It’s 100 feet shorter and $100 million cheaper than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht, but another billionaire’s ship had no trouble drawing attention in Seattle on Tuesday.

“Zen,” a $200 million, 289-foot yacht reportedly owned by Chinese billionaire Wu Guangming, motored smoothly through the Ballard Locks and out to Puget Sound, attracting onlookers along the railings of the popular Seattle destination.

Flying a Cayman Islands flag, the vessel displayed its port of registry, George Town, below its name on the stern.

Wu is the founder of China’s Jiangsu Yuyue Medical Equipment and Supply, which supplies devices such as rehabilitation machines, oxygen tanks and diagnostic equipment.

Forbes ranks Wu, with a net worth of $2.6 billion, No. 1251 on its 2026 list of billionaires. It wasn’t clear if he was onboard or why the vessel was in Seattle.

Marine Traffic listed Alaska as the ship’s reported destination.

The yacht’s fenders and lines were tended to by a dozen or so crew members wearing matching white shirts and black shorts. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers workers guided the ship through the Locks, which connect the waters of Lake Washington, Lake Union, and Salmon Bay to the tidal waters of Puget Sound.

“Tis the season,” said one worker when asked by GeekWire if it seemed like an unusual number of superyachts were sailing into Seattle these days. He said it was not the biggest he’d seen and besides, the Locks are long enough to hold the 600-foot Space Needle lying down.

Zuckerberg’s “Launchpad” arrived in Seattle on May 26 and turned heads with its own trip through the Locks before mooring on Lake Union and drawing even more attention before moving out.

Zen was built in 2021 by Feadship, the same Dutch shipbuilder that made Launchpad. According to Superyacht Times, Zen can accommodate 16 guests and 25 crew members. In the world rankings for largest yachts, it’s listed at number 141.

Matt Sunday of Green Lake was out for a bike ride Tuesday evening when he stopped to check out Zen at the Locks. A director of engineering at Boeing, Sunday said he was interested in how the boat navigated the waterway.

“I’m fascinated by the precision and how it’s using the bow thrusters,” Sunday said. “It looks like it’s got space, but it’s tighter than that captain wants it to be, I’m sure.”

Sunday said he couldn’t really fathom the wealth of someone who could own such a vessel, calling it “a $200 million toy.”

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Amazon’s latest film drama isn’t a movie that it’s producing or streaming, but rather the situation surrounding a project it has dropped.

Amazon MGM Studios has backed away from “Artificial,” a nearly finished film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The studio said last week that the film would “be better served if it were released by a different studio,” according to reports in Puck, Variety, and elsewhere.

The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and focuses on the brief period when Altman was fired from his position at OpenAI in 2023 and then rehired, according to Variety. The film has been referred to as “‘The Social Network,’ but for the AI era,” in a nod to the 2010 film about Facebook.

The New York Times reported that Amazon MGM had spent around $40 million on the project and had tested it in four markets. The decision to drop the film, planned for a 2027 release, “shocked the filmmakers,” the Times said.

Amazon announced a $50 billion investment and strategic partnership with OpenAI in February. The ChatGPT maker and Amazon Web Services deepened their technical ties, expanding an existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over eight years, with OpenAI planning to run more of its AI workloads on AWS.

Amazon said it is “working closely with the filmmaking team to find the film a new home.” The Hollywood Reporter said Netflix and Focus Features have both passed on “Artificial.”

Puck, which first reported the news, said the finished film struck Mike Hopkins, the head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, as darker in tone than the script Amazon had originally bought, and that Hopkins made the decision to drop it after watching a cut. Amazon’s public statement gave no reason.

Guadagnino, who directed the 2017 Oscar winner “Call Me by Your Name,” previously worked with Amazon MGM on “After the Hunt” and “Challengers.”

“We have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagnino as an award-winning filmmaker — not to mention a longstanding relationship that we hope to continue,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.

Other “Artificial” cast members include Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.

When a startup town turns into a soccer town attracting worldwide attention, it’s a great opportunity to test your guerrilla marketing skills.

Seattle’s Yoodli leaned into that theory on Thursday by getting its name and web address on Fox Sports’ live broadcast of FIFA World Cup festivities from Pier 62 on the waterfront.

The company, which launched out of the former AI2 Incubator in 2021, develops AI-powered software that allows users to simulate and practice real-world conversations. Yoodli has been at AI House all week on nearby Pier 70, and the team said grabbing free TV ad time was a “Hail Mary move” — especially in an era when AI company billboards are such a thing.

In a description of events relayed to GeekWire via email, the effort started with Yoodli’s new growth marketing manager Connor Wright scrolling Instagram earlier that morning to catch up on World Cup updates. He saw that Fox was live-streaming from Pier 62.

A scrappy startup lightbulb went off.

Communications and content leader Sage Ke’alohilani Quiamno said she quickly ripped up a monitor box — because the startup is getting a new office soon — and wrote “Yoodli.ai” on the front and “USA” on the back.

Marketing intern Luis Quiroz ran down Alaskan Way with Wright to get inside Fox’s Pier 62 makeshift studio space and hold up the sign just over the shoulder of soccer commentator Alexi Lalas.

“When you’re standing outside with a piece of cardboard and a Fox broadcast camera sweeps by, you seize the moment,” Quiamno said. “Connor held the sign without hesitation while I directed him via phone from the office.”

Yoodli has been watching World Cup action daily from the lunchroom at AI House, and Quiamno said the energy downtown has been something else, especially in anticipation of Friday’s noon match between the U.S. and Australia at Seattle Stadium (Lumen Field).

“It’s the kind of vibe Seattle rarely gets: the waterfront is packed, everyone’s in a good mood, and there’s this collective feeling that the city is on the global stage,” she said.

Yoodli was co-founded by Esha Joshi and Varun Puri and is ranked No. 22 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups. The company currently has about 80 employees.

“We’re growing but still small enough to pull off a guerrilla PR stunt,” Quiamno said.

And apparently it worked. Yoodli says it saw an increase in website traffic and demo inquiries following the broadcast.

“Proof that a handmade sign and a little World Cup energy go a long way,” Quiamno added.

Is video-game industry leader Gabe Newell getting ready to vacate the Seattle area for sunny South Florida like some of his billionaire contemporaries? Reports of a luxury property purchase raise the question.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Newell, CEO and co-founder of Valve Corp., is the buyer of a $70.8 million waterfront estate in Manalapan, Fla., north of Miami. The newspaper this week cited people familiar with the transaction.

Sellers Cindy and Ron McMackin paid roughly $39 million for the 2.06-acre property in 2020, and listed it for $85 million in December, according to the WSJ. The couple, founders of the mechanical subcontracting company Pan-Pacific Mechanical, declined to comment on the buyer’s identity.

The estate is featured in a 2020 YouTube video from Premier Estate Properties, above, and among its features is a tunnel that connects the house with the ocean. It has a roughly 20,000-square-foot residence, an outdoor pool, a dock and a boat lift, the WSJ reported.

Newell, 63, has led Bellevue, Wash.-based Valve since co-founding the video game company in 1996 alongside former Microsoft colleague Mike Harrington. Newell spent 13 years at Microsoft and is credited with helping to build the first three versions of Windows before he left.

Valve is known for creating the PC gaming platform Steam, and its game franchises include “Half-Life” and “Portal,” among others.

With a net worth of $11 billion, Newell is No. 293 on Forbes’ list of the richest people in the world.

A move to Miami would put Newell in the same company as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who announced his move from Seattle in an Instagram message in November 2023. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz also recently announced on LinkedIn a Miami move, and then last month wrote a critical op-ed in The Wall Street Journal blasting Seattle’s anti-business climate and Mayor Katie Wilson.

Seattle entrepreneur Rich Barton, co-founder of Zillow Group and Expedia Group, cited personal reasons for his recent move to Las Vegas.

All of those relocations come amid an increasingly heated debate over taxes in Washington state, where lawmakers have expanded taxes on wealthy residents while some business leaders warn that the policies could drive entrepreneurs elsewhere.

Even though Newell’s move out of the region isn’t confirmed, Bellevue commercial real estate developer Kevin Wallace was already lamenting the loss of another Washington billionaire. In a post on LinkedIn, Wallace shared a chart tracking the state’s billionaire “flight log” — listing the state’s richest people and whether they are still residents.

“Assuming Newell changes his domicile, that’s $15,000,000,000 in wealth headed for states with no income, capital gains or estate taxes, and it’s only been 96 days since the income tax bill passed,” Wallace wrote. “This is going to leave a mark.”

Egypt and Belgium played to a 1-1 draw in a FIFA World Cup matchup in Seattle on Monday. Fans who looked to the sky near Seattle Center later that night got a visual win.

Visit Seattle calls the lighted display the first-ever drone scoreboard, and the destination marketing organization plans to repeat the feat for five more matches hosted in Seattle.

The Egypt vs. Belgium match at Seattle Stadium (Lumen Field) attracted more than 66,000 fans for a noon start time. Thanks to the Pacific Northwest’s late sunsets this time of year, the 400 drones didn’t take flight near the Space Needle until 10:05 p.m. The scoreboard was up for 2 minutes, 45 seconds.

Certainly there are quicker ways to determine a match outcome, but Visit Seattle views the effort as a way to celebrate the city’s first World Cup and embody “Seattle’s history of innovation, strong sports fandom, and iconic skyline.”

The drones are flown by Sky Elements, the Fort Worth, Texas-based company that has put on shows at T-Mobile Park for a Mariners game, Lumen Field for the Seahawks, and at the Needle for New Year’s Eve

The next scoreboard will be live on Friday for USA vs. Australia. The showing is free and open to the public, with schedules here.

Here is the schedule for remaining FIFA World Cup matches in Seattle:

• June 19 (noon): United States vs. Australia (Group D)
• June 24 (noon): Qatar vs. TBD (Winner of Playoff A: Italy/NI/Wales/BIH) (Group B)
• June 26 (8 p.m.): Egypt vs. Iran (Group G) 
• July 1 (1 p.m): Round of 32 Match 82
• July 6 (5 p.m.): Round of 16 Match 94

Mark Russinovich writes a lot of LinkedIn posts. Going forward it appears he’ll be formatting the text for those posts in a new tool he built.

In a LinkedIn post on Sunday — complete with bold, italic, bullets, emojis and more — the longtime Microsoft Azure CTO said he vibe coded a new utility called LinkedIn Post Formatter that allows users to easily get the look they want in text on the professional networking platform.

Russinovich, who has been at Microsoft for more than 20 years, admitted that he’s “always been frustrated” by formatting tools available online, and that most of the free ones are “clunky” and don’t support smooth, in-place text formatting.

