The Amazon founder is reportedly part of a group interested in buying a 30% stake in Liverpool Football Club, the storied English Premier League soccer team whose legendary fans belt out the show tune “You’ll Never Walk Alone” before each home match.
Bezos would join a group that includes the former co-owner of soccer club Queens Park Rangers, Amit Bhatia, who is looking to pay £1.35 billion (about $1.8 billion) for the stake, reports The Guardian. The stake is being sold by current owner Fenway Sports Group, the firm that also owns The Boston Red Sox.
Bezos, who founded Amazon in Seattle in 1994, is considered the fourth richest person on the planet with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $224 billion.
The billionaire has long been rumored as a possible sports team owner, and his name was often tossed out as a possible buyer of the Seattle Seahawks and the Washington Commanders. Earlier this month, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his family emerged as the lead bidder for the Super Bowl champion Seahawks at a reported purchase price of $9.6 billion.
In addition to his recent marriage to former journalist Lauren Sanchez, Bezos also is highly engaged with his space venture Blue Origin and a new AI company by the name of Prometheus, which just raised $12 billion and where he serves as co-CEO.
Owning a piece of a UK soccer club has become a status symbol of sorts for wealthy Americans, perhaps driven by the popularity of shows like Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham. The latter is a documentary that tracks Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and their exploits of owning the Welsh team Wrexham FC.
American owners currently own outright or a piece of some of the top clubs in the English Premier League, including Chelsea led by Todd Boehly; Arsenal owned by Stanley Kroenke; and Manchester United owned by the Glazer family. Liverpool also is considered one of the top soccer clubs on the planet, winning the Premier League trophy in the 2024-2025 season.
On a smaller scale, Remitly co-founder Shivaas Gulati joined an ownership consortium two years ago that purchased Southend United, a football club founded in 1906 and located in Southend-on-Sea, about an hour from London. They play in the National League, which is the fifth tier of English soccer.
The English Premier League season starts on Friday, Aug. 21 when defending Premier League champs Arsenal take on newly-promoted side Coventry City.
This collage highlights some of the projects selected for funding through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, including a study looking at radioisotope heating systems for moonwalking astronauts, depicted at center left. (NASA Graphic)
NASA says it’s funding a new batch of far-out research projects, including a study evaluating how radioactive heaters can keep astronauts warm while they work on the moon.
Zeno’s research project is led by A.C. Charania, the company’s senior vice president of space business development. Charania previously spent two years as NASA’s chief technologist and five years in management roles at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.
The project comes with an acronym taken from J.R.R. Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth: EARENDIL, which stands for Extended Astronaut Radioisotope-EVA in Nighttime and Deep-Space Icy Landscapes. In “The Silmarillion,” Eärendil is a half-Elven mariner who voyaged to the Undying Lands. As described in Zeno’s proposal, EARENDIL technology would warm space voyagers while they work outside during the frigid lunar night, amid temperatures that can plunge as low as 410 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-246 degrees Celsius).
Zeno is already developing a new class of compact nuclear devices powered by the heat of radioactive decay. One type of device would convert that heat into electricity, but the device proposed for EARENDIL would function strictly as a heater rather than a battery.
The NIAC proposal says these heaters would address “a critical barrier to sustained human operations on the lunar surface: the extreme cold of permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) and the two-week lunar night.” NASA’s grant will help Zeno assess the feasibility of integrating compact heaters into the spacesuits that astronauts wear during extravehicular activity, or EVA.
Americium-241, a radioisotope produced as a byproduct in nuclear reactors, would serve as fuel. Zeno is already working on americium-powered generators alongside Blue Origin and other partners in a NASA-backed initiative called Project Harmonia.
Zeno says its EARENDIL study will address key unknowns surrounding heating requirements, radiation dose rates, human factors and spacesuit compatibility. If the results from the Phase I study are encouraging, NASA could award follow-up grants to support further development.
“By extending the operational range and duration of EVAs into PSRs and nighttime environments, EARENDIL enhances crew safety during habitat power failures, reduces reliance on heavy battery systems, and unlocks new opportunities for science and resource utilization in previously inaccessible regions,” Zeno’s proposal says. “This capability is critical for the Artemis program’s long-term objectives at the lunar south pole and directly supports NASA’s broader ambitions for sustainable exploration architectures on the moon and Mars.”
Here’s a rundown of the 17 other proposals funded by NASA’s latest round of Phase 1 NIAC grants:
A judge in Seattle issued a preliminary injunction against Kalshi, finding that Washington state is likely to prove that the fast-growing prediction market is running illegal online gambling.
The ruling by King County Superior Court Judge John McHale, issued Monday, does not immediately halt Kalshi’s operations in the state. McHale granted the injunction in the case brought by Washington AG Nick Brown, but deferred the specifics until early next month.
McHale rejected Kalshi’s argument that oversight by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission preempts state gambling laws. That has been the basis of Kalshi’s defense against regulators across the country. Washington is the latest state where a court has shot it down.
Kalshi quickly pushed back on the ruling.
“States don’t have jurisdiction to regulate prediction markets. Many courts — including the Third Circuit — have made this clear,” spokesperson Jacki McGavick said in a statement. “We’re disappointed to see Washington State continue wasting taxpayer dollars.”
In his ruling, McHale said Kalshi “willfully ignored” a December 2025 notice from the Washington State Gambling Commission that event-based contracts were not authorized in the state, and cited a Kalshi ad showing a text exchange where one user tells another: “I found a way to bet on the NFL even though we live in Washington.”
Kalshi’s platform lets users bet “yes” or “no” on thousands of events across sports, elections, entertainment, and so-called “mention markets” — wagers on whether public figures will say specific words. The New York-based company, which markets itself as a federally regulated “prediction market,” takes a transaction fee on each bet.
Washington has some of the strictest gambling laws in the country: the legislature banned internet gambling in 2006, and while the state allows a lottery, horse racing, and tribal-casino gambling, online betting is broadly prohibited and sports wagers are legal only in person on tribal lands.
The order requires Kalshi to preserve all records tied to Washington users, including logs, communications, geolocation data and marketing materials.
The specific operational terms of the injunction are still being determined: McHale gave both sides until Aug. 3 to submit proposed language, with a full order to follow by Aug. 5.
“Roxy” the AI time-traveling vlogger in front of the famed Crocodile Cafe music venue in what’s supposed to be 1992 Seattle. (@roxyintime via Instagram)
The best thing about Seattle’s grunge era is that it existed before the internet could completely spoil it — although the mainstream media, MTV and fashion designers eventually did their best.
None of them would be any match today for artificial intelligence.
