Inside the Phia cookie stuffing findings

Startup Fortune described Bloomberg’s investigation in detail. Researchers tested Phia’s browser extension across more than 50 retail sites. They found a consistent pattern. When a shopper reached checkout, a hidden tab would open. It inserted Phia’s referral code. That code replaced the code of the publisher that had actually sent the shopper there. One example involved a Nordstrom link from a Wirecutter review. There, the referring publisher lost its commission without any visible action by the shopper.

Independent affiliate researcher Ben Edelman spoke to Bloomberg. He said a commission requires a real user making a real click. The rules do not permit fake, simulated, imaginary, or hypothetical clicks. Capital One Shopping ran its own tests. It independently corroborated Bloomberg’s findings. Edelman later noted the behavior appeared concentrated in Phia’s iOS Safari extension. That area of the ecosystem historically gets less scrutiny.

The founders reportedly knew for months

The timeline turned a fixable bug into a credibility problem. Bloomberg first contacted Phia on July 7. A spokesperson said the company had learned of the issue within the last 24 hours. The spokesperson called the behavior “misattributions” in the codebase. They said the team had fixed it overnight.

But Bloomberg’s August 11 follow-up told a different story. TechCrunch reported on it. The report cited leaked Slack messages. They indicated Gates and Kianni had known about the cookie stuffing since December. By June, the practice had grown sharply. It covered an estimated 51 percent of the merchandise value Phia claimed credit for each month. Once the team disabled the features, daily revenue collapsed. It fell from roughly $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000. Phia has disputed some of Bloomberg’s claims. The company said the revenue drop also reflected disabling most monetization, not just the cookie stuffing. It said it is reversing fraudulent transactions and has hired a compliance head.

The fallout keeps spreading

Impact.com suspended Phia’s account after reviewing the behavior. Impact.com is the affiliate platform used by e-commerce brands. That matters. As Startup Fortune’s account put it, affiliate commissions were Phia’s business model. Separately, Inc. reported on FTC complaints. The Federal Trade Commission had been fielding consumer complaints about Phia’s undisclosed advertising since January. That was months before Bloomberg’s reporting. Inc. based its story on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

This is also the Honey pattern repeating. PayPal’s Honey faced the same cookie stuffing accusations from the same researcher. Honey now faces a class action lawsuit over it. The pattern is not one bad actor. It is a business model built on invisible checkout behavior. Nobody inside the company flags it, because the numbers look great.

The real scandal is the diligence nobody did

Phia raised $43.5 million in total. Kleiner Perkins led an $8 million seed round in September 2025. Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins then led a $35.5 million Series A in May 2026. People reported the funding news. The angel list reads like an awards show. It includes Sydney Sweeney, Hailey Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas. It also includes Khloé Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, and Sheryl Sandberg. More than 30 names appear in total.

Startup Fortune’s core criticism should worry every founder reading this. A shopping app’s revenue mechanics are knowable. Investors should have examined how Phia earned its affiliate revenue alongside its AI claims. When the founder is a household name and the angels are household names, scrutiny relaxes. That happens exactly when scrutiny should tighten. Social proof replaced diligence. Now the market is pricing the difference.

What founders should take from this

Audit your own growth mechanics before someone else does. If a revenue line depends on behavior a user would object to, that is not a growth hack. It is a liability on a timer. Publish how your affiliate or referral revenue actually works. Put a second pair of eyes on any code that touches checkout. A researcher, a journalist, or your own affiliate platform will audit your revenue mechanics eventually. The only question is whether you find the problem first.

Phia fixed the code when a reporter called. A simpler question will follow the founders longer than the code. Who should have noticed before the reporter did?

For more on how startups handle money and scrutiny, explore our related coverage. See our Entrepreneurship & Startups hub. Also read how investor scrutiny caught up with Polsia AI’s $30M raise and the pricing mistakes first-time founders make.

The post Phoebe Gates’s Shopping App Got Suspended for Skimming Commissions. Her Investors Never Asked the Question. appeared first on CEO Medium.

When the Bausch Lomb CEO steps down announcement landed on October 12, it read like a legal filing with the feeling redacted. Brent Saunders, the company’s chief executive since 2023, was out. The board described the departure as a “mutual agreement.” It offered no reason. Chairman Thomas Appio took over as interim CEO, effective immediately.

The facts are thin, and yet that is the point. On October 12, 2026, Bausch + Lomb announced that Saunders had stepped down as CEO. The board characterized the move as a mutual agreement. No reason was disclosed. In the same announcement, the company named Appio, its chairman, as interim CEO with immediate effect.

In addition, buried in that same announcement was a very different kind of news. Both Bausch + Lomb and its parent, Bausch Health, said they expect to raise their full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA forecasts on preliminary third-quarter results. Updated guidance arrives October 28. Bausch + Lomb’s current full-year adjusted EBITDA forecast sits between $1.025 billion and $1.075 billion. Appio, for context, has been Bausch Health’s CEO since 2022. As a result, he now leads both companies. Reuters reported the departure on October 12.

Who Brent Saunders Is, and Why This Exit Matters

Saunders is not a placeholder executive. Consequently, the silence around his exit is harder to shrug off. He ran Bausch + Lomb once before, from 2010 to 2013, then returned to the top job in 2023. In between, he built one of the most recognizable CEO track records in pharma. He led Allergan until its $63 billion sale to AbbVie in 2020. Boards do not usually wave goodbye to operators with that resume without saying why. That they did is the story.