In addition to the in-place text formatting capabilities, LinkedIn Post Formatter also includes a character counter and a preview of posts for mobile and desktop.

His project is hosted directly on GitHub Pages and it’s open source for anyone who wants to check out the code or contribute features.

Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion — and some in the comments on Russinovich’s post alluded to that point in wondering why LinkedIn’s interface doesn’t just offer the same capabilities.

“No offense, but don’t you literally work at the company that owns the formatting UX?” one commenter asked.

“It would be great if we could get it adopted directly into LinkedIn’s native post editor,” another said.

In a keynote address at a Technology Alliance startup and investor event a year ago, Russinovich cautioned that “vibe coding” and AI-driven software development tools aren’t capable of replacing human programmers for more complex software projects.

But he did acknowledge the effectiveness of AI coding tools — like a LinkedIn Post Formatter, perhaps? — for simple web applications, basic database projects, and rapid prototyping, even when used by people with little or no programming experience.

A longtime technical and cloud leader at Microsoft, Russinovich said at the time that the future lies in AI-assisted coding, where AI helps developers write code but humans maintain oversight of architecture and complex decision-making.

Give way, Washington State Ferries, Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht has a new port of call — it’s now north of Seattle off Everett, Wash.

Launchpad was spotted Thursday making the move from Elliott Bay in Seattle. According to MarineTraffic, the Meta CEO’s vessel anchored in Port Gardner Bay near Naval Station Everett around 5:30 p.m. on Thursday.

Tim Davis, a Kingston, Wash., photographer, shared images on Facebook — naturally! — as he saw the yacht pass President Point. His post is loaded with comments from others who saw the ship, from land or from ferries crisscrossing Puget Sound.

Davis said MarineTraffic has the yacht’s destination as “salmon country,” which some speculated could mean it’s headed to Alaska.

Since arriving in Seattle on May 27 and passing through the Ballard Locks before mooring on Lake Union for a couple days, the $300 million, 387-foot Launchpad has drawn gawkers and protesters. No indication has been given about why the vessel was in the Pacific Northwest or whether Zuckerberg would be joining it.

Wingman, a 262-foot support vessel that can carry tender boats, a helicopter and other toys, has been docked at Smith Cove in Seattle, where it remained on Friday morning.

The vessels arrived in Seattle the same day Meta disclosed plans to cut nearly 1,400 jobs in Washington state. That amounted to about 20% of its local workforce, part of a broader reduction of roughly 8,000 positions companywide.

Some on Facebook called the yacht “a grotesque display of wealth owned by a tone deaf billionaire” while others called it a “gorgeous boat” and defended Zuckerberg as someone who “earned it” and who employs thousands of people.

Soccer fans who aren’t there in person or not glued to their phones or TVs during FIFA World Cup matches in Seattle will be able to look to the sky for results.

Visit Seattle is planning to launch what it calls a first-ever drone scoreboard, lighting up the city’s skyline with scores from each of the six matches that will be played in Seattle.

The activation will take place at the Space Needle to add another visual flair to an event expected to draw huge crowds to the city.

The drones will be flown by Sky Elements, the Fort Worth, Texas-based company that has put on shows at T-Mobile Park for a Mariners game, Lumen Field for the Seahawks, and at the Needle for New Year’s Eve.

Seattle advertising agency Copacino Fujikado and Seattle-based PR agency C+C are also part of the production.

Visit Seattle is a nonprofit marketing organization that champions Seattle and King County as destinations for travel and tourism.

Here is the schedule for FIFA World Cup matches in Seattle:

• June 15 (noon): Belgium vs. Egypt (Group G)
• June 19 (noon): United States vs. Australia (Group D)
• June 24 (noon): Qatar vs. TBD (Winner of Playoff A: Italy/NI/Wales/BIH) (Group B)
• June 26 (8 p.m.): Egypt vs. Iran (Group G) 
• July 1 (1 p.m): Round of 32 Match 82
• July 6 (5 p.m.): Round of 16 Match 94

The Google homepage has a special look this morning thanks to the artwork of a Seattle-area teen.

Kameirah Johnson, a senior at Lakeside School, is the winner of the 2026 Doodle for Google contest, and her work is now displayed online for the millions of people who visit the search giant.

Kameirah, 18, of Renton, Wash., beat out tens of thousands of submissions from K-12 students in the annual contest. The 2026 theme was “My superpower is …” and her original work, titled “Hair Power: The Crown That Grows from Us” celebrates hair as a symbol of identity and inherited strength.

In April, Kameirah was selected as one of five finalists and Thursday she appeared on “TODAY” in New York to be revealed as the winner. She said she was “super excited” that her artwork could reach so many people.

The artwork depicts three figures — inspired by Kameirah, her mother Simone, and her sister Kalieyah — lying in the grass, their hair styled as crowns. She told “TODAY” that growing up black she learned to have a lot of pride in her hair, and her biggest inspiration is her mom.

“When I was a little kid, I’d go to preschool and every single week I’d have new hairstyle, whether it’s braids, afro puffs, etc.,” Kameirah said. “And she just really taught me to love my hair and love my culture and who I am.”

In the fall, Kameirah is headed to NYU — her “dream school” since she was 11 — to study economics and studio arts, with an eye toward the intersection of art and business. She hopes to own a gallery someday.

The top prize comes with a $55,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology package for Kameirah’s school.

Asked by “TODAY” what she hopes people will take away from her artwork, Kameirah said she hopes people will “feel inspired to live in their own skin, express themselves and be who they are.”

Now in its 17th year, the Doodle for Google contest has attracted Seattle-area winners in the past. Mahee Chandrasekhar, a ninth grader at Redmond High School, was the Washington state winner in the 16th contest. In 2023, sixth-grader Rebecca Wu of the International School in Bellevue, had her artwork recognized.

Mark Zuckerberg — or whoever is traveling aboard his superyacht in Seattle this week — brought a Wingman.

While the Meta founder and CEO’s 387-foot yacht Launchpad is attracting attention with its travels through the Ballard Locks and into Lake Union, a 262-foot support vessel is docked several minutes away on Pier 90 at Smith Cove.

Wingman has been called a “floating garage for billionaires” and is designed to carry all the various toys one might need at sea and in port, from helicopters to smaller tender boats and other personal watercraft. An onboard crane is used to transfer heavy loads to the water.

The vessel is visible from the Magnolia Bridge and the Elliott Bay Trail that runs along the waterfront, docked at a pier alongside another that is used by giant cruise ships to pick up and drop off passengers. The headquarters of online travel giant Expedia is just across the water.

GeekWire checked with a guard at the entrance to the gated terminal who confirmed that Wingman arrived earlier this week. Launchpad sailed into Seattle Tuesday afternoon. Both vessels are flying the Marshall Islands flag, a common registry for large yachts because of an “attractive tax framework,” according to Yacht Law Partners.

The white and black yacht easily blended into a facility that normally caters to such large vessels. Bikers and walkers using the trail exhibited none of the curiosity about Wingman that is drawing people to Lake Union to gawk at Launchpad.

It’s unclear why Launchpad and Wingman are in Seattle this week, but their presence has taken on a certain irony in light of layoffs that impacted nearly 1,400 regional Meta employees.

Passing through the locks, one crew member on Launchpad indicated the vessel wasn’t in town for the FIFA World Cup, and planned to “come and go.”

Formerly known as U-81, Wingman is reportedly a $100 million ship, and was built in 2022 by Dutch company Damen Yachtbuilding. According to Superyacht Fan, it can accommodate a crew of around 18 as well as eight guests across four cabins.

At last check this morning, both Wingman and Launchpad were still in their respective Seattle ports.

People saw it on Facebook. And they saw it on Instagram. But many had to come see it up close and in person.

Social media scrollers turned into real-life gawkers on Wednesday as a steady stream of onlookers paused along the western shore of Seattle’s Lake Union to take in Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht.

No one knew why the $300 million, 387-foot Launchpad was in Seattle. Some wished it wasn’t. Others were pretty thrilled to get a glimpse of the gleaming blue and white vessel, backed into a giant slip along Westlake Avenue North — within walking distance of Meta’s local engineering offices.

“I’ve been selling boats here in Seattle on Lake Union for 35 years, and I believe this to be the biggest boat I think I’ve ever seen on the lake,” Tony Witek told GeekWire.

The biggest boat Witek has ever sold was about 90 feet long. He called Zuckerberg’s Dutch-built yacht a “personal cruise ship.” Asked how many boats he’d have to sell to afford one like Zuck’s, Witek laughed.

“I think you’d only have to sell this one, and then you could easily go into retirement,” he said.

On a blue-sky May day at lunchtime, the bike and pedestrian trail along the lake was especially busy, and slowed to a pinch point as people stopped to stare, take selfies, FaceTime friends or just ask, “Whose boat is that?”

On the water, people got even closer in dinghies and kayaks — and were warned to stay back by a private security guard from land. A stand-up paddleboarder floated nearby to take pictures. The Argosy Cruises tour boat slowed during a pass by the yacht’s bow. Two electric rental boats did circles as passengers looked up at the towering Launchpad.

The vessel arrived in Seattle Tuesday night, drawing a similar crowd as it passed through the Ballard Locks. The timing was called less than ideal by some, as Meta cut nearly 1,400 jobs in Washington state earlier in the day.

“The timing of it seems a little distasteful,” said Tim Peterson of Renton. “Probably should have kept it out there in the Sound a little bit longer.”

Peterson said he can’t afford a boat of his own and said he’d be lucky to be able to get a dinghy. He’s not on Facebook, but he is on Meta-owned Instagram.

“I helped pay for it a little bit,” he laughed. “I guess my taxes helped pay for it as well,” he added, lamenting the yacht as a glaring example of excess while many people lack food, housing and healthcare.

“If people have that, then by all means, get you a big old boat,” Peterson said.

The yacht drew several employees from Meta’s nearby South Lake Union offices. Two engineers said it was interesting to get a sense of the scale of the ship, especially one owned by the head of their company.

“That’s what it’s like to work for a conglomerate,” one of the workers said. The two didn’t want to give their names for fear of being fired.

Steven Redpath, a former Boeing worker, said he used to come to Lake Union to see the aerospace company’s superyacht, Daedalus. The floating corporate entertainment venue was sold for approximately $13 million in 2020.

“Boeing has cleaned up their corporate image and got rid of the yacht,” said Redpath, who took a detour on his bike ride to get a glimpse of Launchpad.

