This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city is not in decline but is in danger — finding that 10 companies, nine of them in tech, pay three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers, and that the tax structure uniquely penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers.

The report says Seattle should be most concerned about AI but most active in cleantech, the one industry the city can actually shape, since it owns the electric utility and controls permitting, building codes and land use.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Times and Newsday sue Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing them of copying hundreds of thousands of articles to train their AI models, putting Microsoft’s hometown paper against a company that helps fund some of its journalism.

And Apple’s first foldable arrives as the iPhone Duo, reviving the name of the dual-screen phone Microsoft gave up on in 2023, with Surface fans arguing Apple took more than the name.

Which leads us to a new GeekWire Trivia Challenge about the Microsoft products that Apple later turned into categories. Stick around to the final segment to see if you can figure it out.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.

An independent study commissioned by the City of Seattle says the city’s tax structure is unique among its peers in the way it “specifically penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers,” with that penalty falling overwhelmingly on large tech employers.

Overall, Seattle’s business taxes are actually in line with competing cities, write researchers from the economic consulting firm Formation in the new report. But Seattle’s taxes are “particularly distortionary when it comes to hiring high-wage employees,” they add.

Mayor Katie Wilson helped design the tax, known as JumpStart, before taking office. But even the strongest supporters of new local and state taxes would concede that Seattle is “reaching the limits of how much it can tax the industries and people that it is depending upon to drive its growth,” the researchers write.

Another risk for the city is the resulting concentration of the tax base. Three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers comes from 10 companies. Nine of them are in tech-related sectors.

A big company shifting 10,000 workers out of Seattle would cost the city about $50 million a year in payroll tax revenue, the researchers say in an accompanying slide deck, without naming Amazon explicitly. That’s more than a quarter of the $175 million deficit the city projects for next year.

In that way, much of the city’s financial future depends “on the marginal location and compensation decisions of a handful of employers,” the report says. Because much of the taxed compensation is vesting stock, it adds, the city’s revenue is exposed to “the single most volatile attribute of these firms — one the city has no ability to forecast or influence.”

Reducing that dependence through growth is the bigger point of the report.

The 127-page assessment, called “Seawall: Building a Resilient Seattle Economy,” goes well beyond the topic of taxes. The title refers to Seattle’s rebuilt waterfront seawall, engineered to hold back the water and also let marine life take hold. The researchers offer this as a model for protecting the city’s economic base while building a more diverse economy on top of it.

A decade of growth lifted wages at every level of the income spectrum, the report finds. Few other U.S. regions spread prosperity as broadly. But the same growth made Seattle far more expensive, especially for families.

Fast-forward to today, and the report sees an economy that’s dangerously concentrated, “significantly more AI-exposed than the national average,” short of the electricity it will need, and no longer producing mid-sized companies.

In danger, not in decline: The report is also careful to point out the city’s unique position and strengths. Seattle’s tech workforce is “almost peerless,” it says: 23% of the nation’s AI engineers are based in the region, and output per tech worker is more than double the national average.

The region also has the rare combination of a big tech industry and a strong manufacturing base.

Seattle “may not be in decline, but it is in danger,” the researchers write — “not because it is losing its place in the industry, but because the industry could undergo a radical change, and arguably already is.”

The concern that Seattle is becoming “the next Cleveland,” raised in a GeekWire column in February by Seattle tech veteran and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald, is “likely hyperbolic,” the researchers write. (They acknowledge that it “caused quite the stir this past winter.”)

The report points instead to Portland and Los Angeles as the more relevant warnings, citing Portland’s pileup of new business taxes and Los Angeles’ failure to turn a deep talent pool into jobs.

Fitzgerald responded Wednesday evening on his blog, Platformonomics, writing that the city “has finally acknowledged there is such a thing as an economy.” His main objection was who wasn’t in the room: “No businesses were involved, but that seems to be the norm hereabouts on economic matters.”

The report’s acknowledgments list dozens of interviewees, including the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, the Washington Roundtable and the Tech Alliance. No large tech employer is among them.

Ryan Donahue, a co-founder and managing partner at Formation, said in an email that the researchers interviewed many business representatives but no large companies directly, saying he expected a predictable message from their government affairs teams.

The person who led the report’s tax and cost analysis previously ran Amazon HQ2 recruitment at the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the agency that landed the project for Arlington, Va., Donahue said, providing insights into how firms like Amazon weigh those decisions.

A path forward: The report recommends that the city focus on five industries: artificial intelligence, cleantech, maritime, life sciences and space. Cleantech is the priority, the report says, because Seattle owns or regulates much of what the sector needs, from Seattle City Light to building codes, permitting and land use.

The Seattle Office of Economic Development commissioned the report from Formation in 2025, under then-Mayor Bruce Harrell, to examine the drivers of the city’s business climate.

Harrell’s successor, Mayor Wilson, released the report Wednesday afternoon alongside an executive order convening a task force of business, labor, community and civic leaders, directing the city to improve permitting pathways, and calling for a proposal to create a Seattle Strategic Initiatives Fund.

In releasing the report, Wilson’s office said the findings “are independent and are not City policy.” But speaking on KUOW-FM’s Soundside as the report was released, the mayor called it “fantastic,” describing it as “super nuanced,” and urging listeners to take the time to read it.

The cost of a hire: JumpStart, the payroll expense tax, applies to large employers based on the compensation they pay to high-earning workers in Seattle. Approved by the City Council in 2020 and in effect since 2021, it was created to fund affordable housing, small-business support and climate programs, but the city has increasingly used it for general government operations.

Wilson helped create the tax before running for mayor, saying on her campaign website that she “played an instrumental role in designing and passing” the payroll tax.

Under JumpStart, hiring a software engineer at $650,000 in total compensation costs about $17,000 a year more in Seattle than in Bellevue, the report says. For an employee earning more than $1 million, the difference exceeds $33,000. San Francisco imposes no per-employee tax at all, and New York City’s equivalent is less than $6,000, according to the researchers.

That $17,000 reflects the tax’s top rate, which this year applies only to employers with about $1.3 billion or more in Seattle payroll. Two or three companies at most are in that tier, the report says. At the city’s lowest rate for that pay level, the same engineer would cost about $11,800, according to Seattle’s published rates.

The rate rises with an employee’s pay, and a company that crosses one of the city’s payroll thresholds pays the higher rate on every qualifying worker, not just the next hire.

“No other comparison city has a tax with both of these features,” the report says.

An issue of perception: Business leaders interviewed for the study described JumpStart as a problem “not primarily for its cost but because the process of enacting it communicated that the city’s governing orientation is fundamentally extractive.”

The researchers add: “Whether or not that characterization is fair, it is the operating perception, and perception shapes location decisions.”

But the researchers stop short of recommending a change. Taxes have “modest effects on firm location and expansion decisions,” they write, and Seattle is unlikely to lose its biggest employers to other regions, because the alternatives are either more expensive or have weaker talent.

“The Eastside is the only real threat in that regard,” the report says.

The study is blunt about what is at stake in keeping those employers. “If they leave,” it says, “Seattle won’t become more equal, it will just become poorer.”

What to do about taxes? The report does not recommend raising or lowering that top rate. Research on how firms respond to local taxes draws on thousands of firms across dozens of jurisdictions, it says, and “cannot tell us how any one firm will respond to any one tax change.”

With two or three firms in the top tier and “one firm by far the most dominant,” the question “is fundamentally a question about how that single firm will react.” It adds, “That is not a question this report, or the literature it draws on, is equipped to answer.”

GeekWire has contacted Amazon for comment on the report.

Other tax options that have been floated — vacancy taxes, wealth taxes, head taxes beyond JumpStart, expanded gross receipts schemes — are “either disallowed under state law or would, if enacted, likely push out the firms and workers Seattle most needs to retain,” the report says.

And once the state’s new 9.9% tax on income above $1 million takes effect in 2028, Seattle earners above that level will face a combined state and local marginal rate of about 10.5%. Pushing meaningfully above that, the report says, “would be a high-stakes tax experiment.”

Where Wilson stands: The mayor has already conceded the Bellevue point. “I don’t think it’s good that it is less expensive to do business in Bellevue than in Seattle,” she said in May. “We’re going to be taking that into consideration.”

She defended the tax in June, crediting it with helping Seattle recover from the pandemic and cautioning against blaming downtown’s problems on any single cause.

Her relationship with the tech community has been rockier. At a Seattle University event in April, asked about that state tax, Wilson said concerns about wealthy residents leaving were “super overblown” — then waved and said, “the ones that leave, like, bye.” The moment drew national coverage and criticism from Seattle investors.

A bet on cleantech: Taking a step back, the report says Seattle’s best opportunity is in cleantech, a category it defines broadly to include clean energy generation, energy efficiency and sustainable production methods and materials.

The shift is already showing up in local venture funding. Cleantech and energy companies took 3% of the venture capital raised by Seattle-area private companies from 2016 to 2020, and 20% from 2021 to 2025, according to Crunchbase data cited in the report. Three companies — TerraPower, Helion and Group14 — account for 70% of that.

The city “should be most concerned about AI but most active in cleantech,” the report says.

AI will ultimately be more important to Seattle’s future, the researchers explain, but the city has almost no ability to shape it. Cleantech is different: Seattle owns the electric utility, writes the building codes and controls permitting and much of the land.

The city can also use its own purchasing power to create a market for what these companies build, the report says, pointing to a New York program that used public housing demand to bring a new cold-climate heat pump into production.

To reach the top tier of cleantech ecosystems, the report says, Seattle would need a dedicated entity putting at least $5 million a year into growing the sector, funded through ratepayer charges, philanthropy, corporate sponsorship and competitive federal grants.

What’s next: According to the city, Wilson’s executive order calls for the task force to convene industry roundtables in the coming months. The report’s own first-year list runs to ten items, including a business-led commission on the city’s fiscal exposure, with an emphasis on AI, and structured visits with 50 companies across the five industries it identifies.

Others include naming a senior staffer in the mayor’s office to run the city’s AI agenda, and a childcare cost-sharing pilot split three ways between employee, employer and city, with the city’s share paid out of JumpStart.

On taxes, the report’s primary recommendation looks beyond City Hall. It urges Wilson to build a cross-partisan coalition of mayors and county executives to press Olympia for new municipal revenue tools, including changes to the state’s 1% cap on property tax growth.

A caller on KUOW asked Wilson whether there’s a limit to how much Seattle should grow. She said she shares the concern, then pointed back to the report, which she said makes clear there is “no graceful path” for Seattle to cool down its growth.

