• As tech giants lay off thousands of workers to make way for AI, the CEO of the $8 billion food company Ingredion says real people are still the most important ingredient for a successful business. Not having a human-centred approach is a “recipe for failure,” says the Fortune 500 boomer boss James Zallie.

AI is already leaving its mark on corporate America, with tech layoffs hitting 75,000 this year alone as companies prepare for the technology to rival humans in just five years time. 

While this may fuel dreams of a two-day workweek—or fear an AI-fueled apocalypse—James Zallie, CEO of Fortune 500 food ingredient company Ingredion, has a clear answer: People—and culture—still come first.

“If you take your eye off either the customer or the employee and you get very internally focused, it’s a recipe for failure,” said Zallie in an appearance on the Inside the Ice House podcast, hosted by the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.

And while Zallie’s $8.7 billion company has embraced technology like AI in part to predict supply chain issues, refine recipe formulations, and keep up with regulations—letting anything distract from people and culture could backfire, the baby boomer said.

“I think in society today that if you don’t have a strong culture, your business will suffer. And if you don’t focus on people, you will also,” Zallie added. “People will see through whether you’re really living your values and whether you have a care for people in general.”

At a time when some companies like Meta and Target have rolled back DEI initiatives, Ingredion still includes “Everybody Belongs” as one of its five core values. And while serving as CEO is the dream job title for most business leaders, Zallie said in reality, he more so sees his job as a chief clarity officer of sorts—the messenger of what the company is doing—and why.

“We in positions of leadership and management have a responsibility and accountability to (employees) to continuously try to figure out on their behalf how they can have fulfilled careers, be motivated,” he said. “I look at my job as CEO as chief clarity officer.”

Fortune reached out to Zallie for further comment.

The debate over AI’s future rages on

While Ingredion has made it clear that people are their priority, other companies are rather confident they can do more with less people. 

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently said that his $2 trillion company would be shedding members of its corporate workforce thanks to generative AI’s enhanced capabilities.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Jassy wrote in an internal memo last month. 

Microsoft has already put some of this into action by laying off 15,000 employees this year alone. And while the company cited the changes as a means to “best position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace,” the cuts hint at prioritization of automation. Last year, AI saved the company $500 million in its call center alone, reports Bloomberg. 

And while some CEOs like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Google’s Sundar Pichai have increasingly touted AI automation as somewhat of a flex, its replacement of workers has left many, such as software engineers, feeling helpless.

Instead of using layoffs as a means to create a more leaner operation, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said the wiser move is to double down on talent.

“The companies that are the smartest are going to hire more developers,” Dohmke said to The Silicon Valley Girl Podcast late last month.

“Because if you 10x a single developer, then 10 developers can do 100x,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is sounding the alarm on college entrepreneurship programs that encourage Gen Z students to lie to investors and be more like the disgraced founders, Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes. “That’s a waste of time—and you’re gonna go to jail,” he warns. “You don’t have to fake it till you make it.”

Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes may be the latest names added to business history—but it’s not for their successes, rather their high-profile fraud scandals.

However, one startup accelerator CEO has voiced his concern that some college entrepreneurship programs are encouraging students to idolize the two fraudsters’ ‘fake it till you make it’ mindset, and that it could have “dangerous” implications for many young people.

“We’re not going to name them, but in full transparency, we’re worried about them because what we’re coming to understand is they are teaching you to lie,” Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan told a group of students during a live podcast recording at YC’s AI Startup School.

“That’s a waste of time,” he added. “And you’re gonna go to jail.”

While Tan admitted it can be tempting to follow others and cut ethical corners in today’s competitive business environment, the real secret to finding success in tech entrepreneurship today starts with carving your own legitimate path.

“​​In a world where there’s less money, where there’s fewer and fewer jobs, I kind of get it. It’s very zero-sum,” Tan said. 

But he quickly added the caveat: “You don’t have to play by those old rules anymore. You don’t have to lie to investors. You don’t have to fake it till you make it.”

Fortune reached out to Y Combinator for further comment.

Startups don’t follow a syllabus

One of the biggest challenges for young entrepreneurs is breaking out of the structured schooling mindset—and realizing a startup is an open book.

Jared Friedman, YC’s managing director of software and former cofounder of Scribd, said a failure to teach this is a major flaw of many academic programs.

