This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI, including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was OpenAI’s original partner. We tell the story behind the story, explaining how it all came to light.

Plus, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella debuts a new AI catchphrase at Davos, startup CEO Dave Clark stirs controversy with his “wildly productive weekend,” Elon Musk talks aliens, and the latest on Seattle-area physical AI startups, including Overland AI and AIM Intelligent Machines.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton.

The launch of the AI lab that would redefine Microsoft caught the tech giant by surprise.

“Did we get called to participate?” Satya Nadella wrote to his team on Dec. 12, 2015, hours after OpenAI announced its founding. “AWS seems to have sneaked in there.”

Nadella had been Microsoft CEO for less than two years. Azure, the company’s cloud platform, was five years old and chasing Amazon Web Services for market share. And now AWS had been listed as a donor in the “Introducing OpenAI” post. Microsoft wasn’t in the mix. 

In the internal message, which hasn’t been previously reported, Nadella wondered how the new AI nonprofit could remain truly “open” if it was tied only to Amazon’s cloud.

Within months, Microsoft was courting OpenAI. Within four years, it would invest $1 billion, adding more than $12 billion in subsequent rounds. Within a decade, the relationship would culminate in a $250 billion spending commitment for Microsoft’s cloud and a 27% equity stake in one of the most valuable startups in history.

New court filings offer an inside look at one of the most consequential relationships in tech. Previously undisclosed emails, messages, slide decks, reports, and deposition transcripts reveal how Microsoft pursued, rebuffed and backed OpenAI at various moments over the past decade, ultimately shaping the course of the lab that launched the generative AI era.

More broadly, they show how Nadella and Microsoft’s senior leadership team rally in a crisis, maneuver against rivals such as Google and Amazon, and talk about deals in private.

For this story, GeekWire dug through more than 200 documents, many of them made public Friday in Elon Musk’s ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission. Microsoft is also a defendant. Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. A jury trial is scheduled for this spring.

OpenAI has disputed Musk’s account of the company’s origins. In a blog post last week, the company said Musk agreed in 2017 that a for-profit structure was necessary, and that negotiations ended only when OpenAI refused to give him full control. 

The recently disclosed records show that Microsoft’s own leadership anticipated the possibility of such a dispute. In March 2018, after learning of OpenAI’s plans to launch a commercial arm, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott sent Nadella and others an email offering his thoughts.

“I wonder if the big OpenAI donors are aware of these plans?” Scott wrote. “Ideologically, I can’t imagine that they funded an open effort to concentrate ML [machine learning] talent so that they could then go build a closed, for profit thing on its back.”

The latest round of documents, filed as exhibits in Musk’s lawsuit, represents a partial record selected to support his claims in the case. Microsoft declined to comment. 

Elon helps Microsoft win OpenAI from Amazon

Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI has been one of its key strategic advantages in the cloud. But the behind-the-scenes emails make it clear that Amazon was actually there first.

According to an internal Microsoft slide deck from August 2016, included in recent filings, OpenAI was running its research on AWS as part of a deal that gave it $50 million in computing for $10 million in committed funds. The contract was up for renewal in September 2016. 

Microsoft wanted in. Nadella reached out to Altman, looking for a way to work together. 

In late August, the filings show, Altman emailed Musk about a new deal with Microsoft: “I have negotiated a $50 million compute donation from them over the next 3 years!” he wrote. “Do you have any reason not to like them, or care about us switching over from Amazon?” 

Musk, co-chair of OpenAI at the time, gave his blessing to the Microsoft deal in his unique way, starting with a swipe at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: “I think Jeff is a bit of a tool and Satya is not, so I slightly prefer Microsoft, but I hate their marketing dept,” Musk wrote. 

He asked Altman what happened to Amazon.

Altman responded, “Amazon started really dicking us around on the T+C [terms and conditions], especially on marketing commits. … And their offering wasn’t that good technically anyway.”

Microsoft and OpenAI announced their partnership in November 2016 with a blog post highlighting their plans to “democratize artificial intelligence,” and noting that OpenAI would use Azure as its primary cloud platform going forward.

Internally, Microsoft saw multiple benefits. The August 2016 slide deck, titled “OpenAI on Azure Big Compute,” described it as a prime opportunity to flip a high-profile customer to Azure. 

The presentation also emphasized bigger goals: “thought leadership” in AI, a “halo effect” for Azure’s GPU launch, and the chance to recruit a “net-new audience” of developers and startups. It noted that OpenAI was a nonprofit “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” — an organization whose research could burnish Microsoft’s reputation in AI.

But as the ambition grew, so did the bill.

‘Most impressive thing yet in the history of AI’

In June 2017, Musk spoke with Nadella directly to pitch a major expansion. OpenAI wanted to train AI systems to beat the best human players at competitive esports, Valve’s Dota 2. The computing requirements were massive: 10,000 servers equipped with the latest Nvidia GPUs.

“This would obviously be a major opportunity for Microsoft to promote Azure relative to other cloud systems,” Musk wrote in an email to OpenAI colleagues after the call.

Nadella said he’d talk about it internally with his Microsoft cloud team, according to the email. “Sounds like there is a good chance they will do it,” Musk wrote.

Two months later, Altman followed up with a formal pitch. “I think it will be the most impressive thing yet in the history of AI,” he wrote to Nadella that August.

Microsoft’s cloud executives ran the numbers and balked. In an August 2017 email thread, Microsoft executive Jason Zander told Nadella the deal would cost so much it “frankly makes it a non-starter.” The numbers are redacted from the public version of the email. 

