Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting the passions and hobbies that members of the Seattle-area tech community pursue outside of work.

• Name: Peter Lee.
• Day job: President, Microsoft Research. Lee leads the organization’s global labs and drives the incubation of new research-powered products in artificial intelligence, computing foundations, health, and life sciences.
• Out-of-office passion: Converting classic cars to electric.

When Peter Lee first started his research for a project to convert his replica 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder to electric, he used the AI model Davinci-003 (OpenAI’s early Chat GPT-4) for help with the engineering design.

When he explained to the AI what he wanted to do, the first response Lee got back was, “Why on earth would you want to ruin a beautiful classic car like that?” 

The head of Microsoft Research doesn’t just hear it from artificial intelligence. Now in the midst of converting another classic — a 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback — Lee is used to plenty of human car fanatics expressing their displeasure with his hobby.

“Half the people I’ve told about this project think it’s the coolest thing, and the other half think it’s totally evil,” Lee said. “One guy actually told me I’m never going to heaven.”

Lee, who joined Microsoft in 2010 and previously spent 22 years at Carnegie Mellon University, was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in health and life sciences in 2024. Cars have been a passion since he was a kid. He raced karts and Formula Ford, and was even a licensed auto body technician for a time.

Frustrated by fuel system issues with the Porsche in 2020, Lee connected with Marc Davis, founder of Moment Motor Co. in Austin, Texas, a shop that “transforms vintage head-turners into modern electric cars.” Moment is dedicated to “preserving the art and beauty” of classics like those owned by Lee.

Some classic car lovers are quick to criticize EV conversions for messing with the original gas-powered intent of manufacturers, pointing out that the cost alone makes it irresponsible. Davis said Moment’s work generates “plenty of vomit emojis” from purists on the company’s social media posts.

“I personally believe what we’re doing is preservation,” he said, pointing to projects in which people bring new life to a car that was their all-time favorite or something that their dad drove. (This Bloomberg video shows how the conversion process works.)

The cost of such a conversion can depend on car condition, size, and performance and range requirements from the owner, but Davis puts the ballpark between $50,000 and $150,000. That’s on top of a classic car that might cost $200,000. The Mustang project entails 100-150 hours of engineering work and 400-500 hours of installation work.

Lee is drawn to many of the benefits of going electric — no gas or oil to worry about, modern components, and explosive torque.

In the wet Pacific Northwest, Lee’s Porsche is garaged for the winter at a 50% charge. On the first nice day in the spring, there’s little to fuss with.

“I’ll just check the air in the tires, turn it on, and it’ll just go. And it’ll go fast. It’s really a wonderful, wonderful thing,” Lee said, adding that speeds in the Porsche, which is a replica of the model in which Hollywood icon James Dean died, can be “a little scary.”

With the Mustang, Lee is involved in decisions big and small, from what type of shift knob he might like, to whether to retain the solid rear axle.

“I put thought into this, especially when I was driving the car to get to know it,” Lee said. “I ended up thinking that the car wouldn’t be a Mustang anymore if we got rid of the live rear axle, and it turned out that Marc’s design choice was exactly the same.”

When it’s done, the Mustang will be a unique build, and one that Lee says will demand plenty of attention on the car show circuit.

Asked whether he has a third vehicle in mind to convert next, Lee laughed before considering his growing collection and his desire to possibly change over an old pickup truck.

“My wife isn’t around is she?” he said.

Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Lee loves that there are serious technical and design aspects of what he’s pursuing. In the case of the current project, he grapples with decisions that impact what it means for the car to still be a Mustang, and feel like a Mustang.

“The thing I’ve always loved about cars, and why I love to work on cars, is you actually finish something,” he said. “That never happens in software. Software’s never done. You might ship it, but you’re still working on it forever.”

Lee is also a believer in the growing business potential of converting classic cars to EV and he thinks it would be a thrill to be involved on the side with a company that’s doing such work.

“The whole idea of beautiful, classic-looking cars that have all the modern conveniences of being EV — I think that’s going to be a bigger and bigger thing,” he said.

The lessons he brings back to work: Lee has wanted to combine his passion around cars with his day job forever. Today, car technology and auto racing have become so technical that he now has fellow researchers at Microsoft who are generally interested as well.

