Day: November 29, 2025

• Niki Leondakis became CEO of CorePower Yoga after losing her husband and home in a 12-month period.
• She said her decades-long yoga practice helped her heal and the CEO role at CorePower Yoga felt like “a calling.”
• Leondakis told her sister she wanted to lead CorePower Yoga before the brand approached her.

Before becoming the CEO of CorePower Yoga, Niki Leondakis led three hotel companies and worked as the CEO of Equinox.

Roughly a year into her tenure at Equinox, she stepped down after her home burned down in a wildfire. Then, exactly a year after that, her husband died of a sudden heart attack.

“I found myself in this 12-month period without a husband, without my career, and without a home,” Leondakis told Business Insider.

Leondakis, who joined the yoga chain in 2020, said she wouldn’t have re-entered the corporate world for just any opportunity. She said becoming the CEO of CorePower Yoga was her “dream job,” even before it was offered to her.

A core part of her life

Prior to leading CorePower Yoga, which has over 220 studios across the country, Leondakis said she always had a “strong discipline around physical activity.” The CEO said she’s been practicing yoga for over three decades.

“I started yoga because I thought it would help my running when I was marathon training,” Leondakis said. Eventually, though, she said she found herself doing less running and more yoga.

Leondakis became so passionate about the practice that she received her 200-hour yoga certification — not because she wanted to become a teacher, but because she desired a deeper understanding of the history and philosophy behind it.

When Leondakis found herself in a turbulent period following the loss of her husband and home, yoga became key to her healing process. Yoga, she said, helped her find gratitude for what she had, rather than focusing on what she lost.

“The one thing that anchored me, grounded me, and helped me process all my emotion was getting on my yoga mat every single day,” Leondakis said.

The CEO said she’s been practicing with the same yoga teacher for over a decade, and at the time, she was also practicing at CorePower Yoga, near where she lived in San Francisco.

“It carried me through the most difficult times,” Leondakis said.

Getting the job

Leondakis had her eyes set on leading CorePower Yoga before she knew there was an opening.

After the loss of her husband, the CEO said she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. When her sister asked her: “If you could lead any company in the country today, what company would it be?” Leondakis said she responded immediately with “CorePower Yoga.”

Her sister then went on LinkedIn to find out who the current CEO was.

“I looked at his profile and said, ‘Well, he’s been there just a couple of years, and this is a great job, based on what he’s done in his past. He’s not going anywhere,'” Leondakis said. “And I didn’t think another thing of it.”

Sixty days later, in July of 2019, Leondakis said she got a call from a search firm asking if she was interested in the CEO position.

“I really, truly felt like it was a calling,” Leondakis said. “The universe kind of punched me in the stomach a few times. I was struggling with that, but I felt like it was sending a bluebird my way.”

CorePower Yoga’s founder, Trevor Tice, wasn’t the company’s most recent CEO, but he passed away in 2016 from an accident. Leondakis said she felt a sense of purpose in joining the company and believed she had the skills to help build its brand.

“The company had its own tragedy, and I just felt like it was a calling for me to come lead this company into its next chapter,” Leondakis said.

• Palantir CEO Alex Karp swears by a method that helps employees get to the root of a problem.
• Karp has said the Five Whys method “can often unravel the knots that hold organisations back.”
• The approach is often credited to Taiichi Ohno, a Toyota executive during the 1970s.

Palantir’s Alex Karp is not the typical tech CEO. It makes sense then that one of the big data company’s foundational principles is rooted in the lessons of a 1970s Toyota executive.

Karp is a firm believer in the Five Whys, a simple system that aims to uncover the root cause of an issue that may not be immediately apparent. The process is straightforward. When an issue arises, someone asks, “Why?” Whatever the answer may be, they ask “why?” again and again until they have done so five times.

“We have found is that those who are willing to chase the causal thread, and really follow it where it leads, can often unravel the knots that hold organisations back,” Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir’s head of corporate affairs, wrote in “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West” which was published earlier this year.

During a recent interview, Karp pointed to his adherence to the approach as a potential reason that Peter Thiel, once his roommate, entrusted him to lead Palantir when they co-founded the software company in 2003 alongside Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Nathan Gettings. At the time, Karp was a Stanford law school grad who, instead of practicing, went on to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy in Germany.

“The same things that made Peter the world’s best value investor—he finds people that understand the sixth, seventh, eighth derivative of a problem in a business context. And we were friends. I do think there’s a Germanic overlap, in our aptitude for understanding the consequences of a decision very far out,” Karp told Wired in November.

Karp credits Taiichi Ohno, a senior executive at Toyota Motor Corporation, who wrote about about his management approaches for turning him onto the practice.

A 2012 article in the Issues in Information Systems journal praised the Five Whys approach, essentially labeling it Palantir’s special sauce.”