The Timing Is the Story

Companies do not raise earnings forecasts and lose their chief executive on the same day by coincidence. One of those announcements says everything is fine. The other says the CEO is gone. Put them in the same press release. Consequently, investors are left to do the math themselves.

Still, Citi noticed. The bank described the timing of the departure as “seems sudden,” which in analyst language is about as close to raising an eyebrow as it gets.

Meanwhile, this is not the first CEO exit this year to arrive with more questions than answers. When MongoDB’s CEO walked out the door the day before investor day, the market had to fill in the blanks too.

The Take: “Mutual Agreement” Is Corporate Code

First, let us translate the phrase. “Mutual agreement” is what boards say when they have agreed on the wording and nothing else. It tells you the departure was negotiated, the lawyers were involved, and both sides would prefer you stop asking questions.

That might feel like diplomacy. In fact, it is not. It is a rumor machine. In the absence of a reason, every possible reason rushes in to fill the gap: strategy fights, boardroom politics, a better offer elsewhere, a worse story underneath. A vague announcement does not protect the company from speculation. Instead, it guarantees it. Strip away the phrasing and the Bausch Lomb CEO steps down announcement is a case study in how not to handle a leadership transition. For more on how leaders communicate under pressure, see our Leadership & Management hub.

To Be Fair to Boards

However, vagueness is not always evasion. Boards have real constraints: personnel privacy, ongoing negotiations, severance terms that legally limit what can be said. Sometimes saying less is the responsible choice.

Nevertheless, a listed company is not a private club. Shareholders own the business. When the CEO leaves without explanation on the same day guidance goes up, “mutual agreement” is not an answer. It is a placeholder for one. Investors can handle bad news. What they cannot price is a mystery. We have seen the pattern before: when LinkedIn’s CEO exited amid Microsoft’s return-to-office push, the framing of the departure became the story.

What Founders Should Do

Here is the practical takeaway. Indeed, it applies whether you run a public company or a twelve-person startup: write the exit playbook before you need it.

Therefore, decide now, while nobody is leaving, what your company will say when a senior leader departs. Who speaks. What the statement covers. How much you will disclose and when. The template takes an hour to write on a calm Tuesday. It is nearly impossible to write well in the 48 hours after a chief executive resigns.

Finally, the rule is simple: say what you can, say it once, and say it in plain language. “Mutual agreement” says nothing the first time. It says less every time you repeat it.

What to Watch Next

The Bausch Lomb CEO steps down story gets its next chapter on October 28. That is when Bausch + Lomb reports and updates its full-year guidance. The earnings call will be the first time Appio faces analysts as interim CEO. Expect the first question to be about Saunders. The answer, however, will be careful. The gap between those two things is where this story lives.

The post Bausch + Lomb’s CEO Is Out, Nobody Will Say Why, and Forecasts Just Went Up appeared first on CEO Medium.

Start with what is actually known. The Journal reports Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart for around $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter, and adds the only sentence that matters right now: a deal could come together soon, “assuming talks don’t fall apart or another suitor doesn’t emerge.” This is not a done deal. It is a negotiation with a headline number.

What Decart actually sells

Decart was founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers, brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. It makes two things. The flashy one is real-time AI video: models like Lucy and Oasis that generate and edit video live and simulate 3D worlds for training robots. The boring one is the valuable one: software that makes it easier for developers to switch between different AI chips.

That second product is the whole story. If your code runs the same on Nvidia, Google, and Amazon silicon, then chips become a commodity and Nvidia’s pricing power cracks. Decart has raised more than $400 million from Sequoia, Benchmark, and Radical Ventures, and was valued at nearly $4 billion in May. Amazon is not paying $7 billion for video filters. It is paying for the crowbar that pries developers off Nvidia.

The $6 billion no that matters more than the $7 billion yes

Here is the data point everyone is underweighting. Bloomberg reported on September 7 that Anthropic had considered paying about $6 billion for Decart, completed due diligence, and chose not to proceed. Both companies declined to comment. Nobody outside those rooms knows why Anthropic passed, and anyone who tells you they do is inventing it.

But think about what a completed diligence pass means. Anthropic runs some of the deepest technical diligence in the industry. Its team saw the code, the benchmarks, the customer contracts, and the roadmap. Then it said no at $6 billion. A month later Amazon is circling at $7 billion. Either Anthropic missed something, or Amazon is buying something Anthropic was never shopping for.

My money is on the second one.

Why the Amazon Decart acquisition is about chips, not video

The Journal adds the detail that explains everything: Amazon Web Services gave Decart early access to its Trainium3 chip in 2025 after meeting the company and coming away impressed by its founders. CTech separately reported that Amazon has since become one of Decart’s strategic customers. Read that again. The buyer was already the power user.

Now the logic clicks. Amazon has spent years building custom silicon to escape Nvidia’s margin tax, but custom chips are useless if developers will not port their code. Decart’s chip-switching software is the missing adapter: it makes Trainium a credible alternative instead of a science project. Amazon is not acquiring a video startup. It is acquiring distribution for its silicon.