“We bend over backwards for public transportation. We are always looking for solutions to the homeless crisis, and that doesn’t help with either one,” he said, pointing at the yacht. “I think capitalism is letting us down. This is not what our founding fathers were intending to do. This is run amok.”

Gurneet Takhar, an estate planning attorney in Seattle who spends her time analyzing the money moves of millionaires and billionaires, called the yacht “an interesting asset to own.”

A man piloting a dinghy nearby said he owned a boat on the lake and cruised over to get some size perspective, joking about how many of his boats would fit in the yacht. Another man made a comment about taxes while pointing out the yacht’s Marshall Islands flag, a common registry for large yachts.

Another onlooker, a real estate broker reflecting on the effect of tech layoffs on Seattle and the housing market, called the boat “ugly.”

And later Wednesday, a painter captured the scene — with a fiery finished touch.

Deckhands from the yacht could be seen unloading cardboard boxes from a U-Haul box truck parked on the dock. It was tough to tell what was in the boxes — supplies for the stay in Seattle, perhaps. Other workers, including one wiping down parts of the boat, could be seen on decks above.

There was no sign of Zuckerberg.

Ava Pappas stopped by after seeing a picture of the yacht in her aunt’s Instagram story.

Pappas leads a Seattle run club called Cool Down Running that runs from the Center for Wooden Boats in South Lake Union up to the Fremont Bridge and back on Wednesday nights.

She planned to make a stop with the group mid-run.

“It’s insane. Most people don’t understand the caliber of this megayacht,” Pappas said. “It’s definitely just a treat to be able to see it in person. It’s a beautiful boat, and I love just kind of looking at it in awe.”

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Hadi Partovi helped kids around the world learn to code. Next on the playlist: piano.

The Code.org founder, who earlier this year handed off the CEO role at the nonprofit, announced this weekend that he is the new CEO of Payam Music, a Bothell, Wash.-based piano school that he plans to expand nationally with backing from Mark Cuban, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi (Partovi’s cousin), and Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer.

The news coincides with a 60 Minutes segment and a USA Today feature about the school and its teaching approach, known as the Payam Method. Instead of starting with sheet music and a classical repertoire, students learn to play using letters and numbers, choosing songs they already love. Traditional notation and theory come later as students progress through 18 levels.

“I’m taking my experience teaching computer science to hundreds of millions and connecting it to my lifelong love of piano,” Partovi wrote in a LinkedIn post on Sunday.

Partovi told USA Today that he and his twin brother Ali learned piano as children in Iran after the Islamic revolution, when the family was stuck at home. Their father cut out musical notes and taped them to the keys so they could teach themselves. 

After immigrating to the U.S. and moving in with their grandmother, Partovi could no longer afford lessons but kept playing on his own. He still composes his own music.

Payam Music was founded by Payam Khastkhodaei, a 32-year-old piano teacher who developed the method while giving lessons out of a converted home in Bothell. Partovi discovered the school when his son Darius enrolled and saw rapid progress after years of struggling with traditional lessons.

On 60 Minutes, Partovi compared the approach to Code.org’s method of teaching coding with blocks and drag-and-drop elements instead of ones and zeros and semicolons.

Payam Music has eight locations, in Washington state, California, New York, and Maryland. It has raised seed funding in the single-digit millions to expand nationally, USA Today reported.

Khastkhodaei told paper that about 97% of his students continue beyond the first year, compared with 15% to 20% in traditional instruction. Lessons cost $75 to $100 per session.

A Seattle-area developer tools startup is doing something that no amount of banner ads or conference booths could: it’s putting its name on the chest of an English Premier League football club.

Temporal, the Bellevue workflow orchestration company valued at $5 billion, announced Thursday that it is becoming the front-of-shirt sponsor of Crystal Palace Football Club beginning with the 2026/27 season.

It’s a marriage between a 7-year-old startup — whose customers include OpenAI, Netflix, and JPMorgan — and a South London soccer team with 164 years of history.

“Our mission has always been to put Temporal in the hands of every developer building the next generation of software, and the conventional playbook for getting there only reaches so many of them,” Temporal co-founder and CEO Samar Abbas wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the deal. “Millions of developers around the world still haven’t had a reason to find us. A partnership with one of the most watched leagues and beloved teams on the planet changes that math.”

Front-of-shirt sponsorship in the Premier League is serious money. The biggest deals — Manchester City’s arrangement with Etihad Airways, for example — run north of $80 million per year. For a mid-table club like Crystal Palace — whose previous front-of-shirt deal with Asian betting company Net88 was reported to be worth around £10 million, or roughly $13 million, per season — the figures are considerably more modest.

The timing works in Temporal’s favor: starting with the 2026/27 season, the Premier League is banning gambling companies from the front of shirts, freeing up more than $125 million in combined annual sponsorship value across the league and pushing clubs to court a new class of sponsors — including, apparently, developer infrastructure companies from the Pacific Northwest.

Co-founded in 2019 by Abbas and Maxim Fateev — veterans of Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber — Temporal builds open-source software and a cloud service that helps companies run long-running, complex workflows reliably — what it calls “durable execution.”

The rise of AI agents has turbocharged demand for that kind of reliability, with Temporal raising $300 million earlier this year and growing revenue more than 380% year-over-year.

And the deal is more than a logo placement: Crystal Palace is becoming a Temporal Cloud customer, using the platform to modernize its e-commerce, payments, fan experience, and matchday operations as the club undergoes a major stadium redevelopment.

Crystal Palace plays at Selhurst Park, a 25,000-seat stadium in the London Borough of Croydon that has been the club’s home since 1924. The Eagles trace their origins to 1861, making them one of the oldest football clubs in the world.

The club nearly ceased to exist in 2010, when a consortium of supporters led by chairman Steve Parish had 24 hours to find a buyer or watch it be liquidated. They saved it, and what followed was one of English football’s better comeback stories: promotion to the Premier League in 2013, a first-ever FA Cup title in 2025, and now a berth in next week’s UEFA Conference League final in Leipzig, Germany, against Spain’s Rayo Vallecano.

Temporal CMO Clair Byrd, who wrote about the deal in a company blog post, said the partnership resonates because the two organizations share a core value.

“We spend a lot of time thinking about durable systems, resilience, and what it means to build things that people can rely on over long periods of time,” she wrote. “You know better than anyone what this shirt is worth in this community, and we’re not going to claim we already understand what it means to wear it. That is something we have to earn.”

With Seattle set to host matches this summer as part of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the region is buzzing with soccer fever — and the tech scene is increasingly getting in on the action.

Temporal isn’t the only tech name with skin in the English game: Shivaas Gulati, co-founder of digital remittance company Remitly and new startup Arkero, joined the ownership consortium of Southend United — a fifth-tier English club — in 2024, with plans to use AI and software to modernize the club’s operations.

The release of 2026 NFL team schedules on Thursday night marked the return of the “social media Super Bowl” — and the actual Super Bowl champs were might in the mix.

The Seattle Seahawks used a fun play on perfume ads to spritz their opponents in the face. Tight end AJ Barner — sporting the fur coat and cowboy hat he wore during the team’s championship parade — said Parfum De Seahawks smells of “emotion, power, and Lombardi.”

The ad features cameos by actors/Seahawk fans Josh Lucas, Joel McHale and Pierson Fode. Play-by-play announcer Steve Raible and Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch also appear, as well as current players Julian Love and Nick Emmanwori. Taima the Seahawk also flies in.

The video was made in collaboration with Packrat, a creative studio involved in the Seahawks 2025 schedule release video. The studio was featured in an episode of the GeekWire Podcast earlier this year.

The fake ad takes shots at all of the teams the Seahawks will be facing this season, with assorted insight on what perfumes for those teams might look and smell like.

The New England Patriots, who the Hawks beat in Super Bowl LX, have a fragrance that smells like autumn leaves, Boston baked beans, clam chowda and tears.

The Los Angeles Rams fragrance is called Conversion No. 2 — a nod to the controversial 2-point conversion Seattle registered in a comeback win against the Rams last season.

“It smells of melancholy and what the hell just happened,” McHale says. “When you put this cologne on, you don’t even know you’ve already lost.”

Amazon also announced the scheduled of games for “Thursday Night Football” on Prime Video. The company said last year ranked as the most-watched season ever across the 20-year history of “TNF,” averaging 15.33 million viewers throughout the 15-game campaign.

See the Seahawks’ complete schedule here.

Former Boston Celtics majority owner Wyc Grousbeck and Aditya Mittal, an investor in the NBA team, are preparing a bid to purchase the Seattle Seahawks, according to a report Thursday by Sportico.

The report cites multiple people familiar with the process in saying that Grousbeck and Mittal submitted a letter of interest to the banking team handling the sale process for the Paul G. Allen estate. The Seahawks, Grousbeck and Mittal declined to comment to Sportico.

Mittal is a member of one of India’s richest families and is CEO of ArcelorMittal, a Luxembourg-based steel manufacturing company. He invested $1 billion in the group that purchased the Celtics in 2025 for $6.1 billion.

Grousbeck led the ownership group that bought the Celtics in 2002 for $360 million.

At least one Seahawks fan site was optimistic about the potential bid. 12th Man Rising quoted Celtics expert Ben Handler, who called Grousbeck a popular owner who was “present but also hands off” — much like Paul and then his sister, Jody Allen.

“If the Seahawks are going to be sold, then Grousbeck and Mittal, who could invest the most amount of money, would appear to be the perfect transition from the Allen family,” the site said.

The estate of Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder, announced that the Seahawks were being put up for sale in February as part of the long process of divesting many of the assets and investments that Allen made during his lifetime. All proceeds are being directed toward philanthropy.

The team, which won its second NFL championship last season, is expected to fetch upwards of $7 billion.

A report last month named Apple CEO Tim Cook and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg as potential Seahawks suitors, but the two denied any interest.

After more than a decade building cricket fields, sponsoring youth teams, and developing local talent in the Pacific Northwest, a group of Seattle-area tech veterans has taken their investment in the sport to a somewhat unexpected place: Boston.

The five co-owners of the newly acquired New England Eagles, a Minor League Cricket franchise, are all based in the Pacific Northwest and have combined leadership experience at Microsoft, Zuper, T-Mobile, Capital One, and Bee Talent Solutions.

Their hearts, they say, are here, too. But when no local MiLC franchise slot was available and the group was ready to scale, they bought a team they could get.

“We prioritize the pathway over the geography,” said Anand Subbaraj, co-owner and CEO of Seattle startup Zuper. “If we have to operate a team 3,000 miles away to ensure our local players have a door to Team USA, we’ll open that door every time.”

