• Two AI startup founders said that they initially pretended to be AI to validate their product idea.
• Their viral LinkedIn post sparked debate over startup practices in Silicon Valley.
• "You can't fake it till you make it forever," said Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fieflies.ai.

Sam Udotong said he and Fireflies.ai cofounder Krish Ramineni manually took notes for over 100 meetings while pretending to be an AI bot called Fred.

The AI startup's story, posted to LinkedIn by Udotong, raised eyebrows over its "fake it till you make it" approach.

Udotong, CTO of Fireflies.ai, which built a product to automate note-taking for online meetings, wrote that the company's first batch of customers in 2017 were getting a human-run Fred.

The post soon went viral on LinkedIn, with nearly 3,000 reactions and hundreds of comments. While some applauded the founders for their approach, others raised questions.

Fireflies.ai is now valued at $1 billion, largely thanks to the rise of virtual meetings during the pandemic.

When Ramineni and Udotong came up with the concept of a meeting notetaker AI, their backs were "against the wall," Ramineni told Business Insider.

"So we said, we're down to our last bit of money, let's figure something out, but this time, before we write a line of code, let's make sure that we can actually validate it," said Ramineni, the CEO of Fireflies.ai. "And we had to pay rent, and SF is really expensive."

Ramineni was living off savings after a brief stint with Microsoft, and Udotong had never had a full time job. To validate their idea, Ramineni said, they reached out to some friends in the tech space and asked them if they would be willing to pay $100 a month for their meeting notes to be fully taken care of in 2017.

Ramineni said that he told those friends that there would be some human involvement and oversight, but did not specify that the process was actually entirely manual. Posing as an AI bot called Fred, the two founders said they joined meetings and took notes by hand, and they usually delivered the notes within a day.

"We had just enough money to pay for the rent where Sam was staying, and we found incredible demand," Ramineni told Business Insider.

Unlike an AI bot, the founders are humans who could not be omnipresent, and Ramineni said it took about a hundred such sessions for them to grow weary of back-to-back meetings and feel the constant stress about being double-booked.

Ramineni said that Fireflies.ai had not approached any investors until they were already working on the fully automated product, and there was no overlap between investment and the founders pretending to be AI.

By late 2018, the product development was full steam ahead, and they had stopped manually taking notes for customers. Ramineni said they were kept afloat by small checks from angel investors. At the end of 2019, Fireflies.ai was able to beta test its product and do live demos for institutional investors, allowing them to raise a seed fund of more than $4 million.

"We told them, actually, for the first couple of users, we sat down, took notes for them, and it helped us realize and understand what it means to do good notes," said Ramineni of the investors. "And then they were impressed with how we validated the problem first, and then we went and built the product."

The 'fake it till you make it' approach

Tim Weiss, a professor of management and entrepreneurship at Imperial College London, told Business Insider that Fireflies.ai's approach sounds like "pretotyping," which is a very common but "questionable" practice.

"Basically, you pretend you have a product to learn about how people engage with it before you build it," said Weiss. "This is something that is done at the very early stages of a startup to validate an idea, but of course not later on."

In other words, Fireflies.ai may have simply said the quiet part out loud.

The startup may have skimped on details with early customers, but it did not approach institutional investors until the company had a functioning product to show, the founders said.

Kevin Werbach, professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of Business, told Business Insider that, despite the risks, "fake it till you make it" is a "hallowed element" of tech startup culture.

"When done right, it's Steve Jobs' 'reality distortion field' and countless entrepreneurs that fudged on details to get the time or resources needed to make those claims real," said Werbach. "When done wrong, it's Elizabeth Holmes going to jail."

"Most situations are in the middle," Werbach added.

The "reality distortion field" is a term coined by Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, referring to his ability to convince himself and others that seemingly impossible tasks are achievable through the force of will.

According to the "Internet History Podcast," a show that documents the rise of technology that may seem commonplace right now, the iPhone was frequently failing when Jobs made a sleek demonstration of it back in 2007. Engineers determined a specific order of demo actions for Jobs to perform to prevent the phone from crashing, and hard-coded all the demo units to display five bars of cell strength.

Facebook's stand-alone personal assistant, called "M," which was shut down in 2018, was also powered by humans to answer the most complex queries, according to The Verge. The goal was that those humans would help train the AI. The product never made it past its private beta stage, The Verge reported.

Ramineni said that as of today, the AI in Fireflies has done over 2 billion meeting minutes and has taken notes for 20 million people, which would be about 4,000 years of meetings if calculated by an eight-hour workday.

