George Yousling

Partnerships get talked about a lot but in tech and events, they’re often the real growth engine. In tech, they compress time. Instead of building everything yourself, you plug into existing infrastructure, distribution, and trust. Companies like Stripe didn’t just grow on product they grew through deep integrations and ecosystem leverage. In events, partnerships multiply perception. The right collaboration doesn’t just add people, it amplifies attention, credibility, and cultural impact. Across both spaces, the real advantage is leverage: • Borrow trust • Access new audiences • Share costs, increase output • Move faster without scaling risk Most people treat partnerships as transactions. The best ones are aligned systems—APIs in tech, co-created experiences in events. If you’re building, the real question is: Are you creating something others want to partner with? #tech #events #partnership

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Quite a few learnings and AI applications since Paul Woolmington and I last spoke about how Brands evolve in this new era, especially as technology is evolving faster than ever before. Excited to have this conversation, and that too at Zillow offices in Seattle!

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Resale is now live 🙌 We’ve been talking to partners about this release for almost a year. From day one, the brief was simple: if we’re going to build resale into the Nuweb stack, it has to work for the people who actually use it. So we went out and asked our partners a straight question: “What would actually work for you?” That’s how we approach every significant product release. Our partners run their businesses on our platform. Their revenue, their reputation and their fan relationships all sit on top of what we build. If we ship something, it has to work in the real world and not just look good in a product doc. This release is the result of months of calls, feedback sessions and iterations with the teams who’ll be using resale day in, day out. We’re already working with a number of partners on their resale go-lives and we're all looking forward to rolling this out more broadly over the coming months. Huge thank you to everyone - internally and our partners who helped shape this.

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Your IAP pricing was likely set in a single spreadsheet meeting at launch. Most of it hasn't been touched since. The problem isn't the prices. It's what those prices are teaching your players every time they open the store. When I review monetization systems across live mid-core games, the same three pricing failures show up consistently: Flat price lines. Five SKUs at evenly spaced prices. No anchor. No decoy. No graduated value signal. Just a menu. Missing mid-tier logic. Most ARPPU lives in the $9.99 to $29.99 range. Studios that don't engineer this tier lose the bulk of their revenue upside before a player ever reaches the high-value SKU. No decoy architecture. A three-option bundle where the middle choice looks like obvious value increases mid-tier conversion. In the stores that do it well, this is not an accident. There's a fourth failure that cuts across all three: the anchor. The first price a player sees sets their reference point permanently. Show the $0.99 starter pack first, and everything above it feels expensive. Show a $49.99 bundle first, and $9.99 becomes the obvious decision. Most stores lead with the cheapest option. That's anchoring working against you. Pricing architecture is not a launch decision. It's an ongoing experiment discipline, the same way your event cadence is. If your store pricing hasn't been reviewed since launch, start here: • What's your anchor SKU, and is it deliberate? • Do you have coverage in the $9.99 to $29.99 range? • Is there a decoy structure in your current bundle set? What's the most common pricing mistake you've seen across live games? Curious what patterns others are noticing. Your pricing ladder is not a menu. It's the first lesson your economy teaches a new payer.

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Two years ago, before I joined gaiia, I made a bet most VCs wouldn’t. OSS/BSS is the category venture capital avoids. ISPs hate their current platforms (NPS is brutal), but getting them to switch is so painful that almost no one tries to build a better one. Here’s what had to be true for gaiia to work: 1. ISPs would need to adopt us at a rate the industry had never seen. 2. We’d need to migrate them faster than anyone thought possible. Both happened. 75+ ISPs have chosen gaiia as their platform - Greenlight Networks, IQ Fiber, Vistabeam, Direct Communications, Resound Networks, and many more! Migration time is now 4-6 months from signature to live subscribers — an industry best, and it’s gotten shorter as we’ve scaled. Today we’re announcing our $40M Series B 🔥 The counterintuitive lesson: when switching costs are this high, you don’t win with a bigger sales team. You win by spending almost every dollar on product. Live customers do the selling — because the product is the proof. With this round, we widen the gap. Legacy OSS/BSS vs. AI-native, modern infrastructure isn’t a fair fight anymore. ISP operators: find us at Fiber Connect in Orlando next week. I’d rather show you the product than describe it. (Link in comments for an inside look at the raise and what’s next for gaiia)

