Editor’s note: GeekWire publishes guest opinions to foster informed discussion and highlight a diversity of perspectives on issues shaping the tech and startup community. If you’re interested in submitting a guest column, email us at tips@geekwire.com. Submissions are reviewed by our editorial team for relevance and editorial standards.
Ben Golden.
I’m an attorney and advisor to many Pacific Northwest startups, investors, and social entrepreneurs, having spent the past two decades in the Washington innovation ecosystem — including as a higher education policy advocate and former co-chair of the WTIA Policy Committee. I love helping transform great ideas into job-creating companies in my community.
Which is why I’m unmoved by the panic surrounding the proposed “millionaires tax.” Every time Olympia proposes that our wealthiest contribute more, we’re told that this is the final straw for our brightest risk-takers, an existential threat to our state’s economy. But the real threat to the startup community is losing focus on building up our strengths as this catastrophizing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
America is at a crossroads. In this defining moment, when our duties as citizens are gravely needed, a growing chorus of local startup luminaries are speaking up. Which issue galvanizes them? Civil liberties, or climate, or gilded age cronyism, or divestment from public interest research, or immigration, or the dignity of work amidst AI disruption, or freedom of speech…?
Disappointingly, much of the startup community’s advocacy efforts have instead been singularly focused on preventing a few very wealthy folks from changing their primary residence to Las Vegas or Jackson Hole or Palm Beach.
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My oh my, what an uninspired civic imagination in this moment of peril. We can do better.
So chill with the libertarian fever dream. Read the moment. And read the proposal’s fine print, including important small business tax cuts. And remember what’s made Seattle such a dynamic startup community in the first place.
The tax proposal is (probably) not going to take your money
This is a proposed tax on net income over $1 million in a single year. The first $1 million of income would be exempt. This point merits emphasis, as it’s often misunderstood: no one will pay a penny of tax on the first $0 to $999,999 of annual net income. There are additional carve outs and deductions to encourage charitable giving and avoid double taxation. The minimum threshold will be indexed upward with inflation. And the proposed tax would not begin collecting revenue until 2029, allowing plenty of time to work through rulemaking, legal challenges, and fine tuning.
If enacted as proposed, less than 0.5% of households would ever be impacted. Imagine 1,000 random Washingtonians in a room: you could count on one hand the number of people with enough luck, talent, and timing to ever pay this tax.
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What about founders and investors? Many will already benefit tremendously from federal tax advantages like QSBS, which can eliminate up to $10 million in federal capital gains taxes on a successful exit. (An unrelated proposal would apply the state’s capital gains tax on profits that are otherwise exempted from federal taxation; with only a handful of sponsors across both chambers, that proposal appears to have far less traction.)
Further, the same tax avoidance strategies they already deploy, such as staggered sales, deferred compensation, trust and estate planning, and real estate tax shelter investments, will continue to reduce taxes for founders and investors. The idea that a modest state tax on seven-figure net income is going to make entrepreneurship suddenly “not pencil out” is fuzzy math.
Fixing Washington’s regressive tax structure is good for business
Washington consistently ranks among the most regressive tax systems in the country. Relative to other states, lower- and middle-income families pay a disproportionate share of their income in state and local taxes due to our heavy reliance on sales, excise, and business taxes. Addressing this problem is essential to building a resilient state, which matters more than ever in this moment of increasingly reckless and unstable federal governance.
In announcing his initial support for this proposal, Gov. Bob Ferguson tied the tax explicitly to strengthening the Working Families Tax Credit, removing sales taxes on essential personal hygiene products, investing in K-12 education, and greatly reducing B&O taxes for early-stage businesses. In other words, this is a pro-entrepreneurship policy that argues that we’re all better off when we’re all better off.
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Of particular importance for startups, the proposal to provide B&O tax relief for small businesses would be a boon for early-stage companies in their earliest cash constrained years, i.e., when they need it most. The current draft legislation would provide a credit for B&O taxes on annual gross receipts less than $250,000, which would benefit thousands of local startups and small businesses every year. Meanwhile, Ferguson has called to go further by zeroing out B&O taxes up to $1 million on revenue.