"It's fair to have a lot of skepticism around AI, and I definitely do believe that you have to be transparent in that if you're raising funds, talking to investors, building the product," said Ramineni. "You can't fake it till you make it forever — that's not how it works."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amelia Christie-Miller, the 32-year-old founder and CEO of Bold Bean Co. She is from the UK and based in Barcelona. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When I founded Bold Bean Co. in 2021, I was working at a sustainability company in London and had become obsessed with the idea that beans could solve many of the world's problems.

I juggled my job and Bold Bean Co. for about a year before I went full-time with my business that fall.

Beans are so fundamental to soil health and our journey toward net zero, and from a diet perspective, they've just been completely overlooked in the West. Everyone's talking about gut health, fiber, and protein, and beans score highly in all three categories.

My mission was to make people obsessed with beans by giving them a really good quality bean.

I have 20 employees, and we're a remote-first business. I'm based in Barcelona, but I often go back to London, where I started the business (our products are only available in the UK). I have colleagues in Valencia and Edinburgh because I think people should be able to live wherever makes them happiest and most productive.

I work from home, unless I'm meeting one of my four team members who are also based in Barcelona. Here's what a day in my life is like.

I wake up starving at 7:45 a.m.

There's this expectation that founders are super high-performing individuals who drink lemon water and exercise all before 6 a.m., but I'm so far from that. I'm not a morning person. I really need my sleep.

At the moment, because I'm pregnant, I wake up starving. I eat as soon as I can and I'm currently trying to get in a lot of protein, so I usually have eggs. I definitely need my coffee, and I love having it freshly ground. It's a really lovely ritual.

Sometimes my partner and I will have a moment together in bed with our coffee and do NYT Connections or a crossword, to have a moment of pause before the day starts.

I may go for a little walk to get some sun on my face, but often I go straight to my desk if I'm not meeting anyone from the team.

My workday starts at around 9 a.m.

My mornings just whizz by, because that's when I'm really productive and have a lot of meetings. More often, I get derailed in the afternoons through fatigue or brain fog. I think it's really important not to just push on through in those instances and to take a break, go for a walk, or do a meditation, and then come back to it.

When I want a change of scene, I love going to a café. I write a lot, mainly articles for the media and for my LinkedIn profile, and because I'm away from the two big monitors on my desk, I find it useful for shifting into a more creative mindset.

As the business has grown, I spend more time managing people and firefighting, making it harder and harder to focus on strategic, forward-looking stuff, which I did a lot of at the beginning.

I recently started maternity leave, and I see this as a turning point for the business. For example, I've just hired a marketing director. I'm hoping that this time out will mean that I actually let go of some responsibilities and let the team run itself, so I can focus on where I can add the most value. I think that'll be as a campaigner, advocating for beans in general, to help unlock opportunities in retail.

I break for lunch at around 12:30 p.m.

I always try to cook something for lunch. I find taking that pause really positive for my well-being.

I wish I took longer, but my break is probably 20 to 40 minutes because I prefer to finish my working day earlier.

I love the creativity of seeing what we have in the fridge and going from there. The other day, I whipped up some hummus with our chickpeas, chopped up some tomatoes, onions, cucumber, and loads of herbs, cooked some chicken, and had a kind of hummus bowl.

I've always loved cooking and learned mostly by experimenting at home, reading lots of cookbooks, and working alongside chefs in my previous role. I took a monthlong cooking course when I was 18, and after that, I worked as a private chef for a bit.

If I'm having one of those days where I really don't have time, I heat up a jar of our baked beans, which are white beans in tomato sauce, and eat them on toast.

I'm on flex-time before the baby comes

Before the baby comes, I'm on flex-time. I'm off Slack, email, and team calls, and I'm not taking on any new projects, but wrapping up conversations with financial partners and things like that.

Once I've given birth, I will be fully out for probably at least two months, after which I will work on special projects that don't involve the team for a few months, so my schedule is more flexible.

One of the biggest strengths a founder can have is finding a way for the business to exist without them, so I'm feeling positive.

My team is predominantly made up of women who don't have kids, and they want me to be a role model, showing that taking time away won't affect your career.

I stop working at 6 p.m.

My brain is usually frazzled by 6 p.m. I need that step change — like that walk to the shops or cooking —so my brain isn't whirring before I go to bed.

If I'm in the flow, I might keep going, but then it's at the expense of doing yoga or having a nice dinner, and often it's not worth it.

I never have a TV dinner because I think it's so important to connect with the person you're with, my husband in my case. I do often have beans for dinner, but not always.