“We can’t go back to the ’90s,” she said.

[Editor’s Note: Jacob Colker is co-founder and co-managing director of AI House.]

Seattle is one of the most talented, creative and inventive places in the world. But if we want the rest of the country to see us that way, we have to start acting like we believe it ourselves.

First, we need more pride around here.

Let’s talk about what it means to be proud. 

My mother grew up in Tarnów, Poland. She escaped communism and came to the United States in 1978 looking for a better life. She found one, built a family, and has lived in America for nearly 50 years. 

But my mom is still very, very Polish.

Several times a year, I get a message: “Jakub. Did you see this?”

I already know what’s coming. 

Some Polish person did something. A Polish athlete won something. A Polish scientist discovered something. Some guy with a Polish grandmother finished third in a regional Nebraska chess tournament. Doesn’t matter. Poland.

“Jakub. Look at this person.”

Okay, Mom. Who is she?

“POLISH.”

That’s it. That’s the story. 

And I love it, because Mom has this completely indestructible pride in where she comes from. Plenty of us know someone like this: a Greek mom, Vietnamese dad, Indian uncle or Nigerian aunt. Somebody from their corner of the world did something great, and you are going to hear about it.

There is power in that instinct. Not because your people are better, but because you believe your place matters.

Seattle could use more of that.

We are almost pathologically humble. Our response to notable achievements is often a polite nod before everybody gets back to our regularly scheduled Seattle freeze. 

That humility is working against us.

Second, Seattle is awesome and the evidence is everywhere.

I see Seattle’s potential every day working alongside dozens of entrepreneurs building startups. Some of the most ambitious and talented people in the world are already here.

We have many billion-dollar startups across the region and more than 200,000 people working across technology, science, space, health and startups. That is more than enough talent to build yet a dozen more unicorns. 

Nearly 40% of the world flies every day on airplanes built here. Blue Origin and SpaceX build rockets here. Starbucks, Amazon, Costco, REI and Nordstrom reshaped how the world shops. Microsoft helped put computing into our homes. AWS and Azure helped make the cloud the infrastructure of modern life. The University of Washington ranks among the world’s best. Seattle medical breakthroughs have helped save tens of millions of lives. We are pushing forward fusion energy, aerospace and maritime innovation. And let’s not forget: we just won the darn Super Bowl.

And so, so much more. 

So why, despite all the evidence, do we still seem to have a communal case of imposter syndrome?

This is not a city lacking accomplishments.

It is a city with a branding problem.

Third, we have let other people tell our story for far too long. This ends, today. 

Cities have brands whether they intend to or not. Silicon Valley is where ambitious people build companies. Nashville is music. Los Angeles for film and television.

Seattle’s cultural humility mostly assumes our accomplishments speak for themselves.

They don’t.

Reputation gets built one story at a time. You hear one story and it is interesting. You hear 10 and you notice a pattern. You hear 50 and your beliefs begin to change: That’s where important science happens. That’s where talented people live. That’s where I should invest, build or work.

Those beliefs shape real decisions about where people move, where companies get built and where investors put their money.

So to fix Seattle’s branding problem, here’s what we need to do.

Step 1: Let’s tell one clear story — Seattle’s talent pool is ridiculous. 

Seattle is where deep technical talent meets deep domain expertise to build consequential things: AI, aerospace, cloud computing, medicine, fusion, robotics, maritime technology and enterprise software.

We do not need 50 slogans. We do not need another consultant-led branding exercise. We need one simple idea that people outside this region can remember: Seattle’s talent pool is ridiculous.

There is a reason some of the world’s most important companies have built major engineering centers, research hubs and second headquarters here for decades. They come for the talent.

And that talent is why Seattle will not just participate in the future. We will lead in building it.

Step 2: Let’s use the megaphones we already have.

Seattle already has outlets (including this one) telling this story — publications, podcasts and social channels that document the region’s startups, breakthroughs and product launches. 

Every day, startups are raising money, scientists are making breakthroughs, companies are launching products, engineers are building technology and institutions are pushing this region forward.

That is not just tech news. That is the raw material of Seattle’s reputation. So let’s use it.

When you read or hear about a Seattle startup doing something remarkable, share it. When you see a story about a breakthrough at Fred Hutch or the University of Washington, send it to someone outside the region. When a local company raises money, lands a major customer or gets acquired, don’t just scroll past it. Amplify it.

Step 3: Let’s treat every local win as Seattle’s win.

When a local robotics company ships something remarkable, that is Seattle’s story.

When a maritime startup reinvents how ports operate, that is Seattle’s story.

When our AI research labs, or hometown heroes in Amazon and Microsoft, create breakthroughs, that is Seattle’s story. 

When a biotech company lands a major breakthrough, when a game studio creates a global hit, when a clean-energy company reaches a milestone, that is Seattle’s story.

Our companies, universities, hospitals, labs, investors, civic organizations and business leaders should act like an amplification network for one another. Stop treating somebody else’s success as somebody else’s news.

Their win is our collective proof.

Step 4: Let’s put Seattle on the label.

Founders need to say where they are building. “Made with ❤️in Seattle” should be on the bottom of every website. Put Seattle in the press release. Put it in the LinkedIn post. Mention it onstage. Say it in interviews. Tell investors. Tell customers. 

Silicon Valley companies have spent decades attaching their success to their geography. We should do the same. If you build something extraordinary here, make sure the world knows it was built here.

Step 5: Let’s do a better job of selling Seattle.

Every venture capitalist, founder, executive and civic leader in this region should be able to explain in 60 seconds why somebody should build a company here.

Not defend Seattle. Not apologize for Seattle. Sell Seattle. 

Reminder: It’s the talent. 

(And also cream cheese on hot dogs.)

When investors and founders from New York, Boston or San Francisco come to town, show them the region. Introduce them to engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs. Bring them into the community. Let them see what is happening. 

The best branding campaign is somebody getting on a plane home saying, I had no idea all of this was happening in Seattle.

If we’re going to succeed, we need to believe first.

Insert all the Ted Lasso jokes you want, but this stuff matters. 

There is no giant Seattle marketing department coming to save us. There is no national referee who will eventually review the evidence and declare that Seattle deserves more respect.

When somebody here does something extraordinary, act like it. Read the story. Share the post. Send the article to your team. Text it to your friend in New York. Put it in the group chat. Bring it up over dinner. Tell your kids.

Basically, become my Polish mother.

My mom doesn’t give a hoot that Kraków ranks No. 6 on some list or Warsaw is No. 8 on another. She doesn’t need a clickbait listicle to tell her Poland matters. She already believes it does.

We have to build our reputation ourselves. The good news is that we already have everything we need: extraordinary companies, world-class institutions, ambitious people, groundbreaking science and media documenting it all.

What we have been missing is the confidence to start being more loud. Stories become patterns, patterns become reputation, and reputation becomes gravity. 

Gravity is what creates influence and respect.

Pride is not something somebody else gives you. You don’t wait until the rest of the country decides your home is important. YOU decide it is. Then you act like it.

Let’s get to work. 

— Telecom giant T-Mobile announced that Jessica Uhl will join as chief financial officer-designate later this month, and succeed Peter Osvaldik as CFO in February. Uhl served as CFO of Shell and worked for the global oil and energy giant for more than 17 years. She joins T-Mobile from GE Vernova, where she was president.

“I am thrilled to welcome Jessica to T-Mobile,” Srini Gopalan, president and CEO of T-Mobile said in a statement. “She brings deep financial and strategic acumen, capital allocation expertise and an innovative growth mindset that is a perfect fit for T-Mobile’s next era.”

Osvaldik will transition to strategic advisor and retire from T-Mobile in July. He joined the company in 2016 and became chief financial officer in 2020. Osvaldik’s tenure “has been defined by disciplined financial stewardship, consistent financial outperformance, and an unwavering commitment to T-Mobile’s mission,” the company said.

The move marks the latest leadership shakeup at the Bellevue, Wash.-based company. Mike Katz, T-Mobile’s chief business and product officer, announced his departure in July, and Chris Sambar was named chief enterprise officer. T-Mobile has cut 470 jobs in its home state this year and closed numerous retail locations.

— Brent Colburn, Microsoft‘s vice president of global public affairs, is resigning after three years, effective mid-October.

“Stepping away from Microsoft is not a decision that I made lightly, but ultimately it is the right one for me and my family,” said Colburn, who has been commuting weekly between his home in Oakland, Calif., and Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters.

Colburn’s career has spanned leadership roles in government, academia and philanthropy. That includes serving as principal advisor to the secretary of defense for communications and chief of staff to then-Secretary Shaun Donovan. More recent roles include communications vice president for the University of California in Oakland, Princeton University and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

— After nearly 13 years, Audrey Powers has left Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos that develops reusable rockets, spacecraft and rocket engines. She was on Blue Origin’s October 2021 spaceflight that also carried “Star Trek” star William Shatner and two others.

“Hopefully, I’ve helped change peoples’ impressions of rockets (they land, too), astronauts (they are everyone), and our Earth,” Powers said, adding that she was sad to leave, but grateful that she took a chance on “a little startup no one had heard of.”

Powers held the title of deputy and vice president of the New Shepard Business Unit, which is the program that carries people and research payloads into suborbital space. She is an attorney who has previously worked at NASA as a flight controller and as a senior systems engineer at Lockheed Martin.

— Michael Levi has joined AZX as chief commercial officer of the Bellevue-based startup, which works with utilities and other industries to build in-house AI technologies supporting their missions.

Levi is based in San Francisco and was previously vice president of marketing and growth for KloudGin, where he helped reposition the company’s field service software into an AI-native platform for utilities and the public sector. He earlier founded L1CG, a go-to-market advisory, and has held leadership roles in energy, renewables, supply chain and fintech.

— Jason Alafgani was named head of marketing for Caddi, a Seattle startup that launched out of AI2 Incubator and is automating basic business operations with generative AI. Alafgani is the co-founder of startups including the podcast company Jellypod and worked as marketing leader for Appwrite, Dodgeball, Mode and others.

— Dr. Amir Iravani has joined Los Angeles-based UCLA Health as director of the theranostics program, which focuses on treating cancer using targeted radiation therapy. Iravani previously served as theranostics clinical director at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle and was an associate professor of radiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

— Portland Metro Region Innovation Hub has hired Kelly Lyons as director of the organization, which provides networking, coaching, funding and other support to entrepreneurs. Lyons is the founder of two startups and has served in leadership at Core Education, Umpqua Bank and Development House, a social services nonprofit.