“I do believe the pop from someone like Sam and Elon will help build momentum for Azure,” Zander wrote. “The scale is also a good forcing function for the fleet and we can drive scale into the supply chain. But I won’t take a complete bath to do it.”

Ultimately, Microsoft passed. OpenAI contracted with Google for the Dota 2 project instead.

‘A bucket of undifferentiated GPUs’

Microsoft’s broader relationship with OpenAI was starting to fray, as well. By January 2018, according to internal emails, Microsoft executive Brett Tanzer had told Altman that he was having a hard time finding internal sponsors at Microsoft for an expanded OpenAI deal. 

Altman started shopping for alternatives. Around that time, Tanzer noted in an email to Nadella and other senior executives that OpenAI’s people “have been up in the area recently across the lake” — a reference to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

The internal debate at Microsoft was blunt. 

Scott wrote that OpenAI was treating Microsoft “like a bucket of undifferentiated GPUs, which isn’t interesting for us at all.” Harry Shum, who led Microsoft’s AI research, said he’d visited OpenAI a year earlier and “was not able to see any immediate breakthrough in AGI.” 

Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientist, chimed in to say he had tried a different approach. After a Skype call with OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, he pitched the idea of a collaboration focused on “extending human intellect with AI — versus beating humans.” 

The conversation was friendly, Horvitz wrote, but he didn’t sense much interest. He suspected OpenAI’s Dota work was “motivated by a need to show how AI can crush humans, as part of Elon Musk’s interest in demonstrating why we should all be concerned about the power of AI.”

Scott summed up the risk of walking away: OpenAI might “storm off to Amazon in a huff and shit-talk us and Azure on the way out.”

“They are building credibility in the AI community very fast,” the Microsoft CTO and Silicon Valley veteran wrote. “All things equal, I’d love to have them be a Microsoft and Azure net promoter. Not sure that alone is worth what they’re asking.”

But by the following year, Microsoft had found a reason to double down.

The first billion

In 2019, OpenAI restructured. The nonprofit would remain, but a new “capped profit” entity would sit beneath it — a hybrid that could raise capital from investors while limiting their returns. 

Microsoft agreed to invest $1 billion, with an option for a second billion, in exchange for exclusive cloud computing rights and a commercial license to OpenAI’s technology.

The companies announced the deal in July 2019 with a joint press release. “The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” Altman said. Nadella echoed that sentiment, emphasizing the companies’ ambition to “democratize AI” while keeping safety at the center.

So what changed for Microsoft between 2018 and 2019?

In a June 2019 email to Nadella and Bill Gates, previously disclosed in the Google antitrust case, Scott cited the search giant’s AI progress as one reason for Microsoft to invest in OpenAI. He “got very, very worried,” he explained, when he “dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training.”

Nadella forwarded Scott’s email to Amy Hood, Microsoft’s CFO. “Very good email that explains why I want us to do this,” Nadella wrote, referring to the larger OpenAI investment, “and also why we will then ensure our infra folks execute.”

Gates wasn’t so sure. According to Nadella’s deposition testimony, the Microsoft co-founder was clear in “wanting us to just do our own” — arguing that the company should focus on building AI capabilities in-house rather than placing such a large bet on OpenAI.

Nadella explained that the decision to invest was eventually driven by him and Scott, who concluded that OpenAI’s specific research direction into transformers and large language models (the GPT class) was more promising than other approaches at the time.

Hood, meanwhile, offered some blunt commentary on OpenAI’s cap on profits — the centerpiece of its new structure, meant to limit investor returns and preserve the nonprofit’s mission. The caps were so high, she wrote, that they were almost meaningless.

“Given the cap is actually larger than 90% of public companies, I am not sure it is terribly constraining nor terribly altruistic but that is Sam’s call on his cap,” Hood wrote in a July 14, 2019, email to Nadella, Scott, and other executives. 

If OpenAI succeeded, she noted, the real money for Microsoft would come from Azure revenue — far exceeding any capped return on the investment itself.

But the deal gave Microsoft more than cloud revenue.

According to an internal OpenAI memo dated June 2019, Microsoft’s investment came with approval rights over “Major Decisions” — including changes to the company’s structure, distributions to partners, and any merger or dissolution.

Microsoft’s $1 billion made it the dominant investor. Under the partnership agreement, major decisions required approval from a majority of limited partners based on how much they had contributed. At 85% of the total, Microsoft had an effective veto, a position of power that would give the company a pivotal role in defining the future of the company.

‘The opposite of open’

In September 2020, Musk responded to reports that Microsoft had exclusively licensed OpenAI’s GPT-3. “This does seem like the opposite of open,” he tweeted. “OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft.”

Nadella seemed to take the criticism seriously. 

In an October 2020 meeting, according to internal notes cited in a recent court order, Microsoft executives discussed the perception that the company was “effectively owning” OpenAI, with Nadella saying they needed to give thought to Musk’s perspective.

In February 2021, as Microsoft and OpenAI negotiated a new investment, Altman emailed Microsoft’s team: “We want to do everything we can to make you all commercially successful and are happy to move significantly from the term sheet.” 

His preference, Altman told the Microsoft execs, was “to make you all a bunch of money as quickly as we can and for you to be enthusiastic about making this additional investment soon.”

They closed the deal in March 2021, for up to $2 billion. This was not disclosed publicly until January 2023, when Microsoft revealed it as part of a larger investment announcement.