I really try to switch off in the evenings, and yoga and meditation are big forms of relaxation for me. I often go to yoga classes and sound baths after work. My favorite class, which I can't do at the moment because I'm too pregnant, is on the beach on Sunday morning. I go for a swim after, and it's just this incredible weekly reset.

I have a bath every night and fall asleep by 10 p.m.

About a year and a half ago, I got an app called Opal that locks me out of Instagram, email, LinkedIn, and anything like that after 9:30 p.m. It has been game-changing.

At the moment, I'm obsessed with having a bath every night. It's quite woo-woo, but I add magnesium salts and a cocktail of essential oils with different properties, whether calming or energizing. Putting that in the bath feels like you're caring for yourself.

Afterward, my husband and I get into bed and read. My favorite books are about how people exist in the modern day. It's very cliché, but probably a Sally Rooney book. I read until I fall asleep at probably 9:30 or 10 p.m., and that's my ideal evening. It probably was a bit later before I got pregnant.

On the weekends, I usually have a slow breakfast with my husband, go on a long walk, and do some kind of cooking project. Plus yoga or a swim if I can squeeze it in.

• Legal tech ❤️ NYC.
• To win the market, startups say they need to be where the law firms and corporate legal chiefs are.
• Legora and Harvey are expanding their footprints in New York, as Clio hunts for office space.

When Logan Brown left Cooley to start a legal tech firm this spring, she moved to New York City. She has begun recruiting lawyers to her venture.

"It's not that hard of a sell," Brown, 30, said on a phone call from her apartment in the Financial District. More junior lawyers want to help build the future, not watch it pass them by. For them, New York is the obvious place to be.

Legal tech skyrocketed this year as corporate clients pushed law firms to use tools that can lower costs and improve results. The change is playing out floor by floor in Manhattan office towers — a big reason why legal tech startups are increasingly based in the city.

Legora, a Swedish-born legal tech unicorn, said Tuesday it signed a two-floor lease at 838 Broadway, a newly renovated building just south of Union Square. The company, which sells enterprise software to Big Law firms including Goodwin and Cleary Gottlieb, is expanding after a recent funding round valued it at $1.8 billion.

Founded in 2023, Legora has been trading office rentals all year, starting in a coworking space and relocating twice as its need for desks increased. Its employees must be in the office five days a week.

The strategy is simple: To woo elite law firms and corporate legal chiefs, Legora needs to be where they are.

In 2024, the American Bar Association counted 187,656 lawyers in New York, the most of any state and just ahead of California's 175,883. Seven of the 20 largest US law firms are headquartered in New York City, and all of the rest maintain offices there.

"New York is the legal services capital of the world," Patrick Forquer, Legora's senior vice president of global revenue, said over Zoom. "If you want to win this market, you have to win this city."

Legal tech's office land grab

Harvey, one of Silicon Valley's hottest legal tech companies, said in October it secured a 10-year lease at One Madison Avenue in Midtown. The deal triples its New York office footprint to 97,000 square feet. Legora's new lease covers 27,238 square feet and lasts five years.

Fresh off a $500 million funding round, Vancouver legal-tech giant Clio has begun searching for office space in New York, according to a spokesperson. Spellbook, which sells tools for contract review to small and midsize law firms and corporates, is also looking for a New York pad, says CEO Scott Stevenson.

Crosby and Covenant, both newish startups that sell legal services directly, not software, are based in New York. So is Hebbia, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup serving investors and lawyers. It has 130 employees across its global offices, including a new site in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood.

George Sivulka, Hebbia's cofounder and CEO, said in an email that launching the company from New York was "the only option." The proximity means "buyers make decisions faster and feedback comes quicker," Sivulka wrote.

Being steps from clients is convenient; Legora's Forquer said he rides Citi Bike to pitch meetings. The other main draw is talent. New York puts legal tech founders within reach of the lawyers they need to help build and sell their products.

For lawyers, by lawyers

Jen Berrent built her legal career in New York, first as a corporate lawyer, then as WeWork's chief legal officer. Her startup, Covenant, reviews fund documents for private market investors, work they'd typically farm out to a law firm.

Covenant isn't training its own large language models. If it were, Berrent would be in San Francisco for the engineering talent. Instead, she has built a scrappy team of Big Law attorneys who use Covenant's software, built on top of models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, to turn legal work around faster.

"If you believe that the way you're going to win in a vertical is with the expertise, then the expertise is here," Berrent said. Covenant occupies a Midtown WeWork, of course.

As investors funnel money into legal tech, hiring is picking up. Suddenly, junior lawyers have more offers than ever to trade billable hours for a shot at shaping their industry's future.