The other four co-owners are Vandana Thomas, a senior product leader at Microsoft and one of only two women co-owners across the entire Minor League Cricket system; Gaurav Seth, a partner director at Microsoft with 23 years at the tech giant; Manoj Naidu, co-founder and COO of Bee Talent Solutions; and Satheesh Santhamurthi, a technology executive at Capital One and president of the Seattle-area USA Cricket Youth Hub.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The group has been heavily invested in Pacific Northwest cricket for years as coaches, sponsors, and youth program organizers. Seattle already has a Major League Cricket team in the Orcas, and the owners argue the region should have a deeper pipeline feeding into it. Minor League Cricket is the developmental tier that bridges local talent to MLC and ultimately Team USA.

They are hardly the first tech veterans in the Seattle area to see cricket as worth backing. The Orcas’ investor group includes Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Madrona Venture Group Managing Director Soma Somasegar, and Icertis co-founder and CEO Samir Bodas, among others. The Seattle Thunderbolts, the area’s Minor League Cricket team, were founded with backing from tech industry veterans as well.

The Eagles’ new owners plan to run the franchise like a sports-tech startup, using data for player health and performance, treating fan growth like a user acquisition funnel, and building business plans the way they’d build a product roadmap — an approach that fits squarely within that tradition.

“Our group brings best in class product thinking, engineering efficiency, and an AI-forward mindset to a traditional franchise model,” Seth said. “When you apply a disciplined tech stack to the passion of sports, the ceiling is genuinely high.”

The acquisition comes at a pivotal moment for cricket in the U.S. Major League Cricket launched in 2023 with six franchises, including the Orcas, and the sport is set to make its Olympic return at the 2028 Los Angeles Games — a deadline that has accelerated investment across the ecosystem.

For Thomas, the stakes are personal. Her son recently became the first fully homegrown male Seattle youth player to represent Team USA at the ICC Under-19 World Cup.

“Cricket in the U.S. is at an inflection point, and the people who get involved now will shape what it looks like for the next generation,” Thomas said. “I want my sons and every other kid playing in this country to see that the pathway from a local pitch to Team USA is real — and that women, families, and underrepresented communities are part of building it.”

While the Eagles will play out the upcoming season in New England, the ownership group has signaled longer-term ambitions to expand cricket programming in the Pacific Northwest. They also want to help seed a broader culture of private investment in a sport that, despite its massive global following, is still building the financial foundations that more established American sports take for granted.”

“Cricket in this country doesn’t just need more money — it needs more believers,” Naidu said. “Player pathways, ground maintenance, youth tournaments, coaching infrastructure: none of that gets built without people willing to put real capital and real time behind it. We’ve been doing that at the grassroots for years, and now we’re doing it at the franchise level.”

Seattle Seahawks fans envisioning another tech billionaire as the new owner of the NFL team have a couple Silicon Valley-based names to consider. Or not.

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook have been mentioned as potential suitors for the franchise, which was put up for sale in February by the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Front Office Sports reported Thursday that Zuckerberg and Cook are among at least four interested parties considering making offers for the team. They are the first serious names to emerge in a sale that could fetch upwards of $7 billion.

In a post on X, Dylan Byers of Puck said the report was not true and sources close to Cook and Zuckerberg said neither was interested in bidding for the Seahawks.

Reps for all of those involved declined to comment or could not be reached, including the Paul G. Allen estate and the bank handling the sale process, Front Office Sports said.

According to Forbes, Zuckerberg is worth $222 billion and Cook $2.8 billion.

Cook announced last week that he is stepping down as Apple CEO and will become executive chairman on Sept. 1.

The plan to sell the 50-year-old franchise is part of the long process of divesting many of the assets and investments that Allen made during his lifetime and direct all proceeds to philanthropy. Since his death, Allen’s estate has steadily moved to sell major assets, including real estate holdings and, more recently, advancing the sale process for the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers.

Allen co-founded Microsoft with childhood friend Bill Gates, and the billionaire philanthropist bought the Seahawks in 1997 for approximately $200 million from previous owner Ken Behring. The purchase secured the team’s home in Seattle after Behring threatened a move to California. Allen ran the team until his death in 2018 at the age of 65 after he was diagnosed with a recurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Gates has previously expressed no interest in owning the team, but the list of those who could includes many who made their fortunes in tech, from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Related:

• Seattle Seahawks are for sale as Paul Allen estate seeks buyer shortly after Super Bowl win
• Podcast: Debating who could emerge as potential buyers for the Seahawks
• When the Seattle Seahawks sell, will any tech execs step up for the 12s?
• Want to own a piece of the Seahawks? Seattle startup presents its private equity idea to fans

Kameirah Johnson, a senior at Seattle’s Lakeside School, is one of five students nationwide whose artwork will appear on the Google homepage later this month, after being selected as a finalist in the annual Doodle for Google contest.

The contest, which drew tens of thousands of submissions from K-12 students, invited entrants to interpret the theme, “My superpower is …” through original artwork. Kameirah, 18, of Renton, Wash., created a piece centered on hair as a symbol of identity and inherited strength.

The work depicts three figures — inspired by Kameirah, her mother Simone, and her sister Kalieyah — lying in the grass, their hair styled as crowns.

Her artist’s statement reads: “My superpower is my hair and the family history it carries. Each texture and style holds culture, care, and survival passed down without words. Lying in the grass, our crowns rest without weakening. This kinky hair refuses conformity; it makes us different. Shaped by our lineage, our hair is undeniably beautiful.”

Kameirah said she spent more than 40 hours on the piece, often staying up late to work on it. She drew on her own photography and old family albums, including film photos her grandmother has preserved for years.

“I often take inspiration from my own photography or from old family photos,” she said. “Using those images as references, I incorporate elements of my family into my art as a way to honor my lineage.”

Kameirah’s path to art started early, watching her older sister draw. She began sketching as a child, but got more serious during COVID, experimenting with pastels and charcoal. A turning point came freshman year, when she completed her first acrylic painting — a portrait of Stevie Wonder — for a school art show. She now works primarily in oils and acrylics, though her Doodle was created digitally.

Kameirah’s artistic pursuits stretch beyond her painting. She’s a dancer, plays bass guitar in a cover band, collects records, and makes short films.

In the fall, she’ll head to NYU to study economics and studio arts, with an eye toward the intersection of art and business. She hopes to own a gallery someday.

The five finalists’ artwork will appear on the Google homepage on April 28. The public can vote for a favorite through April 29, with the overall winner announced May 12. Kameirah has already secured a $10,000 college scholarship and a Chromebook. If she wins the top prize, that total jumps to $55,000, and her school would receive a $50,000 technology package.

Now in its 17th year, the Doodle for Google contest has attracted Seattle-area winners in the past. Mahee Chandrasekhar, a ninth grader at Redmond High School, was the Washington state winner in the 16th contest. In 2023, sixth-grader Rebecca Wu of the International School in Bellevue, had her artwork recognized.

Judges this year include NBA All-Star Giannis Antetokounmpo and 2025 National Teacher of the Year Ashlie Crosson.

A Bellevue, Wash.-based startup that came out of stealth last fall is really trying to get noticed now, taking a page out of a playbook that’s more prevalent in Silicon Valley.

Summation is an AI platform that helps enterprise leaders draw insights from large volumes of internal data. A bright orange billboard visible from SR 520 doesn’t say that, but it does put the company’s name in sight of drivers — many of whom potentially work in tech — heading east along the highway.

“We’re building Summation here in Bellevue, and wanted to do something a little bold and a little playful — for recruiting, for awareness, and because startup energy should be more visible around here,” CEO Ian Wong told GeekWire.

Wong is the former CTO of real estate giant Opendoor and Square’s first data scientist. He co-founded Summation in 2024 with Ramachandran “RC” Ramarathinam, who led Opendoor’s core transaction platform.

Summation raised $35 million in funding from Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins in October.

Tech company billboards are a big part of the landscape in the San Francisco Bay Area. Signs advertise a whole new era of AI-focused startup names and products. Last summer, The New York Times published a fun quiz challenging readers to decode what some of the billboards were even selling around Silicon Valley.

Wong said capturing a slice of that energy was part of the point with his company’s billboard in Bellevue, which went up about two weeks ago near the Burgermaster restaurant along Northup Way.

“In SF, startup ambition is just visible — on 101, on the sides of buildings, in every coffee shop,” he said. “The Seattle/Bellevue area has world-class technical talent, but the scene here has always been understated. We wanted to put up a small signal that ambitious things are being built on this side of the lake, too — and if you want to work on one of them, come find us.”

Bellevue-based startup Statsig used a reverse tactic back in 2024 when it launched an aggressive campaign to spread its name across the Bay Area with more than 200 billboards and posters at transit shelters and stations.

Summation employs about 35 people right now and is hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market.

Summation’s platform sits on top of data systems and runs massive calculations automatically, testing different scenarios and using AI agents to explore different questions in parallel. The software also automates financial reconciliations, variance analysis, and management reporting.

The advertising lines up with what Wong called “a big product release” coming next week.

“Always be hiring,” he said. “And selling.”

As the head of Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab, Juan Lavista Ferres and his researchers can spend months building real-world AI solutions. Fifth graders that he teaches built an accessibility tool in their class.

The students in a computer science class at the Global Idea School, an independent, non-profit elementary school in Redmond, Wash., learned vibe coding through GitHub Spark and built a Braille 3D Generator, a tool that turns text into printable, tactile 3D Braille models in seconds. 

“We live in an amazing time,” said Lavista Ferres, a 17-year Microsoft vet who has taught at the school, co-founded by his wife, for seven years. “The fact that a 10-year-old can do it in a class without any training? That thing is an actual working solution.”

Six students worked on the Braille 3D Generator. They were inspired by the idea of creating signage to help blind or low-vision people navigate in their school to find classrooms.

The group is the youngest to enter the “AI for a Better World” competition, a national initiative in collaboration with MIT, that invites students in grades 6-12 to explore how artificial intelligence can improve their communities and the broader world.

The students interviewed Anne Taylor, principal program manager for Microsoft Accessibility and an expert in Braille embossers that convert digital text into raised Braille text on paper. Taylor was able to provide feedback and help the students fine-tune their solution so that it was useful for someone who is blind.

The students also visited Microsoft’s Inclusive Tech Lab where they saw how people interact with specialized computer keyboards, game controllers and more.

“I think it would be very good to help people with disabilities,” said Grayson, 10, one of the students in the class. “We’re trying to help the people who can’t see with this Braille project to make it more affordable, so they can tell areas easier — because it would be cheaper for areas to have Braille instead of having to go through a really expensive process.”