“Anytime you try to bottle up entrepreneurship and teach it as a college course, what you end up with is basically a cheap facsimile,” Friedman said during the live recording of the Lightcone Podcast. “They teach you to follow a particular method or a particular practice, and that’s just not what startups are actually like.”

Take social media, for example: Even in just the past five years, its power to propel a brand and launch a product has grown exponentially—yet some college programs have still not caught on. It’s one instance of how traditional teaching can become obsolete by the time students enter the real world.

It’s a problem that’s not exclusive to business programs; the curriculum in many computer science departments is “quite outdated,” with many schools still not promoting AI use in the classroom, warned Diana Hu, a general partner at YC, who was also on the podcast with Tan.

“They’re quite literally prohibiting the students from learning the tools that they are going to need in the future,” she added.

Business leaders are worried about what colleges are teaching

The Y Combinator team is not alone in their skepticism about whether colleges are teaching the necessary skills for students to succeed—especially at a time when the price of attending university continues to skyrocket.

“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are… really big,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an appearance on the This Past Weekend podcast with Theo Von earlier this year.

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has gone so far to call college “overrated.”

“I think the value of a college education is somewhat overweighted,” Musk said in a video he later reposted on X. “Too many people spend four years, accumulate a ton of debt and often don’t have useful skills that they can apply afterwards.”

And because some young people have already caught on—and begun exploring alternative education pathways—many companies like JPMorgan Chase and IBM have scaled back their degree requirements on job postings. Michael Bush, the CEO of Great Place to Work, predicts this trend will only continue to grow.

“Almost everyone is realizing that they’re missing out on great talent by having a degree requirement,” he previously told Fortune. “That snowball is just growing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Former British prime minister Rishi Sunak and his wife’s net worth is nearing $1 billion—but he’s not kicking up his feet and retiring any time soon. The Gen X politician has just rejoined investment firm Goldman Sachs as a senior advisor. Despite the role’s likelihood to come with a hefty salary, Sunak has promised to donate this pay to his new charity, The Richmond Project.

Like millions of Gen Z, former British prime minister Rishi Sunak spent the last year on the job hunt, after voters ousted him from 10 Downing Street following a landslide electoral defeat for his party.

Although he’s still working within the government, the 45-year-old has wasted no time in calling up his network for another gig. On Tuesday, Sunak rejoined investment banking firm Goldman Sachs as a senior advisor. 

“I am excited to welcome Rishi back to Goldman Sachs in his new capacity as a Senior Advisor,” said Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon in a press release.

Sunak is set to advise clients globally on a range of macroeconomic and geopolitical issues as well as contribute to a culture of “ongoing learning and development” with Goldman employees around the world. While the company declined to share Sunak’s new salary, his pay will be donated to The Richmond Project, a newly launched charity by him and his wife—Akshata Murty—to improve numeracy skills in the U.K. However, it’s unclear whether his wife will take home a salary as a trustee. As a newly registered charity, it has not yet published any financial accounts.

Fortune reached out to Sunak for further comment.

Rishi Sunak is even wealthier than King Charles III thanks to family investments and his prime minister role

Sunak and Murty’s net worth totals about £640 million ($871 million), according to The Sunday Times Rich List. Their family is the wealthiest to have called 10 Downing Street home—and are even richer than King Charles III. This is thanks largely to Murty’s 0.94% stake in Infosys, the Indian IT giant co-founded by her billionaire father. With a market cap of about $78 billion, her stake is worth about $740 million—about 85% of the couple’s net worth.

In fact, Murty has also invested in a number of British start-ups, like the gentlemen’s outfitters New & Lingwood, which sells silk dressing gowns for £2,500 (about $3,400), adding to their household’s wealth.

On top of the lucrative dividends paid from their investment portfolio, the family has gained recent income from Sunak’s role at the Washington Speakers Bureau. In April and May of this year, he received a total of £505,661 ($668,000) for three separate appearances, including a speaking engagement for Bain Capital.

Throughout Sunak’s decade of serving in the British parliament, he earned a salary ranging between £66,365 and £86,584—the latter being his 2023-2024 payout, which translates to about $110,000 based on the exchange rate at the time. It’s a source of income he’s likely to continue to bring in as the representative for the northern U.K. region of Richmond and Northallerton.

