Schmidt, the daughter of former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, called the outlet her life’s project when it launched in 2020. In September 2020 she said she would commit up to $60 million to it over the following decade. That figure needs care: it was a planned commitment, not confirmed spend, and one report notes she initially put in $6 million from a family trust. The outlet also drew grants from the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and Luminate. It never sold advertising or subscriptions. Its journalism reached more than 100 countries through a network of over 400 freelancers, and its reporting prompted real policy changes. None of that saved it.

What broke was distribution. Over the past 18 months, search and social referral traffic fell sharply. People inside the organisation point to two shifts: Meta deprioritising news links, and AI chatbots and answer engines satisfying questions without sending readers to publisher sites. Rest of World tried to reverse the decline. It refocused coverage on Western readers, leaned into regions like China, and introduced a reader registration requirement in June 2026. None of it stopped the fall.

The end of January 2027 date is a contingency, not a closed door. Schmidt has told donors the outlet has begun the search for a new institutional home, and talks with several large institutions are ongoing. No partner has been named and no deal has been announced. Deputy editor Rina Chandran has confirmed the plan publicly and says the newsroom will keep publishing through the end of January, with commissioned freelance work preserved and the site staying accessible. A merger or absorption remains possible. Until a deal lands, the wind-down date exists so staff receive exit packages and time to find new jobs if the talks fail.

The Rest of World Shutdown Is an Owned-Audience Story

Here is the lesson founders should take personally. Rest of World rented its audience from search engines and social feeds, and when the landlords changed the terms, the rent came due all at once. A publication with no subscription base and no advertising had no direct line to its readers when referral traffic collapsed. Its journalism was strong. Its distribution was borrowed. Borrowed distribution is not an audience; it is permission that can be revoked.

Every founder-led company faces the same arithmetic. Traffic you do not own can vanish on someone else’s product decision. A mailing list, a community, a direct relationship with customers: those survive an algorithm change. A feed ranking does not. The outlets and companies that endure the current shift are the ones that spent years building a direct line to the people they serve, before they needed it.

Rest of World also shows what a graceful reckoning looks like. It told donors and staff plainly, set a date that protects people, kept publishing, and is looking for a home for the work rather than simply switching the lights off. That is worth more respect than the usual startup postmortem. The warning is real, but so is the dignity of how it is being handled.

Founders reading this should ask one question this week: if search and social stopped sending you readers tomorrow, who would still find you? If the answer is no one, that is the problem to fix first, before the next product launch, the next funding round, or the next growth campaign. An audience you own is the only moat that does not depend on someone else’s roadmap.

Sources: Editor & Publisher and Dealroom. More from CEO Medium: Entrepreneurship & Startups and Leadership & Management.

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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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Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the 67-page petition in Collin County district court. It names Altman personally, not just the company. The claims run under two Texas laws: the Deceptive Trade Practices Consumer Protection Act and the SCOPE Act, which sets safety, privacy, and parental supervision duties for digital services minors can use.

What Texas alleges

The core claim is about marketing. Texas says OpenAI sold ChatGPT as safe and reliable while failing to protect users, especially children. The state says the company launched ChatGPT without adequate parental controls, robust age verification, or comprehensive safety testing, and failed to make sure its models were reliable before the public could use them.

The complaint’s list of alleged harms is severe, and every item in it is an allegation, not a court finding. Texas claims the chatbot aided mass shooters, encouraged vulnerable people toward suicide, publicly humiliated professionals, eroded users’ critical thinking, and addicted minors to a tool that, in the state’s words, feigns human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight. The state also says OpenAI collects private and sensitive information, including information about Texans’ health, finances, relationships, and children, often with the chatbot prompting users to provide it.

Paxton put the duty question bluntly in his office’s press release: ‘OpenAI has the responsibility to protect users and warn them of the many dangers of its platform.’

What Texas actually wants

The money is the smallest part. Texas seeks civil penalties of 10,000 dollars per violation, plus restitution and legal costs, with the petition classifying monetary relief above 1 million dollars without setting a final damages figure. The structural demands matter more. The state asks the court to block ChatGPT for minors, require adequate age verification, restrict features that encourage compulsive use, and require new AI models to pass a safety evaluation by an independent entity approved by the court before they reach users in Texas.

That last demand is the one the whole industry should read twice. A court-approved evaluator standing between a lab and its release is a different world from voluntary safety pledges. If Texas wins even part of this, every AI company’s launch calendar gains a gatekeeper it does not control.