By 2022, the pressure to commercialize was explicit. 

According to a transcript of her deposition, Mira Murati, then OpenAI’s vice president of applied AI and partnerships, had written in contemporaneous notes that the most-cited goal inside the company that year was a $100 million revenue target. Altman had told employees that Nadella and Scott said this needed to be hit to justify the next investment, as much as $10 billion.

Murati testified that Altman told her “it was important to achieve this goal to receive Microsoft’s continued investments.” OpenAI responded by expanding its go-to-market team and building out its enterprise business.

Then everything changed.

The ChatGPT moment

On Nov. 30, 2022, OpenAI announced ChatGPT. The chatbot became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, reaching 100 million users within two months. It was the moment that turned OpenAI from an AI research lab into a household name.

Microsoft’s bet was suddenly looking very different.

OpenAI’s board learned about the launch on Twitter. According to deposition testimony, board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley received no advance notice and discovered ChatGPT by seeing screenshots on social media. 

McCauley described the fact that a “major release” could happen without the board knowing as “extremely concerning.” Toner testified that she wasn’t surprised — she was “used to the board not being very informed” — but believed it demonstrated that the company’s processes for decisions with “material impact on the mission were inadequate.”

Altman, according to one filing, characterized the release as a “research preview” using existing technology. He said the board “had been talking for months” about building a chat product, but acknowledged that he probably did not send the board an email about the specific release.

As its biggest investor, Microsoft pushed OpenAI to monetize the product’s success.

In mid-January 2023, Nadella texted Altman asking when they planned to activate a paid subscription.

Altman said they were “hoping to be ready by end of jan, but we can be flexible beyond that. the only real reason for rushing it is we are just so out of capacity and delivering a bad user experience.”

He asked Nadella for his input: “any preference on when we do it?”

“Overall getting this in place sooner is best,” the Microsoft CEO responded, in part.

Two weeks later, Nadella checked in again: “Btw …how many subs have you guys added to chatGPT?”

Altman’s answer revealed what they were dealing with. OpenAI had 6 million daily active users — their capacity limit — and had turned away 50 million people who tried to sign up. “Had to delay charging due to legal issues,” he wrote, “but it should go out this coming week.”

ChatGPT Plus launched on Feb. 1, 2023, at $20 a month.

A week earlier, Microsoft made its landmark $10 billion investment in OpenAI. The companies had begun negotiating the previous summer, when OpenAI was still building ChatGPT. The product’s viral success validated Microsoft’s bet and foreshadowed a new era of demand for its cloud platform.

Ten months later, it nearly collapsed.

‘Run over by a truck’

On Friday afternoon, Nov. 17, 2023, OpenAI’s nonprofit board fired Altman as CEO, issuing a terse statement that he had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Greg Brockman, the company’s president and cofounder, was removed from the board the same day. He quit hours later.

Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, was not consulted. Murati, then OpenAI’s chief technology officer and the board’s choice for interim CEO, called Nadella and Kevin Scott to warn them just 10 to 15 minutes before Altman himself was told.

“Mira sounded like she had been run over by a truck as she tells me,” Scott wrote in an email to colleagues that weekend.

The board — Ilya Sutskever, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner, and Adam D’Angelo — had informed Murati the night before. They had given her less than 24 hours to prepare.

At noon Pacific time, the board delivered the news to Altman. The blog post went live immediately. An all-hands meeting followed at 2 p.m. By Friday night, Brockman had resigned. So had Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s head of research, along with a handful of other researchers. 

A “whole horde” of employees, Scott wrote, had reached out to Altman and Brockman “expressing loyalty to them, and saying they will resign.”

Microsoft didn’t have a seat on the board. But text messages between Nadella and Altman, revealed in the latest filings, show just how influential it was in the ultimate outcome.

At 7:42 a.m. Pacific on Saturday, Nov. 18, Nadella texted Altman asking if he was free to talk. Altman replied that he was on a board call.

“Good,” Nadella wrote. “Call when done. I have one idea.”

That evening, at 8:25 p.m., Nadella followed up with a detailed message from Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and top lawyer. In a matter of hours, the trillion-dollar corporation had turned on a dime, establishing a new subsidiary from scratch — legal work done, papers ready to file as soon as the Washington Secretary of State opened Monday morning.

They called it Microsoft RAI Inc., using the acronym for Responsible Artificial Intelligence.

“We can then capitalize the subsidiary and take all the other steps needed to operationalize this and support Sam in whatever way is needed,” Smith wrote. Microsoft was “ready to go if that’s the direction we need to head.”

Altman’s reply: “kk.”

The company calculated the cost of absorbing the OpenAI team at roughly $25 billion, Nadella later confirmed in a deposition — enough to match the compensation and unvested equity of employees who had been promised stakes in a company that now seemed on the verge of collapse.

By Sunday, Emmett Shear, the Twitch co-founder, had replaced Murati as interim CEO. That night, when the board still hadn’t reinstated Altman, Nadella announced publicly that Microsoft was prepared to hire the OpenAI CEO and key members of his team.

“In a world of bad choices,” Nadella said in his deposition, the move “was definitely not my preferred thing.” But it was preferable to the alternative, he added. “The worst outcome would have been all these people leave and they go to our competition.”

‘Strong strong no’

On Tuesday, Nov. 21, the outcome was still uncertain. Altman messaged Nadella and Scott that morning, “can we talk soon? have a positive update, ish.” Later, he said the situation looked “reasonably positive” for a five-member board. Shear was talking to the remaining directors.

