Gwynne Shotwell was a teenager when she met a woman working as a mechanical engineer. Now the president and COO of SpaceX, the most disruptive space company in the world, told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan that this female role model is why she came to be where she is today. “I loved what she was doing, […]

Indigo Agriculture CEO David Perry grew up raising corn and cows on his family’s farm in Arkansas. While he wasn’t the type to set up a lemonade stand, he did show early entrepreneurial tendencies. He remembers gathering receipts and diving into the books of the family business at age 11 to figure out whether corn […]

Autonomous vehicles are associated with big names in tech and transportation, like Alphabet‘s Waymo, GM‘s Cruise or ride-hailing giants such as Didi Chuxing and Uber. Less talked about is a critical safety component, Lidar sensors, which serve as the “eyes” of a self-driving car. Lidars are expensive today, but a start-up called Luminar is trying […]

It took six years, but the CNBC Disruptor 50 list is starting to close the gap. There are more female CEOs and founders and start-up business models and products focused on women than ever before. The 2018 Disruptor list has nine female CEOs, up from just three last year. Thirteen of the companies have at […]

As one of the biggest digital currency platforms, Coinbase was in the right place at the right time as the price of bitcoin skyrocketed in 2017, but the company has no intention of taking its crypto gains for granted. With $150 billion in assets across more than 20 million customers, and 2017 revenue reported at […]

Coming up with a game-changing idea or tackling a massive, entrenched industry isn’t the biggest challenge faced by disruptive companies. It’s the challenge of transitioning a fast-moving start-up that breaks all the rules into a sustainable business that plays by the rules. It’s the need to transition “from pirate to navy,” as LinkedIn co-founder and […]

America’s wide lead in venture capital is fading, threatened by Asia and its rising brain center: China. A surge of new money from China and the rest of Asia helped drive funding totals to the stratosphere and transformed the venture landscape. Last year Asia directed 40 percent of the global total versus 44 percent from […]

Can Spotify upend the IPO market? When Spotify went public April 3, it attracted a lot of interest, and not just because the company was well known to the public. Instead of hiring underwriters to sell new shares to the public, Spotify went public on the NYSE in what is called a “direct listing.” It […]

When Facebook Chief Mark Zuckerberg meets with European officials on Tuesday, he is set to testify that the social networking giant did not do enough to prevent its tools from causing “harm.” “It’s also become clear over the last couple of years that we haven’t done enough to prevent the tools we’ve built from being […]

After news that the United States and China reached a momentary truce on trade pushed stocks higher on Monday, CNBC’s Jim Cramer broke down some of the side effects of better relations. “Right now, many of our companies are forced to have these 50-50 joint ventures with local Chinese affiliates if they want to operate […]