For associates running on fumes, the startup route has perks, including stock options. Harvey, which opened its first New York office in 2023, offers free daily lunch, is rolling out wellness and fertility benefits in 2026, and grants a four-week paid leave after four years of tenure.

John Nay is also vying for candidates. His company, Norm Ai, builds no-code tools for compliance and legal teams to do their work. Last week, it announced the launch of an independent law firm that will provide services directly to clients, including Blackstone.

While other startups jostle for attention with billboards and conference booths, Nay's company is taking a different tack. It recently began hosting networking events at New York City bars, as part of a recruiting push into Big Law.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at mrussell@businessinsider.com or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• The Coast Guard is seeing record-breaking numbers of drug hauls from its interdictions.
• Leadership said the service wants more ships, capabilities, aircraft, and people to keep up with drug runners.
• Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities remain a top priority.

USCG HITRON JACKSONVILLE, Florida — The Coast Guard is pushing for more ships, aircraft, and personnel to keep pace with the record flow of drugs heading toward the US.

Recent drug offloads from Coast Guard cutters rank among the largest in the service's history, and leaders say the flow of narcotics through the eastern Pacific and Caribbean continues to rise.

"From a service perspective, I'd say we need assets," Cmdr. Chris Guy, commanding officer of the Coast Guard's South Tactical Law Enforcement Team, told Business Insider. "We need ships," he added, and "the more assets we have, the more ability we have" to "stop the flow of dangerous drugs into the United States."

Last week, the Coast Guard cutter Stone offloaded over 49,000 pounds of cocaine worth more than $362 million in Port Everglades, Florida, after a monthslong deployment in the eastern Pacific. The crew of the Stone, a Legends-class National Security cutter, completed 15 interdictions, including three in one night.

The offload was the largest amount of cocaine ever seized by a single Coast Guard ship on one deployment, but it's just the latest in a string of major busts for the service.

More drugs, more intercepts

The Coast Guard has long been the nation’s leading force for intercepting drug shipments at sea. But as traffickers grow in number and their hauls get larger, the service is pushing to expand its fleet, adopt new technology, and boost recruiting to keep pace.

The Coast Guard's force design plan for 2028, approved by US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this year, aims to increase the workforce, acquire more ships and revamp the current fleet, add more helicopters, and invest in better intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.

At the time the plan was unveiled, the acting Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Kevin Lunday, wrote that it came after "decades of underinvestment and severe readiness challenges."

Some of those issues, including shipbuilding and maintenance delays and years of missed recruiting and retention goals, have been tracked by the Government Accountability Office, a government watchdog agency.

Guy said the Coast Guard knows what capabilities it continues to need to meet that threat.

"We need maritime patrol aircraft, and we need persistent surveillance at sea so that we can find the drugs. We need vessels that have, whether it's a Coast Guard cutter or whether that's a US Navy ship, a Coast Guard boarding team attached to it. And then we need that end-game capability, whether that's a fast boat with a marksman that's in the back of the boat and the ability to shoot out engines, or a helicopter with a marksman that can stop the vessel," he told Business Insider.

As the force design plan takes effect, it’s expected to have a significant impact on addressing major challenges, officials said, at a time when the service is intercepting more drugs than ever before.

A mix of factors is driving those record hauls, from instability in drug-producing countries in South America and shifting trafficking routes to improved surveillance on ships like the Stone and the service’s growing ability to adapt to new smuggling tactics.

In particular, the increasing use of uncrewed aerial systems, like Shield AI's MQ-35 V-BAT, which was aboard the Stone on its recent deployment and helped the ship's crew find vessels at night, is upping the Coast Guard's ability to locate and track drug runners.

"The UAS is a game-changing capability for us," Capt. Daniel Broadhurst, the commanding officer of the Coast Guard's Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron, told Business Insider. "The number one enabler of what we do, the key to success, is ISR."

Getting more ISR capabilities for the cutters on patrol, be it better sensors onboard or drones that can be the eyes in the sky, has been a priority for the service.

Stopping drug runners

The US is intensely focused right now on stopping drug shipments at sea, relying on cooperation across multiple federal agencies.

Under President Donald Trump, the tactics have now moved beyond regular, lawful Coast Guard interdictions. This year, the administration has pursued controversial military strikes on alleged traffickers in the Pacific and Caribbean, raising concerns as the president has used wartime rhetoric. Trump has said that the previous methods of interdicting these vessels have "been totally ineffective."