In responding to the initial proposal, the governor said his ultimate support for the proposal is contingent on a much more aggressive small business tax break — “we need to have the largest tax break for small business owners in state history,” he said this week.
Rather than fear-monger, startup advocates should redirect their efforts toward supporting that effort for targeted savings for early-stage companies.
The Legislative Building in Olympia, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler)
On the pro-millionaire advocates’ counterpoints
There are valid concerns about the proposal’s impact on the business climate and economic growth.
Some argue it “punishes success” by not maximizing exit proceeds. Yet this ignores how the proposal invests in conditions that allow startups to thrive in the first place as well as the urgency of addressing a broken tax system.
A frequent rebuttal to any tax proposal is that the state should cut spending instead. Absolutely, there must be accountability and responsible stewardship of our public resources. But this is not mutually exclusive; as in business, governments can manage their expenses and restructure revenue at the same time.
Critics warn that the income tax minimum threshold will expand in future years. Rep. Jeremie Dufault, R-Selah, calls it “kicking a budget snowball down a hillside. It’s small now, but it will grow as it rolls.” Maybe, but that’s not the proposal under consideration right now. In fact, the current proposal would raise the minimum threshold annually with inflation.
There are also legitimate legal hurdles to implementing the proposed policy. Fortunately, we have multiple branches of government. Jurisprudential ambiguity should not deter legislators from passing policies they deem in the best interest of the electorate.
Large tech companies are downsizing, particularly amongst software engineering teams. Our fizzling “prosperity bomb” is bad news for a local economy supported by so many coders, and those AI-disrupted jobs are not being replaced elsewhere. In this moment of disruption, creating policies that make it easier to be an entrepreneur and live comfortably in a community are more important than ever, regardless of whether a household brings in millions of dollars a year.
Many point to capital flight as the primary concern, though correlation and causation can be muddled on this point. A handful of large tech companies and wealthy individuals have moved operations out of Washington state, and there will likely be a few more (vocal) high net-worth households who will register their primary residence elsewhere to reduce their tax bill — and they may even shift the focus of their investments from local startups to their new neighbors. But the primary cause of capital flight risk is panic; most people do not move to escape tax increases. This tax on outsized annual incomes will not trigger economic ruin, but the outsized investor-class alarm could cause real harm.
Rather than catastrophize, the startup community ought to celebrate the opportunities that would be unlocked by relieving early-stage businesses of B&O taxes, modestly rebalancing our regressive tax structure, and making targeted investments to keep Washington affordable and thriving.
The bill is currently open for debate, and critical details remain to be finalized. The startup community should be in these negotiations, rather than adopting an out-of-touch absolutist approach that reduces their influence and credibility.
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Entrepreneurs will build here because we bet on ourselves
Entrepreneurs want to build something from nothing, test ideas, prove their doubters wrong, and ultimately solve problems. And sure, they want to make loads of money. Their ambition to build, ideate, prove, and solve will not be quashed by a tax that only kicks in after annual net income over $1 million.
Most creative, ambitious, and educated people are not primarily motivated by marginal tax rate optimization. They want to live in places with access to world-class universities, vibrant cultural and artistic ecosystems, reproductive health care, diverse neighbors, multimodal transportation, LGBTQ+ rights, respect for the natural environment, libraries that don’t ban books, and a basic sense that society has their back.
The best places in the country to launch a startup include the Bay Area, Boston, New York, and the greater Seattle area. With apologies to the fine folks in Sioux Falls, Houston, and Anchorage (the least taxed large U.S. cities), it turns out startups thrive in communities that invest in themselves and their people. We’ve done that in the Pacific Northwest and are set up for success. Millionaires tax or no tax, the next generation of great companies and scrappy entrepreneurs are primed to emerge from AI House, CoMotion, Foundations, 9Zero, and across our great state.