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👋 Interesting TechCrunch article on Venmo redesign & upgrades being rolled out this week. The app hasnt been updated since 2021 - one driver cited for the upgrade is the fact that PayPal is spinning off Venmo. It cites Stripe as a potential acquirer of Paypal. Thoughts on the potential of Stripe acquiring PayPal? https://lnkd.in/gqVAdnNQ

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This week on the GeekWire Podcast, John Cook and I recap a week of Seattle-area startup headlines, which taken together offer a glimpse into how AI is reshaping the region's tech industry at a grassroots level. - Q1 venture numbers reveal bigger checks going to fewer companies, with Seattle slipping behind the likes of Austin and Miami on deal volume. - And yet the distributed nature of modern startups is complicating what it even means to be a regional tech hub these days. (Does a mailbox in Pioneer Square really count as a Seattle headquarters?) - Founders and CEOs are navigating this in different ways. Those with enough cash are eyeing strategic acquisitions, including opportunities to absorb startups caught up in the AI shakeout. - Many are also rethinking how they hire and expand. More than a third of the GeekWire 200, our ranking of top Pacific Northwest startups, saw year-over-year employment declines, as agents boost individual productivity and reshape the workforce. *** Plus: Andy Jassy’s shareholder letter signals Amazon is making bets again, in areas including chips and robotics. Driving home the point, the tech giant’s Amazon’s ambitious Globalstar acquisition effectively means it’s inheriting Apple’s satellite roadmap. Of course, we have to talk about Allbirds. The sustainable shoe brand, which once challenged Amazon over knock-off sneakers, pivoted to AI infrastructure and saw its stock soar. And in our final segment, our weekly trivia challenge is a walk through the history of the GeekWire 200 startup index. GeekWire: https://lnkd.in/gtMWeFPH Apple: https://lnkd.in/giEjGYjp Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gpfnQJ6m Thanks as always to Curt M. for editing.

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Excited to share that Badge raised $17.1m in funding from TTV Capital, Stripe, QED Investors, Infinity Ventures, and Synchrony Ventures.  Thank you to our investors, customers, and platform partners for your support! With over 120m US customers spending more than $400b in their Apple and Google wallets, mobile wallet is the next great growth engine. I would be happy to share how Badge can connect you to customers in wallets, delivering personalized, dynamic experiences in real time. Re-sharing the video we debuted at Google last month that shows what's possible: https://lnkd.in/gutarXBN

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Zuckerberg is reorganizing part of Reality Labs into "AI-native pods." New titles: AI Builder, AI Pod Lead, AI Org Lead. Dorsey cut 4,000 people at Block, then laid out a new model built around ICs, DRIs, and "player-coaches" instead of a permanent middle-management layer. Different language. Same wager. The middle layer, i.e. the people whose job was to coordinate, relay context, and turn meetings into more meetings, is being designed out. What's left is the person who owns the outcome. The one who decides what gets built, where to compete, and what to kill. The operator. Silicon Valley spent a decade burying that role under org charts. Now it's rebuilding companies around it. Funny how that works.

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The Equity team at TechCrunch put together one of the better breakdowns I've heard on the Google-Wiz close this week. If you're in enterprise tech and haven't listened yet, make 20 minutes for it. Shardul Shah (Index Ventures, early Wiz backer) reframed the deal in a way most coverage hasn't. He didn't position it as a cybersecurity story. He positioned it as what happens when AI, cloud, and security spend all converge on one company at the right moment. The part that landed hardest for me: Wiz became a $32B company because most enterprises moved to cloud faster than they built the controls to manage it. The governance layer got skipped. And then they had to buy it back at a price that made history. I support the teams who see this playing out with AI every week. Agents shipping, copilots rolling out, automation programmes kicking off — while governance, observability, and compliance are still somewhere between "next quarter" and "whose budget is that?" EU AI Act enforcement starts in August. That's not theoretical. The Wiz story is a reminder that the unsexy work — assurance, operating models, the governance no one puts in a keynote — is consistently where the value ends up. It's exactly the gap we're focused on at @OnStak. 🎧 https://lnkd.in/eE2ycW3s