Why now, and why Texas is not alone

Texas is the tenth state to sue. Eight bipartisan attorneys general filed separate lawsuits on October 14 over child safety and allegedly misleading claims about ChatGPT. Florida sued OpenAI in June over allegedly misleading the public about the chatbot’s harms. Together with Texas, that makes ten states suing. Paxton’s office has also sued or settled with Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Roblox over child safety in the past year. This is a pattern of enforcement, not a one-off filing.

OpenAI had not commented by press deadlines. Nothing in the complaint has been tested in court yet, and OpenAI will get its answer. Founders should still read the filing as a warning about the gap between what a product promises and what it does. Texas is arguing that the gap itself is the violation. The marketing page is now evidence.

The lesson for founders

Every founder writes two documents: the public promise and the internal numbers. Texas is now arguing that when those two disagree, the company pays. The question Moonshot answered voluntarily this same week, by publishing what it removed from its own model, is the question Texas is forcing on OpenAI in court. One lab chose restraint before release. The biggest lab in the field is being sued for allegedly not doing so. That contrast is the story of AI safety in 2026: the voluntary era is ending, and the courtroom era has begun.

For more on the leadership questions behind this story, explore CEO Medium’s leadership and management hub and entrepreneurship and startups hub, read Should AI Replace the CEO Instead of Workers? The Math Says Maybe, and read Moonshot Weakened Kimi on Purpose. That Is the Point.

Sources: Bloomberg Law, October 23, 2026; Privacy Daily, October 23, 2026; Texas Attorney General press release, October 23, 2026.

Featured image: Texas State Capitol oblique view by Daniel Mayer (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons).

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The numbers are the story. Moonshot removed cyber-related data from Kimi K3.1 Pro’s training corpus and reinforcement-learning environments while keeping its general coding skills. On the company’s internal benchmark for finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in a controlled setting, the score fell from 90.5 percent to 81.0 percent. That fall is the clearest public measure of Moonshot Kimi K3.1 Pro cyber capabilities after the cut. These are Moonshot’s own internal results and have not been independently verified. The model still beat its predecessor. Moonshot published the downgrade anyway, with a line that should embarrass every lab that talks about safety without showing its work: “We aim not to release open weights that would extend the absolute frontier of cyber capability.”

Moonshot Kimi K3.1 Pro cyber capabilities: why open weights change the stakes

A hosted model can be patched, restricted, or pulled. An open-weight release cannot. Once Kimi K3.1 Pro’s weights publish on November 4, Moonshot loses control over who uses them and how. Anyone can run them, strip the guardrails, and keep the powerful version forever. That irreversibility is exactly why this decision matters more than a similar promise from a closed lab. The only real safety decision happens before release, and most labs keep dodging it.

Kimi K3.1 Pro still ships as a frontier product. It runs at a 1-million-token context window, and a faster Highspeed version runs at two to three times the speed of the standard model. Moonshot did not kill its flagship. It proved a flagship can survive an honest downgrade.

Restraint as strategy, not sainthood

Do not mistake this for pure altruism. China proposed export controls last week that would ban exports of AI-driven malware-generation technology and restrict AI-assisted vulnerability-discovery tools. Moonshot is also under United States scrutiny and preparing for a Hong Kong listing. This is a founder navigating two governments at once, and choosing restraint as strategy. That context makes the decision more interesting, not less. It shows restraint can be a rational business call, not just a moral one.

Moonshot was founded in Beijing in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin. Yang Zhilin is chief executive. Its backers include Alibaba and Tencent.

The question for every other lab

The AI industry’s safety debate is mostly theatre because the costs are always deferred. Moonshot attached a number to its restraint and published it. If OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and the rest believe their own safety language, they should be willing to show the same math: what did you remove, how much capability did it cost, and what did you decide not to ship?

Founders should ask themselves the uncomfortable version of this question. Before launch, name the one capability you will not ship, even if it costs you a benchmark win. Write it down, tell your team, and tell your users. A safety principle you will not pay for is just marketing copy. The labs that refuse to try are telling you what they value more than safety: the scoreboard.

For more on the leadership questions behind this story, explore CEO Medium’s entrepreneurship and startups hub and leadership and management hub, and read Should AI Replace the CEO Instead of Workers? The Math Says Maybe, and read Texas Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman Over ChatGPT Safety.

Source: Reuters, October 24, 2026.

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Polymarket confirmed nothing publicly. A spokeswoman declined to comment to the New York Post, which broke the story, and sources say a separation agreement is being finalised. But the outline is clear enough: an internal probe, worried investors, a regulator circling, and a board that decided the company’s chief marketer had become its biggest liability.

