Figma’s CFO traces a rise from early-career finance hire to public-company executive, crediting luck, first-principles thinking and a willingness to grab the work no one else owned. The conversation widens into how finance leaders build trust, make bets in the AI era and prepare companies for the scrutiny of public markets long before an IPO.

Brendan Ballou argues that forced arbitration has become a private justice system, built by courts and terms of service that strip consumers and workers of meaningful recourse. The conversation links that quiet legal machinery to a broader crisis of corporate power, public corruption and the feeling that ordinary people are locked out of real accountability.

Neuroscientist and physician Mithu Storoni argues that in an AI-saturated workplace, human efficiency should be measured by the quality of ideas rather than the quantity of output. She explains how attention, creativity, learning, and even boredom follow distinct brain states that managers can better support through flexible schedules, protected focus time, and work designed around natural cognitive rhythms.

Casey Newton and Ella Marciano open a new Platformer series with survey data showing AI adoption is highest among managers and top earners, while junior workers and administrative staff remain more skeptical of its benefits. A later conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie argues that enterprise software will be remade by agents, but that most jobs will shift rather than disappear as human work moves to the harder, higher-value last mile.

Molly Graham talks with former Facebook executive and Sundial co-founder Julie Zhu about treating risk as a craft rather than a personality trait. Their conversation moves from everyday acts of candor and feedback to the manager’s job of creating trust, shared values, and enough safety for people to make bets and learn from being wrong.

Joanna Stern joins Nilay Patel to talk through a year of living with AI, the gap between flashy demos and useful products, and the privacy costs hidden inside convenience. The conversation also turns to her leap from The Wall Street Journal to her new venture, New Things, and what it takes to build an independent tech-media business around YouTube, newsletters and a mainstream audience.

Eric Ries argues that good companies rarely collapse because of competition; they are more often hollowed out by governance, incentives and financial pressure that turn success into a liability. Drawing on examples from Anthropic, Novo Nordisk, Cloudflare and Philip Morris’s disastrous purchase of Vectura, he makes the case that founders must build mission protection into both culture and corporate structure before it is too late.

A sprawling Friday news roundtable connects Anthropic’s massive compute deal with SpaceX, the OpenAI trial’s newly public text messages, and a wave of AI-era layoffs. Beneath the gossip and spectacle runs a sharper argument over whether the boom is driven by real product demand, IPO maneuvering, and a genuine rewiring of how companies operate.

Bruce Daisley talks with journalist Kate Murphy about the elusive chemistry of human connection, and what her research into synchrony suggests about teamwork, meetings and the limits of digital communication. Their exchange moves from the contagion of a single workplace "bad apple" to the rare colleague whose presence can steady a room.

Perplexity’s chief business officer argues that the industry’s rush toward agentic “super apps” is less a pivot than an attempt to monetize AI where it already matters most: work. The conversation weighs whether computer-controlling assistants are durable businesses or just the next novelty spike, and what it means to trust them with calendars, email, taxes, and the modern payroll budget.

Muriel Wilkins joins the Women at Work hosts for a practical conversation about communicating under stress, from knowing when you are too depleted or reactive to speak well to staying present, patient, and clear when the stakes are high. The discussion also turns to authentic appreciation, hard messages, and the difference between avoiding discomfort and finding steadiness in the middle of it.

ZenBusiness CEO John Kim lays out an internal AI marketplace where employees post “quests,” share reusable skills, and compete on token-consumption leaderboards to turn curiosity into company-wide adoption. The conversation argues that AI works best not as a mandate to move faster, but as a way for marketers, operators, and leaders to build joyful, bespoke tools that would never survive a normal roadmap.

MG Siegler and Alex Kantrowitz size up Apple’s unusually modest AI spending against the rest of Big Tech’s infrastructure binge, arguing that the company may be either prudently waiting out a commoditized market or dangerously ceding the future to rivals. They also trace the loosening Microsoft-OpenAI alliance and the murky reality of Stargate, where grand promises of owned infrastructure are giving way to outsourced capacity and financial improvisation.

Molly Graham talks with former Microsoft executive and Gates Foundation founding CEO Patty Stonecipher about the personal mission statement that has guided decades of career choices, from high-profile yeses to disciplined noes. Their conversation turns work into a question of values, asking how ambition, love, justice, learning and humor can shape a life rather than merely a résumé.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sketches a company trying to turn its ride-hailing app into a broader travel and services platform, while juggling the trade-offs of hotel booking, personal shopping, AI tools and autonomous vehicles. He argues that Uber’s edge lies not in flashy demos but in handling the messy, probabilistic real world where reservations fail, drivers cancel and logistics have to keep working.

A jumble of AI signals comes into focus as OpenAI’s user growth cools, cloud providers post blockbuster numbers, and the industry lurches from consumer hype toward enterprise agents. Alex Kantrowitz and Ranjan Roy weigh whether generative AI is becoming ordinary infrastructure, a shaky consumer business, or simply a market still too expensive and too euphoric to understand clearly.

The Vergecast turns Elon Musk’s OpenAI trial testimony into a case study in how power evaporates under cross-examination, then widens into a sharper critique of AI’s shaky consumer appeal and the tech industry’s habit of mistaking compulsion for affection. Along the way, the hosts tour Microsoft and OpenAI’s retreat from the AGI fantasy, Brendan Carr’s latest FCC overreach, and a pile of gadgets that may or may not deserve Nilay Patel’s attention.

A veteran product leader argues that the best chief product officers set direction, understand customers deeply and keep reallocating resources as technology and markets shift. The conversation ranges from navigating founder dynamics and office politics to making riskier AI bets, protecting time to think and building products around outcomes rather than buttons.

Nilay Patel and Nick Statt turn Decoder’s own mailbag into a defense of adversarial tech journalism, using the backlash to a bruising Superhuman interview to argue for tougher scrutiny of AI hype and executive spin. The conversation draws a sharp line between enterprise use cases that may be real and consumer products that still feel coercive, unconvincing, and culturally corrosive.

Stripe’s Emily Glassberg Sands sketches an internet where AI agents are becoming buyers, sellers and developers, forcing payments, fraud detection and software tooling to adapt to machine users. The conversation traces the surge in AI-company revenue, the rise of compute theft and free-trial abuse, and the new pricing and checkout systems emerging for an agent economy.