At the end of day, most of the loudest critics of this proposal — people I respect and work with daily — will almost certainly continue to live and work here in Washington state. So let’s cool it on the millionaires tax hysteria, recognize the criticality of the moment, and bet on ourselves.
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Disclaimer: Written in my personal capacity. I’m no startup Lorax — I do not speak for my clients.
Or Lenchner, the CEO of Bright Data, one of the world’s largest web-scraping firms, says that his company’s bots do not collect nonpublic information. Bright Data was previously sued by Meta and X for allegedly improperly scraping content from their platforms. (Meta later dropped its suit, and a federal judge in California dismissed the case brought by X.)
Karolis Stasiulevičiu, a spokesperson for another cited company, ScrapingBee, told WIRED: “ScrapingBee operates on one of the Internet’s core principles: that the open web is meant to be accessible. Public web pages are, by design, readable by both humans and machines.”
Oxylabs, another scraping firm, said in an unsigned statement that its bots don’t have “access to content behind logins, paywalls, or authentication. We require customers to use our services only for accessing publicly available information, and we enforce compliance standards throughout our platform.”
Oxylabs added that there are many legitimate reasons for firms to scrape web content, including for cybersecurity purposes and to conduct investigative journalism. The company also says that the countermeasures some websites use do not discriminate between different use cases. “The reality is that many modern anti-bot systems don’t distinguish well between malicious traffic and legitimate automated access,” Oxylabs says.
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In addition to causing headaches for publishers, the web-scraping wars are creating new business opportunities. TollBit’s report found more than 40 companies that are now marketing bots that can collect web content for AI training or other purposes. The rise of AI-powered search engines, as well as tools like OpenClaw, are likely helping drive up demand for these services.
Some firms promise to help companies surface content for AI agents rather than try to block them, a strategy known as generative engine optimization, or GEO. “We’re essentially seeing the rise of a new marketing channel,” says Uri Gafni, chief business officer of Brandlight, a company that optimizes content so that it appears prominently in AI tools.
“This will only intensify in 2026, and we’re going to see this rollout kind of as a full-on marketing channel, with search, ads, media, and commerce converging,” Gafni says.
Microsoft announced today that the Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Exchange Online will be shut down in April 2027, after nearly 20 years.
EWS is a cross-platform API for developing apps that can access Exchange mailbox items, such as email messages, meetings, and contacts, retrieved from various sources, including Exchange Online and on-premises editions of Exchange (starting with Exchange Server 2007).
Microsoft will begin blocking Exchange Online EWS by default on October 1, 2026, but administrators can temporarily maintain access via an application allowlist. The final shutdown occurs on April 1, 2027, with no exceptions granted.
Administrators who create allow lists and configure settings by the end of August 2026 will be excluded from the automatic October blocking. Starting in September 2026, Microsoft will pre-populate allow lists for organizations that have not created their own, based on each tenant’s usage patterns.
The company may also conduct temporary “scream tests” that temporarily disable EWS to expose hidden dependencies before the final cutoff, and will keep IT admins informed via monthly Message Center notifications that provide tenant-specific reminders and usage summaries.
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However, it’s important to note that this retirement process affects only Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online environments, and EWS will continue to function in on-premises Exchange Server installations.
EWS retirement timeline (Microsoft)
“Today we’re announcing we will use a phased, admin controllable disablement plan that starts in October 2026 and concludes with a complete shutdown of EWS in 2027,” the Exchange Team said on Thursday. “EWS was built nearly 20 years ago, and while it served the ecosystem well, it no longer aligns with today’s security, scale, or reliability requirements.”
Microsoft also advised developers using the EWS API to switch to the Microsoft Graph API until EWS is retired, since it has reached near-complete feature parity with EWS for most scenarios.
“EWS is not being retired on-prem. Hybrid scenarios vary depending on how apps access data. On-prem mailboxes may continue using EWS; cloud mailboxes must move to Graph. Autodiscover will help apps determine mailbox location automatically,” Microsoft added.