Nadella asked about the composition, according to the newly public transcript of the message thread, which redacts the names of people who ultimately weren’t chosen.

“Is this Larry Summers and [redacted] and you three? Is that still the plan?”

Summers was confirmed, Altman replied. The other slots were “still up in air.”

Altman asked, “would [redacted] be ok with you?”

“No,” Nadella wrote.

Scott was more emphatic, giving one unnamed person a “strong no,” and following up for emphasis: “Strong strong no.”

The vetting continued, as Nadella and Scott offered suggestions, all of them redacted in the public version of the thread. 

Nadella added Smith to the thread. One candidate, the Microsoft president wrote, was “Solid, thoughtful, calm.” Another was “Incredibly smart, firm, practical, while also a good listener.”

At one point, Scott floated a joke: “I can quit for six months and do it.” He added a grinning emoji and commented, “Ready to be downvoted by Satya on this one, and not really serious.”

Nadella gave that a thumbs down.

The back-and-forth reflected a delicate position. Microsoft had no board seat at OpenAI. Nadella had said publicly that the company didn’t want one. But the texts showed something closer to a shadow veto — a real-time screening of the people who would oversee the nonprofit’s mission.

By evening, a framework emerged. Altman proposed Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo as the board, with himself restored as CEO. Taylor would handle the investigation into his firing.

Smith raised a concern. “Your future would be decided by Larry [Summers],” he wrote. “He’s smart but so mercurial.” He called it “too risky.” (Summers resigned from the OpenAI board in November 2025, following revelations about his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein.)

Altman wrote, “id accept it given my conversations with him and where we are right now.” He added, “it’s bullshit but i want to save this … can you guys live with it?”

Nadella asked for Summers’ cell number.

At  2:38 p.m., Altman texted the group: “thank you guys for the partnership and trust. excited to get this all sorted to a long-term configuration you can really depend on.”

Nadella loved the message.

Two minutes later, Smith replied: “Thank you! A tough several days. Let’s build on this and regain momentum.”

Altman loved that one.

Nadella had the last word: “Really looking forward to getting back to building….”

Later that night, OpenAI announced Altman’s return with the newly constituted board.

“We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board,” Nadella posted on X. “We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

The crisis was resolved, but the underlying tensions remained.

‘Project Watershed’

On December 27, 2024, OpenAI announced it would unwind its capped-profit structure. Internally, this initiative was called “Project Watershed,” the documents reveal.

The mechanics played out through 2025. On September 11, Microsoft and OpenAI executed a memorandum of understanding with a 45-day timeline to finalize terms.

Microsoft’s role was straightforward but powerful. Its approval rights over “Major Decisions” including changes to OpenAI’s structure. Asked in a deposition whether those rights covered a recapitalization of OpenAI’s for‑profit entity into a public benefit corporation, Microsoft corporate development executive Michael Wetter testified that they did.

The company had no board seat. “Zero voting rights,” Wetter testified. “We have no role, to be super clear.” But under the 2019 agreement, the conversion couldn’t happen without them.

The timing mattered. A SoftBank-led financing — internally called Project Sakura — was contingent on the recapitalization closing by year-end. Without the conversion, the funding could not proceed. Without Microsoft’s approval, the conversion could not proceed.

Valuation became a key focus of negotiations. Morgan Stanley, working for Microsoft, estimated OpenAI’s value at $122 billion to $177 billion, according to court filings. Goldman Sachs, advising OpenAI, put it at $353 billion. The MOU set Microsoft’s stake at 32.5 percent. By the time the deal closed after the SoftBank round, dilution brought it to 27 percent. 

OpenAI’s implied valuation was $500 billion — a record at the time (until it was surpassed in December by Musk’s SpaceX). As Altman put it in his deposition, “That was the willing buyer-willing seller market price, so I won’t argue with it.”

For Microsoft, it was a give-and-take deal: the tech giant lost its right of first refusal on new cloud workloads, even as OpenAI committed to the $250 billion in future Azure purchases.

At the same time, the agreement defused the clause that had loomed over the partnership: under prior terms, a declaration of artificial general intelligence by OpenAI’s board would have cut Microsoft off from future models. Now any such declaration needs to be made by an independent panel, and Microsoft’s IP rights run through 2032 regardless. 

The transaction closed on Oct. 28, 2025. The nonprofit remained (renamed the OpenAI Foundation) but as a minority shareholder in the company it had once controlled.

Six days later, OpenAI signed a seven-year, $38 billion infrastructure deal with Amazon Web Services. The company that had “sneaked in there” at the founding, as Nadella put it in 2015, was back — this time as a major cloud provider for Microsoft’s flagship AI partner.

In a post this weekend, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar made the shift explicit: “Three years ago, we relied on a single compute provider,” she wrote. “Today, we are working with providers across a diversified ecosystem. That shift gives us resilience and, critically, compute certainty.”

Revenue is up from $2 billion in 2023 to more than $20 billion in 2025. OpenAI is no longer a research lab dependent on Microsoft’s cloud. It’s a platform company with leverage. 

In December 2015, Nadella had to ask whether Microsoft had been called to participate in the OpenAI launch. A decade later, nothing could happen without the Redmond tech giant. 

But OpenAI will no longer be theirs alone.

Vega Cloud, a Spokane-area tech startup that makes software to help companies manage their cloud spending, has been placed into the hands of a receiver after declaring it could no longer pay its debts.

