Late last year, billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla made a bold prediction: Over the next decade, we will see the most rapid demise of Fortune 500 companies in history: an extinction event that will destroy any incumbent that fails to figure out AI.
I was reminded of this warning when I visited Memphis, the home of FedEx and its CEO, Raj Subramaniam, to interview him for our Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. The 35-year company veteran is leading the logistics giant through multiple transitions—cutting billions in structural costs and retooling the company for the AI age. Openness to change is fundamental to FedEx’s culture, Subramaniam told me, remarking, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to hate extinction.” My story about our conversation can be read here.
Across global business, we see again and again that the leaders who are winning are those who embrace change. Take Amazon: Founder Jeff Bezos once dubbed his mentality “Day 1”—holding on to the scrappiness of an ambitious startup, where the priorities are growth, innovation, and survival. “Day 2 is stasis,” Bezos wrote in a 2016 shareholder letter. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