Last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told reporters aboard the Stone that the president "has taken an all-hands approach" to stopping drug smugglers.

"He's not choosing just one line of effort but recognizes the unique capabilities that we have across the United States government to get after that promise that he made to make America's streets and communities safe again," Gabbard said.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard continues to see substantial success in conducting its lawful, step-by-step interdiction process.

"When we say the Coast Guard is accelerating counter-narcotics operations, we mean it," Vice Adm. Nathan Moore, commander of the Coast Guard's Atlantic Area, said last week at the Stone's offload. "In fiscal year 2025, we seized the most cocaine in the service's history, nearly 510,000 pounds."

The Coast Guard estimates 80% of interdictions of US-bound drugs occur at sea, the majority of which are based in the eastern Pacific. They're coming to the US mostly on "go-fast boats," as well as fishing vessels and semi-submersibles.

The increasing number of drugs seized, particularly in the past year, reflects "the intensity and the scale and the lethality of the drugs and the threats that we face," Moore added.

• I had to book Amtrak instead of flying, and it made my holiday travel experience less of a hassle.
• A generous luggage policy and my worry about airport disruptions made train travel more appealing.
• The trip can be uncomfortably long, but flexible seating and beautiful views make it worth it.

After procrastinating to buy my flight home for Thanksgiving one too many times (sorry, Mom), I've been left with no other option but to turn to the Pennsylvanian, a 9-hour and 20-minute Amtrak train that travels from New York to Pittsburgh.

This time, I paid $316 for the round-trip ticket, and was happy to book the train instead of a flight. I've taken this train ride almost a dozen times in the past five years, and have turned into somewhat of a train enthusiast because of it.

Additionally, flying disruptions — such as the recent government shutdown — and the seemingly endless construction at my hometown airport have made me more inclined to take the train over the past few years.

It's not perfect, but from avoiding never-ending security lines at the airport to having a row to myself, here are the four reasons I prefer traveling by train.

1. There are no security lines or airport hassles

I've been stranded in too many hour-plus airport security lines to count. When I arrive at the train station, I simply wait for my track to be announced, which typically occurs 15 minutes before departure, and then board the train when it arrives.

There aren't any annoying security lines or shuttles to take between terminals, so I can get to the train station around 30 minutes before the train leaves. Plus, boarding usually goes pretty fast because the train attendants can stagger the boarding lines between train cars.

2. I don't have to worry about size restrictions or checking too many bags

Have you ever shed a tear watching TSA throw away a precious perfume or hand lotion you just bought?

One of the lovely things about traveling by train is that there are no size restrictions on liquids. This is a small win, but when I fly, I'm constantly holding my breath to see if my carry-on toiletry bag will make it through TSA, so it's another tick on the pros list for me.

Additionally, Amtrak has a really generous luggage policy. Each passenger is allowed one personal item, two carry-ons, and two checked bags free of charge. Additional checked luggage is only $20 a bag.

3. There aren't assigned seats, and I usually have a row to myself

With no assigned seats, there's usually an opportunity for me to find a row to myself. I've taken this train route five times in the last year, and there's only been one ride where I wasn't able to snag that luxury.

There's a roughly two-to-four-hour period of the train ride where I lose cell service entirely, and I use that time as a deep work block to get writing, planning, or anything else that I need to get done accomplished.

One benefit of having a row to myself, besides the obvious extra room, is that I can spread out my work in front of me and not worry about bothering anyone.

4. It's a beautiful train ride

Lastly, it's a scenic ride. Although I try to focus on getting some work done or taking stock of my priorities, both personally and professionally, I sometimes can't help but get lost in the views for hours.

My favorite part of the ride is about halfway through, when we go on the horseshoe curve in Altoona, PA. It's a 220-degree railroad curve that was finished in 1854. I've now seen the curve through almost every season and look forward to marveling at the view each time.

As much as I do love the train, the ride itself isn't always the smoothest, the café car never has consistent hours, and sometimes, by hour six, the 9-hour ride feels like it will never end.

But overall, if I have the time to spare, I'll always choose the train over flying. I've realized that having this time for myself helps me reset in between destinations.

Got a travel hack to share? Email this reporter at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.

• Pinterest CEO Bill Ready is all in on search.
• Google dominates the all-purpose search market, but rivals are making gains in particular niches.
• This story is one of a five-part series exploring the changing online search landscape.

Four years ago, Pinterest was bleeding users.

The platform known for mood boards had made a big effort to compete with TikTok — as did nearly every other social media platform at the time — with short-form video, shoppable livestreaming, and paying creators.