In a new video we spotted on Instagram, a time-traveling vlogger under the handle Roxy In Time goes back to 1992 Seattle to explore the city’s music scene during its heyday. The result is grunge meets 2026 AI slop.
It’s an interesting study in how technology that’s very much being built and hyped in modern Seattle can be used to illustrate what the city sort of looked like more than three decades ago. In the video, it’s two years before the start of Amazon and another 15ish before cloud computing and a massive tech boom truly reshaped the region.
AI is being both celebrated and derided for its ability to help create content like Roxy’s time-traveling exploits. Where some see an innocent, weirdly educational history lesson, others can’t look past the replacement of human creativity, the excess of such material polluting social media channels, and the tech’s ability to deceive viewers in more dangerous ways.
Roxy is an AI-generated influencer — not a real person — with a penchant for visiting historically significant places, both real and imagined. She recently checked out L.A.’s Sunset Strip in 1987 and a New York speakeasy during Prohibition in 1929. In other videos she runs across fantastical figures including Paul Bunyan and Humpty Dumpty, and she visits cavemen in 30,000 B.C.
In the Seattle video, Roxy is dressed for the era’s part in a flannel, Nirvana T-shirt, ripped jeans and combat boots. She starts her tour by saying she’s in town to see the band Mudhoney play at Belltown’s Crocodile Cafe. But first she heads to Easy Street Records in West Seattle to browse records, tapes and CDs.
The video is populated with images of random musicians carrying guitars down the street, and people drinking coffee and reading actual print publications instead of staring at laptops. At The Central Saloon and OK Hotel in Pioneer Square, everyone has long hair, or a beanie, or both. Sweaty music fans in mosh pits seem to fit the timeline.
AI’s vision of 1992 Seattle: No laptops at the cafe! Garbled words on flyers! The grunge pit! (Screenshots via @roxyintime)
AI’s artistic limitations do come into focus in a few spots, especially when written words are displayed. The names of bands and clubs on music flyers — such as Comet Tavern — are a jumbled mess. Same goes for some of the names on record dividers at Easy Street, where the store’s neon wording also breaks apart.
Back at the Crocodile, Roxy is in line to see Mudhoney, and she’s confused by an opening act named Pen Cap Chew. Inside, as the show starts, she realizes that Pen Cap Chew is actually Nirvana, playing under the secret moniker because by that time the band was a worldwide sensation riding the success of the album “Nevermind.”
In perhaps the most realistic demonstration of being in 1992 — in a club where no one knows what a smartphone is yet — Roxy ends the video by saying she needs to stop recording.
“I’m putting this thing away, I’ve gotta watch this,” she says.
It might not be a full Zuck, but Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is getting lots of attention, and not in a good way, for the latter this week.
Sharma was named Thursday to co-lead a new Federal Reserve “Productivity and Jobs” task force, charged with assessing the economic impact of AI and other new technologies on the labor market. Her co-leaders: Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and vocal AI booster, and Stanford economist Charles I. Jones, who is currently on leave at Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI chatbot.
The gaming press, as you can imagine, is having a field day. The headline from Kotaku sums it up: “Xbox CEO Will Advise Federal Reserve On Jobs After Mass Layoffs.”
PC Gamer, for its part, noted that the task force is supposed to represent a “commitment to price stability and maximum employment.” However, that’s the Fed’s broad mandate, as described by Chairman Kevin Warsh. It’s actually not the specific mission of the Productivity and Jobs task force, which is narrower: assessing what AI and other new technologies are doing to the economy.
In a separate sign of the backlash, Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw took to X on Friday to knock down claims that the Xbox cuts were made to replace employees with foreign workers, calling it “bad information” and noting that the H-1B visa figures being cited are company-wide renewals, not Xbox-specific. He also pointed out that Sharma is “an American born, raised, and educated CEO, from Wisconsin.”
Also lost in the coverage of the Fed appointment is the fact that Sharma is less than five months into the job, having taken over as Xbox CEO in February with a mandate to turn around and preserve a gaming division that spent more than $20 billion over five years while its core revenue shrank. The restructuring announced this week is a key part of that effort.
What’s more, it’s hard to imagine that this is the timing Microsoft or Sharma wanted. Announcements like this are often outside the control of the participants. The Federal Reserve sets its own schedule.
Still, it’s tough timing for an executive who announced plans this week to cut 3,200 gaming jobs — about 1,600 immediately, with the rest over the coming year — amounting to roughly 20% of Xbox’s workforce. Sharma herself called it the most significant restructuring in the division’s history.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht Launchpad, for the record, is currently cruising the waters off Juneau, Alaska, a full 900 miles from Seattle.
A federal court has turned down the Federal Trade Commission’s request to declare a rentals deal between Zillow and Redfin “presumptively unlawful” before trial next month.
On Wednesday, July 8, Judge Anthony J. Trenga of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied the FTC’s motion for partial summary judgment in its case alleging Zillow and Redfin violated antitrust laws when Zillow paid $100 million to become Redfin’s exclusive multifamily rental listings provider in early 2025.
After a hearing Wednesday morning, Trenga said he found “genuine disputes of material fact” regarding the FTC’s ask.
The complaint is scheduled for a bench trial, meaning the judge will hear and decide the case without a jury, on Aug. 24.
What the states and FTC asked for
In their June 10 motion, the plaintiffs asked for declarations that would have put more of a burden on Zillow and Redfin at trial if they had been granted. Specifically, they asked the court to:
Deem the nationwide market for internet listing service (ILS) advertising for rental properties and for multifamily rental properties as the “relevant markets” for the case
Declare the Zillow-Redfin deal an “acquisition of assets” under Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which prohibits mergers and acquisitions that would substantially lessen competition
Declare the deal “presumptively unlawful” for further concentrating already highly concentrated relevant markets and therefore lessening competition
Zillow, Redfin dispute FTC assumptions
On June 24, the defendants asked the court to reject the FTC’s motion outright.
Regarding the relevant markets, they said rental competition is local, not national, and non-ILS companies such as Google and social media outlets compete for rental advertising dollars with ILSs like Redfin and Zillow. Thus, those types of companies should not be excluded as competitors in the same market.
In response to the FTC’s request to to define the Zillow-Redfin deal as an acquisition of assets that is presumptively unlawful, the defendants argued that it is an open question whether the deal was a merger and that the presumption request was improper at this stage of the proceedings.
Judge convinced by defendants’ arguments
In his July 8 ruling, Trenga agreed with the defendants, finding that “genuine disputes of material fact existed” regarding “the relevant product market, relevant geographic market, and the presumptive illegality of Defendants’ challenged activity for purposes of Plaintiffs’ claim under Section 7 of the Clayton Act.”
The defendants, not surprisingly, supported the ruling.