— DigiStor, a Vancouver, Wash.-based provider of secure data-at-rest protection solutions, appointed Michael Callahan to its board of directors. Callahan co-founded Awake Security and PolyServe, which was acquired by HP.

California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease.

“According to Newmark Research, the transaction is the largest industrial lease in the Puget Sound region year-to-date,” Newmark, the real estate broker for the deal, said in a news release. Newmark represented CenterPoint Properties, Cowboy’s new landlord.

The facility at 7650 S. 228th St. previously served as a Costco distribution and delivery center. “This building was originally designed for large-scale logistics users, but Cowboy Space recognized the opportunity to reimagine it as a highly specialized production facility,” said Taylor Hoff, a vice chairman at Newmark’s office in Bellevue, Wash.

Newmark said Cowboy Space plans to convert the facility into a manufacturing operation supporting space and rocket development. The operation is expected to add 300 jobs, Newmark said. Cowboy is currently listing 46 Kent-based positions in its careers database.

The city of Kent, which is about 20 miles south of Seattle, is one of the hotspots for space companies in the Pacific Northwest. Boeing’s Kent Space Center remains active more than 50 years after building NASA’s Apollo moon rovers. The city also hosts Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Stoke Space, which was founded by Blue Origin alumni.

Cowboy Space, previously known as Aetherflux, plans to send its own rockets into low Earth orbit starting as early as 2028, with the upper stages outfitted to serve as solar-powered orbital data centers. The Stampede constellation is one of several planned projects aimed at getting around the land, power and water constraints that have made ground-based AI data centers increasingly controversial.

“We are building what I call the last big clean-sheet launch vehicle in my lifetime, so it’s going to be a very big heavy-lift vehicle, and we’re working every day to bring it to reality,” Warren Lamont, Cowboy Space’s head of launch and propulsion, said this week in a LinkedIn video. Lamont, who previously worked for IonQ and Blue Origin, is one of the executives heading up Cowboy Space’s engineering hub in the Seattle area.

The company announced in May that it raised $275 million in a Series B funding round, in part to expand its production capability. Cowboy is collaborating with Nvidia to deploy the chip giant’s Nvidia Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules in orbit. And in July, it secured a deal to test its propulsion system at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

“We’re really excited to get into first engine hot-fire next year,” Lamont said.

Cowboy Space’s potential competitors include SpaceX, which wants to launch up to a million AI-processing satellites; and Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which is setting up a production facility in Woodinville, Wash., and seeking authorization for up to 88,000 data center satellites.

Update for 3:30 p.m. PT Sept. 13: Cowboy Space confirmed the opening of its Kent facility in a post to LinkedIn. “Kent will be our launch vehicle and satellite design hub, and we will be building our rocket engines and solar systems here too,” the company said:

— Aneesh Raman has taken the role of chief economic opportunity officer at Microsoft. He previously held the same title at LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary where he worked for five years.

The job is focused on “helping companies, including our own, build and deploy AI tools in ways that will unlock new levels of economic opportunity and human capability for workers and workforces alike,” Raman said.

Raman, who is based in San Francisco, began his career as a TV journalist and served as a speechwriter for President Obama and other political leaders. More recently he was an adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom and led economic impact for Facebook.

— Jenny Lay-Flurrie was promoted to corporate vice president of Microsoft‘s Trusted Technology Group. In February, she had taken the role of vice president and head of Trusted Technology, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory compliance, responsible AI use and related topics.

Lay-Flurrie announced the change on LinkedIn, saying that she was “honoured, humbled and a little lost for words (yes,, it does occasionally happen ;)).”

The tech leader has been with Microsoft since 2005, and led the company’s efforts on accessibility and disability inclusion for more than a decade.

— Brian Gill has resigned as chief product and technology officer for DAT Freight & Analytics, a Beaverton, Ore.-based freight company. Gill was with DAT for more than three years and previously served as CPO for Nordstrom.

In a LinkedIn post, Gill did not give specifics on his next move but said he would be “rolling up my sleeves and building the many ideas that are suddenly so much easier to bring to life.”

Gill’s other past roles include executive positions at Hotwire and nearly a decade at Expedia. Last month DAT announced multiple promotions and hires to its leadership team.

— Colin Newman has joined Zillow Group as head of public policy. He was previously director of U.S. public policy for Amazon, leading initiatives on employment, workforce transformation, AI, transportation and economic development. He first took a government affairs role with Amazon’s Audible business in 2015 and moved to Amazon five years ago.

“I look forward to leveraging my government, legal, and public policy experience to support our efforts to simplify and democratize the housing process for everyone,” Newman said. His background includes legal counsel for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

— Lisa Finnegan is returning to Microsoft as vice president and human resources business partner for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. Finnegan, who is based in Dublin, was previously with LinkedIn for more than eight years, departing in March 2025. Her interim role was with Lumera HR Consulting.

“It’s a pretty incredible time to (re)join Microsoft and the opportunity to help shape the people and organisation agenda across EMEA at this critical moment is incredibly compelling,” she said.

— James Lau, chief product officer at Hiya, announced this is his last week at the Seattle startup, which battles fraudulent calls and provides technology to protect voice identity. He’s been in the role for three years and previously worked at Microsoft over multiple stints.

Lau is launching a company called Entrovox, which he describes as an AI phone team that helps insurance agencies land new customers through state-of-the-art AI voice agents, branded caller ID and smart campaigns.

“There has never been a more exciting time for building, and I am deeply passionate about voice AI. Making AI sound genuinely human is a challenge I find irresistible,” Lau said.

— Jason Wilbur has left Oracle to join OpenAI‘s Seattle office as a leader in cloud partnerships.

Wilbur was with Oracle over two stints spanning more than six years and leaves the role of senior director of product management. Past jobs include CEO at Aarno Labs, co-founder of Require Security, and senior product manager at Amazon.

— Julia Liuson was appointed to Elastic’s board of directors. Earlier this year, Liuson resigned from Microsoft after more than 34 years. She was most recently president of Microsoft’s Developer Division. San Francisco’s Elastic bills itself as the “search AI company.”

— Dan Walter was promoted to vice president of fission technology for Everett, Wash.-based Zap Energy. Walter joined Zap earlier this year as the clean power startup announced it was expanding to pursue fission micro-reactors as well as fusion-based nuclear energy. Zap is No. 11 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

Walter was previously at TerraPower for nearly a decade, most recently in a director role for the nuclear power company.

— Kelsey Wolf has joined next-gen battery company Group14 Technologies as director of communications and marketing. Wolf was previously the communications lead for Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based e-bike startup that went bankrupt and was acquired this past spring. Group14 is No. 34 on the GeekWire 200.

“I’ve spent my career telling exciting stories about technology that changes how we work, how we find home, and how we move around the world. Up next, I will get to tell stories about the technology and materials powering our world,” she said.

— Tin Can, a Seattle startup selling Wi-Fi-enabled landline phones for kids, announced three hires:

• Evan Jacobs has joined as head of engineering, previously serving as a software development manager at Amazon Web Services. Jacobs is also a startup founder.
• Quinn Hawkins was named head of communities, joining from First Street, where he was chief product officer. His background includes leadership at Redfin and Microsoft.
• Masud Khan was named staff software engineer. Past employers include Apple, Databricks, Meta and Amazon.

Tin Can, which launched last year, is No. 153 on the GeekWire 200.

— EchoMark, ​the ​Bellevue, Wash., startup using forensic ​watermarking ​to identify ​the ​source of information leaks, ​has named Alex Gamoran vice president of enterprise sales. Gamoran was previously at Smartsheet for nearly a decade, leaving as regional vice president of commercial sales for North America.

“It struck me that every security-conscious enterprise is going to need a solution to the types of information leaks that conventional security software is blind to — and that’s when I knew I wanted to be part of EchoMark,” Gamoran said via email.

— Sara Dutta was named director of AI innovation and partnerships for Seattle biopharmaceutical company Omeros. She previously founded the life sciences consultancy Ocilisni and was a director at Novo Nordisk, focused on external partnerships and emerging technologies.

Last year, Omeros struck a deal worth up to $2.1 billion with Novo Nordisk, giving the latter exclusive global rights to develop and commercialize a clinical-stage drug candidate that treats rare blood and kidney disorders. Omeros won Deal of the Year at this year’s GeekWire Awards.

— Rebekah Bastian announced that she is leaving mpathic as chief marketing officer. She joined the Bellevue, Wash., startup working to make AI safe in December. Bastian previously launched and was CEO of the life-and-career social platform OwnTrail. She was with Zillow Group for more than 14 years and also worked at GlowForge.

“I’m giving myself some intentional time to explore ideas and let them incubate before deciding where they lead,” she said. That could include new companies or initiatives within existing companies, and her areas of focus span “human agency, creative entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and generally how humans find meaning and thrive in the age of AI.”

— Seattle-area wine recommendation startup Theodora has appointed Heather Stephens founding marketing lead. Stephens has worked for more than a decade in consumer and B2B marketing, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy development.

— Marc Brown, former global head of M&A and strategic investments at Microsoft and now managing director of venture capital coverage at JPMorgan, has joined the board of trustees of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, an organization supporting civic engagement for young people.

— Adrienne Lopez, a Seattle-based marketing leader who has worked on initiatives with organizations including Meta, WhatsApp, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, was named executive vice president of WH Inc.

— Washington Research Foundation announced its new cohort of venture analysts: Jessica Ayers, Ankit Azad, Nello Gu, Michael Malone and Elya Shamskhou. The program helps graduate students and postdoctoral fellows gain expertise in technology commercialization and entrepreneurship.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Bill Gates published a new essay warning that the AI industry is crossing the safety lines it set for itself, and that nobody is preparing for what’s coming. At age 70, he also uses AI more than most people half his age, and he finds it enthralling, as you’ll hear on this week’s show, with highlights from our interview with him.

Along the way, we dig into his three proposals: new institutions for managing the transition, a category of jobs reserved for humans, and a tax on the use and purchase of AI and robots.

The change in his own tech usage: “I joke with people that I used to have Claude-like people that I would send email to, but they were so slow, and there were some topics they didn’t actually know. … It’s three a.m. I want to understand sodium batteries, and now there’s no reason to go to sleep. Here we go. Yeah, it’s crazy.”

How he uses AI specifically: “If you’re a curious person, this is a mind-blowing time. When I’m working on malaria, nutrition, my poor humans that I work with always get these long conversations from me, where I paste in — me, Claude, me, ChatGPT. Sometimes I do it if there’s three of us: Claude, ChatGPT and me, debating these things.”