Among those debts: nearly $830,000 owed to cloud giant Amazon Web Services. 

Vega Cloud, founded in 2018 and based in Liberty Lake, Wash., had raised $12.2 million and reached about $7 million in annual revenue as of 2023, according to PitchBook data. It had also cracked the GeekWire 200 — ranking #181 in the most recent quarterly update of our Pacific Northwest startup index.

What brought Vega Cloud to this point isn’t clear. Responding to our email inquiry this weekend, co-founder and CEO Kris Bliesner said the company is going through a restructuring via receivership, and said he wished he could say more about the situation.

The company had less than $17,000 in the bank when it was placed into receivership Thursday, Jan. 15, in King County Superior Court in Seattle, the filing shows. It employed about 35 people as of earlier this month, down from about 65 two years ago, according to LinkedIn. 

Receivership is a state-level process often used as an alternative to bankruptcy. In this case, Vega Cloud executed what’s known as an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, which puts a neutral party in charge of the company, pauses creditor collections, and places decisions about asset sales and payments under court supervision.

Sometimes those assets sell mostly intact, allowing new investors to give a business another try. But at this point, it’s not yet clear what will happen to the company’s employees or product.

Past ambitions for an IPO

In a March 2024 interview for GeekWire’s special series on Spokane, Bliesner described Vega Cloud’s trajectory in optimistic terms, saying the company was planning a $20 million to $30 million funding round and eyeing the public markets.

“We’re trying to push the envelope at Vega to maybe do the IPO route,” Bliesner said at the time. “We think that’s a viable thing for us.”

Vega Cloud operates in the sector known as FinOps, short for financial operations, helping companies get a handle on their cloud spending by bringing together finance and technical teams to track costs and avoid waste.

This is becoming more and more important as businesses pour money into cloud computing, often without realizing how much they’re spending on unused resources. Vega Cloud focused specifically on helping mid-sized companies manage spending across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, using automated tools to spot problems and recommend fixes. 

In the tight-knit Spokane tech community, Vega Cloud has been seen as a startup with the potential to make it big. We took note of the company in 2022, when it raised $9 million.

Investor and entrepreneur Martin Tobias, a longtime fixture in Pacific Northwest enterprise tech, invested in Vega Cloud shortly after moving from Seattle to Spokane during the pandemic. He told us in early 2024 that it would probably be one of his most successful investments. 

Tobias said Bliesner was exactly the kind of founder he looks for: someone with deep experience in a market who had tried to solve something one way, realized it wasn’t going to scale, and came up with a better solution.

“He took a new approach to an old problem,” Tobias said at the time. 

Bliesner previously co-founded cloud migration startup 2nd Watch, which raised about $56 million before selling a majority interest to Singapore-based investor ST Telemedia.

Financial details from the filing

Vega Cloud’s court filings give an inside look at the privately held business.

First, the company had real customers and revenue. The filings list contracts with companies including Paramount, Hearst, Deloitte, Molina Healthcare, John Wiley & Sons, and Cal Poly, among others. It lists roughly $264,000 in accounts receivable.

The largest secured creditor is Sun Mountain Private Credit Fund I, owed $3.5 million. That debt is backed by Vega Cloud’s intellectual property — its software, patents, trademarks, and domain names. Any proceeds from a sale of those assets would go first to that lender.

In addition to the roughly $830,000 owed to AWS, the court records show convertible promissory notes totaling about $2.5 million that were issued to investors throughout 2025.

The records list current and former employees who are owed unpaid commissions, bonuses, and expense reimbursements, with some bonus obligations dating back to 2023. The company also owes payroll and withholding taxes to the IRS and multiple state tax agencies.

Bliesner is the largest shareholder at about 30%. Other significant investors include Album Ventures (10%), Cowles Company (3%), Rudeen & Company (3%), Kick-Start III and IV (combined 4%), Tacoma Venture Fund (1.5%), and Pitbull Ventures (1%). 

The shareholder list also includes Voyager Capital, Alliance of Angels, Incisive Ventures, and Morning Star Foundation, along with dozens of individual investors.

Under court supervision, the receiver can now take possession of Vega Cloud’s assets and records, secure its bank accounts and data, evaluate and sell assets such as intellectual property, collect remaining receivables, and distribute proceeds to creditors in priority order.

The filings do not include a timeline for asset sales or any plan for the business to continue operating. Those details typically emerge later through receiver reports.

XRP has racked up major wins recently, from regulatory breakthroughs to network upgrades, yet its price continues to slide. A crypto analyst has shared insights into why this is happening, outlining several developments this week that would typically act as bullish catalysts for the XRP price, but have so far failed to push the token out of its downtrend and propel its value to new highs. 

XRP Sees Four Major Developments In One Week

Despite experiencing four major developments in just one week, the XRP price has shown little reaction. Crypto market expert Chain Cartel has pointed out that while many traders focus on immediate price movements, Ripple Labs, the developer of XRP, is quietly building the infrastructure that could position it as a key system of record for digital settlements.

The analyst suggested that the market overlooks structural developments, underestimating their impact on long-term growth. He highlighted rumors of Ripple’s collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as one of this week’s major events, noting that the alleged partnership explores the use of Amazon Bedrock AI for the XRP Ledger (XRPL). 

With this integration, XRPL system logs that used to take days to process can be analyzed in just minutes. According to Cartel, this is not an “hype AI,” but a development focused on improving security and scalability, and on giving institutions better visibility into XRP. 