For the students, the process felt unlike anything they had done before in class, where they had previously used block-based coding tools like Code.org.

“Instead of having to type the code, we could just say English to the AI and it would make this whole app,” Grayson said.

Vibe coding is a style of software development in which the programmer describes what they want in plain English and lets AI generate the underlying code. GitHub Spark, a tool from Microsoft-owned GitHub, takes that approach and lets users build and deploy web applications through natural language prompts alone — no coding experience required.

What surprised even Lavista Ferres was the leap from browser-based app to physical object. GitHub Spark typically generates React code for web applications, and he didn’t realize it could produce 3D models until the students tried it. Some of their early attempts didn’t work, but they kept experimenting.

“When I saw the output, I was like, ‘wow,'” he said. “I’ve been vibe coding for some time now. I wasn’t aware that we could do this.”

Lavista Ferres started at Microsoft as a data scientist in 2009 and became a lab director 10 years later. The AI for Good Lab operates as part of Microsoft Philanthropies, separate from the company’s product groups. Last year the lab launched an AI for Good Open Call to support projects in public health, education, sustainability, and humanitarian action.

Lavista Ferres said the kids in his class could be future Microsoft colleagues, because they’re creating real-world applied solutions that work.

“This is a new world,” he said. “I show it to all my team and say, ‘Guys, if these kids can do this, you guys can be much more productive. We need to start using this technology more and more.'”

Keeping track of the days of the week is exhausting enough. Managing a calendar full of various “tech weeks” in Seattle and elsewhere feels like a full-time job.

There are now weeks dedicated to AI, energy, deep tech, regular tech, women in tech, tech for the oceans, tech for space and more.

Thankfully, Sarah Studer is paying attention to a lot of it. A self-described community builder and connector, Studer is interim assistant director for the Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership program at the University of Washington’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship. She was previously managing director of Impact Hub Seattle, and she likes lists.

Studer recently shared the coming lineup of tech weeks in the Pacific Northwest, starting this month and continuing into fall. We’ve re-listed them here with descriptions of what to expect.

Women In Tech Regatta, April 26 – 30

• Nope, it’s not really a boat race. But the play on words throughout this inclusive event includes nods to sailing, ports, riding the wave and finding your north star. It all seems rather relevant for anyone navigating tech’s sometimes stormy seas.

Vancouver Startup Week, April 27 – May 1

• Head north! Oh, Canada is the place to build. The description for this week north of the border says it’s not a “passive, sit-back conference” but rather a “hands-on, community-driven experience designed to help you meet the right people, learn from real stories, and keep moving forward.”

Portland Startup Week, May 11 – 16

• Head south! Portland is the place to build as far as this week’s organizers are concerned, with events designed to spotlight the Rose City’s startup ecosystem.

Energy Week, May 11 – 15

• Clean energy. Clean buildings. Good clean fun? Energy transformation is the name of the game during a week that spotlights advancements in energy efficiency, decarbonization, and renewable energy solutions for the built environment. 

Deep Tech Week Seattle, June 8 – 12

• A regular tech week is apparently just too shallow. Deep Tech Week promises a “decentralized conference series” where anyone can host their own event — because why have one tech week when you can subdivide it into many?

PNW Climate Week, July 13 – 19

• Every week should be climate week, but we’ll take what we can get. This event aimed at the PNW’s role in climate leadership and innovation takes place across six cities — Seattle, Vancouver, B.C., Portland, Bellingham, Wash., Tacoma, and Bend, Ore.

Seattle Tech Week, July 27 – Aug. 1

• All other tech weeks should just bow down to a tech week that calls itself Tech Week.

Seattle Space Week | Sept. 28 – Oct. 4

• We just had a rather exciting Space Week with the Artemis 2 mission to the moon and back. But with the amount of space-focused tech companies in the Seattle region, let’s get another week on the books, right here on Earth.

One Ocean Week Seattle, Oct. 19 – 25

• If things don’t go well at PNW Climate Week in July we may be headed toward just one ocean come October. This event is a gathering of ocean leaders, innovators, researchers, startups and others to accelerate solutions for a sustainable, inclusive maritime future.

Seattle AI Week, Oct. 26 – 30

• Isn’t every week already AI Week these days?

And if all of those weeks look like they’re going to add up to an especially exhausting year of showing up, connecting, networking and learning, you might want to start with another type of week.

Seattle Cocktail Week, April 19 – 26, is billed as the biggest cocktail celebration in the Pacific Northwest, with parties, tastings, themed bars, brand demos and more. Get your drink on before diving into a summer full of tech weeks.

For more meetups, startup events and geeky gatherings, check out GeekWire’s community events calendar.

At a time when finding a job in tech has turned into a frustrating cycle of rejections, ghostings or worse, Chris Pirillo‘s work speaks for itself — in that it makes a mockery of the whole process.

Pirillo, the longtime tech enthusiast and entrepreneur, has been showing off his skills by illustrating how hard it is to get anyone to pay attention to his skills. Two of his latest vibe-coded creations include a Resume Analyzer and a pre-rejection letter generator called Dear Applicant.

Each is sure to hit home with job seekers dealing with a seemingly hopeless process, and the recruiters and employers who are hopefully trying to fill roles with some shred of humanity.

The Resume Analyzer is exactly what it sounds like — and nothing like what you’d hope. Users are invited to paste in a job description and upload their CV for what’s billed as a “semantic scan” that generates a “personalized, actionable gap-analysis report.” The punchline, of course, is that no matter what you submit, the verdict is the same: “Nah, you’re f**ked, mate.”

Pirillo said the idea started as a half-joke on social media earlier this week. The response was immediate and resonant enough to convince him the joke was actually a mirror. A few hours later, the app was live.

The Dear Applicant generator arrived shortly after, born from a comment on Threads suggesting the logical next step: a rejection letter that arrives before you’ve even applied. “Imagine all the efficiency gains,” the commenter wrote. Pirillo obliged.

I tested both and left laughing both times, especially at the methodology fine print on the Resume Analyzer, which read, in part: “No resumes were analyzed in the production of this report. No data left your browser. The job market is, in fact, a burning dumpster. This tool confirms what you already suspected. Have you considered goat farming?”

“These apps are funny because they aren’t,” Pirillo told GeekWire via email.

The frustration Pirillo is spoofing is well-documented — and the timing is no coincidence. A report last month from pre-employment testing company Criteria found that more than half of job seekers had been ghosted by an employer in the past year, a three-year high. It comes at a time when tech layoffs have remained brutal: more than 178,000 tech workers were cut in 2025 alone, flooding an already strained job market with qualified candidates competing for fewer openings — and hearing nothing back.

The tension — between the gag and the genuine grievance underneath it — is what gives both tools their edge. Pirillo, who describes himself as more than qualified for positions he applies to, said he’s given up on the traditional job search in favor of fractional and contract work, not because he wants to, but because the alternative feels like shouting into a void.

“That behavior and expectation has been normalized,” he said of ghosting by employers. “The entire process that few of us are in control of teeters on abusive.”

Building the apps, he noted, took less than an hour each — a pointed contrast to the hours job seekers routinely sink into tailoring resumes and cover letters that often vanish without acknowledgment. Pirillo has now shipped more than 300 of these “mini-products” on his Vibe Arcade website and is actively teaching others, technical and non-technical alike, to do the same.

The question he’s asking, implicitly, is whether building things is now a better use of a job-seeker’s time than applying for jobs. For him, the answer is yes — and he’s leaning into what he calls an emerging archetype: the “product developer,” someone who shows their work rather than curates a resume.

“I believe I put more thought into making these apps than any company has in considering my application,” he said. “Probably more than all of them combined — even when someone made a personal referral to the hiring manager.”

He’s even considering attaching Dear Applicant’s pre-rejection letter to his own future applications — partly as an experiment, partly because he says he has nothing to lose.

“Worst that could happen is I get ignored differently,” he said.

Pirillo isn’t pretending the apps are activism — or that they’ll change anything. He knows HR won’t find it funny. But that’s not really who he’s talking to.

“If there was an intent behind these specific apps, it’s not just to evoke a sense of ‘you’re not alone’ but to laugh at the absurdity of the situation some of us find ourselves forced into,” he said.

Previously: Vibe-coding a new reality: Chris Pirillo on the rise of AI-powered apps, features, and founders

A new retail storyline is close to beginning in downtown Seattle with the opening of a Barnes & Noble bookstore — six years after the chain closed its longtime downtown location.

The new store at 520 Pike St. is about four blocks from Pike Place Market and another four from Amazon’s headquarters, in a 29-story Tishman Speyer office building. A grand opening event is planned for May 6 at 9 a.m., with a ribbon cutting and a book signing with bestselling author Robin Hobb (“Blood of Dragons”).

Downtown Seattle Association President and CEO Jon Scholes signaled his excitement Monday for the return of a major national retailer to an area hit hard by retail exits and depleted foot traffic during and after the pandemic.

“A strong signal to others who may have left the market over the last 6 years and to those that have yet to plant a flag here,” Scholes wrote on LinkedIn alongside a picture of the outside of the store. “With a record residential population, visitor numbers that are beating 2019 level and an increasing return of locals – there are many great reasons to be downtown.”

The store will be a short walk from the HQ towers and Spheres that make up Amazon’s Denny Triangle home. The tech giant got its start as an online bookseller, and on its way to disrupting multiple retail verticals, the company’s e-commerce dominance took a toll on physical bookstores, including Barnes & Noble. Amazon even opened physical Amazon Books locations, a concept that lasted about seven years before they were shut down in 2022.

In an especially ironic twist, Barnes & Noble moved into two vacant Amazon Books locations in the Boston area in 2022.

Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt said in a television interview last year that he believes the experience in a physical store wins out when compared to shopping online with Amazon or elsewhere. Customers engage with other books and other customers about books.

“You will have an experience, and when you walk out of the store with [a book] in your bag it will lift you,” Daunt said. “It’s the same book, but I promise you it’s a better book, and the reading of it will be more pleasurable because you bought it in a bookstore.”

Barnes & Noble left its Pacific Place location at 600 Pine St. in Seattle in January 2020, after 22 years. Shoppers told GeekWire at the time that they were saddened by the loss of downtown’s only bookstore.

The chain still operates locations in the Northgate and University District areas of Seattle and has several locations in Western Washington. The opening of a new location at Bellevue Square attracted a steady stream of book lovers in January 2025.

The company, which peaked at 726 locations nationwide in 2008, has undergone a revival since the pandemic, opening nearly 60 stores in 2024 and dozens more in 2025. It has plans to open 60 more this year and is already back over 700 stores.