On where personal agents are headed: “We will get to a point where you won’t buy things yourself. You just won’t. … You won’t go to those applications. You’ll just go to your personal agent. … From a productivity point of view, we are in heaven.”

What has surprised him: “I was shocked by ChatGPT, and I was shocked by Claude Code. Those are both things where I went, oh my God. … I did not expect that a statistical machine would essentially learn to read, and the idea that the code is better than human code. Those are two stunning thresholds.”

On writing this essay: “It’s very unnatural for me to think that innovation may be a net negative if it’s not managed properly. The more I wrote the memo, the more I was like, Jesus, we really need to get our act together here. Even though this may come across as negative, that’s the truth. If we don’t step up, the negatives will substantially outweigh the positives.”

What AI leaders say privately: “You’re in this perverse period right now where people in the AI industry who are willing to say that AI might have some negative effects are told, ‘Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.’ … I know they’re all worried. Or all of them that I know, which is basically everybody but Elon.”

On losing control of AI: “The wake-up for the memo is that the bad stuff thresholds are all being crossed. Even lack of control that I thought would be many years from now, we’re seeing lack of control. … These are people who are super expert on the thing, going, well, maybe we won’t be able to control these things. What kind of risk have we chosen to run here?”

On how fast robots are coming: “What’s weird about AI is it’s better at doing jobs across the entire economy, including physical jobs when the robots come — which you can guess when that is, but my view is it’s only a couple of years.”

Is he still an optimist? “I don’t think being pessimistic is helpful. I do think, wow, this is sure an interesting time. I’m the guy who in my 30s thought people in their 50s or 60s didn’t understand anything. So it’s kind of bizarre if a guy who’s 70 comes and writes a memo that’s actually helpful. … But I am very concerned. And honestly, when you get people one-on-one, so are they.”

Related headlines and links

• The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical. — Bill Gates, Gates Notes
• ‘I am very concerned’: Bill Gates says the world needs a plan to deal with AI, and he has three ideas to start
• Bill Gates says there’s ‘no upper limit’ on AI, citing opportunity and risk
• Etzioni on AI: Bill Gates has the right diagnosis but the wrong prescription
• Dwarkesh Podcast: Ryan Greenblatt — What happens once AI can automate AI research?
• NPR: Trump’s new AI safety order seeks voluntary review of new models
• New York Times: Bill Gates is warning that A.I. is more dangerous than Big Tech will admit
• Wall Street Journal: Three takeaways from Bill Gates’s 5,784-word warning on AI: ‘There is no plan’
• MIT Technology Review: Bill Gates says we’ve passed AI’s danger thresholds. Now what?
• Axios: Gates confronts the Epstein questions hanging over his AI push
• Transcript: Here’s what Bill Gates told lawmakers in his recent Epstein testimony
• OpenAI: A Collective Approach to Cyber Defense

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Edited and produced by Curt Milton. Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

Long before the July email arrived confirming she was one of thousands of Xbox employees laid off in Microsoft’s latest round of job cuts, Agnes Kim could feel the impending doom hanging over big tech.

But instead of waiting around for the next pendulum swing, the eight-year Xbox veteran spent her nights and weekends laying the groundwork for a very different kind of reboot: a boutique Korean skincare startup called ViaJiin.

The pivot from big tech and gaming to startups and beauty is an illustration in how preparation can help a laid off worker upend the usual five stages of grief that come before figuring out what to do next. Kim skipped straight to acceptance — announcing her new venture on LinkedIn just two days after getting her pink slip from Microsoft.

Kim joined the tech giant in 2018 after roles at Sony Pictures Entertainment and Deloitte Consulting, eventually rising to director leading Xbox’s market expansion in Asia. For years, she thrived in the role, building teams and expanding the gaming footprint in regions close to her roots. But as post-pandemic gaming demand normalized, the environment shifted from ambitious growth to what felt like a cycle of corporate survival.

Starting in early 2023, layoffs began rolling through the company every six months. Seeing the predictable pattern take its toll on team morale, Kim realized she couldn’t rely on long-term corporate stability to fulfill her goal of becoming an entrepreneur.

“You have a sense of impending doom,” Kim recalled. “There’s a shadow lurking. I felt like every six months we were waiting for the next round. I just didn’t feel like I was in an upswing anymore.”

Determined to take control of her timeline, she began tinkering with her business concept in late 2025, officially forming an LLC for ViaJiin in March 2026 and running focus groups by May — all while balancing her full-time executive role. When the July cuts finally hit Xbox, eliminating 1,600 jobs, Kim had already built six months of momentum.

Kim’s connection to skincare is deeply personal, rooted in her childhood spent living in South Korea from ages eight to 15. She grew up watching her mother religiously follow a multi-step routine and stress the daily necessity of sunscreen — a reflection of a culture where maintaining a youthful appearance carries immense social expectation.

That intense domestic demand has birthed a fiercely competitive market of over 30,000 brands, driving rapid scientific innovation. It has also turned South Korea into a global beauty powerhouse, with cosmetics exports surging past $10 billion as the U.S. recently surpassed China as the top destination for Korean beauty products.

ViaJiin aims to solve the overwhelming paralysis that American consumers face when trying to navigate the K-beauty market. Instead of building a massive retail catalog or pushing complicated 12-step routines, Kim simplifies the process into a streamlined four-product kit — cleanser, toner, serum, and cream — curated through a digital skin quiz. And she bypasses mainstream brands sold at big-box retailers to source exclusively from boutique Korean makers.

“The products I carry, you can only get through me,” Kim said. “I find boutique products that are filled with good ingredients, come to the U.S. compliantly, and turn it into a kit.”

ViaJiin’s full kits sell for $179, while smaller duo sets are priced at $99. Since shipping her first orders in August, Kim has been hand-packing boxes herself with personalized touches, building early traction online while hosting small, local events like “ViaJiin Nights” to let clients test products in person. The kits have also secured retail shelf space at K-Beauty & Skin in Renton, Wash., where Kim lives.

Kim’s transition from managing corporate teams to operating as a solo founder has meant trading human delegation for AI assistance.

Toward the end of her tenure at Microsoft, every conversation and initiative was dominated by a relentless push toward AI. Kim is now embracing those tools to execute work that would typically require a suite of employees or contractors.

She’s relied on Anthropic’s Claude as a virtual strategist and used platforms like Lovable to try her hand at “vibe coding” — the trend of using conversational natural-language prompts to generate functional software code — building out ViaJiin’s website and skin quiz without hiring a developer.

“I don’t have a co-founder… I’m delegating to Claude and GPT,” Kim said. “People are very surprised by my website or the skin quiz. I’m not an engineer, but it looks like I hired a web designer.”

While AI can handle code and logistics prompts, Kim quickly found that software can only go so far when running a physical inventory business. Between navigating complex U.S. FDA labeling regulations, managing customs paperwork, and verifying ingredient compliance, the operational heavy lifting remains resolutely analog.

And the shift from corporate structure to total solitary accountability is daunting at times.

Without a team to delegate to or a clear roadmap of objectives and key results, Kim admits there are moments where the freedom of entrepreneurship gives way to self-doubt.

“I think I understand why some people just work for the man,” Kim joked. “When you work for Microsoft, certainty and structure are more there. There are definitely moments where I’m like, ‘What the f*ck am I doing? What is today’s goal?'”

Still, Kim has no interest in turning back. Energized by the daily hustle and the creative control of building something from scratch, she insists she wouldn’t trade the experience for her old corporate desk. She hopes to grow ViaJiin into a household national brand while staying out of big tech for as long as she can.

“I’m 1,000% energized. I absolutely would not trade it,” Kim said. “This is allowing me to be truly the version of Agnes that I thought I would be when I was 12, and I want to keep going at it.”

— Marc Whitten, a former Microsoft and Amazon executive, was named president and CEO of San Francisco-based Dolby Laboratories. He succeeds Kevin Yeaman, who is retiring after leading the entertainment technology company for nearly 20 years.

Whitten spent 17 years at Microsoft, rising to corporate vice president and chief product officer for Xbox. He went on to serve as chief product officer at Sonos before joining Amazon as vice president of entertainment devices and services, overseeing products including Alexa, Kindle and Fire TV.

He later served as president of Unity Create and CEO of Cruise. Most recently, he was vice president of robotics at Meta.

— Fred Hutch Cancer Center announced leadership changes in two divisions.

Dr. Lawrence Fong was named senior vice president and director of the Translational Science and Therapeutics Division, effective Dec. 1. He succeeds Dr. Geoff Hill, who is departing the organization in December.

Fong joined Fred Hutch in 2024 as scientific director of the Immunotherapy Integrated Research Center and Bezos Family Distinguished Scholar in Immunotherapy. He previously founded the Cancer Immunotherapy Program at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Andrew Hsieh, the associate director of the Fred Hutch Human Biology Division, was named the inaugural Larry and Virginia Gordon Endowed Chair in Prostate and Bladder Cancer Research. Hsieh is a physician-scientist at Fred Hutch specializing in genitourinary cancers.

— Two recent notable Microsoft AI-related exits:

Andréa Mallard is leaving her role as chief marketing officer of Microsoft AI after joining from Pinterest in January, according to Business Insider. She will stay on as an advisor until early next year. Mallard, who is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, previously served as global chief marketing officer at Pinterest for eight years.

Ece Kamar departed Microsoft Research after 16 years with the company. She was corporate vice president and managing director of the AI Frontiers Lab, where she worked on small language models and the company’s agentic AI stack. She has not announced her next role.

— Poppy MacDonald was named president of NationSwell, a social impact membership organization. MacDonald previously served as president of USAFacts, the nonpartisan civic data initiative founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, for seven years. A past recipient of an Uncommon Thinkers award from GeekWire and Greater Seattle Partners, she is also the former president and COO of POLITICO.

— Jeff Buhrman joined Seattle startup Tin Can as head of finance. The company is building a screen-free, WiFi-enabled phone designed to let kids connect with friends and family. Buhrman previously served as CFO of Seattle-based Sleep Doctor for more than four years.

— Susan Loosmore was confirmed to the Major League Baseball Stadium Public Facilities District board, which oversees T-Mobile Park. The King County Council approved the appointment Aug. 25. Loosmore spent more than 17 years in executive leadership at T-Mobile and previously served as chair of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

— Seattle-based SecureW2, a passwordless security company, named Martin Musierowicz as president and Mark Packham as chief marketing officer.

