• Organizational Realignment: Google DeepMind has established a specialized strike team to enhance AI coding capabilities, overseen by senior leadership including Sergey Brin and Koray Kavukcuoglu.
• Competitive Pressure: The internal initiative was accelerated by advancements in Anthropic’s coding models, which currently outperform Google’s Gemini series in code generation tasks.
• Strategic Focus: The objective is to transition toward agentic models capable of multi-step execution, with a specific aim to automate the work performed by AI researchers and software engineers.
• Internal Development: Google is prioritizing training models on its proprietary internal code base to increase automation, mandating the use of tools like Jetski among engineering staff to raise current AI usage from 50% to full-scale adoption.
• Technological Objectives: The development roadmap targets self-improving AI systems that can execute long-term, complex software projects and perform large-scale autonomous experimental research.

Exclusive

Google Creates Strike Team to Improve Coding Models

Art by Mike Sullivan

By

Erin Woo

erin@theinformation.comProfile and archive

Apr 20, 2026, 6:00am PDT

Google has assembled a strike team of researchers and engineers to improve its AI coding models, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation, as it looks to automate more of its own coding and ultimately its AI research.

The push was prompted in part by Anthropic’s recent AI model releases, according to two of the people. Researchers at Google DeepMind view Anthropic’s coding tools as exceeding the code-writing abilities of Google’s Gemini models, the people said.

The Takeaway

• Google DeepMind forms strike team to improve AI coding models.
• Anthropic’s advanced coding models spurred Google’s urgent effort.
• Google’s AI writes 50% of code, trailing Anthropic’s near 100%.

Powered by Deep Research

The end goal is AI takeoff, or AI that can improve itself, which has been a particular focus for Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Brin has told staffers that improving Google AI’s coding abilities is a step toward that eventual goal.

Both Brin and Google DeepMind Chief Technology Officer Koray Kavukcuoglu have been directly involved with the strike team, showing its importance to Google’s top leadership, one of the people said.

In a recent memo, Brin told Google DeepMind staffers that they must aggressively pivot to catch up on agents, the term for AI that can handle multi-step tasks.

“To win the final sprint, we must urgently bridge the gap in agentic execution and turn our models into primary developers” of code, Brin wrote.

An advanced coding agent, combined with AI that can solve math problems and run experiments, could one day automate the work of AI researchers and engineers at a large scale. OpenAI already has an internal tool to help its AI researchers work faster, including by generating code for experiments related to AI models.

Coding Emphasis

Coding has been a major focus this year across all frontier AI labs, as OpenAI and Google have sought to catch up to Anthropic, which has long been in the lead in code generation abilities. Last month, OpenAI announced it would shut down its Sora video generator and focus on coding and enterprise work.

Google is now putting more emphasis on models that write code the company can use internally, a strategy shift from focusing primarily on coding models for external customers. That requires training the models on Google’s code, which is important for performance because Google’s private code base differs significantly from the external code it usually uses to train general-purpose coding agents.

Models trained on internal Google code can’t be released publicly, although they could theoretically help create better models that could then see a public release.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the company had seen “tremendous adoption” of internal coding tools. “Their use has been turbocharging our model and AI tooling development—we’re really focused here,” the spokesperson said.

The strike team is led by Sebastian Borgeaud, a research engineer at Google DeepMind who previously led pretraining for Google DeepMind, the three people said. The team focuses on improving model performance for long-term coding tasks like writing a new piece of software. Such tasks are often highly complex, requiring the models to read through files and understand a user’s intent, two of the people said.

Tracking Usage

Google is also trying to push its own employees to adopt coding tools. Like Meta Platforms, Google has an internal leaderboard tracking usage of its internal coding tool, Jetski, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. Some teams outside Google DeepMind are also holding mandatory AI training sessions for engineers, according to one of the people.

In the memo, Brin wrote that every Gemini engineer must be forced to use internal agents for complex, multistep tasks.