“The FTC asked the court to partially resolve this case before Zillow has the opportunity to present its full evidence at trial — evidence that will demonstrate the pro-competitive effects of this partnership for renters and housing providers,” Zillow said in a statement on its website.
“We are pleased with the court’s decision today, and look forward to presenting the full record at trial next month.”
Similarly, a Redfin spokesperson told Real Estate News the company “strongly” disagrees with the FTC’s allegations and is eager to present “the full facts” at trial.
“The reality is simple: Redfin’s actions are pro-competitive and benefit consumers,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“Redfin pursued the Zillow partnership to maintain and grow Redfin’s rental business. And because of that decision, Redfin’s websites have more rental listings than ever before and Redfin can invest even more in search innovations that directly benefit our customers.”
Seattle’s skyline, the economic engine of Washington state. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
For much of the past year, the narrative surrounding Washington state’s business climate has taken a decidedly negative turn.
Business leaders have criticized a wave of new taxes approved by lawmakers. High-profile companies have announced expansions elsewhere. Entrepreneurs have questioned whether Washington remains as welcoming to innovation as it once was, prompting Gov. Bob Ferguson to launch a new Economic Development Council aimed at strengthening the state’s competitiveness.
But a new national ranking released Thursday complicates that narrative.
Washington climbed three spots to No. 11 in CNBC’s annual America’s Top States for Businessrankings, up from No. 14 last year, suggesting that many of the state’s underlying competitive strengths remain intact even as debate over its business climate has intensified.
That’s the good news. The bad news: Just four years ago, Washington ranked No. 2 in the same survey. In 2017, the state was No. 1
Certainly, Washington is at a crossroads when it comes to how it thinks about its business community. The CNBC ranking and the big fluctuations over the past four years speak to the seesaw-like narrative that has taken shape.
The business climate also has been front-and-center in GeekWire’s recent coverage.
Washington lawmakers approved billions of dollars in new taxes during this year’s legislative session, including new taxes affecting many technology companies.
Ferguson subsequently created the Economic Development Council composed of leaders from companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing and T-Mobile to identify ways to strengthen the state’s economy amid growing concerns about competitiveness. (GeekWire contributing columnist Charles Fitzgerald questioned why the council did not include anyone from the startup community in his recent piece: Governor’s new economic council snubs startups, forgets AI).
We also recently traveled to Cleveland to examine why Ohio has emerged as one of the country’s fastest-growing destinations for business investment and technology jobs. State leaders there have aggressively positioned Ohio as an alternative to coastal technology hubs, touting lower costs, business-friendly policies and major investments in manufacturing, semiconductors and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
That strategy appears to be paying off.
Ohio claimed CNBC’s top spot this year, overtaking last year’s winner to become America’s Top State for Business in 2026. It has been an historic climb for the Buckeye state, which ranked No. 30 in the inaugural survey in 2007 and just cracked the top 10 last year.
One of GeekWire’s key takeaways from our visit to northeast Ohio is that the entire community is unified, rowing in one common direction, from Gov. Mike DeWine to real estate developers to entrepreneurs to philanthropic organizations.
“I don’t give advice to other areas,” DeWine told us on our recent visit. “But my advice to people is, come to Ohio. Come work in Ohio. You will not find a better place, better people, quality of life. Cost of living is low compared to the two coasts.”
The ranking also comes as several prominent Washington employers have announced significant investments outside the state. Starbucks recently unveiled plans for a major corporate expansion in Nashville, while aerospace supplier Janicki Industries said it will build a large new manufacturing campus in Montana, fueling concerns among some business leaders that Washington is becoming a more difficult place to grow.
At the same time, CNBC’s methodology highlights many of the advantages that have long made Washington one of the country’s leading innovation economies. Here’s how Washington ranked per CNBC:
CNBC graphic
The network evaluates states across 10 categories using 138 metrics, including workforce, infrastructure, economy, technology and innovation, business friendliness, education, cost of doing business and quality of life. The methodology is updated annually to reflect the factors companies say matter most when making investment decisions.
While Washington continues to face challenges related to business costs and taxes, it remains home to one of the nation’s deepest concentrations of technology talent, world-class research universities, global companies including Microsoft and Amazon, and a robust startup ecosystem — strengths that continue to score well in CNBC’s analysis.
The results also underscore how different rankings can produce different conclusions depending on what they measure. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation, which focuses specifically on state tax policy, ranked Washington 45th in its 2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index, citing the state’s gross receipts-based Business & Occupation tax, taxation of business inputs and recent changes to its capital gains tax.
Seattle also recently declined in a new ranking of the best places in the U.S. to attract foreign businesses and investment. The fifth annual list compiled by British newspaper Financial Times and stock market index Nikkei ranked Seattle 13th among 95 U.S. cities — a drop of 11 places from last year’s second-place position.
Together, the rankings illustrate the complexity of evaluating a state’s business climate.
Washington continues to enjoy many of the assets that have made it one of the nation’s leading centers for technology and innovation. At the same time, business leaders have become increasingly vocal that higher taxes and rising costs could erode those advantages over time if policymakers fail to address competitiveness.
Auger co-founders Leigh Anne Clark and Dave Clark at the company’s Bellevue, Wash., office. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
While investors spent much of the spring concerned that frontier AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would consume the software industry, Dave Clark was closing a funding round for exactly the kind of enterprise software those models are supposedly going to replace.
Auger, the supply chain technology startup founded in Bellevue, Wash., by the former Amazon executive, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Eclipse, with existing investor Oak HC/FT also participating in the new round.
The round brings total funding to $150 million for the company, which has grown to about 130 employees and counts Meta’s virtual and augmented reality division, sports merchandise giant Fanatics, and consumer products maker Kimberly-Clark among its customers.
Clark’s view is that general-purpose AI can generate insights but can’t handle deeply specialized domains like running a supply chain. Making financial and operational decisions and executing them at the scale of big companies requires systems built on strong supply chain expertise — what Auger calls its ontology, essentially a detailed map of how supply chains actually work.
“Many a pure technology company died on the hill of supply chain over the last decade,” said Clark, the company’s CEO, in an interview this week. “You really need to understand the complexity and the contextual requirements.”
Auger sits on top of a company’s existing systems — ERP, warehouse management, transportation management, and demand planning tools — and unifies the data into a single operating layer. Rather than replacing those systems, it connects them, using AI agents and traditional optimization models to make decisions and execute them automatically, as much as possible.
For example, in a recent demo at the company’s Bellevue office, Clark showed how the system would handle a supplier missing a delivery commitment when there isn’t enough product to go around. Auger identifies the shortfall, determines which customers get priority, reallocates inventory, and pushes the updated plan back to the company’s existing systems.