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What the probe found

The trouble started with growth tactics. Reporting on the internal probe describes a campaign that ran from December 2025 to May 2026. Paid creators published 1,105 promotional videos as part of it. Creators filmed hundreds of the videos on replica websites built to look like Polymarket’s real platform. The videos showed about $1.9 million in simulated wagers presented as genuine action. One batch of 118 clips displayed nearly $900,000 in fabricated winnings. Placed for real, those bets would have lost more than $166,000. The campaign pulled in over 140 million views, and some creators never disclosed they were paid.

The Wall Street Journal exposed the staged videos in June. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission opened an investigation, which is ongoing, and no wrongdoing has been established. According to the Post’s sources, the company’s own lawyers had already told Modabber to stop the campaign. That was before any of it became public. The people paid to see the risk warned him internally. The campaign ran anyway.

The probe reportedly looked wider. More than $2.5 million in payments to creators ran through a personal PayPal account over thirteen months. At least $350,000 of it went to identified influencers, some of whose posts carried no sponsorship disclosure. Whatever the intention, money moving through a personal account is what governance failure looks like on paper.

Why the Polymarket CMO fired story is a governance story

Firing a CMO over a marketing scandal is routine. Firing your oldest friend is not, and by the Post’s account, Coplan nearly did not do it. Insiders say disciplining Modabber was always tricky because of the bond. They say an irate Coplan threatened to fire members of the legal team pushing for the termination. And they say he later accepted the split was best for the company.

The board’s patience ran out first. Polymarket is weighing a public listing, and investors have pushed for stronger financial controls. Directors concluded in recent weeks that Modabber was blocking the company’s attempt to shed its scrappy startup image. The August restructure of the marketing team, which brought in new leadership over him, now reads like the warning shot.

None of this required hindsight to see. A loyalist nobody can discipline is not a culture asset. He is an unpriced risk, and the bill arrives at the worst possible moment. In this case, a federal probe is open and IPO bankers are reading the coverage.

Trust is the product

There is a reason this scandal lands harder at Polymarket than it would at a normal consumer app. A prediction market sells one thing: prices people can believe. The odds are the product. Marketing that fabricates wins is not an aggressive growth tactic that went too far. It is counterfeiting inside a business whose entire value is that the numbers are real.

That is also why the comparison with ordinary startup hype does not hold. A meal kit company exaggerating its subscriber growth is cheating its investors. A market exaggerating its winners is cheating the market itself. And that market is seeking regulators’ blessing for a public listing. The CFTC probe will decide the legal questions, and it has established nothing so far. The board has already answered the governance question.

What founders should learn

Loyalty is not a management structure. The people who were there on day one need performance reviews, spending controls and someone who can tell them no, exactly like everyone hired later. If a co-founder or an old friend sits beyond discipline, you have not built a loyal team. You have built a blind spot with a title.

Second: marketing that cannot survive daylight is not marketing, it is liability with a media budget. If the tactic needs a replica website and undisclosed payments, the growth it produces borrows against the company’s credibility, at an interest rate regulators set.

And the hardest one: if your board has to force you to fire your friend, you have already failed at the part of the CEO job that a CEO cannot delegate. Coplan, at 28 one of the youngest billionaire founders in the country, built something genuinely new. The open question after this week is whether he learned the lesson, or simply lost a friend.

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On Wednesday, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state, the largest penalty the company has ever faced over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The number is enormous. The reasoning is worse. Judge Francis Mathew did not describe a rogue team or a policy slip. He described a plan.

What the Meta $25 billion fine actually says

A jury found in September that Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times. The violations misled users about how Meta handled their data. Each violation can carry a penalty of up to $5,000, which put the theoretical ceiling near $219 billion. Mathew set the figure at $25 billion.

The case reaches back to 2018. That year, Facebook disclosed that a personality quiz app had harvested data from as many as 87 million users. It fed the data to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy that built voter profiles for the 2016 Trump campaign. New Mexico sued in 2021. While 48 other states chose to settle their claims, New Mexico went to trial alone. It sat through two weeks of evidence, and won.

The judge also found that the misrepresentations went far beyond a marketing page or a help centre. They reached the most senior levels of the company. That includes chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Deception at the core of the business model

One sentence in the ruling is why this story belongs on a leadership page and not just a legal wire. Mathew wrote that Facebook’s misrepresentations about users’ control of their data “were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model,” part of “a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public.”

