Vinod Khosla has spent four decades building and funding companies around a single idea: hire the right people and get out of their way. He’s one of the most respected and influential investors in Silicon Valley, with a track record of big bets and a habit of not backing down.

On Saturday, a group led by the billionaire venture capitalist and his family agreed to buy the Seattle Seahawks from the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for a reported $9.6 billion, which would be the highest price ever paid for an NFL team.

Khosla, 71, was born in Pune, India. He earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and Carnegie Mellon before getting his MBA at Stanford, where he landed in Silicon Valley for good. After co-founding Sun in 1982, he spent nearly two decades as a partner at the legendary venture firm Kleiner Perkins before launching Khosla Ventures in 2004.

His firm now manages roughly $15 billion and has backed companies including DoorDash, Affirm, and Opendoor. Khosla was the first VC to invest in OpenAI, putting in $50 million in 2019. Forbes ranked him No. 1 on its Midas List of top tech investors this year and estimates his net worth at $15.6 billion.

But the Seahawks deal isn’t just about Vinod. The Allen estate’s public statement confirming the formal sale agreement described the buyer as “an ownership group led by the Khosla family,” and Vinod’s own quote in the statement was delivered “on behalf of the Khosla family.”

Estate of Paul G. Allen Reaches Agreement to Sell Seattle Seahawks pic.twitter.com/Pmv8i6FEp8

— Seattle Seahawks (@Seahawks) July 11, 2026

An NFL memo sent to all 32 teams Saturday, reported by ESPN’s Adam Schefter and others, identified his wife, Neeru Khosla, as the controlling owner, and said their son, Neal Khosla, “would be expected to have a significant leadership role in the ownership group.”

Neal may be the one to watch. He has described himself on his personal website as “an obsessive sports fan” who likes “bringing a quantitative and analytical lens to understanding the game within the game,” the Seattle Times reports.

He and his father have been San Francisco 49ers season ticket holders for 30 years, and Neal has consulted for both the 49ers and the Miami Heat. The Khosla family last year bought a 3.1% stake in the 49ers — the Seahawks’ NFC West division rivals — which they’ll now have to sell.

But Vinod Khosla’s track record is the clearest window into how the family will approach its Seahawks ownership. Here’s what we know about him based on his long career in tech.

He focuses on people and talent above all else. “A company becomes the people it hires, not the plan it makes,” Khosla said in a 2016 Startup Grind interview.

“Experience doesn’t matter. The rate of learning matters,” he told Sam Altman in a Y Combinator interview the same year, using a football analogy (fittingly as it now turns out): “Pick for the best athlete, not the person who’s the most established wide receiver who knows how to run one pattern.”

At Sun, Khosla spent an inordinate amount of his time on recruiting. He personally reconstructed the org chart of competitor DEC to identify talent that the company could poach.

Speaking at Seattle’s AI House in March 2025, Khosla’s main advice for startup founders was that their success will be driven by the people they hire and the questions they ask.

“The single most important decision by far you will make is the team you build,” he said at the time. “The more questions that get asked around your conference table, the better it will go, the faster you will learn, and the faster you will accumulate advantages.”

“Talent drives everything,” he said at another event in Seattle last summer, the Bloomberg Green Seattle conference on climate change.

For the record, the Seahawks’ current leadership is ostensibly locked in: general manager John Schneider is under contract through 2031, and head coach Mike Macdonald, who led the team to its Super Bowl win in February, is signed through 2029, according to The Seattle Times.

Whether the trademark Khosla obsession with talent will translate into getting involved with draft picks and player personnel will be an interesting question to watch.

He’s a Bay Area guy, not a Seattle guy. Khosla has lived and worked in Silicon Valley since earning his MBA at Stanford in 1980. Khosla Ventures is based in Menlo Park. The family’s 49ers ties underscore that this is not a homegrown owner.

Khosla has made a handful of appearances in the Seattle area over the years. His firm led a $11 million round for Seattle-based AI legal startup Lexion in 2021, and a $15 million round in Viome, the wellness startup co-founded by Seattle-area entrepreneur Naveen Jain, in 2017.

