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Inside the White House cybersecurity summit with Hadi Partovi of Code.org Aug 28, 2021

Show notes

President Joe Biden brought together top executives from the nation's biggest technology, financial services and energy companies this week to address the growing challenge of cybersecurity, speaking to tech leaders including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

"The federal government can't meet this challenge alone," Biden said in his public remarks to open the meeting. "I've invited you all here today because you have the power and the capacity and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity. And so, ultimately, we've got a lot of work to do."

So what happened next? And did any real solutions emerge? Our guest on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast was in the closed-door meeting. Seattle-area investor and entrepreneur Hadi Partovi, CEO of computer science education nonprofit Code.org, shares details and key takeaways on this week's show.

In the third segment, Partovi reflects on his own childhood in Iran, as a 6-year-old during the 1979 revolution, later immigrating to the U.S. with his family, and finding success as a computer scientist and entrepreneur along with his twin brother, Ali, who joined him in founding Code.org.

Read his full thread on that topic and see our earlier coverage.

See GeekWire.com for more.

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Inside our hybrid studio: GeekWire's tech tips and tricks for the latest twist in virtual meetings Aug 21, 2021

Show notes

The last 18 months have been an audio-visual adventure, requiring many of us to improve and refine our at-home tech setups for virtual meetings and remote work.

And just when we thought we'd figured it out, we were hit with a new scenario entirely: hybrid work, with some people together in the office, and others dialing in from home. Getting things to work seamlessly in these situations is no easy task.

This can be especially challenging when you're trying to get good sound. We’ve struggled with this latest twist on GeekWire's podcasts, with multiple people in the studio, for example, and others joining us remotely. We’ve figured it out, mostly, through lots of trial and error — emphasis on the error.

We're sharing our hard-won lessons on this behind-the-scenes episode of the GeekWire Podcast, including details on hardware and software we’ve been using.

Even if you're not recording audio or video, or producing your own show, we hope these insights might help with your own hybrid meetings and events.

We use a few of our favorite mics to record the show, letting you hear the difference in quality. In addition, we discuss mics to avoid, based on our experience.

Also making an appearance are some new Microsoft headsets and microphones that we’ve been trying out on loan from the company.

Stepping out from behind the virtual booth to participate in this episode is Curt Milton, who edits and produces the GeekWire Podcast every week.

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How SPACs are shaking up Seattle's startup scene Aug 14, 2021

Show notes

An online marketplace that helps to facilitate trade between marijuana sellers and buyers will soon see its own stock traded on the Nasdaq.

Another that connects pet owners with walkers, boarders and other caregivers just posted its first earnings as a publicly traded company.

And a 3-year-old Redmond-based biotech company with a mere 25 employees just raised $80 million its stock market debut.

SPACs are shaking up Seattle's startup scene. On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we examine how special purpose acquisition companies are turning startups into publicly traded stocks at a rapid clip. The SPAC phenomenon is giving many of these companies access to additional sources of capital while creating new risks for investors and raising questions about the long-term direction of the stock market.

Our guest (and guest audio editor) is Laurel Deppen, a journalist who has been working as an intern at GeekWire in Seattle this summer through the Dow Jones News Fund, reporting a wide range of stories about the region's tech and business community, including an earlier story about soon-to-be public online cannabis marketplace Leafly.

She studied broadcast journalism at Western Kentucky University, where she was editor-in-chief of the College Heights Herald, and in addition to joining us for the podcast conversation, she edited this episode as one of the final assignments of her summer internship.

In the second segment of the show, we talk with Laurel about her overall impressions of Seattle as a newcomer to the city, as documented in part in her story, How Bumble BFF helped this Kentucky transplant find friends and break The Seattle Freeze.

And in our final segment, it's the return of the Random Channel, our segment exploring the random things that caught our attention this week. Laurel talks about the HBO drama The White Lotus, GeekWire co-founder John Cook suggests the new podcast The Edge, and I share my enthusiasm about recent episodes of Kara Swisher's New York Times podcast, Pivot.

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The new realities of real estate: Redfin CEO on tech, climate, housing, and the era of 'a thousand HQs' Aug 07, 2021

Show notes

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to discuss the latest twists in the housing market; delays in returning to the office; the role of climate in real estate; how technology is changing homebuying; and the impact of remote work and migration on Seattle and other big U.S. cities.

