👋 Good morning. If time feels like it’s standing still this morning, just be glad your workweek isn’t nine months long. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams weren’t so lucky after their one-week space jaunt on Boeing’s Starliner capsule turned into a nine-month stay at the International Space Station. Luckily, the two returned to Earth Tuesday — and are due for some major OOO time.
🚗 AI takes the wheel: Nvidia founder and CEO (and leather jacket connoisseur) Jensen Huang announced a partnership with General Motors, saying now is the time for autonomous vehicles. The collaboration will bring Nvidia’s AI infrastructure to the automaker to help it build its own custom AI systems, including robots, factories, and self-driving cars. Nvidia’s tech will let GM build digital twins of its factories and assembly lines to test out changes to production processes without disrupting its business. It’s just the latest auto news for Nvidia, which has supplied GPUs to companies like Tesla, Waymo, and Wayve.
📺 Macy’s is getting into the TV biz, and we don’t just mean its annual parade. The retail chain is creating a series based on Julie Satow’s book When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion. The show will follow women integral to the rise of department stores, or, as Macy’s CMO Sharon Otterman put it, “Women who understood the power of storytelling and branding long before it was a business strategy.” The series, which has yet to name a showrunner or cast, will include the story of Macy’s own Margaret Getchell, who reportedly created its star logo.
🍵 The tea: Engadget has revealed some juicy details from Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir about her time working at Facebook, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. The former director claims that Mark Zuckerberg built himself a safe room to protect himself from Zika while in Peru, that Sheryl Sandberg lied about nearly being a passenger aboard a fatal plane crash, and that Joel Kaplan — Meta’s current chief global affairs officer — did not know the location of various countries and frequently engaged in inappropriate behavior. A Meta spokesperson has called the book “false” and “defamatory.”
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Pebble creator Eric Migicovsky will ship two smartwatches this year under a new company, Core Devices, using Pebble’s open-source operating system. The first, Core 2 Duo, will ship for $149 in July. Fitbit acquired Pebble in 2016 for $23m, then shut it down.
Ooh la la: We see Delta’s Shake Shack meal and raise you Air France’s new PJs. Passengers flying in the airline’s La Première first-class cabin will receive complimentary loungewear from French designer Jacquemus, available in four sizes with a choice of two colors and necklines.
Purdue Pharmafiled a new bankruptcy plan for its $7.4B+ opioid settlement. The updated plan comes nine months after the company’s last attempt was stopped by the US Supreme Court for offering the Sackler family civil immunity from the thousands of opioid crisis lawsuits it faces.
FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM
That supplement meant to make you stronger, sharper, and just plain better is making the same promises to your co-worker.
But with completely different bodies and needs, does that make sense?
Bioniq doesn’t think so. That’s why the startup is using AI and blood biomarker data to create 10m+ unique supplement formulas based on age, weight, and lifestyle.
Intrigued? So are the company’s pro athlete backers.
It’s tough out there for app developers, at least according to RevenueCat’s 2025 State of Subscription Apps report.
The report, which analyzed data from 75k+ apps that use its tool kit, revealed that nearly 20% bring in $1k per month, while just 5% earn $10k per month, perArs Technica. Another stat to put this in perspective: The top 5% of apps generate over 400x more revenue than the bottom 25%.
RevenueCat’s report found that photo, video, and gaming apps are the most likely to hit $1k monthly revenue within two years, but shopping, travel, and utilities apps struggle. AI apps also grow quickly, but only those that are unique enough to stand out.
What’s an app developer to do?
The key to revenue growth is to attract paid subscribers. RevenueCat found apps fare better when they:
Immediately present their paywalls — 80% of trials occur on day one
Require users to pay or subscribe before using the app at all
Provide longer trials of 17-32 days
Offer cheaper annual plans, most of which retain 36% of users after one year, compared to higher-priced plans, which only retain 6.7%
However, maintaining those users is tricky when everything is a subscription, and consumers are experiencing subscription fatigue. Customers want to see immediate value or they’ll drop a subscription. Case in point: 30% of annual subscribers bail within the first month.
Developers can also…
… monetize with both subscriptions and other consumables or lifetime purchases — something 35% of the apps RevenueCat analyzed offer.
Examples include:
Extra lives or premium loot in gaming apps
In-game currency
“Super likes,” profile boosts, or extra swipes in dating apps
Premium and/or personalized features
Additional content
This may be irritating for customers who are tired of constant upsells and paying for stuff that was once free, yet apps that find ways to offer consistent value can make it big.
Many of the top-grossing apps globally are games with in-app purchases, but there are exceptions. Language-learning app Duolingo made $448m in revenue in 2024, while health tracker MyFitnessPal earned $164m and dating app Tinder pulled in a whopping $1B+.
Co-marketing and “pickle slut” friendship bracelets: How this startup brand outmarketed a stalling industry.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
The amount that job switchers increased their wages in January and February.
That’s compared to the 4.6% received by job stayers.
Those numbers seem really close… because they are. The salary difference between those staying in their roles and those switching jobs hit its lowest level in 10 years, perThe Wall Street Journal’s analysis of federal data.
Career guidance has long-advised workers to jump ship when looking for sizable salary bumps, but it seems sucking up to your boss — kidding, sort of — is actually the way to go.
This, along with mass layoffs and the rarity of high-paying roles, explains why the number of American workers quitting their jobs hit the lowest level since 2020 last year, with even fewer predicted to quit in 2025.
Seems like you might have to worry about that Q2 project, after all.
AROUND THE WEB
đź“… On this day: In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was established by the States General of the Netherlands to conduct trade activities in Asia.
“Succession” actor Jeremy Strong apparently jumped at the opportunity to have his picture taken by WikiPortraits at a NYC event last year. Photographer Jay Dixit, who took Strong’s photo, told 404 Media that most celebrities do.
Why, you ask? WikiPortraits, a group of volunteer paps supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, is on a mission to elevate the images in the public domain and replace the often busted headshots of public figures found on the online encyclopedia — Wikipedia photos tend to be unflattering since they’re typically unlicensed and not professionally shot — with high-quality license-free portraits. Since launching last year, the group has covered ~10 global star-studded events and taken 5k+ photos of celebrities looking their hottest.
Finally, someone is tackling the world’s real problems.
SHOWER THOUGHT
It’s entirely possible that two random people on the internet have had a friendly conversation on one forum and later an aggressive, hateful conversation on another, without ever knowing about their previous wholesome interaction.SOURCE
Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman, with help from Singdhi Sokpo and Kaylee Jenzen. Editing by: Ben “Tea sipper” Berkley.