Most supply chain software, Clark said, generates alerts and waits for a person to act. Auger is designed to make routine decisions on its own and flag the exceptions for human review.
“We’re not really a tool,” he said. “We’re really the new employee.”
At Fanatics, the sports merchandise company, Clark said about 85% of decisions in the process Auger manages are happening autonomously, with a goal of reaching the mid-90s soon. In addition to the customers it has named so far, Clark said another eight to 10 companies are in contract negotiations or pilot programs.
Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead the company’s worldwide operations and later its worldwide consumer business. He left in 2022 and became CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarding startup, but that tenure lasted less than a year amid a turbulent period for the company.
He launched Auger in 2024 with a team that includes Leigh Anne Clark, his wife, who serves as co-founder and president of the company’s fashion and beauty division, focused on an industry Clark describes as one of the most wasteful supply chains outside of groceries.
Clark moved back to the Seattle area from Texas to tap the region’s talent pool, and raised a $100 million Series A from Oak HC/FT. The company quickly assembled a C-suite drawn heavily from Amazon’s senior ranks, along with leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Salesforce, spanning supply chain operations, AI, data science, and product development.
In March, Auger was named a premier supply chain partner on Microsoft Fabric, the tech giant’s data platform. Auger’s product is built on Azure, and Microsoft sales reps can earn commission on Auger deals. Clark said the partnership has generated engagement but is still early.
Clark said Auger went out for the Series B early, before the company needed it, to avoid the distraction of fundraising during what he expects to be a busy fall of customer onboarding.
With the investment, Eclipse partner Jiten Behl joined the Auger board, which also includes Clark, president and CFO Alex Ceballos, and Oak HC/FT’s Matt Streisfeld.
Auger hasn’t disclosed revenue or other financial metrics, but Clark said the valuation was roughly double the level set by Auger’s initial round. “We didn’t shoot for the crazy astronomical valuation,” he said. “We sat at a place that we felt really comfortable with.”
That pragmatic approach extends to how Auger operates. In Bellevue, the company works out of an office it subleased after Microsoft vacated the space. Auger kept the desks, monitors, and chairs the tech giant left behind, furnishing its new offices for next to nothing.
But Clark’s ambitions for the company are anything but modest. He said Auger’s goal is to have half of U.S. GDP flowing through its platform by 2030, with revenue exceeding $1 billion.
“That requires a pretty steep curve to get there,” he said. “We’re not playing small.”
A screengrab of the Cascade PBS streaming app as built by Local Public. (Local Public Image)
Seattle’s Cascade PBS has spun out its streaming app technology into a standalone company called Local Public, which is now building connected-TV and mobile apps for public media stations across the country.
The goal is to provide local PBS stations nationwide their own branded, station-curated streaming apps — plus tools for fundraising and audience data — as an alternative to a one-size-fits-all national app.
Local Public was originally created within Cascade PBS (KCTS-TV channel 9) to build apps for that station, which serves Western Washington and part of British Columbia. Supported by 10 Founding Sponsor partner stations, a Local Streaming Initiative (LSI) was launched to expand the platform to serve stations nationwide.
On July 1, Local Public launched as a public benefit corporation. Cascade PBS owns 100% of Local Public, but it’s expected to take on investment and be co-owned by a coalition of other PBS stations in the near-future.
In a blog post announcing the launch, Local Public CEO Kevin Colligan wrote that the company is aiming to build “a growing coalition of independent public media organizations working together while remaining deeply rooted in their own communities.”
Eighteen stations are currently using Local Public, according to Cascade PBS, including Arizona PBS (Phoenix), Houston Public Media, OPB (Oregon), Rocky Mountain PBS (Denver), Vegas PBS, WETA (Washington, D.C.), WHYY (Philadelphia), WQED (Pittsburgh), and others.
Colligan framed the launch against the backdrop of media consolidation, arguing that a shrinking number of corporations increasingly control what Americans watch and read, while local newsrooms have been gutted and replaced by centralized programming.
He also pointed to the rise of low-effort, AI-generated content as a further threat to authentic local journalism and storytelling — one he said makes trusted, community-rooted public media more valuable, not less.
“We bring a startup mentality to public media’s longstanding tradition of community service,” Colligan wrote. “We are building technology that allows stations to move faster, collaborate more effectively, and reach audiences wherever they are.”
Local Public apps currently run on 10 platforms, including Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Google TV, Android TV, LG and Samsung smart TVs, iPhone, Android and a web video portal. NPR, radio and podcast integration is in development and expected to launch in fiscal year 2027.
The apps run on a centralized content management system, letting stations publish their own programming, build featured-content carousels and pull real-time viewer analytics. Stations can also message members and prospective donors directly within the app. The platform fully supports PBS Passport, the streaming benefit for recurring donors, and PBS Media Manager, the system stations use to manage and distribute video.
TheDesk.net reported that Sacramento’s KVIE has already relaunched its streaming app through Local Public as KVIE Plus (stylized KVIE+), offering free access to the station’s full lineup of broadcast channels over streaming alongside local programming and acquired shows, movies and documentaries. Denver’s KRMA has relaunched its connected-TV app through the platform as well
Pricing for Local Public is tiered by station size, based on how many Passport-eligible members a station has at signup. Small stations (fewer than 15,000 members), for instance, pay an $8,000 onboarding fee and $60,000 annually.
Overland AI’s autonomous ground vehicles lined up at the company’s proving grounds. (Overland AI Photo)
Seattle-based Overland AI has landed a U.S. Marine Corps contract to produce autonomous ground vehicles, a milestone the defense-tech startup says makes it the first ground autonomy company to serve as the prime contractor on a military production deal.
The nearly $20 million agreement — $19.7 million, according to the Department of War — calls for Overland to deliver more than a dozen autonomous ground vehicles, along with the software that runs them. Initial deliveries are expected to begin sometime in early 2027.
The agreement was announced June 29. The vehicles will work with a Marine Corps system that shoots down enemy drones. Overland’s vehicles will initially handle resupply for those crews rather than replace any existing vehicles, co-founder and CEO Byron Boots said in a media briefing, as reported by trade publications DefenseScoop and Defense One.
Boots is a University of Washington machine-learning professor who leads the school’s Robot Learning Laboratory and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He co-founded Overland in 2022 with Stephanie Bonk, the company’s president, spinning it out of the UW.
The company’s technology is designed to let military vehicles drive themselves across rough, off-road terrain in places where GPS isn’t available.
Overland has grown to more than 100 employees and raised over $140 million in venture funding, including a $100 million round in February led by the venture firm 8VC. It opened a 22,000-square-foot production facility in Seattle last year, and ranks No. 9 on the GeekWire 200, our index of the top privately held Pacific Northwest tech companies.