“To truly define values in the eyes of the customers, Palantir Technologies emphasizes the need to talk with customers throughout the development process, keep asking ‘why?’ but never ask ‘why?’ without implementing the answers, and be very disciplined at every step of the process,” the authors wrote. “Their success in both the government and financial sectors began with the very first lean principle — identifying the values of customers.”

Palantir’s culture is almost as iconoclastic as its leader. Employees at the company, named for the magical seeing-stone in The Lord of the Rings, don’t have formal titles — many employees report only to their teammates. Karp abhors higher-ed culture; there’s even a video devoted to employees who dropped out of college to join Palantir.

Despite being a major defense contractor around the world, Karp recently said that non-US clients shouldn’t expect to be wined and dined if they want access to Maven, Palantir’s AI-powered platform for security and defense.

“We’re not selling you sick dinner, we’re not selling you our charm,” he told podcaster Molly O’Shea while walking around the company’s office.

The Five Whys approach seems to be working. Shares of Palantir are up over 100% year-to-date, and Karp’s net worth is estimated to be roughly $15.7 billion.

Why not.

• Posting work on LinkedIn and his website helped Dhyey Mavani land an engineering job at LinkedIn.
• Sharing projects and personal stories online expanded his professional network and visibility.
• Mavani encourages others to post their journeys to unlock career opportunities and mentorship.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dhyey Mavani, a 21-year-old software engineer at LinkedIn, based in Sunnyvale, CA. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I moved to the US from India in 2021 to attend Amherst College, where I triple-majored in computer science, mathematics, and statistics. During my freshman year, I developed a support system for statistical programming that became part of an introductory statistics course.

Opportunities to talk about my work on and off campus started coming up, which led to different perspectives, insights, and connections. I thought about how I could scale this up to a broader audience.

I started posting my work on my personal website and LinkedIn in 2022. Reach-outs, research, and informal job opportunities started coming in, which made me realize that posting online about your work is as important as doing the work itself.

After seeing my work online in 2023, a recruiter at LinkedIn contacted me directly on the platform to discuss an internship opportunity, which ultimately led to my current full-time position as a software engineer at the company. I started full time this year.

I started building my network through my online presence

I started posting because people on campus were reaching out and asking to chat through ideas and career advice, and I couldn’t devote much time to each individual. I still wanted to share my resources, so I decided to document my learnings and my progress and share them online.

Since I started posting, I’ve significantly expanded my network to over 500 connections and more than 6,000 followers. I posted about a research paper I wrote, and in the post walked through a short summary about my research, how I got there, what the key accomplishments were, and what things I’m still looking into for future work.

That gained some traction with over 45,000 post impressions on LinkedIn. Then I had people working in research labs at Princeton and other universities reach out, which led to further conversations about job opportunities that I never could’ve had otherwise.

I had to get over the fear of being judged

It’s terrifying to put your work out there. I also thought of this as an opportunity to be resourceful and repay the help that my upperclassmen and alumni have given me.

That motivation really helped me overcome all the other worries I had. If it’s for a good cause and to help others, I shouldn’t worry about people judging my work. If they do, I try to take it in a constructive manner and learn from their perspectives to identify areas for improvement.

It’s important to post the whole journey, not just your achievements

Adding personal anecdotes to the technical content that you post makes it more engaging for users. As I scroll on LinkedIn or read blog posts, I always engage a lot more with content that has a personal element. It gives me a thrilling ride through the adventure that the person went through to come to this conclusion or achieve this goal.

It’s helpful to phrase the posts you share in a value-first manner, where you provide some of your own perspective and explain why you stand by it. When I share my work online, I like to walk readers through why I pursued this project, what it entails, and who it impacts.

I also try to engage with content I see to increase visibility and expand my network. I recently commented on a post about Google, sharing my thoughts on the company’s strategy, and my comment had over 100,000 impressions.

Content works for you while you sleep

When I first heard someone say that content builds your career while you are sleeping, that really moved me.

I realized that there are opportunities that arise from organic posting and genuinely engaging with other people’s content. I’ve received numerous outreach requests from people who have been working in similar fields that I admire, as well as for my internship opportunity at LinkedIn and other places that haven’t yet had job postings listed.

Sharing content about an achievement helps me close that chapter of my work in my mind, and it can serve as a good checkpoint for people who are just starting on that journey when I’m ending it and seeking guidance.

I wouldn’t have the job options, the reach, network for mentorship, and other engagements if I hadn’t started sharing my journey online.

Do you have a similar story to share? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.

• A philosophy professor warns that reliance on AI is quietly eroding workers’ core skills.
• She says junior employees risk becoming “useless” when they over-rely on AI tools.
• Data shows most ChatGPT use is personal, raising concerns about cognitive offloading.

Companies are racing to adopt AI tools they believe will supercharge productivity. But one professor warned that the technology may be quietly hollowing out the workforce instead.

Anastasia Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, said that new research — and what she’s hearing directly from colleagues across various industries — shows that employees who heavily rely on AI are losing core skills at a startling rate.

