Apple has not publicly confirmed the meeting or the account of what was said. Every claim in this article about that conversation comes from Gurman’s reporting, which rests on unnamed sources. That matters, because the story is not really about a voice assistant. It is about what a new boss does in his first two months. It is about whether the machine he inherited can change speed.

Ternus took over from Tim Cook after a 15-year run that, according to the Motley Fool, carried Apple from a market value of about $350 billion in 2011 to about $4.6 trillion. Cook stayed on as executive chairman. Ternus unveiled the iPhone Duo eight days after taking the job. By mid-October he was on the cover of TIME. The Gurman report is the first public sign of how he intends to run the company he inherited. The sign points at pace.

The John Ternus Apple AI strategy: urgency from the top

The push targets the gap between Apple’s software planning and the speed of the AI race. Gurman reports that Federighi’s organisation plans roughly 12 to 18 months ahead. Apple’s hardware teams plan products several years into the future. That difference was manageable when software shipped on an annual cycle and the roadmap was mostly refinements. It is a problem when the competition ships new AI capabilities in weeks. The product you are chasing keeps moving.

Federighi is not a newcomer to this argument. He oversees software engineering and took charge of Apple’s AI efforts after a leadership shake-up last year. The rebuilt Siri AI has since reached customers. It shipped in beta with iOS 27 on September 14. It offers personal context, understanding of what is on screen, and more sophisticated actions inside apps. Five more languages followed with iOS 27.2 in October. On November 3 Apple opened Siri AI to developers through app skills in the iOS 27.3 betas. The work got done. Gurman’s reporting says Ternus wants more than the work getting done. He wants the ambition to change.

That is the distinction founders should steal. A better Siri is a product improvement. A different AI strategy is a leadership decision. Leaders have to declare it from the top before it shows up in any roadmap. Ternus did not ask for a better voice assistant, according to the report. He asked for a different pace, and he asked it of the person who sets the pace for software.

The 12 to 18 month problem

Short planning horizons quietly kill long bets. An AI assistant that can follow a goal across apps needs sustained coordination. It must remember context and act without being asked at every step, across devices, operating systems and services. It needs the software team, the silicon team and the services team to agree. They must agree on something that will not ship for two or three years. They have to keep agreeing while the market moves underneath them. A team that plans 18 months out can build the next version of Siri. It struggles to build the thing after Siri.

Gurman reports that Apple is exploring exactly that next thing. It is a Siri that behaves more like an autonomous agent. It could follow a goal and make progress on tasks without a separate instruction at every step. He believes Apple could make Siri more like an agent as early as next year. Apple has not announced it, and there is no confirmed release date or final list of features. On the November 2 earnings call, Ternus called agentic AI capabilities “promising” and said Siri is “primarily request-based today” but built on “a modern orchestrator-driven architecture that gives us real room to expand its capabilities over time.” Those are public remarks, not a product announcement. They point in the same direction as the reported meeting. The company knows where Siri has to go. The question is how fast it gets there.

Buying engineers more time

There is also a practical change under way. Gurman reports that the first iOS 28 development milestone gives engineers 50 percent more time to code and explore. It gives them less time on integration, as coding agents have improved. That is a separate part of Apple’s software strategy, and it does not establish which AI features will ship. But it is consistent with a company trying to buy its engineers more room to build ambitious things. That is what a longer planning horizon would demand.

The friction underneath

The report also describes friction around Federighi’s management approach. He reportedly takes a close interest in technical decisions and debates proposals in detail. Some employees believe that style leaves limited room for other voices to influence the direction of Apple’s products. That account rests on the report’s sources, not on a public assessment by Apple. Read it as atmosphere rather than verdict. But atmosphere matters inside a software organisation. The people who have to build the ambitious roadmap are the same people whose voices need room.

Gurman also describes Federighi as an AI skeptic. He has concerns about the technology’s privacy, security, and societal and employment implications. Those are serious concerns, and they are not wrong. They are also the kind of concerns that slow a company down when its rivals are moving fast. That tension is precisely what Ternus is reported to be pressing on. A chief executive does not need his software chief to stop caring about privacy. He needs him to care about it at the speed the race demands.

The personnel picture is wider than one meeting. Mike Rockwell is Apple’s vice president of Siri engineering and the creator of Vision Pro. He took over Siri in March 2025. According to Gurman, he continues to seriously consider stepping down from his role or leaving Apple altogether next year. Bloomberg previously reported in April that Rockwell had reservations about reporting to Federighi. Apple has announced no departure. There is also no indication in the reporting that Federighi is preparing to leave. This article does not claim that he is. What the reporting shows is a software organisation under real pressure for the first time in years. Its most senior people are weighing their futures while the new chief executive asks for more speed.

What founders should copy

Copy the move, not the meeting. A new leader’s first test is whether he can reset the tempo of a machine built by his predecessor. Ternus chose to do it through his software chief, in plain language, behind closed doors. The leak made it public. That is its own lesson: in a company that size, a private message to one lieutenant is a public message to everyone.

The founder version of this is smaller but identical. If your planning horizon is shorter than your competitor’s ambition, you are already behind. No amount of polish on the current product closes it. You have to declare urgency from the top. Do it in words your own team would recognise, before it shows up in the roadmap. Ternus did not ask for a better Siri. He asked for a different ambition, and he asked the person whose organisation has to deliver it.

There is a second lesson in the other direction. Federighi’s caution about privacy and the societal effects of AI is not a flaw in the story. It is the counterweight every AI strategy needs, and a chief executive who bulldozes it will regret it. The test for Ternus is not whether he can make Apple move faster. It is whether he can do it without losing the judgement that made its software trustworthy in the first place.

What to watch next

Three things turn this from a leak into a leadership case study. First, whether Apple confirms or responds to the report at all. Silence would be normal for Apple, and it would leave Gurman’s account as the only version on the record. Second, whether Rockwell stays or goes. A departure next year would confirm that the pressure inside the software organisation is real. It would leave a gap at the top of the Siri team at the worst possible moment. Third, whether an autonomous Siri agent actually appears, and when. Gurman’s “as early as next year” is a belief, not a date. The first real test of Ternus’s urgency will be whether that agent ships while the debate is still live.

Cook built Apple into a machine that never misses a quarter. Ternus has to decide whether that machine can also move fast. His first answer is already on the record, at least the one the world gets to see. Fixing Siri is not a strategy. What he builds instead is the story of his first year.