It didn't work. When Bill Ready took over as Pinterest's CEO in 2022, he felt the company needed a new direction.

"I didn't think the world needed a fourth or fifth best TikTok," Ready told Business Insider in an interview. Ready, who left his previous post as Google's president of commerce, decided that a search experience that was both personalized to each user and highly visual would be the platform's special sauce.

"Search is the core of the business," Ready said. "The business didn't have that clarity three years ago."

Pinterest's user growth has rebounded since Ready's takeover, steadily increasing for the past nine quarters. It recently hit 600 million monthly active users, and about two-thirds of the interactions on the platform are related to search.

Pinterest's focus on search has been a hit with users, with about 80 billion monthly search queries, according to the company.

It's also helped Pinterest win over Gen Z users.

More than half the platform's users are now Gen Z, Ready said. In a 2025 survey conducted by Adobe of 800 consumers and 200 business owners, 47% of Gen Z respondents said they used Pinterest for search.

"At the core of why we're winning with Gen Z is what we're doing with visual search and what we're doing to make it more positive than social media," Ready said.

Pinterest has more to prove. The company's share price hasn't returned to its pandemic high. While Pinterest's revenue increased 17% year-over-year in the third quarter, its stock plummeted over 20% following its earnings release, which included an earnings miss and weak guidance for the fourth quarter. Pinterest management said ad sales had been negatively affected by tariffs.

Raymond James analyst Josh Beck rated the company at a neutral "market perform" following the third-quarter earnings, but wrote he was "encouraged" by Pinterest's broader progress in shopping and "untapped" advertising opportunity.

Search will continue to play a significant role in Pinterest's advertising strategy, as Ready emphasized in its latest earnings that Pinterest search results are "highly commercial in nature."

Broadly, search has been undergoing a shake-up due to new consumer behaviors, such as using TikTok or ChatGPT to find answers. Advancements in technology, including visual search, are shifting how people — especially younger generations — search, said EMARKETER analyst Sky Canaves. (EMARKETER is a sister company to Business Insider.)

"Whatever is the easiest way to find information and has the least amount of friction will be most likely to be used for the particular search cases, whether it's voice, or text, or images," Canaves said.

How search is transforming Pinterest's business

Pinterest has rolled out a series of revamped search tools under Ready's watch, including an AI-powered tool that enables users to discover content tailored to their body type, skin tone, and hair pattern.

In May, the platform expanded its "visual search" features, allowing users to find exact products or similar items. It's a category that competitors like Google, TikTok, and new startups are also targeting.

Here's how it works: Imagine you're redecorating your apartment and save an image for inspiration to your Pinterest board. With visual search, you can shop right from that image — clicking on a lamp, for example, will surface links to similar items and sometimes an exact match.

With stronger search tools — and the data that comes with them — Pinterest has opened up more doors for advertisers and in-app shopping.

Lower-funnel ads, meaning ads that drive the user to make a purchase, make up two-thirds of Pinterest's business, Ready said.

"Search behaviors are key inputs powering its ads business," Forrester analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf told Business Insider. "That intel makes Pinterest a really attractive high-intent surface for advertisers."

AI is also playing a significant role in how users shop via Pinterest by learning their tastes.

"Effectively, what we've created is an AI-powered shopping assistant," Ready said. In October, Pinterest officially launched a shopping assistant tool that users can chat with verbally or over text.

Users who visit Pinterest to search, whether for shopping or inspiration, are "more valuable" than pass-by scrollers, said Kamran Ansari, Pinterest's former head of corporate development.

"The whole reason why Google built a $3 trillion company is search has the highest kind of intent signal of anything you can possibly do," Ansari said.

Why search is 'up for grabs' more than ever

Ready, who worked at Google for a little over two years before joining Pinterest, is well acquainted with the stakes in search.

Google still owns about 90% of the market share for traditional search, according to data from Cloudflare.

In a March EMARKETER survey, 93% of US consumers said they had used Google in the last year. There were also many players cited in the EMARKETER survey that fall outside the traditional search market, from e-commerce platforms like Amazon (56%) and Walmart (45%) to video platforms like YouTube (49%) and TikTok (29%).

"The future of search is more up for grabs than it has been in the last 25 years," Ready said.

According to a recent McKinsey survey of US consumers, about 50% said they "intentionally seek out AI-powered search engines, with a majority of users saying it's the top digital source they use to make buying decisions."

As players like ChatGPT and Perplexity aim to battle Google for the wider, all-purpose search market, Pinterest is focused on improving its visually driven niche, Ready said.