Read that as a founder. Courts fine companies for broken rules all the time, and companies pay and move on. This ruling says something different: that the gap between the promise and the practice was the product strategy. The promise was control. The practice was collection. The company told users they held the keys while it monetised what walked through the door.

That is the version of the story that should worry every operator. After all, most companies do a milder version of it. The privacy page says one thing. The growth dashboard rewards another. Nobody writes the deception down as strategy, which is exactly how it becomes one.

The trust gap has a market price

Every chief executive claims trust is the company’s most valuable asset. The claim is cheap. Trust is not a value on a wall. It is the distance between what you say and what you do. And the people who measure it cannot see inside your building.

Meta’s fine is simply the market price of a wide gap, calculated by a jury at $5,000 a violation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who brought the case, joked that the state may have “paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years,” and state officials say the money is dedicated to an education fund. Founders should hear the other side of the joke. The tuition is real. Whoever holds the company when the gap is finally measured pays it.

There is a practical discipline buried in this. Write the policies you could defend in a courtroom, not the ones that read well in a press release. Audit the distance between your public story and your data practices before a regulator does it for you. New Mexico has now published the playbook, and attorneys general in the other 49 states know how to read.

The appeal does not end the lesson

Meta says it will appeal, and the number may well shrink. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney called the ruling one that “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.” He argued that the lawsuit “seeks to impose a tax on speech.” The company may be right about the law. It is probably wrong about the lesson.

A penalty that a company can price in is not a deterrent; it is a licence fee. Meta has paid licence fees before, including a $5 billion federal settlement in 2019 over the same scandal. The uncomfortable question this verdict asks is whether $25 billion is finally large enough to change the internal maths. Or Meta absorbs it too, as the cost of doing business the way the business has always been done.

That question is not really about Meta. Every founder reading this runs a smaller version of the same calculation. How much daylight can exist between the story and the operation before someone with subpoena power measures it? New Mexico just showed the measuring instrument. The companies that survive it will be the ones that closed the gap while it was still cheap.

Photo: Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Start with the gap itself, because the numbers are stark. The US Food and Drug Administration approves fewer than 10 new drugs each year for companion animals. For people, the figure is more than 50. Yet dogs and cats develop many of the same diseases as their owners. Often, the same underlying biology drives them: cancers, heart disease, immune disorders and neurological conditions. When a pet gets sick today, veterinarians routinely reach for human medicines. They use them off-label. They do so without dosing or safety data for the species in front of them. The treatment exists. The evidence package does not. And nobody has owned the job of creating it.

A licensing model built on other people’s research

Familiar Therapeutics exists to own exactly that job. Elizabeth Iorns co-founded the company as chief executive. Dan Knox co-founded it as chief operating officer. The company licenses the veterinary rights to drugs with years of human research behind them. Then it leads the clinical development and manufacturing work. That work wins FDA approval for dogs and cats. Each programme starts partway down the road. As a result, the company believes it can move significantly faster than rivals. A new animal drug typically takes seven to ten years from scratch.

The lead programmes target conditions where owners currently have few real options. They include hemangiosarcoma, an aggressive cancer common in dogs. They also cover intervertebral disc disease. In addition, they cover respiratory disorders in flat-faced breeds and immune-mediated diseases. The seed money is earmarked for moving those lead programmes into clinical studies. It will also advance the wider pipeline, according to the company’s launch release.

What separates this launch from most seed announcements is how much has already happened. In its first five months, Familiar has built 13 programmes. They span oncology, neurology, cardiology, respiratory disease and immunology. It has signed several licensing agreements with pharmaceutical and biotech partners. It has also opened two investigational new animal drug files. Those files sit with the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine. In addition, it has filed a provisional patent. Its first clinical study is set to open this autumn. The University of Illinois Veterinary Teaching Hospital will host it. Most companies announce a seed round with a slide deck. In contrast, this one announced it with a pipeline, regulatory files and a teaching hospital.

The founder has done the unglamorous part before

Iorns is a cancer biologist by training, with a PhD in cancer biology. She ran into a version of this problem from the other side. As a young researcher, she struggled to find collaborators and suppliers. So in 2011, she co-founded Science Exchange with Knox. Science Exchange is a marketplace that let scientists outsource experiments to verified labs. The company went through Y Combinator. It also raised from investors including Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures. Iorns then led it through its acquisition in 2024. Knox ran operations there. In effect, Familiar is the same founding team. It points the same skill at a new market. It is building the trusted intermediary layer in a fragmented, specialist industry. In that industry, the science is strong and the infrastructure is weak.