More CEO stories are in the CEOs archive. Emma Walmsley’s appointment as HP chief executive is the other new-CEO story of the month. An outsider is taking over a hardware giant. The Datavault AI founder who sued his own board shows what happens when a founder and a board disagree. It is a disagreement about the pace of change.

The post Apple’s New CEO Just Told His Top Lieutenant That Siri Is Not Enough appeared first on CEO Medium.

Co-founder and chief executive Melanie Perkins announced the restructure in a staff note on November 3. She called it “without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history” and “our hardest year yet.” She told staff that “small changes won’t be enough” and that “to set ourselves up for the next decade, we need to refound Canva, getting back to our roots of small, empowered teams.”

Read the number carefully, because it is doing a lot of work in the headlines. Not all 1,271 people are leaving. Some will change roles, some will be asked to relocate to central hubs, mainly Sydney, and some will leave. Canva has not said how many of the 1,271 will ultimately go. That gap matters, and it is the first thing a founder should notice. Even the number everyone is quoting is a range, not a headcount.

The Canva layoffs package, in full

This is why the reaction was praise instead of anger. Everyone leaving gets at least six months of pay, including statutory entitlements, in every location. Healthcare continues for 12 months where Canva provides it. Canva waived the one-year equity vesting cliff for people who joined in the past year. Departing staff keep their MacBooks. There is career coaching and a year of LinkedIn Premium. And there is a US$10,000 grant from a new Canva Collective Fund for anyone who wants to start a business or a community project. The fund takes no equity, and registration is open until December 14.

The small details matter as much as the money. People leaving keep access to Slack and Gmail until the end of the week, so they can say goodbye on their own terms. Everyone affected gets an individual meeting with a senior leader. Canva cancelled non-critical meetings for the rest of the week. It told staff to take time off if they needed it, with no need to log it as leave.

How the package was received

Social media noticed. Jasveer Singh, co-founder and chief executive of KnotDating, called the package “a master-class in how to handle layoffs.” Mark Di Stefano, who edits the Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window column, called it very generous. On LinkedIn, content creator Vinod Sandhu wrote that while companies may not always be able to save jobs, they can ensure employees “don’t lose their dignity while leaving.” The staff note spread fast after a post on X, where one thread sharing it drew more than 65,000 likes. The jokes came too. “Makes me wanna join Canva just to get laid off,” one user wrote. Another asked, “How do I apply to be fired by Canva?”

Call it a masterclass if you like, but remember whose words those are. “Most humane layoff in tech history” and “masterclass” are the internet’s praise, not a verdict. The praise is real, and it is earned. It is also not the whole story.

Why it happened: the AI bill came due

Perkins said growth has slowed for the first time in a decade. That is a relative statement, and the numbers behind it are worth seeing. Sales grew 38 percent in 2025 and 45 percent the year before. This is not a company in freefall. It is a company whose engine slowed just as its costs jumped.

In August, Canva cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 30 percent to 20 percent. TechCrunch tied the cut to rising AI costs. Co-founder Cliff Obrecht explained the shift the same month. Creating a design used to cost Canva almost nothing. The cost of serving each user has climbed from cents per month to many more cents. For a freemium business built on giving most of its product away, that change goes to the heart of the model. Canva has been building its own AI models to depend less on outside providers. It says it has cut AI serving costs by about 90 percent since the crunch began. It was not enough to hold the forecast.

The competition and the valuation

Competition is doing the rest. ChatGPT and Google image tools now do for free what Canva charges for. Google launched Pics, a Workspace-native AI image editor, on September 1. Early investors noticed before the layoffs did. Blackbird and Airtree, two early backers, marked their internal valuations down about 17 percent to roughly $35 billion in August. That is according to Australian Financial Review reporting. An employee share sale in August 2025 set the last priced valuation at $42 billion.

Canva closed 2025 at about US$4 billion in annualised revenue. It has more than 250 million monthly users and around 5,800 people across 37 countries. The restructure merges the Product, Growth and Platform teams into a single Product Org. It removes management layers and makes Sydney the main base for more product teams. Hybrid staff will spend two to three days a week in the office from January.

What the staff note did not say

Here is the honest tension in the story. Perkins did not name AI in the staff note. The note talks about organisation, location and ownership, not artificial intelligence. A Canva spokesperson told the Australian Associated Press that the changes are “about setting Canva up to build those products, not using AI to do the work of people who are leaving.” The economics behind the cut are AI economics. The letter avoids the word. Both facts belong in the same paragraph, because the gap between them is the story.

The praise is earned. The problem is not solved.

How you fire people is now part of your employer brand, and Perkins set the bar. People will measure every founder who cuts staff in 2026 against this package. The package is six months pay, a laptop to keep, and money to start something new. That is what treating people like adults looks like, and it is why the reaction was applause instead of anger. Founders should copy the package without hesitation.

But a generous exit does not fix an AI strategy problem. Six months pay is also great PR. It arrived in the same week Canva’s investors were marking the company down. Blackbird, which owns about 10 percent of Canva, has said it backs the changes. That is a vote of confidence from an owner. It is also a reminder that the people who pay for the package are the ones who approved the cut.

Keep the history straight too. This is the first company-wide redundancy round in Canva’s history, but it is not the first cut. Canva let go 32 roles in March 2025, including a significant part of its technical content writing team. It cut 10 of its 12 technical writers earlier. The pattern was already there. It just got much bigger, much faster.

Canva is not alone in this. Adweek noted that Netflix, Dropbox and Uber have all announced significant job cuts in the last two months. The difference is that Canva won praise for how it did it, and the praise is the reason the story travelled.

What founders should copy, and what they should fear

Copy the package. Plan the exit the way you plan the hire. Cut once instead of in drips, so people stop waiting for the next round. Say plainly why it is happening, in words your own staff would recognise. Fund people’s next chapter instead of handing them a cardboard box. Give them time to say goodbye. None of that is expensive next to the trust it buys. The trust is the point: the people who stay are watching how you treat the people who leave.

Fear the cause. The company that sells AI design tools is restructuring because AI changed its economics. Chatbots now do for free what Canva charges for. Serving AI features costs more than the freemium model was built to carry. Perkins called this the hardest year yet and said the company needs to refound itself around small, empowered teams. That is the right language. The question is whether small teams and a lower cost base are enough. General-purpose AI is commoditising the product itself.

What happens next

The next beat arrives fast. Canva holds a company all-hands on November 10, with organisation-level meetings from November 11. Watch whether Perkins names the AI strategy behind the “refound” she promised. The package bought goodwill, and the strategy has to earn it back. Six months pay, a MacBook and $10,000 will carry a departing employee into next year. They will not carry a company through a platform shift. That is the part nobody is talking about. It is the part that decides whether this was a masterclass or just a very well written goodbye.