• Musierowicz, who is based in Atlanta, previously served as chief revenue officer at SmartBear and Keyfactor. Earlier, he led global channels and alliances at Atlassian through its IPO.
• Packham, who is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, joins from Dragos, where he was CMO. He previously served as executive vice president of marketing at DigiCert.

— Vancouver, B.C.-based Integrated Quantum Technologies, an enterprise AI infrastructure company, appointed Husam Fezzani as CEO. He succeeds Alan Guibord, who moved to chairman. Fezzani spent nearly 30 years at HSBC, where he held senior technology and engineering leadership roles including global engineering head for the bank’s Commercial Technology Division.

When Bill Gates talks, people listen. This week he published a lengthy essay on what AI is going to do to work, and told GeekWire that people inside AI companies who name the downsides get told, “Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.”

He’s right about the hard part. The job displacement he describes lands on young workers first, and the safety net is funded by taxes on the very wages that AI erodes. He prescribes three treatments: new institutions at home and abroad, a tax on AI tokens and robots, and “Human Reserved,” a category of jobs only people may hold.

Gates has the diagnosis right but the prescription mostly wrong. I’d sign the robot tax tomorrow, because hiring a person costs you payroll tax every year while buying a robot gets written off in year one. The other two I’d send back.

Let’s start with what’s solid. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab updated its “Canaries in the Coal Mine” work this month. Employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed occupations is running 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with their peers in less exposed work, up from 15% a year ago. The same authors say they don’t see widespread, economy-wide displacement, and unemployment held at 4.1% in July.

The AI damage isn’t arriving as layoffs. It’s arriving as jobs that never get posted, and Gates is right that the young get it first.

Now the token tax. Tokens (essentially words) are what AI companies bill by. Taxing tokens is like taxing keystrokes: it measures effort, not displacement.

A high school class working through calculus with an AI tutor burns tokens continuously. A model that quietly retires a 40-person customer center might burn relatively few. The tax lands hardest on the uses Gates says he wants to protect.

Stanford’s AI Index put the cost of GPT-3.5-level performance at $20 per million tokens in November 2022 and seven cents by October 2024, a 280-fold drop. You’d be indexing the safety net to a number that falls every year while displacement rises.

And you can’t collect it. Inference runs on laptops and phones now, and on servers in whatever country declines to sign. A token tax is a tax on whoever uses an American API, and every dollar it adds makes a Chinese model look cheaper. We’d be slowing ourselves down and not China.

Gates says the institutions will take years to build, and also says we can’t afford to move slowly. He’s right twice, and that’s the problem. He wants the international body to borrow from nuclear inspections and aviation regulation. That may pan out in the long term, though the UN is the cautionary tale for the bureaucratic nightmare that the international community can produce.

Meanwhile we have functional agencies with jurisdiction today. The FDA can rule on AI in diagnosis. The FTC can go after AI-enabled fraud. We don’t need a new agency to say a bank can’t deny your mortgage because a model felt like it. We need the banking regulator to reiterate it forcefully.

That leaves Human Reserved, his best idea but his most privileged one. Gates would protect a job for either of two reasons: the role is deeply personal, like a caregiver, or the people who hold it are unlikely to find other work. Only one of those holds.

Freezing headcount because the workers have nowhere else to go protects the job for a while and makes the service more expensive along the way. Reserving the moments when a human being is the point is defensible, and Gates makes that case well. On a robot delivering the news that you have an incurable disease, he writes, “There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t,” and adds, “Yet it shouldn’t.” He’s right.

I made the case in WIRED nine years ago that displaced workers should move into caregiving, and that it would take real money to lift the pay enough to draw them.

The problem with Human Reserved is that it assumes there’s a human being available. Home health and personal care aides earn a median of $34,900 a year, and BLS projects roughly 765,000 openings in that occupation every year through 2034. At that wage, they keep coming open. A third of home care aides are immigrants, and tighter enforcement threatens that supply. A rule that reserves care for people, in a market with no spare people, reserves care for the families who can outbid everyone else.

Gates half-anticipates this, telling The New York Times he might be a flawed messenger because of his wealth. On this point he is. The caregivers who gave his father something irreplaceable were in that room because someone could pay them to be there.

So don’t fence AI out of the room. Put it to work in the hours nobody is paid to cover.

In February the Times ran Eli Saslow’s story about Jan Worrell, 85, living alone on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula with an AI companion called ElliQ that engages her about eight times a day and pushes her to stay hydrated and moving. (I serve on ElliQ’s board, and I joined because the company builds a machine that extends a caregiver’s reach instead of replacing one.)

Her goal, she told her doctor, was to never live anywhere else. Fund enough aides to cover the hours that need a person and put the machine on the rest.

Here’s where I net out: equalize the tax treatment of labor and capital, which Congress could do next session, and route the proceeds into retraining and into topping up the pay of workers who land in lower-paying jobs. That’s a better answer than a protected job title.

Drop the token tax, build the caregiving workforce instead of fencing it off, and use the regulators we already have while somebody works on the ones we don’t.

Bill Gates is legendary, bordering on notorious, for his late-night emails — missives to colleagues with piercing questions about Java back in the day, or malaria these days, or whatever esoteric topic he happens to seize upon at any given moment.

But increasingly, he is sending these messages to AI, not to people. He’ll bounce something off Claude, get ChatGPT to weigh in, and insert himself in the middle.

He described the pattern in an interview with GeekWire: “It’s 3 a.m., I want to understand sodium batteries. Now, there’s no reason to go to sleep. Here we go! Yeah, it’s crazy.” 

If you’re a curious person, he said, “this is a mind-blowing time.”

In terms of productivity, he added, “we are in heaven.”

All of which might be predictable. This is Bill Gates, after all. Now 70 years old, he has spent more than five decades impatient for the future to arrive — making the case that innovation, on the whole, will ultimately put humanity and the world in a better place.

So here’s the surprise twist: He’s now deeply concerned about where technology is headed, how fast it’s progressing, and how little the world is doing to get ready.

In a new essay, Gates says the “turbulent AI era” has arrived, with technology threatening to erase categories of jobs, supercharge fraud and deepfakes, lower the bar for cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, make it easier to engineer a deadly new disease, let governments kill without humans involved in the decision, and fundamentally change how kids grow up.

If someone came up with a credible plan to slow the pace of AI globally, he writes, he’d likely support it. But he doesn’t expect one. The geopolitical and economic forces are too much. 

He says that the world needs to take action, and offers three ideas to start:

Build new institutions, at home and globally. No existing agency was designed for a technology that touches jobs, security, health, energy and elections all at once, he writes.

Gates calls for new national bodies that can set priorities across agencies, plus a new international organization modeled on nuclear weapons inspections, aviation rules and the ozone treaties.

Set aside jobs for humans. Gates calls this “Human Reserved”: work that machines will be fully capable of doing, but that we decide to keep for people anyway. The model is a nature reserve — land where we could build roads and buildings, but choose not to, because the loss would be too great.

One example: a robot delivering the news that you have an incurable disease. “There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t,” he writes. “Yet it shouldn’t.” 

The idea came in part from watching the caregivers who looked after his father through Alzheimer’s, work he describes as “irreplaceably human.” 

Tax AI tokens and robots. Today a company that hires a worker pays payroll taxes, while a company that buys a robot deducts the cost. Gates says that gives employers a reason to replace people. He’s calling for a tax on AI to change the incentives and help pay for retraining. 

He first floated a robot tax nine years ago, but the idea was widely dismissed. He’s still for it. He acknowledges that it isn’t economically efficient, but says that with innovation accelerating, we can afford a little inefficiency as the price of keeping people employed.

Gates is candid that he doesn’t have all the answers, particularly on the proposal for “Human Reserved” jobs. Who decides what gets reserved, and by what criteria? How do you keep companies from using robots in the jobs that are supposed to stay human? 

These, he writes, “will need to be worked out in public.” 

In the meantime, he’s working it out with Claude. Gates said he has talked the idea through with the chatbot, thinking through different ways to get the share of work reserved for humans up to 40%, using shorter workdays and earlier retirement to spread what’s left around.

Crossing the threshold

In the GeekWire interview, Gates said the essay came out of a specific realization: the AI industry is blowing past its own warning signs, one after another, and almost nobody is saying so out loud. 

For years, he said, people in AI described certain moments as dangerous points where the industry would stop and think hard before going further: making it easier to build a bioweapon, making it easier to launch a cyberattack, building machines people become emotionally dependent on, wiping out large numbers of jobs, and losing control of the technology itself.

“We’re in the process of crossing every single one of those thresholds,” he said.

Meanwhile, nobody in the industry wants to be first to step on the brakes. “Most people you talk to will say, yeah, well, if everybody else would slow down, maybe I would, too,” he said.

Gates said one way out of that standoff is for governments to step in. 

His example: any AI model capable of designing new molecules — the capability that would let someone engineer a new disease — should be monitored. The monitoring would be mandatory rather than voluntary, and it would cover free models as well as commercial ones. It would also have to be written so a company can’t copy the model elsewhere and strip the monitoring out.

“To me, that’s kind of like common sense,” he said. “But we don’t see a specific proposal to do that.”

‘The whole thing seems so empty to me’

Under an executive order signed by President Trump in June, AI companies are asked to submit their most powerful models for government testing up to 30 days before release. The order specifically bars the program from becoming a licensing or preclearance requirement. The White House finalized the framework in early August.

Gates said he doesn’t get it.

“What is the threshold that’s being examined, and what is the action taken when you cross that threshold?” he said. “The whole thing seems so empty to me.”

If the world can’t take these basic steps, he said, “I really am going to throw up my hands.”

If the process stays voluntary, with no line and no consequence for crossing it, “we’re going to look back on this as a kind of eye-of-the-storm type moment,” he said.

Asked if he had taken his proposals to the Trump administration or to other heads of state, Gates said with a bemused tone, “Well, you could tell me who at the White House I should be talking to about this.” He said he hopes the essay reaches people in Congress and in the executive branch.

He said the public argument among AI companies over whether the risks are real is beside the point, because privately the people running them already agree. “I know they’re all worried,” he said, “or all of them that I know, which is basically everybody but Elon.”

People inside AI companies who acknowledge the downsides, Gates said, get told: “Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.”

Gates said he previously expected losing control of AI to be a distant problem, something to worry about “many years from now.” He’s no longer convinced that’s the case.

He referenced an Aug. 11 episode of the Dwarkesh Patel podcast featuring Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at the AI safety group Redwood Research. Greenblatt said that as AI systems get more capable, the people building them understand less and less about what is happening inside, and that sufficiently advanced models could end up working against their creators.