But he has no deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, which is a major difference from Seattle native Paul Allen and his family. How quickly the Khosla family builds a connection to the city and Seahawks fans may matter as much as anything they do on the football side.

He supports the people he picks, but tells it like it is. In more than 30 years on startup boards, Khosla says he has never once voted against a management team, even when he strongly disagrees.

“I’ll argue with them, I’ll debate with them, I’ll push them, but I will not vote against them,” he said in the Startup Grind interview. The Khosla Ventures website puts it more plainly: “Once we pick a management team, we back it and don’t second-guess it.”

For a Seahawks fan base that watched Paul Allen’s sister Jody Allen take a largely hands-off approach as chair of the Allen estate, the philosophy may sound familiar, although Khosla’s version would also come with a willingness to challenge leaders behind closed doors.

For example, Khosla has said he deliberately takes positions he doesn’t believe in when coaching founders — not to mislead them, but to force them to think through risks they haven’t considered.

The Khosla Ventures approach, as explained on its site, is “brutal honesty over hypocritical politeness.”

He’s not without controversy. In 2008, Khosla bought a 53-acre property south of Half Moon Bay, Calif., that included the only access road to Martins Beach, a stretch of coastline that surfers and families had used for decades. He locked the gate and blocked public access, setting off a legal battle that has lasted more than a decade and drawn widespread criticism.

The case has gone to the California Supreme Court and back.

“Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves,” the New York Times headlined a 2018 story about the dispute. Khosla has argued it’s a private property rights issue. Critics see it as a billionaire putting his own interests above the public.

The takeaway: he doesn’t back down, even when public opinion is against him.

He’s persistent in business, as well. That habit of not backing down has been consistent throughout his tech and investing career.

When Sun was told it had lost a critical early deal to a rival, Khosla flew from San Francisco to Boston and camped out in the prospective customer’s office until the CEO agreed to see him. By the end of the day, the company had signed with Sun, according to The Generalist.

When defective Philips monitors nearly bankrupted Sun, Khosla went home at 3 a.m. and was back by 7 a.m. for months until the crisis passed, he said in the Y Combinator interview.

“Survive long enough in your field to have time to get lucky,” he told founders at one meetup.

During a 2011 appearance in Seattle, Khosla offered this take on betting big: “I don’t mind the low probability of success, but I better be impactful if we do succeed.” He was talking about startups, but the same idea no doubt applies to chasing another Lombardi Trophy.

As the country marks its 250th birthday this week, Microsoft is rolling out an unlikely summer project: a six-part series of short videos, hosted by Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith, that look to American history for lessons relevant to technology and innovation today.

The premise is that every technology debate of the moment — over such issues as patents, privacy, and who gets to shape AI — has a precedent somewhere in the country’s past, and that we’d all benefit from remembering how we got here in the first place.

“We felt that the 250th anniversary of the country deserved some added reflection about the lessons of history, the role of technology, and the questions that we’re facing as a country,” explained Smith, a well-known history buff, in an interview with GeekWire this week.

In the first episode, for example, he stands in Philadelphia’s Independence Square to explain how a steamboat demonstration on the Delaware River in 1787 helped inspire the Constitutional Convention to give Congress the power to grant patents. This was the basis for the intellectual property framework that Smith describes as a bedrock of American innovation.

Savvy viewers may see some irony in a company extolling the virtues of IP protections even as Microsoft and OpenAI defend themselves against a New York Times copyright suit over the material used to train their AI models.

Asked about that, Smith made it clear he doesn’t see a contradiction.

“Every generation of technology has required a new round of legal thinking, legislation and oftentimes lawsuits, so that courts can sustain the balance that has always been needed between new innovation and the protection of things created already,” he said.

He also noted that Microsoft is often the party going to court to protect customers, pointing as one example to the company’s move this week to intervene before Europe’s top court in defense of the European Union and U.S. data-protection framework.