Anthropic has bragged that it already uses coding tools for the bulk of its internal engineering needs. The head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, said in January that “pretty much 100%” of Anthropic’s code is written using AI. In contrast, coding agents write about 50% of code at Google, according to Google Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi, speaking on Google’s most recent earnings call in February.

Erin Woo is a San Francisco-based reporter covering Google and Alphabet for The Information. Contact her at @erinkwoo.07 on Signal, erin@theinformation.com and at @erinkwoo on X.

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• Succession Timeline: John Ternus Assumes The Role Of Apple Chief Executive Officer On September 1 With Tim Cook Moving To Executive Chairman
• Professional Background: Ternus Is A Mechanical Engineer Who Previously Directed The Hardware Engineering Division Across The Entire Apple Product Portfolio
• Strategic Focus: The Incoming Chief Executive Is Tasked With Navigating The Company Through The Artificial Intelligence Era And Developing Future Product Innovations
• Management Style: Internal Assessments Describe Ternus As A Decisive And Collaborative Professional Who Prefers Engaging Directly With Product Teams Rather Than Management Layers
• Internal Reputation: Colleagues Characterize The New Leader As A Levelheaded Individual Known For Navigating Corporate Culture Without Generating Internal Conflict
• Operational Experience: Past Responsibilities Included The Successful Development Of AirPods And Leading The Transition Of Mac Computers To Internal Apple Silicon Chips
• Corporate Philosophy: The Incoming Chief Executive Maintains Emphasis On Established Company Principles Such As Product Secrecy And The Preservation Of Institutional Culture
• Public Transition: Apple Leadership Conducted A Controlled Public Integration Of Ternus Through High Profile Product Presentations And Retail Appearances To Prepare For The Leadership Change

John Ternus. Bebeto Matthews/AP

By

Rolfe Winkler

April 20, 2026 10:45 pm ET

BPC > Only use to renew if text is incomplete or updated: | archive.ph

BPC > Full article text fetched from (no need to report issue for external site): | archive.today | archive.ph

• John Ternus will become Apple chief executive on Sept. 1, with Tim Cook transitioning to executive chairman.

• Ternus, a mechanical engineer, takes over as Apple seeks its next hit product and remakes itself for the AI age.

• Ternus, who led hardware engineering, is known for decisiveness and navigating Apple’s internal culture.

This summary was generated with AI and reviewed by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.

• John Ternus will become Apple chief executive on Sept. 1, with Tim Cook transitioning to executive chairman.

  View more

The Mac Mini was sorely in need of an update, and John Ternus hoped he didn’t need to go through design guru Jony Ive.

Years ago, before Ternus was tapped to take the helm of one of the world’s biggest and most influential companies, he led Apple’s AAPL 1.04%increase; green up pointing triangle Mac hardware division. It was one of many stops as he rose through the ranks of the insular company and learned to navigate its curious internal politics.

The AI revolution that would make the Mac Mini hugely popular was still years away, yet software developers needed a new version with updated chips. A new enclosure for the Mini could require work by Ive’s industrial design department that could lead to delays.

Ternus ordered the update after determining that the design wouldn’t need a major change, people familiar with the move said. He didn’t dwell on the product’s profit potential, focusing instead on its value to Apple’s overall ecosystem. It was one of many episodes that showed his decisiveness, keen understanding of Apple’s culture and products, and how to get things done inside the company, the people said.

Ternus at the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2017. Gary Reyes/MediaNews Group/Getty Images

Over his 25 year career at Apple, those characteristics have propelled Ternus all the way to the company’s top job, which he will take over Sept. 1, the company announced Monday, instantly making him one of the highest-profile corporate leaders in the world. Longtime Apple CEO Tim Cook will become executive chairman.

Ternus will follow two corporate legends. Steve Jobs developed the most lucrative product in history, the iPhone. Cook squeezed trillions of dollars of value from the smartphone thanks to the supply chain he built and the services and ancillary products he rolled out.

As Cook did when he succeeded Jobs, Ternus is taking over as a relative unknown to the outside world. If Jobs was a product visionary and Cook a supply chain guru, Ternus is a hardware savant who exists somewhere in the middle.