In his post, Cartel also highlighted Ripple’s regulatory progress in the UK. He announced that the UK subsidiary of the crypto company has not been registered with the Financial Conduct Authority, which is known as one of the world’s strictest financial regulators. He stressed that this approval is a significant milestone for Ripple, boosting its compliance credentials and international credibility. 

In addition to achieving even greater regulatory clarity, Cartel highlighted Ripple’s partnership with The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon) as another key development. BNY Mellon recently launched tokenized deposit services for institutional clients, and Ripple Prime, a digital asset prime brokerage platform created after Ripple acquired Hidden Road, is among the first users. Even more important, the analyst said that BNY Mellon remains the primary reserve custodian for RLUSD, showing a direct integration between traditional banking and digital settlement rails. 

Finally, Cartel mentioned the upcoming vote on the CLARITY Act by the US Senate Banking Committee scheduled for January 15. This bill will decide how crypto trading, settlements, and connections to financial systems are regulated in the future. The analyst said that if the bill is passed, it could affect how institutions interact with XRP and the broader crypto market. 

Why The XRP Price Is Still In A  Downtrend

Despite all these developments and milestones, Cartel noted that XRP’s price has barely moved over the week, still trading around $2.0. The analyst stated that the reason the cryptocurrency keeps moving lower is that it reacts less to hype and more to the completion of key infrastructure. 

According to Cartel, these developments are building significant pressure in the market. He described XRP’s situation as a compression before a violent release, suggesting that the cryptocurrency could experience a sharp price rally once the foundational systems are fully in place.

— Jon Pollock is now chief product officer of Acumatica, the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant that was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners.

Pollock joins Acumatica from childcare management software company Procare Solutions, where he was CPO and general manager of Procare’s ChildPlus division. He previously held leadership roles with Worldpay, Asurion, Dell, Polaroid and others.

“Jon has the experience, vision, and strong track record of leading dynamic teams to execute our product strategy and empower the people who use our software every day,” John Case, CEO of Acumatica, said in a statement.

Case succeeds Ali Jani, who was with the company for 16 years. Early in his career, Jani co-founded a PC manufacturing startup and a company providing software for business management operations.

— Mo Malakoutian is now the mayor of the City of Bellevue. Malakoutian joined the Bellevue City Council in 2023, was elected by his colleagues to serve as deputy mayor beginning in 2024, and was chosen as mayor this month.

Malakoutian previously worked at Amazon for more than eight years, leaving the role of senior manager of learning and development in October. He is currently the executive director of the University of Washington’s Consulting and Business Development Center with the Foster School of Business.

Malakoutian replaces Lynne Robinson, who was mayor since 2020. She remains on the Bellevue City Council.

City councilmember Dave Hamilton was appointed deputy mayor of Bellevue.

— Software engineering leader David Bettis is leaving Amazon after two decades. Bettis was most recently with Amazon Web Services, including roles focused on the company’s telehealth initiative. Earlier in his career, Bettis worked on the company’s Halo product, Amazon Go’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology, Kindle and other initiatives.

Bettis said on LinkedIn that he stayed at Amazon for so long because of the opportunity to work on emerging businesses, which provided “new and exciting opportunities, while staying under the same roof.”

More recently he had “explored a couple paths internally, but nothing sparked the same excitement I’d felt in previous roles. That’s when I realized it was time for a bigger change.”

The engineer added that he’ll spend most of this year deciding what full-time role comes next — maybe a smaller company, teaching, something entrepreneurial — and that he’ll be staying in Seattle.

— In another Amazon departure, Steven Hatch has resigned from his role as head of engineering with AWS Bedrock. Hatch, based in New York City, has been with Amazon for nearly 18 years, working in areas including with Audible, Amazon Prime delivery experience, computer vision and most recently in AI.

Hatch said on LinkedIn that he’s “closing a chapter that changed how I think, lead, and build. I’m proud of my achievements. But the real story was about the people, the learning, and the craft.”

Hatch did not disclose his next move, but said there would be “more soon.”

— Warren McNeel left T-Mobile after more then 25 years with the Bellevue-based telecom juggernaut. McNeel has been in the wireless sector for three decades, and most recently served as T-Mobile’s senior vice president of information technology.

McNeel said on LinkedIn that he wanted to spend time with his family “and begin thinking about the next chapter of my professional journey.”

“I’ve had the privilege of leading some of the best technology and product teams in the industry,” he added. “I couldn’t be more proud of the innovations, technology transformations, and results these teams delivered.”

— Seattle-based Gates Foundation appointed Sri Mulyani  Indrawati to its governing board. Indrawati was Indonesia’s first female minister of finance and the former managing director and chief operating officer of the World Bank.

“She adds fresh perspective for the board as it guides the foundation’s direction over the next 20 years,” said CEO Mark Suzman.

The Gates Foundation announced two additional leadership changes:

• Hari Menon is now president of the organization’s Global Growth and Opportunity Division. Menon has been with the foundation for nearly 20 years.
• Ankur Vora is president of the newly-created Africa and India Offices Division as well as retaining his role as chief strategy officer.

— Reverb, a Seattle-based HR consulting and leadership development firm, is officially expanding into the Colorado market with the hiring of Renee Fischer. Fischer, who resides in Denver, is a business development and human resources consultant.

— Sabah Öney joined the board of directors of Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center. Öney is the president and CEO of Dispatch Bio, a Bay Area startup that is developing a treatment for solid tumors. He is also a co-founder of the protein design company Vilya.