Her framing of the mission is clinical rather than sentimental. “Our goal is to give vets proven, FDA-approved treatments that change the course of serious diseases in dogs and cats, where today they often have very few options,” Iorns said at the launch. Note what that sentence promises. It does not promise wellness apps or diagnostics dashboards. Instead, it promises approved drugs that change outcomes. It is the most regulated, slowest and most defensible corner of the pet economy. She chose it deliberately.

What the Familiar Therapeutics funding has to prove

None of this makes the next stage easy, and the risks are specific. Licensing cuts both ways. Familiar’s pipeline depends on pharmaceutical partners. Those partners must keep handing over veterinary rights to their compounds. It also depends on terms a seed-stage company can afford. Regulatory files are not approvals. The FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine will still require species-specific safety and efficacy data. It requires that data for every programme. Thirteen programmes in five months is an impressive rate of deal-making. However, it also spreads a small team across five therapeutic areas. That spread comes before any single programme has read out clinical results. The discipline question is whether the company sequences ruthlessly. The alternative is trying to run everything at once.

The market timing question

There is also a market timing question. Pet owners have shown, repeatedly, that they will pay for treatments. Those treatments extend a dog’s or cat’s life. Meanwhile, human drug pipelines keep producing compounds whose veterinary rights sit unused. Familiar’s bet is that the arbitrage between those two facts is wide enough to build a company on. The $5 million buys the first clinical studies. Those studies are the evidence that will make or break the next raise.

For founders, the transferable lesson is about second acts. Iorns and Knox did not chase a trend after their exit. Instead, they recycled a decade of pattern recognition. That pattern recognition covers how science actually gets bought, sold and delivered. Then they applied it to an adjacent market where the same friction existed. We make a related point in our piece on how much a founder should pay themselves in year one. Early-stage success usually comes from discipline about the unglamorous fundamentals, not from novelty. Familiar’s founders have swapped novelty for leverage. They are profiled alongside other operators in our Women Founders & Leaders hub.

The verdict on this seed round will not come from the announcement. It will come when the first Familiar study reads out at the University of Illinois. It will also come when the first licensed compound clears the FDA. That compound will clear it for a species it was never originally designed for. If that happens even once, the model stops being a curiosity. Instead, it becomes a template: a standing bridge between human medicine and the animals. Those animals share our homes and, increasingly, our diseases.

Photo: Nenad Stojkovic, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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CSL was, until recently, Australia’s most valuable listed company and a fixture in global growth portfolios. The past year stripped that status away. A run of earnings and revenue downgrades, followed by a plan to cut 3,000 jobs, triggered selloffs. As a result, those selloffs wiped billions of dollars from its market value. Former chief executive Paul McKenzie departed abruptly in February amid investor frustration over the falling share price. Gordon Naylor, a board member, has run the company on an interim basis ever since.

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The turnaround is already priced in

Here is the complication for any incoming chief executive: the recovery has started without her. CSL has forecast growth for fiscal 2027. In addition, its shares have more than doubled from the decade low they hit in June. Investors have, in effect, already paid for a turnaround that Waterhouse now has to deliver. If momentum stalls, she owns the disappointment anyway. The new leader inherits the expectations created by the rebound. Instead, she does not inherit the sympathy created by the fall.

Chair Brian McNamee set out the brief in February, when the search began. The next chief executive, he said, would need “the ability to continue the momentum of our commercial performance, renew our pipeline and simplify our operations without losing the science and purpose that built this great company.” Announcing the appointment, he argued Waterhouse has done each of those things more than once. “Deborah is an outstanding global leader with a proven ability to grow complex businesses,” he said. “The Board’s decision to appoint Deborah was unanimous.”

The CSL CEO Deborah Waterhouse record: thirty years at GSK

Waterhouse is no turnaround tourist. She joined GSK in 1996 and has spent three decades inside large, complicated pharma businesses. She ran GSK in Australia and New Zealand from 2008 to 2012. Then she ran its US vaccines business, then its US primary care business. She took the top job at ViiV Healthcare in 2017. GSK owns a majority of ViiV, with Shionogi as a shareholder. It is the world’s leading specialist HIV company. It recorded sales of £7.7 billion in GSK’s 2025 financial year. Alongside ViiV, she serves as president of GSK Global Health.

