Joe Vernachio, Allbirds’ former COO, was appointed CEO in March 2024, replacing co-founder Joey Zwillinger, to turn around the company after years of declining sales and store closures. Less than five years after the sneaker maker‘s $3 billion IPO, Vernachio is now asking shareholders to approve a deal, announced April 15, to sell the company’s…
Earlier this month, a student walked into Erik Brynjolfsson’s office hours with a blunt fear: that she might never find a job in the A.I. era. She worried her generation could be left behind entirely. Brynjolfsson, a Stanford economist who studies technology and labor, doesn’t share that outlook. He calls himself “mindfully” optimistic. “I told her…
Cohere, the Toronto-based startup led by Aidan Gomez, has already established itself as Canada’s A.I. darling. Now, with the acquisition of Germany’s Aleph Alpha, the company is pushing into Europe, pooling talent, compute and national ecosystems to create a new transatlantic alliance. In an A.I. race increasingly dominated by U.S. and Chinese giants, the deal…
On March 14, millions of high school students sat down to take the first SAT of 2026. Each year, the kick-off to peak testing season reignites the same debate: Are standardized tests fair? It’s the wrong question. The test itself isn’t the primary source of inequity in college admissions. The prep system surrounding it is. …
Earlier this month, Writer co-founder and CEO May Habib took the stage at the HumanX conference in San Francisco to discuss with Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas why so many companies’ A.I. strategies are failing. In a landscape where 95 percent of enterprise generative A.I. pilots fail to deliver returns, Writer has carved out a role helping…
The use of A.I. in trading has been steadily evolving for years, but an important shift is now underway. Once limited to supporting human traders through analyzing charts, processing data and summarizing news, A.I. is increasingly acting on its own. Over the past year, major exchanges and trading platforms have begun rolling out agent-based systems…
Stockholm produces more unicorns per capita than superstar cities like New York or London, second only to San Francisco. Global success stories like Spotify, Klarna, IKEA, Volvo and H&M were joined in December by Lovable, the fast-rising A.I. startup founded in 2023 and reportedly valued at $6.6 billion. Its rapid ascent adds to a remarkable…
There’s a lot of confusion around 23andMe: Is the company still in business? Is it now owned by Regeneron, the biotech company that once tried to buy it? Are its genetic test kits still available for sale? And if you’re a customer, what happens to your data? It’s been about a year since 23andMe plummeted…
What do actor James Franco, former NBA player Jeremy Lin and writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs have in common? They were all students of Esther Wojcicki. Beyond raising future Silicon Valley leaders like Anne and Susan Wojcicki, the educator spent decades pioneering a media program at Palo Alto High School. Watching her students thrive has been “the best…
After years of speculation and quiet succession planning, Apple announced yesterday (April 20) that Tim Cook will step down as CEO in September and be replaced by John Ternus, Apple’s current head of hardware engineering. Cook will transition into the role of executive chairman and welcome Ternus to the board. Needless to say, this is…