“But note that only Exchange SE will support Graph for calls to Exchange Online, so hybrid customers will have to use Exchange SE to host on-premises mailboxes.”
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Today’s announcement comes after Microsoft revealed in September 2023 that it planned to begin retiring the EWS API in October 2026, and after a 2018 warning that EWS would stop receiving functionality updates.
Three years later, in October 2021, Microsoft revealed that it had deprecated the 25 least-used EWS APIs for Exchange Online and removed support for them in March 2022 for security reasons.
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Despite the hype about these agents being co-workers, from our experience, these agents tend to work best if you think of them as tools that amplify existing skills, not as the autonomous co-workers the marketing language implies. They can produce impressive drafts fast but still require constant human course-correction.
The Frontier launch came just three days after OpenAI released a new macOS desktop app for Codex, its AI coding tool, which OpenAI executives described as a “command center for agents.” The Codex app lets developers run multiple agent threads in parallel, each working on an isolated copy of a codebase via Git worktrees.
OpenAI also released GPT-5.3-Codex on Thursday, a new AI model that powers the Codex app. OpenAI claims that the Codex team used early versions of GPT-5.3-Codex to debug the model’s own training run, manage its deployment, and diagnose test results, similar to what OpenAI told Ars Technica in a December interview.
“Our team was blown away by how much Codex was able to accelerate its own development,” the company wrote. On Terminal-Bench 2.0, the agentic coding benchmark, GPT-5.3-Codex scored 77.3%, which exceeds Anthropic’s just-released Opus 4.6 by about 12 percentage points.
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The common thread across all of these products is a shift in the user’s role. Rather than merely typing a prompt and waiting for a single response, the developer or knowledge worker becomes more like a supervisor, dispatching tasks, monitoring progress, and stepping in when an agent needs direction.
In this vision, developers and knowledge workers effectively become middle managers of AI. That is, not writing the code or doing the analysis themselves, but delegating tasks, reviewing output, and hoping the agents underneath them don’t quietly break things. Whether that will come to pass (or if it’s actually a good idea) is still widely debated.
Members of the Arrived team sporting their Seahawks colors in Seattle, from left: Jackie Thai, Abhishek Sharma, Ryan Frazier, Alejandro Chouza, Patrick Anderson, and Korin Hedlund. (Arrived Photo)
The 12s have long been celebrated in the Pacific Northwest for their vocal support of the Seattle Seahawks. Could those fans also band together as a collective ownership force?
That’s the vision of Arrived, a Seattle-based tech startup that is typically associated with helping everyday investors gain a stake in rental homes.
After a week in which reports made a sale of the Seahawks seem especially imminent, and just days before the team competes in its fourth Super Bowl, Arrived launched a new initiative to gauge fan interest in participating in the next potential ownership group. Fans can use the website, which is not affiliated with the Seahawks or NFL, to share their hypothetical investment amount and learn more.
The company’s idea is buoyed by a 2024 move by NFL owners that allows private equity funds to buy stakes in teams. Arrived would act as such a fund.
“We built our [home] platform around a $100 minimum investment and making that very accessible. We’d love to do the same with this,” Arrived co-founder and CEO Ryan Frazier told GeekWire.
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Arrived would put together a special purpose investment vehicle where it would collect fan investment through its platform and then serve as a single private equity investor in the Seahawks.
Frazier pictures bringing together 100,000 or more fans to help Arrived’s fund get closer to a stake of between 3% and 10% — especially considering rising franchise values and the expectation that the Seahawks could fetch as much as $8 billion.
“These teams’ valuations are so high, there’s so few people that can actually step up and acquire these teams,” Frazier said. “I really see this model working well where there’s a lead owner and then other minority investors that can help provide a more stable capital base.”
Frazier has been aware for years of the wishes of late Seahawks owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen when it comes to selling the team, as has been done with other Allen assets. But reports from ESPN and The Wall Street Journal last weekend claimed that a sale could happen sooner rather than later. Allen’s estate, chaired his sister Jody Allen, denied that a sale would be put in motion soon after Super Bowl LX.