The company isn’t alone in chasing military ground autonomy. One of its rivals, Maryland-based Forterra,won a larger, $92 million Marine Corps production deal earlier in June — but as the autonomy supplier under prime contractor Oshkosh Defense, rather than holding the contract itself. That’s the distinction Overland is claiming as a first.
Overland’s deal came through a Pentagon program called APFIT — short for Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies — which fast-tracks funding to move promising technology from prototypes into production. For Overland, it marks a step from testing and demonstrations into building vehicles at scale for the military.
“We’re registering extremely high demand from U.S. operational units who want to incorporate this technology into their concepts of operation,” Boots said in the briefing, pointing to the war in Ukraine as evidence of a growing role for uncrewed vehicles.
Overland has been working for years with the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, also completing a multiyear DARPA autonomy program. The new contract builds on recent work integrating its self-driving technology into Marine Corps vehicles.
Satya Nadella says the industry shouldn’t “cede value to a few models that eat everything they see.” (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Microsoft is launching a new AI “company.” It won’t be a separate legal entity, and most of its 6,000 people already work at Microsoft. But the $2.5 billion behind it is real, and the stakes are big, given how many of its AI partners and rivals are racing to do basically the same thing.
The tech giant on Thursday announced “The Microsoft Frontier Company,” which will embed engineers inside customers to build and run AI systems. It will be led by Rodrigo Kede Lima, a longtime Microsoft sales and enterprise leader, most recently president of Microsoft Asia.
This practice is known in the industry as forward-deployed engineering, in which a company sends its own technical employees to work inside a customer’s operations to design, build, deploy and operate AI systems on-site rather than selling a tool and walking away.
The model was pioneered two decades ago by Palantir, but in recent months the approach has become the hot new thing in enterprise AI. Amazon committed $1 billion to its own forward-deployed engineering initiative just two days ago. (Some inside Microsoft suspect that its rival may have caught wind of what it was planning and moved to announce first.)
Anthropic and OpenAI launched rival ventures in May to put engineers inside enterprise customers. Unlike Microsoft’s initiative, the OpenAI Deployment Company, as the ChatGPT maker’s venture is known, is an actual standalone entity — majority-owned by OpenAI but backed by more than $4 billion from a partnership led by the private-equity firm TPG.
Similarly, Anthropic teamed with Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman on a $1.5 billion venture — not yet named — to embed engineers inside mid-sized companies, starting with the investment firms’ own portfolio businesses.
Microsoft is attempting to one-up them all.
“This goes beyond what has been labeled as Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) and will be the largest, most capable, outcome-driven engineering organization in the industry,” wrote Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, in a post announcing the new initiative Thursday morning.
Responding to questions from GeekWire, a Microsoft spokesperson called the new initiative “a purpose-built company with its own leadership and financial accountability” but stopped short of calling it a separate legal entity or standalone company.
The spokesperson said the organization “brings together more than 6,000 industry, engineering and AI professionals, drawn primarily from Microsoft’s existing engineering and forward-deployed teams,” noting that it will “grow through a combination of internal talent and external hiring across engineering, AI, and industry roles.”
Separately, some consulting roles are among those expected to be impacted by the round of layoffs anticipated next week.
Microsoft wouldn’t say whether the $2.5 billion is new spending or repurposed from existing budgets, or over what period it’s being spent. The company also hasn’t yet spelled out what the new organization means for the future of its existing consulting and services units.
Across the industry, this is happening now because the payoff from AI has proven harder to capture than many companies expected. Businesses across the economy have adopted tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot, only to find that impressive demos don’t automatically translate into results. The technology is powerful, but deploying it can be difficult inside a real company, with its own data, rules and entrenched ways of working.
So the AI providers have started sending their own engineers to work inside those companies, figuring out where the AI can actually help, then building it into their operations.
“Having the model alone doesn’t change your workflows or how you operate,” said Marc Nachmann, Goldman Sachs’ global head of asset and wealth management, in an interview with CNBC about the Anthropic partnership. “You need people who can combine the technology with what’s actually happening in the business and implement those changes.”
The big AI providers have multiple reasons to do this. Each of them wants to get more businesses using its AI platform at higher volumes. All of them are looking to drive long-term demand for the AI capacity they’re collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build.
Another big reason: AI models are becoming commodities, getting cheaper and more similar by the month. The big money for the likes of Microsoft is in selling the services needed to make AI pay off inside a company, which is a far bigger market than just selling the models themselves.
Microsoft is pitching privacy and trust as a selling point. Its promise is that a customer’s data and hard-won knowledge stay the customer’s alone. Microsoft says it won’t feed them into training its AI models in ways that would hand the same advantages to the customer’s rivals.
It’s also promising choice: customers can run whichever AI model fits the job, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, or open-source providers, not locked into using one.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has argued that a company should be able to exchange one AI model for another without losing all the institutional knowledge it has built up.
That’s his test, as he put it, for whether a business still controls its own future.
“The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see,” Nadella wrote in a June 14 essay. “If all the value is accrued by only a few models, the political economy will simply not tolerate it. There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries.”
Whether that vision of swappable AI models becomes a reality remains to be seen. There’s actually a risk for customers that the opposite will happen in the forward deployed engineering approach. Even if they can theoretically swap in a competitor’s AI model, working with Microsoft’s engineers means their systems naturally end up running on Microsoft’s cloud platform and related technologies, making it very difficult to jump ship.
It’s also not clear how new all of this really is for the company. Microsoft already runs a large in-house delivery arm — Industry Solutions Delivery, the group that absorbed what used to be called Microsoft Consulting Services — with thousands of consultants and engineers building and deploying technology inside customer organizations.
Microsoft also has programs like FastTrack to help customers roll out its software, and over the past year it has been rolling out “forward-deployed engineering” teams with partners, including a dedicated practice with Accenture and a $1 billion, five-year alliance with EY.
So ultimately the Microsoft Frontier Company is less a new company than a new push behind work the actual company was already doing, albeit bigger and better-branded than before.
— Hrishikesh Aradhyehas joined Amazon Music as vice president of product and tech for the streaming service. He spent nearly 19 years at Google, most recently as senior director of engineering leading YouTube Music and Podcasts.
“The music industry is going through a tectonic shift that will unlock entirely new kinds of customer experiences through AI,” Aradhye said.
Earlier in his tenure there, he worked at Google Research, where he helped pioneer computer vision and machine learning systems for YouTube and Android.
Vasu Jakkal. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Vasu Jakkal is stepping down after six years as Microsoft‘s corporate vice president of Security, Compliance, Identity, Management & Privacy. She thanked colleagues and customers in a LinkedIn post.