More leadership stories are in the Leadership archive. Nike’s layoffs under Elliott Hill show the same hard trade between a turnaround and the people who pay for it. Nikesh Arora’s warning that AI has made engineers fair game is the other side of the same argument. Proton chief executive Andy Yen faced a similar backlash when he pushed AI into his own product.

The post Canva Cut 22% of Its Staff and Got Applauded for It. Here Is the Part Nobody Is Talking About appeared first on CEO Medium.

HP did not hire a PC person because the job is no longer a PC job. A memory chip shortage has pushed component costs up, supply chains are strained, and the industry is in a downturn. HP’s board ran what it called a comprehensive global search and picked a pharma transformer over a hardware insider. That is a verdict on the PC business as much as a vote of confidence in Walmsley. The question now is whether a playbook built on drugs and consumer health works when the constraint is memory prices and a Windows ecosystem she has only watched from the boardroom.

The Emma Walmsley HP CEO appointment: a career built on outsider leaps

Walmsley, 57, has made a career of arriving from somewhere else. She spent 17 years at L’Oreal, holding marketing and management roles in London, Paris, New York and Shanghai, and rose to run its consumer products business in China, overseeing brands including L’Oreal Paris, Maybelline and Garnier. She joined GSK in 2010, became chief executive of its consumer healthcare unit in 2015, and took over the whole company in April 2017, the first woman to lead the British drugmaker.

At GSK she did the thing HP is now hiring her to do. She sharpened the company’s focus on specialty medicines and vaccines, rebuilt its research pipeline, strengthened the balance sheet, and oversaw the separation of the consumer healthcare business, now Haleon, in 2022. She parted ways with GSK at the end of 2025 after nearly nine years as chief executive, telling Semafor the company was completely different from the one she had been appointed to lead. Reuters calls the HP job her third outsider test: cosmetics, then drugs, then PCs, each move a bigger leap than the last.

She is not a complete stranger to technology. Walmsley has sat on Microsoft’s board since 2019, seven years watching the company at the forefront of AI and cloud computing, whose Windows operating system sits at the centre of HP’s PC business. She also embraced AI at GSK, including its use in drug discovery. She has seen the technology playbook from the inside, even if she has never had to sell it.

What she is walking into

The numbers explain why HP reached outside the industry. In its fiscal third quarter, HP’s Personal Systems business grew revenue 18 percent year over year to about 11.8 billion dollars, but unit shipments fell 16 percent and the segment’s operating margin slipped to 4.6 percent from 5.4 percent a year earlier. Average selling prices rose 40.8 percent, which is what happens when a company passes higher component costs to customers and leans on premium devices to protect its margins. HP has indicated that industry wide PC shipments could decline by a mid single digit percentage in fiscal 2027, and the company reports fourth quarter results on November 24, the last earnings release before Walmsley arrives.

The squeeze comes from memory. Soaring memory chip prices have driven up costs for PC makers and now threaten to push retail prices higher still, while the expansion of AI data centres has pulled memory production capacity away from ordinary chips. HP lists increasing memory and storage costs among its supply risks, and over the twelve months to July 2026 it generated about 59 billion dollars in revenue, so even a small shift in component costs moves a very large number. That is the context the board hired into: an industry downturn that rewards a chief executive who can restructure under pressure.

Patrick Moorhead, chief executive of analyst firm Moor Insights and Strategy, put the priority plainly to Reuters. “HP’s edge AI bet rides on Windows, and she has seen that playbook from the inside,” he said. “Her first problem won’t be AI. It will be memory costs.” That is the honest version of the job description. The AI story is the future HP wants to sell. The memory bill is the present it has to pay.

Why the board picked a pharma transformer

HP’s own announcement makes the reasoning clear, and it has nothing to do with gender. The board cited Walmsley’s transformation record and her leadership experience across multiple industries. Broussard, the outgoing interim chief executive, called her “a proven CEO with a track record of leading organizations at scale and guiding them through significant change,” and said she has the experience to bring HP’s businesses, capabilities and people together as AI moves to the edge. Chair Chip Bergh said she stood out for “the strength of her leadership experience across multiple industries, the clarity of her strategic thinking and her ability to translate customer insights into new growth.”

“HP is an iconic company with a defining role in shaping the future of work on a global scale,” Walmsley said in the announcement. “We will focus on harnessing the power of the AI era and putting HP’s creativity and innovation to work to unlock new sources of growth and deliver lasting value for our customers, shareholders, partners and people.”

None of that is a diversity hire. The gender angle is context, not the reason given, and the reason given is specific: a leader who has reshaped a sprawling global company before. The board is betting that skill transfers across industries. It is a reasonable bet, and it is also unproven, which is what makes the appointment worth watching rather than simply applauding.

The counterview she invites

Walmsley has said she wants people around her to challenge her thinking, even if that means disagreeing with her in front of colleagues. “I explicitly invite the counterview,” she told Semafor in an interview published in April. “I come across as having conviction and an opinion, which I do, but I also am quite comfortable with shifting it if the facts change.” It is a management style she says helps prevent chief executives from hearing only what they want to hear.

That is a real asset in a downturn, where the people around a chief executive usually learn to agree. But inviting disagreement and fixing a supply chain are different skills, and HP’s next twelve months will show which one she actually has. Changing her mind is valuable only if she can also change the facts on the ground: the memory contracts, the supplier relationships, the product mix that decides whether HP absorbs the cost or passes it to customers. The counterview keeps her honest. It does not negotiate with a chip supplier.

What founders should steal

Hire for the problem, not the industry. That is the lesson, and HP just demonstrated it at the highest possible level. When the problem changes, the profile changes with it. A founder hiring for a turnaround should read the HP brief before writing the job spec: the board did not ask who knows PCs best, it asked who has done the hard thing before, which is reshaping a big company under pressure.

In 2025, women held 55 chief executive positions, or 11 percent, at Fortune 500 companies, a record high. Every one of the nine women who newly joined those ranks in 2025 was promoted from within her own company. Walmsley is the opposite bet: an external hire, from another industry, brought in precisely because she is not from within.

An outsider hire is also a public admission that the old way of running the business has run out, and it puts the new leader under immediate pressure to prove the leap was worth it. Founders who hire outsiders for a turnaround should be ready for the same scrutiny: the hire itself becomes the standard the hire is judged against.

