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WeWork was once valued at 47 billion dollars. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2023, with reported liabilities of more than 18 billion dollars. The company that emerged needed an operator, not another visionary. It got one in John Santora, a 47 year veteran of real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield, who became chief executive in June 2024 as WeWork exited bankruptcy. He describes himself, as reported from the event, as a suit and tie, buttoned up real estate person. That description is the strategy.

The WeWork CEO John Santora turnaround in numbers

Speaking at Business Insider’s The Long Play event on 29 October, Santora laid out a recovery that would have sounded fanciful three years ago. WeWork has now reported eight quarters of EBITDA profitability. It is projecting a fourth consecutive quarter of cash flow success. Reported revenue for 2025 is roughly 2.3 billion dollars. Treat every one of those figures as reported, not audited. They come from event coverage, not from a WeWork financial statement. However, the direction is consistent across the coverage, and it points one way: a real estate business finally being run like a real estate business.

That last sentence is the twist. WeWork did not die because coworking was a bad idea. It died because a founder sold a real estate business as a consciousness raising movement, and nobody in charge knew how to run the underlying business. Offices still need leases, landlords, occupancy rates and margins. Vision does not pay rent. Discipline does.

Give and take: the whole playbook

The playbook has two halves, and both matter. The first half is the standard. Professional dress in shared spaces. A clear signal to landlords and members that adults are in charge again. The second half is the concession. One work from home day a week. No clock watching on arrival or departure times, as long as the work gets done and customers are happy. Santora reportedly even wears sneakers himself on Fridays. The dress code is not about suits. It is about signalling seriousness to the people who pay the bills.

This is why the give and take framing is load bearing. Standards without give feel like control, and staff will route around them. Flexibility without standards feels like drift, and customers will notice before managers do. Santora paired one visible standard with one genuine concession, and that pairing is what makes the standard stick. Compare it with the rigid five day mandates failing elsewhere, which buy attendance and lose goodwill. Compare it also with fully remote cultures drifting apart, which buy freedom and lose cohesion. WeWork’s version buys both, one day at a time.

In addition, the model answers the return to office debate with something rarer than a policy. It answers it with a trade. Employees accept a visible standard because they receive visible trust in return. Managers accept flexibility because they receive visible professionalism in return. That trade is easy to describe and hard to fake, which is exactly why it works as a signal.

Why discipline is the culture

Founders overrate vision and underrate operational discipline, and WeWork is the most expensive proof of that ever produced. Neumann sold a story. Santora runs a business. The difference shows up in the numbers above, but it also shows up in the building. A member walking into a WeWork today meets a company that looks like it takes its own business seriously. Three years ago, that was not a safe assumption.

Discipline is not the enemy of culture. It is what makes culture affordable. A company that cannot pay its landlords cannot protect any culture at all. Santora understood that sequence. First, make the business viable. Then, and only then, argue about what kind of workplace it should be. Most turnaround stories reverse that order, and most of them fail for it.

What founders should steal from this

Steal the pairing, not the dress code. One visible standard that says “we are serious”, paired with one genuine flexibility concession. The standard must be visible, because invisible standards change nothing. The concession must be genuine, because a fake concession breeds more cynicism than no concession at all. Together, they tell staff and customers the same story: this company keeps its promises in both directions.

WeWork’s next test is whether discipline survives success. The moment the company starts believing its own comeback story, it is back where its founder left it. Santora’s boring playbook works precisely because it refuses to be a story. It is a routine. Routines do not make headlines, but they do make payroll. For a company that once believed its own headlines all the way into bankruptcy, that is the most radical change of all.

The post WeWork’s Boring CEO Is Winning Where Its Visionary Founder Failed 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.

The post Proton Sold Privacy. Its CEO Just Called Caution Loser Thinking appeared first on CEO Medium.

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 four winners, Kate H. of Vermont, Yasmine B. of California, DeJanae P. of Texas and Harleen C. of New York, were selected from more than 6,000 applicants. Each receives a $45,000 grant and a full year of small business services from H&R Block experts. Beyond the four recipients, every applicant has been offered a $1,000 voucher toward H&R Block small business services, worth more than $6.3 million in total.

Kate H. founded BirdieBlue, which upcycles retired ski and snowboard gear into bags and accessories. Yasmine B. founded Hayati Goods, a modern Arabic food brand built around Palestinian za’atar spice blends. DeJanae P. founded Dotted, offering non-toxic feminine care products and a reproductive health app. Harleen C. founded Harleen Kauer, a size-inclusive, ethically produced Indo-Western fashion brand.

The women founders AI trust line

The survey numbers explain the line. 79% of the founders are already using or testing AI, and 77% expect it to help their business. But trust stops at the money. Founders said they trust AI for customer-facing tasks, not for financial projects, and just 7% trust AI for payroll. The survey was collected by Hello Alice from the programme’s applicants, so it reflects this group of founders rather than a random sample of all women founders.

That caution makes sense once you see how these founders started. 54% launched entirely on their own, with no mentor and no support network. Only 12% had a formal mentor when launching. One in five had no network of other entrepreneurs at all, and 15% did not know how to find a mentor. The gap is structural, not a lack of desire.