— Seattle-based Cascadia Capital, an investment bank serving clients globally, promoted Kerri Hagen to managing director within the its Financial Sponsors Group. Hagen has been with the firm for more than three years.

— Seattle software engineering startup FlintLab named Diwakar as its head of engineering. Diwakar, who was previously based in India, joins from the semiconductor company AMD. Past employers include Ericsson, RSA Security and others.

FlintLab launched in 2024 and describes itself as an “AI-powered infrastructure platform as a service” company. Co-founders Krishna Seerapu and Jinesh M.D previously held roles at Amazon and elsewhere.

— Life Science Washington announced four new members of its board of directors:

• Arden Yang, vice president of Innovation at the Allen Institute
• LisaMarie Curda, a partner focused on audit and assurance with Deloitte
• Jie D’Elia, CEO of the bio-pharmaceutical company SystImmune
• Chris Holt, vice president of cell therapy external manufacturing with Bristol Myers Squibb

— T-Mobile appointed Jon Freier as its new chief operating officer. He succeeds Srini Gopalan, who was named CEO of the Bellevue, Wash., telecom giant in a surprise move that took effect last month.

Freier joins the C-suite from his previous position as president of the T-Mobile Consumer Group, a title he has held since 2021. But he has been with the company for much longer: Freier began his professional career at Western Wireless in 1994 when he was 19 years old. That business became T-Mobile after Germany’s Deutsche Telekom took over as majority shareholder in 2001.

The company disclosed Freier’s promotion in a filing. T-Mobile has undergone additional leadership reshuffling in recent months, expanding the role of its chief technologist and marking the departure of its chief communications and corporate responsibility officer and its business group president.

— Alex Berezhnyy is now chief technology officer for RentSpree, a Seattle company that supports the rental application and screening process, and helps manage lease documents and payments.

Berezhnyy was previously at the real estate platform Redfin for more than a decade, leaving the role of vice president of engineering. Prior to that, he was at Amazon where he served in a variety of software development manager roles in retail systems and Kindle education.

“[Berezhnyy] brings deep technical expertise, a track record of building strong teams, and a bold vision for how AI will shape the future of renting,” RentSpree posted on LinkedIn.

— Paige Johnson has left her role as Microsoft’s vice president of Education. She is relaunching EdCatalyst Group, an Oregon-based consulting business that she previously ran for nearly three years that supports companies, nonprofits and public organizations in using AI to expand their impact.

“My years at Microsoft were an extraordinary chapter. I learned so much about how AI is reshaping industries — from education and media to public sector and financial services,” Johnson said on LinkedIn.

Earlier in her career, Johnson was with Intel for nearly two decades, creating and scaling a professional development program that trained millions of teachers worldwide.

— James Newell is chief financial officer of WayTrade, a commodity trading company focused on renewable fuels including sustainable aviation fuel.

Newell, who will work remotely from Seattle, was previously a general partner with Voyager Capital, an investor in early stage companies in the Pacific Northwest.

“I found the perfect opportunity to make a meaningful impact at a company that itself makes a meaningful impact, and I get to do so alongside incredible people,” Newell said on LinkedIn.

— After 15 years with Amazon Web Services, Julien Ellie has resigned from his job as senior principal engineer. Ellie praised his colleagues who helped shape cloud computing, but said the company he joined and what AWS has become are no longer the same.

“From where I sit, process has taken precedence over customers, and rules have replaced high judgment. The culture has shifted from high trust to low trust, and from impact-driven to ‘who you know.’ That doesn’t align with the builder mindset that brought me here,” Ellie said on LinkedIn.

Prior to Amazon, Ellie was at Microsoft for nearly a decade.

— Jonathan Assayag has left his Sunnyvale, Calif., role with Amazon where he served as general manager and director of the company’s smart eyewear program. During more than nine years at the tech giant, Assayag worked on products including Echo Frames and Smart Delivery Glasses.

“These were true zero-to-one efforts that pushed ambient computing, Voice AI, and AI-assisted workflows into new territory. They challenged me both as a builder and a leader, sharpening how I think, make decisions, and drive impact,” he said on LinkedIn.

Assayag also thanked his team members and company leaders. He did not share his next move.

— Gravyty, a Seattle-based company that facilitates alumni donations and higher ed student engagement, named Lisa Haubenstock as its new chief customer officer. Haubenstock joins Gravyty from shipping logistics company Truckstop, and has held roles at Amazon and the education company Everfi.

“Gravyty presents an opportunity to tie together so much of my previous experience with a truly dedicated global team working to build something great,” Haubenstock said on LinkedIn.

— Bobby Franzo is now CEO of WatchMeGrow, a Lacey, Wash.-based company that provides cameras and live video streaming in the childcare, pet-care and senior-care spaces. He succeeds John Lewison, who led the company for 24 years and is now a board member and advisor.

Franzo is the founder of PB&J TV (Peanut Butter and Jelly TV), a streaming service that merged with WatchMeGrow earlier this year.

“What started as an idea to give families peace of mind has evolved into a company shaping how technology supports safety and quality during the most important years of a child’s development,” Lewison said on LinkedIn. He added that Franzo “is exactly what the company needs at this moment, and I’m thrilled he’s at the helm.”