“We have a tremendous amount of empirical data on this question of skill attrition or skill atrophy,” Berg said on “The Philosopher” podcast this week. “We talk a lot about what it takes to acquire a skill,” but skills also require maintaining, she said

While Berg did not cite particular studies, there is research from Oxford University Press and journals, including Springer and MDPI, that suggests AI may boost speed and engagement in learning, but often at the cost of depth, critical thinking, creativity, and long-term skill development.

AI could be damaging the workers who need to learn the most

Berg said the workers most vulnerable to this deskilling effect are junior employees.

She said it’s not just a problem with the humanities subjects; computer science professors say that students and early-career developers are relying so heavily on AI tools that they’re no longer learning how to write or debug code on their own.

“It’s one thing for a senior coder to use AI,” she said. “But the junior people are useless because they cannot help themselves from using it.”

Because they lean on AI from day one, Berg said, they never build the foundational knowledge required to understand what the AI is doing — let alone verify or correct it.

AI is becoming a crutch — even outside work

Berg said AI dependency is spreading far beyond the workplace. Adults now consult chatbots for everything from emotional support to daily decision-making — a shift she believes erodes independent judgment.

“The majority — if not something close to — of AI use among adults isn’t work-related,” she said, pointing to “constant advice,” “a lot of weird sociability,” and “emotional task management.”

An analysis of 1.58 million ChatGPT conversations by researchers at OpenAI, Duke University, and Harvard University found that by June 2025, 73% of messages from adult users were non-work-related, though the study did not break down the specific non-work uses.

That kind of reliance, she said, weakens the cognitive capacities people need not only to perform specialized jobs but to function independently in everyday life.

A looming crisis of competence

Berg’s point is that AI doesn’t merely automate tasks — it automates the very processes through which people develop their skills.

Once workers grow dependent on AI, they lose the friction that strengthens their ability to reason, problem-solve, and make decisions.

“We have them compromising their most basic levels of their ability,” she said. “The threat to the highest level of their ability is just tremendous.”

If companies continue to push AI into every workflow under the banner of efficiency, she said, they may end up with a generation of employees who appear more productive on paper but lack the ability to perform without digital hand-holding.

In other words, AI might not be enhancing the workforce. It might be slowly dismantling it.

• Uber, Lyft, and other apps market themselves as ideal side hustles.
• One driver said the work hasn’t fit well with her schedule as a medical student.
• The driver has looked at other gigs, such as substitute teaching, to make money.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Porshaye Watkins, a 37-year-old ride-hailing driver for Uber and Lyft in Atlanta. Business Insider verified her work and expenses. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I started medical school in January 2020. Then, life happened.

My grandmother passed. She raised me, so after that, I had to navigate life a little differently. I became the sole caretaker for my Vietnam War veteran grandfather and my intellectually disabled adult brother.

In the fall of last year, I had the wonderful idea to use rideshare to supplement my income while studying and caring for my family. However, it has not been what I’ve planned.

The story I had heard from others who drove rideshare was that they did it full-time and were able to make thousands of dollars a week. But the most profitable times to work don’t always fall within the hours I’m able to spend outside and work. Sometimes I have to study when lots of people are requesting rides, such as at night.

Initially, when I started driving rideshare, I rented a vehicle through Lyft. It was very expensive: I was paying about $300 a week for the car, and that doesn’t include a deposit, taxes, fees, or insurance. So I was paying over $1,000 a month for a car that I didn’t own. When some rides paid as little as $2 or $3, it didn’t make financial sense. Earlier this year, I ended up buying my own car.

Some weeks, I end up driving for 55 hours to make enough money to cover my expenses. So far, I’ve completed about 1,400 trips on Uber and 500 on Lyft. I’m taking a break from school, although I plan to re-enroll and complete my final year in January.

As a future doctor, I see certain behaviors among other drivers that concern me. Like me, a lot of other ride-hailing drivers whom I talk to while working or getting rides myself say they sacrifice downtime and sleep to drive. That can make them more anxious, especially late at night, which puts everyone on the road at risk.

(Editor’s note: A Lyft spokesperson said driver health and well-being is a top priority, and the company encourages drivers to take breaks and limits drivers to working 12 hours at once. An Uber spokesperson declined to comment.)

I’ve also noticed that I’m sitting a lot more as a driver than I used to when I was in medical school. It doesn’t do the body good. I’m trying to figure out a way to get more active again.

Over the past year or so, I’ve realized that driving for rideshare is not a sustainable side hustle for me. I’ve started applying for other jobs, but I usually don’t hear anything back. I’ve also been making grocery and restaurant deliveries through Instacart and DoorDash. The main alternative that has worked out for me is working as a substitute teacher.

It’s devastating to me that I’m working this hard. I hoped the rideshare industry could be a reliable option for someone like me who needs flexibility, but it’s not.

Do you have a story to share about Uber or other gig work? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or 808-854-4501.