“These are people who are super expert on the thing, going, well, maybe we won’t be able to control these things,” Gates said. “I mean, what kind of risk have we chosen to run here?”

In the poorest countries, he expects AI to do more good than harm. In the countries where the Gates Foundation works, doctors, teachers and farm advisors are all in short supply. AI can help fill those gaps. The foundation will lay out that work at its Goalkeepers event next month, including an effort to make AI models work as well in African languages as they do in English.

The job losses, he added, will hit rich countries first.

Gates published the essay early Wednesday morning, and it’s drawing coverage from a variety of outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and MIT Technology Review.

It’s the first big wave of new attention on the Microsoft co-founder and Gates Foundation chair since he answered lawmakers’ questions in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation on June 10, sitting for a nearly six-hour voluntary interview with the House Oversight Committee.

Gates, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, was asked by Axios whether he’s concerned that the Epstein issue could undercut his message. According to the site, he compared this to earlier situations when personal and professional challenges diminished his ability to speak out on key subjects: during the Microsoft antitrust trial, and his divorce from Melinda French Gates.

The AI Road Ahead

For all of this, Gates is still thinking about how technology will change human life and productivity, in many ways for the better on an individual level. 

• A key step, he said, will be establishing broad-based persistent memory for AI agents across contexts. For now, AI still doesn’t know you like a human assistant who’s familiar with your relationships and how you think about your time. 
• Gates sees the role of apps changing in the future. Instead of bouncing between different pieces of software, he said, AI will increasingly be the primary interface. “You won’t go to those applications,” he said. “You’ll just go to your personal agent.”
• He also sees AI continuing to transform shopping, to an extreme: “We will get to a point where you won’t buy things yourself. You just won’t.” Telling the agent to help you buy something, “it’ll consider so many more things, and it’ll make it so much easier for you to do it.”

Asked whether he is still an optimist, Gates didn’t answer directly. “I don’t think being pessimistic is helpful,” he said.

“I do think, wow, this is sure an interesting time. I’m the guy who in my 30s thought people in their 50s or 60s didn’t understand anything.” He called it “kind of bizarre” that he would be delivering a message like this at 70.

“But I am very concerned. And honestly, when you get people one-on-one, so are they.”

One of the video game studios impacted by Xbox’s layoffs in July has successfully reclaimed its independence, as well as control over its intellectual property.

Compulsion Games, headquartered in Montreal, was founded as an independent studio in 2009 and acquired by Xbox in 2018. Its one release as a member of the Xbox Games Studio network was 2025’s South of Midnight, an action/adventure game set in a magical Deep South.

In July, Microsoft announced the first wave of a planned 3,200 job cuts throughout its Xbox department, alongside plans to spin out or shut down five of its studios. Compulsion Games was one of those five, alongside Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts), Ninja Theory (Hellblade), Undead Labs (State of Decay), and Arkane Studios (Deathloop, Dishonored).

Subsequently, on Aug. 20, Compulsion CEO Guillaume Provost revealed in an interview with GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi that Compulsion’s management had successfully reacquired the studio, its staff, and the South of Midnight IP on Aug. 11.

South of Midnight is still available via its previous storefronts, including Steam and the PlayStation Network, but is currently self-published by Compulsion.

Provost told GamesBeat that no layoffs had been made at Compulsion as it transitioned to independence, and most of the team elected to stay together.

As for the other studios affected by Xbox’s July 6 layoffs:

• Double Fine Productions, headquartered in San Francisco, confirmed on July 28 that it had laid off 23 employees to return the studio to a “sustainable size.” It is once again fully independent and has control of its IP, such as Psychonauts, and will be exhibiting in Seattle on Labor Day weekend as part of the Penny Arcade Expo.
• Ninja Theory, from Cambridge, England, was one of the more unexpected shutdowns, as it had debuted Senua, a third entry in its Hellblade series, only a few days before the layoffs announcement. It has reportedly been spun off from Microsoft and will continue work on Senua under an unspecified new owner.
• Likewise, Seattle’s Undead Labs is currently under unidentified new ownership and still plans to release the long-anticipated third entry in its zombie survival series State of Decay at some point next year.
• Finally, Arkane’s status has yet to be firmly established. It formerly consisted of two studios, in Austin, Texas and Lyon, France, but its Austin office was closed down as part of a wholly separate wave of Xbox layoffs in May 2024. Several of the affected employees in Texas, including former studio head Harvey Smith, announced on Aug. 19 that they’d founded a new company, Black Pony Immersive, with plans to create new games in the same “immersive sim” subgenre as Dishonored.

Xbox is currently exhibiting at the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany.

Immersive Gamebox, a global interactive group gaming company, is coming to the Seattle region with its first Pacific Northwest location opening this week at Westfield Southcenter mall.

Designed for groups of two to six players, the venue uses projection mapping, touch-sensitive walls, 3D motion tracking, and spatial audio to create controller-free, immersive gaming environments.

Players use their bodies and movements to interact directly with the room to play titles based on major media franchises, including Netflix’s “Squid Game,” “Batman,” “Angry Birds,” and “Floor Is Lava.”

A grand opening celebration on Friday starts at 10 a.m. and includes a 2 p.m. ribbon cutting and giveaways. Bookings are currently open online, with limited availability for opening weekend.

The Tukwila location marks a strategic shift for the UK-founded company, which operates roughly 20 company-owned venues across the U.S. and more than 35 worldwide. The Southcenter space is its first step into U.S. franchising, partnering with local operators to scale the experiential tech concept across North America.

Founded in 2018 by Tough Mudder co-founder Will Dean, London-based Immersive Gamebox (formerly Electric Gamebox) was acquired and recapitalized by Harlan Capital Partners in early 2025. The company uses proprietary, patented LiDAR tracking tech in its “smart rooms” and counts Index Ventures among its early venture backers.

Pricing varies by game and time. An hour of “Squid Game” for one adult costs $31.99. Thirty minutes of “Floor Is Lava” for a child ages 3 to 11 is $23.99.

Immersive Gamebox will be open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

This week on the GeekWire podcast: SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company, and Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver a majority of the world’s internet within a decade, leveraging production facilities in Redmond. Musk also explains the company’s data center ambitions, calling terrestrial infrastructure a trivial problem next to reusable rockets. 

Plus: we bring two Washington tech universe posters into the studio, 17 years apart. The 2009 original turns up gems including Boeing’s unlikely connection to Classmates.com, the 1990s forerunner to Facebook. It also brings back memories of Teledesic, the Craig McCaw venture backed by Bill Gates that tried to beam internet from space decades before Starlink.

Finally, the GeekWire Trivia Challenge returns with a timely question about Google’s origins.

Related stories and links

SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company

• SpaceX earnings: Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver most of the world’s internet within a decade
• Elon Musk’s Mars illusion — Dominic Gates on the gap between the Mars vision and the timeline
• Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explodes on pad during test; Jeff Bezos vows to rebuild
• Blue Origin’s rocket blowup hits NASA and Amazon Leo as well

Mapping Washington’s tech universe

• New map traces Washington state’s tech ‘universe’ to a few key hubs, and shows what’s at risk
• The latest Washington Tech Universe map from WTIA, and posters are available here
• Massive map shows how Seattle’s tech ecosystem evolved over the last 30 years — the 2015 edition
• The original 2009 Puget Sound Tech Universe map. (Thanks to Ken Myer for digging this up!)
• GeekWire’s Seattle engineering centers list

GeekWire Trivia

• The startup idea that convinced a UW computer science legend to leave Google after 27 years
• What a longtime Google AI leader told UW computer science students at their graduation

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio edited and produced by Curt Milton.

The satellites rolling off the line in Redmond, Wash., are paying for Elon Musk’s AI ambitions — and he says the company’s satellite internet business is only getting started.

SpaceX’s Starlink connectivity division posted $1.7 billion in operating income for the second quarter, maintaining its status as the company’s only profitable business, according to numbers released Tuesday afternoon as part of its inaugural earnings report as a public company.

The AI division, built around the Grok model and the X social media and technology platform, lost $1.3 billion while spending $15.8 billion on capital projects. That capital spending amounted to more than three times Starlink’s quarterly revenue of $4.3 billion (up 66%).

Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, used the first SpaceX earnings call to make the case that investors are badly underestimating Starlink.

He said a new generation of satellites could increase Starlink revenue tenfold, and the network could deliver “a majority of the world’s internet” in less than 10 years. Musk said AI and robots will drive demand for bandwidth far beyond anything people generate on their own.

“I think Starlink is the only thing that can actually service that bandwidth,” he said.

Amazon is getting in the race, building its own satellite internet network at a factory in nearby Kirkland, Wash. Its Leo constellation has “close to 400 satellites in orbit, enough to begin initial satellite internet service this year,” CEO Andy Jassy told analysts last week.

Overall, SpaceX topped Wall Street expectations with revenue of $7.8 billion for the quarter, up 92% from $4.1 billion a year earlier. It also narrowed its net loss to $541 million from $1 billion.

SpaceX shares closed at $125.33, up 9.4% on the day, then fell nearly 5% in after-hours trading following the report, apparently on concerns about the company’s capital spending.

SpaceX builds its Starlink satellites at a Seattle-area factory that produced about 70 a week from December 2025 to April 2026, according to the company’s IPO filing. The output has put roughly 9,600 Starlink satellites in orbit, about 75% of all active maneuverable satellites circling the planet.

For the second quarter, SpaceX reported 12 million Starlink subscribers, double the number a year earlier and an increase of 1.7 million from the first quarter. The revenue increase in the Starlink division (officially known as “Connectivity”) was driven by a 108% jump in enterprise and government business, which now accounts for more than 40% of the segment’s sales.

The subscriber total was just under the 12.19 million Wall Street had projected, but the segment’s revenue exceeded expectations by about $460 million, more than any other part of the company.

Starlink now brings in $66 a month per subscriber, down from $85 a year ago as it expands overseas and adds cheaper plans. The good news for SpaceX: the figure stopped falling, holding flat from the first quarter, despite the company’s warning to IPO investors that it would keep sliding.

The tradition of using new technology to shape political discourse goes back centuries in America, to the printing presses that enabled the spread of early publications like Common Sense and the Federalist Papers. Just imagine what Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton could have done with access to LLMs and a modest budget of AI tokens.

It might have looked something like Culliton2026.org.