A mechanical engineer by background, who most recently has led hardware engineering for all of Apple’s products, Ternus takes Apple’s reins at a critical time in its history. The company is at the top of its game selling iPhones, after rolling out popular new models last fall. Yet it is struggling to find its next hit product.

It also must remake itself in the age of artificial intelligence. After decades defining how people interact with computing devices, first on their desktops and then in their hands, Apple has fallen behind rival companies who are leading the next great computing platform with chatbots that converse like humans. Apple’s own Siri, which is set to get an AI brain transplant this year, has been a Neanderthal by comparison.

Ternus’s long Apple history will be essential in his new role. justin lane/epa-efe/rex/Shutterstock

Ask anyone from Apple what they think of Ternus, and they all say the same thing: He’s a super nice guy. People who have worked with Ternus describe him as a great collaborator who inspires fierce loyalty among those who work for him, a levelheaded voice who has made few if any enemies inside a company that in the past was notorious for its noxious personalities.

Staffers describe his ability to get things done in meetings, which he keeps focused, as well as his preference to deal directly with lower level staffers more familiar with products, rather than their managers who have less specific knowledge. 

Outside Apple, Ternus loves to race his Porsche at tracks like California’s Laguna Seca raceway, where he clocks laps in under 1:40, people familiar with his times said, which they added was solid for an amateur driver.

Ternus is tall and thin, with the same build he carried when he was a swimmer in college at the University of Pennsylvania. “Ternus was a very good guy,” said his one-time teammate, Andrew Berkowitz, who recalled the team running down Locust Walk on campus in their speedos in the winter, an annual hazing ritual for freshmen.

He graduated in 1997 and joined Apple in 2001 after four years working at a virtual-reality startup.

Ternus, in his senior-year yearbook at Penn. Andrew Berkowitz

An image from a YouTube video shows Ternus speaking during the 2024 Penn engineering undergraduate commencement ceremony.

A decade ago, Ternus was among the top executives charged with developing AirPods. Now a must-have iPhone accessory, the development of the first generation was infamous inside Apple for infighting among Ternus’s peers as they argued over how to keep the wireless ear buds connected via Bluetooth. One peer was later forced out, another sent to China. Ternus, not yet 40, stayed above the fray.

One of the biggest successes on Ternus’s watch has been the redesign of Apple’s Mac computers to use the company’s own chips, which run faster and cooler than the Intel chips Apple previously used. Most credit for that change goes to Johny Srouji, Apple’s hardware technologies leader who is taking over and expanding Ternus’s present job leading hardware engineering.

Ternus’s diplomatic skills and long Apple history will be essential in the new role. Apple has a unique structure. Other large companies have general managers responsible for discrete business lines. Apple is organized by function so an insider CEO with knowledge of the various parts of the company is at an advantage.  

What he isn’t known for is taking big, risky swings, said people familiar with Ternus’s tenure, leaving open the question of whether he can provide the product vision that company critics say has been absent since Jobs died.

Ternus is already a keeper of the company’s cultural flame. He has led talks to energize employees, reminding them never to speak of the company’s forthcoming products, a nod to the company’s secrecy dogma preached by Jobs.

For months, Ternus has been seen as Cook’s likely successor, a testament to Apple’s efforts to engineer a smooth succession unlike the chaotic transitions that have played out in recent years at other storied American companies.

Apple has taken steps recently to raise his profile. When Apple lifted the curtain on its 2025 device lineup, it was Ternus who showed off the new iPhone Air model. Soon after the device showcase, he was dispatched to London to welcome customers at Apple’s flagship U.K. store on the first day of new iPhone sales. He also introduced the company’s newest product, the cheap MacBook Neo laptop, last month.

Apple celebrated its 50th birthday at Grand Central Station in New York City a few weeks ago. Two executives headlined it: Cook and Ternus. 