He called cars “a great laboratory” for trying to understand action models — the AI systems designed to predict and determine the next best action an agent (like a robot or software) should take to achieve a specific goal.

At Microsoft Research, advancements in car software provide interesting ways to think about the architecture of an action model or training paradigms, with learnings that could impact what’s happening on your own computer.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if five years from now the ’68 Mustang conversion has more intelligence, more self-drive, more action model, more robotic capabilities,” Lee said. “I think you’ll see those things pop up even in your plain old Windows desktop over time.”

Read more Out of Office profiles.

Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: tips@geekwire.com.

In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing one of the largest marine oil spills ever. In the aftermath of the disaster, whale scientist Iain Kerr traveled to the area to study how the spill had affected sperm whales, aiming specialized darts at the animals to collect pencil eraser-sized tissue samples.

It wasn’t going well. Each time his boat approached a whale surfacing for air, the animal vanished beneath the waves before he could reach it. “I felt like I was playing Whac-A-Mole,” he says.

As darkness fell, a whale dove in front of Kerr and covered him in whale snot. That unpleasant experience gave Kerr, who works at the conservation group Ocean Alliance, an idea: What if he could collect that same snot by somehow flying over the whale? Researchers can glean much information from whale snot, including the animal’s DNA sequence, its sex, whether it is pregnant, and the makeup of its microbiome.

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This Green Wednesday, Verilife is celebrating the season by offering a special discount for their customers. They’re marking down some of their top products, and that’s not all. On the week of 11/23, any customer who stops by any Maryland Verilife location can get a chance to redeem a doorbuster with just a single in-store […]

The post Enjoy some of Maryland’s best deals this Green Wednesday at Verilife. appeared first on Leafly.

This Green Wednesday, Verilife is celebrating the season by offering a special discount to their customers. They’re marking down some of their top products, and that’s not all. On the week of 11/23, any customer who stops by any Illinois Verilife location can get a chance to redeem a doorbuster with just a single in-store […]

The post Enjoy some of Illinois’ best deals at Verilife this Green Wednesday appeared first on Leafly.

Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don’t have enough common ground for that to even be possible? An alien species is bound to be biologically very different, and their language will be shaped by their home environment, broader culture, and even how they perceive the universe. They might not even share the same math and physics. These and other fascinating questions are the focus of an entertaining new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions About Science and the Nature of Reality.

Co-author Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, who has worked on the ATLAS collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He’s also a gifted science communicator who previously co-authored two books with cartoonist Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame: 2018’s We Have No Idea and 2021’s Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe. (The pair also co-hosted a podcast from 2018 to 2024, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.) This time around, cartoonist Andy Warner provided the illustrations, and Whiteson and Warner charmingly dedicate their book to “all the alien scientists we have yet to meet.”

Whiteson has long been interested in the philosophy of physics. “I’m not the kind of physicist who’s like, ‘whatever, let’s just measure stuff,'” he told Ars. “The thing that always excited me about physics was this implicit promise that we were doing something universal, that we were learning things that were true on other planets. But the more I learned, the more concerned I became that this might have been oversold. None are fundamental, and we don’t understand why anything emerges. Can we separate the human lens from the thing we’re looking at? We don’t know in the end how much that lens is distorting what we see or defining what we’re looking at. So that was the fundamental question I always wanted to explore.”

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Greetings team,
I’ll be speaking at AI Edge in two weeks. Come join us at what’s shaping up to be a standout AI event.

Today’s edition covers a wild week in the AI world: Kimi K2 just outperformed every major model, signaling how fast Chinese open-source systems are advancing while keeping costs dramatically lower. Anthropic is now on track to hit profitability years ahead of OpenAI, and a new Silicon Valley-backed startup is raising the question none of us expected so soon: Would you edit your future baby’s DNA?

Let’s dive in — and stay curious.

• Anthropic to be Profitable before OpenAI
• AI Tools
• Kimi K2 AI Model Beats all other LLMS
• AI Guides
• Would You Edit Your Future Baby’s DNA?

Subscribe today and get 50% off for life, free access to our 1,500+ AI tools database, and a complimentary 30-minute personalized consulting session to help you supercharge your AI strategy.