FOX 13 reported in December that the new downtown Barnes & Noble space will be 17,538 square feet and offer an array of books, toys, games, magazines, gift items and more. The company signed a 10-year lease — the largest retail lease in downtown Seattle since 2020.

Correction: A previous version of this story had the incorrect Seattle store opening date. Barnes & Noble moved the date after publication.

It’s tough to tell who has the bigger smile: the guy zipping by on the Onewheel, the dog running alongside him at full sprint, or the passersby lucky enough to witness it.

This is Eric Howard‘s dream job.

Howard is the founder and chief dog runner at Dog Tired, a dog-exercising service outside of Seattle that operates at a different speed. After stints in tech, including at data visualization company Tableau, Howard ditched the corporate leash for one he actually wanted to hold.

“I show up and I’m like the Beatles, and they’re like a teenage girl. They’re just excited to see me,” Howard said of his four-legged clients. “It’s hard to have a bad day when you go see eight dogs and they’re all just losing their mind, happy to see you.”

A longtime adventure seeker, Howard is a snowboarder and kiteboarder who fell in love the first time he stepped on a Onewheel — the self-balancing, single-wheeled electric board that riders control by shifting their weight.

He’s also a dog lover. When a relationship in Portland ended and the dog he’d shared with his girlfriend stayed behind, he got another one — a 15-pound poodle mix named Riley — and soon realized he was cut out for some sort of job in the pet industry.

The concept for Dog Tired came together when a friend had a high-energy rat terrier that was, in Howard’s words, bouncing off the walls. Howard tried running the dog alongside his Onewheel and it quickly became a daily — sometimes twice daily — ritual.

His friend noticed the difference immediately. The dog was more manageable and happy. And Howard saw an opportunity.

A nudge from dad

Howard graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in informatics at age 31 — a non-traditional path that he describes as a theme in his life. He joined Tableau as a senior tech support engineer when the company was still in what he considered a startup phase — long before it was acquired for $15.7 billion by San Francisco-based Salesforce in 2019.

He spent nearly five years across two separate stretches at Tableau, which he called the best employer he’s ever had. But as the startup atmosphere began to fade he lost his passion for data analysis, server engineering and managing a team. He needed a change.

“My dad really wanted me to do the Onewheel business. I really credit my dad with giving me that final nudge,” Howard said. “He was like, ‘You’ve got some money in your retirement and some money in savings. How long could you survive without making any money?'”

Howard figured he could make it six months or so.

“As soon as I started reaching out, spreading the word, it just caught fire,” he said. “People were just like, ‘This is a genius idea.'”

‘Bottomless demand’

Howard soon had 15 clients and a regular weekly routine. Within six months he was covering his bills. And five years later, Dog Tired has grown into a full-fledged operation. Howard does 50 runs a week and a part-time employee handles another dozen or more.

“I’ve got about 5,000 dog runs under my belt, about 17,000 miles total,” he said, adding that the business largely sells itself, with little turnover. “There’s a bottomless demand out there of dogs that are just waiting to get the exercise they need.”

Howard has a 100-pound-dog limit and he sticks to low-traffic areas. It helps him stay in control on the Onewheel when his clients want to chase squirrels or rabbits.

He said the work is really about relationship management, which is a lot of what he learned at Tableau. There’s plenty of troubleshooting, but in this case it’s dogs rather than computers.

“I’m not rich. I don’t make a fortune, but I feel very rich,” Howard said. “I look forward to every day. I get up early in the morning and the day can’t get started fast enough for me.”

Seattle independent radio station KEXP prides itself on being a leader in new music discovery. They may have moved the bar up several notches with a band and video that is going viral on YouTube.

The performance by Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine, playing live during the Trans Musicales festival last December in France, was uploaded to KEXP on Feb. 5. Since then it’s attracted more than 6.7 million views, making it one of the most-watched videos on the station’s channel over the past several years.

Khn de Poitrine, on microtonal guitars, and Klek de Poitrine, on drums, wear polka-dot costumes with large headpieces and elongated nose masks. The instrumental music is groovy, psychedelic, surfy and surreal, with spare, robotic vocals that sound otherworldly. A barefooted Khn de Poitrine manipulates effects pedals with his toes, and the two members communicate with triangle hand gestures.

I saw someone refer to it as “math rock” — a style of progressive indie rock “characterized by complex, unconventional time signatures, angular melodies, and intricate, often tapping-based guitar work,” as Wikipedia describes it. If that’s not geeky I don’t know what is.

The visual and musical impact is evident in what might be the greatest comment section — 38,000 and counting — I’ve waded through in some time. In an era when digital feeds are increasingly loaded with content created by artificial intelligence and promoted by big-tech algorithms, people are clearly starved for other creative humans.

• “This is what humanity can do without the hindrance of influence. This is the peak unfiltered madness of creativity.”
• “Can’t believe the most human music I’ve seen all year sounds like it’s made from another planet and dimension.”
• “First time I’ve been proud to be human in weeks.”
• “Thank God there are still humans making real art in this world.” … “Pretty sure these are aliens.”

Surely there are plenty of reasons why people are looking for an escape in today’s world. The rise of AI might be one of them. Regardless, nearly 28 minutes of sensory-altering music and video is a good reminder of what people can make with their real brains.

Turn it up.

The New York Yankees just cruised through Seattle and won two out of three games against the Mariners. On the other side of Washington state, the Bronx Bombers’ “torpedo bats” were being scientifically scrutinized.

In what Washington State University is calling the first-ever laboratory experiments on the new baseball bat design, researchers found that torpedo bats and traditional bats basically perform the same.

It didn’t look that way last season, when the Yankees hit a franchise-record nine home runs in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers and drew viral attention to the bats that they were swinging.

The torpedo bat design relies on a slightly different shape in which wood is removed from the barrel tip and added to the bat’s sweet spot, so that the diameter tapers down, a little like a bowling pin. But the hype appears overblown.

“Wood is wood,” Lloyd Smith, a professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and director of the university’s Sports Science Laboratory, told WSU Insider. “When it comes to baseball, there’s not a lot you can do with wood. If your goal is to keep the game steady and consistent and not have a lot of change, wood bats are good.”

Smith is part of a research team that includes Alan Nathan from University of Illinois and Daniel Russell from Penn State University. They’ll present their findings at the upcoming International Sports Engineering Association conference, June 1–4 in Pullman, Wash.

According to WSU Insider, the researchers created two maple bats that were duplicates of a standard Major League Baseball bat. Two additional maple bats were made with a torpedo-shaped barrel that gave them the same swing weight as the standard bat.

They measured how much energy the bat returns to the ball by firing baseballs from an air cannon at a stationary bat and using light gates and cameras to measure the speed of the incoming and rebounding ball.

The team found nearly identical performance for the torpedo and standard bats except that the sweet spot for the torpedo bat was a half inch farther from the bat tip than the standard bat.

“It was actually pretty phenomenal how close they were,” said Smith.

While some Yankees players said last year that any little tweak could provide an advantage, the team’s captain wasn’t convinced.

Aaron Judge hit an American League-record 62 homers in 2022, 58 in an MVP season in 2024 and 53 as repeat MVP in 2025. He had three homers using a traditional bat in that much-talked-about rout of the Brewers.

“The past couple of seasons kind of speak for itself,” Judge told ESPN last May. “Why try to change something?”

The meeting was running long, so someone said what they always say: “let’s take this offline.”

For Krystal Graylin, that phrase — hollow corporate shorthand for a problem deferred, not solved — became something else entirely.

She actually did it.

Graylin, a former Microsoft product manager, and her friend from college, Lucy Kong, an auditor at EY, both watched as their industries raced to automate and cut headcount. They responded by betting on the one thing they figured AI couldn’t replicate — handing someone a drink and watching that person’s face light up.

The result is Offline Coffee Co., a new cafe in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that opened last month, drawing on Chinese cafe culture for its menu and aesthetic, leaning into the “third place,” and serving as a deliberate departure from the corporate world both founders left behind.

In a city full of tech and coffee, Graylin and Kong are an unlikely pair to be running a cafe. Neither had worked professionally as a barista, aside from operating their home machines and hosting apartment cafe parties with friends. One was monitoring the health of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The other was auditing Amazon’s books at EY.

“Some people we talked to were like, ‘You guys have no business opening a coffee shop. You haven’t been a barista or owned a food business before. What makes you think like you can just quit your job and open a cafe,'” Graylin said, adding, it’s a “fair concern.”

Friends since their days at the University of Washington, Graylin said she and Kong joked for years about the cafe idea, but only started taking it seriously last April. They considered what it would mean to give up a steady income and sign a lease for a retail space.

“Going into this, it was not like, ‘we hate our jobs so much that we want to escape and do something completely different,'” Graylin said. “We knew it would be risky, but we knew that going through this experience, it would make us change in a way that we couldn’t pay someone to teach us.”

They got the keys to 711 Bellevue Ave E. last July and quit their jobs in August. For several months they worked on building out the space, adding their design touches with light wood finishes, a tiled main bar, and thrifted furniture before opening in February. The menu is built around floral syrups and flavor combinations that Graylin and Kong would bring back from trips to China — cafe ingredients that she said are harder to find in Seattle.

“It feels crazy,” Graylin said. “I cried five or more times the first week we were open, because I was so stressed but also I was so happy to see all the people in here.”

Friends have been visiting, others work on laptops in the cafe, and neighbors are making Offline a regular stop on their dog walks. Graylin said it’s cool to become part of someone’s routine.

But the leap from tech to coffee wasn’t just about escaping the corporate grind. It turns out, Graylin said, that being a product manager prepared her for more than she expected.

Negotiating contracts, managing people, de-escalating difficult customers, knowing how to prioritize — all of it transferred. So did a comfort with AI tools, which she and Kong have leaned on to close knowledge gaps, whether researching equipment, navigating legal questions, or estimating costs before bringing in an expert.

But it was also AI, and what she saw it do to the people around her at Microsoft, that helped push her out the door.

“So much of the focus was on, how can we use AI to 10x, and cushion the impact of layoffs to avoid losing revenue,” Graylin said. “Rather than, how is everyone on the team doing with all these layoffs? How can we [use AI] to improve the work-life balance on the team?”

The cafe, she said, felt like an answer to that question — a deliberate bet on what she believes advancing technology can’t touch.

“AI is good for automating things that are really tedious and unpleasant,” she said. “But social interactions — those are things that don’t need to be sped up.”

Ryan Gosling set out to save the planet, and he may just save Amazon’s movie-making credibility.