The ViiV tenure is the core of her case. HIV treatment is a market where standing still means losing. Older daily pills give way to long-acting medicines. Meanwhile, rivals circle every patent. McNamee credited her with renewing the franchise “by driving the development and commercialisation of the next generation of medicines to support patients.” In other words, she has already done the exact job CSL needs done. In practice, that job is to keep a mature, profitable drug business growing. It must grow while the business builds its next generation of products underneath it. She also brings board experience outside pharma. From 2019 to 2025, she was a non-executive director of Schroders. At Reckitt, she has been a non-executive director since July 2026.

A £1.5 million salary and a £7.71 million buyout

CSL disclosed the full contract. The numbers show how expensive it is to extract a sitting chief executive from a rival. Waterhouse will earn a base salary of £1.5 million a year. CSL sets her short-term incentive at 120 per cent of salary at target. The maximum is 240 per cent. Her long-term incentive starts at 250 per cent of salary at target, rising to 500 per cent. On top of that, CSL will hand her restricted stock units worth £7.71 million. Indeed, those units replace the GSK awards she forfeits by leaving. CSL will also hand her a further £1.65 million in performance shares. In short, those shares bridge the gap between her old and new incentive cycles.

The contract’s fine print

Two details in the fine print deserve attention. First, she will stay based in the United Kingdom. She will spend significant time in Australia, the United States and other major markets. A chief executive will run a Melbourne institution. In contrast, her home is on the other side of the world. The board is betting that it can schedule presence. Second, her contract bars her from any involvement in CSL’s Seqirus vaccines business until 31 March 2027. In fact, that bar is a legacy of her years competing against it at GSK. For her first two months in the job, one of CSL’s three divisions is formally off limits. Indeed, it is off limits to its own chief executive.

Waterhouse, for her part, leaned on an old connection to the city. “CSL is one of the great companies in our industry, and I saw what it means to Australia when I lived and worked in Melbourne,” she said. “The foundations are strong. My job is to continue the momentum and evolve the path into reliable growth for patients and shareholders.”

What this appointment says about boards in 2026

Read the pattern and a shift in boardroom taste becomes visible. When a share price collapses, boards no longer reach for a visionary with a transformation slogan. They reach for an operator who has run a comparable P&L, in a comparable regulatory regime, for a long time. Waterhouse’s entire career has been spent inside businesses that sell complex medicines to sophisticated buyers under heavy regulation. In short, there is no learning curve in this appointment, and that is precisely the point.

It is the mirror image of the decision we covered in the Lindt board story this week. In that decision, directors removed a chief executive and reached back for a predecessor. Boards on both sides of the world are making the same calculation. In a year of downgrades and activist pressure, familiarity beats novelty. The Lindt board wanted a known pair of hands from inside the building. The CSL board wanted a known pair of hands from inside the industry.

Why this appointment matters for women

For women watching the top of the corporate ladder, the appointment matters for a structural reason. Waterhouse did not get the job through a diversity initiative headline. She got it because she had spent nine years running a £7.7 billion business. Ultimately, that business maps almost exactly onto the vacancy. The pipeline argument has always been that women reach these roles when they are given the big operating jobs first. Her career is that argument, documented. More profiles like hers sit in our Women Founders & Leaders hub. The pattern across them is consistent. The route runs through revenue responsibility, held for years.

The tests arrive quickly. Seqirus returns to her remit at the end of March. The fiscal 2027 growth forecast has to be met, not managed down. And the simplification programme she inherits has to land. In particular, it includes those 3,000 job cuts. It has to land without hollowing out the science the board wants to protect. “The foundations are strong,” she said. By this time next year, investors will grade that sentence.

Photo: Sgroey, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Within hours, the interview stopped being about the tax code. It became about the man. Kirby collected $32.3 million in total compensation last year, 334 times what the airline paid its median employee. Every critic reached for the same two numbers, and in a credibility fight, numbers like that end the argument before it starts.

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The number that follows him into every room

The proxy statement is the document that haunts this story. United paid Kirby $32.28 million in total compensation for fiscal 2025. The package held a $1.2 million base salary and $22.6 million in stock awards. It also included $8 million in non-equity incentive pay and roughly $500,000 in other compensation. The same filing put the median United employee’s total compensation at $96,670. That is how the 334-to-1 ratio became the headline inside the headline.

Kirby did not build that ratio alone. United’s board set it, and shareholders approved the framework. Most of the package is stock that rises and falls with the share price. That is standard practice at any large airline. Nevertheless, it is beside the point once the chief executive starts using the word danger. FOX Business and Fortune both asked United how Kirby squares the package with his warning. They also asked whether he plans to reduce his own pay. The airline did not respond to either.