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📰 AI News and Trends

• xAI works on Grok Code Remote to rival OpenAI’s Codex
• Lovable has surged to nearly 8 million users and sees 100,000 new projects built daily.
• OpenAI to sell compute capacity to other companies, putting the company in direct competition with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Being a cloud provider would help fund big AI spending.
• Altman and Masayoshi Son Back 27-Year-Old Louis Andre’s Bid to Build “A New Bell Labs” With Episteme, a San Francisco Research Lab Aiming to Free Top Scientists From Bureaucracy and Turn Breakthrough Ideas Into World-Changing Products
• Wikipedia urges AI companies to use its paid API and stop scraping
• OpenAI is weighing a move into consumer health apps

Other Tech News

• SoftBank sold 32.1 million shares of Nvidia in October. It also sold part of its stake in T-Mobile for $9.17 billion to finance OpenAI
• With $19 billion in quarterly sales, TikTok Shop now rivals eBay
• Apple Plans Major New Satellite-Powered Features for iPhones
• China-Backed $23B Simandou Mine Launches, Promising Cheaper Steel and a Potential Guinea Boom Amid Growing Environmental Fears
• Tesla Breaks Ground on Massive Giga Texas Plant to Build Millions of Optimus Humanoid Robots

Anthropic to be Profitable before OpenAI

The Information

Anthropic and OpenAI are on wildly different financial paths. New documents show Anthropic is set to break even by 2028, while OpenAI expects $74B in operating losses that same year, about 75% of revenue driven by massive chip and data-center spending.

OpenAI plans to burn 14× more cash than Anthropic before reaching profitability in 2030, fueled by Sam Altman’s push for scale and $1.4T in long-term compute commitments. Anthropic, valued at $183B vs. OpenAI’s $500B, is growing its business more efficiently by focusing on corporate customers (80% of revenue) and avoiding compute-heavy ventures like video generation. In 2024, both companies burned roughly 70% of revenue, but Anthropic’s burn rate drops to 9% by 2027, while OpenAI’s remains high. OpenAI is betting big that demand will justify its infrastructure buildout, spending nearly $100B on backup data-center capacity alone, while Anthropic opts for steadier, revenue-aligned growth.

Courtesy of Sacra

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Kimi K2 AI Model Beats all other LLMS

Kimi 2 Thinking Benchmarl

Moonshot’s new Kimi K2 Thinking, just changed the AI landscape. The fully open-source model is now outperforming GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Grok-4 on major benchmarks in reasoning, coding, retrieval, and agentic tool use.

Built as a 1T-parameter MoE (32B active), K2 Thinking scores 44.9% on HLE, 60.2% on BrowseComp, and 71.3% on SWE-Bench. Verified all frontier-level results. It supports 256k context, native INT4 inference, and long autonomous tool chains (200–300+ calls), while staying far cheaper than closed models. Moonshot released it under a modified MIT license, making it one of the most permissive high-end models available. The breakthrough marks a turning point: open-weight systems are now matching and in many cases beating proprietary giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. At a time when U.S. labs face scrutiny over trillion-dollar compute spending, K2 Thinking shows that frontier AI doesn’t require massive capital infrastructure, just efficient architectures.

For enterprises, it raises a blunt question: why pay for closed APIs when a free open model now leads the benchmarks?

🧰 AI Tools of The Day

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Would You Edit Your Future Baby’s DNA?

A Silicon Valley startup called Preventive, backed by Sam Altman and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, is researching whether gene-editing human embryos can safely prevent hereditary diseases, sparking fierce ethical and legal debate.

The company has raised $30 million and is studying CRISPR-based embryo editing in San Francisco, even though implanting a gene-edited embryo is illegal in the US and banned in most countries. Preventive says it isn’t trying to create a baby now, only to prove the technology can be made safe, but critics warn it risks sliding into “designer baby” territory and eugenics. Some insiders say the startup has explored doing future trials in countries with looser rules, while supporters argue it could one day eliminate devastating genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis or sickle-cell disease.

💰Anthropic to be Profitable before OpenAI was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the federal workforce continues to evolve, the government’s employee benefits landscape is simultaneously adapting to the changing needs and expectations of this diverse workforce.

For health carriers, adapting to the evolving federal workforce means reevaluating and refining the benefits offered through government insurance programs to better align with their changing needs.

