Rapid Response: Navigating a leadership crisis, w/Web Summit CEO Katherine Maher

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On the cab to JFK the night before I left I went, Is this really the right decision? It's an incredibly high wire act to pull off navigating an organization through a moment where it has been thrust into the sort of geopolitical spotlight. I was, you know, incredibly concerned about whether I was going to be able to rise to that moment. But I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I've spent time in Israel. I have People that I love very dearly in these communities. We need to find a way, of course, to recognize that.

Patty's comments really did create harm and hurt. And also, we need to find ways to ensure that WebSummit doesn't shy away from topics. Maybe this is the original sin of the tech sector, is that everybody stood up and said, Hey, we're here to change the world and people said Great. Okay. Well we're gonna make you, you know, live up to your promises.

That's Catherine Marr, the new CEO of Web Summit, who came aboard recently in the midst of a crisis that, while not as heavily covered as open AIs, was just as existential. I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group, and host of Masters of Scale Rapid Response. I wanted to talk to Catherine because leadership tumult happens in almost every organization at some point, and there are good ways and bad ways of dealing with it. In late October, Web Summit's founder and CEO Patty Cosgrave Posted social comments that described Israel's actions against Hamas as quote war crimes.

The uproar that followed threatened to derail Web Summit's signature event in Lisbon, Portugal, just a couple of weeks away. With sponsors including Amazon and Google pulling out. Cosgrave stepped down as CEO and in came Katherine Maher. The former CEO of Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia. І нес епизод of Rapid Response, Кариха Транзищен Ав.

Her hopes, her strategies, and how she steady the situation around the Lisbon event, which successfully drew over seventy thousand tech leaders from one hundred and fifty three countries. Plus She shares her perspective on the open AI situation and more. Let's jump in.

I'm Bob Safian and I'm here with the CEO of Web Summit, Katherine Marr. Catherine, thanks for joining us. It's great to be here. So you have just finished your first Web summit. a CEO in Lisbon and I'm eager to hear how it went.

But first I wanna ask you what in the world is going on at OpenAI. It's been such a whirlwind. I I think like everybody else. the weekend was just full of what's your best baseless speculation, what's your best rumor mongering, uh wrong answers only sort of conversations. Um, I mean look it's

Uh it's an unfolding moment still, but I think one thing that I'm interested in because of my background is the role that governance played in all of this. than really understanding the purpose of a board and what their objectives are and you know pro commerce, pro productization, get out to market, start building a a client base.

Versus We're a research lab and our nonprofit mission. And I I think there's a fundamental tension here, that sort of misalignment of the governance structure, the corporate structure. The mission, integrity, and purpose. All of that.

It feels like that was a that was a fundamental disconnect. You also had some tumult around your entry into this new role. Really just a few weeks ago. Web Summit's founder, Patty Cusgrave. Abruptly resigned as CEO in the wake of comments he made about the Israel Hamas war.

Can you take us through like how and when you first heard about His social media comments about war crimes and How that then evolved to you getting connected with Web Summit directly.

I had been traveling in Dubai at an event And it was on the flight home I You know, sitting there waiting for the plane to take off. I open up my phone and I'm scrolling through the news and I went, Oh Like Patty resigned, and I don't know Patty well, but I been to Web Summit and I

Really enjoyed the experience and I knew he's Pretty outspoken on social. And I so I read about his comments and I thought okay, well. I'll be really curious how this all shakes out. And by the time I landed at the other end of my flight, which was in Austin, Texas

I had a message from a friend of Patty's uh who said, Hey, would you be willing to take a call? They're looking for a new CEO. And so I I got on the phone. uh initially with Patty and then with the board and the executive team, and the conversation sort of went from there.

Were there questions you had? Of them things you needed to be reassured about. So You understood what you were getting into? I wanted to understand how much autonomy and independence I was going to have. It's a privately held company and what influence did The shareholders have

I think the biggest distinction that I was looking at was is this a company in crisis or is this a company going through a crisis? I've seen both and I've worked in both and The latter is a you enter into something that has fairly solid bones and it It's about how do you steer through that moment through asking pointed questions and and really sort of testing the way that they responded. I I felt very confident that the team was incredibly solid. I knew the product was solid and it felt as though that was that was something I was willing to step into.

may or may not have questioned that decision a few times between there and actually getting on the plane to go. So it sounds like you Had second thoughts. I didn't have second thoughts about the product. Again, I think Web Summit is fantastic. I enjoyed it so much when I had attended. I I know

the role that it plays and I was really confident that it needed to exist. My hesitation was it's an incredibly high wire act to pull off. navigating an organization through a moment where it has been thrust into the sort of geopolit that It's well.

over its skis, so to speak. And I knew that people would want to hear From me and That is Um very difficult conversation to have and there's very few things that you can say

Yeah. won't be misinterpreted or misheard. I was, you know, incredibly concerned about whether I was going to be able to rise to that moment. And that was why on the cab to J F K the night before I left, I went, Is this really the right decision? But um The thing that I kept coming back to is

I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I've spent time in Israel. I Have people that I love very dearly in these communities and I recognized in a very real way how much pain and suffering um people were feeling, and that is probably the only thing that is appropriate.

