The CEO Series

Hosted by William Salvi

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Executive House is a business media platform for executives and aspiring business leaders. We go beyond boardrooms and balance sheets to showcase the human stories that define leadership, resilience, and innovation. Some of our featured shows include: The CEO Series, The CEO Roundtable, The Tech Series, EverydayCEOs, Techbytes & Executive Report. Hosted by Will Salvi, The CEO Series is an Emmy award-winning original content series. Each episode profiles a business leader and their respective business. The series provides a humanizing look into the CEOs personal story, mindset and insights of their business and industry. Find the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ExecutiveHouse

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60 recent

September 8, 20261 hr 33 min

Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest on the Netflix documentary, the cheating scandal and 10M daily users

In this episode of The CEO Series, Will sits down with Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest. Erik walks through the early days of Chess.com and the two chess businesses he ran before it. He talks about the company's slow, steady growth for over a decade, the surge that came with COVID and Queen's Gambit, and the playbook they built afterward for getting chess into the cultural conversation. He also covers the second spike in 2023, driven by the Hans Niemann lawsuit, short form video, and chess taking off in schools. He talks about his role as CEO, why he still does it after 20 years, and his view on capitalism, the negative perception of CEOs, and how he tries to make that change inside his own company first. He also gets into the cheating controversy involving Hans Niemann and Magnus Carlsen, the report Chess.com published, and how he feels he was portrayed in the Netflix documentary.

September 1, 20261 hr 31 min

How this investment banker became CEO of a Whiskey brand at 33 | WhistlePig CEO Alex Roberts

In this episode of The CEO Series, Will travels to Vermont to sit down with Alex Roberts, CEO of WhistlePig Whiskey, at the WhistlePig farm. Alex explains how he went from working as a 24-year-old investment banking analyst on a potential sale of WhistlePig to being offered the CFO job himself. He talks about entering the company with no operating experience, dealing with imposter syndrome and the blunt feedback from his CEO that forced him to rethink how he was adding value. Eight years later, Alex became CEO. He walks through the transition from CFO to CEO, why he restructured the company within his first weeks in the role and what he has learned about making difficult decisions, building an executive team and more. Alex also breaks down how WhistlePig grew roughly 5x during his time with the company, what it actually takes to grow a premium whiskey brand and why bartenders have played such an important role in WhistlePig's strategy. They get into declining alcohol consumption, Gen Z, marijuana, affordability, AI eliminating jobs, tariffs and why Alex believes being a private company gives WhistlePig an advantage. After the conversation, Will tours the farm and distillery and meets the pigs and Highland cows.

August 20, 20261 hr 33 min

Mid-Day Squares Co-Founder Jake Karls on How They Built a $38 Million Brand by Being Themselves

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Jake Karls, co-founder and Chief Rainmaker of Mid-Day Squares. Jake walks through the early version of the business which was three people making 50 to 100 bars a day in a condo kitchen and hand delivering samples with a Polaroid and a handwritten note. He explains how they raised money and built their own manufacturer. Jake talks about why he doesn't believe he is a good manager, his burnout, pitching to Wall Street in shorts and a buttoned down shirt and why after 8 years he still does therapy with his co-founders. He also gets into what it actually takes to get a CPG product into stores, from showing up to trade shows and road shows to using storytelling and social media to drive sales.

August 6, 20261 hr 25 min

HexClad CEO Danny Winer on building a billion-dollar brand after 50

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Danny Winer, co-founder and CEO of HexClad. Danny traces his path from studying theater and film at NYU and moving to Los Angeles with $2,000 and three suitcases, to a car accident at 28 that broke his back, shattered his right leg, and left him six figures in debt with no ability to work. He rebuilt by selling cookware at trade shows, then lost his first company, Juicepresso, in September 2016 at age 50. What became HexClad started in the basement hallway of a trade show in Guangzhou, where Danny spotted hexagons lasered onto a Korean barbecue plate and found the rare thing nobody finds at those shows: the actual inventor, holding a book of 13 patents. They talk about the handshake deal that gave an unknown American company US exclusivity, why every investor turned him down for refusing to sell into retail, the emptied retirement accounts and rolling stack of credit cards, and the single Costco test store that saved the company when it was months from going out of business. They also get into celebrity partnerships. Gordon Ramsay found HexClad by following them on Instagram, and Danny explains what his business manager meant by "you're going to get more than you bargained for," why Gordon is on weekly calls looking at numbers rather than just filming ads, and what happens when he does not like a product. Plus becoming the official cookware of the New York Yankees, the F1 work, and how a conversation with Jimmy Iovine turned a martini shaker into a collaboration with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

July 30, 20261 hr 11 min

Eventbrite Co-Founders Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz on What No One Tells You About Selling a Company