“A lot of long-time federal employees are retiring or leaving and being replaced by younger people, so what is important today is different than what was important 20 years ago,” Missy Plohr-Memming, MetLife’s senior vice president for U.S. Group Benefits, said during Federal News Network’s 2026 Open Season Exchange. “So when we think about the program benefits for 2026, we think about flexibility and expanding that program.”

Delivering benefits through FEDVIP and more

MetLife Federal Benefits offers a range of coverage options within the government’s marketplace, including comprehensive dental and vision coverage as part of the Federal Employee Dental and Vision Insurance Program (FEDVIP), as well as various supplemental health benefits separate from the program. In total, MetLife offers benefits to about 50,000 employers, spanning roughly 40 million employees and their dependents.

“We have the privilege of caring for those folks every day, and we take that privilege quite seriously,” Plohr-Memming said.

Part of MetLife’s current focus, she said, is to look at what is most important to federal employees in the current moment, especially as it pertains to a more holistic approach to health and wellness.

“Certainly, people need medical benefits. … But then there are all the other ancillary benefits. Think of that as dental and vision, of course, but it’s also things like legal insurance and pet insurance,” Plohr-Memming said. “And then you bring in those elements of financial health and mental health, and you can really craft a bespoke set of benefits for your unique circumstances, from the offerings available through the Office of Personnel Management and as a federal employee and a member of the federal family.”

Expanding benefits to meet changing needs

There are some specific ways that MetLife is changing its options to meet the evolving needs of federal employees. Some of those key changes are focused on expanding options for dental benefits.

“We worked to craft some plan design changes that make sense in the context of the modern workforce, including offering three cleanings for people who are pregnant or have diabetes,” Plohr-Memming said.

But the changes for MetLife go beyond updates to the benefits themselves, she said. For instance, dental and vision enrollees can also access identity and fraud protection from the health carrier — at no additional cost.

“We’re also thinking about things like the network: How do we make sure we have the most expansive network, both for dental and vision?” Plohr-Memming said. “We want to meet people where they are in their time of need, and in the place that they believe they can get the best care.”

Taking advantage of Open Season

An annual study conducted by MetLife, the Employee Benefit Trends Study, found that 35% of federal employees feel “holistically healthy.” That’s lower than the 39% of U.S. employees overall who say the same. And within the federal workforce, 27% of federal managers say they feel “holistically healthy,” compared with 40% of nonmanagers in government who say the same.

Part of the reason for that divide may stem from an incomplete understanding of the benefits and coverage that federal employees can access, according to MetLife’s analysis of the study’s findings.

Open Season is the best time for participants to conduct research and learn more about the options that are out there, Plohr-Memming said.

She recommended three specific steps federal employees should take before the enrollment window closes Dec. 10:

• First, really take time to consider the different options at participants’ disposal.
• Second, focus on family circumstances and what may be necessary there.
• Third, look “holistically” at the options — and beyond just the premium cost.

“What’s really important is, what does that premium get you?” Plohr-Memming said. “When you estimate your out-of-pocket expenses plus the premium that comes out of your paycheck, you can get the true cost or the true value of the program.”

She recommended visiting carriers’ benefits websites and checking pricing — say, for example, the cost of a root canal or having a cavity filled and comparing pricing. People should look at their possible needs over the coming year, Plohr-Memming said.

“Our philosophy is always focused on you building a more confident future. That philosophy guides everything we do, from the capabilities we establish to the plan designs we work with employers on and actually how we execute and deliver service.”

Discover more articles and videos now on our 2026 Open Season Exchange event page.

The post 2026 Open Season Exchange: MetLife’s Missy Plohr-Memming on prioritizing holistic health first appeared on Federal News Network.

Adrienne Chan‘s pivot away from a career in tech could more aptly be considered a pirouette.

The former Microsoft product manager is the co-founder of a new ballet school in Redmond, Wash., where she’s reconnecting with the dancing she practiced growing up, and seizing on a desire to run her own business.

“I knew I had to do this because I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Chan told GeekWire. “I loved my job at Microsoft, and I wanted to do both … but 24/7 my mind was only thinking about the ballet school.”

Bellevue Classical Ballet opened in September in Redmond Town Center with a mission to serve students of all ages and skill levels. Chan is serving as executive director, and her co-founder, Eric Hipolito Jr., a former dancer and instructor with Pacific Northwest Ballet School, is artistic director.

