amount of information that we will now understand about you as an individual, your buying preferences, your behavior, your predictability, is going to be wholly unprecedented here. And how that affects you as a marketer, I guess is in a couple of ways, right? It is the sort of devil in the detail whereby you are now loaded with so much unique insights and information about who your customers are, where they live, what they're doing, what who they do for work, and what that means is it, on the one hand, empowers you to deliver very, very personalized insights. On the other hand, it's incredibly sensitive information that you have to be thoughtful about how you use and how you proceed to target. So I think we're only scratching the surface of this because marketers, you know, asking chat GPT to write your next email campaign is very different from pulling on the last 1000 email campaigns that were sent to John and how John's going to feel when you send this new email that was a collection of all the responses and all the all the sort of open times of feedback and and everything that you've received from him as a customer in this new email, right? These are two completely different paradigms that they're going to see moving forward. We had the chat GPT moment back in November 2022. Now we're finding these really interesting edge use cases that are going to turn mainstream when that comes to truly predicting by a behavior and where that will help influence but also dictate where you are going to position yourself, not only as as as a as a marketer and your marketing strategy, but your organization as a whole. You've worked alongside billionaires and you've helped friends achieve a hundred million dollar milestones. I mean you've like consistently built empires by trusting your instincts and taking decisive action. So what would you say has actually been like the most cherished moments of your career so far? So one would think that my most cherished most fun moments were when I made a successful 200 million dollar trade, but they're not. The most cherished moments for me are when I see my mentees exceed what I've ever done. When they make more money than I've ever made, when they're far more successful, when by age 29 I can't even understand what they're doing. Like when they they describe their job and what they do day to day and it's just just makes me super proud, a little confused but super proud. Do you feel like these are state by state that you do with everyone that you need to take and you take us through a little bit of that? Yeah so there's what I call basically there's frameworks that you can look at the wealthiest people in the world, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. You can look at them and you can look at the top billionaire venture capitalists and they all follow the same framework. So there's definitely framework and then there's also room for customizing because each person has their own unique path. And so typically I use two main frameworks. One is called the three Bs which is breaking in building equity and breaking out. Breaking in is obviously okay you decide on an industry you decide on a career path now you've got to break in and learn your skills. Once you've learned skills you can start getting paid equity for part of your compensation. And then the breaking out and that's kind of seeding your opportunity to have step function increases in your wealth as soon as you start building equity. And then breaking out is when you have a fully activated what I call money flywheel of equity positions in multiple in multiple different kind of pockets. And so that money flywheel is what I call the Silicon Valley secret. And if you go into Silicon Valley you'll run into people that are working in private markets. And they're building a company and a couple other friends are building other companies so they're investing in a couple companies. Their friends are building there may be advising a couple others that are a little you know 10% behind them. And they're doing build investigative eyes. You go anywhere else in the world and people either have their jobs or they're running their agency. And that's it. And they don't think about their career in this build invests advice. And so the breaking out piece of the three b's that last piece is when in the building equity phase you were say working for a startup or working in an agency where you're starting to build equity and you own the agency. So you're working and you're building a company. And then you're advising a couple of others and you're getting paid in cash plus equity. And you're also investing either as a scout for venture capital if you're if you're working in a hot area or you're just investing in interesting companies that you see or interesting companies that you're doing work with. And what happens is then your other investors may say hey there's this other company that needs advice or your other advisors on your board of advisors might find your next build opportunity. Maybe you want to build multiple companies at once. And so the each one feeds off each other and it creates what I call a money flywheel. But it's also an opportunity flywheel. And so if you if we back up and just look at let's say we look at a billionaire like Elon Musk. He is mostly a builder. But when he was thinking about buying Twitter he was on the he was on the board of directors. So he he dabbles in advising. But mostly he invests in his own businesses and builds his own businesses but he also holds so much equity that he's build invests. So you don't have to have all three components. Look at Bill Gurley, a very famous venture capitalist at benchmark. He is on a lot of board of directors and he is an investor as a professional investor. So he's not a builder. He hasn't built companies. Look at Marc Andreessen at Andreessen Horowitz. He is an investor but he started out building multiple companies with with Horowitz you know with his partner and so with Ben Horowitz. And so he's more so he's done build invest advice but he's moved from one to the other. One of my mentees one of my mentees that I started with when she was in college. She has moved back and forth between the areas. So she started at Coinbase building. While she was at Coinbase they allowed her to also invest in other coins. Then she started the hedge fund so she moved over to invest but during that time she was advising other projects. And now she discovered this company she was super passionate about. After six years of running her hedge fund she closed its new investors and now she's fully immersed in building while still advising other companies. And so you can move around the build invest advice but you're just building these equity stakes. And what this ends up doing is in an environment in private markets whether you're an agency owner or whether you're diving into tech startups. 