This Week in Tech (Week Ending May 9, 2025)
TL;DR - 🇺🇸new pope; ✨OpenAI will remain a nonprofit; 🤝M&A
Hey folks!
TGIF. Tech news below
TL;DR -
🇺🇸We’ve got ourselves an American pope! The first ever.
⭐️just kidding! OpenAI abandoned its for-profit conversion and will remain under the control of a nonprofit organization
🤝 Fair bit of M&A - including from 💰OpenAI / Windsurf (AI coding assistant)- OpenAI’s largest acquisition to date; Doordash / Deliveroo, and SevenRooms, a CRM software for restaurants and hotels; Datadog / Eppo, a feature-flagging and experimentation platform; ServiceNow / Data.World, a data catalog and governance startup.
💃 Met Gala ‘fits!
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🇮🇳🇵🇰India said that it had conducted strikes on Pakistan, two weeks after armed militants killed more than two dozen civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir. Pakistan, which confirmed five strikes, said in a statement that the attacks “will not go unanswered,” and military officials said they had begun a “measured but forceful” response.
🇺🇸We’ve got ourselves an American pope! The first ever. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, was elected as the 267th leader of the Catholic Church and is now now Pope Leo XIV.
That’s encouraging: The Fed held interest rates steady. Jerome Powell, the central bank’s chair, said the next step is “not at all clear.”
Let’s talk money and careers: Both tech and finance have vaulted millennials into their generation’s top 5% of household incomes, compared with baby boomers at similar ages in 1990. Millennial software developers and financial analysts are roughly 4x as likely to be in their generation’s top-earning 5% of households, compared with millennials overall. It’s a major difference from prior generations where doctors and lawyers were often the top of the earning pyramid.(but based on the # of layoffs this week, the money comes w some volatility…)
🌎Trending - Latam developer ecosystem: U.S. tech companies are increasingly hiring Latin American developers to support post-work training on LLMs, and Brazilian startup Revelo is taking advantage of this trend by supporting a talent network. The company says it’s seen a surge in demand for expert coders from clients like Oracle, Dell, and Intuit
🏡Homeownership: There are now 233 U.S. cities where a typical starter home costs at least $1 million — nearly triple the number from March 2020. Why it matters: It's a sharp reminder that homeownership is slipping further out of reach, especially for younger people. The median age of first-time buyers is pushing 40, the oldest on record.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
🍎 Apple is planning major upgrades to its iPhones in the coming years such as an ultrathin phone this fall, a foldable phone in 2026 with an eight-inch screen when open and at least one model in 2027 with an edge-to-edge display.
🍎 Apple is “actively looking at” adding AI search options to its Safari browser and has had discussions with the AI search provider Perplexity, an Apple executive testified on Wednesday during the Google search monopoly remedies trial.
📌Pinterest announced that it is rolling out a slew of new upgrades to its image search feature, which allows users to search by photo instead of text. These upgrades allow for better precision and refinement in image search and make it more accessible on the Pinterest website.
🇳🇬Meta and Nigeria are currently feuding. Nigeria has fined the company $290 million for regulatory breaches. Meta is threatening to pull the country's access to Facebook and Instagram.
The DOJ wants Google to sell two of its advertising products to help restore competition in ad tech: its ad exchange product, AdX, and its ad server for web publishers, DoubleClick for Publishers.
Will Musk also be mayor? Elon Musk’s SpaceX is getting its own company town after residents around the company’s launch site in Southern Texas voted to incorporate as a city. It’ll be named Starbase, and most of its residents are SpaceX employees.
🗺️Snap Map now has over 400 million monthly active users, cementing its status as one of the most used mobile maps globally. Gen Z (and, increasingly, Gen Alpha) relies on Snap Map not just to see where friends are, but to discover local events and trending spots.
🫧 Cute! Fizz is a new app from Instacart that is supposed to make it easier for people to shop for parties and events by allowing friends to collaborate on grocery carts together.
Mozilla earned $570 million in revenue last year, 85% of which came from Google as a result of a deal Mozilla has to share ad revenue from Google search queries coming via Mozilla’s Firefox browser. If Google were not able to pay Mozilla for search distribution—as the government has proposed as part of a broader remedy to fix Google’s illegal search monopoly—Mozilla’s revenue would drop “precipitously” because no other search firm could match Google’s payments.
