• Kyle Ray turned his window-cleaning side hustle into a six-figure business.
• Ray, lacking a business degree, used books to gain knowledge and grow his business.
• He incentivizes himself to read a book a month, thanks to his $100 bill bookmark hack.

Kyle Ray never felt comfortable in the classroom.

“I didn’t do great in school, and I was basically told, the best you can hope for is to be a manager of a restaurant,” he told Business Insider. “That’s just been an internal driver — like, ‘I’m going to prove this person wrong.’ And that still drives me really hard today.”

The entrepreneur, who turned his window cleaning side hustle into a six-figure business that services hundreds of clients across Houston and Austin, leveraged books to get ahead.

“I didn’t go to college and get a business degree, so I read a lot of books,” said Ray, who spent years bartending and waiting tables to pay the bills while slowly building Geek Window Cleaning. It took about seven years until he started earning enough income from his side gig to quit his service jobs.

Today, Ray reads at least a book a month — and he has a strategy that holds him accountable.

“My hack for reading is I put a $100 bill as my bookmark, and when I’m finished reading the book, I get to spend it,” he said. “It’s a good motivator.”

He can spend it on anything he wants, as long as it’s not work-related. Sometimes, he’ll add the bill from a book he’s just completed to his next book and save a couple of hundred dollars so that he and his wife can splurge on a fancy dinner.

Ray, who now manages a team of employees, credits much of his business’s success to principles he’s picked up from various business and leadership books. His top picks are “Drive” by Daniel Pink, “Dare to Lead” by Brené Brown, and “Beyond the Hammer” by Brian Gottlieb.

He’s most looking forward to reading Phil Gilbert’s “Irresistible Change,” which will be released in late 2025.

Ray wants to develop his team as much as he does his business, and part of the promotion process requires finishing specific books.

“We’re not a window cleaning company; we’re a training facility that develops people,” he said. “My main goal is to make anybody who comes to work with us really successful.”

A key to success, at least in his eyes, is self-education.

“Every business owner should just be reading as often and as much as possible.”

• Apple’s former CEO, John Sculley, said OpenAI represents Apple’s “first real competitor” in decades.
• Speaking at a conference, Sculley said AI hadn’t been Apple’s strong suit.
• He said Apple needed to shift from the apps era to the agentic era in the AI race.

Apple is facing a tough new rival in the era of AI, according to the company’s former CEO.

Speaking at the Zeta Live conference in New York City on Thursday, Apple’s former CEO, John Sculley, said OpenAI represented “the first real competitor” that Apple has had “in many decades.”

“AI has not been a particular strength for them,” Sculley said of Apple.

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On some counts, Apple does appear to have fallen behind in the AI race, lacking the consistent product updates that have become customary at companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and Meta. It has experienced product rollout setbacks, like the delay of a planned overhaul of its AI-powered assistant Siri earlier this year.

Sculley ran Apple from 1983 to 1993. He applied his marketing experience from over a decade at Pepsi-Cola, where he launched the “Pepsi Challenge” campaign, to help popularize the Mac brand. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had a tense relationship with Sculley and the board throughout his tenure. Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985 before returning in 1997 and later becoming CEO.

Speaking on Thursday, Sculley acknowledged speculation that current Apple CEO Tim Cook might be considering retirement soon. Sculley said whoever replaces Cook would need to help Apple transition from the apps era to the agentic era.

“In the agentic era, we don’t need a lot of apps, it can all be done with smart agents,” Sculley said. (Agentic AI refers to technology that’s capable of performing agent-like behavior and autonomously accomplishing complex tasks on your behalf.)

Sculley, 86, who recently retired from his role as cofounder and vice chairman of the marketing tech company Zeta Global to become vice chairman emeritus, said agentic AI will help knowledge workers automate the heavy lifting of their workflows. That’ll shift more technology companies to subscription-based business models, he said.

“When we had apps at the center of everything, it was selling tools, selling products,” Sculley said. “When you think of subscription, it’s about people paying for something as long as they need it.”

Sculley said subscriptions offer a much better business model.