Capital is the sharpest edge. 79% want access to capital and funding connections, the single most requested form of support, and 62% want access to financial experts such as tax professionals and bookkeepers. Women receive just 2% of global venture funding, according to the World Economic Forum, cited in the release. Two thirds of the founders reported prior-year revenue under $100,000, and one third are pre-revenue or earning less than $25,000, even as 64% say their business is growing.

The AI industry keeps selling a future where software runs the whole business, and calls human oversight friction. These founders call it the business. When you have built with almost no support, you do not hand the vault keys to a chatbot. Every fully automated pitch that removes the human from money decisions is solving a problem founders do not have.

“Female small-business owners are growing, but too many are doing it without the capital, mentorship, and financial expertise they need to truly thrive,” said John Thompson, vice president of financial services and small business at H&R Block. “We go beyond funding, by providing the human support and professional services our research shows they want.”

What founders should do

Use AI to buy back hours. Keep a human in every money decision. And invest in one real mentor relationship before the next tool subscription. That order matters: tools first, trust second, and never the other way round.

The founders who survive will not be the ones with the most automation. They will be the ones who know exactly what to automate and what never to hand over. The announcement lands during National Women’s Small Business Month, and its lesson lasts longer than the month: AI is a tool, not a CFO.

Read more in our Women Founders & Leaders hub, and in related CEO Medium stories: Elizabeth Iorns Is Bringing Human Medicine to Dogs and Cats and Scaling a Product-Based Business Just Got Easier with The Product Boss.

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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.

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Why OpenAI Google chips matter more than another model launch

Forget model benchmarks for a moment. Who controls the hardware underneath the models increasingly decides the AI race. OpenAI now acts like a company that knows it cannot afford a single supplier. OpenAI is one of the largest buyers of Nvidia graphics processing units. The chips help it train models and run inference. Buying from Google does not replace that relationship. It gives OpenAI leverage inside it and a second source to point to in every negotiation. That also offers a hedge if supply tightens.

This is also not a cold start. Reuters reported in June 2025 that OpenAI had begun renting Google chips. In October 2026, OpenAI announced its top models would be sold through Google Cloud. Its exclusive distribution arrangement with Microsoft expired in April. The relationship has been deepening in plain sight for months. A chip purchase would be the next logical step, not a sudden reversal.

Rivals in search, partners in silicon

Google and OpenAI compete head on in chatbots and search. That is what makes this story strange and interesting at the same time. Google’s Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, have gained traction as an alternative to Nvidia’s market leading chips. Companies look for cheaper options and chips better suited to running models. Google began selling TPUs directly to some customers this year. Previously, it rented them only through its cloud.

OpenAI is not the only buyer testing that door. Oracle said on October 27 that it will begin offering Google’s TPUs for the first time. That came alongside an expanded Nvidia deal at multi gigawatt scale. It also came with new inference offerings from Cerebras and SambaNova. Oracle Cloud president Mahesh Thiagarajan put it plainly: “Different AI workloads have different compute needs.” That sentence is the whole market in miniature. Training still belongs mostly to Nvidia. Inference is the business of answering user prompts at scale. It is up for grabs, and Google wants a share of it.

Nvidia is not being dumped. It is being negotiated with

It would be wrong to read this as OpenAI breaking with Nvidia. The evidence supports diversification and leverage, not a divorce. Nvidia still dominates training. OpenAI still buys its GPUs at enormous scale. No source has suggested otherwise. What has changed is the assumption that one supplier is enough. When the biggest buyer in the market starts shopping elsewhere, every other buyer gets permission to do the same. Every supplier gets a warning.

Investors will get a fresh data point within hours. Alphabet reports quarterly results after the market closes on Wednesday, October 28. Attention will focus on whether heavy AI investment keeps driving cloud growth. Another very strong quarter looks likely for Google Cloud. Any comment on TPU sales or OpenAI will draw close attention. Microsoft reports the same evening. By Thursday morning, the market will have a much clearer picture. That picture will show whether the AI infrastructure boom is paying for itself.

The lesson for founders: audit your single point of failure

Here is the part that matters to readers who will never buy a chip. OpenAI, the most powerful AI company in the world, is diversifying its most critical input. So a startup with one vendor for its most critical input is far more exposed than it thinks. Models get copied in months. Chip supply, power contracts and compute access decide who ships and who waits.

Founders should do this audit now, before they need to. List the inputs your business cannot run without. For each one, ask what happens if the price doubles, the lead time triples, or the supplier changes its terms. Then find a second source while you still have negotiating power. Negotiating from weakness costs far more than a backup supplier ever will. The next great AI rivalry will not play out in model benchmarks. It will play out in foundries, power grids and procurement meetings. OpenAI just showed everyone which game it is playing.

Related: Leadership and management, Anthropic’s IPO filing, and Texas Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman Over ChatGPT Safety.

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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.

Photo by Tran Nhu Tuan on Pexels

The post 9 in 10 CEOs Think Their Team Trusts Them. Fewer Than Half Do. appeared first on CEO Medium.

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

The post Anthropic Just Filed for a $2 Trillion IPO. Its CEO Spent Weeks Warning About AI Risk. appeared first on CEO Medium.

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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).

The post Texas Sues OpenAI and Sam Altman Over ChatGPT Safety appeared first on CEO Medium.