👋 Good morning. That mistake you made at work yesterday? Don’t sweat it. Even the most successful people mess up sometimes. Take Apple CEO Tim Cook, for example, who said the 2012 launch of Apple Maps was his “first really big mistake,” after the glitchy app led to backlash and a leadership switch-up. But he says his blunders were all part of growing Apple to a $4T company. Before you go confessing your slip-ups to the boss, note that Cook said this after announcing he’s stepping down as CEO.
NEWS FLASH
💰 Odd twist: Kalshi penalized three political candidates accused of participating in insider trading. The prediction market forbids politicians and athletes from betting on events they can control. Matt Klein of Minnesota and Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas both face fines of less than $1k and suspensions of up to five years, while Mark Moran of Virginia has received a five-year suspension and a fine of over $6k. Moran posted to X that betting on himself was all part of his plan to get caught and give attention to “how this company is destroying young men.”
⚔️ Dungeon on demand: AI gaming startup Latitude revealed Voyage, its new AI-powered RPG platform. Currently in expanded beta, users can design and customize their own worlds by describing settings, quests, gaming mechanics, characters, and more. Players can also explore a variety of text-based games run by AI systems that narrate what’s happening, interact with players, and remember player decisions. TechCrunch noted that because these bot-run gaming sessions are unscripted, they can get a little weird.
📓 Today’s version of reading your kid’s diary: Meta will allow parents using its supervision tools to see the topics their teens ask Meta AI about on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. While parents won’t get word-for-word transcripts, they will be able to see which topic category their child discussed with a bot — ranging from “school” and “entertainment” to “health and wellbeing” and “lifestyle” — and click into a topic to see subcategories.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
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No ifs, ands, or butts: The UK passed a generational smoking ban, prohibiting the sale of tobacco to anyone born after Jan. 1, 2009. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the UK.
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Handy: Shade, a cloud storage startup that just raised $14m, offers creative and marketing teams a platform for quickly surfacing files. For example, they can search using natural language instead of trying to remember what the heck they named that video.
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And on the fourth day… A group of astronomers used physics-based simulations to create an entire synthetic universe mirroring ours to test whether the current understanding of the cosmos is correct.
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Bard bot: The Poetry Camera lets users take a pic, but it spits out an AI-generated poem instead of a photo. Cute, perhaps, but would you pay $349 for one?
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THE BIG IDEA
Why Starbucks fled the city for the exurbs
Remember those jokes about New York City having a Starbucks on every corner? Not anymore. Over the last several months, Starbucks has closed roughly two dozen Manhattan shops and several more in Brooklyn and Queens.
Meanwhile, Atoka, Tennessee, an exurb ~30 miles outside of Memphis with 10k people (up from less than 700 in the 1990s), recently got its first store.
But Starbucks isn’t just chasing population growth. It’s becoming an exurban company because, unlike in denser cities, there’s plenty of room for drive-throughs.
Goodbye to all that
The pandemic changed a lot in this country, including fast food habits. University of Texas, El Paso professor Partha Sarathi Mishra, along with co-authors Sunil Chopra and Ioannis Stamatopoulos, studied store-visit data at Starbucks and a handful of other popular chains from 2018 to 2025 and found:
- Stores without drive-throughs experienced a drop in demand during the pandemic and didn’t fully recover.
- Stores with drive-throughs experienced a temporary shock and not only recovered but saw their volume increase.
Mishra describes this as a shift in demand volume: For Starbucks, it was as though 25% of total customers migrated from in-store to the drive-through.
That doesn’t mean nobody wants to sit inside a Starbucks (the company is renovating many stores to improve their third-place feel). It just means that locations with drive-throughs are far more successful, prompting an expansion into areas where there’s enough asphalt for people to wait in line in their cars.
“It seems like they’re recognizing the fact that people have changed their preference to more drive-through stores,” Mishra says. “So the option is to open more in the suburban areas.”
How deep will Starbucks spread into the exurbs?
An extremely random website called Starbuckseverywhere.net, operated by a guy who wants to visit every single Starbucks, tracks the brand’s openings and closings.
- As of late March, Starbucks had opened ~70 new stores this year.
- There were more openings in cities with 30k or fewer residents than in cities with more than 100k residents.
In 2026, Starbucks plans on opening ~650 stores. On a recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Brian Niccol suggested they could add ~10k more US stores in the coming years, a huge increase above the ~18k it currently operates.
The exurban future of Starbucks, then, might look a bit like its urban past. Except instead of a Starbucks on every corner, it will be a Starbucks off every highway exit.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Blackberry, Sonos, Swiffer — the man behind some of the world’s most iconic brand names shares his secrets to building a billion-dollar brand.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Weight, in tons, of a gigantic robo-arm that China-based engineer and influencer Fan Shisan created for funsies — or, based on a video description he posted, “just to see if my friend could survive the ultimate slap!” While he didn’t actually crush his buddies with the massive machine, which it absolutely would have, he did get it to demolish a small Volvo with one swing using a hand-mounted controller.
Some people just have too much time (and scrap metal?) on their huge robotic hands.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1704, The Boston News-Letter, the first continuously published newspaper in the colony of Massachusetts, debuted.
📰 Newsletter: Get calm, clear financial insights from The Daily Upside.
🎟️ Save your spot: HubSpot’s former head of paid media is sharing his playbook for success in a live session hosted by Marketing Against the Grain and HubSpot for Startups.
📱 That’s cool: Take a virtual tour of the National Museum of Natural History’s exhibit "Cellphone: Unseen Connections."
🐇 Aww: Clean your ears.
SHOWER THOUGHT
Procrastination may be one of humanity's greatest survival mechanisms. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Mark Dent, and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Suddenly craving a Frappuccino" Friedman.
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