GeekWire

On this week's show, we're out on the GeekWire deck for our annual founder open house, where we dig into Microsoft's latest round of layoffs — including a major Xbox shakeup — and the surprising rise of hardware companies on the GeekWire 200. Then we sit down with four guests to talk about how AI is reshaping how they build:  Jana Schuster of StackIQ , whose AI-native platform hel...

This week on the show, we're sharing the debut of Positive Charge , a new GeekWire podcast from reporter Lisa Stiffler and producer Laura Scott about the innovations that could help save the planet.  In this episode, they dig into the high-stakes race to harness the power of the sun and make fusion energy real, visiting two Seattle-area startups chasing this dream, and asking whether limitles...

This week: F5 turns 30 years old this year , and the Seattle company has reinvented itself repeatedly to get here — starting, improbably, as a group of University of Washington students trying to build online video games. On this week's GeekWire Podcast, recorded on location at F5 Tower, the company's chairman, president and CEO François Locoh-Donou joins us to trace that journey, fro...

Anthropic takes its most powerful models offline after a U.S. order, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly contributing to the concerns that helped trigger it. Todd and John dig into the Amazon-Anthropic dynamic, how agentic AI is upending Amazon's "working backwards" tradition , an AI-driven school arriving soon in the Seattle area , and the sensor-packed World Cup ball . With GeekWire co-founder...

In February, Seattle angel investor Charles Fitzgerald warned the region not to become the next Cleveland , prompting Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb to join the podcast and make the case for his city's comeback. This week we close the loop: Fitzgerald and GeekWire co-founder John Cook call in from an abandoned Westinghouse factory in Cleveland, where days of meeting entrepreneurs, civic leaders, and...

Microsoft's Build conference was a firehose: in-house AI models, agent-first devices, new coding tools, and a Copilot "super app" that got teased but never shown. Todd Bishop and Mary Jo Foley sort through what's real and what's not quite fully baked, from Project Solara and the Scout agentic assistant to Microsoft's push for AI self-sufficiency and the mounting pressure on GitHub. Related Stories...

This week on the show: Mark Zuckerberg's superyacht  arrives in Seattle the same day Meta discloses nearly 1,400 local layoffs , robot pizza startup Picnic flames out and sells to a mystery buyer , and corporate America confronts the rising cost of AI , including the leaderboard-gaming practice known as "tokenmaxxing." And we return to the theme of billionaire yachts for our trivia challenge....

On this special episode, Eric Ries, author of the 2011 bestseller "The Lean Startup," discusses his new book, " Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great. " Ries explains why he's redefining profit as the maximization of human flourishing, reveals his role advising Anthropic's founders on their corporate structure, and makes the case that the era of shareholder pr...

This week on a supersized Memorial Day Weekend edition of the GeekWire Podcast: A massive IPO filing from SpaceX includes new details about Elon Musk's Starlink business and its satellite factory in Redmond. Jeff Bezos talks about wealth, inequality and eventually tech in an hour-long CNBC appearance. John goes to World Cup ticketing hell and turns to ChatGPT and Gemini when FIFA's support falls s...

Brian Evergreen worked in AI at Microsoft from 2016 to 2023, including a role helping Fortune 500 executives develop their AI strategies. He kept seeing the same pattern: most of those projects were failing. He set out to figure out why, and the answer became his book, Autonomous Transformation . In this live recording for GeekWire's Agents of Transformation series , presented by Accenture , Everg...

This week: As the Musk v. OpenAI trial heads to the jury, we dig into what Microsoft's internal board memos and executive testimony revealed about the origins of the company's massive bet on AI, and why this case matters beyond the billionaire drama. Plus, Howard Schultz, a former Washington governor, and the tech community weigh in on whether Seattle is squandering its edge as an innovation capit...

This week on the show: Conversations with finalists and special guests at the annual  GeekWire Awards about AI, innovation, startups, and the forces reshaping their industries, plus a special trivia challenge marking GeekWire's 15th year hosting the event. Guests include: Luis Poggi, CEO of HouseWhisper AI , winner of CEO of the Year Tracy Drinkwater, founder of the Seattle Universal Math Mus...