No, a website that uses artificial intelligence to assess Washington state’s Supreme Court races won’t go down in history alongside the publications that helped launch a revolution and ratify a constitution. But at a basic level, its creator is attempting the same thing: reaching people at a key moment of decision, using the most powerful tools of the day.

The modern-day pamphleteer is Viet Nguyen, a veteran Seattle-based technology communications executive and former political campaign manager.

He built the interactive website using AI to give voters a sense of how each candidate for the state’s high court — starting with those in the Tuesday, Aug. 4, primary — might rule on the state’s new “millionaires’ tax.” Its core feature lets visitors swap in different judicial candidates to see how the outcome could tip the court in either direction, depending on who’s elected.

The site is named after Culliton v. Chase, the 1933 ruling that struck down a graduated income tax in Washington state. The new tax, which some tech and business leaders have warned could drive high earners and businesses out of state, may test that precedent.

Nguyen opposes the new tax — which would apply a 9.9% statewide levy on income above $1 million — and wrote a Seattle Times op-ed calling it unconstitutional. (He noted that he has run political campaigns on both sides of the aisle, and wouldn’t owe the tax himself.) 

For each of the 16 candidates across the five races, the site gives a one-line read: likely to keep the landmark ruling, likely to scrap it, or too close to call. The analysis uses four criteria: who appointed the candidate, what they did before reaching the bench, how they describe their own judicial approach, and anything they’ve said or written about Culliton or the new tax.

“People don’t understand who their Supreme Court justices are,” Nguyen said, describing his motivation. “There’s just zero knowledge about where judges stand on a particular issue.”

A faulty premise? But that very proposition — that anyone or anything can forecast how a judge will rule — is exactly what critics dispute. In a fact-check published last week, Andrew Villeneuve of the Northwest Progressive Institute (NPI), which supports the tax, described Nguyen’s Culliton2026.org as “speculation dressed up as a voter’s guide.” 

Judicial-ethics rules bar candidates from saying how they would rule on a case that could come before them. Hugh Spitzer, a retired University of Washington law professor and a leading authority on Culliton, told Villeneuve it isn’t possible to predict how the justices would rule.

“Rather than examining and scoring the candidates on a rubric of qualifications or issues, Nguyen has organized his whole project around attempting to guess how each candidate would rule in a single legal challenge that is not yet before the justices,” wrote Villeneuve, the organization’s founder and executive director, in the article.

NPI runs its own guide to the 2026 Supreme Court elections — the Washington State Supreme Court Elections Visualizer — which sorts candidates by their endorsements and voter-pamphlet statements, but does not make any guess at how they’d rule. 

Culliton2026.org is described on its About Page as independent and nonpartisan. It says it doesn’t endorse candidates, isn’t affiliated with any campaign, and isn’t telling people how to vote.

Despite the site’s flagship feature — the “Balance of power” tool that lets visitors swap in candidates and watch the projected ruling shift — the About Page asserts that the site is “not a vote predictor” when it comes to how future Supreme Court justices might rule. 

That disclaimer “seems like a tacit acknowledgment that his whole premise is faulty,” Villeneuve wrote in the NPI piece.

The response: Asked about the article, Nguyen called the feedback helpful and said he made a series of updates to address some of the issues raised by Villeneuve in the piece.

For example, he added a “note on the foundations” to the site’s case explainer, granting that Culliton rests on federal precedents the U.S. Supreme Court has since abandoned, and citing Spitzer’s own argument that a future court should weigh the question fresh. 

“Reasonable people will disagree on the project’s premise, and that’s fine,” he wrote to Villeneuve in an amicable exchange that he shared with GeekWire. 

The article describes Nguyen as right-wing, but he said he tries to stay “in the moderate lane.” 

He said he wanted the site “to be less political and more educational, applicable to any voter wishing to know more about the judicial candidates.” In fact, it could be used just as easily by people wanting to align their ballots with the likelihood of upholding the new tax.

How he built it: Nguyen, who is not a software developer, used agentic AI to research the public records and build the entire site from scratch, directing it to rely on sources he considered legitimate (including court opinions, official filings, and news coverage) rather than random blog or Reddit posts.

He also set up a vetting process to fact-check entries before publication.

Nguyen uses Perplexity Computer, an agentic tool that operates a computer on its own (browsing the web, using software and building files) and divides a job among multiple AI agents working in parallel. He’s on the $200 a month Perplexity Max plan.

A sophisticated website or app like this might have required a small team and thousands of dollars in the past. Nguyen built it over the course of a few hours, for about $100 in AI tokens. He says it has attracted “a few hundred thousand page views” since its launch this spring. 

“This is where agentic AI steps in and offers a whole roster of skills that I don’t have,” he said. “I would never be able to imagine that I could put something like this together.” 

Legal landscape: The Legislature passed the 9.9% tax and Gov. Bob Ferguson signed it in March 2026. It applies to income earned starting in 2028, with the first payments due in 2029.

Culliton2026.org’s assessment is that six of the nine current justices on the court lean toward upholding the tax, two toward striking it down, and one is too uncertain to call. 

Five of the court’s nine seats are on the ballot this year, four of them contested in Tuesday’s primary, with the top two in each race advancing to November. Three of the seats on the ballot are held by sitting justices seeking to stay on the court; the other two are open. 

A case filed in Klickitat County Superior Court in April, led by former state Attorney General Rob McKenna and former state Supreme Court Justice Phil Talmadge, argues the tax is an unconstitutional income tax and is expected to reach the state Supreme Court. The number of contested seats means the election could reshape the court before the case arrives. 

Voters will also weigh in directly in November. Initiative 645, backed by Let’s Go Washington — the group founded by hedge-fund manager Brian Heywood — would repeal the tax before it takes effect in 2028. It qualified for the ballot in July with more than 500,000 signatures.

Nguyen’s background: He arrived in Washington as a 17-month-old refugee from Vietnam in 1975, studied political science at the UW, and got his start in 1996 volunteering on Gary Locke’s campaign for governor, as he noted in the Seattle Times piece. 

He ran local races before spending nearly two decades at Microsoft, T-Mobile and 5G Americas, the wireless industry trade group that he led until it wound down this year.

Culliton2026.org is just one of the civic sites Nguyen has built the same way. His Washington Accountability Registry catalogs 87 state and local government cases it labels fraud, conflicts of interest or oversight failures, and, like the Culliton site, calls itself independent and nonpartisan. 

Others are more explicit in taking a side: a dashboard about the King County homelessness authority is headlined “One verdict: wind KCRHA down,” and an emergency-clause tracker titled “Locked Out” flags 19 bills the Legislature made “referendum-proof.” 

He has also dabbled in AI-generated music videos, including one about Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson with the hook, “Hey Katie, get it together, the city’s falling apart.” 

“All AI generated,” Nguyen said of his projects. “We live in a new world.”

Or, as Paine put it in Common Sense, “The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

Guest Opinion: When I moved to Seattle in 2000 and started in venture capital, I read the book “The Silicon Boys: And Their Valley of Dreams,” which told the story of how venture capital drove the innovation ecosystem.

Entrepreneurs toiled day and night in their garages. Venture capitalists discovered these entrepreneurs, writing “small” checks for ownership and partnering side by side to build blue-chip companies. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins alone backed Intuit, Netscape, Amazon, and Google. 

More than 25 years later, venture capital is going through a dramatic evolution, chasing once-in-a-lifetime IPOs like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. There is more venture capital available than ever before, and it is harder than ever for most founders to get funded, especially if you are not working on foundational AI. 

Today’s founders need to think hard about alternative financing and growth strategies, rather than relying on venture capital. But before we get to those solutions and ideas, here are just a few examples of what’s happening in the market.

Anthropic envy: The Wall Street Journal covers the story of Spark Capital’s Yasmin Razavi, a former McKinsey consultant who invested $75 million in Anthropic when much of Silicon Valley passed at a $4 billion valuation in 2023. That stake is now worth about $7 billion — nearly 100x in three years! Silicon Valley is now chasing this pattern. 

More money, fewer winners: In 2025, US venture firms deployed roughly $319 billion, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. In the first half of 2026 alone, they put in $412.7 billion, more than all of 2025. Capital has never been more abundant. But according to Silicon Valley Bank, 33% of all US venture dollars went to the top 1% of companies by valuation, up from 12% in 2022. 

Seed valuations for the “right company” are at an all-time high. The bar for the next round is not a little higher. It is roughly double what it was a few years ago. 

Peter Walker from Carta tracks seed valuations over time showing that the top 5% of seed deals are up 177% year over year, rising from about $72 million to $200 million. Carta found that 30.6% of companies that raised a seed round in early 2018 reached a Series A within two years. For the 2022 cohort, that number fell to 15.4%. 

The practical takeaway for founders: The median revenue you now need to raise a Series A has roughly tripled, to about $3.5 million in ARR. 

VC for the select few: A company that would have raised easily a few years ago now can’t get funded at all. Reid Christian from CRV argues the way to raise now is to be “Legible to Capital.” Two kinds of startups are getting funded, he says: “stupidly obvious credentialed teams with a semblance of an idea” priced at $50-200M, and later-stage rounds that “don’t require any amount of thinking.” 

If the founders are the right demographic — “young, cracked, or repeat,” the right schools, “nepo, etc.” — capital finds them. Everyone else, he writes, is “just fighting pattern recognition in a lemming industry.” 

So what should a founder do?

Go for it and raise VC: If you are building the next OpenAI, go raise VC. Recruit the best team possible and swing for the fences. Make sure you execute and your growth rates match the high expectations for a 2026 VC-backed company. 

Heather Redman of Flying Fish Partners says companies “are getting pre-seed financed at ‘modest’ valuations and then going and executing like crazy to show dramatic growth … and raising great successive follow-on rounds.” 

Seattle’s Tin Can is a great example of a contrarian bet (landlines for kids) that is showing tremendous growth and follow-on VC funding success. 

Seek other sources of capital: Kirby Winfield of Ascend says, “If you don’t have reasonable confidence in hitting $3M-$5M ARR within 18-24 months of your first commercial contract you probably shouldn’t raise venture in 2026.” 