Chan first interned at Microsoft in 2017 before spending almost four years at the tech giant working on Azure products. She left in 2022 to get her Master of Science degree in entrepreneurship from the University of Washington before returning to Microsoft for another 11-month stint.

While at the UW, Chan utilized her engineering background and worked on a dance education app as part of her degree program.

“Something still felt a little off for me,” she admitted. “I felt that maybe I wanted to stray a little bit more away from tech.”

She met Hipolito and made the leap back into dancing. And along the way, she found tech was still a suitable partner.

Intrigued by entrepreneurship

Chan grew up in Toronto and transitioned from gymnastics to ballet as a kid, falling in love with the art form at age 9 thanks to her teachers. She eventually took up other styles of dance in productions within the Chinese community in Toronto.

She studied systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and as an undergrad, her first internship was at a startup incubator.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Chan said. “The drive that people have, the motivation — they just want to get work done. They’re so passionate. And that really sparked my interest in entrepreneurship.”

Her feelings were lining up with memories she had of a “career class” she took in high school where she had to list 10 things she might want to be when she grew up. Engineering was on the list. And so was CEO of a dance company.

Although she wanted to pursue her master’s directly after undergrad, she had already committed to Microsoft and moved to Seattle to begin her career.

Adaptability, iteration and more

Chan’s parents and others were a bit surprised when she left a high-paying tech job to go back to school, and even more so when she left that job again to open a ballet school.

Even though she was touching products used by millions of people, Chan wasn’t connecting with those people on a day-to-day basis. She wasn’t using those products herself, and they didn’t align with her aspirations.

“I really did enjoy my job at Microsoft, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted long term,” she said. “I wanted something more meaningful, something that felt like I could make an impact on people.”

Chan is a big believer in the notion that everything has led her to where she is today. And she feels that her tech background is making an impact on the ways she thinks about running a small business — something she’s been writing about in posts on LinkedIn.

“If I pursued dance in college, I don’t think I would be as successful doing this now,” she said. “I think that tech background really helped me do this.”

Managing a product is a lot like managing a business, Chan said, calling out the ambiguity of both. At the ballet school, she finds herself leaning on the adaptability and decisiveness that helped her at Microsoft, and iterating as she goes — a mindset she calls very common in tech.

But she’s not using AI.

When she had to crunch 100 different schedule options for the school, Hipolito asked why she didn’t just throw all the variables into an AI model and ask for the best result.

“I said, ‘No, I want to use my brain,'” Chan said. “I trust my brain.”

Chan also chuckles at the irony of her life now — teaching the kids of Microsoft workers while some of those parents are outside her dance studio working on laptops, doing code reviews or whatever else.

When people call her a risk-taker or commend her courage for the change she’s made, Chan doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s stressful. But I’m stressing for what I really want to be doing, what really matters to me,” she said. “I don’t think that’s replaceable at all. I don’t think there’s any other option.

When Marissa Coughlin left her latest tech job to open a romance bookstore and crafting hub in Seattle, she didn’t leave technology behind completely.

In fact, alongside her partner, Constantine Vetoshev, who still works in tech, artificial intelligence has become a major player in this next chapter of their lives.

Coughlin worked in a variety of communications and content roles for companies including Airbnb, Textio, Highspot, and most recently, T-Mobile. Vetoshev is a software developer at Brook.ai, a Seattle-area health technology startup that uses AI to help clinical teams deliver remote care.

Both big readers, the pair first started looking at spaces and developing a bookstore business plan in 2023. But with two small children, they were waiting for better timing. When a space became available on Market Street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood they finally made the leap, and opened Swoon City last month.

While Coughlin has no interest in seeing AI used to write the books or illustrate the covers that line her shelves, she’s a big believer in how the technology can help the back end of the business.

“I think more businesses should be using this stuff, especially small businesses, if they can figure out how to tap into it,” Coughlin said. “It’s super useful, but you have to know that it’s there and what it can do, and be a little bit creative and figure out the solutions.”