• Four-day workweek trials surged in popularity a few years ago, when employees had more power at work.
• Now that the job market has cooled, many CEOs are demanding more from workers.
• AI could help bring about longer weekends if it could sufficiently boost economic gains, one CEO said.

For a time, the four-day workweek seemed like it just might happen.

Like pandemic-era fixations we thought would last forever — looking at you, sourdough starter — the dream of working 32 hours a week for 40 hours' pay seemed within reach for some.

Now, years later, hiring is sluggish, CEOs are demanding that workers lock in, and 9-9-6 memes can feel as pervasive as 6-7 mishegoss.

The chill settling over the workplace means that many workers' hopes for four-day weeks are on ice — for now.

There appears to be "a pushback from management on the things that workers were gaining during the pandemic," said Juliet Schor, a Boston College economist who has researched shorter workweeks.

Yet the idea of permanent three-day weekends isn't dead, Schor and other backers told Business Insider. Instead, thanks to return-to-office orders and companies' relentless focus on AI, broader adoption might simply take longer than advocates might hope.

Thanks, 9-9-6

One challenge, for now, is that the four-day talk doesn't always jibe with narratives about doubling down on work. Some leaders have tired of discussions about work-life balance, and big employers, in particular, have been calling workers back to their cubicles.

In some ways, ideas like 9-9-6 — slogging from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — are a response to the four-day workweek, Schor said.

That's even though trials from the UK to New Zealand run by Schor and other researchers have indicated that spending less time on the job can leave workers happier and less burned out — without compromising productivity.

For now, many CEOs are focused on the merits of RTO and the need to hustle. Some of that sober speech is a way for big bosses to signal to boards and investors that their employees will work harder than ever, said Vishal Reddy, executive director of WorkFour, a nonprofit that advocates for making the four-day, 32-hour workweek the standard.

"Part of it, I think, is a performance," he said of CEOs' directives.

Reddy said another reason there is less buzz about a four-day workweek is that the idea is no longer as novel as it was in 2020 and 2021, when some employers, looking to attract and retain workers, implemented the concept.

Carrying the idea forward, he said, will likely require waiting for the market to change and for workers to regain power.

Reddy said that he sees proposed legislation involving four-day workweek pilots in New York and Maine as signs that supporters haven't given up on the concept.

There are still a number of examples of companies that have adopted shorter schedules. In nearly all cases, once employers adopt the schedule, they don't go back, Reddy said.

The impact of AI

The challenges to adopting shorter weeks aren't just practical considerations, like how to meet customers' demands that someone picks up the phone on a Friday.

To make it feasible for employers to pay people the same for working one day less, the economy would have to really take off — growing in the high single digits or even double digits, said Pavel Shynkarenko, founder and CEO of Mellow, a contractor-management platform.

One factor that could help: AI.

If the technology can crank up workers' productivity enough, a shorter week could be doable, Shynkarenko said. Having only four days on the clock could also help prevent widespread unemployment due to AI by spreading work among more people.

Essentially, the four-day workweek would serve as a "safe harbor" for the economy as it transitions to one where bots take on more of the tasks that now fall to humans, Shynkarenko said.

One day, he said, AI could make it so that even a four-day workweek would be unnecessary. Workweeks might only last two days, he said. Regardless, any departure from five days as the norm would likely take years, Shynkarenko said.

Until AI can do more heavy lifting, Shynkarenko said, there will be little room for discussion of truncated weeks because employers will face too much cost pressure.

Plus, in ultra-competitive industries like tech, an abbreviated workweek could be seen as a concession to competitors.

Schor, the economist, doesn't expect that employers will be able to avoid the issue indefinitely, however. That's because although workers' stress and burnout rates have improved from COVID-19 crisis levels, progress has plateaued, and remains above pre-pandemic levels, she said.

"We're still in that level of heightened stress," Schor said.

The four-day guilt

Even if economic growth were to occur at a rapid enough pace to allow for a four-day workweek, other factors might still arise. One is that, in some cases, employees might feel a sense of shame about working less, said Dale Whelehan, an assistant professor in systems psychology at Trinity College Dublin, who supports shorter workweeks. Until January, he served as CEO of 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit advocating for less time on the clock.

"There was such an internalized sense of guilt towards not working hard enough or not performing hard enough," he said, referring to what can happen at organizations that try out shorter weeks.

Nevertheless, Whelehan said, the benefits to worker well-being and companies' performance are substantial enough that the conversation about the four-day workweek, which has been dampened for now, "is going to rise again."

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.