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“I think we definitely felt the sense of urgency this week with some of the news breaking about the imminent potential for sale,” Frazier said. “Seeing Jody Allen speaking to how she thinks about the importance of the team to the fans of the city, we felt like maybe this is something that she would be supportive of as well.”
Jody Allen, right, sister of Paul Allen and chair of the Seattle Seahawks, helps raise the 12th Man flag and pumps up the crowd before a game at Lumen Field in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo)
Although a different model, the NFL’s Green Bay Packers are the only major professional sports team in the U.S. owned by the community rather than a single billionaire or corporate entity. Established as a publicly held, non-profit corporation in 1923, the team is currently owned by over 538,000 shareholders who collectively hold more than 5 million shares. The shares do not pay dividends, cannot be traded for profit, and provide no equity interest.
Private equity owners that take stakes in NFL franchises aren’t allowed to have voting power. NFL.com columnist Judy Battista noted in 2024 that “it is not going to be like flipping real estate.”
“We’d want the shares to be participating in appreciation alongside other shareholders,” Frazier said. “We see this as an equity stake and getting exposure to value growth.”
Frazier said it’s inevitable that the model will spread as team valuations continue to grow across sports leagues and there’s a greater need for minority investors. If the plan with the Seahawks doesn’t pan out, he can see Arrived trying it elsewhere.
Frazier, who came to Seattle from Arkansas in 2014, and Arrived co-founder Alejandro Chouza, who came from Mexico around 2010, both moved during a surge in success and popularity for the Seahawks. Like homegrown and transplant 12s across the city and region, they’ve become obsessive fans, and they want to know what it feels like to have even a fraction of a stake in owning the team.
“You see these people, we bleed in and out every day for these teams, because it’s so exciting,” Chouza said. “There would be nothing better, even if it’s 50 bucks, if I had a tiny sliver, and my son had a tiny sliver of a team — that’s priceless.”
A sampling of properties on Arrived’s website. (Arrived Image)
Founded in 2019, Arrived (formerly Arrived Homes) lets people buy fractional shares of single-family rental homes and vacation rentals for as little as $100. It’s pitched as an alternative way to gain exposure to real estate without taking on a full mortgage or managing a property.
The company identifies and acquires rental properties, then handles financing, renovations, property management and tenant relationships. Investors can buy shares in individual homes or pooled funds through the Arrived website. They earn quarterly dividends from rent plus a share of any appreciation when the property is sold after a multi-year holding period.
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Nearly 1 million registered investors have invested more than $375 million on the Arrived platform. The company says it has distributed more than $63 million and funded more than 550 properties across 65 markets in the U.S.
Arrived raised $27 million in new funding last November and $25 million in a Series A round in 2022. The company, which employs 51, declined to share its current valuation.
The startup’s leadership includes Frazier (formerly with Simply Measured and Sprout Social); Chouza, the COO (Oyo and Uber); and CTO Kenny Cason (Simply Measured).
Investors include Neo, Forerunner Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Core, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
Reddit suggested on Thursday that its AI-powered search engine could be the next big opportunity for its business — not just in terms of product, but also as a revenue driver impacting its bottom line. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, it offered an update on its plans to merge traditional and AI search together and hinted that although search is not yet monetized, “it’s an enormous market and opportunity.”
In particular, the company believes that generative AI search will be “better for most queries.”
“There’s a type of query we’re, I think, particularly good at — I would argue, the best on the internet — which is questions that have no answers, where the answer actually is multiple perspectives from lots of people,” said Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.
Traditional search, meanwhile, is more like navigation — it’s a way to find the right link to a topic or subreddit. But LLMs can be good at this, too, if not better, he said. “So that’s the direction we’re going.”
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The exec also noted that weekly active users for search over the past year grew 30% from 60 million users to 80 million users. Meanwhile, the weekly active users for the AI-powered Reddit Answers grew from 1 million in the first quarter of 2025 to 15 million by the fourth quarter.
