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Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Modern CEO has reported on disparate levels of enthusiasm for AI between corporate leaders and the general public. More worrying, there’s an emerging trust gap in the workplace, with only 27% of workers in the U.S. saying they “trust their employers to use AI responsibly,” according to…

A father-son duo has vibe-coded a gaming company that’s generated nearly 30 million plays and 20 million visits across four mini-games in just 90 days. Say hello to Dialed. Dialed is a gaming website that tests players’ senses and memory in games about color, sound, time, and shape. Geoff Teehan, chief design officer at the payments services company Lightspark and former vice president of design at Meta, created a color-matching game using Cursor and Claude during a hackathon. The project was inspired by an old college professor’s comment about how bad humans are at recalling color. “They think they’re really good at it, but you show them a color and then they go …

AI may be attracting billions in venture capital, but money is not flowing to every founder with a chatbot demo and a slick deck. In fact, as AI makes building a great product faster and more accessible, founder behavior, judgment, and credibility become even more important. In a crowded market where every pitch claims “category-defining AI,” red flags can surface fast. Founders must recognize that most investors are not just underwriting your product. They are underwriting you as a person for the next seven to ten years. If they sense weak leadership, poor decision-making, or shaky ethics early on, the meeting or any next steps is often over before diligence even beg…

In a recent speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University, Pope Leo XIV warned that investments in artificial intelligence and high-tech weapons could push the world into what he called a “spiral of annihilation.” Leo has identified AI as a critical issue for humanity and is expected to soon release a papal encyclical (a kind of open letter on Catholic doctrine) addressing the subject. His concerns reflect a broader debate taking shape across religious communities: Though artificial intelligence in its current form has only been in the marketplace for a few years, religious leaders and scholars from traditions stretching back centuries or more have already weighed in on the…

Michael Patrick King has spent decades writing about people navigating worlds where everything feels transactional. With the colossally successful Sex and the City, which spawned multiple films and the sequel series And Just Like That…, King explored how identity, romance, and status become tangled up in consumerism and self-invention. In the long-running sitcom 2 Broke Girls, the focus shifted toward economic precarity and the humiliations of trying to survive in a world where money shapes nearly every relationship. But King’s sharpest work may be The Comeback, the HBO cult classic he co-created with Lisa Kudrow, who stars as Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom actre…

In order for a chatbot to become more intelligent, and thus more useful to the end-user, it needs to assimilate data continuously. This process is known as “training.” The problem is that many AI companies never explicitly ask for consent from data owners before scraping their webpages and adding the data to the corpora of the large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots. But some of those data owners, also known as content creators or IP holders, are now fighting back. They are doing this by using tools known as “tarpits.” Their aim? To poison the chatbot’s underlying LLM and thus degrade the quality of its outputs, potentially causing end-user flight. Here’s …

When Olympic skier Eileen Gu walked the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Met Gala on May 4, she wore a short, shimmering gown that appeared to be made of thousands of iridescent soap bubbles caught mid-float, clustered across her body and trailing into the air behind her. Eileen Gu It was created by Iris van Herpen in collaboration with the Tokyo-London design studio A.A.Murakami. Assembled from 15,000 hand-formed glass bubbles, it took 2,550 hours to construct, and contained hidden microprocessors that released real bubbles into the air as Gu moved. It was also a glimpse into the show that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on May 16: Iris van Herpen: …

RETN started with a bold ambition to build a nine-figure business. After doubling our revenue to nearly $80 million in the last five years, that goal is now within close reach. But it’s taken more than a daring founding team to get us to this point. This is all due to our engineers, sales, and support staff, who share a desire to grow and achieve exceptional results. As a team, we believe a business is only as strong as its weakest link. Poor components can cause bottlenecks and compromise performance. To maintain our strong network, we’re meticulous about hiring, no matter the role. And these three questions help us identify exceptional talent to maintain our gr…