“It’s been an epic journey — six years ago, we formed our Security customer solution area and the growth and impact of Microsoft Security over these past years has been incredible as we built the #1 security business in the world while keeping our mission of building a safer world for all at the heart of it,” Jakkal wrote.
Jakkal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held executive roles at FireEye and Intel. She did not indicate her next move.
Mika Yamamoto. (Veeam Photo)
— Mika Yamamoto was named chief marketing and customer AI officer for Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company. It’s the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made four other executive hires or promotions this year.
Yamamoto previously worked for Seattle-area companies including F5, Microsoft and SAP, and joined Veeam from Los Angeles-based Blackline.
“She has experienced this industry from every angle — analyst, operator, executive leader — and has consistently put the customer and partner at the center of how companies operate,” CEO Anand Eswaran said in a statement.
— In case you missed it, Microsoft has undergone a leadership shakeup within Copilot as the company works to turn its platform into a “super app.” Changes include:
Jacob Andreou has moved from corporate vice president at Microsoft AI to executive vice president of Copilot. He joined the company in 2025 from Greylock Partners and before that was at Snapchat-maker Snap.
Peter Sellishas been named Copilot’s lead of design, growth and engineering, reporting to Andreou. He joins Microsoft from Discord and overlapped with Andreou at Snap, where Sellis was VP of product.
The reshuffle also comes with a departure. Trevor O’Brien, former VP of product for M365 Copilot experiences, has resigned from his role. “The past two and a half years have been inspiring, chaotic, intense, and deeply rewarding,” O’Brien said on LinkedIn. He did not indicate his next move.
Niranjan Vijayaragavan. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Seattle-based tech executive Niranjan Vijayaragavan has taken the role of CTO at Five9, a cloud-based contact-center-as-a-service company. He joins Five9 from Nintex, where he served as chief product and technology officer. Other past employers include Avalara and Expedia Group.
“Five9 is at the center of one of the most important shifts in customer experience as AI reshapes how companies engage with their customers,” Vijayaragavan said in a statement. The company is based in San Ramon, Calif., but Vijayaragavan will remain in Washington.
Maura Mast. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Maura Mastwas appointed president of Seattle University, succeeding Eduardo M. Peñalver, who resigned to lead Georgetown University. Mast is the first woman and first mathematician to hold the top role at the Jesuit Catholic university.
“Our world urgently needs spaces of dialogue and discernment that actively work to heal deep divisions and build a more equitable society,” Mast said in a statement, adding that SU can lead in these areas.
Mast will begin the job on Sept. 1 and joins SU from Fordham University, where she served as a dean and mathematics professor.
Jake Gentry. (LinkedIn Photo)
— The Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator named Jake Gentry as its executive director. Gentry helped create CSAA, which aims to make the Pacific Northwest a center for the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). He remains a senior director at Seattle’s Earth Finance and is leading the accelerator as part of that organization.
Hawaiian Airlines CEO Diana Birkett-Rakow praised Gentry’s appointment, saying in a statement that he has “the right combination of strategic depth, execution orientation, coalition-building instincts, and commitment to the work.”
Gentry previously held sustainability leadership roles with companies including Point B and Boeing.
— Seattle’s F5 has added Gavin Munroe to its board of directors, where he will serve on the audit and risk committees. Munroe has decades of experience in financial services and most recently was chief information officer and transformation head at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
— Harini Gokul, a former leader at Microsoft and AWS and past chief customer officer at Entrust, has joined the board of Afiniti. The company builds AI software for call centers that aims to match customers with the appropriate agent. Gokul also serves on the Medina City Council.
— Safe Software, a data and AI enterprise integration platform based in Surrey, British Columbia, has named Nabil Lodey vice president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Lodey will help lead the company’s expansion in the UK and Ireland.
— Allison Gruber is now VP and leader of Portland-based Cambia Health Foundation. She previously oversaw Cambia Health Solutions’ Strategy and Innovation team, where she led data-driven strategy initiatives.
— And some more folks are retiring from Microsoft, in addition to those featured Tuesday in a GeekWire story on the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program:
Nir Michaely, Azure software engineering manager, closes out 26 years with the company.
John Ballard, principal security researcher, departs after nearly 30 years.
Kristen Mattoni, senior product marketing manager, is leaving after 15 years.
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson last week announced an Economic Development Council to “identify practical actions that strengthen Washington’s economy, expand opportunity and help more Washingtonians succeed.”
To Ferguson’s credit, he may finally be recognizing that Washington’s business climate is deteriorating.
While he didn’t admit any responsibility for that decline, the number of companies and highly successful job creators that have said “Bye Bob” and taken jobs to other states — Starbucks and Janicki Industries to name two recent examples — cannot have escaped his attention.
Who’s who
The council’s composition gives us a glimpse into the governor’s economic mindset. Unfortunately, it isn’t forward-looking.
There are more nonprofits and governmental agencies than businesses. Except for one small homebuilder, none of the participating companies were founded this century. Calling the council a “historic convening” is unintentionally apt.
There is zero representation from entrepreneurs, the startup ecosystem or anyone building the industries of the future. The mayor of Cleveland remains better plugged into our startup community than any politician in Washington.
The largest participants on the governor’s new council are notable for mass layoffs and shifting their workforces out of the state.
Amazon and Microsoft have each cut tens of thousands of jobs, as they become more capital-intensive and lean into AI-driven productivity. Boeing now has nearly two-thirds of its employees outside Washington state, and that shift continues.
Oblivious to AI
Also missing from the governor’s framing is the single biggest force shaping the economy today: AI.
He namechecks quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, and clean energy, but omits AI.
New jobs overwhelmingly come from young growth companies, and AI is driving new company formation.
Beyond startups, AI is going to dramatically reshape knowledge work and boost productivity in every single organization (including, hopefully, government).
It is impossible to talk about “the next chapter of economic prosperity for our state” without discussing the implications of AI.
The committee agenda
“The council will meet quarterly and submit advisory reports to the governor with its findings and recommendations.”
The first report, in its entirety, should say “STOP DRIVING BUSINESS AWAY.”
Starbucks, perhaps not surprisingly, was not invited to participate on the council, though Gov. Ferguson tells The Seattle Times he understands the coffee giant’s importance to the region and “has a direct line of communication with them.”
The governor suggests he “would be open to more aggressive financial incentives to attract out-of-state business,” but why not prioritize keeping companies that are already here?
The zero-sum view of job creation — that you must pay to lure companies from other states — reflects a profound ignorance of the magic of economic growth.
Just nurture an environment conducive to growth. Effective and efficient delivery of public services, predictable taxes, and sensible regulation. But that would require changes in how state government operates today.
In other words, grow what you’ve got.
