Day: October 20, 2025

• This post originally appeared in the Business Insider Today newsletter.
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Welcome back! Did you notice something different about Alexa this morning? A major AWS outage appears to be disrupting more than 50 services, including Zoom, Snapchat, and many others.

Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of AI startup Perplexity, confirmed in an X post that its service is down. “The root cause is an AWS issue,” he said. “We’re working on resolving it.”

Meanwhile, there’s still time to sign up for our event on autonomous vehicles. It’s this Wednesday at 12 p.m. ET, featuring top auto-industry executives discussing how self-driving cars are becoming a fast-moving reality. Sign up here.

Now, in today’s newsletter: I recently asked if loyalty or money in the workplace was more important to you. The results are in.

What’s on deck:

Markets: Things got a bit nasty in the world of private credit.

Tech: Another twist is CoreWeave’s $5 billion bid for Core Scientific.

Business: People who have quickly climbed the corporate ladder share their best remedies for avoiding burnout.

But first, a discussion on loyalty.

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The big story

Not all about the money

The tribe newsletter readers have spoken.

Last month, a story about loyalty in the workplace from the great Aki Ito prompted me to ask you a question: Would you prefer a workplace that values loyalty or one that pays you more money?

I admittedly had a theory. For as much stock as people put into loyalty, cash is a tough thing to turn down.

Boy, was I wrong!

As Aki covers in her latest story, nearly double the poll’s respondents opted for a loyal workplace over one that pays better. Aki also included some of the incredible feedback she got from readers about why they’re desperate for a change in the employer-employee relationship.

I chatted with Aki about what the future of workplace loyalty would look like.

Dan: First, congratulations on being right! I will stubbornly say I still think there’s a difference between people anonymously answering a poll from their favorite newsletter writer and actually choosing loyalty over a higher salary in a real-life situation. But I should stop moving the goalposts to suit my argument and just take the L.

Aki: Haha, I mean you could still be right — I would love to see a real-life experiment of this! But I do have a real-life anecdote to back this up. As I wrote in my piece today, one person I spoke to faced this exact dilemma: Should he stay with his current employer that treats him well, or go for this higher paying job at this big corporation that previously ghosted him? In the end, he chose to stay. He chose loyalty.

Dan: I know you also heard from a professor who had a group of Gen Z students working on solutions to the workplace loyalty problem. That was striking, because I feel like the younger generation is the most comfortable with job-hopping. After all, many benefited from entering a workforce that initially rewarded people who jumped around. (But now I’m referencing your own pieces to you!)

Aki: Yeah, I’m a millennial, and when I talk to Gen Z workers, I’m often struck by how un-naive — even cynical — they are about work. Which isn’t a criticism, by the way. I think their attitude makes total sense given the reality of the corporate workplace today. But I loved hearing that there are young people out there trying to come up with solutions, too. To fix things, it’s not enough to see the reality as it is. You also need to have hope that things can get better, even if it’s bad right now.

Dan: As much as I can be a cynic, I love that optimism. Ok, before I let you go, any chance you can give the readers a slight tease on what’s coming next from you?

Aki: I have some stories in the works right now about the worsening hiring market and AI. In the medium-term, I want to keep writing these bigger stories about people’s changing relationship to work. And I’m always open to ideas! If you’re reading this, please get in touch at aito@businessinsider.com.

3 things in markets

1. An inside look at the never-ending work of a junior banker. A lawsuit between a former investment banking analyst and Centerview Partners sheds light on what can be Wall Street’s around-the-clock work schedule. As one banker described it in an email: “The finish line is always going to be moving.”

2. The potential risk in private credit just went very public. Private credit had a tough week thanks to some loans going sour and critical comments from executives. However, some non-bank lenders were quick to defend their industry.

3. What is “debasement,” and why is it becoming the hottest trade these days? Concerns over rising government debt and inflation has investors skittish that currencies will maintain their current value. That’s led to people rushing to gold, silver, and bitcoin. Here’s how it works.

3 things in tech

1. The Great Vibening is upon us. Corporate America is increasingly using “vibes” to describe automating the tedious, routine parts of a job. But vibe working is still working, and the term may disguise how much expertise is actually needed to do it. Beware bad vibes.

2. CoreWeave’s $5 billion deal is on shaky ground. The third-largest shareholder of Core Scientific, the company CoreWeave is looking to buy, told BI he’d vote against the acquisition “under the math of the deal today.” A dip in CoreWeave’s stock price has weakened its offer and raised concerns among investors that Core Scientific is being undervalued.

3. Scale AI agrees to settle four lawsuits from contractors. The lawsuits, filed by former California contractors, accused the startup of misclassifying and underpaying them. Scale AI agreed to settle and has since stopped taking California gig workers.

3 things in business

1. Tariff pain, delivered by UPS. Package chaos is showing how tariffs have finally arrived at Americans’ doorsteps. In addition to paying extra fees, some are finding they have to become amateur customs brokers to free their deliveries.

2. How Wall Street’s brightest stars maintain the “life” of a work-life balance. We asked our latest crop of rising stars of Wall Street how they establish boundaries at work despite their high-pressure roles. From early-morning lifts to family time, here’s how they stay grounded and fend off burnout.