👑Passing the crown: Warren Buffett has asked his board to replace him as CEO with his designated successor Greg Abel at the end of this year.
😬Trending - job uncertainty: Workers are anxious. The share of people talking about uncertainty on Glassdoor is up 80% since last year. Glassdoor's employee confidence index, which measures how positive workers are feeling about their employer's business outlook, is hovering at a record low.
Layoffs: CrowdStrike said it would lay off 5% of its workforce (~500 ppl). Google cut around 200 employees across its global business organization, the unit responsible for sales and partnerships. Match Group is laying off 13% of its staff, or about 325 employees, as it reorganizes to reduce costs.
🤖 AI News
⭐️just kidding! OpenAI abandoned its for-profit conversion and will remain under the control of a nonprofit organization
OpenAI has hired Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to oversee some parts of the company in a major leadership restructuring at the artificial intelligence firm. Simo’s role will be “CEO of applications” and that she will report to Altman.
More than 200 CEOs signed a letter urging state leaders to mandate AI and computer science classes as a high school graduation requirement. Why it matters: Taking just one high school computer science course boosts wages by 8 percentage points for all students, regardless of career path or whether they attend college.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
💰OpenAI finalized a deal to buy Windsurf (or Codeium, for those who remember the AI coding assistant’s former name) for a whopping $3B. It’d mark OpenAI’s largest acquisition to date
🛍️ Doordash went on a shopping spree and acquired U.K. rival Deliveroo for about $3.88 billion, giving it access to nine new markets in Europe, and it’s acquiring SevenRooms, a startup that provides CRM software to restaurants and hotels.
Datadog announced it acquired Eppo, a feature-flagging and experimentation platform. Datadog just acquired Metaplane a few weeks ago. Databricks is also in talks to acquire startup Neon, which rents access to a cloud database service that’s designed for AI agents and applications, for around $1 billion
ServiceNow announced its plans to acquire Data.World. The latter is a data catalog and governance startup that raised more than $130 million.
Employer.com has acquired MainStreet.com, making it the latest fintech to be purchased by a workforce management company. Employer.com says the merger would help “simplify business back office solutions” into a single platform
Skechers, the shoe company we all remember from high school, agreed to sell itself to the investment firm 3G Capital for $9.4 billion.
Fundraising
Cursor-maker Anysphere has reportedly raised $900 million at a $9 billion valuation.
Wonder, the food company that owns Grubhub and Blue Apron, has raised $600 million from investors, bringing its total money raised to more than $2 billion.
Recraft, the startup behind a mysterious image model that crushed OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney last year, has raised $30 million in a Series B round. Recraft says it builds its own models from scratch, and it excels at generating images for brands.
Partnerships
Apple is working with Anthropic to incorporate the AI startup’s Claude Sonnet model into the next version of its Xcode programming tool, in a move to help its internal developers write and edit code faster and more efficiently.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
music minimalism but amenity-rich: Some Gen Zers are “quitting” music as part of a broader movement toward abstention, digital minimalism, and intentional consumption. But their tastes are different for housing: Gen Z now makes up 47% of recent U.S. renters and they prioritize amenity-rich, design-forward apartment buildings that function like mini ecosystems, complete with coworking spaces, pools, and social lounges.
🎥 Summer films: this summer has the potential to be the biggest in the post-COVID era. My favs below - more here at the Summer Movie Guide
Mission Impossible - Final Reckoning - ‘nuff said!
Deep Cover - what happens when you combine improv comedy and an undercover cop? lol;
28 Years Later - the sequel to 28 days later;
Jurassic World Rebirth - A new era of “Jurassic” movies starts here. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey. Apparently the script reads “like a love letter to Spielberg’s early work”. 😍
Freakier Friday - Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are back as the body-swapping mother and daughter duo.
Honey Don’t - Margaret Qualley, Chris Evans, and Aubrey Plaza in an Ethan Coen movie? heck yea
The Met Gala happened Monday and the sartorial theme was “Tailored For You,” a very menswear-themed night. See all the ‘fits here.
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