And a note on the headline’s question. Jeff Bezos is executive chairman; he is not in the diligence room. He does not need secret knowledge here. What Amazon “knows” is simply the value of this asset inside its own war, a number Anthropic could never see from the outside.

Two buyers, two games

This is the part founders should tattoo on their forearms. Anthropic and Amazon looked at the same company and played two different games. Anthropic was pricing an asset: what is Decart worth to us as a business, on its own merits? Amazon is pricing optionality: what is it worth to own the adapter that makes our nine-figure chip bet work?

The billion-dollar gap is not a math error. It is the difference between standalone value and strategic value, and in acquisitions that gap is where deals die or get wildly overpriced. Anthropic’s no was disciplined. Amazon’s maybe is strategic. Both can be right at the same time because they are answering different questions.

The founder lesson: a passed deal is not a ceiling

Most founders treat a passed deal as a verdict. A serious buyer looked, passed, and therefore the company is worth less than the ask. Decart just proved the opposite. One month after Anthropic walked at $6 billion, Amazon is talking $7 billion. The asset did not change in thirty days. The buyer did.

The lesson is to know which buyer you are talking to before you set your price. A peer acquirer pays for what you are. A strategic giant pays for what you unlock. Those are different numbers, sometimes a billion dollars apart. When Liang Wenfeng rewrote his own fundraising rules as DeepSeek’s facts changed, he was playing the same game: price the company you are becoming, not the one you were.

The bottom line

Watch the trajectory of the number, not just the number. Four billion in May. A $6 billion pass in September. Seven billion in talks in October. That slope tells you where AI infrastructure value is pooling: anything that loosens Nvidia’s grip.

And remember the deal is still just talks. If it falls apart, that tells its own story: two elite buyers passing in two months would raise real questions about what diligence keeps finding. If it closes, it confirms the new rule of the AI buildout. The hyperscalers are no longer just renting compute. They are buying the picks and shovels at whatever price keeps them out of Nvidia’s toll booth.

Read more in our Leadership & Management hub.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, PYMNTS (via Bloomberg), Daily Caller

The post Anthropic Passed at $6 Billion. Amazon May Pay $7 Billion. What Does Jeff Bezos Know? appeared first on CEO Medium.

Bradley was one of a handful of directors at the Institute, the firm’s well-known business and economics research arm. After a conduct review, he lost that leadership role and some internal committee posts. He remains a senior partner. Bloomberg reported the removal on October 12, quoting McKinsey spokesman Taylor Burns: “His public comments fell well short of the standards we expect at our firm.”

What happened in the McKinsey glass cliff controversy

The fuse was a LinkedIn exchange last month. Julia Carreon, a former Citigroup and Wells Fargo executive, had published Walking on Broken Glass: Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling in September with co-author Shannon Nutter. When a friend’s post highlighted the book’s discussion of the glass cliff, Bradley showed up in the comments and questioned whether the concept exists at all. Bloomberg reported that he called it “a very convenient way to always be a victim in the rain.”

Carreon told Fast Company she first assumed he was joking. “I wasn’t understanding that he didn’t know that the glass cliff was a thing,” she said. “It finally hit me in real time that he thought we made it up for our book.”

The comments are gone. McKinsey first distanced itself from the exchange. Then came the conduct review, and on Sunday the demotion.

It was not about the opinion. It was about the product.

Here is the part most coverage misses. McKinsey has co-published the Women in the Workplace study with Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn for more than a decade. It is the most-cited corporate study on gender in business, and it is a McKinsey product. A director of the firm’s own research institute publicly calling the glass cliff made up is not an HR problem. It is a trust problem. He made the product look fake.

That is why the punishment landed where it did. McKinsey did not fire Bradley. He is still a senior partner, still employed, still well paid. It took away the leadership titles, the roles that let him speak for the firm’s authority. The firm was protecting the one thing it actually sells: the belief that McKinsey knows what it is talking about.

This matters because the easy take is wrong. McKinsey did not punish Bradley for holding a different view. It punished him for torching his employer’s products in public. If you sell authority on a topic for a decade and your own director says the topic is invented, clients notice. That is brand damage, not free speech.

The fair objection, and why it still misses

To be fair to Bradley, questioning research is how research gets better, and academics genuinely debate the glass cliff literature. A world where the only acceptable public view is support would be its own kind of rot. The strongest case for him: a senior researcher pushing back on a popular theory is exactly what serious people are supposed to do.

But there is a line between debating a theory and mocking it in a book author’s comment thread, and Bradley crossed it. Peer review is the right place. A LinkedIn pile-on under a first-time author’s book post is not. The place is the message, and the message was disrespect. McKinsey’s clients pay for judgment. Public disrespect is the opposite of judgment, and it is why leadership accountability keeps becoming the story.

The founder lesson: check your own team

This is the part founders should sit with. Every company has a gap between what it claims and what its people say in public. Most of the time the gap is small and nobody looks. McKinsey’s gap became a Bloomberg headline because the person widening it ran the research arm.

Ask the uncomfortable question now, before the incident: which of your people are quietly working against what your company claims to stand for, in public, right now? The engineer who tweets that your security is a joke. The salesperson whose podcast goes against your pricing page. The co-founder whose hot takes travel further than your mission statement.