Of course, being prime minister further enhanced Sunak’s wealth. Between April 2022 and March 2023, he earned £139,000 (about $167,000) from his salary as a member of parliament, finance minister and prime minister, and £2.1 million (about $2.5 million) from investments, according to accounting data reported by Reuters.

In the U.K., former prime ministers are also entitled to public financial support of up to £115,000 (about $156,200) a year to reimburse “incurred expenses for necessary administrative costs arising from their special position in public life.”

How Rishi Sunak made his first million

Sunak’s latest gig is a full circle moment: Before he entered politics or even attended Stanford, he began his career working for Goldman, as an intern—and then in an analyst role. He later served as a partner at two other hedge funds. 

The Gen Xer first hit multimillionaire status in his late 20s, when as a hedge fund manager, he shared a £100 million pot after a lucrative bet in the buildup to the global financial crisis.

In a joint commencement speech with Murty at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (where the couple first met back in 2004), Sunak told graduates that key to finding success is being adept at both what the data and own instinct is telling you.

“As you progress in your own careers, learn to listen to your intuition with as much respect and rigor as you do the analysis because if you want to lead it’s not a question of data or intuition you’ve got to get comfortable with both,” Sunak said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Tennis legend Roger Federer is the newest member of the billionaires club, with a $1.3 billion net worth. However, despite winning 20 Grand Slams, his prize earnings make up just a fraction of his wealth. Federer’s longtime brand deals with Rolex and Mercedes-Benz—as well as newfound partnerships with Uniqlo and investment in Swiss shoe company On—have made his bank account skyrocket.

Roger Federer is most known for being one of the most decorated players in men’s tennis history—having won 20 Grand Slam titles—but you can now also call him a billionaire.

The Swiss tennis star has amassed an estimated net worth of about $1.3 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. That includes $130.6 million in prize money over his 24 years on the court, during which he won at Wimbledon eight times and the U.S. Open five. 

But it’s Federer’s deals off the court that have led to a far greater increase in wealth for the now 43-year-old. Partnerships with luxury deals have garnered millions throughout his career, including a reported $8 million annual income from Rolex, $5 million annually from Mercedes-Benz, and $20 million total from Lindt.

But Federer’s 2018 decision to part ways with Nike (which he had worked with since he was 13 years old) as his clothing and shoe partner has proved to be among the most lucrative. Soon after, he landed a $300 million partnership with Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo, paid out over 10 years. 

Federer also made a bold bet on Swiss shoe company On in 2019 by buying a 3% stake after finding his wife and friends obsessed with them. The company has since exploded in popularity in the U.S., and according to Bloomberg, On is now worth about $17 million, meaning Federer’s stake is at least $500 million.

And while Federer’s name has historically been synonymous with tennis greatness, in a commencement address to graduates at Dartmouth College last year, he encouraged Gen Z to look beyond their bubbles and seek out a fulfilling life.

“All of you have so much to give, and I hope you will find your own unique ways to make a difference, because life really is much bigger than the court,” Federer said to graduates in 2024. 

Fortune reached out to Federer’s foundation for comment.

A growing pipeline from the locker room to the millionaire club

Federer is not the first to leverage his popularity as a professional athlete and make billions in the process: he’s joining the ranks of Tiger Woods, LeBron James, and Michael Jordan to have ten figures to their name.

And while each has made millions from their time playing in their sport, social media has made it easier than ever for the athletes to spotlight brands and cash in. Just in the last week, James partnered with Amazon in an Instagram post that garnered nearly 250,000 likes.

Moving forward, it’s likely that more and more athletes will become part of the ultra-rich, in part because they can land brand deals earlier in their careers thanks to name, image, and likeness (NIL) rule changes for student-athletes. In fact, it’s now possible for young athletes to hit millionaire status while still being a teenager, and according to sports media company On3, dozens of college athletes now have multi-million-dollar NIL deals.

At the same time, some believe the changes to college athletics have made the process too focused on making money, rather than enjoying the game. Players have opted to transfer schools multiple times to secure the best deal—which is a problem, says multimillionaire Shaquille O’Neal.