In some ways, "it's our employees who are deciding where Redfin's headquarters are going to be," Kelman says. "We now have 1,000 headquarters. There are people who have moved all over the country."

In literal terms, Kelman explains, he's committed to keeping Redfin's headquarters in Seattle. But he says the migration of employees creates a new dynamic for city officials seeking to work with business leaders to address economic inequality.

We talked after the tech-oriented real estate brokerage released its second-quarter earnings report this week. Redfin's revenue jumped 121% to $471 million, and its net loss widened to $27.9 million from $6.6 million a year earlier. Kelman also addressed the dynamics prompting Redfin to focus on growth over profits.

Earlier in the week, Redfin announced a new feature for home listings: a numerical rating that gives a climate score to a given house or property, analyzing the risk of heat, fire, drought, and storms over a 30-year period by county, city, neighborhood and zip code. Redfin is partnering with ClimateCheck on the feature.

On the COVID front, Redfin had planned a broad reopening of its headquarters and field offices for Sept. 6, but told employees this week that the milestone would be pushed back indefinitely for now, promising to give them at least 30 days notice of the new date. Those working in the office must be vaccinated, and the company is asking those who haven’t been fully vaccinated to work from home.

Microsoft said the full reopening of its U.S. workplaces will happen no earlier than Oct. 4. Amazon went even further, delaying its return to January 2022.

Podcast edited and produced by Curt Milton; Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

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Satya Nadella's biggest success as Microsoft CEO; Inside GeekWire's Great Race; Number of the Week Jul 31, 2021

Show notes

When Microsoft announced its acquisition of LinkedIn for more than $26 billion five years ago, there was lots of skepticism, and for good reason.

After all, Microsoft was a company known for taking huge write-downs when its biggest acquisitions (aQuantive, Nokia, etc.) failed to live up to expectations.

But that was then, and after becoming the new leader of the venerable software giant, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was taking a different approach, sticking to Microsoft's strength in business technology by picking up the popular business social network.

It remains the biggest deal in Microsoft's history, and with that in mind, now it also qualifies as Satya Nadella's biggest success as Microsoft CEO.

This week, we learned that LinkedIn has joined the ranks of Microsoft's $10 billion-dollar businesses, crossing that threshold in annual revenue for the first time.

Unfortunately, we still don't know for sure if LinkedIn is a profitable business, as Microsoft stopped disclosing LinkedIn's operating profits a couple of years ago. But based on the underlying economics of the business, and the prior trajectory of LinkedIn's bottom line, it's a relatively safe bet that it's operating in the black.

We discuss the LinkedIn deal, five years later, in the second segment of this week's GeekWire Podcast.

My colleague John Cook are back in the GeekWire studio at our offices in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood for the first time in 18 months, along with podcast producer Curt Milton.

We start with a behind-the-scenes discussion of GeekWire's Great Race II, and conclude with a new feature, Number of the Week, plucked from our local coffee giant's latest results.

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Day 2: Amazon's earnings reveal a fundamental shift Jul 30, 2021

Show notes

This is a special presentation of Day 2, GeekWire's podcast about everything Amazon. For more episodes, see geekwire.com/day2 or subscribe to Day 2 in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Direct retail sales are poised to represent less than half of Amazon's business for the first time in its history — a fundamental shift that reflects the e-commerce giant's expansion beyond its roots as an online store.

Revenue from Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime, third-party seller services, online advertising and other services added up to 49.3% of Amazon's business in the second quarter. It almost matched the company's revenue from online and physical stores, and appears to be on a trajectory to surpass them in the future.

That's one of several takeaways from Amazon's second-quarter earnings report, released Thursday afternoon. On this episode of Day 2, GeekWire's Podcast about everything Amazon, we nerd out over Amazon's numbers.

Joining GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop for the discussion are two online retail industry veterans who pay close attention to Amazon's business:

Our podcast collaborator, Jason Boyce, former Top 200 third-party seller, founder of Avenue7Media and co-author of The Amazon Jungle.
Andrea Leigh, vice president of strategy and insights at Ideoclick, a Seattle-based e-commerce technology and services firm that works with vendors to Amazon’s first-party retail sales, and third-party sellers. Leigh was an Amazon general manager and retail category leader for nearly 10 years.

Coverage of Amazon earnings:

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How Facebook works: Secrets of the social network's engineering process Jul 24, 2021

Show notes

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees recently that the company's long-term goal is to "bring the metaverse to life" — helping to create an interconnected world of physical, virtual and augmented reality spaces that will reshape the way we work, interact with each other, create new things, and generally experience life.