This week on the show: Todd  reports from inside the Oakland federal courthouse where Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, with jury selection revealing just how hard it is to find anyone neutral about Musk these days. Meanwhile,  Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership the same morning the trial began — and less than 24 hours later, OpenAI's models lan...

Bill Hilf has spent decades enterprise tech, open-source technologies, and AI, from IBM and Microsoft to running Paul Allen's portfolio as the CEO of Vulcan. He now chairs the Allen Institute for AI and American Prairie . His debut sci-fi novel,  "The Disruption," imagines AI gone very wrong, and implicitly challenges the industry to think differently about how it's building our real future t...

Microsoft is offering a voluntary retirement program for the first time in its history, with thousands of U.S. employees eligible. GeekWire's Todd Bishop joins KIRO Newsradio hosts Angela Poe Russell and Mike Lewis to break down the details, what makes this so unusual in the tech industry, and what it says about the company's approach to managing costs in the AI era.  See omnystudio.com/liste...

This week on the GeekWire Podcast , a week of Seattle-area startup news shows how the AI era is reshaping the regional tech scene. Q1 venture numbers reveal bigger checks going to fewer companies, with Seattle slipping behind the likes of Austin and Miami on deal volume. And yet the distributed nature of modern startups is complicating what it even means to be a regional tech hub. (Does a mailbox...

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: we take the show on the road — or rather, on the rails — recording on Sound Transit's 2 Line as we ride the world's first light rail on a floating bridge from Seattle's Northgate neighborhood to Microsoft's campus in Redmond. Along the way, we talk tech news, chat with fellow passengers, and get a behind-the-scenes look at the engineering from Sound T...

This week: Rec Room , the Seattle-based social gaming platform once valued at $3.5 billion, is shutting down — and Snap is picking up some of the pieces . Todd talks about what it was like fielding calls from distraught users on the night of the announcement. John offers his thoughts on what the shutdown says about the VR hype cycle, and whether everyone betting on the AI boom should take no...

Fresh off the big GeekWire AI summit this week, Todd and John unpack what they heard from Microsoft EVP Charles Lamanna, OpenAI applications CTO Vijaye Raji, and other speakers at the Agents of Transformation event in Seattle , presented by Accenture. The big thread: the economics of AI, from token budgets becoming a hiring negotiation point to startups running on subsidized credits that may not l...

Amazon is working on a new smartphone, code-named "Transformer," more than a decade after the Fire Phone debacle, according to Reuters . We dig into the connection to a past GeekWire scoop : former Microsoft Xbox leader J Allard joined Amazon's devices team in 2024, and he's now leading a group called ZeroOne with a mandate to create "breakthrough" gadgets. Is this an AI-native device? A companion...

Brice Budke (President) and Zeek Earl (Executive Creative Director) run two Seattle studios: Shep , a video agency that works with tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft, and Packrat , a creative studio that specializes in miniature worlds, handmade sets, and retro creative projects. You might know Packrat's work from the epic and widely watched 2025 Seahawks  schedule release video , which...

OpenAI just opened its largest office outside San Francisco, in downtown Bellevue, Wash. GeekWire was there on day one to tour the space. Chatting inside the OpenAI game room, we share our observations about the Mad Men-meets-Pacific Northwest aesthetic, which features open floor plans and lots of common areas, and try to figure out what it all says about OpenAI's culture.  Plus, we talk with...

Anthropic acquired Seattle startup Vercept on Wednesday, raising familiar questions about the impact of early exits on the broader Seattle startup ecosystem, and the question of whether AI startups can compete long-term against the giants of the field. We dig into the deal, the public feud between two of the company's early investors on LinkedIn, and why one co-founder's prior departure to Meta ma...

Amazon promises 30-minute delivery with its new Amazon Now service . We put it to the test — live on the show — with help from Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz , co-founders of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners and two of the sharpest Amazon watchers we know. While we wait for our order of yogurt, blueberries, and flossers ( long story ), Mike and Josh break down why Amazon closed i...

We're live this week in the "Center of the Universe" in Seattle for a special recording of the GeekWire Podcast, presented by the Fremont Chamber of Commerce at Fremont Brewing Co . Fresh off the Seahawks' Super Bowl victory, we debate some potential ownership groups for the Seahawks and Sonics — from Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez to Costco's Jim Sinegal. (Who wouldn't want $1.50 hot dogs an...