“If I write you a check for a million dollars, you can’t stay for 300 days,” Shaq said on his podcast last month. “You gotta at least give me two years.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Founded by an Italian immigrant, Chef Boyardee is emblematic of the American Dream. As a teenager, Hector Boiardi left Europe to become a top chef at a luxury New York hotel before going out on his own and eventually creating a nationwide brand. Nearly a century later, the Chef Boyardee brand has gone from a $6 million sale in 1946 to a $600 million deal today, marking a 10,000% increase in value. 

You might know Chef Boyardee for being a staple across U.S. grocery store shelves or for rolling to the home of a disappointed young girl in its iconic 2000s TV ad.

Even so, the American brand just made a much bigger move—thanks to its $600 million sale from Fortune 500 company Conagra Brands to Hometown Food Company, a portfolio company of Brynwood Partners, that also owns nostalgic staples like Pillsbury and Hungry Jack.

And while the 100-year-old Chef Boyardee brand may seem simple, as a collection of canned pasta products, its value has grown some 10,000% since it first exchanged hands from the family business. In that time, it’s gone on to stock the shelves of thousands of grocers and have a 500-person strong manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania.

But 110 years ago, its founder, Hector Boiardi, was just a teenage Italian immigrant chasing the American Dream.

Chef Boyardee’s founder went from the Ritz-Carlton to feeding the army during World War II

In 1915, Boiardi first made a name for himself by becoming a top chef at big-name New York City hotels like the Ritz-Carlton while just 17 years old. Less than a decade later, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he opened his own restaurant, called Il Giardino d’Italia. Soon, his expansion of dine-in and carry-out operations required factory production, and the brand took off nationwide—and even thrived during the Great Depression.

During World War II, the company created field rations for the armed services, and Chef Boyardee exploded to a company with $20 million in annual revenue (over $320 million in today’s money). By 1946, Chef Boy-ar-dee (as it was named then, before pivoting to today’s style, Boyardee) Quality Foods sold to a larger food company for $6 million (about $100 million today). Boiardi remained a company consultant until 1978 and invested in other local restaurants before passing away at 87 years old in 1985. But his legacy, in his namesake brand, lives on.

“We are excited to add the iconic Chef Boyardee brand to the Hometown collection of nostalgic brands that offer a longstanding rich heritage,” wrote Henk Hartong, chairman and CEO of Brynwood Partners (the firm behind Hometown Food Company) in a press release. 

And despite Chef Boyardee’s relative simplicity for its near 100-year history, focused on canned and microwaveable cups, there may be innovation in the works.

“We have grown the Hometown portfolio by nearly twofold since we formed the business and are confident that we can reinvigorate the Chef Boyardee brand and extend into new formats quickly,” Hartong added.

Fortune reached out to Conagra Brands and Hometown Food Company for further comment.

The American Dream: These simple ideas became billion-dollar household names

Chef Boyardee’s rise from a humble kitchen to supermarket staple captures the spirit of the American Dream—just like other enduring brands that have stood the test of time and grown into billion-dollar empires.

For example, Minute Maid juices started in the 1940s focused on selling frozen concentrated orange juice and began expanding to usher in the new retail beverage category. In 1960, Minute Maid Corporation was purchased by The Coca-Cola Company for a stock swap worth about $59 million (worth about $640 million today). However, estimates now put the entire value of the Minute Maid portfolio near $8 billion.

In a similar timeline, Pepperidge Farm, known for cookies and crackers including Goldfish, started as an expansion into commercial baking in the 1940s. By the early 1960s, it had grown into having $22 million revenue and was purchased by Campbell Soup Company. Four decades later, Pepperidge Farm’s revenue has grown nearly 60-fold to $1.3 billion, according to Fox News. 

Today, the food and beverage industry remains one that is full of opportunity—despite the crowded grocery store shelves. Probiotic soda brand Poppi, which started as an endeavor started in founder Allison Ellsworth’s kitchen, recently sold to Pepsi for $1.95 billion. 

“Over the years, I discovered people tend to make excuses or talk themselves out of trying to start a business,” Ellsworth said to Forbes in 2024. 

“I believe successful entrepreneurs are willing to take the necessary risks. Some people get stuck in the ‘What if I fail?’ mindset, but I’ve always looked at it as ‘What if you tried?’ You’ll never know unless you try it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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