The six-part series was overseen by Smith’s longtime chief of staff, Carol Ann Browne, a Microsoft vice president; and produced by Kirkland, Wash.-based Trifilm. The episodes, around 3 or 4 minutes each, will roll out in the coming weeks. Smith said they recorded during existing travel plans, working the shoots into stops on trips he was already taking.

The series travels next to a Boston courtroom for the birth of privacy rights, Henry Ford’s Detroit assembly line for the spread of new technology, Cincinnati for Tocqueville’s take on nonprofits, Great Falls, Md., for George Washington’s early infrastructure ambitions, and the Lewis and Clark expedition in Montana for the value of uniting competing viewpoints.

“The 250th anniversary of the country is quite rightly an occasion to honor the past, celebrate the past,” Smith said, explaining the motivation for the series. “But let’s make sure we get something out of the past that helps us be more successful in the future.”

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.

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.

U.S. shoppers spent a record $26.4 billion across all retail sites during Amazon’s four-day Prime Day event, and for the first time, the people most likely to complete a purchase were those who arrived from AI chatbots.

It’s the latest twist in a high-stakes bet by Amazon. The AI assistants now sending retailers their best-converting customers are the same ones Amazon has worked to keep away from its own store, hoping to keep shoppers coming directly to Amazon.com and using its own on-site AI assistant instead.

Adobe reported over that weekend that visitors who clicked through to shopping sites from AI assistants were 40% more likely to make a purchase during the four-day event than those showing up through search, email or social media.

AI still accounts for a small fraction of total shopping traffic, but a trend is starting to emerge. In the past, shoppers sent by AI were the least likely to buy, according to Adobe’s data. The change suggests that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are becoming more effective at giving shoppers the information they need to buy with confidence.

Those figures span all of U.S. retail — “Prime Day” has become much more than a day, and much bigger than Amazon alone. The distinction matters, because Amazon has taken a different path than many of its rivals. While Walmart, Target and others have opened their catalogs to outside AI assistants, Amazon has kept them out.

Agentic AI drives less than 1% of traffic across every major online store, but Amazon’s share is the lowest of the group, at about 0.4%, according to J.P. Morgan data.

That’s by design: Amazon sued Perplexity, for example, over its browser that shopped on customers’ behalf, and won a preliminary injunction barring the tool from the logged-in parts of its site, arguing that unauthorized shopping agents degrade a trusted experience. Perplexity is appealing.

Amazon has separately blocked ChatGPT’s crawlers from reading its listings — even as it has begun buying ads inside ChatGPT to bring shoppers back, a move first spotted by Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas and reported by Business Insider and Modern Retail.

On Amazon’s most recent earnings call, in April, CEO Andy Jassy said the company was in talks with the AI companies to come up with a better experience between Amazon and third-party agents to “find something that works for customers and all the companies.”

In the meantime, Amazon is focusing on its own AI assistant.

The tool — launched as Rufus and folded in May into a service called Alexa for Shopping — has drawn more than 250 million users, with monthly users up more than 115% over the past year, the company said. Customers who use it while shopping are more than 60% more likely to buy, and Amazon Web Services has said the tool drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year.

Jassy said on the earnings call that third-party agents weren’t good enough yet — that they lacked a shopper’s history and often couldn’t get prices right — and that people would gravitate to whichever assistant knew them best. That’s the opening Amazon is going after with its own AI chatbot and related tools on Amazon.com.

“We are aiming to have it be the best shopping assistant anywhere,” Jassy said.

The strategy reflects one of the ways Amazon is increasingly making money. Advertising is now among its most profitable businesses. J.P. Morgan expects it to bring in about $83 billion in revenue this year and, because the margins are high, to account for roughly a third of the company’s operating income.

That advertising revenue depends on Amazon getting shoppers to browse its own site rather than handing the decision to an outside chatbot it doesn’t control.

The big question long-term is whether Amazon can maintain its own role as a primary destination for shoppers and avoid becoming just another selection on a chatbot’s shelf.