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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• Strategic Customer Focus: Early-stage companies are advised to shift attention from rapid acquisition toward fostering deep loyalty and long-term advocacy within their initial client base.
• Collaborative Product Development: Engaging early customers in roadmap decisions, prototype feedback, and feature prioritization leverages their direct input to refine product utility.
• Intensive Service Investment: Tactics such as providing direct access to founders, dedicated engineering support for bug resolution, and personalized onboarding create high-touch experiences that differentiate new products.
• Mutual Brand Amplification: Capitalizing on opportunities like case studies allows the firm to gain social proof while providing clients with professional visibility and career advancement.
• Cultural Foundation Building: Although these unscalable practices do not persist indefinitely, they establish the organizational values and operational quality that inform long-term brand identity.

Playbooks

How to make your first customers raving fans

Proven tactics that turn early customers into lifelong advocates

[

](https://substack.com/@dpolitis)

David Politis

Apr 16, 2026

[

](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!liMT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb381b11b-fc8f-4665-b738-91ec96dec2bc_1200x627.png)

When you close your first customer, there’s this overwhelming sense of relief. You did it. You got someone to say yes. They’ve signed the contract, and they’re actually paying for something you built.

And then you immediately move on to finding the next customer.

I’ve seen this happen with almost every first-time founder I work with. You put so much energy into landing those first deals that once they close, you’re already thinking about how to get the next one. It feels like momentum, and when investors are pushing you to hit ARR milestones and customer count targets, it makes sense to think this way.

Plus, in those early days, you’re not really dealing with churn yet. Everyone is in the first few months of using the product or year one of their contract. But if you don’t invest in turning those first customers into raving fans, you’re not just risking churn down the road, you’re missing a massive upside opportunity.

I’m talking about going above and beyond, doing unscalable things to make your customers feel valued and like they’re part of your company, from day one.

Table of contents

1. Your first customers are the ones who help you build

2. The compound value of raving fans

3. Ask early customers what to build next

4. Assign a dedicated engineer to fix bugs immediately

5. Spend recurring 1:1 time with early customers

6. Hold their hand during implementation and onboarding

7. Amplify their personal brand

8. Go overboard with personalized swag

9. Ask for feedback on prototypes before building

Early customers are more like investors, not just buyers

Your early customers help you figure out what to build when you barely have a product. They’re the ones who will sit through bugs, missing features, and a clunky UI. They’ll give you feedback and forgive you when you make mistakes.

And if you do this right, your early customers will go to bat for you in several ways. They’ll be references for you (for other customers, investors, and partners), volunteer to participate in case studies and write reviews about you on sites like G2, and speak at conferences on behalf of your company.

These are the people who push you to add new features, they tell you what they’re seeing from competitors, and they become your eyes and ears in the market. They’re invested in your success in a way that customer number 500 never will be.

The compound value of raving fans

When you have that first set of customers who feel like they’ve been in the trenches with you, you get something most founders don’t realize they need until it’s too late: leeway to mess up.

Your product goes down for half a day? They stand by you. Renewal comes up, and the price increases 20%, 30%, or even 40%? They fight for the budget. A competitor reaches out with a cheaper alternative? They don’t take the call because you’ve already built trust and loyalty with them. Or even better, maybe they take the call to gather some intel, then share it with you.

This is the compound value. These relationships pay dividends for years.

That core group of early customers could be with you for 10 years, maybe more. Sometimes at the same company, often not. When they leave for their next role, you’re the first product they buy. They’ve already invested in you. They know the product works. They trust you and your team. So when they land at a new company and need to solve the same problem, they’re not evaluating five vendors; they’re going to you.

But they don’t stop there. They tell their colleagues and industry friends about you. They share your company on social media. They become word-of-mouth marketing engines for your brand.

If you do this right, these early customers will feel like they’re part of your story. They were there early with you, helping you build and being patient as you went through growing pains.

This is what’s on the line when you’re deciding whether to invest the time, energy, and money in making your first customers love you.

Here are seven ways to turn your first customers into raving fans.

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1. Ask early customers what to build next

You’ll hear tons of feature requests from early customers, and it will probably overwhelm you. Here’s how to figure out what to prioritize while also surprising and delighting them.