90% of companies fail after five years or in the first five years. And so you don't but when you're successful the upside is massive because you look at like all of the top richest people they're all owners right they're all company owners. And so you don't want to take away the upside. And so the strategy that I that I espouse and these frameworks is a way to kind of seed multiple equity stakes in areas where you have a lot of knowledge you've done the research and there's huge upside. So it gives you all the upside without without as much risk as you diversify. A high important do you think disruptive thinking is for brand leaders and can you actually quickly help define what disruptive thinking means to you? Absolutely. So to me disruptively thinking means first principles thinking and never has it been as important as it is today and I hate to bang on the AI drum once again. But but we've got to figure out as an agency owner when when the leaders in AI are saying they're going to be more AI agents than people on the planet they're going to be billions of these things. And you're an agency owner are you're going to be part of that process you're going to help people build these agents are you're going to have these agents working for you like how how is that going to be and if we're if you don't and so for me disruptive thinking is purely first principles thinking because when a disruption happens and you're not thinking in first principles and you're thinking about the way that it's always been done you're going to get obliterated. If you think in first principles of how can we help our clients how can we grow the business how can we be how can we deliver more value and you know how how can how can AI maybe make us have two businesses one is an agency business and one is a software's a service business that is helping other people spin up agencies using AI what top three critical qualities do you think businesses must prioritize when selecting an agency partner what do people tell you when selecting real estate location location location right it's like that's one of the three top things in real estate location location location right and then my friends will say to me that are real estate brokers they'll say well just have like three things that you need like higher ceilings or whatever that are kind of your things but at the end of the day it's location location location and so for me with having worked with a lot of agencies over the last four or five years character character character because things are going to go wrong and I've had things go wrong and agency owners just disappear and I've had other things go wrong and an agency owner that barely knows me is like hey I've got a bunch of levers I could loan you some money I could do this or the and I'm like I don't even know this person that well right and they're and they're really like acting like a human being how do you know the character of the people that run it before you go there and I think that is looking through their website not at the testimonials that people give but possibly for figuring out kind of under the cover who else has worked with them that maybe they're not highlighting and try to talk to some other people not just the ones that they give you that have worked with that agency and I think that's the for me that's the biggest thing is character character character and then you've got to figure out is this look is this the right mix you're not nobody's perfect is it the right mix for you and are they really the character that they say they are if you would have say like very simply you know what it actually means for the average business user when they computer ease AI enabled what picture would I see yeah so think of it you know we we talk a lot about the future of AI devices is it's going to be an AI digital twin so in today's terms if I just if I just step back from that think of it like a digital teammate or a personal assistant so that's inside it in contained in your device and so now it's going to start looking at or analyzing patterns of how you work it's going to look at how it can automate repetitive tasks how it can summarize meetings for you it can play as I said before earlier can block phishing threats or or potential attack security issues can even help generate content for you so we categorize these into a group that we call three piece personalization protection and productivity and if you think of those outcomes any outcome we're trying to drive that supplemented or augmented by AI can be bucketed into one of these three piece it's all happening on device which is really exciting who is the most impressive executive or innovator the key you've encountered along your path in journey yeah there's no shortage of brilliant minds in the space and in AI we're we're effectively going through a major pivot in the industry like we've seek to be honest we haven't seen it this pivotal If I go back into the past, I'm talking about really the dot com era and I date myself and say that but the dot com era was a sweeping innovative era that we went almost overnight from well effectively no internet to internet and you know, and we're gone from that same sweeping era from no AI to AI. I would say, you know, when I look at the leadership across the tech space, I've always been impressed with leaders who can zoom out and see the an articulate a grand vision or roadmap or a North star, but they can also come back down and drive down into product or solution execution. So you see the forest from the trees, so to speak, you know, if I look at my track into leadership, I've always been influenced by great leaders inside Lenovo as well, who is who really drive that zoom in zoom out, but are constantly listening to the voice of the customer, the voice of the market because we spend a tremendous amount of our time engaging with customers and when I sit down with customers, I talk about the future. I don't talk about hey, here's what I have today, you know, please buy something, but it's about, here's what I'm thinking about next, what do you think, tell me what problems you're trying to solve, and that's super critical for us, because then when I go back to those customers every year, I can say, well, here's what you told me