The Scott Kirby wealth tax argument, in his own words

Strip away the noise and the position is genuinely radical for a sitting Fortune 500 chief executive. Kirby argued that a wealth tax has to be national, because a state version would simply push rich residents across state lines. On inherited wealth he went further, backing inheritance taxes close to total confiscation above some level he did not define. He named no threshold and no rate, and he was not endorsing a specific bill. He was stating a principle.

On Wednesday, he returned to the subject on CNBC with a narrower frame: fairness. Workers pay income tax on every paycheck, he argued. Passive wealth, by contrast, can grow for a lifetime and never realize a taxable gain. It can then pass to heirs with a stepped-up cost basis that erases the tax bill. “That doesn’t feel fair to me,” he said. “It’s just a matter of fairness.” He also distanced himself from advocacy, noting that the Times had asked for a non-consensus view: “I’m not a politician, I’m not ever going to be in politics, nor am I a policy advocate for this or other programs.”

The backdrop is stark. Federal Reserve figures give the top 1 per cent of households 32.5 per cent of the nation’s net worth. That is up from 31.1 per cent a year earlier. The bottom half holds 2.3 per cent. Today’s federal estate tax tops out at 40 per cent above a $15 million per person exemption. An inheritance tax close to 100 per cent is a different system, not an adjustment. Kirby joins a short list of wealthy executives, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff among them, who have backed higher taxes on people like themselves. None of them put a number like 100 per cent on the table.

The pile-on was instant, and it was not really about tax policy

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry supplied the line the whole backlash now runs on. “How audacious from a guy that didn’t even build @united and makes $32 million a year,” he wrote on X. “If he feels that strongly he could simply cut a check.” He linked to the Treasury’s public donation account for the national debt, and closed with: “Let’s see you step up and place your money where your mouth is!”

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, skipped the policy and went for the product: “The WiFi didn’t work on my last two flights.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board dubbed it “Flying the Socialist Skies at United” and suggested more legroom instead. Some users, meanwhile, threatened to stop flying the airline.

The other side of the ledger is real too. The Guardian’s US Instagram post on the backlash drew about 11,000 likes and 350 comments. It was a sign that breaking ranks buys a constituency advertising cannot. His defenders add that he aimed the argument at a tax treatment, the stepped-up basis, that even many tax specialists find hard to defend.

The messenger is the argument

Kirby’s fairness point is arguable on the merits, and on CNBC he argued it well. But the debate never reached the merits, because a 334-to-1 pay ratio is a rebuttal the public can hold in one hand. A chief executive calls the wealth gap a danger to society while collecting $32.3 million a year. He is asking people to separate the message from the pay stub. They will not. They never do.

There is also a quieter point about boards. United’s directors approved every dollar of that package, knowing that blunt public positions are part of how Kirby leads. We made a version of this argument about the Lindt board this week. Directors own the consequences of the people and the packages they choose. If a board wants a populist chief executive, it should price the populism into the pay decision. And if Kirby believes concentrated wealth is the danger he describes, a remedy exists that needs no act of Congress. He can ask his board to restructure his own package tomorrow. Until he does, the lecture reads, fairly or not, as a prescription for a sacrifice he has not volunteered to make first.

What founders should take from this

Most founders will never be asked about tax policy on television, but the exposure is identical at every scale. The moment you take a public moral position, your own numbers become public evidence, and your critics will audit them faster and more gleefully than your supporters will. Pay, perks, layoffs: all of it gets read as the real text, with your statement as the footnote.

So pressure-test the stance against the spreadsheet before you publish either one. We have written before about how much a founder should pay themselves in year one. The discipline is the same at $32 million as at $120,000. Defend the number in the same breath as the principle. If the two cannot survive in the same sentence, one of them has to change.

Kirby, to his credit, did not retreat. He went on CNBC, restated the fairness case, and shrugged the whole episode off as one man’s view. And the attention only compounds: every angry post repeats his name, his airline and his argument. That is why the final judgement sits with United’s board. If bookings hold, this week becomes a case study in candor. If they do not, it becomes one in something else. For more on how we think about leading in public, see our Leadership & Management hub.

Photo: United Airlines, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Huang’s response was gracious, and it was also incomplete. He told security to go easy, promised to talk to the protesters later, and got on with his show. However, the question followed him out of the hall, because it was never really a question about one keynote. It was a question about whether the world’s most valuable company can control where its technology ends up.