Graduation season is upon us, which means copies of Oh, the Places You’ll Go! are flying off bookstore shelves—since whimsical Seussian life advice has been the go-to gift for new graduates since 1990. But handing over a picture book seems especially unhelpful for the class of 2026. While every generation of young graduates seems to face a unique set of woes in their early adulthood, this year’s new grads are coming up against some particularly turbulent times. AI is gobbling up the entry-level jobs that new graduates need to get their foot in the door. Adding insult to injury, commencement speakers are encouraging grads to embrace their new AI overlords. But …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom. Federal Reserve researchers estimate “new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.” Unlike housing demand, housing stock isn’t as elastic and can’t quickly ramp up. As a result, the heightened demand drained the market of active inventory and caused home prices to overheat, with U.S. home prices in June 2022 sitting at a staggering 43.2% above March 2020 levels. …

High-performing leaders don’t automatically create high-performing teams. Even the most impressive executive teams on paper can struggle with alignment, trust, and collective execution. When a team isn’t functioning, a leader’s instinct is to blame individual performance, skill gaps, or the strategy. More often the underlying issue is that the team doesn’t know how to operate together. In the earlier stages of a leader’s career, they are often rewarded for what they produce. There is far less emphasis on how leaders can drive team performance. As they move up in the organization, leaders find themselves in more team environments. Yet what makes leaders successful indi…

Organizations invest in setting the right goals to drive strategy, and increasingly they’re using AI to help. To be sure, AI can support the mechanics: draft objectives, align to strategy, track progress. But the questions that determine whether you can deliver on a goal, sustainably, aren’t ones an algorithm can answer: Are you clear on the target? Do you know why it matters? Is it realistic given your capacity? Too often, employees take on goals without asking these questions, and the result is unfocused, empty effort or burnout. The fix isn’t an AI agent—it’s having a smarter, human conversation before you commit. Next time your manager asks you to take on a new in…

Using your email address as your username has become the standard. In many cases, you simply enter your email address and choose a password. Some services remove the need for a password altogether, allowing you to register using just your email address and a onetime code sent to it. Others offer the option to connect your account directly to your Google or Apple identity. As we scroll, shop, apply, and register across services, our email address quietly becomes our identity everywhere, from shopping platforms to banking to travel. Over time, more and more of our activity starts pointing back to a single account. While it all feels convenient, there is an issue we …

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I rely on Ideogram, an AI image generator, to help me create posters, banners, social posts, newsletter illustrations, and video thumbnails. Context: Ideogram competes in an exploding market. Gemini’s new Nano Banana Pro makes remarkable infographics, ChatGPT’s image generator produces fantastic illustrations, and Canva, Adobe, and Midjourney keep getting stronger. Yet I still find myself returning often to Ideogram. 10 reasons I like Ideogram Your prompt gets automatically improved. Ideogram’s magic prompt algorithm refines …

I used to think I was a great salesperson because I had all the right answers. I knew my product inside and out. I could explain every feature, every benefit, every reason someone should say yes. And I did what most people do—I led with that. Confident. Certain. Ready to convince. And I lost deals I should have won. I remember one pitch early in my career like it happened yesterday. I walked into the room fully prepared. My slides circled the room like a victory lap. I spoke for ten minutes straight, laying out exactly why my offer was the perfect solution. When I finished, the client looked at me and said, “That’s nice… but that’s not what I’m looking for.” It was a …

One cold Friday night a few years ago, I collapsed to the ground in the arrivals hall of a small French airport. I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. It took physical collapse for me to acknowledge that I was burned out and that my work life was unsustainable. In the time since my own burnout, the term has become ubiquitous. And given the abundance of research on the topic, I’m not going to deny its dangers. Burnout is real, serious, and measurable. However, I don’t believe that we’re living in a burnout epidemic. What we are living through is an epidemic of the use of the term burnout. And that overuse is blunting the urgency of a massive global issue. What burno…