“We’re seeing a lot of growth there, and I think there’s a lot of potential too,” Huffman added.
Reddit said it’s working to modernize the AI answers interface by making its responses more media-rich, and pilots of this are already underway.
The company is also thinking about how it can position itself when it’s not just a social site, but a place people come for answers. Reddit told investors on the call that it’s doing away with the distinction between logged-in and logged-out users starting in Q3 2026, as it will aim to personalize the site — using AI and machine learning — and make it relevant to whoever shows up.
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The company announced in 2025 it was planning to combine its AI search feature, Reddit Answers, with its traditional search engine to improve the experience for end users. In the fourth quarter, Reddit said it had made “significant progress” in unifying its core search and its AI feature. It also released five new languages on Reddit Answers and is piloting dynamic agents along with search results that include “media beyond text.”
Though Reddit sees value in its AI answers, it’s not been keeping that to itself. The company’s content licensing business, which allows other companies to train their AI models on its data, is growing, too. That business revenue is reported as part of Reddit’s “other” revenues (i.e., its non-ad revenue). This “other” revenue increased by 8% year-over-year to reach $36 million in Q4 and was up 22% to reach $140 million for 2025.
People frequently claim that the Blink Video Doorbell (2nd Gen) is the best value around, and recent reviews tend to support this. It’s available in a package with the Sync Module Core for around $35.99, which is almost half the original price of $69.99. Meanwhile, Google Nest and Arlo devices cost $100, $130, or more, and include an additional sensor or two, albeit at a hefty price.
Getting it up and running is rather simple, as the doorbell runs on batteries, or a pair of 3AA lithium batteries that may last up to two years, so there is no need to bother about wiring. Simply install the device on the wall using the provided mounting kit, and they’ll serve as the corner accessory for getting the angles correct, and you can have everything up and running in a matter of minutes using the app. Users frequently mention how easy it is, especially when contrasted to wired setups that require some actual electrical labor.
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The video quality is good enough for pretty much everyday use. The camera gives you a nice overhead shot in a square 1:1 aspect ratio, with a 150 degree view that captures people right up to their feet & spots packages on the ground pretty easily. The resolution is a decent 1080p HD, (although some tests suggest it’s actually got more like 1440p clarity when it counts) & infrared night vision works just fine in the dark. You can even have a two-way conversation with whoever is at the door, and the motion alerts are timely to say the least.
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One of the most notable features is the battery life, which may last up to two years, allowing you to avoid needing to twist and spin them every few months as you would with some other products. As an added plus, it’s fairly weather resistant, withstanding a bit of rain and dust in most locations without blinking.
You have storage and extras without breaking the bank. The included Sync Module Core allows you to save clips locally on a drive you add separately, eliminating the need for cloud fees for basic recording, but if you want a little more, the Blink subscription is only $3/month for one device or $12 for unlimited – which includes cloud storage, person detection, and all that other good stuff. Which is significantly less expensive than Ring’s $5+ plans or Nest’s higher-tiered options.
The Apple Intelligence-powered Health+ service is reportedly being scaled back now that Eddy Cue is in charge, and will focus on getting features to users sooner with smaller releases.
Apple Health to get multiple smaller feature updates soon
Apple has never announced Health+ or plans for the initiative, but leaks surrounding the project suggested some kind of AI chat interface was going to be offered. Users would be able to discuss their health data and be directed to professional videos explaining certain topics. According to a report from Bloomberg, Services chief Eddy Cue is now in charge of Apple Health after Jeff Williams retired, and he’s restructured the plans around its future. Instead of trying to release one big feature set under the umbrella of “Apple Health+” and a new subscription, Apple is allegedly planning on breaking up the planned features into smaller, incremental releases. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
Steep discounts on Apple’s MacBook Air have driven prices down to as low as $389.99 heading into the weekend.
