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Shares of Netflix Inc. (Nasdaq: NFLX) are getting battered this morning, one day after the company reported its Q1 2026 financial results—the first since the streaming giant abandoned its plans to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in February. In addition to its quarterly earnings, Netflix also announced a bombshell: its cofounder and current chairman, Reed Hastings, will be exiting the company this June. The departure of Hastings, who has been the de facto face of the company since its inception, has left many investors wondering about Netflix’s future. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On Thursday, Netflix announced its Q1 2026 finan…

Modern brides need something old, new, borrowed, and blue. But if they’re influencers, add a sponsor to the list, too. Paid sponsored content is commonplace for anyone who scrolls through an influencer’s social media, where you might encounter anything from a lavish vacation to new products to try. But a recent viral discussion on social media has users questioning if the practice has gone too far. “Just saw someone posting their wedding on IG,” a user posted to X, alongside a screenshot of an Instagram quote from content creator Jaz Smith. “The 1st slide was them and the second slide was a photo of CAPITAL ONE CAFE. “I can’t make this shit up. WHEW, is no…

From software engineers to non-technical staff, Google has urged its employees to fully embrace AI. And it seems like the push to use the tech has resulted in a major productivity leap. In a Wednesday blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that three-quarters of the company’s new code is AI-generated. “We’ve been using AI to generate code internally at Google for a while,” Pichai said. “Today, 75% of all new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50% last fall.” “We’re now shifting to truly agentic workflows,” the tech giant CEO continued in the blog post. “Our engineers are orchestrating fully autonomous digital task forces, f…

NASA this week released a stunning video of “Earthset,” the humbling moment when the Artemis II crew (now back at home) caught a view of Earth setting behind the lunar surface. From the window of the crew’s capsule, the recording captured the cusp of our bright and blue planet slowly disappearing behind the moon. The camera lens is of high-enough quality that the imaging picked up the wisps of weather systems traveling over our oceans and, in the foreground, the much darker lunar surface, peppered with crevices and craters. “Dude,” exhales an overcome astronaut on the recording’s audio. “No way.” This was all filmed on an iPhone 17 Pro Max and was shot by Reid W…

When Meryl Rosenthal and her cofounder started a human capital and workplace transformation consultancy in 2005, she was 41 years old. Nine years later, her cofounder left for personal reasons, rendering Rosenthal—by then age 50—a so-called solopreneur. Being a woman of that age and running a business on her own certainly came with challenges. One, she says, was that younger HR and business leaders tended to assume she didn’t have the necessary expertise because her background had not squarely been in HR. Another was a preconception that she—as an older woman—didn’t understand technology as well as her younger peers. None of these things daunted Rosenthal, though…

I have a confession to make. I keep a secret document in my Google Drive titled “Fund Theses That Piss Me Off.” And every time I read about a venture capital fund with a generic, meaningless, or buzzwordy thesis that manages to raise a bunch of money regardless, I copy and paste it into my burn pile. This is how I started to notice a couple of years back how sometimes VCs will make dramatic changes to their thesis and investing focus. And it happens not just at a fund level, but across whole chunks of the industry, too. Take, for instance, climate VC. This was a white-hot category not too long ago. Today, all of a sudden, all the climate funds are gone, or they’v…

A new cafe in Stockholm just opened its doors and, though there’s a human behind the counter making drinks and light bites, an AI manager is calling the shots. Andon Cafe is the latest autonomous organization experiment run by AI research company Andon Labs, tasking its AI to sell coffee and manage European bureaucracy. The result? Curious customers, $1,000 in sales in four days, and a lot of surplus supplies. A viral experiment Like the company’s AI-run retail experiment in San Francisco, Andon Labs secured a lease in Stockholm on a quaint corner coffee shop, then handed it over to an AI—in this case, Mona, powered by Gemini. At the beginning of the exper…

For years, leaders have treated transformation as a question of strategy and technology. Do we have the right plan? The right tools? The right talent? Most leadership teams think they have a speed problem. They don’t. They have a friction problem. Not the obvious kinds, like failed systems or bad strategy. Friction is quieter, far more pervasive, and seems innocuous. But friction, the invisible drag embedded in how organizations structure work, make decisions, and align teams, is becoming a material leadership risk. And as organizations push harder for agility, that friction comes with serious costs. WHERE WORK SLOWS DOWN Friction rarely shows up as a drama…

If you’ve been avoiding giving feedback to someone on your team, you’re not alone. You’re in good company. Well . . . common company, at least. Most managers aren’t avoiding feedback because they don’t care. It’s because it feels awkward and uncomfortable, and they’re hoping things will somehow get better on their own. Spoiler alert: they almost never do. I’ve seen this from multiple angles—as an employee, a manager, an employment lawyer, and someone who spent years in HR—and the cost of avoiding feedback is almost always higher than the cost of the conversation you didn’t want to have. What Happens When You Keep Waiting On the legal side, this patter…

