👋 Stay sharp today — you don’t want to get taken for a ride like the ~48.5k pounds of cheddar cheese worth $390k that was stolen by a con artist from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London.
🎧 On the pod:A look back at Nokia’s ahead-of-its-time “taco phone.”
NEWS FLASH
💰 What true leadership looks like: settling for a mere $30.6m raise. That’s the story over at Microsoft, where CEO Satya Nadella asked the board to reduce his $10.7m cash incentive, citing failings managing multiple cybersecurity breaches. Still, Nadella’s compensation package grew 63%, to a grand total of $79.1m, during the company’s most recent financial year. The optics aren’t ideal: Microsoft has laid off 2.5k+ employees this year.
🤖 Don’t ignore the AI warning labels: OpenAI’s transcription tool Whisper has a bit of a lying problem. Experts say the AI-powered feature frequently hallucinates, fabricating entire sentences when transcribing interviews and generating text. The untrustworthy tendency is more concerning given that Whisper is being used in medical centers to transcribe interactions between patients and doctors — despite OpenAI’s caution that the tool shouldn’t be used in “high-risk domains.”’
☕ Yemeni coffee houses are surging in popularity across the US. They’re in demand among younger Muslims who don’t drink, but also younger Americans in general looking for a social third space that’s open late, but isn’t a loud club. Qahwah House — a chain originating in Dearborn, Michigan, home to a large Arab American population — now has 19 locations across seven states with several more on the way.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Delta is suing CrowdStrike for breach of contract and negligence over the security software company’s summer outage. Per Delta, the event led to 7k flight cancellations, $380m in reduced revenue, and $170m in additional costs.
Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norway’s oil fund, knocked Europeans for lacking ambition, saying, “Americans just work harder.” The kicker? His team of lazy duds has amassed a market value of $1.6 trillion.
The FTC blocked an $8.5B merger between Tapestry (Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman) and Capri (Versace, Michael Kors, and Jimmy Choo), claiming it would have given the former a “dominant share of the ‘accessible luxury’ handbag market.”
BETTER TRENDSPOTTING
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Love at first site: Startups bring financial transparency to couples
While Gen Z might have earned itself a bad reputation for slacking in the workplace, today’s youths seem to have a solid grasp when it comes to their personal finances.
They’re also willing to stare some previously taboo topics in the face, with 47% of engaged or married millennials and 41% of Gen Zers saying they’ve signed prenups.
For tech-savvy generations raised on the internet, new startups are emerging to bring the prenup process online and make it easier:
HelloPrenup, which first pitched its online prenup platform on “Shark Tank,” grew sales 14k% over three years to $3m and a $22m valuation. The service, which starts at $600, lets couples create notarized, state-specific prenups online and consult lawyers.
First, which currently only serves customers in California, starts at ~$2.6k and includes a custom agreement and independent counsel for both parties.
Beyond money, the services can account for everything couples want to protect, including furry friends, a growing trend.
Investing in the future
It’s not just a prenup that young couples want assistance with — they’re looking for easier online solutions at all stages of a relationship.
Divorce.com offers a $2k “fully guided” divorce, with personalized documentation, court filing, and four mediation sessions.
Plenty is a membership service that lets couples share information on their investments, financial goals, and savings progress.
Honeydue is a free mobile app that helps couples track bank accounts, coordinate bills, and chat about their finances.
What’s causing the push for financial transparency?
Americans are waiting longer to get married and have more assets to protect by the time they do; many young people who witnessed their parents get divorced may be proceeding more carefully; and younger generations are more transparent about finances.
Winning a James Beard Foundation Award is a chef’s equivalent of winning an Oscar, but is it always a good thing? Tune in to find out how the coveted prize can transform a business — and an industry.
When it comes to marketing, there’s one big question that can reinvigorate your whole approach and jump-start your campaigns. Find out what you should be asking.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Average number of viewers who watched the Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the New York Yankees 6-3 in Game 1 of the World Series on Friday, the Fall Classic’s biggest audience since 2017.
The game’s viewership was 62% larger than last year’s World Series opener, a sigh of relief for broadcaster Fox, which hit even loftier numbers over the game’s final half hour: a peak of 17.8m viewers were watching around the time Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman hit a game-winning grand slam.
Not counted in that tally: the millions of fans watching in Japan. Thanks to Los Angeles’ star tandem of Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Japanese viewers significantly outnumbered Americans in watching earlier rounds of the MLB postseason — extra impressive as games are broadcast in Japan’s morning hours, America holds a 3x population edge, and y’know, the league is based in the US.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law, bolstering copyright protections for the internet age.