“Project Hail Mary,” the sci-fi epic that stars Gosling as a scientist sent on a mission to save Earth from extinction, grossed $80.6 million in its opening weekend, marking the biggest box office success of the year so far.

It’s also the best opening ever for an Amazon MGM Studios film, beating the $58 million brought in by “Creed III” in 2023. Rotten Tomatoes noted that the studio was in need of a win “after the triple duds of “Mercy,” “Melania,” and “Crime 101” so far this year.

“We believe deeply in the Hail Mary, and it’s clear audiences do as well,” Amazon MGM’s distribution chief Kevin Wilson said, according to Variety. “What we’re seeing in theaters — the energy, the exit scores, the word of mouth — is everything we believed this film would deliver.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy did his part to market the film with a post on social media last week in which he called it his favorite movie that he’s seen in a long time. “Truly outstanding and unique, and recommend your seeing,” Jassy said.

The Hollywood Reporter said the film collected $60.4 million overseas for a global launch of $141 million. Gosling’s top-grossing film of all time is “Barbie,” but “the new film “Project Hail Mary” is his biggest domestic opening as an actor in a leading role, THR reported.

“Project Hail Mary” was adapted from “The Martian” author Andy Weir’s best-selling 2021 novel. The film, which cost $200 million to produce, was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (“21 Jump Street,” “The Lego Movie”).

Amazon closed its $8.5 billion deal to acquire MGM in May 2022. It was Amazon’s second-largest acquisition behind its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods in 2017.

Variety reported that 2026 is Amazon MGM Studios’ first year with a full theatrical slate — 13 scheduled films — since the acquisition, and there was pressure on “Project Hail Mary” to become a big hit. A string of the studio’s movies have made nowhere near enough to recoup their budgets, and while Amazon’s deep pockets make it easier to absorb losses, “no studio wants to be associated with a string of bombs,” Variety reported last week.

Amazon’s next major release is June’s toy adaptation “Masters of the Universe.”

Related:

• No Oscar nods for Amazon this year, but company is among tech targets from host Conan O’Brien
• Oregon theater marquee joked about ‘Melania’ movie, and manager says Amazon pulled the film
• Amazon MGM Studios strikes deal for 007, takes over creative control of James Bond film franchise

Amazon’s beloved Treasure Truck finally ran out of road in 2022, after about a seven-year run. But Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores and an early champion of the deals-on-wheels concept, once worried that Marshawn Lynch was going to crash the party just as it got rolling.

In a new episode of his “Learn and Be Curious” podcast (below), Herrington recalled a December 2016 promotional event for the Treasure Truck in Seattle in which Lynch, the onetime Seattle Seahawks running back, got behind the wheel.

Herrington remembered Lynch asking if he could drive the truck, and someone said yes. Herrington said he could still picture the keys going into Lynch’s hands.

“We had the press there and it was a big hurly burly and there was all these people running around,” Herrington said in a conversation with Kandace Kapps, director of Amazon’s sub-same day ops integration. “And he gets in this Treasure Truck, starts driving it … and all I could imagine was, ‘This is how the Treasure Truck enterprise ends, when Marshawn Lynch crashes it into some crowd at the end.'”

With fans outside CenturyLink Field (now Lumen Field) chanting “Beast Mode! Beast Mode!” and Lynch bopping to hip-hop music in the driver’s seat, the short drive near the stadium did not turn to disaster. Herrington said that in addition to being an excellent running back, Lynch was also an excellent driver and “all went well.”

Lynch, who spent six seasons in Seattle and helped the team win a Super Bowl in 2014, was on hand that day to hand out a Beast Mode-skinned Amazon Echo and Beast Mode Hat for $139.99. He signed autographs and handed out Skittles.

His driving skills have been famously captured on video before the Treasure Truck episode and since:

• In October 2006, Lynch commandeered a medical cart and took it for a joyride around the field at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., after Cal beat the Washington Huskies, 31-24. Weaving in and out of players and coaches to celebrate the win, it was classic Lynch behavior before Seattle came to love him.
• For an episode of Amazon Prime’s “Thursday Night Football” last fall, in which Lynch does a segment called “‘N Yo’ City,” Lynch tried a variety of off-road vehicles during a visit to stunt performer Travis Pastrana’s compound. He even ended up upside down in one four-wheeler mishap.

GeekWire first spotted the Treasure Truck in Seattle in June 2016. The first official deal was an inflatable paddleboard for $99 — 79% off the regular price of $476.99.

Customers were alerted to such deals via text message and during the heyday of the traveling trucks, they could reserve an item through Amazon’s mobile app and then go to a location to grab their purchase. Once the truck’s supply was exhausted, the deal was done.

When the Treasure Truck program — which grew to a fleet of more than 100 vehicles across 29 U.S. cities — did come to an end, it wasn’t Lynch’s fault. It was the pandemic in 2020 and then the reality that deals online sold a lot more items than deals facilitated by a glorified ice cream truck.

“We probably should have figured this out ahead of time,” Herrington said. “And all of a sudden the light kind of went off, it’s like, wow, one thing people love more than coming to the truck and picking up all this stuff is having us deliver to their home.”

Amazon has a solid record of success at the Academy Awards, scoring dozens of Oscar nominations and a handful of wins for its studio business over the past nine years.

Amazon MGM Studios was shut out of the race this year, but the tech giant still got a mention in host Conan O’Brien’s monologue to open the show on Sunday night.

“Amazon Studios didn’t receive any nominations this year,” O’Brien said (at the 6:44 mark in the video below). “Yeah. Also, shut out: Walmart, Alibaba, and Chewy. Why isn’t the website I order toilet paper from winning more Oscars!?”

Amazon’s rise from e-commerce juggernaut to real Hollywood player began in earnest more than 10 years ago, and it was the first streaming service to win an Oscar in 2017, when the studio took home three awards.

Sunday was not the first time the company has ended up in O’Brien’s Oscars crosshairs. Last year, the host joked about Amazon’s takeover of the James Bond franchise and founder Jeff Bezos’ arrival at the ceremony in an Amazon box. At least Bezos and wife Lauren Sánchez did manage to get photobombed by Nicole Kidman on Sunday at the Vanity Fair after-party.

Sunday’s show was peppered with a number of tech references, including how artificial intelligence can’t replace the human creators behind animation, as well as a look at how classic films can be cropped for the smartphone generation.

O’Brien took a shot at another streamer with a joke about Netflix and CEO Ted Sarandos, who was in attendance. “It’s his first time in a theater!” O’Brien said, before mocking Sarandos’ fake take (below) on why people would gather in such a place.

In a bid to preserve classic films for the smartphone generation, O’Brien spotlighted a studio named Ventura Crossroads, which is committed to “making movies very tall and very skinny.”

It’s not easy to reach a younger audience addicted to screens, especially with a broadcast television event dedicated to films they didn’t see in a theater. O’Brien lowkey tried anyway.

The Oscars are moving to YouTube in 2029 and O’Brien showed what that could look like for viewers who aren’t used to such abrupt commercial interruptions.

And finally, Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio — the “King of Memes” — did it again, and again, with a little help from O’Brien.

A new proposal to buy the Seattle Seahawks has been launched by a fan of the team who thinks such a community treasure should be owned by all of the 12s rather than one super rich billionaire.

Abel Charrow‘s “Let’s Buy the Seahawks” website is a fun little distraction for any fans still nursing a Super Bowl hangover or lamenting the loss of some key players in this week’s free agency transactions.

Charrow is a Seattle-based partner at Extra Good Studio, a collective of creatives that operates as a branding studio. As a longtime fan of the Seahawks, he was looking for a way to spark some interest in alternative ownership models now that the Paul Allen estate has put the team up for sale.

But Charrow admits the effort is more tongue in cheek than it is a serious bid to become NFL franchise owners, even if he finds the shareholder model of the Green Bay Packers attractive.

“Without being too on the nose, it’s sort of a criticism of billionaires and just how absolutely insane an amount of money it requires to buy something of that size,” Charrow told GeekWire during a phone interview Tuesday. “On some level, that’s what I wanted to highlight.”

The site proposal calls on fans to raise a $12 billion bid, which is not an unrealistic price tag but maybe a few billion more than the Hawks will eventually command. At one share per person, everyone gets an equal stake. If all 780,995 residents of Seattle pitch in, that’s $15,365.02 each. The cost would drop as more fans across Washington state, the Pacific Northwest and beyond contribute.

On Tuesday afternoon, 153 share-Hawks had been spoken for, including one by me. That put my investment at the time at around $79 million. I received a digital “receipt of intent,” but, sorry, I’m not good for that kind of money.

Charrow lived in New Mexico as a kid without a pro sports team to root for. When he moved to Seattle it was a big deal to become a Seahawks fan. And when he moved again to L.A. to attend USC, he was there during the Pete Carroll era. Again he ended up back in Seattle, at the same time Carroll became the Hawks head coach and won the team’s first Super Bowl championship.

This year, Charrow was equally excited cheering on USC alum Sam Darnold, the Seahawks’ newest Super Bowl-winning quarterback.

Charrow doesn’t consider himself a technically proficient person. He got an MBA in technology management from the University of Washington last year because he felt the need to “skill up.”

“In a way, it was a big experiment in vibe coding, to use a popular word these days,” Charrow said of the Hawks site he built. He explored a few different programs including Cursor, Replit, and Codex, and said Claude Code is next.

There are a few easter eggs built into the site if fans bother to click around. Clicking on the Space Needle triggers a “Beast Quake” and clicking on a dangling football launches a Jason Myers simulator that lets fans kick field goals.

The idea of community ownership has been kicked around since the estate of Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder, announced that the team was being sold in accordance with his wishes. Seattle-based tech startup Arrived is gauging fan interest in acting as a collective that would hold a private equity stake in the Seahawks. More than 12,000 fans have shown $113 million worth of potential interest.

Beyond that, most fans and sports prognosticators expect another billionaire to eventually step up. The list of such people who also have ties to Seattle includes a who’s who of tech, including former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates has said that he’s not interested.

Charrow isn’t keeping track of names or contact information of fans who actually signal their interest in owning a share of the team, admitting that it’s “mostly an art project.”

“If people are serious about it, they can subscribe and I’ll keep them posted on the progress,” he said. “Hopefully it’ll start some conversation and maybe people will get this idea of … ‘why not?'”

LONDON — Strolling among the food vendors and independent pop-up shops of London’s historic Spitalfields Market, I stumbled upon a modern slice of American retail.

There, just a stone’s throw from merchants selling Mick Jagger portraits and piping hot dumplings, was a curiosity I did not expect: Amazon’s iconic curved arrow logo attached to a retail storefront called Amazon Salon.