Learning from Cleveland
I have argued that the software era is ending, and we need to find our next economic act in Washington state. Prosperity is precarious and can’t be taken for granted.
The governor was invited, through a representative, to join GeekWire’s recent visit to Cleveland but never responded. I still hope he can learn from Cleveland as part of his interest in economic development.
Cleveland’s experience after its industrial economy fractured painfully demonstrates the potential downside we face. More than a half century later, that city is still working extraordinarily hard to recover.
The mayor of Cleveland observed that when the Rust Belt started to rust: “We didn’t pivot fast enough, and the world left us behind.”
Today, every level of government in Ohio is laser-focused on jobs, economic growth and prosperity. Our state should be just as focused, especially as our economic tectonic plates shift.
It is a very positive milestone that our governor is seeking “the next chapter of economic prosperity for our state.”
But committees don’t drive economic growth. It starts with “first do no harm.”
Anthropic’s booth at AWS re:Invent in 2025. Its new Seattle lease puts it just up the street from Amazon. (GeekWire File Photo)
Anthropic is embarking on a major expansion in Seattle, underscoring how artificial intelligence companies are emerging as one of the few bright spots in the region’s office market.
The maker of the Claude AI model recently finalized a lease at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, capping months of speculation about the company’s expansion plans in the region.
Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but CoStar News reports that the company leased 113,000 square feet of space across multiple floors in the north tower at 700 Dexter Avenue North. CoStar called it one of the largest office deals of the year so far in Seattle.
The expansion would significantly increase Anthropic’s footprint in Seattle, where the San Francisco-based company established an engineering office in 2024 as it recruited talent from the region’s deep pool of AI researchers and software engineers.
It would also place Anthropic next door to Amazon. The companies in April expanded their existing partnership: Amazon committed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, which simultaneously made a $100 billion-plus spending commitment to AWS over 10 years.
The following month, Anthropic announced $65 billion in funding at a $965 billion valuation, thought to be the last venture round before an initial public offering later this year.
On Thursday, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, which the company says “can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models.”
Anthropic’s Seattle lease provides hope that demand from AI companies could help revive parts of Seattle’s office market after several years of elevated vacancy driven by remote work and tech industry cutbacks. Seattle’s office vacancy rate inched up to 28% during the first quarter, the highest in the region.
Other AI firms, including OpenAI and Databricks, have also expanded their Seattle-area office footprints in recent months. In those instances, the companies chose to grow in nearby Bellevue.
Dexter Yard, a two-building office and life sciences campus developed by BioMed Realty, opened in 2022 and was designed to accommodate both technology and biotech tenants. The north tower contains approximately 163,000 square feet of office and lab space.
Anthropic has a number of open engineering roles spread across Seattle, New York and San Francisco. The company says it expects all staff to be in one of their offices at least 25% of the time.
A spokesperson for Anthropic acknowledged the new lease, but did not respond to requests for additional comment.
It’s not surprising that Microsoft is looking to turn its Copilot platform into a “Super App,” given that its rivals are doing the same. But Microsoft is going about the task in a way that doesn’t follow its usual playbook, by putting a big bet on a consumer-savvy hire from the outside with some feather-ruffling ways.
The company’s newly minted Copilot Executive Vice President Jacob Andreou came to Microsoft from Greylock Partners and before that, Snapchat-maker Snap. Andreou currently oversees more than 11,000 Microsoft employees, according to a recent profile in Fortune.
Microsoft is bringing onboard another former Snap (and Discord) vice president, Peter Sellis, to help, GeekWire has learned. Sources say Sellis will be leading Copilot Design, Growth and Engineering, reporting to Andreou.
Andreou is part of a recently formed Copilot Leadership Team. His charter is to lead the “Copilot experience” by driving design, product, growth and engineering, as outlined in a March 2026 reorg memo from CEO Satya Nadella. He is one of a small group charged with shaping the future of Copilot, alongside others focused on the underlying Copilot platform and AI models.
Given Andreou’s Snap background, his plan to meld Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise Copilot experiences makes sense. It won’t be a snap, however. (See what I did there?)
Even though both share the Copilot brand, consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot don’t work the same way or use the same data sources or architecture. To boot, Microsoft hasn’t had a lot of luck with this kind of consumer-enterprise unification, as evidenced by the low interest in and uptake of its free, consumer-focused Teams product compared to its business-focused Teams collaboration offering.
The 33-year-old, Los Angeles-based Andreou seemingly is undaunted by the challenge and is pushing some employees to clock 12-hour days to keep up with younger, AI-focused companies, Fortune reports.
Microsoft was infamous for requiring employees to work long hours and weekends during crunch times leading up to delivering Windows NT and Windows 95, but not so much in recent years. Microsoft is known as a place where outsiders often struggle to thrive compared to those who climb the corporate ladder for years, making Andreou’s approach feel even riskier.
Andreou has been a big backer of the Tasks productivity layer in consumer Copilot, which is still in public preview. Tasks, which enables Copilot to handle actionable items, is similar to the recently released Copilot Cowork layer that is part of Microsoft 365 Copilot. (I asked Microsoft if the two would merge as a single Cowork-type offering at some point but was told the company had no comment.)
However, the holy grail remains the “Super App.” With the Copilot Super App, Microsoft is looking to give consumers and business users a reason to stay within Copilot regardless of the AI task with which they – or their agents – are engaging.
“Come summer, we will be bringing coding to all knowledge work within one Copilot Super App. That’s really exciting. So you’re going to have Chat, Cowork, and Code all in Copilot,” Nadella told Microsoft Build conference attendees in early June.
Microsoft isn’t the only AI-focused company working on extending its AI coding capability beyond just developers. Nor is it the only one betting on the Super App concept.
OpenAI is working to turn ChatGPT into a Super App that brings together ChatGPT and Codex into a single environment that operates like a personal assistant.
Anthropic is extending Claude to become a Super App (though it hasn’t used that terminology), as well, by creating a single environment that combines productivity, development and automation tools.
The Copilot Super App isn’t Andreou’s only focus. He tells Fortune that AI model choice and home-grown AI model excellence also are among his key priorities.
Microsoft is expanding model choice in the Copilot Cowork feature beyond Anthropic to include OpenAI and soon, Microsoft’s own Cowork 1 model – which may be based on Microsoft’s hosted version of the open-source DeepSeek model. Cowork 1 will be the newest addition to Microsoft’s growing pool of Microsoft-developed models, seven of which debuted at Build this year. Microsoft is seeking to position itself as the champion of lower cost, efficient models built for those who are token-maxxed out.
Andreou definitely has his work cut out for him as a consumer guy in a heavily enterprise-centric company.
Microsoft 365 Copilot and consumer Copilot are just two of more than two dozen different “Copilot”-branded commercial offerings available across the various Microsoft product teams, which can feel overwhelming.
