Inside one of the world’s greatest fundraising operations

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Rick Shadyac Jr. took over as CEO of the fundraising organization responsible for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, it was bringing in about 600 million a year. The recently retired leader joins host Jeff Berman to reveal how he built a fundraising machine that is now approaching 3 billion per year, and how that money will have a global impact on kids with cancer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey listeners, we're launching a new Masters of Scale survey, and we'd love your input.
0:06.5	Your feedback will help us get to know you, our audience, and create content that better meets your wants and needs.
0:13.8	Go to Mastersofscale.com slash Survey 25 to weigh in.
0:18.5	Again, go to Mastersofscale.com slash survey 25 to give your feedback.
0:25.4	Is your AI built for everyone, or is it built to work with your businesses' data?
0:31.0	IBM helps you integrate and govern unstructured data wherever it lives, so your business can
0:36.3	have more accurate AI instead of just more of it.
0:39.5	Get your data ready for AI at IBM.com, the AI built for business.
0:45.4	IBM.
0:50.0	I will tell you, I sweated to the whole thing.
0:52.8	I died and, you know, I know my board asked me lots of questions. Are you sure you want to do this? And I had asked a lot of questions about risk.
1:00.5	The risk that the mission would go wrong or the risk that you couldn't raise the money to match it. Where was the risk for you in this?
1:05.1	I mean, the risk was about life. Rick Shadyak is no stranger to high stakes.
1:13.5	As the head of Alsack, the fundraising organization for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital,
1:19.4	every dollar he raised helps save patients, support families, and find cures.
1:26.0	On this particularly sweaty day, Rick was watching a brave group,
1:30.8	including a former St. Jude patient, get launched into space to inspire more donations.
1:38.1	This space mission was one of the countless scroll-stopping media efforts Rick used to get
1:43.4	more attention for St. Jude and how he achieved the astronomical fundraising number of $2.7 billion in one year.
1:54.5	If you look at the data and the data is telling you a story, if you believe in that story, then you make investments that
2:03.2	way. As data got better and better, we said, this is not hard guys. We have to meet people
2:09.2	where they are. Where are they? They're on TikTok. They're on Instagram. And, you know,
	...

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