GeekWire

On this week’s show, we’re on the GeekWire deck for our annual founder open house, where we dig into Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs — including a major Xbox shakeup — and the surprising rise of hardware companies on the GeekWire 200. Then we sit down with four guests to talk about how AI is reshaping how they build: • Jana Schuster of StackIQ, whose AI-native platform helps companies find redundancy in their software spending — like Rocket Money, but for business — with a small team.

Ever since its founding, SpaceX has fixed upon a single idea: Elon Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars. Everything the company does is geared to that foundational goal. Two years ago, Musk posted on X that there could be a city on Mars within 20 years, “but for sure in 30.” “Civilization secured,” he added, implying that even if our troubled lives here on Earth come to some catastrophic end in the coming decades, don’t worry, humans will endure on Mars.

For the second time in the past 60 days, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has penned an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that takes direct aim at the state’s political leadership, calling Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson “inept” and noting that Gov. Bob Ferguson continues to “burden businesses with one tax increase after another.” Like GeekWire contributing columnist Charles Fitzgerald earlier this month, Schultz also points out that Gov.

Challenges, breakthroughs and big ideas in the race to protect our planet. SEE MORE British Columbia-based General Fusion on Friday completed its deal to become the first publicly traded fusion stock. The 24-year-old company is trying to harness the atom-smashing reactions that power the sun, aiming to create commercially viable amounts of electricity — a feat no one has yet accomplished. • General Fusion has closed its merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp.

Geek Life: Fun stories, memes, humor and other random items at the intersection of tech, science, business and culture. SEE MORE Seattle Seahawks head coach and self-professed football nerd Mike Macdonald just doesn’t understand why any coach or team would ignore the chance to lean into data and analytics. “Why wouldn’t we use the best information out there?” he said during an interview this week on the Dan Patrick Show.

Which is worse, sailing your superyacht through the city where your company just made mass job cuts, or getting named to a U.S. Federal Reserve panel on jobs and productivity three days after announcing thousands of layoffs? It might not be a full Zuck, but Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is getting lots of attention, and not in a good way, for the latter this week.

[Note: Armon Dadgar, a UW computer science alum, was co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation company that was founded in 2013, went public on the NASDAQ in 2021, and sold to IBM in 2025. In his role, he spoke with thousands of companies adopting cloud across a wide range of industries, giving him a unique perspective on technology adoption.] Pixar released WALL-E in June 2008, almost two weeks before Apple launched the App Store.

Commentary: The last couple of weeks have served as a capstone to what’s become a bad few years for the international video game industry. Now it appears the larger sector is headed directly into a significant crash, as several unsustainable practices all seem to be approaching a crisis point at once. The first and most obvious issue is the ongoing component shortage.

A federal court has turned down the Federal Trade Commission’s request to declare a rentals deal between Zillow and Redfin “presumptively unlawful” before trial next month. On Wednesday, July 8, Judge Anthony J.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Pulse Space says it has received a $40 million award from the U.S. Space Force to develop technologies for laser-based power beaming and orbital tracking systems. The startup, founded in 2022, is working on a system that would collect energy using solar arrays and send that energy via a laser beam to remote nodes in space. The technologies developed for the system could also be used to track objects in orbit and transmit data.