If that’s not you, that’s fine — it just means priced venture equity may be the wrong instrument. Other sources of capital to consider:

• Angel funding: Individual angel investors write smaller checks, move faster, and don’t carry the same growth expectations or blocking rights as institutional VCs. A round assembled from angels lets you raise less, give up less ownership, and avoid the signaling trap where a lead investor’s follow-on decision dictates your next round. The tradeoff is more relationships to manage and less firepower behind you for follow-on financing — but you keep control of your own timeline.
• Venture debt: For companies with revenue and real margins, venture debt extends runway without dilution. It’s a loan taken alongside or shortly after an equity round, repaid over time with interest. The catch: it usually assumes an equity sponsor standing behind you, and it’s debt that must be paid back, so it works best as a bridge to a clear milestone.
• Revenue-based financing: This approach, which advances capital against your recurring revenue, is one of the fastest-growing categories in startup finance. If you have predictable revenue and real margins, you have more options than a priced equity round. Providers advance a multiple of your monthly recurring revenue and get repaid as a percentage of it. It’s built for exactly the company this market has stranded: too small for a mega-round, too healthy to need one.

Get profitable fast: The cheapest capital you will ever raise is your own revenue. The best founders are not thinking about VC or chasing the next investment milestone. They’re heads-down building their businesses. AI has made this easier than at any point in history. A small team that controls its own burn controls its own destiny. 

Aviel Ginzburg of Foundations and Founders’ Co-op offers this parting advice for founders: “Recognize that venture is just as confused as they are. We aren’t gatekeepers here, we’re getting disrupted.”

A new Warner Bros. Discovery lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the tech giant of poaching a top HBO Max marketing executive 16 months before her contract expired, comes with an unusual request: a court order barring Amazon from hiring any employee of the media conglomerate as long as they’re under contract.

The suit, filed July 21 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, centers on Pia Barlow, the longtime HBO Max executive who was announced last week as Amazon MGM Studios’ new head of series marketing. Her Warner Bros. Discovery contract ran through October 2027.

She resigned in June and was due to start at Amazon on Aug. 3.

Warner Bros. Discovery accuses Amazon of “hurriedly seeking to pirate away a number of contracted employees,” calling the company a “digital bull in a china shop” that chose to build its entertainment workforce by raiding Hollywood rather than hiring from scratch.

The suit says Amazon tried weeks earlier to recruit another WBD executive under contract through December 2027 and failed, and was pursuing at least one more when the suit was filed.

The complaint says Barlow’s departure “conveyed a troublesome message throughout Plaintiffs’ executive ranks” — that contractual commitments could be disregarded “whenever a larger paycheck appears.”

Amazon declined to comment in response to GeekWire’s inquiry.

The company acquired MGM in 2022 for $8.5 billion, its second-largest acquisition ever behind the $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods in 2017. The deal brought a catalog of more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows, and the studio was rebranded Amazon MGM Studios in 2023.

It’s led by Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios.

Warner Bros. Discovery itself is in the middle of being sold. Paramount Skydance agreed in February to buy the company for about $81 billion, outbidding Netflix, but 12 state attorneys general sued this month to block the deal, and Paramount has pushed its closing deadline to as late as June 2027.

The complaint goes further, alleging Amazon didn’t just recruit Barlow but also picked her lawyer. Warner Bros. Discovery says the firm now representing her is based less than a mile from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and “has a well-publicized, long-standing relationship with Amazon as outside litigation counsel,” and that Amazon is paying its fees. The firm isn’t named in the complaint.

Barlow, who lives and works in Los Angeles, is not a defendant.

Warner Bros. Discovery says its lawyers exchanged letters with Amazon and with that attorney before filing suit, demanding Barlow not leave. It makes the fee allegation on “information and belief,” a legal phrase indicating a claim based on inference rather than direct evidence.

Microsoft has topped earnings expectations consistently in recent years, yet its stock is near a one-year low. So while it’s worth paying attention to revenue and profits when the company reports its fiscal year-end results Wednesday, there are clearly other forces at play on Wall Street.

Here are the key stats and trendlines to watch going into the earnings report for the fourth quarter of the company’s 2026 fiscal year, ended June 30.

Core numbers: Analysts expect revenue of about $87.7 billion for the quarter, up 14.7% from a year ago, and earnings of $4.24 per share, up 16%, according to Yahoo Finance. Microsoft’s own revenue guidance was $86.7 billion to $87.8 billion — meaning Wall Street is looking for a result at the very top of the company’s range.

For the full fiscal year, that works out to roughly $329 billion in revenue, up 17% from $281.7 billion in fiscal 2025.

Capital expense: This is the big one. Microsoft told investors to expect more than $40 billion in capital spending for the quarter, which would be a record — up from $31.9 billion in the March quarter and $37.5 billion in the one before that. About two-thirds goes to GPUs and other short-lived hardware.

For the calendar year, the company expects to spend roughly $190 billion. Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said about $25 billion of that total is the result of higher component prices.

One big question this week will be the company’s guidance for capex going forward. Because this is the fiscal year-end, Wednesday brings the company’s first capital spending guidance for fiscal 2027, which began July 1.

Capex concerns: Google parent Alphabet last week foreshadowed what may happen to Microsoft. It reported revenue up 24% and cloud revenue up 82%, then raised its own capital spending forecast to as much as $205 billion — well above the roughly $188 billion analysts expected. The stock fell 7% the next day and Alphabet fell below its prior $4 trillion market valuation.

Big picture, investors seem to have decided the capital spending is getting ahead of the payoff. Data centers and chips cost money now, while the AI revenue meant to justify them arrives over years — if it ever reaches the scale these companies are promising.

Moody’s Ratings raised its own red flags about this last week, saying the six largest cloud and AI platforms will spend about $785 billion this year and close to $1 trillion in 2027. Demand is real and accelerating, the ratings agency said, but “the ultimate return on investment is unclear.”

Cloud margins: This is where the capital spending starts to become evident in the company’s core quarterly results. Microsoft Cloud gross margin — the share of cloud revenue left after the cost of delivering the service — has slipped from 72% three years ago to 66% last quarter.

For the quarter it reports Wednesday, Microsoft told investors to expect about 64%. On the prior earnings call, Hood attributed the decline to AI infrastructure costs and growing use of GitHub Copilot, partly offset by efficiency gains in Azure.

Microsoft doesn’t absorb the cost of a data center all at once. It spreads the expense across the years the equipment is expected to last. That cost shows up here, in the expense of running the cloud — making this one of the first places where the capital spending hits earnings.

Microsoft Azure: On its prior conference call, Microsoft said it expected the Azure cloud business to grow 39% to 40% in constant currency in Q4, a slight acceleration from the 39% posted in Q3. Analysts expect roughly the same, with some outliers such as BNP Paribas looking for 41%.

But the published expectations aren’t the real bar. In January, Azure grew 38% — ahead of Microsoft’s guidance — and the stock fell 10%, because Wall Street had privately been expecting 39.4%.

Azure’s growth rate also reflects a choice as much as it does demand. Microsoft has been routing scarce computing capacity to its own products first — Copilot, GitHub Copilot, internal research — and selling what remains to Azure customers. Hood has said the growth rate would have been higher had that capacity gone to customers instead. Demand continues to outrun supply, and the company expects to stay “constrained at least through 2026.”

Business Insider reported Sunday that the shortage of supply has pushed Microsoft to shop for additional computing capacity outside its own data centers, evaluating capacity from Amazon and Google, and that Amazon stepped in following a series of GitHub outages.

Copilot and AI revenue: Microsoft said in April that its AI business had reached a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, up 123% from a year earlier. It was the first update to that number since January 2025, when the company put it at $13 billion. Whether Microsoft discloses it a third time Wednesday is a signal in itself.

Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 20 million paid seats last quarter, up from 15 million in January. That’s about 4.4% of the 450 million commercial seats across Microsoft 365 — the gap that has drawn skepticism from investors all year. Microsoft said it expects the number of new paid seats to grow again this quarter.

Meanwhile, the company is launching new initiatives to drive adoption of AI among its customers. Earlier this month it launched the Microsoft Frontier Company, a $2.5 billion effort to put 6,000 engineers inside customer organizations to help them deploy AI.

Wednesday is also the first report since Microsoft changed how it charges for GitHub Copilot. As of June 1, customers pay based on usage rather than a flat fee per user.

The OpenAI backlog: Microsoft’s remaining performance obligations — RPO, a measure of contracts customers have signed but the company has not yet fulfilled — reached $627 billion last quarter, up 99% from a year earlier. About a quarter of that is expected to become revenue in the next 12 months. It’s the strongest evidence that there’s real demand supporting the AI buildout.

But the RPO is also highly concentrated. In January, when it stood at $625 billion, 45% was tied to OpenAI — roughly $281 billion committed by a single customer that is still losing money. Take OpenAI out of last quarter’s figure and the growth drops from 99% to 26%.

Then in April, Microsoft and OpenAI revamped their partnership, and OpenAI ended its exclusive commitment to run on Azure.

Reliability: On July 23, a bug in Microsoft’s automated network maintenance tooling cut a West US Azure data center off from the company’s global network, knocking out Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot Chat for about five hours. Microsoft has published a preliminary post-incident report, and a final one is due within two weeks.

The outage falls in the quarter that began July 1, so it won’t appear in Wednesday’s numbers. But it comes as Microsoft is asking businesses to hand AI agents real control of their operations.

Retirement charge: Wednesday’s results will include about $900 million in one-time costs from Microsoft’s voluntary retirement program, the first in the company’s 51-year history. Hood said roughly $350 million falls in the cost of revenue and $550 million in operating expenses.

About 8,750 U.S. employees were eligible — 7% of Microsoft’s U.S. workforce — and about 30% accepted, Chief People Officer Amy Coleman confirmed in an interview with GeekWire, in line with what the company expected. Those departures reduced the size of the 4,800-job cut Microsoft announced July 6, which happened after this quarter ended.

Even with the retirement costs, Microsoft told investors it expects operating margins for the full fiscal year to be about a point higher than last year. Hood also said on last quarter’s call that headcount declined year over year and will keep declining in fiscal 2027.

Windows: Microsoft expects Windows OEM revenue — what PC makers pay to put Windows on their machines — to decline close to 20% this quarter.

A few factors are driving this:

• Last year’s wave of PC upgrades, when support for Windows 10 ended, makes for a tough comparison.
• PC makers stocked up on parts and machines ahead of rising memory prices and are now working through them.
• The PC market itself is slower, because memory prices have made computers more expensive.

The memory shortage is hitting Microsoft a few different ways. In addition to adding about $25 billion to the company’s capital spending this calendar year, as noted above, it lowers what Microsoft earns from Windows. Also, in late June, Microsoft raised Xbox console prices by $100 to $150, saying storage and memory costs had risen more than 2.5 times.

This week: Facebook parent Meta reports the same afternoon as Microsoft, with Apple and Amazon on Thursday and Alphabet already out. Check back Wednesday afternoon for coverage.