GeekWire

We start this week's GeekWire Podcast by opening the listener mailbag, highlighting some recent comments and emails that set a new standard for critical feedback, in different ways. We discuss Vayo , the AI travel venture Booking Holdings is launching in Seattle, home of its biggest rival, Expedia. Led by recent guest Mike Fridgen, Vayo uses AI agents to manage your trips. It's an example of the b...

This week, we take the GeekWire Podcast to Front Burner Studios near Pike Place Market, where our host is studio co-owner Seth Paul, who's also co-founder and CEO of the Seattle security startup Qinsay . We discuss the White House crackdown on Microsoft’s green-card sponsorships, hours before President Trump honored Satya Nadella. We also talk about record Seattle startup funding and Shield...

This week, GeekWire co-founder John Cook joins University of Washington historian Margaret O'Mara, author of " The Code ," and San Francisco journalist Jonathan Weber, author of " City on the Edge ," for a live joint taping with the Blue City Blues podcast at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. With Blue City Blues hosts David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik, they trace the rise of Microsoft and...

This week: Amazon is  blocking Meta's new Muse AI assistant from shopping on Amazon.com, saying the agent doesn't identify itself and violates the site's conditions of use. We explain why the standoff is an early sign of a much bigger fight over whether AI agents can use websites and apps on people's behalf, and why Amazon has so much riding on the answer. For the definitive word on the issue...

On this week's show, recorded live at  Atmosphere Seattle on the shores of Lake Union, Zillow Senior Vice President of Engineering Toby Roberts joins us to talk about what AI is doing to the business of buying and selling homes. The show was recorded in partnership with Real Estate At Work , the networking group hosted by Leka Devatha , a broker with Real Residential and founder of the redeve...

This week:  A study commissioned by the City of Seattle warns that the city is not in decline but is in danger, finding that 10 companies, nine of them in tech, pay three-quarters of the payroll tax on large employers, and that the tax structure uniquely penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers. The report says Seattle should be most concerned about AI but most active in clea...

This week: The NBA suspends former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a year and hits the Clippers with $30 million in fines and five lost draft picks over allegedly sham endorsement deals for Kawhi Leonard, drawing comparisons to the Microsoft antitrust era. A new Redfin report says San Francisco's housing market is booming on AI wealth while Seattle slumps, with the Bay Area-to-Seattle migration pi...

This week: Bill Gates published a new essay warning that the AI industry is crossing the safety lines it set for itself, and that nobody is preparing for what's coming. At 70 years old, he also uses AI more than most people half his age, and he finds it enthralling, as you'll hear in highlights from our interview with Gates about the memo. Along the way this week, we dig into his three proposals:...

This week: Amazon's Prime Air drones are finally going national, nearly 13 years after Jeff Bezos unveiled the idea on 60 Minutes. GeekWire's John Cook goes inside Anduril's unmarked Bellevue office as the defense company builds toward 1,000 Seattle-area engineers. Plus: a reporter hides an AirTag in a rare book and tracks it to a secret Amazon book-scanning facility in Las Vegas. With John Cook a...

This week: What should Liverpool FC fans expect from Jeff Bezos as a member of the storied club's new minority ownership group? We consult the Amazon leadership principles for the answer. Plus, a tip and an SEC filing lead to a scoop on a former Meta AI director's new startup, the GeekWire Editorial Board convenes to decide whether Dave Clark's Auger stays on the GeekWire 200 after moving its HQ t...

This week:  SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company, and Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver a majority of the world's internet within a decade, leveraging production facilities in Redmond. Musk also explains the company's data center ambitions, calling terrestrial infrastructure a trivial problem next to reusable rockets.  Plus: we bring two Washington tech universe poste...

This week: Microsoft and Amazon both reported quarterly numbers, and both stocks rose on cloud results that beat expectations. Is AI spending is paying off in real business? And in related news, Microsoft sees a rare annual headcount decline, hitting product R&D hardest.  Plus: Satya Nadella builds a Power BI dashboard out of an analyst's research report, and touts it on the earnings call...

On this special mid-week episode, we're sharing a remarkable installment of GeekWire’s new podcast,  Positive Charge , which is all about finding slivers of hope in climate and sustainability.  In their latest show, reporter Lisa Stiffler and producer Laura Scott find that hope in an unexpected place: an innovative alternative to traditional burial and cremation. It might not be th...

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Seattle startup funding drops 40% in the first half of the year while AI money floods everywhere else. We dig into the numbers and the implications for the region. Plus: a Seattle judge deals Kalshi a setback , Impinj marks a decade on the Nasdaq after a 26-year climb, and nearly 40 Seattleites trade their smartphones for flip phones for five weeks.  Related...

This week:  Silicon Valley legend Vinod Khosla's family is leading a group that's  buying the Seattle Seahawks for a record $9.6 billion . We dug into hours of his talks and interviews to answer the big questions: Who is this guy, why does he want an NFL team, and what does his track record tell us about the kind of owner he'll be? Plus, the blind spot that could get him into trouble. Fe...

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...