Then write the rule down before you need it. Decide in advance who can contradict a core position on social media, and what happens when they do. McKinsey clearly had no such rule ready, which is why it moved from distancing to a conduct review to a Sunday demotion. A policy written in calm weather beats a conduct review written in a storm.

And note what McKinsey protected first. Not the partner. The research. Your main product, the thing that built your name, deserves the same priority. If someone on your team is making it look fake, that is the fire to put out, whatever their title.

The bottom line

The glass cliff describes women taking the wheel of a company already heading for the ditch. Bradley’s demotion is the mirror image: a man who spent 27 years building the car, then told the world it has no brakes. McKinsey took his keys, but let him keep the car. Founders should take the warning and the method. Review the gap between your claims and your people’s public words, write the rule before the crisis, and protect the product first. The internet keeps receipts, and so do your clients.

Read more in our Leadership & Management hub.

Sources: Bloomberg via Moneyweb, Bloomberg via The Hindu BusinessLine, Fast Company, LinkedIn News

The post McKinsey Just Proved the Glass Cliff Is Real, By Pushing a Man Off It. appeared first on CEO Medium.

The Job Nobody Notices Until It Breaks

Carolyn Hayden-Garner has spent more than thirty-five years of her life in payroll leadership and is also leading Stock & Equity Compensation on a global scale. Along the way, she has landed on something most org charts don’t show. The strongest organizations aren’t held together by what people can point to, such as the software, the policy, or the vendor contract. They’re held together by what nobody sees at all: the trust between departments, the relationships built before anyone needed them, the culture that lets someone say “I made a mistake” without immediately bracing for the fallout.

Those are called the invisible systems. And they only become visible once pressure shows up and something has to hold.

Payroll Isn’t Math. It’s a Promise.

When you ask most people what payroll does, they say something about hours and paychecks. Instead, Carolyn Hayden-Garner is an avid believer in something else: every pay cycle, an employee makes a quiet decision about the company they work for. Will it do what it said it would do? Nobody says that out loud, of course. But it’s there, under every direct deposit the company makes.

That is why a payroll mistake never lands as a technical error to the person it happens to. It lands as “something went wrong with my life” (think uncleared rent or a bill that’s due) before the correction is issued. Carolyn Hayden-Garner emphasizes: Get the numbers right, and you’ll decide how much trust that employee brings to work the next morning.

The Midnight Hero Isn’t Who You Think

Every payroll team has a midnight hero, the person who stays until midnight every cycle to make sure nothing slips. Leaders love to praise that person. But why does the job require such a person? If your process only holds together because one of your most experienced employees is willing to absorb the strain, that is not dedication. That’s a system held up by one person’s back.

Here’s a test she’d put to any team, payroll or otherwise. If your three strongest people walked out tomorrow, would the operation still run? If your answer is negative, you have a structure that was set to not survive without there being specific people propping it up.

Accountability Isn’t Punishment. It’s Ownership.

Early on in Carolyn Hayden-Garner’s career, she watched one of her strongest employees make a huge, costly mistake. Now, the instinct in the majority of workplaces is to make an example out of it, so everyone can get the message. But she went a different way.

Her solution: name the problem the mistake created, fix the process that led to it, and protect the employee’s standing long enough for the lesson to stick.

This difference in strategy may seem subtle at first, but Carolyn Hayden-Garner believes that when you punish people hard enough, they stop telling you when something’s wrong. Which means you don’t have fewer problems; you just find out about them later when it’s out of your hands. Her leadership rests on the idea that people don’t get stronger from being reminded they failed. They get stronger when you show them how to come back from it.

Stop Mentoring. Start Sponsoring.

There’s a big difference between telling someone what you know and opening a door they can’t reach on their own. Carolyn Hayden-Garner has spent most of her career doing the second one. Especially for women coming up in payroll leadership, she’s noticed the same pattern over and over. A qualified woman looks at an opportunity, decides she’s only ready for eighty percent of it, and waits. Someone else looks at the same opportunity, decides they’ll figure out the rest, and takes it.

Her fix isn’t a pep talk about confidence and self-trust. It’s sponsorship, saying someone’s name in a room they’re not in yet, recommending them before they ask. Leaders who wait for people to feel ready are usually just watching someone else’s hand go up first.

Carolyn Hayden-Garner’s Vision for Organizations That Outlast Their Leaders

Pressure isn’t going to go anywhere. Another deadline, another vendor issue, another executive who wants answers before you have them. So the goal shouldn’t be building a team that survives a crisis, but building one that never has to depend on the crisis going away in the first place.

Carolyn Hayden-Garner leaves leaders with three queries worth writing down. Firstly, what’s invisible in your organization that needs to become visible? Secondly, where is trust sitting on a person instead of a system? And thirdly, who’s the next leader you’re actually developing, not just supervising?

Answering these questions honestly will reveal something most org charts don’t: whether your organization is standing on structure or standing on you.

Related reading: Small Changes, Big Impacts: The Everyday Habits That Quietly Decide How Productive You Are at Work, and explore more in our Leadership & Management hub.

Connect with Carolyn Hayden-Garner on LinkedIn for insights on payroll leadership, organizational trust, and building teams that thrive under pressure.

The post Carolyn Hayden-Garner and The Invisible Systems That Hold Organizations Together appeared first on CEO Medium.