Meanwhile, a familiar face from Apple recently turned up at OpenAI: former design chief Jony Ive. OpenAI acquired Ive’s device startup earlier this year for more than $6 billion.

Ive said this week at OpenAI’s DevDay conference that he hoped the devices his team is working on would address some of the issues that smartphones and tablets have caused since their launch.

“He’s the one who actually designed and built the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad,” Sculley said of Ive. “If there’s anyone who is probably going to be able to bring that dimension to the LLM, in this case OpenAI, it’s probably going to be Jony Ive, working with Sam Altman.”

• Wall Street heavyweight JPMorgan will kick off bank earnings season next week.
• What they say could offer a clearer read on whether borrowers are still holding up.
• Banks may also shed light on how much of the economy is being propped up by the AI boom.

There’s a lot of jargon in the average bank earnings call — net interest margin, capital markets, credit quality. But if you cut through the noise and know what to listen for, you can learn a lot about the state of the economy.

Next week, many of the nation’s biggest banks will report results for the three months that ended September 30. America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, kicks things off Tuesday, alongside Wells Fargo and Citi, followed by Bank of America on Wednesday.

Thanks to the government shutdown, which has halted a slew of economic data, these earnings calls could shed light on the health of both the American consumer and businesses. They may also offer insight into the AI boom and its role in the economy’s growth.

“You can think about banks as being thermometers of the economy,” said Nathan Stovall, head of financial institutions research at S&P Global Market Intelligence. The question people will be asking, he said, is: “Are we starting to see any real cracks in the armor?”

Here are three key indicators to watch:

Credit quality

Credit quality is a way of assessing whether customers are making good on their loans or missing payments because money is tight.

Stovall said Wall Street “is really divided” about what credit quality might look like this earnings season, with some predicting deterioration and others forecasting continued strength.

“People are going to be listening closely to earnings and asking, ‘Is your customer base really holding up?’ he said, adding that he expects “a little bit of slippage,” but not much change from the previous quarter.

Last quarter, banks told Wall Street analysts that their data suggested the economy was chugging along despite concerns about tariffs slowing business and increasing costs for consumers.

“We continue to struggle to see signs of weakness,” JPMorgan’s CFO Jeremy Barnum said. “The consumer basically seems to be fine,” he added.

Loan growth

Bank loan growth indicates whether consumers and businesses have sufficient confidence in their future earnings potential to borrow money to purchase homes, expand their companies, or start new businesses.

“Are borrowers’ risk appetites going up? Are they borrowing more?” Stovall explained, adding that Federal Reserve data that tracks commercial bank balances suggests some softening in new loan demand in the third quarter.

“I think that’s going to be a little bit softer. And we have some data that supports that,” he added.

Softness may also be due to increased competition from non-bank lenders. Issuing loans outside the traditional banking system has become a driving growth model for companies like Apollo Global Management, which once primarily specialized in corporate buyouts.

Further complicating matters, the industry’s loan growth has been increasingly linked to the money banks lend to nonbanks, which in turn use that money to lend to companies, acquire businesses, or finance residential and commercial mortgages.

“When you look at loan growth for across the bank space, 60% of it year over year has come with loans to non-depository financial institutions, which includes private equity, private credit firms,” Stovall said.

The AI arms race

The AI arms race has become one of the economy’s biggest boosters — and banks are, in many ways, at the center of it.

Major lenders, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, have helped provide billions in loans and other financing to AI firms such as CoreWeave and to companies building the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence.

What investors will want to watch for is how much of the industry’s business will eventually be tied to a sector with great potential but whose business model has yet to be proven. Additionally, what are the risks associated with the ballooning demand for AI investments, including through bonds?

“The good times are when the future bad loans are made,” said Mike Mayo, a veteran bank analyst at Wells Fargo.

Banks could also shed light on corporate spending tied to the technology. Mayo said he believes Wall Street has little choice but to invest aggressively in AI to stay competitive — even if some of that spending won’t pay off.

“A lot of projects are not going to bear fruit, he said, adding, “That’s the cost of admission to the AI world.”