So how exactly will Facebook approach such an audacious plan?

A new book called "Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software" doesn't delve into the metaverse, specifically. But in looking at Facebook's engineering practices — the way the company makes stuff — the book examines the digital DNA of the social network, sheds new light on its most infamous motto, and explains the inner workings of a company that wants to reshape the human experience, again.

Facebook influences the engineering culture and economy not just in its hometown of Menlo Park, Calif., but also in its development offices in the Seattle area, where it employs 7,000 people. And of course, ultimately, Facebook's internal practices end up influencing people around the world who use its products.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we talk with the author of the book, Jeff Meyerson, the longtime host of the Software Engineering Daily podcast, about the ways Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Google make things, and what those different approaches tell us about where they're taking us.

Audio editing by Curt Milton, theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

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How to make tech more equitable Jul 17, 2021

Show notes

A new report details extensive gender and racial inequities in Washington state's technology workforce, and makes a series of recommendations to address them.

Among the recommendations: creating state-supported worker-owned co-ops for independent and contract workers; establishing a state startup fund to support women and people of color in the technology industry; and broadening the focus of the state's technology industry point person and training programs to address equity issues.

The report, Creating Quality Jobs for All in Washington’s Tech Sector, was published by OneAmerica, an immigrant and refugee advocacy organization, and authored by our guests on this week's episode of the GeekWire Podcast: researcher and consultant Kimberly Earles; and Marcus Courtney, a public affairs consultant who specializes in labor issues.

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Bezos, Branson and the billionaire space race Jul 14, 2021

Show notes

Sir Richard Branson added new fuel to the billionaire space race July 11 when he and his Virgin Galactic crewmates floated in suborbital space.

"To all you kids down there, I was once a child with a dream, looking up to the stars," Branson said before unbuckling. "Now, I'm an adult in a spaceship with lots of other wonderful adults, looking down to a beautiful, beautiful Earth. For the next generation of dreamers, if we can do this, just imagine what you can do."

Can Jeff Bezos top that? We'll soon find out. Amazon's founder is set to go even higher as a passenger July 20 on the first crewed flight for his space venture Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.

On this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast: the dawn of a new era in space tourism, what to watch when the Amazon founder blasts off next week, and what's next for commercial space exploration.

Joining us is longtime space journalist Alan Boyle, GeekWire contributing editor, who has covered Bezos' space ambitions for years.

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Former Amazon exec Jeff Wilke on his next big thing Jul 10, 2021

Show notes

Jeff Wilke did something unusual when he left his role as Amazon's Worldwide Consumer CEO in March, after more than two decades with the company: he learned to code in the Python programming language.

"I had lots of computer scientists that were working for me and the organization, and I was heavily involved in a bunch of architectural decisions, but I hadn't written code in years," he explained. "I didn't understand exactly what it took to turn the ideas that we had into actual code. ... So I just thought it'd be useful to update my skills after a couple of decades."

He was "blown away" by the experience.

"The coolest thing about coding ... is that you get to stand on the shoulders of all the other people who have written code and uploaded it to libraries before you and so you don't have to go back and reinvent everything. And that just means innovation and invention and goodness can accelerate," he said. "So I actually left those two weeks totally optimistic."

Wilke is translating that optimism into a variety of investments and projects, across a range of interests and industries, from biotech to honeybees. But the venture getting most of his time and attention is Re:Build Manufacturing, a Massachusetts-based company on a quest to reinvigorate the U.S. manufacturing industry.

Re:Build has raised more than $400 million and made six acquisitions in engineering services and advanced materials, with six facilities in five states.

Wilke is the company's chairman and co-founder, and it's a return to his roots. He grew up in Pittsburgh and worked early on in pharmaceuticals, chemicals and electronics.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we talk about the future of U.S. manufacturing with Wilke and Re:Build Manufacturing CEO Miles Arnone, a longtime industrial business leader, inventor and investor who co-founded the company with Wilke.

Later in the show, during a momentous week for Amazon, we also get Wilke's thoughts about his former employer, as Andy Jassy succeeds founder Jeff Bezos as CEO. Wilke was considered a potential and even likely successor to Bezos prior to the announcement of his departure. He addressed that in a prior interview with our partners at the tech news site dot.la.

Audio editing by Curt Milton; theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.

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