Walmsley starts on January 4. The first earnings call will tell us whether HP bought a transformer or a tourist. Either way, the appointment already says something worth hearing: in 2026, the hardest job in hardware belongs to someone who has never sold a computer.

The post Emma Walmsley Has Never Sold a Computer. HP Just Made Her CEO. appeared first on CEO Medium.

That is the story. Not the split itself, but what it admits. CVS spent $69 billion buying Aetna and told the world that owning the whole healthcare chain was the future. Eight years later it is taking the chain apart, and its own chief executive is calling that a position of strength. The market did not agree. Shares fell 12.5 percent on the day, wiping out nearly $15 billion of market value, even though the company beat its earnings expectations.

The CVS split into two companies reverses the $69 billion bet

The Aetna deal was the signature bet of an era. CVS announced in 2017 that it would buy the health insurer for about $69 billion in equity value, $77 billion including assumed debt, and closed the deal in 2018. The pitch was integrated healthcare: one company that sold the prescription, managed the benefit, paid the claim and ran the clinic. CVS had already bought the Caremark pharmacy benefit manager nearly twenty years earlier, and it later spent about $10 billion on Oak Street Health, a primary care chain for older adults, plus Signify Health for in home evaluations. By 2026 the combined company had about 9,000 pharmacies, more than 1,000 clinics, a benefits manager covering about 87 million plan members and insurance products serving about 37 million people.

That was the empire. The problem was never the size of it. The problem was that every piece added a new regulator, a new margin fight and a new management distraction, and the whole ended up worth less than the parts. CVS is now worth about $117 billion on the stock market, and its shares are flat so far this year while the healthcare sector fund is up more than 20 percent. The integration that was supposed to be the advantage became the thing investors wanted taken apart.

The market did not buy it

The timing made the verdict harsher. CVS reported third quarter results the same morning, and they were strong. Revenue was $108.4 billion, up about 5 percent and ahead of the $104.8 billion analysts expected. Adjusted earnings were $2.09 a share against a $1.65 estimate, and the medical benefit ratio, the share of premiums paid out in medical costs, came in at 91.3 percent against a 92.3 percent consensus. Same store sales fell 0.6 percent, but that was better than the 1.4 percent drop analysts feared.

None of it mattered. Shares closed down 12.5 percent at $79.96. Kevin Caliendo, an analyst at UBS, put it plainly: CVS shares are weak despite very strong third quarter operating results because the announced split came as a surprise and is perceived as a defensive move against regulation rather than an offensive move. Barclays analyst Andrew Mok pointed to a lack of financial detail around the breakup, and noted that when CVS bought Caremark twenty years ago it promised synergies of at least $500 million. Kevin Gade of Bahl and Gaynor said investors were asking why they should lean into a story facing an earnings hiccup in 2027, a year when rivals are seeing accelerating growth, even though CVS forecast 2027 adjusted earnings of at least $8.65 a share, ahead of the $8.53 analysts expected.

Not every analyst called it a retreat. Michael Cherny of Leerink Partners said the split feels like a complete shock, but added that the retail pharmacy business has been performing well, winning market share from competitors and seeing stabilizing gross margins thanks to CostVantage, the new pharmacy reimbursement model CVS introduced last year. In that light, he wrote, the outlook for a standalone retail pharmacy with meaningful scale and leverage on its own may be stronger now than before.

Chief executive David Joyner defended the move on the analyst call. “We are not doing anything out of a distressed decision,” he said. “We are doing it because we have healthy balance sheets with appropriate capital allocation opportunities and momentum in each one of the businesses that we are operating.” He has reason to sound confident. Shares have risen about 70 percent since he took the helm in October 2024. But a chief executive does not break his company in two because the model is working. He does it because the model stopped working and the market finally said so out loud.

The pressure CVS will not name

Joyner did not blame regulation, but the analysts did, and they may be right. Ann Hynes, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, wrote that the decision is largely driven by mounting legislative and legal pressures surrounding vertically integrated healthcare companies, particularly pharmacy benefit managers. That is analyst interpretation, not CVS’s stated reason, and it should be read as such. But the pressure is real and it is documented.

In February, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley introduced the Break Up Big Medicine Act, a bipartisan bill that would bar common ownership of medical providers with insurers, pharmacy benefit managers or drug wholesalers, giving companies one year to divest. The bill drew support from Mark Cuban. Three pharmacy benefit managers, CVS Caremark, Express Scripts and Optum Rx, handle about 80 percent of prescription drug claims in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission is already investigating the industry. Arkansas has passed its own law barring pharmacy benefit managers from owning pharmacies.

None of this proves CVS split because of Washington. But a founder reading the announcement should understand the direction of travel. When the largest players in an industry are also its most scrutinized, owning every link in the chain stops being a moat and starts being a target. CVS is getting out ahead of a fight it may not be able to win, and doing it on its own timetable rather than a regulator’s.

What founders should steal

Own the step you can be best at, and partner for the rest. That is the lesson, and it has three lines.

First, buying the chain only works if you can run every link better than the specialists already running it. CVS bought a pharmacy benefit manager, an insurer, a primary care chain and a home health business, and each one needed a different kind of management, a different regulator and a different margin structure. The company that ran 9,000 drugstores well was not automatically the company that could run an insurer well. Second, integration is a cost, not just a synergy. Every acquisition added meetings, reporting lines and compliance work that pulled attention away from the stores where customers actually walk in. Third, watch what the market rewards. Investors sent the shares down 12.5 percent on a day the company beat earnings, because they were pricing the breakup, not the quarter. The market was telling CVS that two focused companies are worth more than one sprawling one.

There is one more thing founders should steal, and it is the least comfortable. The split is not done. It still needs final approval from the CVS board, an effective Form 10 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and confirmation that the separation is tax free for the company and its shareholders. CVS itself says there can be no assurance the separation will occur, or that it will occur on the terms or timeline described. Goldman Sachs is leading the advice, with Consello and the law firm Wachtell Lipton alongside. Both resulting companies are expected to carry solid investment grade ratings, generate strong free cash flow and pay an attractive dividend. Shareholders will own shares in both.

The direction is set even if the paperwork is not finished. The era of healthcare gigantism is ending, and the company that built the biggest version of it just said so out loud. Founders who still dream of owning the whole value chain should read this split as a warning written in their own language: buying everything is easy. Running everything is the hard part, and the market has stopped paying for it.

The post CVS Just Admitted Its $69 Billion Healthcare Empire Did Not Work appeared first on CEO Medium.