In the fast-paced world of consumer packaged goods (CPG), innovation has become one of the most overused—and misunderstood—terms in our vocabulary. Walking the halls of Expo West this year, the sheer scale of innovation on display is staggering. Every aisle promises a new solution to our food system’s woes—higher protein, added fiber, or the latest superfood infusion. Yet a troubling question persists: How much of this is actual food innovation, and how much is marketing dressed up as engineering? The modern CPG landscape excels at generating hype but often fails to create lasting value. Brands appear overnight, fueled by venture capital and massive marketing spends, …

After a few months of job hunting, I drastically reduced my time on TikTok and Instagram. LinkedIn became my preferred social media app, less for entertainment and more for anything that looked like it might turn into a paycheck. A couple of weeks ago, I stepped away from the search and fired up Threads, hoping to find something lighter. I didn’t. Instead, I stumbled upon a job posting that was trending for all of the wrong reasons. The post sought a remote full-time creative strategist to join a Charlotte-based baby product retailer. The role sits at the content, branding, and social media crossroads, word to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. “You need to be sharp, fast, and…

In a social media landscape dominated by obnoxious ads, algorithms, and AI, Letterboxd has stood firm as a cult favorite. The app, which acts as a digital diary for users to log and leave reviews of any movie they watch, has been described by a Letterboxd spokesperson as “less a social media platform, more a community.” It’s resisted adding the infinite scroll feature that now seems omnipresent online, instead letting users curate their own feeds of friends and popular reviewers. But news that a controlling stake in Letterboxd could be going up for sale has users worried that their online safe haven could go the way of other resold apps like X. Canadian holdin…

If you’ve caught a movie in the theater recently, you may have noticed the crowd leaned, well, decidedly younger. Gen Z and millennials are driving a renaissance of sorts at movie theaters, taking in more movies each year and spending more money per outing than older generations, according to the results of an annual moviegoing trends and insights study released this month by Fandango. But Gen Z was a standout in a couple key ways: 87% of people born after 1997 said they had watched at least one movie in the theater in the past year, the highest share of any generation, and they were also the most likely to purchase tickets online or pre-order snacks, according t…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. There was a five-week window this spring during which four different U.S. homebuilders—one of them publicly traded, Tri Pointe Homes—were acquired by Japanese firms. At the time, ResiClub estimated that, once those deals close, Japanese firms would control more than 5.5% of the U.S. single-family homebuilding market. This wave of Japanese firms buying U.S. homebuilders isn’t just a 2026 phenomenon—it’s been building for a decade. According to new construction analytics firm Zonda: Back in 2015, Japanese firms owned U.S. homebuilders that acc…

In October 2024, I wrote that the tech industry was entering an era of silent firing. Jobs were not being eliminated overnight, but subtly reshaped in ways that encouraged attrition, as companies quietly prepared for large-scale automation. At the time, this was largely a warning. With age, it looks more like a pattern. Amazon’s January 2026 announcement of 16,000 layoffs brings corporate staff reductions to roughly 10% of its workforce. Publicly, leadership has been careful to separate these cuts from artificial intelligence. As CEO Andy Jassy put it after earlier reductions, “the announcement that we made…was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really A…

A twenty-something man once went to a French restaurant in New York—the kind of place with tuxedoed servers. He told the waiter he had never eaten anywhere so fancy and had a hundred dollars to spend, then asked him to bring the best meal he could within that budget. What arrived was a feast worth at least $150, and he was treated like a king. The experience stuck with him. That young man—who would later become a well-known executive coach, profiled in The New Yorker—came to believe in the value of trusting expertise and putting decisions in other people’s hands. It’s a useful lesson for leaders: when you truly delegate, people often exceed your expectations. …

For the past decade, the global startup playbook has been clear: grow at all costs and dominate through visibility. Sweden has played a different game, one of profitability and sustainability—and is outperforming as a result. The country now ranks among the top 10 globally for unicorn companies, and first in Europe per capita, with 46+ billion-euro startups and counting. Earlier this year, vibe coding unicorn Lovable became the fastest growing software-startup in history, reaching $100 million in subscription revenue in just eight months For a nation of just over 10 million people, that’s an astonishing concentration of innovation. Stockholm alone now hosts one of the…

Ikea design manager Johan Ejdemo is looking years into the future. A towering Swede with a six-inch beard, Ejdemo is a trained cabinetmaker who has nearly 30 years of experience at Ikea. Since 2022 he’s been the company’s design head, leading a team of 20 in-house designers in Sweden and a roster of freelancers from around the world. Together they give shape to the 1,500 to 2,000 new products Ikea releases every year. Most have been brewing in the company’s design department for several years, if not more than a decade. I recently met with Ejdemo at Ikea’s headquarters in Älmhult, Sweden, the city a two-hour train ride from Copenhagen where the company was founded…

There are plenty of different hacks, tools, and apps designed to break social media addiction or otherwise reduce your screen time. This is just the cutest one. Cat Gatekeeper is a new Chrome browser extension designed by the developer Zokuzoku, and it reminds you to stop scrolling by sitting a cat on your browser as a clock counts down until your break time is over. The browser extension is meant for anyone who keeps opening social media without thinking, and it’s inspired by the all too real experience of cats who want attention at the exact moment that it’s time to get to work. “We’ve recreated that classic cat-owner experience in your browser,” the dev…