3. An 18-year-old with a million-dollar startup. Zach Yadegari sold his first app before he could legally vote. Since then, he’s founded an AI-powered nutrition app that generates around $30 million a year. His message to other young entrepreneurs: Ignore the noise.

In other news

• Yoga, cold plunges, and beach workouts: LA Tech Week is embracing wellness over booze.
• $1.65 trillion chip giant Broadcom cuts staff in units like sales and accounts.
• Prince Andrew gives up his royal titles as controversy swirls around his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
• I’m a Stanford professor and AI startup cofounder. Here’s how to get a job at an AI company.
• ‘True nerds’ or crypto crooks? Meet brothers ‘Snoopy’ and ‘Curious Rabbit’ on trial in a $25 million heist case.
• Federal workers are pinching pennies during the shutdown: ‘I’d love to come to work, but may not have gas money.’
• I went to Salesforce’s biggest conference to learn what it actually does. I finally kind of get it, and I saw Metallica live.

What’s happening today

• Happy Diwali!

Dan DeFrancesco, deputy executive editor and anchor, in New York. Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in New York. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York.

• Casium is taking on the US visa system with its AI-enabled processing tool.
• Founder Priyanka Kulkarni is using her experience of the immigration system to help employers.
• Maverick Ventures recently led the company’s $5 million seed funding.

America’s visa system is a labyrinth that Priyanka Kulkarni, a 34-year-old machine learning scientist, knows all too well. After spending nine years on a visa, she’s now using artificial intelligence to help people find the path to employment-based immigration.

Her startup, Casium, sells employers a portal to run visa cases end-to-end, replacing the Excel spreadsheets and, in many instances, the outside law firms that they usually rely on.

It’s a product built for the quickly changing landscape of employment immigration. Immigration policy has swung in recent months, culminating in the Trump administration’s surprise executive order requiring companies to pay a $100,000 fee for each new H-1B application. While some companies welcomed the change, the move also sent employers scrambling and sparked lawsuits from business groups and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Casium’s bet is that a tech-first approach can bring speed and transparency to a system that’s often beset with delays and confusion.

The company says it has assisted hundreds of candidates through assessments, compliance reviews, and actual filings, citing an “exceptionally high approval rate.” In several cases, founders who hired Casium went from intake to on-the-job start in under a month, Kulkarni says.

Investors are on board. In recent months, Casium, founded in 2024, secured $5 million in a seed funding round led by Maverick Ventures, with participation from the Ai2 Incubator, GTMfund, Success Venture Partners, and angel investor Jake Heller, whose startup Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2023. The company declined to share its valuation.

An agentic approach to immigration

Here’s how it works. A candidate fills out an intake form. Then, Kulkarni said, a swarm of “agents” — software that can execute tasks autonomously — scours public data such as scholarly journals and patents to learn about the candidate.

Within minutes, she said, Casium generates a dossier and recommends the most suitable visa. H-1B, O-1, and EB-1A are among its most commonly issued employment-based visas.

The company then routes the report to a pool of independent, licensed lawyers and paralegals contracting with Casium. One click, Kulkarni said, produces a draft attorney letter laying out the candidate’s eligibility.

Kulkarni said its tech shrinks the time it takes to gather the paperwork for an application — from three to six months working with a traditional law firm to less than 10 business days — and helps catch errors, which could help more candidates sail through the process.

Casium offers initial assessments for free and charges a flat fee for filings based on visa type and case complexity. It declined to specify the price. Kulkarni says the company is also developing a subscription model to give employers more options for ongoing support.

Venture money is piling up behind the bet that software can steer people through the immigration maze. Parley sells drafting and filing tools to immigration law firms. OpenLaw is building a marketplace to match clients and lawyers, including immigration attorneys.

Closest to Casium are Manifest Law and Plymouth, which similarly use technology to help employers hire and retain international talent. Boundless, another lawyer-plus-software hybrid, has raised more than $50 million in funding to date, according to the company.

The pitch is seductive, but the risks are also concrete. Employers will weigh a lawyer’s track record on specific visa types against a startup’s black-box automation. To be fair, startups already own big slices of the human resources stack, from recruiting to benefits to payroll. In that light, Kulkarni argues that immigration is simply the last, high-stakes workflow to be digitized.

Firsthand experience

Born and raised in India, Kulkarni was hired straight out of college to join Microsoft. There, she spent nearly a decade as a machine learning scientist, helping to shape AI strategy for enterprise products like Office. She did it on an H-1B visa. The visa is awarded by lottery and tied to one employer, a setup that can make workers anxious about layoffs and hesitant to switch jobs because a new sponsor isn’t guaranteed.

“Honestly, it was exhausting, confusing, and at times can feel very career-limiting,” Kulkarni said.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Kulkarni had long wanted to start a company, and when the Ai2 Incubator in Seattle offered her a spot in its 2024 cohort, she applied for an EB-1 visa, also known as the “Einstein visa” for foreign nationals with extraordinary abilities. She worked with a law firm for three months to wrangle the paperwork.

On her first day, when a managing director asked what she wanted to build, she didn’t hesitate to say immigration tech. “Everything I’ve done,” she said, “has culminated to this point.”

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