Part of the backlash against Patty's comments were from big tech firms who were saying they were gonna Potentially pull out of the twenty twenty three event. So there were commercial implications on the kind of communication you were gonna have.

Yeah. I when when I stepped in, we'd already heard from some of the larger partners such as uh Amazon and Google that they weren't going to be coming. Uh they were public about that. The first question that I had was, Well, is there any chance that we could convince any partners to come back? The answer was

Uh for some it it it's actually like a physical impossibility. The limitations of the build out for the conference itself are such that these decisions, once they're made, you're talking shipping containers and teams. So that's going to be tough. Um then the next question is What about folks who are still feeling as though they've got some degree of uncertainty, or are there people who can come back in some speaking capacity or And things along those lines. And We were successful in having conversations with partners and bringing them back to the table and the thing that we heard was that the Decision to

move quickly for Patty's resignation to find a new CEO. Right. some degree of stability and certainty. And once I'd sort of been clear about the tone, the tenor, the purpose of what this event is and how we would move to the future, we started to hear, okay, let's start talking about the next event, whether that is our event in Doha, our event in Rio, our event in Toronto or you know Lisbon in twenty twenty four. We've seen

Elon Musk social posts take a bite out of X Twitter's you know, revenue, big advertisers retreating, Apple, IBM, others. Do you feel like that's Appropriate Boycott by business in service of

social or political aims. Is what part of the job of Being a CEO is today. It's not just about what CEOs want. in the technology industry in particular, there's a lot of expectation that companies have some sort of values alignment. Maybe this is the original sin of the tech sector, is that

Everybody stood up and said, Hey, we're here to change the world. And people said, Great, okay, well, we're gonna make you, you know, live up to your promises. If you say that you're not going to be an evil force in the world, well, what does that actually mean? And now we're going to force you to engage in that in a rigorous dialogue. And we as employees came to you because we believed in that mission. And so we're y you're not the only one who gets to make a determination about whether that mission exists or not. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. As a Investor.

Maybe not, but I actually think that given the pervasiveness of the industry's role in shaping every aspect of society, it's probably completely appropriate that we're holding companies to account. You know, it is a CEO's prerogative to know when to speak and when not to speak. When I was in my last role at Wikipedia, we were very clear that we would speak about anything that potentially could harm our mission, uh, whether that was censorship or Freedom of expression, freedom of inquiry, and the like. And then we were very clear that we would speak about anything that could be harmful to our staff. So limitations on mobility, um, the immigration bans, these were things that had a direct impact on our ability to be successful and for our employees to feel as though there were someone looking out for them.

Every CEO, every company is going to have different boundaries and sort of different limitations and have to be really thoughtful about that. You said earlier that Web Summit Needed to exist. Why does it need to exist? I mean there are a lot of Events and conferences in the world.

I have spent a lot of time in Decision making rooms that are populated exclusively by C suites. There's a lot of norm shaping that happens in those rooms. There are very few events in front of an audience of ten, fifteen thousand people, which is sort of the capacity that we offer on our biggest stage, in addition to the seventy thousand people who are at our events. It's a

You have incredibly important discussions that happen On the stage. In the corridors. about the future of what technology should be, or even sort of whose voices matter.

Uh, you know, Web Summit takes tremendous pride in the work that we do around gender parity in terms of our speakers, in terms of our attendees. We also take a similar approach to innovators from the LGBTQ community, from minority groups or marginalized groups, or the global south. You don't see that at most conferences, but Web Summit It's absolutely there to support entrepreneurs. It's absolutely there to support people who have the big idea. It is a place in which deals get done. It is a place where checks are written. And it is also a place where conversations are had.

in Lisbon where there's far greater access to A Different attendee base. I think that's a really healthy reminder of the fact that

This discourse is global. Um and it and it must be and it needs to be. And and I guess this uh emphasis on sort of a cultural openness. It's part of what made it Patty's comment so Challenging for the organization, something needed to be dealt with so quickly. One of the things that I said on my opening night remarks were that

We need to find a way, of course, to recognize that Yeah, Patty's comments really did create Harm and hurt. for members of this web summit community and Also, we need to find ways to ensure that

Web Summit. Doesn't shy away from topics. We should have conversations that challenge us on stage. That's a healthy way of engaging in intellectual curiosity and debate. Anything worth doing in the world is going to challenge somebody.

