Month: November 2025

• The partners said that strong relationship-building skills and a focus on details are key.
• One partner said that though AI is transforming work, the key skills she seeks remain the same.
• CEO David Solomon has said the bank will need to hire more “high-value” people with AI.

If you want to land a job at Goldman Sachs, consider honing your people skills.

Two partners at the bank told Business Insider how AI adoption is changing — or, in some cases, not changing — what they look for in applicants. As the cohead of Global Private Wealth Management and One Goldman Sachs, which is undergoing an AI-driven overhaul, Meena Lakdawala-Flynn said people skills are especially important.

“Strong judgment, strong interpersonal skills, creativity, curiosity, and of course a strong work ethic,” she said when asked what she looks for in potential hires.

Wealth management is, she said, about relationship building, and using AI tools effectively could free up more time to spend with clients.

“Those interpersonal skills are really important, because the more that you’re able to connect with your client and gain trust, the more that they open up to you,” Lakdawala-Flynn said. Her team often uses tools like the “GS AI Assistant,” the bank’s interactive AI sidekick, and a language translator, among others.

Asahi Pompey, global head of the Office of Corporate Engagement and chair of the Urban Investment Group, has been at Goldman for nearly 20 years and is herself a “big AI user.” Yet she doesn’t think the core skills that differentiate top applicants and employees have changed much, even as the technology transforms the workplace.

“The fundamentals are still the same,” Pompey said. “You want someone who lives in the details, who really understands the aspects of the work that they’re doing. You’re going to want somebody who’s going to be very responsive, because we move in a fast-paced way. Has a high level of accuracy.”

Knowing how to correctly prompt an AI chatbot and question its output are also key skills, she said.

Goldman has spent around $6 billion on technology this year, and CEO David Solomon has said the bank’s AI tools will “scale and transform our engineering abilities.” Junior employees are among the bank’s “AI natives,” Marco Argenti, Goldman’s chief information officer, said last month.

Though a recent internal memo about the AI updates to OneGS outlined “limited” job cuts at the firm, Solomon has said that the technology means Goldman will need to raise headcount and hire “high-value” employees.

Work at Goldman Sachs or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at atecotzky@insider.com or Signal at alicetecotzky.05. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• The future of the 35-year-old company behind the Roomba is uncertain.
• iRobot has warned that it is running out of options and cash.
• The company said it may be forced to fold or seek bankruptcy protection.

Roomba once reigned supreme in the world of robotic vacuums, conquering both dirty living room floors with its advanced tech and the marketplace it helped create.

But iRobot, the maker of the iconic self-cleaning disc-shaped vacuum, is now finding itself left in the dust as it teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. The Massachusetts-headquartered company, a pioneer in the robotics industry, has warned that it’s running out of options — and cash.

iRobot has grappled with mounting financial strain in recent years, and the collapse of Amazon’s planned $1.4 billion acquisition of the Roomba maker in early 2024 has only exacerbated the company’s troubles.

After months of trying to find a new buyer, iRobot said in a regulatory filing last month that its last remaining potential acquirer pulled out “following a lengthy period of exclusive negotiations.”

The possible iRobot buyer offered a price per share that was “significantly lower than the trading price” of its stock over recent months, the company said in the October 22 Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The debt-burdened iRobot warned in the filing that if it can’t find fresh funding soon, it “may be forced to significantly curtail or cease operations and would likely seek bankruptcy protection.”

An iRobot spokesperson told Business Insider that, consistent with its policy, it does not comment “on matters of this nature beyond our public disclosures.”

With the holiday season approaching, the spokesperson said the company remains “focused on executing our strategy and delivering for our valued customers, partners, and consumers.”

iRobot first publicly warned investors that there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue “as a going concern” in a March earnings report.

That same month, the company rolled out a new fleet of Roomba vacuums and mops, which CEO Gary Cohen said was aimed at “better positioning iRobot as the leader in the category that we created.”

“There can be no assurance that the new product launches will be successful due to potential factors, including, but not limited to consumer demand, competition, macroeconomic conditions, and tariff policies,” the company said at the time.

iRobot’s current financial position marks a stunning fall for a company that introduced the world to the Roomba vacuum more than two decades ago and has sold over 50 million models globally since.

Founded by MIT roboticists

Before there was Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, there was iRobot.

iRobot was founded in 1990 by three roboticists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Colin Angle, Helen Greiner, and Rodney Brooks — who had a “vision of making practical robots a reality,” the company says on its website.