To make room for more housing without losing green space, planners in a new Toronto neighborhood flipped the usual approach: Instead of carving out room for parks and plazas, they made the streets do that work instead. “The street is almost like a public courtyard,” says Rasmus Astrup, design principal and senior partner at SLA, the Denmark-based firm that was part of the design team for the new neighborhood, called Ookwemin Minising. The main street will be car-free, “like a linear park,” he says, and filled with 400 trees. Other streets will allow cars, but prioritize large swaths of green space. The design gives residents public space, and doubles as climate i…

One of the best days of Gabriella’s career was also one of her hardest days as a parent. Gabriella, who asked for a pseudonym to protect her children’s privacy, had just filmed the launch video for her new company. On the train ride back home, she got a call from her daughter’s school. The new nanny she’d hired, who had been thoroughly vetted, had left her two-year-old son locked in the car in the school’s parking lot and disappeared for half an hour before teachers heard the crying and rushed to help. “I remember feeling so guilty and crushed, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don’t feel like I can leave my children because I don’t know how to find childcare that I can trust,’…

In a recent survey of senior leaders at large U.S. and U.K. professional services firms, 61% said they had abandoned at least one AI project in the past year because their people lacked the skills to deliver it. Deloitte’s “2026 State of AI in the Enterprise” report, based on a survey of more than 3,200 business and IT leaders across 24 countries, found that insufficient worker skills are now the single “biggest barrier to integrating AI into the business.” There is no quick or easy solution to this problem. While it is possible to bring in new hires or contractors with the short-term capabilities you need, this approach is not sustainable in the long term as it is bo…

One of the more annoying things that could happen is that you spend $3,300 on a brand-new display, only to find out that, just after you’ve passed the return window, the price has dropped by $400. Nothing else has changed; just the price gets cheaper after you’ve already paid for it and can no longer return it to the store. That’s what happened for customers who bought Apple’s brand-new Studio Display XDR, the company’s high-end mini-LED monitor targeted at professionals with a few grand to spend on a monitor. The company offered the Studio Display XDR with two stand options—a VESA mount adapter and what Apple calls a “tilt-and-height-adjustable stand.” Both versions …

There’s a quiet trade-off happening inside high-growth companies right now. We’re moving faster than ever, and teams are more efficient. AI is handling work that used to take hours, and asynchronous communication means decisions don’t have to wait for meetings. On paper, it’s all an upside. But underneath the speed, something else is happening. Leaders are moving further away from their teams. Not intentionally and not dramatically—just gradually enough that you don’t notice it until alignment shifts: decisions that need to be revisited, priorities that aren’t as clear as you thought, or challenges surfacing later than they used to. The assumption that new…

Ah, the olden days of choosing where to spend your money on dining, travel, and all that connected those experiences. Neighborhood restaurants would drop flyers in your apartment lobby to let you know they were there. Hotels would rent space on billboards and place ads in newspapers and magazines. Some joined industry groups, such as the Leading Hotels of the World, which got its start by promising ship passengers when they arrived at their destinations there would be appropriate accommodation for them. The go-to reference for figuring out where to eat would have been the iconic burgundy Zagat guides, one of the original crowdsourced review guides with quotes from ordinar…

OpenAI has prevailed in its fight against Elon Musk. A jury on Monday found that Musk did not file his lawsuit against the AI giant within the statute of limitations. The judge quickly agreed with the jury, making the ruling final. The win for OpenAI came after less than two hours of jury deliberation. Within 20 minutes, the judge, who could have taken up to a month to issue a final ruling in the case, agreed with the advisory jury and issues the final say. Musk had alleged that OpenAI “stole a charity” when it converted into a for-profit company. With the case now behind it, a major obstacle in OpenAI’s path toward becoming a publicly traded company has been…

It’s graduation season and my email inbox is flooded with inquiries from students entering the workforce, looking for career advice. How do I land my dream job? What should I do at the company where I’ve been recently hired to get where I really want to be? How do I go from what I have to do to what I want to do? What I’ve gathered from these students is not much different from what we more seasoned professionals struggle with day in and day out. How do we square the incongruence between our duty—the thing we have to do to survive, pay our bills, and keep the lights on—and our conviction—the thing we feel called to do? The job, of course, is our duty. The gift is our…