Let's just make sure that we're doing that in a way that's really respectful, that sees our collective humanity or our individual humanity in doing that and creates a space for openness for those conversations to happen. So you stay in the cab. You go to JFK. You fly your way to Lisbon. Um, it's it's it's Web Summit's signature event, but it isn't really your event because you've just inherited it. Although that's been there before.

What was your plan for your role? In that environment. on day one of Web Summit. All sorts of folks sort of microphones poked in my face and say, Well, you know, what's gonna be different about Web Summit under your leadership? And I'm like, You guys know that this has all been being planned for literally months now. Like there's it's not as though this Bear is my stamp.

like my role coming in was supporting the team. And in this particular moment that was being the public face of the event Being Available to partners, our sponsors, telling attendees what to expect on stage and setting the tone.

There have been demonstrations here in Brooklyn where we both live about the Israel Hamas battle, even just yesterday. Were you concerned about demonstrations at the summit? Were there any? We did talk about this, uh, especially given that I stood up and said, Look, I think that we need to have a right to express ourselves. Well, what does the right to expression look like? As it turns out.

Unscheduled protests. in Portugal are actually illegal. Uh that's obviously something we're not familiar with here in the US. That is what I learned about Portugal. So that would be sort of out on the street. We didn't see any of that. Within the venue

What we agreed was that Every speaker would have the right And every attendee would have the right to show up as they wanted to show up. If you wanted to wear something, if you wanted to carry something on your person to make a statement about anything. That As long as it wasn't sort of incitement or with it was within the bounds of safety for other attendees.

That's okay. If you wanted to make some sort of statement with your presence at Somebody else's speaking moment. As long as that was silent and respectful and not bothering attendees. we would give that moment as well. If you were going to be disruptive in some sort of way.

Well then. our normal rules and conditions of of entry and participation apply. So one of the changes that we made was we actually foregrounded those Code of conduct policies so that every attendee when you show up at Web Summit, you have to sort of click through your your app as your badge when you go to registration. You you actually had to

Proactively assent. to that code of conduct so that attendees were reminded that that was what we expected out of them was respectful participation. Catherine's calm and clarity amid the storm around Web Summit and the consistent communication around what's known and unknown. Stands in stark contrast to what we've seen unfold at other tech firms in crisis. After the break, we'll hear about lessons from her time running Wikipedia and why she prefers a startup like work environment.

We'll be right back. When you build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years.

Building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Lear more at creative plating dot com slash masters of scale. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely for From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

I hope to see you there. Hey there, it's Jill Slessenger. I'm launching a new show. It's called Money Moves, and your money is going to move. We're gonna help you make better financial decisions. We're gonna call out the BS you're finding all over social media. We're gonna give you actionable guidance to make your financial life clearer, less stressful. We're gonna answer your financial questions and take the mystery out of your financial life. Follow and listen to Money Moves with Jill Schlesinger wherever you get your podcast. Before the break, we heard Web Summit CEO Katherine Marr talk about the crisis she walked into and how she's navigating it.

Now she shares from her time running Wikipedia, why she prefers a startup like work environment and more. You've got Web Summit in Cut our in Doha coming up in February. Especially with events going on

In Israel, that may be a more fraught location than one you would have chosen for your next For your next Uh event. Uh Is is that complicated?

Many people have expressed their thoughts about it to me, yes. Um if you wanna get into the geopolitics of it. The New Yorker actually has a really great piece about Cutter's emerging role as neutral party that brings people to the table and what I would focus on is not Oh my goodness, are we going to a country in the Middle East? What I would focus on is

It has access to Three of the world's largest markets that are the least well represented in the global technology ecosystem and least well served. And if you look at South Asia. seriously deep connections to Qatar specifically.

It's like two and a half, three hours to India. It's so close. Then you have Obviously the Middle East, and that's three hundred and fifty million people, the vast majority of which are under the age of thirty five. And that means they're digitally native. It is a market that has traditionally been underserved because there hasn't been a lot of development of digital products in the Arabic language.

And then you have Africa. If you're sleeping on Africa, you're sort of missing the boat for the next century. By the time we hit 2050, one in four people on the planet are going to be African. By the time we're at the end of this century, that's 40% of the world's population that is going to be African. The velocity of emerging markets in Africa transitioning into middle income status is higher than any other region on the planet. And What web summit.