That is the story. Not the investor revolt itself, but what it confirms. Our October 21 piece was headlined “The Board Should Be Next.” Two weeks later, the people who own the company are saying the same thing, in public, on the record. The board fired its chief executive for a strategy the board itself approved, and its biggest shareholders have noticed.

What the investors actually said

The demand is specific, and it is aimed at the top. Ingo Speich of Deka, one of the investors who spoke to Reuters, said renewal cannot stop at the executive management and should also happen on the board. He added that the current concentration of power must be abolished, and that Lindt faced structural challenges that required new thinking.

Vincent Kaufmann, chief executive of Ethos, Switzerland’s leading shareholder advisory group, said Lindt suffered from a lack of adequate checks and balances on its supervisory board. He added that only three of the board’s eight members were independent by Ethos’s criteria, while company pension funds were overrepresented. His verdict was blunt: a change of chief executive alone will not resolve the governance issues Ethos has raised, because those issues concern the board itself.

Of the five investors Reuters spoke to, only one large shareholder backed the company’s current board. Six other major shareholders contacted by Reuters declined to comment. One top 20 shareholder, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the board shared responsibility for the pricing missteps and needed new blood, noting that six of its eight members were at least 70 years old and that Tanner had served as chairman since 1994. Lindt owed Tanner a great deal, the investor said, but the world has changed greatly over the past 30 years.

This is the first major rebuke of Lindt’s board since the chief executive’s ouster last month. Tanner has faced opposition before, with some shareholders voting against his reelection at annual meetings in recent years. This time the opposition is not a protest vote. It is a public demand for a different board.

The Lindt CEO ousted investors board shake-up, in numbers

The revolt has a price tag behind it, and the numbers explain why shareholders stopped being polite. Lindt raised prices by 19 percent in 2025 and a further 12 percent in the first half of 2026, in response to soaring cocoa costs. Tanner acknowledged last month that Lindt had misjudged what customers would pay. Volumes fell as shoppers tightened their belts, and the company cut its organic growth forecast to between 0 and 2 percent, well below the 10.9 percent five year average. Its shares are down about a quarter this year after outlook cuts and weak performance in Europe.

Lindt has reaffirmed its medium to long term goal of 6 to 8 percent annual sales growth, though investors say achieving it could prove challenging. A third top 20 investor told Reuters it could be difficult for the company to quickly recapture previous growth rates, with challenges around pricing and the rise of GLP-1 weight loss drugs, which could curb chocolate consumption.

Not every investor blames the pricing. A second top 20 investor said he understood why Tanner was staying and defended the price increases, which were key to protecting margins at the 24 billion dollar company. That defence deserves a fair hearing. Cocoa costs did soar, and protecting margins is a real job. But it is also the defence of a strategy that cost the company a quarter of its share price and its chief executive. Margins held. Customers and shareholders did not.

The analysts saw this coming. Vontobel analysts said after the October firing that the board should also face scrutiny, that it could have intervened earlier, and that they would welcome further board renewal next spring. When your own bankers are asking for board renewal, the problem was never just the person in the corner office.

The chairman who will not step down

Tanner is 80, has been chairman for 32 years, and has been executive chairman since 2016. He has said he will not step down, saying his priority is to get the company back on track. He remains strongly placed. He personally holds 2.3 percent of the company’s shares, while two pension funds he chairs have more than 15 percent of the voting rights.

Read that last sentence twice, because it is the whole governance story in one line. The chairman who presided over the pricing strategy, the forecast cuts, and the chief executive’s dismissal also chairs two pension funds holding more than 15 percent of the voting rights. The board that is meant to check him is a board on which only three of eight members count as independent by Ethos’s criteria, and six of eight are at least 70 years old. That is not a supervisory board. That is a room full of people who have worked together for decades, being asked to judge one of their own.

None of this makes Tanner a villain. He built Lindt into what it is, and even the investors demanding change say the company owes him a great deal. But gratitude is not governance. A chairman who cannot be challenged is a chairman who cannot be wrong, and a chairman who cannot be wrong will keep making the same calls until the market makes them for him. The market is now making them.

What the board said back

The board has not responded to the investor demands beyond a single line. A Lindt spokesperson told Reuters the board also reviews the board composition regularly, and that succession planning is a fixed part of its work. Tanner declined to comment. No further statement from the board has appeared since the November 4 report, and no board change has been announced.

That silence is worth noting, because it is the same silence that followed the chief executive’s dismissal. The board said the search for a new chief executive had launched and expected to appoint a successor in the second quarter of 2027. Former chief executive Dieter Weisskopf has returned as interim chief, and Germany head Michal Spiller left alongside Lechner. The company is being run by the man it replaced four years ago, while the board that designed that transition says it reviews its own composition regularly.

Regular review is not renewal. A board that reviews itself and finds itself satisfactory, every time, for 32 years, is not reviewing itself. It is admiring itself. The investors are asking for something the board has never done voluntarily: let new people in, and take power away from the person who has held it longest.

What founders should steal

Write the board you want before you need it. That is the lesson, and it has three lines.

First, set a real limit on how long one person can hold the chair, and write it down while everyone is still friendly. Lindt has no such limit, and now its investors are imposing one in public. Second, keep the board independent in fact, not just on paper. If your pension funds, your old colleagues, and your friends hold the seats, you do not have a board. You have an audience. Third, separate gratitude from governance. Thank the person who built the company, and then build a board that can overrule them. If you cannot do both, you will one day be forced to choose, and the choice will be made for you by your shareholders, in the press.

Lindt fired its chief executive last month. Its investors are now saying the board should be next. They are right, and they are two weeks late. CEO Medium said it first. The shareholders are saying it louder. The only people who have not said it yet are the directors themselves.

The post Lindt Fired Its CEO. Investors Say the Real Problem Still Sits in the Chairman’s Chair. appeared first on CEO Medium.

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According to 404 Media, Yen replied in the company’s security channel after an employee asked for a few days to penetration test newly written code before it went live. The reported reply was blunt: “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure.” Yen also reportedly told staff to stop lovingly handcrafting all their code and use AI more. In addition, he reportedly set up an inbox for anything blocking AI adoption so leadership could, in his reported words, ruthlessly smash it. These are reported internal messages, not statements Proton has confirmed in public. That distinction matters, and this article keeps it throughout.