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What the protesters actually demanded

The protest had two targets, and both were specific. First, the activists demanded answers on Nvidia components reportedly recovered from Russian drones and missiles used in Ukraine. Second, they attacked the environmental cost of the AI buildout. Greenpeace Germany has been building a case on that issue for months.

Greenpeace set out its asks in a press release around the protest. On the weapons question, it wants Nvidia to run independent audits of its global distributors. That way the company can show its products are not reaching military programmes. On climate, it wants Nvidia to extend its 100 per cent renewable energy commitment across the whole supply chain by 2030. That second demand carries a number. A Greenpeace study released in September found Nvidia’s disclosed Scope 3 emissions have risen 725 per cent since 2020. Those are the indirect emissions across its supply chain. Nvidia’s own operations already run on renewable power. But many of its manufacturing partners in East Asia still rely on fossil fuels.

In other words, this was not a random heckle. It was a prepared intervention with a policy list attached. The activists staged it at the one moment in the year when Nvidia’s chief executive could not avoid hearing it. The disruption itself lasted about a minute, according to MarketWatch’s report from the auditorium. The demands, by contrast, will last much longer.

The Jensen Huang keynote protest points at a very small chip

The hardware at the centre of this story is not one of Nvidia’s giant data centre processors. It is the Jetson Orin, a compact, consumer-grade computer module built for robotics and machine vision. Students, developers and startups buy it for beneficial applications. It sells in volumes that no export control regime can track piece by piece.

In August, Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence agency identified a Jetson Orin module inside a Russian S-71 Monochrome cruise missile. The munition uses the chip for autonomous targeting. The New York Times also reported similar Nvidia products in debris from Russian drones. Notably, the Ukrainian agency did not allege that Nvidia knowingly supplied Russia. The allegation is narrower and, for Nvidia, harder to shake. Its mass-market hardware is reaching a battlefield through resale chains it does not monitor.

Nvidia’s position has not changed since August. “Our Jetson Orin modules are consumer-grade products sold to students, developers, and startups for a wide range of beneficial applications,” the company told Tom’s Hardware, in a statement reported by Mezha. Nvidia did not design the modules for military use, and it does not sell them in Russia. The secondhand market makes final destinations hard to trace. All of that is probably true. Even so, it is increasingly beside the point, because the standard has moved. When a chip guides a missile, “we did not sell it to them” answers a legal question. The protesters were asking a leadership one.

Composure is a skill. It is not an answer.

By every account, Huang handled the interruption superbly. As security moved in, he told them, “It’s OK, go easy, give her a chance.” He added that “everybody has a chance to say something.” The crowd applauded. “All important issues,” he said, “but let me get through my keynote.” And then he did. He unveiled the DSX POD modular system for AI factories and the OpenShell platform for autonomous agents. He closed with a robot demo that briefly refused to follow his instructions.

That composure is a genuine executive skill. It is one reason Huang has become the public face of the AI era. We saw the same instinct in his White House clash with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. He conducted that fight in public without ever losing the room. He has also argued, in remarks we covered, that AI firms should get no regulatory waivers. That makes the Berlin moment more pointed, not less. A chief executive who rejects special pleading for his own industry should accept scrutiny of his own supply chain.

Meanwhile, the commercial machine barely noticed. Nvidia shares rose nearly 2 per cent in premarket trading after the keynote. Huang spent the Berlin trip telling European leaders to build their own AI economies. He told bankers that Nvidia chips hold their value so well they can serve as collateral for data centre debt. A day before the keynote, he told Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Europe cannot regulate its way to technological leadership. Coverage of the event summarised that line. The keynote, in short, is no longer a product launch. It is a political stage, and on a political stage, every unanswered question stays on the record.

What founders should take from this

Most founders will never face a banner at their own keynote. Nevertheless, the underlying exposure is the same at every scale. If your product can be resold, repurposed or embedded in something harmful, your distribution chain is part of your governance. That is true whether you planned it that way or not. Nvidia’s defence rests on not knowing where used Jetson modules end up. For a smaller company, not knowing is rarely a defence at all. It reads as a choice.

So the practical lessons are plain. Audit your distributors before someone audits them for you, and keep the paperwork. Write down, in advance, the answer you would give. Imagine someone shouting the hardest question about your product in a room full of cameras. And if you promise a conversation later, hold it, because the follow-up is what gets remembered. Huang’s promise to talk to the protesters was the graceful part of the story. What he says in that conversation is now the story itself. For more on how we think about leading through moments like this, see our Leadership & Management hub.

Photo: NVIDIA Taiwan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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