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Walmart seller VIPOutlet has blowout inventory of Apple’s M1 MacBook Air 13-inch for $389 while supplies last. This seller has a 4-star rating with 23,495 total reviews at press time. While the system has 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage, the budget-friendly price makes it a viable system for casual use like web browsing and streaming content. Buy M1 MacBook Air for $389 Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
Soft skills are as important to long-term success as hard skills, and online courses can be a great way to learn.
Since the start of the new year, SiliconRepublic.com has covered soft skills in a variety of ways, for example in pieces covering meta skillsand the must-have soft skills for 2026. So, what better way to continue that trend than to explore some of the free and relatively inexpensive courses that can enable a professional to sharpen up those soft skills?
Alison
Online learning platform Alison has a free Soft Skills for Professionals course aimed at professionals looking to either find a role or excel in one via a range of interpersonal skills. The course description states that participation will teach students 10 soft skills that professionals will need in their working lives, for example in communication, adaptability, flexibility and negotiating, among others.
There are four modules and the average time it takes to complete the course is typically between one and three hours. To complete the course and receive a certificate, students will need to achieve more than 80pc in their assessments.
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Coursera
While payment down the line may be required, learning platform Coursera offers several free trials for its soft skills courses. Professionals can avail of courses such as Developing Interpersonal Skills, Foundations for Interviewing with Confidence, People and Soft Skills: Essential for Professional Success, and People and Soft Skills Assessment.
Depending on the course, the time needed to complete learning could range from one week to several months, with the free trial giving you time to figure out if a course matches your ambitions. Courses are aimed at everyone from beginners all the way through to those looking to learn specialist knowledge.
Great Learning
For professionals in the IT space, Great Learning’s Soft Skills for IT module is an ideal learning opportunity. Modules include: an introduction to soft skills; soft skills and their importance; soft skills to possess; effective communication; and team work, alongside others.
The free course starts at beginner level, takes around 1.5 hours, tests users with a range of quizzes and awards the student with a certificate upon completion of the course. Great Learning states that the course will help professionals to be noticed by recruiters, earn a job and showcase their skills online.
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Skills Connect
Skills Connect, which is an initiative developed by Skillnet Ireland, offers a number of free programmes designed to enable jobseekers to get back into the workplace. The strategy offers free training to help jobseekers develop the technical and soft skills that employers are looking for today. Additionally, some of the programmes offer practical work placements or projects. To apply, participants will have to meet certain criteria, which can be found on the group website.
OpenLearn
OpenLearn, a free educational platform operated by The Open University, has a diverse range of free soft skills courses open to students and professionals. Courses are relatively flexible, but the website suggests committing roughly three hours a week to study for a period of around eight weeks. However, you can commit as much or as little time as you have available, as materials exist online. Course titles include Succeed in the Workplace and Effective Communication in the Workplace.
According to OpenLearn, professionals and students will come away able to properly and effectively communicate in the workplace, with the ability to manage different personality traits, social attitudes and scenarios that require emotional intelligence. Its website says: “Everyone can benefit from some focused training and development to help them realise their full potential. OpenLearn has a number of courses you can study to enhance your soft skills right now”.
So, if you have the time and want to expand your professional capabilities and workplace relationships, why not consider taking up a course in soft skills? You might soon find that it gives you an unexpected edge.
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People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code.
While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments.
Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure headaches for nontechnical creators.
Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute — essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.
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Every time an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micro-payment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this whole process seamless, letting the AI agent decide what to buy and when without human intervention.
“In the future, apps are going to consume services which require payments.Right now, there’s no easy way for agents to actually access all of that,” said Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel.
Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI payments space, but he believes Zerbib’s focus on the financial layer for enterprises, rather than consumers, is what’s truly needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.
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“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you spin up a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.
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While it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes that its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibe-coding companies and other companies creating AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things on their own.
For example, anyone who has vibe-coded an app with SMS capabilities won’t have to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy an API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all of that in the background, and the person building the micro-app will be charged for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another vibe-coding platform.
While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While that future is exciting, Zerbib believes that AI won’t magically make people buy more things, which is why he’s focusing on creating financial layers for businesses instead.