— CreateMe, a California-based clothing manufacturer using robotic assembly lines, announced two leadership changes:

• Nick Chope, who is located in Portland, Ore., has been promoted to chief engineer and head of manufacturing. Chope has worked in robotics and automation at Microsoft, Apple, his own firm and elsewhere.
• Seattle’s Natasha Chand is now executive advisor, having previously worked as the global CEO of Amazon Softlines Private Label, which includes clothes, footwear and accessories.

— Lauren Weinberg is now a board advisor at Adora, a Seattle-based marketing technology startup that emerged from stealth in October. Her past roles include leadership positions at Peleton Interactive, Square, Yahoo and elsewhere.

LAS VEGAS — Speaking this week on the Amazon Web Services re:Invent stage, AWS executive Colleen Aubrey delivered a prediction that doubled as a wake-up call for companies still thinking of AI as just another tool.

“I believe that over the next few years, agentic teammates can be essential to every team — as essential as the people sitting right next to you,” Aubrey said during the Wednesday keynote. “They will fundamentally transform how companies build and deliver for their customers.”

But what does that look like in practice? On her own team, for example, Aubrey says she challenged groups that once had 50 people taking nine months to deliver a new product to do the same with 10 people working for three months.

Meanwhile, non-engineers such as finance analysts are building working prototypes using AI tools, contributing code in Amazon’s Kiro agentic development tool alongside engineers, and feeding those prototypes into Amazon’s famous PR/FAQ planning process on weekly cycles.

Those are some of the details that Aubrey shared when we sat down with her after the keynote at the GeekWire Studios booth in the re:Invent expo hall to dig into the themes from her talk. Aubrey is senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, overseeing the company’s push into business applications for call centers, supply chains, and other sectors.

Continue reading for takeaways from the conversation, watch the video below, and listen to the conversation starting in the second segment of this week’s GeekWire Podcast.

The ‘teammate’ mental model changes everything. Aubrey draws a clear line between single-purpose AI tools that do one thing well and the agentic teammates she sees emerging — systems that take responsibility for whole objectives, and require a different kind of management. 

“I think people will increasingly be managers of AI,” she said. “The days of having to do the individual keystrokes ourselves, I think, are fast fading. And in fact, everyone is going to be a manager now. You have to think about prioritization, delegation, and auditing. What’s the quality of our feedback, providing coaching. What are the guardrails?”

Amazon Connect crosses $1 billion. AWS’s call center platform reached $1 billion in annual revenue on a run rate basis, with Aubrey noting it has accelerated year-over-year growth for two consecutive years. 

This week at re:Invent, the team announced 29 new capabilities across four areas: Nova Sonic voice interaction that Aubrey says is “very close to being indistinguishable” from human conversation; agents that complete tasks on behalf of customers; clickstream intelligence for product recommendations; and observability tools for inspecting AI reasoning. 

One interesting detail: Aubrey said she’s often surprised by Nova Sonic’s sophistication and empathy in complex conversations — and equally surprised when it fails at basic tasks like spelling an address correctly. 

“There’s still work to do to really polish that,” she said.

The ROI question gets a “yes and no.” Asked whether companies are seeing the business value to justify AI agent investments, Aubrey offered a nuanced response. “I observe companies to struggle to realize the business impact,” she said. But she said the value often shows up as eliminating bottlenecks — clearing backlogs, erasing technical debt, accelerating security patching — rather than immediate revenue gains. 

“I’m not going to see the impact on my P&L today,” she said, “but if I fast forward a year, I’m going to have a product in market where real customers are using and getting real value, and we’re learning and iterating where I might not have even been halfway there in the past.” 

Her advice for companies still hesitating: “If you don’t start today, that’s a one way door decision… I think you have to start the journey today. I would suggest people get focused, they get moving, because if you don’t, I think that becomes existential.”

Trust requires observability. Aubrey says companies won’t get full value from AI teammates if they can’t see how they’re reasoning. 

“If you don’t trust an AI teammate, then you’re never going to realize the full benefit,” she said. “You’re not going to give them the hard tasks, you’re not going to invest in their development.” 

The solution is treating AI inspection the same way you’d manage a human colleague: understand why it took an action, audit the quality, and iterate. 

“You can refine your knowledge bases. You can refine your workflows. You can refine your guardrails, and then confidently keep iterating… the same way we do with each other. We keep iterating, we keep learning, and we keep getting better,” she said.

Product updates: Beyond Connect, Aubrey offered updates on other parts of her portfolio of Amazon’s applied AI solutions. 

• Just Walk Out, Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology, deployed more than 150 new stores in 2025 and should accelerate next year.
• AWS Supply Chain, meanwhile, is getting a reset. “I’m going to declare that a pivot,” she said, with a Q1 announcement coming around agentic decision-making for supply and demand planning.
• Also coming in Q1: a life sciences product focused on antibody discovery, currently in beta. 

She teased “a few other new investment areas” expected to come in early 2026.

Amazon is experimenting again. This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we dig into our scoop on Amazon Now, the company’s new ultrafast delivery service. Plus, we recap the GeekWire team’s ride in a Zoox robotaxi on the Las Vegas Strip during Amazon Web Services re:Invent.

In our featured interview from the expo hall, AWS Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey discusses Amazon’s push into applied AI, why the company sees AI agents as “teammates,” and how her team is rethinking product development in the age of agentic coding.

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• Stars on the ceiling, Cher on the speakers: Our first ride in Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi
• We tested ‘Amazon Now’ in Seattle — and got our delivery in 23 minutes
• The AWS CEO thought Amazon needed a million developers, until AI changed his mind

With GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook. Edited by Curt Milton.

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