Business is moving past the tech bro era and learning to value ‘real people, real places’

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Steve Case and David Rubenstein about finding initiative and entreperneurship across the U.S. The big leadership story: Is renting AI from another country a national security risk? The markets: A modest recovery after yesterday’s tech crash Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune. Good morning. I often wonder when our mythologizing of tech bros will come to an end. The builders, coders and creators of Silicon Valley have done much to drive innovation, but the entrepreneurs who profit from it are often not programmers. And leaders like Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S are increasingly talking about the importance of the humanities grad in the era of AI. This week, I spoke with two political science grads who became billionaires by having the insight to spot an opportunity to innovate and partner with people who understood the mechanics of what they wanted to do. Steve Case was a marketing manager at a Pizza Hut in Wichita, Kansas when he decided to join a struggling startup carved out from the carcass of a failed gaming company in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C. He became the founding CEO of America Online, or AOL, bringing the internet to 30 million American households and giving consumers access to the wonders of email, chatrooms and news-on-demand. David Rubenstein, the son of a Baltimore postal worker, was frustrated in a Washington law firm when he was both inspired by a wildly successful leveraged buyout and unnerved by a book that claimed the odds of successfully starting a company plummets after 37. He co-founded Carlyle Group in 1987, just before he turned 38. Case joined us at a C-suite dinner on Monday that Fortune co-hosted with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in its historic headquarters across from Lafayette Square and the White House. Now the chairman and CEO of Revolution, an investment firm, Case spoke about the need for a more inclusive innovation economy. “It’s not good that all the money