Then came the walk-back, and it is the reason this story is still moving. At an all hands meeting on 30 October, Yen cancelled the planned AI re-interviews, conceding, according to 404 Media’s account of meeting audio, “a communication failure on my part”. However, he paired the concession with a clear signal that the direction is not changing. “Going forward, I’m still going to push,” he reportedly said. He also said a reorganisation next month would involve redistributing talent across teams, but no loss of jobs from AI. In short, the process was cancelled. The push was not.

The Proton CEO Andy Yen AI controversy in brief

The 404 Media investigation, published 29 October, rests on interviews with eight current and one former employee, plus internal Slack chats and meeting recordings. It reports that CTO Bart Butler told engineers their old job is gone. It also reports that Butler said in a meeting that 90 percent of Proton’s code in October was written by AI, much of it with Claude. Treat that figure as the CTO’s internal claim, not an audited company statistic. No independent measurement of it exists.

The investigation also reports that staff were to be re-interviewed about their AI use between 4 and 11 November. Proton later posted the 26 October staff email on Reddit, in which the re-interviews were described as consequential. Employees told 404 Media they feared reluctance could cost them their jobs. As a result, the re-interviews became the flashpoint. They are now cancelled, and staff told 404 Media the things they would have measured will instead become part of performance reviews.

Meanwhile, users responded in public. Posts about cancelling subscriptions spread across Reddit and Proton’s own forum. Some users named alternatives such as Tuta and Mullvad, and some called for Yen to resign. A forum post calling for action gathered over 800 likes, according to CyberNews. Those posts are anecdotes, not a churn number. Proton has published no cancellation figure, and no data breach has been reported. The story is about leadership culture and process, not a demonstrated vulnerability. Any article that claims otherwise would be inventing a scandal on top of a real one.

Why trust brands cannot buy back belief

Speed is a legitimate strategy. For most companies, it is the right one. For a privacy company, it is the wrong one when it comes at the cost of visible caution. Proton’s users are not buying features. They are buying restraint. They pay precisely because they believe someone will choose the slow, careful option when nobody is watching. The moment a privacy CEO treats security review as an obstacle to velocity, he tells customers the product is now just another app with a privacy logo on it.

That is why the walk-back only half works. Cancelling the re-interviews removes the most threatening detail. It does not answer the deeper question, which is whether security review still slows anything down at Proton. Yen’s own words at the all hands suggest it will not slow much. He is still going to push. Customers heard both halves of that message. The first half sounded like an apology. The second sounded like a warning.

Proton’s spokesperson did not dispute the 29 October reporting, according to 404 Media. The company is not contesting the quotes. It is contesting the interpretation, and interpretation is exactly what customers buy from a trust brand.

What founders should steal from this

If your brand is trust, your internal culture is your product. One leaked message can do what no competitor could. Therefore, founders in trust businesses should set one rule that survives every revenue miss: security review is never the thing you cut when you are behind. Write it down. Enforce it in public. Make it boring, because boring is what trust looks like from the outside.

In addition, assume your internal messages will eventually leak. So write every Slack message as if your best customer will read it. Your internal voice is your real brand statement.

Proton built its name by being the company that would not compromise. The question now is whether it can still say that with a straight face, or whether its users have already answered it by leaving. The walk-back bought time. It did not buy back belief. Only a visible return to caution will do that, and caution is the one thing Yen has so far refused to promise.

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For example, the market reaction tells you how seriously investors took the story. Shares fell as much as 20% to 52.11 rupees, the day’s lower circuit. However, they recovered to close at 57.17 rupees, down 12.2%. The fall came on a day the bank reported its highest ever quarterly profit. That profit was 218 crore rupees (2.18 billion rupees, about $22.9 million). In addition, total business crossed 1 lakh crore rupees (1 trillion rupees) in the September quarter. A record quarter did not save the CEO. Instead, a story did what numbers could not.

The market reaction and the perceived conflict

Vasudevan led Equitas since it began as a microfinance institution in 2007. In addition, he oversaw its conversion to a small finance bank in 2016. In other words, a small finance bank is a lender that serves people and small businesses underserved by mainstream banks. He spent two decades at the lender, after two decades at Cholamandalam, and built it from microloans into a listed bank.

The perceived conflict, stated fairly, is this. His daughter, Varshini Vasudevan Pathangi, co-founded Unico Housing Finance, an unlisted non-bank lender, in 2023. In fact, a non-bank lender, or NBFC, lends money but does not hold a banking licence. Vasudevan says the arrangement was disclosed to the bank’s board and to the Reserve Bank of India, India’s central bank. Furthermore, he says the bank had no dealings with Unico beyond one short-term deposit. That deposit was made about two and a half years ago and repaid at maturity. Moreover, he maintains there was no real conflict, and that the arrangement sits within the Banking Regulation Act.

In investor meetings over the past three years, he was repeatedly asked about the perceived conflict. He explained the disclosure, the single deposit, the regulatory position. However, the perception persisted. In his resignation letter he wrote: “Sometimes perceptions are stronger than reality.” In addition, investors had told him the “overhang” was causing the shares to underperform. Per media reports, the Reserve Bank had earlier this year asked the bank’s board about the relationship. This happened when his tenure was being extended. However, Vasudevan himself told BusinessLine that “the regulator is not in the picture at all.”

What the Equitas CEO resignation teaches founders

Founders treat disclosure as the fix for a conflict. It is not. In fact, disclosure tells people the facts. However, it does nothing about what they believe. Once a narrative attaches to a leader, every explanation sounds like a defence. As a result, the cost of staying eventually exceeds the cost of leaving. For example, Vasudevan chose exit, and that choice is the warning. Therefore, if you wait until investors tell you the overhang is hurting the stock, you have already lost the argument.

The board has asked Vasudevan to stay until a successor is found. In addition, it has asked its nomination and remuneration committee to identify internal and external candidates. Furthermore, any appointment will require Reserve Bank approval. This is not his first attempted exit. In 2022 he planned to step down to pursue philanthropy. However, the board talked him out of it. The difference between the two exits is the lesson. The first time he wanted to go. The second time the market wanted him gone.

What founders should do

Map every family, friendship and side venture overlap before investors do. Build real separation instead of relying on transparency alone: recusal from related decisions, independent oversight, or a clean break. If an overlap survives three investor meetings, treat it as a governance problem, not a communications problem. Transparency tells the truth. However, structure changes what people can believe.

Vasudevan built a bank over nearly two decades and left it at a record profit. He left not because he did something wrong, but because he could not kill a story. That is the part founders should remember. You do not lose your company the day you do something wrong. Instead, you lose it the day people stop believing the explanation.