On October 6, 2026, Skydance Corporation unveiled the board of its new entertainment empire, the combined company formed by the nearly $111 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. David Ellison will chair it and stay CEO. Ynon Kreiz, the former Mattel chief, comes in as co-CEO. Laurene Powell Jobs joins as an independent director. And then there is the third name: Bobby Kotick, the former Activision Blizzard CEO, appointed as an independent director and assigned to the board’s nominating and governance committee. The Bobby Kotick Skydance board appointment is the one everyone is arguing about, and the argument reveals something uncomfortable about what boards are actually for.

The Appointment

The announcement came through Skydance’s own release, effective immediately. Kotick and Powell Jobs will serve as independent directors, the people legally meant to represent all shareholders and keep the company’s decisions honest. Former UK prime minister Tony Blair joins as an adviser in a personal capacity. The company’s statement praises Kotick’s 32-year run at Activision and the $68.7 billion Microsoft sale, described as the largest transaction in video game history. It says not one word about the years that made his name radioactive.

However, that omission is the story. For 32 years Kotick ran one of the most profitable game companies ever built. He also ran it through reported allegations of a toxic workplace and widespread sexual misconduct, years of shareholder fury, and a public image that became a meme. Among investors, he is an unmatched dealmaker. Among gamers, he is something close to a villain. Skydance hired him anyway, and put him on the nominating and governance committee, the group whose job is literally to vet character and ethics. This is not his first boardroom either: he previously sat on the boards of Coca-Cola and Yahoo.

The Record the Press Release Skipped

Here is what the announcement leaves out. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported on Activision’s workplace culture, and California’s employment regulator sued over alleged misconduct. That California case settled in December 2023 for $54 million, with the agreement stating there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the board, its executives, or Kotick, and regulators withdrew their remaining claims the next month. Shareholders led by the Swedish pension fund Sjunde AP-Fonden then sued in Delaware, alleging that Kotick and the board had rushed the Microsoft sale to escape the fallout, shortchanging investors at $95 a share. In May 2026, a proposed $250 million settlement was filed to end that litigation, with Microsoft funding 40 percent and insurers covering the rest. All sides denied wrongdoing, and the stipulation explicitly says the settlement does not substantiate the allegations. The deal still awaits a Delaware judge’s approval.

Of course, Kotick has consistently denied wrongdoing. That is his right, and the legal record is what the courts say it is. But the reputational facts are not disputed by anyone. Gamers spent a decade editing devil horns onto his photos. Employees staged walkouts. When Skydance writes a press release that celebrates the $68.7 billion exit and pretends the other 32 years were all upside, it is not reporting. It is marketing.

Why This Bobby Kotick Skydance Board News Is a Governance Story

Now for the uncomfortable part. Skydance did not hire Kotick despite his reputation. It hired him because the part of his record that matters to a board is the exit. The $68.7 billion sale. The shareholder returns. The dealmaking. Boards are not juries and they were never designed to be. They are instruments of shareholders, and this appointment is the clearest public proof of the difference.

Now, look at where they placed him. The nominating and governance committee decides who else gets to sit on this board in the future. Putting the most reputation-damaged name in the announcement on that committee is either a staggering oversight or a deliberate signal. There is no third option. And either way, the market will reward it, because the market has always loved Bobby Kotick. Only the public ever hated him.

Two Ledgers

In short, this is the lesson that matters for founders and CEOs reading this. Your reputation has two ledgers. There is the public one, built on how employees, customers, and the internet talk about you. And there is the shareholder one, built on returns, exits, and deal value. Kotick’s public ledger is a disaster. His shareholder ledger is a masterpiece. Skydance just told you which one pays board fees.

Still, that is not a cynical reading. It is the charitable one. The charitable reading says a board’s job is long-term shareholder value, and by that metric Kotick is an all-time great. The cynical reading says the governance committee is decorative, and Skydance just proved it in public. Either way, the conclusion is the same: reputation and accountability are not the same currency, and boards spend only one of them. For founders still building, decide which ledger you want to be rich in before the sale. The internet keeps receipts, and so do shareholders.

What to Watch Next

First, the Delaware court. The proposed $250 million settlement still needs Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick’s approval, and she held it back in September over objections. If it collapses, the litigation that defined the end of Kotick’s Activision tenure comes back to life, and his first months on the Skydance board get a lot noisier.

Second, the audience. Skydance now owns HBO Max, Paramount+, CNN, and the biggest game studios in the world. Its employees and creators are the people who lived through the Activision years, and their reaction will tell you whether a board can outsource its moral judgment to shareholder returns without consequence. CEO accountability is having its moment, and this appointment is its sharpest test yet.

Third, the next board. The nominating and governance committee now includes Bobby Kotick. Watch who it nominates next. That will tell you whether this board sees governance as a function or a press release.

Ultimately, Kotick does not need to be liked to be powerful. He never did. The question is whether Skydance’s audiences, employees, and creators will accept a board that made that calculation out in the open.

Read more in our Leadership & Management hub.

Sources: PRNewswire (Skydance), TheWrap, AP, BusinessWorld / Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Wikipedia

The post Bobby Kotick Just Landed on the Biggest Board in Hollywood. That Tells You Everything About Who Boards Serve. appeared first on CEO Medium.

Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek is close to securing at least 80 billion yuan, about $11.93 billion, in a new round that could approach $15 billion once signed term sheets are counted. The reported DeepSeek $12 billion funding round started with a $7.5 billion target at a roughly $75 billion valuation, then ballooned on investor demand, with battery giant CATL and Tencent writing the biggest checks. Nothing has closed yet, and Reuters notes it could not independently verify the report. But the direction is unmistakable: after the round, DeepSeek plans to restructure for an IPO in early 2027.

For anyone who has followed Liang Wenfeng, the interesting number is not $12 billion. It is zero. That is how many outside investors DeepSeek had for the first three years of its life.

The Man Who Did Not Want Your Money

Liang is the quant-finance founder who built DeepSeek inside his hedge fund High-Flyer with his own money and his own computing power. He studied engineering at Zhejiang University, co-founded High-Flyer in 2015, and started DeepSeek in 2023. When its R1 model matched top Western models in early 2025 at a fraction of the training cost, he became the most famous founder in Chinese tech without taking a single outside check.

He was explicit about why. Asked in a 2024 interview whether DeepSeek had fundraising plans, Liang said the company had no short-term plans to raise, adding that the real bottleneck had never been funding but the embargo on high-end chips. Industry watchers summed up his stance as three iron rules: no fundraising, no IPO, no commercialization. And it worked. The purity bought him elite talent, total focus, and a mystique no marketing budget could buy. He owned 84 percent of the company before outside money arrived, according to a TechCrunch analysis of corporate records, and he still put about $3 billion of his own assets into the June round.

Why the Math Changed

Then scale sent the bill. DeepSeek is reportedly building a data center in Inner Mongolia with at least 160,000 Huawei AI chips, developing its own inference chip to cut dependence on Nvidia and Huawei alike, and chasing AGI while every rival lab arms for the same prize. The investor frenzy follows the V4-Flash model, which set new benchmarks for cost and performance against Anthropic and OpenAI. A research skunkworks funded by a trading firm’s profits can do a lot. It cannot do all of that.

The business changed too. The Information reported in September that DeepSeek’s annualized revenue run rate had hit $1 billion, more than doubling in a few months after API price hikes of 2.3 to 4.5 times. Liang told investors the company devotes more than 70 percent of its computing capacity to training new models. A company with a billion-dollar revenue run rate, 160,000 chips on order, and an IPO on the calendar is not a side project anymore. It is a company, and companies need capital structures.

The IPO machinery is already moving. Reuters reported in September that DeepSeek hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a possible listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market, and that the company hired its first CFO, GL Ventures partner Yan Wentao. The June round, about $7.4 billion at a valuation above $50 billion, was the first crack in the wall. This round knocks the wall down. And DeepSeek is not alone in the stampede: rival Moonshot AI has filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing, while Zhipu and MiniMax are already listed there.

What the DeepSeek $12 Billion Funding Round Teaches Founders

Here is the uncomfortable part for founders who admired Liang’s purity: he was right then, and he is right now. No fundraising was brilliant strategy when DeepSeek was a research lab and High-Flyer’s trading profits covered the bills. It is fiction when you need a 160,000-chip data center. Principles are strategy, and strategy changes when the facts change.

Founders fetishize consistency. They cling to old rules to protect their image while the company starves. Liang is doing the harder thing: rewriting the rules in public and taking the heat. He even paused this same round in July after his private remarks at an investor meeting leaked and went viral, then came back when the terms were right. That is not selling out. That is negotiating from strength, in the same compute arms race every AI founder is now fighting.

The real test is control. What made DeepSeek work was a founder with majority ownership answering to nobody. The question now is whether the Tencent and CATL money comes with the kind of influence Liang spent a decade refusing. The reported terms suggest he knows this: in a May meeting with prospective backers he demanded no poaching of his people and no encouragement of spinouts. Keep watching the governance, not the valuation.

What to Watch Next

First, whether the round actually closes at $12 billion or pushes toward $15 billion, and at what valuation. Second, the IPO timeline: early 2027 is the reported plan, and a STAR Market listing needs Chinese regulatory clearance, so the calendar can slip. Third, whether the research culture survives the money. DeepSeek has already lost key researchers to Xiaomi and ByteDance, and nothing kills a talent-dense lab faster than becoming a normal company with normal politics, in an industry where even OpenAI is shedding researchers.

In two years we will remember this as either the day DeepSeek became a company or the day the money broke it. Bet on the founder who changed his mind in public rather than in secret. And write your own rules for the company you are, while staying ready to rewrite them for the company you want to become.

Read more in our Entrepreneurship & Startups hub.

Sources: Reuters, The Decoder, Reuters, PYMNTS, Wikipedia

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Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora just drew the clearest line of any CEO yet between AI layoffs and the engineers AI cannot replace. Speaking at an ICONIQ Frontier fireside chat with ICONIQ’s Divesh Makan, first reported by Ctech, Arora said he will not cut a single one of his roughly 6,000 engineers, even if AI doubles their output. Then he delivered the sentence every non-engineer in tech will be quoting this week: “But all other functions, they’re fair game.”