Here are some of the ways Swoon City is tapping into AI, leveraging Coughlin and Vetoshev’s know-how:

• To help pick the store’s inventory of 3,000 books, they used analysis based on Seattle Public Library data of the most-borrowed romance novels over the past 18 months.
• They built a custom generative AI tool to categorize all the romance novels they bought into sub-genres so people can quickly find their favorites. For example, the book “Thirsty” would typically just be categorized under romance or maybe paranormal romance, but Swoon’s system categorizes it as paranormal romance, LGBTQ, enemies to lovers, vampire romance, romantic comedy, and urban fantasy.
• GenAI was used to build a customer loyalty program. Vetoshev, who said he is “all in” on Anthropic, asked the AI assistant Claude to analyze some requirements they had for different programs. Claude wrote back and said, “You could go with this one, or you could just build it yourself. Here’s how.”

“I feel like there’s a lot of things that we’ve created for this store that other people who might be curious about doing something like this could tap into and be able to leverage for their own stuff,” Coughlin said.

Vetoshev said he can come home from his day job, put the kids to bed and then focus on something that needs to be built for the store.

“A couple of hours of work with a [large language] model, and we’re off to the races,” he said.

The technology is all in service of a genre that is exploding, especially among young readers.

Romance is the leading growth category for the total print book market thus far in 2025, and the volume for the category has more than doubled compared to four years ago, with 51 million units sold in the past 12 months, according to industry analysis.

NPR credited romance interest driven by Gen Z readers, especially on BookTok, a subcommunity of TikTok for recommending, reviewing, and discussing books.

Swoon City is hoping to follow in the successful footsteps of The Ripped Bodice, an independent brick-and-mortar romance bookstore with locations in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, N.Y.

Coughlin looks forward to bringing people together not just around books, but by hosting various events and building out crafting classes for embroidery, stained glass, jewelry making and more.

“I feel like part of what was exciting for a romance bookstore is the community, because it is often not a genre that’s as well respected in the book community, even though it’s huge,” she said.

In the midst of the Seattle Mariners’ win streak back in September, sports anchor Aaron Levine was going on a little run of his own, as a contestant on “Jeopardy!”

The episodes aired this week, and Levine, sports director for FOX 13 in Seattle, managed three wins in a row before bowing out in Thursday night’s episode of the popular game show.

Levine taped all four of his games over about four hours, with 15-minute breaks between them to switch outfits in the “champion’s changing room.”

“It’s a little jarring to win a game and then go back to change, and all of a sudden you’re pretending it’s a brand new day,” Levine told GeekWire on Friday. “No question there’s a mental fatigue aspect to it. I have a brand-new respect for anybody who can win multiple games in a day, let alone survive an entire day and then move on to the next tape day.”

A self-professed trivia geek, Levine majored in history at Stanford University and considers that category his strongest. It’s why he’s kicking himself for not getting Thursday’s Final Jeopardy question correct (about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello) in the category “historic homes.”

Elsewhere in the game Thursday, Levine found what appeared to be a couple of softball Seattle clues, especially one about the Seahawks that he got right. But he failed to buzz in on a clue about billionaires and their kids’ inheritance — who is Bill Gates?!

Earlier in the week he did get a Daily Double question correct about Stanford, and he was especially pleased to be able to shout out his alma mater with a “Go Cardinal” fist pump.

And along the way this week, he made a fun nod to a classic “Key & Peele” sketch with the way he etched his name — “AA ron” — on his podium screen.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Levine watched “Jeopardy!” every night with his family and always wanted to be on the show’s teen tournament. He scored an appearance on “The Price is Right” at age 18, but when he went off to college, trivia wasn’t a part of his life.

Levine landed on TV again in 2004 when he was the national runner-up on the ESPN reality show “Dream Job,” which was a search for a new “SportsCenter” anchor.

It wasn’t until he was living in Gig Harbor, Wash., that he started going to trivia nights, winning free food at restaurants, and watching “Jeopardy!” again. And he started making his note cards in 2019.

The numerous boxes of index cards look like something out of a library’s filing system, and they serve as flash cards for Levine to test his knowledge on a range of subjects — literature, music, art, geography, religion, etc.

In the decades that “Jeopardy!” has been on the air, plenty of Seattleites have made appearances. Good Thinking Games CEO David Erb is a notable past champion, and Amazon employee Stephanie Hubley got a shout-out from Jeff Bezos for her appearance back in 2016.

Levine enjoyed getting to meet host Ken Jennings, who lives in Seattle, during limited time in which Jennings interacts with contestants during commercial breaks.