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One of the most impactful (and popular) offerings we deliver at Growth Molecules™ is our Customer Journey Mapping Workshop. So many companies are recognizing the urgent need to create a shared vision of the ideal customer experience - one that transcends departmental boundaries and puts the customer front-and-center. What I love most about these sessions is bringing together teams who may not often sit in the same room, helping them share ideas, uncover challenges, and co-create solutions in real time. You can feel the shift that happens - from siloed perspectives to a united focus on the customer. Every time we leave the room, there’s renewed energy, clearer ownership, and a collective recognition that while each of us might own a function, the customer only experiences one company. Last week, Sabina M. Pons and I had the pleasure of facilitating a particularly complex version of this workshop - one built around a two-sided marketplace model. In this case, there are two distinct journeys to understand, each with its own set of needs and expectations, yet deeply interdependent. Mapping both sides simultaneously - and exploring where their experiences intersect - was a fascinating and powerful exercise in alignment. Check out the post below and let me know what questions you have about why journey mapping is worth doing, and what makes the process most effective.

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AI agents can now securely initiate purchases using Shared Payment Tokens, bringing Affirm’s transparent pay-over-time options directly into AI-driven checkout flows powered by Stripe 🚀

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“Tokenmaxxing” is everywhere right now Leaderboards, competitions… who can burn the most tokens I understand it gets teams using AI, but this TechCrunch piece was a good reality check: https://lnkd.in/ey6xfx-D What we’ve been hearing in conversations is pretty consistent More tokens ≠ better outcomes Teams are moving faster in some areas… but also creating new bottlenecks, or just shifting where the work shows up At the high end, it’s something like ~2x the throughput for ~10x the token cost At some point, the question shifts from: “How much AI are we using?” to “What actually changed?” Are we shipping faster? Is quality improving? Are teams more focused on high-impact work? Tokenmaxxing is a great starting point But the teams that figure out how to connect usage → real outcomes are the ones that actually win

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We re-launched SERPrecon this week. I wrote a blog post explaining all of the new features. You really need to check it out - there's no other tool like it in the market right now - at least not one that's affordable for all SEOs. https://lnkd.in/ekd3-Gr3

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Shopify announcement at NRF is just so big. 1️⃣ Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): Built with Google, UCP is the first open standard for AI-to-merchant transactions. IOW, a common language so any AI agent can connect and shop with any merchant. 2️⃣ Agentic Storefronts: Shopify stores now show up natively inside Gemini, Google AI, and Microsoft Copilot. The buying journey moves from "searching" to real conversations wherever decisions are made. 3️⃣ Agentic Plan: Any brand—on Shopify or not—can list and sell through the Shopify Catalog, unlocking AI-powered sales across AI channels. This is the most “make commerce better for everyone” announcement yet. Full announcement from Harley Finkelstein here: https://shorturl.at/YgBIT Spec-  https://lnkd.in/ec2npYMD #NRF2026 #Shopify #ecommerce #futureofretail #entrepreneurs #NRF2026 #Shopify #ecommerce #futureofretail #entrepreneurs

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Just wrapped up a great week at GDC. One thing was clear across conversations with developers, studios, and platform leaders: industry interest in Roblox is accelerating. More teams are recognizing the scale of the creator ecosystem and the opportunity to build entirely new kinds of experiences. Equally exciting is how creators are adopting AI. Not as a trend, but as a set of tools that help them move faster, experiment more, and raise the quality bar of what small teams can build. And as always, one of the best parts of GDC was reconnecting with longtime friends and colleagues across the industry. The energy around where games and creator platforms are heading next feels very real. #gdc #games #roblox

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LambdaTest has officially rebranded to TestMu AI. 🚀 The Shift to "Agentic" AI is pivoting from being a standard test execution platform to an "Agentic Quality Engineering Platform."

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Great to see Captur close a $6M US seed round led by Rally Ventures, with former Google CIO Ben Fried joining the board. I've backed Captur from the beginning - when running AI on mobile devices was a technical pipe dream. Now they're leading the market and expanding into the US. Exciting to watch Charlotte Bax and the team build this!

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