• Martin Fowler said software engineering is in a 'depression' due to a lack of investment.
• Fowler advises junior engineers to seek mentorship from senior developers.
• He said developers starting out should also be wary of the outputs when working with AI.

One of the most influential software engineers has hope for junior developers amid the industry-wide uncertainty caused by artificial intelligence.

Martin Fowler sat down on a November 19 episode of "The Pragmatic Engineer" podcast to discuss the state of the software engineering world in 2025 — a year when major tech companies aren't holding back when it comes to job cuts. Layoffs.ai has tracked around 114,000 tech employee layoffs so far in 2025, compared with nearly 153,000 in all of 2024.

The 62-year-old, who has written several books about software development and is the chief scientist at software company Thoughtworks, said the massive job layoffs in the tech world are one sign that the software development world is in a "depression." In this current era of "great uncertainty," he said, businesses aren't investing in software. And, while the tech world is pouring money into artificial intelligence, that growth seems to be a "separate thing" that's "clearly bubbly."

"While businesses aren't investing, it's hard to make much progress in the software world," Fowler said. "And so we have this weird mix of no investment, pretty much depression in the software industry, with an AI bubble going on."

The "unpredictable" AI bubble presents challenges and uncertainty for junior software engineers, in particular.

"The thing with bubbles is you never know how big they're going to grow," Fowler said. "You don't know how long it's going to take before they pop, and you don't know what's going to be after the pop."

When asked about his advice for junior software engineers, Fowler didn't discourage them from using AI for coding. However, he said, newer developers can't always identify if the output of large language models, or LLMs for short, is useful. That's where the knowledge of a more experienced coder comes in handy.

He said the best way for junior developers to learn is to find a senior engineer to mentor them. A good experienced mentor is "worth their weight in gold," he said.

Fowler is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of software engineering. He was one of 17 authors of the 2001 "Agile Manifesto," which redefined how software is built collaboratively by teams.

He seemed confident in his industry to persevere.

Although he said the timing for software engineers starting out in tech may not be as great as it was 20 years ago, Fowler said there's "plenty of potential in the future" since the core skills required of a good software engineer remain the same today.

"I don't think AI is going to wipe out software development," Fowler said.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a meeting that he wants employees to use AI whenever possible.
• Huang said the company plans to continue hiring aggressively.
• Nvidia isn't alone as tech companies stress the importance of AI adoption for employees.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants employees to use AI whenever they can — and he insists they shouldn't worry about losing their jobs in the process.

In an all-hands meeting on Thursday, the day after the chipmaker reported record earnings, Huang responded to a question about managers instructing employees to use AI less.

"My understanding is Nvidia has some managers who are telling their people to use less AI," he said at the meeting, which Business Insider listened to. "Are you insane?"

Huang said he strongly disapproved.

"I want every task that is possible to be automated with artificial intelligence to be automated with artificial intelligence," he said. "I promise you, you will have work to do."

Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Nvidia isn't alone, as tech giants have taken measures to push employees to incorporate more AI into their day-to-day work. Both Microsoft and Meta plan to evaluate employees based on their AI usage, and Google told engineers to use AI for coding, Business Insider reported. Amazon was in talks to adopt the AI coding assistant Cursor after employees requested it, according to Business Insider's reporting.

Huang also said Nvidia's software engineers use Cursor. And if AI does not work for a specific task, "use it until it does," he added. "Jump in and help make it better, because we have the power to do so."

Though fear of job loss has been a constant drumbeat amid the rise of AI, Huang suggested Nvidia employees shouldn't worry. He said that while other tech companies have conducted layoffs, Nvidia had hired "several thousand" people last quarter, which he joked was putting a strain on office parking spaces. He added that hiring is still ramping up.

"Frankly, I think we're probably still about 10,000 short," Huang said, "but the pace at which we hire should be consistent with the pace at which we can integrate and harmonize the new employees."

Nvidia has significantly expanded its workforce, increasing from 29,600 employees at the end of fiscal 2024 to 36,000 employees at the end of fiscal 2025.

As Nvidia grows, its physical footprint is expanding. Huang said at the meeting that the company has recently moved into new offices in Taipei and Shanghai and is constructing two additional sites in the US.

Nvidia has become the world's most valuable company, with a market cap of over $4 trillion. The company reported last Wednesday that it generated $57.01 billion in revenue in the last quarter, up 62% from the same period last year.

Recently, investor Michael Burry of "The Big Short" has been taking aim at Nvidia, voicing skepticism about the AI boom. Nvidia pushed back on these criticisms in a memo to Wall Street analysts, Business Insider reported Monday.

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