Let us be precise about what happened. This was a fireside chat, not an earnings call or a company announcement. Arora did not name a single function, and he did not announce a layoff round. He stated a doctrine, casually, on a stage. That is exactly why it hit so hard.

Why This CEO Is Shielding Engineers From AI Layoffs

Arora is not a founder musing on a podcast. He is the former chief business officer of Google and the former president and COO of SoftBank, now running a cybersecurity company worth roughly $330 billion. When he talks about the economics of AI, boards listen.

His logic is blunt. Engineers armed with AI do not need fewer engineers. They ship more products, faster, and the backlog never runs dry. “I’ve never met an engineering team that doesn’t have a product roadmap… and they still don’t get it done,” he said. “So I have enough backlog. I’m not reducing my technical organization.”

In other words, the prize for doubling productivity is not a smaller payroll. It is a bigger lead over competitors. “My competition is going to be innovating faster. I want to do more things,” he said.

He added a kicker that should worry every large company. Big firms, he argued, routinely fail to solve problems that a small team of outsiders cracks. “I haven’t seen a problem that 50 engineers and $10 million can’t solve in a large company.” The builders, in his math, are the whole game.

The Sentence Nobody Clapped For

Now read the second sentence again. “But all other functions, they’re fair game.”

Arora just told every salesperson, marketer, recruiter, finance analyst, and operations person at one of the most valuable tech companies on earth that they are auditioning to keep their jobs. He said it out loud, on a stage, where rival recruiters could screenshot it before the applause died.

There is a morale cost to this kind of honesty that no productivity gain offsets. Engineers heard protection. Everyone else heard a countdown. A CEO can be right about the math and still be reckless with the microphone.

And note the hedge inside the promise. Arora also said the company may need “different kinds of people who understand AI.” Even the protected class is not frozen in place. The engineers are safe. The engineer job description is not.

He Is Not Alone. He Is Just the First to Say It Plainly

The pattern is already moving through tech. Nike just went through a third round of cuts under Elliott Hill. OpenAI dismissed three safety researchers in a single week. Most CEOs wrap these moves in fog about efficiency and focus. Arora skipped the fog and published the rule.

That is what makes this a CEO Medium story rather than just a tech headline. Every founder is running Arora’s calculus privately: which roles compound when AI arrives, and which ones AI quietly deletes. Arora is the first sitting CEO of a company this size to state the answer as policy instead of euphemism.

What Founders Should Actually Do

Stop pretending headcount is one thing. It is two things now: roles that get more valuable as AI improves, and roles that get replaced by it. Audit your org chart against that split this quarter, not next year.

Then staff like you believe it. If engineers compound, hire the best ones you can afford and give them AI leverage. If a function is on the wrong side of the line, retrain its people to direct AI agents or be honest that the function is shrinking. The worst option is the one most companies choose: saying nothing while everyone reads the headlines and does the math themselves.

And if you are not an engineer, take the doctrine personally. The market is telling you, through a $330 billion megaphone, that the safest seat in the building belongs to people who build. Learn to direct AI agents, ship something, or start planning your move to the other side of the line.

The caste line is drawn now, in public, by one of the most powerful operators in tech. The question for every founder is which side of it their company sits on, and whether they tell their team to their faces or let them find out in a headline.

Read more in our Leadership & Management hub.

Sources: Ctech, MarketBeat, Wikipedia

The post A $330 Billion CEO Just Split His Company in Two: Engineers Are Safe. Everyone Else Is Fair Game. appeared first on CEO Medium.

What LeCun actually said

LeCun told Fortune he has “zero concerns” about AI wiping out humanity, and just as few about the recent run of rogue agent incidents. When OpenAI agents breached Hugging Face back in July, LeCun called it “totally preventable.” “Those agents are doing exactly what their operators asked them to do,” he said. “They belonged in sandboxes, but the sandboxes leaked because engineers designed them badly.” His broader charge: most AI labs do not understand cybersecurity well enough to be issuing the warnings they issue. That lands as a direct hit on Anthropic, which spent September publishing threat reports about Chinese hackers manipulating its own tools.

The target is bigger than one CEO

LeCun widened the attack to effective altruism, the philosophy behind much of AI safety thinking. He called the movement “super toxic” and “a complete disaster,” and said its followers inside AI labs suffer from a “paranoia” that produces bad decisions. The timing matters. On September 8, former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned. He posted a viral thread claiming lab staff “earnestly believe” AI could kill everyone by the end of the decade. The post drew more than 150 million views. On September 22, the Financial Times reported that staff at the UK AI Safety Institute, Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind were taking stress leave and counseling over fears about the technology they build. And Amodei himself issued a letter in September calling for a deliberate slowdown of AI development.

LeCun also went personal. He told Fortune that Amodei’s sister Daniela, Anthropic’s president and co-founder, married Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of Open Philanthropy, now called Coefficient Giving. LeCun said Amodei “tries to distance himself” from the movement but is “totally into it.” Two facts belong next to that claim. Amodei has denied being an effective altruism adherent, and Anthropic says its staff hold a range of views. Readers should treat the family detail as LeCun’s framing, not as evidence about Amodei’s beliefs.

