In today’s CEO Daily: Astera Labs wins a top entrepreneur prize.The big leadership story: Marc Benioff says agents are doing a lot—but not ‘selling and communicating.’The markets: Mixed with big surges in parts of Asia.Plus: All the news and watercooler chat fromFortune.
**Good morning. **Astera Labs CEO Jitendra Mohan, along with co-founders Sanjay Gajendra and Casey Morrison, won the prestigious EY World Entrepreneur of the Year award in Monaco last night. This tops off a banner year for the Silicon Valley semiconductor company, which creates pioneering connectivity solutions, primarily for AI data centers. As Gajendra put it: “We designed a nervous system for the brain, purpose-built for a world where you have so many computing devices that need to be connected at extreme speed.”
Despite rapidly growing to $1 billion in revenue and a $60 billion market cap, Astera is not a household name. The same could be said of EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year franchise, an independently judged series of competitions that started in Milwaukee in 1986, yielding U.S. winners like Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, Howard Lutnick, and Howard Schultz long before they were stars. Past winners also include the founders of Infosys, Chobani, Jollibee, Cirque du Soleil, GlobalWafers, Biocon and Yubiko. About 5,000 entrepreneurs now compete in regional competitions that culminate in the annual Monaco gathering that this year brought together 58 winners from 46 countries or regions.
Mohan didn’t initially know about the competition but was blown away by the depth and diversity of the network. “This is about the entrepreneur journey and hopefully becoming part of a much larger entrepreneurship community where they can help us, and we can help them.”
For EY, which now boasts one of the largest global networks of entrepreneurs, the competition clearly brings benefits to the brand, relationship building, business development, and client engagement. For country managers, it’s an opportunity to get face time with EY Global Chair and CEO Janet Truncale, who’s now nearly two years into running a professional services firm of 400,000 people. Like her peers, she faces the challenge of reimagining a business model that must adapt to the agentic age. “You have to allow an environment where you will take risks and fail, and then you learn from failure,” she said, adding that being around entrepreneurs “who are nimble and willing to make decisions without all the answers” reinforces that message. That doesn’t mean embracing everything they say. With 1,500 employees, Gajendra, for one, doesn’t aspire for Astera Labs to one day have as many people as EY. “Being a big company is a liability given how fast AI is moving. Being small and nimble…is the key.”Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
AI is taking over at Salesforce—except in sales
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said this week that the company is meaningfully growing headcount in only one area—sales—as AI takes over roles elsewhere. "The one thing that we are doing here with you—selling and communicating—that agents are not exactly doing that," Benioff said.
CEOs can't find the right words for AI
Many CEOs are struggling to talk about AI without sounding either impersonal or needlessly alarming, drawing backlash from employees and the general public. Experts say most leaders are defaulting to boardroom jargon when what employees need is a far more human conversation.
Google engineer charged with insider trading
Google software engineer Michele Spagnuolo was charged with using confidential information to pocket $1.2 million on prediction platform Polymarket, placing bets tied to Google's 2025 Year in Search campaign. He was arrested in New York and faces up to 50 years in prison, the Justice Department said.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are up 0.09% this morning. The last session closed up 0.58%. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.60% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.15% in early trading.** Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 2.53%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 3.55%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.45%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.70%. India’s NIFTY 50 **was down 1.50%. Bitcoin was down at $74K.
Around the watercooler
Costco CEO Ron Vachris says tech is ‘elevating’ workers,’ not replacing them—as IBM and Delta bosses make the same bet on humans by Preston Fore
More Americans are going hungry now than during the pandemic, as people face a ‘remarkable’ rise in food insecurity, New York Fed says by Jacqueline Munis
UBS says Ron DeSantis has a problem with his plan to help 92% of homeowners save on property taxes: His own state’s data by Nick Lichtenberg
Warren Buffett says ‘you’re giving up your potential’ if you don’t have this one skill—and it has nothing to do with the stock market by Sydney Lake
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
CEO INITIATIVE INSIGHTS
*"My whole life has been behind the scenes, building technology to strip out friction. About 41 million people now use Apex to invest in markets through our partners. AI doesn’t change the need for good plumbing.” *- Bill Capuzzi, Apex Fintech Solutions.
This month, we also welcome new CEO Initiative members: Heritage Group’s Nicholas Schorsch, Upstart’s Paul Gu, Ascendium's Paul Markovich, Edelman CEO Richard Edelman, and Henry Schein CEO Frederick M. Lowery.
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