Before iRobot had its consumer breakthrough with the launch of the Roomba vacuum in 2002, the company focused on designing robots for space-related research and military use.

In 1998, iRobot won a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, to build a tactical mobile robot. This led to the development of iRobot’s PackBot, which was later used in search operations at Manhattan’s Ground Zero following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

iRobot boasts on its website that its robots have “revealed mysteries of the Great Pyramid of Giza, found harmful subsea oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and saved thousands of lives in areas of conflict and crisis around the globe.”

When iRobot went public in November 2005 at an initial share price of $24, it was already known for its innovative robot vacuums.

By 2013, iRobot had sold over 10 million home cleaning robots, vastly outnumbering the more than 5,000 defense and security robots it had delivered to military and civil defense forces worldwide the year before.

The company sold its defense and security business to the private equity firm Arlington Capital Partners in 2016 for up to $45 million.

Over the past decade, iRobot’s annual revenue peaked in 2021 at $1.56 billion, but sales have been falling ever since.

iRobot — which today slings models ranging in price from $269.99 to as high as $1,299.99 — may have set the standard for home robot vacuums, but competition has surged from Chinese rivals like Dreame, Roborock, and Ecovacs, and other brands like Shark and Samsung.

In an August SEC filing, iRobot acknowledged that it has, in recent years, “seen increased competition with new product offerings in the robotic floorcare segment and have conceded some market share.”

The failed Amazon-iRobot deal

Amazon agreed to buy iRobot in 2022 for $61 per share in an all-cash transaction, but the deal fell apart two years later with the companies saying there was “no path to regulatory approval in the European Union.”

The failed deal was a major blow to iRobot. The same day the companies announced that the proposed merger was off, iRobot said it would lay off 350 employees, or about 31% of its workforce. Angle, iRobot’s cofounder and longtime CEO, also stepped down as part of the restructuring.

As the cash-strapped iRobot awaited the completion of the Amazon deal that never came, it took out a $200 million loan from the private equity firm Carlyle Group in July 2023.

iRobot said in last month’s regulatory filing that it had further extended its loan waiver period to December 1 as its financial outlook darkens.

“We are currently in discussions with the Lenders to provide the additional capital we require to fund our ongoing business operations,” iRobot wrote, adding that it may be forced to file for bankruptcy protection if the lenders “do not provide this necessary funding and we are unable to find other sources of capital in the near term.”

The iRobot spokesperson told Business Insider, “As disclosed in our Form 8-K filed with the SEC, we have reached an agreement with our primary lender to extend our covenant waiver under our loan agreement through December 1, 2025, in order to continue our active and ongoing review of strategic alternatives, including, but not limited to, exploring a potential sale or strategic transaction and refinancing our debt.”

Meanwhile, iRobot’s shares — priced at $2.70 as of Wednesday’s market close — have plunged about 65% year-to-date.

• Peter Thiel once offered a simple theory for why millennials are more supportive of socialism.
• In 2020, Thiel said student debt and the cost of housing were to blame.
• His once-private email is being shared once again after Zohran Mamdani’s victory.

Peter Thiel’s theory for why some millennials have embraced socialism is receiving renewed attention following New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory.

“When 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why,” Thiel wrote in a January 2020 email to top Facebook leaders, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya posted a screenshot of the exchange as business and tech leaders began to digest Mamdani’s stunning rise as a self-described democratic socialist to lead the nation’s largest city.

“Tl;dr too much student debt and lack of affordable housing keeps young people with negative capital for too long,” Palihapitiya wrote on X. “And without a stake in the capitalist system, they will turn against it.”

Thiel said that young Americans had grown fed up with a system that many may have felt had left them behind.

“from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it,” Thiel wrote.

Often described as a libertarian, Thiel wrote that he “would be the last person to advocate for socialism,” but it was important to understand why a large percentage of young Americans felt disconnected. Thiel spoke in support of President Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Thiel distanced himself from politics after the 2022 midterms, but has recently resumed supporting Republican causes.

At the time of his message, Thiel was encouraging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to think more about how to deploy his capital as “the spokesman for the Millennial generation.” Thiel said the social media network needed to make sure it stayed “attuned” to the rising generation.

The internal messages came to light amid an onslaught of lawsuits related to Meta’s treatment of young users’ mental health. Thirty-three states sued Meta in federal court while others, including Tennessee and the District of Columbia, filed suit in state court. Business Insider verified the authenticity of Thiel’s message, which was posted by the newsletter Internal Tech Emails.