Sources and further reading: Reuters: India’s Equitas Bank tanks after CEO steps down over conflict of interest. Hindu BusinessLine: Equitas SFB MD & CEO P N Vasudevan resigns citing perception of conflict of interest. Market data: EQUITASBNK.NS. More from CEO Medium: CEOs, Leadership & Management. Bausch + Lomb’s CEO Is Out, Nobody Will Say Why, and Forecasts Just Went Up. Lindt Fired Its CEO and Called Back the Old One. The Board Should Be Next.

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The DoorDash Instacart deal is about Walmart, not groceries

Start with the numbers that explain why two rivals would combine at all. Instacart’s market value was about $13 billion at Friday’s close, so a $17 billion valuation is a premium of roughly 30 percent. On Monday, Instacart shares finished 7.9 percent higher, while DoorDash shares fell 6.1 percent. Investors, in other words, think Instacart is getting a good price and DoorDash may be paying it.

The strategic logic is not groceries. It is Walmart and Amazon. Wedbush analysts wrote on Monday that a combination of strong restaurant delivery plus a marketplace of grocers “can be a critical combination against Walmart and Amazon in particular, who continue to push in this market”. EMarketer forecasts United States online grocery sales growth of 12.9 percent this year, with online sales accounting for 15.5 percent of overall grocery sales. Walmart leads those sales with 30.9 percent market share, ahead of Amazon at 23.6 percent, with Instacart and Kroger trailing both. Neither DoorDash nor Instacart can outmuscle those two alone. Together, they might.

Why now: Instacart is being squeezed

Instacart did not come to the table from strength. The Information reported last week that Instacart was exploring a sale, generating interest from DoorDash and Uber, and the Journal reported that discussions with Uber are no longer active. Bernstein analysts noted they were surprised at how quickly a possible deal was moving, and that their initial reading was that a deal was unlikely “considering it was [Instacart] approaching DASH/UBER and not vice versa”. Instacart went looking for a buyer. That matters.

The squeeze is visible in the trading. Instacart’s sales have grown more slowly than DoorDash over the past year, according to eMarketer analyst Zak Stambor, who warned that Instacart “risks getting squeezed between retailers building their own digital channels and larger platforms that can bundle grocery with other services, giving consumers more reasons to keep coming back”. That is the whole story in one sentence. A standalone grocery marketplace is a feature. A bundle of restaurants, groceries and retail, delivered by one network, is a habit. Instacart has the grocers. DoorDash has the network and the habit. Each has what the other lacks.

What the combination would actually do

Put the two businesses together and the shape is obvious. DoorDash, led by co-founder and chief executive Tony Xu, brings restaurant delivery, a vast courier network and a push into delivery of other goods from other retailers, plus autonomous delivery vehicles and purchases through ChatGPT. Instacart, run by chief executive Chris Rogers, brings an established grocery marketplace and deep retailer ties. Bernstein analysts called the joined companies an “indispensable solution”, while noting any deal would require some combination of debt, cash on hand or equity.

There are real questions underneath the enthusiasm. Wedbush flagged product and merchant overlap, and how the Instacart brand integrates into the broader acquirer’s brand. Those are the questions that kill mergers after the announcement, when two product teams discover they built the same thing twice. On regulation, Wedbush said it does not expect material pushback, given the strength of Amazon and Walmart in the market. That is a reasonable reading: a combined DoorDash and Instacart would still be chasing the two giants, not replacing them.

The founder lesson: bundle or be squeezed

Founders should read this deal as a warning about the endgame in platform markets. When the giants enter your category, a good single product stops being enough. Walmart built its own grocery delivery. Amazon built its own. The platforms that survive are the ones that bundle enough services that leaving costs the customer something. Instacart learned that a marketplace alone, however good, can be squeezed from both sides at once.

Tony Xu made the same point from the other side this week, talking about AI shopping agents. Agents can search, order and pay, he argued, but they cannot carry anything to a door. DoorDash owns the end to end job: getting an item to a customer in the condition they expect, on time, every time. That physical network is the moat, and it is the thing Instacart does not have. If this deal closes, the delivery industry will have consolidated from a handful of rivals into a genuine duopoly of scale against Walmart and Amazon. If it falls apart, Instacart will have advertised to the whole market that it is for sale, and the squeeze will only tighten. Either way, the standalone era of grocery delivery is over.

Related: Entrepreneurship and startups and Gently does it: how an AI-powered delivery firm is decentralizing logistics.

Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.

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That is a 44 point gap. It comes from Boston Consulting Group, not from one company’s HR blog. BCG surveyed 645 CEOs at companies with at least $100 million in revenue, plus 500 nonexecutive employees, for the second edition of its CEO Insomnia Index, released on October 14, 2026. The report is back in leadership feeds this weekend, and the reason is simple. Every founder is now running an AI transition, and this survey measures what that transition feels like from below.

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The CEO employee trust gap, in plain numbers

First, look at the AI numbers, because they are the sharpest part of the story. Four in ten employees say their CEO has not been transparent enough about how AI will affect their roles and careers. Yet only 15% of CEOs worry that their approach to AI could erode trust. One side is anxious. The other side does not know it should be.

Second, the gap is wider than AI alone. Nearly 70% of CEOs are confident employees trust them to prioritize employee well-being when they fund critical business priorities. Only 36% of employees agree. That is a gap of more than 30 points on a question that should be easy to get right: do you put people first when money gets tight?

Third, most CEOs do not seem worried at all. In fact, 58% say they are not concerned about rising employee disgruntlement, and many point to efforts they already have in place. Meanwhile, 60% say near-term pressures consume a disproportionate share of their time, up 3 points from the previous survey. In other words, leaders have less time to build trust at the exact moment trust matters most.

Trust is not soft. It is effort.

Here is the number that should change how founders talk about trust. Among employees whose trust in their CEO’s handling of AI grew, 50% are more willing to go above and beyond at work than they were three months ago. Among employees whose trust eroded, fewer than 10% say the same. That is a difference of more than 40 points.

So trust is not a vibe. It is discretionary effort, and discretionary effort is output. A team that believes its leader will tell the truth works harder on a hard change. A team that does not believe it conserves energy, waits, and watches.

Be careful with what this survey does and does not prove. BCG reports what CEOs and employees said about themselves. It does not prove that AI causes distrust, or that trust alone causes extra effort. However, the association is stark, and it points in one direction: people give more when they feel honestly led through change, and they give less when they feel managed around it.