last year, and here's what I did about this. Here's how we, and you're helping me change and influence the market, so I would say that that's the style of leadership I look to and aspire to be is really that listening to the voice of the customer. If you could sit down with like one global tick leader, to actually tackle the next generation of AI innovation together, who would it be, and then also what would you want to figure out with them? I'd love to sit down with Jensen Wong to really tackle two issues with AI. One is the ethical use, and the second is sustainable use of AI. Now ethical use is actively being worked, aggressively being worked, because when you start thinking about the use of the data, you've got to put security, privacy, you've got to put guardrails around it, then what do you do, how does the data being used? That, that, when I think is being actively or, you know, being worked, I think the sustainable use is a second component that, you know, we're moving it such a rapid pace or evolution, kind of skipping over the fact that these large models that are being run in the cloud in the data center consume a tremendous amount of power, tremendous amount of GPUs. And so that, that power is a major concern if you think about the sustainable use. Now what I'm excited about is as we move into more of a hybrid standards, we're able to leverage the power of the devices, the, the AI PCs that are now being coming out into market, those draw power at a much lower power state, and so you can accomplish a lot at the edge. And so you're, you're starting to benefit as we can bring models in, especially the agentic models down to device to execute locally without having to go up into cloud, that's going to help on the sustainable use of AI. And so I think that's really equally important, but that, you know, that would be the conversation that Jensen and I would have if I was to have to have called with him tomorrow. So call lays has just unveiled its biggest brand refresh in nearly 100 years. Why was now the right time to make such a bold please. Yeah, we're almost a hundred year old brand and our last visual redesign was in 2016. So in the modern term, that's a really long period of time to be in one consistent look. The world has changed, you know, I think people's people's way of shopping, people's way of interacting with the brands that they buy, especially in the grocery store is changing. And we, we felt like we had a really powerful story to tell on lays, which is the biggest brand and, and, and really the potato chip category and the chip category and the, and many food categories. And, you know, we've been rooted in real potatoes for our entire history and people kind of forgotten that fact a little bit. They know our chip, they know the iconic brands, they know the joy we bring, they know our Super Bowl commercials, but they had, you know, maybe forgotten a little bit where we came from. And we thought it was, there was an opportunity to tell that story in a much stronger way. So we retooled the visual identity system to, to be able to tell our story in an authentic way. Can you actually take us inside like the design process, you know, what with the biggest breakthroughs or like the turning points that you had a longer way? Yeah, so, you know, it's, it's a fantastic experience to come into a brand like this that does have this history and get a chance to shape its next generation. You research a lot, you learn about the past, you learn about the brand around the world and how people have experienced it. You interact with teams that have been working on it for a long time and get under the skin of what it is, you talk with the people who love the brand and learn about what made them love it in the first place. And we found so many incredible things through this process. This was something we did as the PepsiCo design center, you know, it's our design function within PepsiCo. We have over 300 designers around the world. And, you know, we partner globally and locally to understand the brand relevance. We start really with a 360 process, right? We have these ideas that we prototype that, okay, what if the brand told the story in this way? What if the visual identity came to life in this way? Would that be meaningful for the people that love this brand? We try a lot of things on very rapidly and, you know, we do a rapid prototype process where we're trying them on, we're showing them around, we're getting internal feedback. We're showing them to real people that love the brand and understand what they love about it. And I think, you know, starting a big thing like this, you take it on in full and then you break it down into its pieces and you kind of give it a flow. What advice would you actually give to leaders who want to make a bold, confident design decision, like lays did one that's strong enough to reshape that entity? You really need to know your why in the beginning, not just it's been a while since I've made a change or my business is struggling like you need to have a reason why you would make such an investment in changing your visual identity system. It is the tool that you will use to express everything about your brand, your logo, your packaging, your campaign ideas, your social media, your brand experiences. It is the creative expression tool for those things. And so you have to have a really strong why because all of those things I just mentioned as well, those are going to change over time. You might need to have a different campaign message. You may need to activate in a different vertical. You may need to flex into different places. So I have a really, really good reason why I will also say resilience is needed to do one of these things because of the length of time that they take to implement in the world. You have to be really sure of why you're doing it because you can lose the faith over the process. You can go, is this really worth the investment? Is this really worth the work? You know, there's going to be some places I call the messy middle where you're in transition and everything kind of feels like how is it ever going to connect and then you get past it. So you have to be you have to be brave and you have to be resilient and you have to have really know your why that would be that would be my best advice to anyone trying to make a big bold change. Curious about what top brands look for when choosing an agency? Turn into our latest episodes where we reveal the decision making secrets of leading brands. Subscribe to the Design Rush podcast and stay ahead of the competition.