“You don’t get a lot of time to talk to him, but I did feel a sort of familiarity and kinship with him, knowing that not only is he from Seattle, but he’s a big Seattle sports fan, and that he’s a huge Mariners fan,” Levine said. “It was also cool because he was familiar with my work being on TV here in Seattle.”

Levine’s three wins are a long way from what Jennings achieved (winning 74 games), but his goal going into the experience was to win just one game, and he came away with a “lifetime of memories.”

“To be able to walk away from that stage and say, ‘Hey, I’m a ‘Jeopardy!’ champion’ and to have done that three times and qualify for a postseason tournament is more than I could have ever dreamed of,” Levine said. “I hope I didn’t embarrass myself too much on the stage.”

There’s nothing embarrassing about the money he walked away with — nearly $50,000 — and his plans for what he’ll do with it.

“It’s going into a college fund for my son,” Levine said of his 8-year-old. “It’s so relieving to me to just have a sum of money that can hopefully grow for the next 10 years.”

Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting the passions and hobbies that members of the Seattle-area tech community pursue outside of work.

• Name: Vivek Ladsariya.
• Day job: General partner and managing director at Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs, where he helps create and invest in startups as a venture capital investor.
• Out-of-office passion: Cooking.

Growing up in India, food was a big part of the culture and something that Vivek Ladsariya was immersed in at home.

His family had a flour mill and would buy wheat grain to grind it into flour. He watched his mother and grandmother cook, and he ate and enjoyed their food.

“When I moved to the U.S., I missed it tremendously, and there was no real way to get some of that home food except to learn how to cook it,” Ladsariya said. “That’s when I started to really learn how to cook all of those things, because I needed that food to consume. So, it was very much born out of necessity.”

His taste and skill goes beyond making the dishes he loved as a boy. He makes pastas and Taiwanese food. He likes to slow cook meat or use his fancy pizza oven. During a recent potluck lunch he made scallion pancakes.

Ladsariya and his wife cook every meal at home, and with a 7-week-old daughter, he finds himself “wearing” her around the kitchen while he’s cooking, encouraging her to taste what he’s making.

During the pandemic while living in San Francisco, Ladsariya got the chance to work in two restaurants — Merchant Roots and Sushi Hakko — to stay busy while his wife was working her healthcare job.

“I think that’s when my cooking game really elevated,” he said. “Up until then I enjoyed cooking, but I’d create a mess. Then I got really organized in the kitchen. I became really efficient.”

With a friend, Ladsariya also put together a pop-up restaurant in which they spent two months researching and prepping a menu and cooking for guests over three days. The proceeds went to charity, and Ladsariya called it one of the favorite times of his life. It’s a process he plans to repeat in Seattle.

But Ladsariya, who enjoys hosting smaller dinners for startup founders, has no plans to leave his day job for a life in the kitchen.

“You’re standing on your feet the entire day and you are unbelievably exhausted,” he said. “I think it’d get old really quickly, and I’d lose the love for this.”

Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Ladsariya said that his day job is so high level and “in the brain” that it can sometimes can be abstract and lacking in the real-time feedback that he gets from working with his hands.

“I just fell in love with that aspect of cooking,” he said. “Everything you do is right there, you get the evidence of whether you did it well or not right away. The effort, the reward — that loop is just so instant and real and gratifying to work with your hands.”

And it’s not about feeding himself. For Ladsariya, the joy of cooking comes from feeding others.

“It’s the bringing people together, the community and all of that that food enables,” he said. “I’m able to provide a great meal and bring together people with something that scratches my creative desires.”

The lessons he brings back to work: Ladsariya finds a connection between how he thinks about cooking and how he thinks about startups.

“Cooking is really about high quality ingredients and not messing it up,” he said. “More often than not, bad food comes from bad ingredients. And I think the same is true for startups. As long as you have a good group of people, they can do something good. People are the ingredients of startup building.”

Furthermore, whether it’s a dish he’s never made or a startup idea that’s especially daunting, it’s best not to overthink things and just do it.

“It’s easy to be intimidated and say, ‘Oh, I have no idea how to do that or where to even start,'” Ladsariya said. “But with a little bit of research and work and just committing to it, you can do pretty incredible things.”

Read more Out of Office profiles.

Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: tips@geekwire.com.

Microsoft has rolled out a huge Patch Tuesday update bundle for October 2025, addressing 175…

Microsoft October Patch Tuesday Is Huge With 170+ Fixes on Latest Hacking News | Cyber Security News, Hacking Tools and Penetration Testing Courses.

Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting the passions and hobbies that members of the Seattle-area tech community pursue outside of work.

• Name: Maksim Surguy.

• Day job: Senior design technologist for Amazon Devices, working on concepts for new devices or new features on existing devices, such as Fire TV, Alexa, and Echo smart speakers.

• Out-of-office passion: Using machines to create art.

Before he pursued a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Maksim Surguy made an initial — and brief — run at a bachelor’s in art.

“Two weeks later, I realized that I suck at art and I switched to computer science,” he laughed.

Fourteen years after completing his education at California State University, Fullerton, Surguy has found happiness and success in marrying the two disciplines, as a technologist and an artist in Seattle.

“My sketching is not to the level that I want, so instead I use code to create artwork,” he said in describing the “robot art” that occupies his free time.

Surguy not only relies on machines to generate his artwork, he creates the software tools that facilitate such art, whether the finished pieces exist as digital NFTs or as physical works such as pen plotter drawings made via scalable vector graphics.

“I spend a lot more time making the tools than actually using them,” Surguy said. “But other people use them to actually make something. So I enjoy both sides of this.”

Surguy is a 2018 graduate of the University of Washington’s Master of Science in Technology Innovation (MSTI), a program at the UW’s Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) — a joint initiative of the College of Engineering and Foster School of Business.

For a hardware/software project, he created a 3D-printed drawing machine with his own electronics program. During the process, he couldn’t find a community for like-minded people who make such things. So he started DrawingBots, a website/Discord that’s attracted thousands of artists and engineers.

Surguy was born and raised in Ukraine and was an accomplished breakdancer who competed as a professional in Eastern Europe when he was younger. He moved to the U.S. in 2004.

He’s been at Amazon for six years and his artwork has been displayed in the company’s headquarters buildings, in public exhibitions — including at Seattle’s NFT Museum, and on his website and social media channels. He’s also written extensively about technology.

And in the blurring space between human and AI-created artwork, he’s leaning further into technology.

“I use AI for a lot of things, and especially now with code, it makes it easier to create tools that are custom and specific for whatever use case,” Surguy said. “I just open-sourced one last weekend. It’s a tool that allows artists to preview their artwork, how it’s going to look before they make it on paper. So it saves them time and money and art supplies.”

Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Surguy most enjoys the growing community he helped foster around the tools and art he makes.

“I got to know thousands of people that do this kind of stuff and are very interesting people,” he said. “Some of them were TED speakers. Some of them are PhDs, very well known researchers, scientists, artists. I had conversations with all of these people and consider some of them my friends. So that’s the most rewarding part.”

The lessons he brings back to work: “This kind of procedural and algorithmic art definitely has a place in making products that are digital experiences,” Surguy said of the connection between his hobby and his work at Amazon.

For example, his Devices team launched a dynamic art feature for Fire TV: a screen saver that created artwork on the fly based on data such as weather, time of day, and other inputs.

Surguy said the ideas he generates outside of work serve as inspiration for what he creates at work, whether it’s creative coding or simply expanding the boundaries of what he makes and how he makes it.

Read more Out of Office profiles.

Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: tips@geekwire.com.

Jamie Siminoff has lived the American Dream in many ways — recovering from an unsuccessful appearance on Shark Tank to ultimately sell smart doorbell company Ring to Amazon for a reported $1 billion in 2018.

But as with most entrepreneurial journeys, the reality was far less glamorous. Siminoff promises to tell the unvarnished story in his debut book, Ding Dong: How Ring Went From Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door, due out Nov. 10.

“I never set out to write a book, but after a decade of chaos, failure, wins, and everything in between, I realized this is a story worth telling,” Siminoff said in the announcement, describing Ding Dong as the “raw, true story” of building Ring, including nearly running out of money multiple times.

He added, “My hope is that it gives anyone out there chasing something big a little more fuel to keep going. Because sometimes being ‘too dumb to fail’ is exactly what gets you through.”

Siminoff rejoined the Seattle tech giant earlier this year after stepping away in 2023. He’s now vice president of product, overseeing the company’s home security camera business and related devices including Ring, Blink, Amazon Key, and Amazon Sidewalk.

Preorders for the book are now open on Amazon.