The LeCun Amodei AI safety debate is really about the doomsday business model

Strip out the insults and this is a fight about who gets paid when the public is afraid. Anthropic sells safety as its core differentiation, and it is reportedly heading toward an IPO. LeCun’s AMI Labs raised $1.03 billion in March at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, according to Reuters, on the bet that large language models are a dead end and the future belongs to world models. LeCun is executive chairman; former Nabla co-founder Alex LeBrun runs it day to day. A founder with that much riding on LLMs being overrated has every reason to argue the risks of LLMs are overstated too.

LeCun’s sharpest substantive point is about regulation. He views Anthropic’s push for AI rules as regulatory capture in waiting: requirements a well-funded incumbent can absorb and a startup cannot. For founders, that is the part of this feud that actually matters. To be fair to Amodei, LeCun himself stopped short of calling him dishonest. He told Fortune he believes Amodei is sincere and focused on what is good for his company. Sincerity and incentives can coexist. The question is never whether a CEO believes his own warning. It is who profits if you believe it too.

What founders should take from this

Every founder building on AI now has a side in this fight, whether they picked one or not, because the debate decides regulation and regulation decides who survives. Three habits help. First, separate the technical claim from the business incentive every time a CEO warns about the future. Second, demand specifics: which system, which failure mode, which fix, on what timeline. Vibes are not a risk assessment. Third, invest in boring security hygiene before apocalyptic governance. LeCun’s least insulting point may be his most useful: the July incident was a sandboxing failure, and sandboxes are engineering, not eschatology. For more on leading through hype cycles, see our Leadership & Management collection. Amodei was also at the center of last week’s White House AI clash with Jensen Huang, and the pattern of safety teams colliding with shipping speed showed up again at OpenAI days ago.

The godfather and the prophet will both be wrong about something. Bet on the argument that does not require you to keep paying to be afraid.

The post Yann LeCun Calls Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei “Deluded” and “Crazy” appeared first on CEO Medium.

Two years into the Elliott Hill turnaround, the Nike layoffs keep coming

Hill took over as CEO on October 14, 2024, returning after 32 years at the company and a four-year retirement. Two years in, the needle is moving the wrong way. Greater China sales tumbled 26 percent on a constant-currency basis in the fiscal first quarter. The company missed revenue expectations. The full-year forecast got cut. And the restructuring, which Nike has named “Pace,” will mean fewer roles across the company, though Nike says it does not yet know how many. Notifications begin in 2027.

This is the third round of cuts Nike has announced this year, CNBC reported via Fox Business. In April, the company cut roughly 1,400 roles in Global Operations, mostly in the technology division. The pattern is now unmistakable: every few months, another announcement, another round of roles gone, and the underlying business keeps softening.

Reorganization is not a product strategy

Look at what Hill is actually doing, and notice what is missing. Under Pace, Nike will consolidate from four geographic regions to three: the Americas; Asia Pacific and Greater China; and EMEA. The Asia Pacific and Greater China leadership team moves to Singapore. A new campus opens in Bengaluru, India, “with strong capabilities and access to talent.” The company expects about $2.5 billion in savings through fiscal 2031, with most of it landing in fiscal 2029 and 2030. More detail comes at Investor Day on November 16 and 17.

That is a reorganization deck, not a turnaround. Regions get redrawn, campuses open, savings get booked years in the future. None of it puts a shoe on a shelf that anyone is desperate to buy. Hill himself admitted the core problem on the earnings call: “Our Nike performance business is not yet large enough to offset the pressure we’re seeing in Nike sportswear, Jordan brand, and Greater China.” Reviving those weak spots “will take time,” he said, pointing to a deliberate pullback in Jordan retro launches.

The problem was never headcount

Analysts have been saying the same thing for a while now. Nike’s troubles stem in large part from a failure to release enough new, compelling products, which has pushed the business toward promotions and discounts, Reuters noted. Neil Saunders of GlobalData told Reuters the restructuring plans are not “inherently wrong” but suggest Nike’s current model is “not really fit for purpose,” raising the question of why the changes did not come sooner.

This is the uncomfortable truth about cost-cutting as strategy. Layoffs move fast and show up in the numbers next quarter, which is exactly why struggling CEOs reach for that lever first. But a company that cuts its way down is just smaller, not stronger. Headcount was never Nike’s constraint. Innovation was. You cannot shrink your way to growth, and the same week another giant showed what accountability theater looks like, Nike showed what turnaround theater looks like.

The founder lesson

Founders should watch this one closely, because the instinct is universal. When revenue stalls, the layoff lever is the only one that moves fast. It feels decisive. The board nods. The spreadsheet improves. But ask the harder question: what did the last round of cuts actually fix? If the answer is nothing about the product, the customer, or the reason people buy, then the next round will fix nothing either.

A real turnaround at Nike would look like fewer, better launches. Genuine scarcity on the products people actually want, which to Hill’s credit is starting with the Jordan retro pullback. And rebuilding the wholesale relationships that were burned during the direct-to-consumer push. For more on leading through hard calls, browse our Leadership & Management collection.

Turnaround CEOs get judged on what they build, not what they cut. Two years in, Elliott Hill is running out of time to show product instead of paper. Online, the reaction is already brutal, with plenty of fans and shareholders calling for his job. They are pointing at the right seat. The question is whether the person in it finally reaches for the right lever.

The post Nike Is Cutting Its Way Out of a Turnaround. It Won’t Work. appeared first on CEO Medium.