Really? Amazon was in the hair coloring and neck massage industry?

We all know Amazon as a master of book sales, cloud computing and Prime Video — but I certainly had to determine how a Seattle-based tech juggernaut fared at cutting hair.

Amazon opened its first-ever — and to this day only — hair salon in the east London neighborhood five years ago. At the time, an Amazon executive said it would “bring us one step closer to customers, and it will be a place where we can collaborate with industry and test new technologies.”

Frankly, I had completely forgotten about GeekWire’s coverage of Amazon Salon — after all, it was one of many experiments that the so-called “everything store” was rolling out at the time.

I wasn’t really in need of a haircut. But I couldn’t resist this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get my locks trimmed by Amazon.

Stepping into a salon operated by a $2.3 trillion company didn’t look or feel much different than a slightly upscale Great Clips. It was clean, well-organized and the staff were overly pleasant — even with a curious American tourist asking a lot of questions.

Luckily, it was a slow Monday afternoon, so the staff were able to accommodate me as a walk-in. I was introduced to Korell, a gregarious stylist with a big laugh who has worked at the shop since its opening.

I informed Korell of the “experiment” I was undertaking, and he was happy to play along with a nice “tidy-up.”

“I kind of get your vibe,” he told me.

Beyond the “Amazon Salon”-branded barber’s gown and the logo on the wall, there was nothing particularly Amazon-y about the experience.

No robotic scissor cuts, frictionless check-out or AI-generated imagery showing what I’d look like with purple hair.

You are able to purchase beauty products on the wall with ease and have those shipped directly to your residence via Amazon, of course.

One thing Amazon Salon absolutely nails, however, is the haircut itself. Korell spent more than an hour sculpting, crafting, washing and styling my hair in a way I’ve never experienced.

(GeekWire staffers know I am not really a salon kind of guy. I previously took advantage of a promotion at Great Clips that allowed for free haircuts if the Seattle Sounders scored three goals in a game. Frustratingly, this promotion no longer exists.) 

You can judge for yourself, but I’ve never had a better trim (or salon experience). I joked with Korell that I’d look pretty darn good for that night’s football match at London Stadium. (West Ham United knocked off Brentford in penalties to advance in the FA Cup.) No wonder Korell told me that they’ve experienced a steady stream of business over the years, with a number of repeat customers. 

Upon check-out, I wondered if I’d be able to somehow link to an Amazon account for payment or perhaps “just walk out” — but neither service was available. I was told that the salon discontinued the Amazon account tie-in functionality, in part because they were drawing a number of out-of-country customers (like me) and they needed an Amazon UK account. It was just easier to pay, like any other salon.

A few hours after the $60 haircut I received an auto-generated email: “It was great to see you at Amazon Salon today, we hope you love your new hair!”

Yes, in fact I do!

Matt Lubbers says the genesis for his new startup was a visit to his friend Tim Clothier‘s house, where a living room view of Mount Rainier was partially obstructed. The problem? A mountain of trading cards from Clothier’s personal collection was in the way.

They weren’t just in the living room. The garage was full of boxes of cards stacked on top of more boxes. A longtime collector, Clothier numbers his lot at about 7 million cards. Separating and organizing them all by hand, he figured he could handle about 25,000 cards a week. He told his wife it would take about 15 years to sort them at that pace.

“I don’t think it was crazy for me to say, ‘What are you doing here?'” Lubbers told GeekWire.

“My friends, when they’re over, I’ll be sorting and they kind of run the other way,” Clothier said.

But Lubbers was different, as Clothier explained: “Matt’s very inquisitive and he started asking questions, and he said, ‘What do you think technology could do for you?'”

More than four years after that initial conversation, the startup co-founders are answering that question. Renton, Wash.-based Gradient is up and running, using custom robotics and artificial intelligence to help sort, analyze, list and sell sports trading cards, gaming cards, and more.

The goal is to grab a slice of the $15 billion U.S. trading card market, to help customers manage collections small and large, and to simply and quickly get a return on eBay for sometimes forgotten treasures.

Card geeks and engineers

The stealthy operation is located across the hall from the headquarters offices for Seattle Sounders FC at the soccer club’s Renton facilities — the Providence Swedish Performance Center & Clubhouse. Sounders majority owner Adrian Hanauer is an investor in Gradient, which has raised $6 million from mostly friends and family.

Clothier, the CEO, has known Hanauer since he was 15 years old. He spent 30 years at Pacific Coast Feather Co., the Hanauer family’s onetime pillow and blanket manufacturing business.

The sprawling Gradient space looks like any upstart tech company office with a few notable exceptions. There are boxes upon boxes full of trading cards everywhere, stacked near rows of rolling racks also containing boxes of cards — 10 million in all and room for three times that.

A close look at any open box or neat stack of cards reveals the faces of sports heroes past and present across baseball, football, basketball, hockey and more.

Around a few tables there are employees shuffling through some cards by hand. Others at computer stations digitally flip through card files or write the code that helps manage such work. The environment is a mix of card geeks and engineers.

And in one corner, the hum of eight robotic sorters can be heard, pulsing with little bursts of air and whirring as components move cards back and forth on a custom rigging apparatus that looks like something from a rock concert stage.

The system is the brainchild of Lubbers, the chief technology officer, who is a computer vision and AI expert who spent the past 15 years building complex systems and robots for autonomous vehicles and self-flying drones at ZF Group, Faraday Future, Voyage, Amazon Robotics and Zipline.

“We saw that there wasn’t much tech, at the time, in this industry. That’s what got us excited,” he said. “What if we could process cards extremely fast? What if we could reduce the amount of time someone, a customer or even expert, took to identify or price or list the card? That’s what we built.”

Up to 100,000 cards a day can be processed by the robots — and there is room to add more machines.

Lubbers is especially protective of what he’s built, and wasn’t ready yet for GeekWire to shoot photographs or video of the robots at work.

Under bright lights, the machines rapidly move cards to flatbed scanners to capture images of the card backs as cameras positioned overhead take photographs of the card fronts. Every single card is physically and digitally cataloged.

While it may sound like fast-moving robots could be a recipe for disaster when mixed with delicate and sometimes quite valuable paper cards, the system is impressive. From the shape of the 3D-printed trays in which the cards are picked and then dropped, to the buttery soft suction fingers that gently lift each card, there is great care taken to never mark or damage any card.

The collected images are instantly sent to a nearby server room where three custom supercomputers — utilizing a high-density configuration similar to NVIDIA’s H100 or H200 chips — house six GPUs each. These machines handle all AI model training and inference testing, crunching through 500,000 images a day to analyze and score cards against a database of 30 million variants.

Storing and managing a collection

Gradient joins an increasingly tech-heavy ecosystem where AI-powered platforms like Ludex, CollX, Card Boss and eBay’s own scan-to-list feature are already used by collectors to instantly grade and price cards with quick scans via mobile phone apps. Gradient’s closest industrial competitor is probably TCG machines, which makes a robotic sorter used by card shops to process thousands of cards an hour.

Gradient’s goal beyond demonstrating how quickly it can process and accurately assess many thousands of cards is also to prove that it can efficiently store them, find them easily via QR-coded boxes and trays, and move them on the collectors’ market.

The company is just getting started in attracting customers, but its largest so far has given Gradient more than 500,000 cards to process.

Different subscription price tiers attract different customers and collection sizes. Pay-as-you-go card scanning runs 40 cents per card. A premium level subscription is $9.99 per month for up to 10,000 cards; Pro is $29.99 per month for up to 30,000 cards; and Commercial is $99.99 per month for up to 100,000 cards. The levels include secure storage and other perks.

Customers gain access to a personal web portal where they can manage their collections and see images of their cards, read the card details, list them on eBay through the Gradient Collects store, and monitor active and sold listings. A customer can choose one card or “send all my cards to eBay” and Gradient’s system will generate such a request.

Gradient takes between 16% and 20% per sale, depending on the subscription level, with 13% or 14% of that covering the costs with eBay.

The startup, which employs 25 people, streams live auctions on eBay where hosts excitedly open packs of Pokémon cards from a makeshift in-house studio located behind piles of boxes. And the company is also building its own marketplace so it can give customers the option of listing with Gradient, eBay or both.

Like a kid opening a fresh pack of cards at the corner mini mart, the possibilities with Gradient seem pretty endless. Especially for the kid, or, let’s face it, the adult collector, who finally uncovers those attic shoeboxes stuffed with thousands of cards and doesn’t know where to start.

“Our job is to help you digitize and inform you what you have, and then you get to choose what you wanna do with it,” Lubbers said.

Longtime Seattle independent record label Sub Pop Records is leaving Amazonia.

The company announced via social media on Thursday that its retail store at 2130 7th Ave., at the base of Amazon’s re:Invent headquarters tower, is closing this Sunday after five years.

A new Sub Pop store will open April 1 on the Seattle waterfront in the Maritime Building at 908 Alaskan Way.

“Sub Pop is an established and well-regarded institution in Seattle,” said Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll. “We’ll miss having them on Amazon’s HQ1 campus and wish them the very best in their new space.”

The move comes a few months after Sub Pop closed its Sea-Tac Airport location at the end of 2025, ending a 12-year run for that space near the entrance of Concourse C.

Sub Pop set up its brick-and-mortar shop in the heart of Amazon’s headquarters campus in January 2021, offering merchandise ranging from clothing, knick knacks and trinkets emblazoned with the iconic Sub Pop logo to vinyl records.

The sticker-plastered front of the shop stood out in the Denny Triangle neighborhood of steel and glass high rises, across the street from the Spheres and the first Amazon Go location.

Opening during the pandemic was a retail anomaly, especially in the building of an e-commerce giant. Amazon reshaped a city which in many ways was put on the map by Sub Pop and the grunge music movement, fueled by bands on the label such as Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and others.

The label was founded in 1988 by Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, six years before Jeff Bezos started his online bookseller in a Bellevue, Wash., garage.

IPIC Theaters plans to permanently close its Redmond, Wash., movie theater on April 28, according to a WARN notice filed with Washington state regulators.

The upscale movie theater chain notified state officials on Feb. 23 that all operations at the site will cease “due to business circumstances.” It will lay off 64 employees.

IPIC last week filed for bankruptcy. The company, which operates 13 dine-in theaters across the country, is also shutting down a theater in Atlanta.

IPIC runs luxury theaters known for recliner seating and full food and drink service. The company opened its theater at Redmond Town Center in 2011.

Movie theaters like IPIC have faced ongoing pressure from streaming services. North American box office numbers fell short of projections in 2025 — just above the prior year but well behind pre-pandemic highs.