A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Young voters continue to warm to socialism

More recent polling shows that a wide swath of younger Americans continue to hold positive views of socialism, even as the nation as a whole does not. An August Gallup poll found that 49% adults 18 to 34 had a positive view of socialism, 10 percentage points higher than adults overall.

It’s not a straight line. It’s hard to reconcile Thiel’s thesis with President Donald Trump’s significant improvement among young voters in 2024 compared to his two previous runs. Trump has routinely used the socialist label as a cudgel against his opponents, a trend he continued with Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he also called a “Marxist” and a communist. (Harris was neither of those things.)

The AP Voter Poll, which is based on a survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California, and New York City, found most voters under 30 supported Democrats.

Mamdani built a massive advantage with young voters, the survey found. He outperformed Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by 60 percentage points among voters ages 18 to 19 and by 38 points among voters ages 30 to 44.

Addressing his supporters Tuesday night, Mamdani quoted Eugene V. Debs, a 1900s American socialist leader who once ran for president while in prison.

“I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this,” Mamdani said.

• Tatiana Teppoeva launched her own company after being laid off from Microsoft in January.
• Her son’s entrepreneurial success inspired her to pursue her long-held business dreams.
• Now she’s in control of her own schedule and enjoys the freedom that comes with being an entrepreneur.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tatiana Teppoeva, a 49-year-old entrepreneur in Redmond, Washington. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I’m an entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in economics and two master’s degrees, and I’m currently pursuing an MBA. I’m also a US patent holder in predictive AI, a certified personality profiler, and certified in nonverbal communication, voice, and speech analysis.

At the start of my career, I worked at Boeing as a business analyst, where I led global customer satisfaction initiatives and internal employee engagement analytics.

In May 2011, I joined Microsoft as a senior research manager. From 2015 to 2025, I transitioned into a senior data and applied scientist role, where I developed and patented an AI model for predicting hardware failures.

When I was laid off from Microsoft after 14 years, I started a company, One Nonverbal Ecosystem, rather than seeking a new corporate job. Now I teach executives how to command the room and project the presence they want.

I got an email from Microsoft in January telling me I had been laid off

My first reaction was disbelief and pure happiness. I picked up the phone and called a friend to share the news.

For more than a year, I had been thinking about leaving to start my own company, but it was not an easy decision after a 17-year stable career at Boeing and Microsoft.

I even had a resignation letter saved in my drafts, waiting for the right moment. When the layoff happened, I felt it was a green light, and I was grateful.

Microsoft provided me with clarity and a financial cushion with severance and medical coverage, which allowed me to start building my business without the immediate pressure of financial concerns.

One of the biggest inspirations for me to start my own company was my son, who’s a successful businessman

I watched him start from nothing and build something impressive as a business owner in the construction space. He wasn’t interested in college, and I didn’t know how it would turn out, but I told him it was the perfect time to experiment. If it worked, wonderful. If not, he would still gain valuable experience. I’ve always believed we either win or we learn; there are no failures.

Watching his journey encouraged me to take the same leap. I had wanted to start my own business since I was 30, but life circumstances made me put that dream on hold.

But now, my kids are older, and I have my degrees and experience. I know I could always return to employment if I want to.

In Big Tech, I learned that fear, not ambition, became the dominant driver behind performance

One time while at Microsoft, we were in the middle of a high-stakes incident review, the kind where everyone is under pressure because millions of users could be affected.

On the surface, the team looked motivated and fully engaged, but when we talked privately afterward, many colleagues admitted they were working out of fear of being blamed if something went wrong.

That moment showed me how often performance in corporate settings is powered by fear rather than real drive. Fear can create short bursts of results, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. I learned that people do their best work when they feel trust and clarity, not when they’re trying to avoid punishment.

This is exactly how I envision entrepreneurship: being busy on my own terms

I officially launched my business in spring 2025. Some days I work 16 hours and I love it, and other days I might work zero. I decide when and what I do. I really enjoy learning new things, and this is a completely new world for me.

At times, it feels overwhelming because I have 100 ideas competing in my head, so I have to work on focusing.

I’ve been published in the media, spoken on podcasts, created my first online course, trained small business teams, and worked with high-level individuals — all things I had never done before. Recently, I hired my first employee part-time.

I wish I had known earlier that isolation is not the challenge I expected

For me, it’s actually the opposite. I’m part of many communities and groups, so I often have to step back to focus on my top priorities.

The real difference from corporate life is that now, even when I feel overwhelmed, it’s because of my own choices — and that feels like freedom.