Posts by Mark Darwin
Interest Rate Hike Pushes the Fed Range to 4 Percent
The Federal Reserve raised rates on Wednesday afternoon. The Federal Open Market Committee voted 12-0 to lift the target range by a quarter point to 3.75% to 4.00%, an interest rate hike that ends more than three years without one. The vote was unanimous, which is the detail worth holding onto. A divided committee leaves…
Read MoreTalent Acquisition Software Meets a 244-Applicant Flood
If hiring has felt heavier lately, the numbers back you up. Boomband launched across New England on Tuesday, a new piece of talent acquisition software from Jeff Taylor, the person who built Monster.com and put the help wanted ads online in the first place. Taylor is unusually direct about his role in the mess. He…
Read More20 Companies and Over 1 Billion Dollars Later
Brent Freeman was 23, fresh out of USC and carrying a quarter million dollars in student debt, when he closed a $10 million deal in Dubai. He celebrated that night and the next morning he woke up expecting to feel fulfilled. Instead, he felt empty. “Full stop. Money does not make you happier,” he told…
Read MorePricing Strategy Gets Harder as Input Costs Climb
Clothing prices in the United States are set to climb this autumn as the people who make and sell clothes push higher energy, factory and freight bills down the chain, according to reporting published Monday that builds on a Bloomberg investigation into the sector. Fighting in Iran, and the shipping chaos it has created around…
Read MoreBusiness Valuation Tools Reach the 30-Person HVAC Shop
A Las Vegas company called Reins launched a standalone product on Monday called Valuation, built to tell contractors who run their own shops what the business is currently worth, and which levers would lift that number. It reads a business through its own books and job data rather than through a generic industry multiple. Most…
Read MoreAI Content Creation Drives Pocket FM Past $500M ARR
Pocket Entertainment, the parent company of audio drama platform Pocket FM, announced on September 10 that it has passed $500 million in annual revenue run rate, growing 70% year over year. The company runs on a network of more than 550,000 creators and an ai content creation stack that handles production, localization, and distribution. The…
Read MoreAI Guardrails Lag as 62% See Errors Reach Clients
Most teams bought AI tools long before they wrote down who checks the output, and a report published September 10 puts a number on the consequence. Macabacus polled its own user base across finance and professional services. Of those people, 62% think at least one AI generated mistake has already landed in front of a…
Read MoreFounder CEO Sidelined as Automattic Board Votes Him Out
The most famous founder CEO in open-source software lost control of his own company on Wednesday. Automattic’s board voted in favor of putting Matt Mullenweg on paid leave. Mark Davies, Chief Financial Officer, steps up as interim chief executive at the business that owns WooCommerce, Tumblr and WordPress.com. Mullenweg founded the business in 2003 and…
Read MoreAI Note Taker on Your Wrist: Apple Watch Now Listens
You have probably already sat in a meeting where someone’s laptop was quietly transcribing, and nobody said anything. Apple used Wednesday’s Surprise and Shine keynote to move that capability onto a wristwatch. An ambient notetaker now ships on two devices, the Series 12 and the Ultra 4. Running a small company means most of your…
Read MoreMarketing Trends 2026: Ad Spend Forecast Jumps to 12.3%
Every marketing trends 2026 forecast written in January is already out of date. The Interactive Advertising Bureau raised its projection on September 10, increasing expected United States ad spend to 12.3% for the full year. That sits at 2.8 percentage points higher than the 9.5% figure it published eight months ago. A faster-growing market sounds…
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