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz, Co-Founders of Eventbrite. Kevin traces his path from the early days of Silicon Valley to co-founding Xoom, a money remittance company that became one of the first developers on the PayPal API and was ultimately acquired by PayPal in 2015 for $1.1 billion. Julia shares how she left a career in television development at MTV and FX to co-found Eventbrite with Kevin. Together they built Eventbrite into one of the world's leading live events platforms, took it public in 2018, and sold it in April 2026 for $500 million. In this conversation they talk about what it actually takes to build a company with the person you are married to, how they handled investors who told them flat out they would not back a husband and wife team, and what happened when COVID turned Eventbrite from a $5 billion GMV company to negative revenue in 14 days. They also get into the real overhead cost of running a publicly traded company, why Kevin believes selling Xoom when he did was a $10 to $20 billion mistake in hindsight, what Julia honestly does not know about what comes next, and their unfiltered takes on AI, the current investment cycle, and whether we are heading into a bubble.

July 23, 20261 hr 29 min

Capital One Co-Founder Nigel Morris on The Idea That Built Capital One

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Nigel Morris, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of QED Investors and Co-Founder of Capital One. Nigel traces the origins of Capital One, from a working class childhood in England with a military father who moved the family 11 times, to building one of the most disruptive financial services companies in history. He recounts how he and Rich Fairbank identified that the biggest banks in America were making billion dollar decisions by gut instinct rather than data, and how being rejected by 25 banks only strengthened their conviction to prove them wrong. He discusses the regulatory crisis of 2002 that caused Capital One's stock to drop 40% overnight, what it felt like to carry his net worth statement in his briefcase for a year before leaving the company he built, and why the only sustainable advantage in any business is culture. Nigel also shares his philosophy on venture capital at QED, why fintech is a force for social good, and why he believes artificial intelligence will kill jobs while simultaneously creating opportunities we cannot yet conceive of.

May 28, 202624 min

ScottsMiracle-Gro CEO Jim Hagedorn On Overcoming Losing $2 Billion

In this episode of The CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Jim Hagedorn, CEO of ScottsMiracle-Gro. Hagedorn opens up about the most turbulent chapter of his career: a $2 billion gamble on the cannabis industry that nearly ran the company into the ground. He discusses the intense pressure of "burning money," the isolation of leadership during a crisis, and the difficult reality of cutting hundreds of millions in operating expenses to keep the business afloat. Hagedorn also shares insights into his unconventional path to CEO, from running away from home at 15 to join a commune to flying F-16s in the Air Force. He reflects on the "ruthless" but influential relationship with his father, Horace Hagedorn, and how he eventually spearheaded the massive deal between Scotts and Miracle-Gro.

May 15, 202623 min

Vectra AI CEO Hitesh Sheth on AI-Driven Cybersecurity and Unicorn Valuations

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Hitesh Sheth, CEO of Vectra AI, to discuss the evolving landscape of AI-driven cybersecurity. Sheth explains how Vectra AI protects enterprises across five of the six major attack surfaces and why the network remains the most critical source of truth for security teams. He breaks down why attackers currently have the advantage, how agentic AI is creating new attack vectors that most security tools can't yet see, and what business leaders should be doing at the board level to keep up.

May 14, 202623 min

Pega CEO Alan Trefler: What Chess Taught Me About Running a Company

In this episode of The CEO Series, host William Salvi sits down with Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems, to discuss what it takes to build and lead a company for over four decades. Trefler explains how a frustrating experience consulting for New York banks sparked the vision behind Pega, and why bootstrapping the company from scratch gave him a perspective on business that still shapes how he leads today. He breaks down how chess thinking, specifically the concept of candidate moves, applies directly to business strategy, why he thinks the current conversation around AI is mostly gibberish, and what it really means to build software that lasts. He also opens up about public market pressures, the billionaire label, and why significance matters more than success.

May 7, 202621 min

Doppel CEO Kevin Tian on Fighting AI-Driven Social Engineering

As digital integrity faces an existential threat from AI-driven social engineering, traditional cybersecurity has reached a critical turning point. Attackers are no longer just sending simple phishing emails; they are deploying autonomous AI agents to conduct "vibe phishing". They do this by using deepfakes and fake personas to build rapport and manipulate victims in real-time across multiple channels. To survive this "dystopia" where seeing is no longer believing, organizations must move beyond manual workflows toward a modernized, machine-led defense that can match the volume, velocity, and variety of today's threats. In this episode of the CEO Series, William Salvi sits down with Kevin Tian, the CEO and co-founder of Doppel. A former software engineer at Uber and Lyft who worked on flying cars and dispatch systems, Kevin has pivoted his expertise in large-scale machine learning to protect the world's most recognized brands. Doppel recently secured major funding from top-tier investors like Andreessen Horowitz to scale their social engineering defense platform, which now protects against sophisticated impersonation attacks for organizations managing billions of people. This interview is presented by Orchestra. Orchestra is a strategic, integrated communications and marketing company helping brands connect, engage and grow in today's fragmented media landscape. Learn more about them here: https://www.orchestraco.com