This is not one survey

The BCG numbers do not stand alone. Glassdoor’s Worklife Trends 2026 finds senior leadership ratings down sharply since their pandemic peak, with only a slight recovery in 2025. In employee reviews, mentions of misalignment rose 149% and mentions of distrust rose 26%. That language matters. Misalignment means people no longer believe the plan. Distrust means they no longer believe the person explaining it.

Businessolver tells a similar story from the other side of the desk. In its 2026 State of Workplace Empathy research, 33% of CEOs now describe their own workplace culture as toxic, up 25 points in a year. Among employees, 40% say the same. Even more telling, workers in cultures they call toxic report far less AI training than workers in cultures they call empathetic: 33% versus 87%. So the trust problem and the AI readiness problem may be the same problem, wearing two labels.

Add one more BCG finding, because it explains why the gap persists. About a third of CEOs, 34%, say they have considered stepping down in the past six months. At the largest companies in the study, that figure rises to more than 40%. Leaders are tired, pressed for time, and still expected to narrate a transformation they have not finished deciding. Silence then feels easier than honesty. Unfortunately, silence reads as a plan the team is not supposed to see.

What teams actually need to hear

Most AI announcements fail in the same way. A CEO announces a transformation as if the announcement were the strategy. The team hears a transformation with no role map, no timeline, and no honest answer about headcount. Then everyone does the math in private, and the private math is always worse than the real plan.

What teams actually need is three sentences. First, what changes. Second, who it affects. Third, when they will hear more. For example: “We are testing AI tools in customer support this quarter. No support roles change before March, and we will share the results with the team before we decide anything.” That is not a promise you cannot keep. It is a timetable people can hold you to.

And when you genuinely have not decided, say so, with a date attached. BCG’s own advice makes the same point: when answers are uncertain, communicate more, not less, rather than leaving employees to fill the silence with their own assumptions. “We have not decided yet, and here is when you will know” builds more trust than silence, because it treats the team like adults.

What founders should do this week

Do not launch another engagement survey and call it a trust check. Instead, try a smaller, sharper exercise.

First, ask the team directly what would make them trust the direction more. Ask in writing, anonymously if needed, and ask about AI specifically: which roles, which timelines, which decisions feel unclear?

Second, publish what you heard. Not a summary that smooths the edges, but the actual themes, including the uncomfortable ones. People trust a leader who repeats back hard feedback far more than one who thanks them and moves on.

Third, name one AI decision you will explain before you make it. Pick something real, like how AI will change one workflow, or how you will judge whether a pilot worked. Then explain it before the decision lands, not after.

Finally, measure again in 30 days. Ask the same question, in the same words, and compare the answers. Trust grows when people see their feedback change something. It dies when feedback disappears into a deck.

For more on building a culture that can survive hard change, read Creating Brave Cultures Through Transformational Leadership (link above). For the brain science behind why uncertainty drains performance, see How to create a brain-friendly workplace culture (link above). Both point to the same lesson: people do their best work when they understand the change and believe the person leading it.

The bottom line for founders

The CEOs who close this gap will not be the ones with the best AI tools. Tools are now easy to buy. Instead, the winners will be the leaders whose teams believe them when they say what comes next.

That belief is earned in small, repeatable acts: a clear role map, a real timeline, an honest “we have not decided yet” with a date for the answer. Do those things, and the 44 point gap starts to close. Skip them, and no AI rollout will save you, because the people who must make it work have already stopped believing the plan.

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That contradiction is the story. Amodei is not a founder who stumbled into a valuation. He is a founder who warned, in plain language, that the technology his company builds could endanger humanity. However, he then filed to sell it to the public. The price would make Anthropic one of the most valuable companies on earth.

The Anthropic IPO filing in numbers

Anthropic submitted its S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, October 26, after filing confidentially in June. In addition, the filing puts hard figures on a company that private investors valued at $965 billion earlier this year.

Revenue in the first half of 2026 was $16.3 billion, up from $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025. The net loss over the same period was $80.7 billion, compared with a $13 billion loss a year earlier. Reports put the IPO raise at around $100 billion. That would eclipse the record set by SpaceX’s June offering. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has reportedly pointed to the week of November 16 as the target.

Anthropic is five years old. Amodei founded it with his sister Daniela after both left OpenAI. In addition, the company says its top customers are diversified. According to filing summaries, no single customer topped 10 percent of revenue in the first nine months of 2026.

Why Amodei’s warning matters more now

Weeks before the filing, Amodei argued for an industrywide slowdown on the most advanced models. He also called for independent safety evaluators embedded at the top labs. However, critics said the plan had conflicts of interest. The labs themselves would pay for their own scrutiny.

Founders should read the filing and the warning together, because that is how the market will read them. The warning gives Anthropic a moral frame no rival can copy cheaply. It says: we are the lab that tells you the danger. In turn, the IPO converts that frame into capital on a scale no private round could match. Whether that is principled or convenient is the debate the next month will settle. The debate itself is free marketing for the offering.

What founders should take from this

First, losses no longer disqualify a company from the biggest stage in capitalism. An $80.7 billion half-year loss is not a footnote in this filing. Meanwhile, it sits next to a growth curve so steep that investors must price 2027 and 2028, not 2026.

Second, a founder’s public position is now part of the prospectus. Therefore, investors, regulators, and rivals will quote Amodei’s safety stance back at him while Anthropic is public. Founders who take a public stand should assume it becomes a permanent part of their company’s story.

Third, timing is a weapon. Anthropic filed first among the frontier labs, ahead of OpenAI. Whoever lists first sets the terms of the conversation. Therefore, every lab that follows must match Anthropic’s numbers.

What to watch

No one has set the final valuation or offering price yet. However, the reported November 16 target week could move. OpenAI’s own expected debut means this is not a single IPO. In other words, it is the opening of a new public market for AI labs. In fact, Anthropic is writing the first prospectus.

Amodei built Anthropic on a promise that safety and capability could grow together. The Anthropic IPO is about to test whether investors believe that promise at $2 trillion. Founders watching should pay less attention to the valuation and more attention to the test. Ultimately, the result will set the price of ambition for every AI company that follows.

Featured image: Photo by Alex Knight on Pexels.

Related reading:

Entrepreneurship & Startups

Anthropic IPO Delayed to November: What the $2 Trillion Listing Means for Founders

Texas Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman Over ChatGPT Safety

Sources:

New York Post: Anthropic files for blockbuster IPO that could value AI giant at $2 trillion

KTVU / Associated Press: AI giant Anthropic files papers to sell shares to the public for 1st time

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