Microsoft also needs to give users a clearer way to find and use the quickly expanding stable of first- and third-party agents, like the OpenClaw-based Microsoft Scout personal assistant. Will Andreou and his Super App quest bring at least some order to the Copilot and agent madness? We’ll know more sometime this summer.
Gov. Bob Ferguson announcing the new Economic Development Council. (Washington Office of Financial Management Photo)
Gov. Bob Ferguson last week recruited top executives from Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, Boeing and other major employers to help shape Washington state’s economic strategy, launching a new advisory council as concerns mount that the state is becoming less competitive for business.
The 26-member Governor’s Economic Development Council is the first such governor-led economic advisory body in roughly two decades, reviving an approach last used under former Gov. Christine Gregoire in 2006. The group includes leaders from technology, aerospace, organized labor, higher education, tribal governments, ports and economic development organizations who will advise the governor on policies aimed at strengthening Washington’s economy. (See full list below).
One missing ingredient: No members from Washington’s venture capital or startup ecosystem are on the council, even though they are often considered the bench strength of a growing economy.
The announcement comes as executives, startup founders and business organizations have increasingly warned that higher taxes, rising costs, permitting delays and an uncertain regulatory environment are making Washington a more difficult place to build and grow companies. Ferguson recently signed the so-called “millionaires tax” — a proposed 9.9% tax applied to taxable, personal annual income that exceeds $1 million.
Some of the region’s wealthiest and most prominent entrepreneurs — including Zillow and Expedia co-founder Rich Barton; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz — have publicly announced moves out of Washington state in recent years.
Starbucks also recently announced a major expansion in Nashville, and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte of earlier this month announced that Sedro Wooley, Wash.-based Janicki Industries chose Great Falls for the site of an $800 million manufacturing center expected to create 1,000 jobs.
“Washington is our home, and that is not changing,” said John Janicki, president of Janicki Industries, in a press release. “Our footprint in Washington has continued to grow but is slowing due to ever-increasing regulations and lack of business understanding at an executive and legislative level.”
Meanwhile, a recent survey from the Association of Washington Business found that 24% of businesses are considering a relocation out of the state, up from 17 percent in the prior quarter.
Washington’s economic climate was also one of the reasons why GeekWire recently traveled to Cleveland, where we explored how the Midwestern city was positioning itself for a changing economy, and the lessons that Washington could learn from it.
“We cannot take our strength for granted,” Ferguson said in announcing the council. “I’m launching a historic convening of top leaders from around Washington state to help guide the next chapter of economic prosperity for our state.”
The council will help develop Washington’s long-term economic strategy, identify opportunities to create family-wage jobs, evaluate the state’s competitiveness against other states and global markets, recommend ways to attract new employers and review regulatory barriers that may be slowing economic growth. The group will meet quarterly and submit recommendations to the governor.
The council’s creation comes after months of growing unease within Washington’s technology and business community.
GeekWire has reportedextensively on criticism surrounding this year’s tax package, which raised business taxes on many employers and expanded the sales tax to additional services, including advertising. Business groups warned the measures could discourage investment and expansion in Washington, while lawmakers argued the revenue was necessary to close a multibillion-dollar budget gap and preserve essential public services.
The broader economic backdrop remains mixed. Washington continues to rank among the nation’s strongest state economies and remains home to global leaders in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, aerospace and life sciences. At the same time, employers are navigating higher borrowing costs, federal policy uncertainty, trade tensions and intensifying competition from states aggressively courting new investment.
As one example, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recently encouraged people and businesses from places like Washington to consider Ohio.
“Come work in Ohio,” DeWine noted after a question from GeekWire about advice he’d provide to Washington. “You will not find a better place, better people, quality of life. Cost of living is low compared to the two coasts.”
In the press release announcing Janicki Industries’ Montana expansion, Gianforte was a bit more blunt.
“The Treasure State is proud to attract job creators like Janicki that choose to expand from high-tax, high-regulation blue states to take advantage of our unmatched quality of life, lower taxes, and strong workforce,” he said. “I look forward to seeing the impact of this significant investment.”
Ferguson has sought to make economic development a central priority during his first year in office. His administration has highlighted efforts to speed permitting across state agencies, increase housing production and invest in sectors including quantum computing, advanced manufacturing and clean energy.
However, some have argued that the governor’s efforts come a bit too late, and are only be instituted in response to criticism. Gov. Ferguson shot back at that contention in the press conference last week, saying he doesn’t worry about critics and he’s interested in “solving problems.”
“I didn’t wake up last week and think about forming this council,” he said. “To be clear, as I mentioned in my talking points, this was an effort we really started last year and was an outgrowth of having conversations with many of the folks behind me and many other people across the state.”
Whether the new council ultimately leads to meaningful policy changes remains to be seen. But its creation sends a signal that Ferguson intends to place economic competitiveness — and closer engagement with Washington’s business community — near the center of his administration.
Amazon Chief Global Affairs and Legal Officer David Zapolsky, a member of the newly created council, called the formation of the group an “important step.”
“When the public and private sectors align around shared goals, communities benefit,” he said.
Governor’s Economic Development Council members:
Michael Cade — Incoming Board Chair, Washington Economic Development Association; Executive Director, Thurston County Economic Development Council
Dr. Betsy Cantwell — President, Washington State University
Leonard Forsman — Chairman, Suquamish Tribe
Denny Heck — Washington State Lieutenant Governor
Kris Johnson — President, Association of Washington Business
Trevor Johnson — CEO, Blackwood Homes
Dr. Robert Jones — President, University of Washington
Mike Katz — Chief Business & Product Officer, T-Mobile
Mary Kipp — President & CEO, Puget Sound Energy
Heather Kurtenbach — Executive Secretary, Washington State Building & Construction Trades Council
Dr. Thomas J. Lynch Jr. — President & Director, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
Julianna Marler — CEO, Port of Vancouver
West Mathison — President & CEO, Stemilt Growers
Stephen Metruck — Executive Director, Port of Seattle
Denise Moriguchi — President & CEO, Uwajimaya
Stephanie Pope — President & CEO, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
Heather Rosentrater — President & CEO, Avista
Michael Senske — Chairman & CEO, Pearson Packaging Systems
April Sims — President, Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO
Brad Smith — Vice Chair and President, Microsoft
Rachel Smith — President, Washington Roundtable
Bill Sterud — Chairman, Puyallup Tribe
Shane Tackett — President and Chief Financial Officer, Alaska Airlines
Monique Valenzuela — Executive Director, Ventures
Dr. Rebekah Woods — President, Columbia Basin College
David Zapolsky — Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer, Amazon
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