Daha offers us is the ability to bring all three of these markets together, which is If I'm an investor, if I'm a startup, if I'm um a major corporate, I'm going, like, how do I access this more deeply? I'm so excited about what we're going to see there. And So passionate about technology and and what's possible here, huh? I got my start. Working.

For UNICEF on the role of technology in transforming healthcare outcomes for mothers with HIV. who are giving birth to children who could be HIV free. if they were able to take their medicines on time every day.

And I was working in rural Zambia. And what we realized was that mobile phones meant that people now had Alarm clocks in their pockets. That were reliable.

You could take your medication at the same time, you could communicate with your community health worker. And in doing so, you were able to have an entire generation of people who are able to be born Without H IV And so technology can be absolutely transformative. And I see that possibility in

Every new technological innovation. Web Summit actually offers us the opportunity to have these conversations recognize all of that opportunity, you can build the next unicorn and it might even do something good in the world. And also what are we gonna how are we going to talk about what the unintended consequences are? How are we going to talk about the responsibility to society and to people in the process? You were previously CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. How is that experience as CEO

Informing your approach. Wikipedia is a global consumer product. It has a billion users Plus. We ran.

Every aspect of our own technical stack. Like we rolled our own DNS. We were Absolutely in the guts of Everything that we did. The ability for us to run that operation at the scale that we did.

with the size of the team that we had on the budget that we had meant that Every decision was a trade-off, right? You're trying to make decisions in an incredibly compressed time period with a tremendous amount of pressure and sort of limited capacity, you're having to prioritize. That's what Wikipedia felt like every single day, despite the fact it's a 20 year old site that everybody knows. Uh How do we compete in this incredibly competitive industry as a top ten website? Everybody that's s using our content, reusing our content.

Mining our content to build the large language models of the future, right? It was a it was a very intense Experience. Web Summit's a different product. But The

real time aspect of it. Is there. Right. So Web Summit is just as global. It is Also, in a competitive market where we have to be very thoughtful about how we're positioning ourselves, but also how we're relating to all these different partners and stakeholders.

and how we respond in real time to what's of interest and value in the world. is quite similar. Uh Wikipedia is negotiating ambiguity in real time. In a way that where everything that happens in the world would happen on our pages. Everything that happens in the world is pertinent to Web Summit because everything is technology and technology is everything. And so that is a familiar place. I I'm still getting up to speed.

But that feels very familiar to me. And culturally it sounds like even though it's been around for a while, as Wikipedia has. It still feels and operates. Like a startup. Or you want it to, you need it to. I think it's healthy too. It feels like a startup in the sense that there is a high degree of awareness that execution is everything and you're only as good as your last event. Um it feels like a startup in the sense that

We're always seeking what's the fresh angle. I like that environment. I mean, I'm somebody who seems to to really enjoy running towards like the burning building, right? And so for me that that tension feels as though It's a fun place to be. It's a place at the edge. So Lisbon Soha

There is web summit. Rio in April. There's Junior North America event, collision in Toronto. What's gonna be different about the operations and the events with you at the helm? We

Have A great depth in when it comes to startups and the consumer facing productization of Existing technologies. I am quite keen to have

technologists on our stages talking about Where innovation and research are going and how that might project us forward into the future. Our name is Web Summit, but we're much more than the web. And so

What are we thinking about when we think about technology? What does that actually mean? Is it fundamental R D? Is it you know, applied sciences and m biomedical and material science. Is it climate and climate tech? I hope we'll see more of that on our stage.

So much of where really truly interesting things that are going to be transformative to our world. Are not yet part of our event. So I I'm I'm looking forward to bringing that in. And then I think that It's essential for us to be a platform that brings people in from truly everywhere.

I I want to make sure that Web Summit continues to be a place where we're challenging what truly global technology actually is. And then I guess the last thing that I'll say is How do we ensure that that conversation about our social obligations as innovators, entrepreneurs, technologists is met.

Because ultimately the things that we're building My strong belief is that they have to be in service of the societies that we live in. And I know that not everybody agrees with me on that. But that is what makes for really good conversation and I want that to be a part of our stages. Well, um this has been great. Thank you so much for doing this.

My pleasure, Bob. Um thanks for having me. What strikes me when listening to Catherine is how her leadership style combines both calmness and enthusiasm. Things often don't go as planned in business. Sometimes the disruption is self-inflicted. Sometimes it's unavoidable. Regardless, finding the way forward doesn't have to be a panic. Clarity of thought enables clarity of action.

And that's what delivers lasting progress. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

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