The key is letting your customers help you decide. Send a quick survey to all your current customers. “We’ve heard these 10 things over and over again. Which one do you think we should build next?” Make it clear that the feature that gets the most votes will be prioritized next.

Build whichever one gets the most votes. And this is the most important part: follow up with them and close the loop. When you ship the feature, email all of them and tell them it’s live. Tell them you built it because they voted for it, and thank them for pushing you to get it out.

It’s that simple, but you’ll be surprised how many companies fail to approach early product development this way. And when you close the loop, it establishes a level of trust and loyalty that can’t be matched.

Tip: Don’t put anything on this list that you’re not willing to build. This isn’t a fake democracy where you pretend to care about their input and then build whatever you want. You have to be ready to deliver.

2. Assign a dedicated engineer to fix bugs immediately

Every piece of software has bugs, and most software users expect them. This is especially true for new products. But what they don’t expect is for you to fix those bugs fast.

If you have someone dedicated to fixing bugs as soon as they come in, you create goodwill that’s hard to replicate any other way. Of course, many bugs can’t be resolved right away, but a lot can. Most companies don’t do this, and it’s an easy win for building trust and loyalty.

This doesn’t mean you need a full-time engineer dedicated to fixing bugs (but depending on your product, team size, number of customers, and the quality of your code, maybe you do). Having someone on call ready to jump in and resolve issues quickly is what matters. Maybe they even get on a call with the customer to recreate the bug and show they’re actively working on it.

Again, close the loop. Don’t just fix it silently and hope they notice. Tell them it’s done. That’s the whole play. Fix it fast, tell them you fixed it, and move on.

Tip: Have engineers on rotation in the support queue so customers can talk directly with the people who fix bugs. This creates a memorable experience for the customer and gives your engineers invaluable exposure to real user problems.

3. Spend recurring 1:1 time with early customers

As the CEO of a small startup doing very little in revenue, you might feel insignificant. You could go out of business tomorrow. Who cares about getting on a call with you, right?

Wrong. Your customers don’t get on calls with Zoom’s CEO, and they’re not talking to the CEO of Salesforce. When most of the products they use are from massive companies, having direct access to you (the CEO or founder, the person making product decisions) is a differentiation.

Your title matters, even if you feel like it doesn’t.

In the early days of BetterCloud, I was doing monthly hour-long meetings with our first customers. Then it moved to quarterly as we scaled, and it naturally became less frequent. But in those early days, that recurring time was critical.

These weren’t support calls. We talked about what we were building and why. We talked about what we were seeing in the market and what their peers (our other customers) were seeing. I’d share our roadmap and get their feedback. They’d tell me about their business priorities and where they were getting stuck.

All of this helps influence the roadmap, which is super important. But it also meant I could help them be more successful in their role.

I could tell them, “Other companies are approaching this problem this way,” or “Here’s what’s working for similar teams.” That kind of market intelligence is valuable for your product and for your customer relationships.

Tip: Make yourself accessible beyond those scheduled meetings. I’ve seen founders spin up shared Slack channels with clients where the entire engineering team can communicate directly with the customer. I’ve seen other CEOs give out their personal cell phone numbers.

4. Hold their hand during implementation and onboarding

Many customers, especially with an immature product, are going to struggle. Maybe the UI is bad. Or some product features are half-baked. Or critical functionality might be missing altogether, requiring manual workarounds.

This is normal for new products, but you can’t ignore those gaps. Your job is to make sure whatever problem they’re trying to solve with your product is actually achievable.

This is the forward-deployed engineer concept people talk about now. Sometimes it’s a consultant. Sometimes it’s a customer support person. The point is to hold the customer’s hand and provide whatever resources they need to be successful.

That might be helping them write custom integrations or building bespoke solutions for them on the fly. Or maybe it’s simply walking them through a workflow.

This doesn’t have to be you personally (although it might be). It could be your co-founder, CTO, or your first support hire. Whatever the case, someone needs to own making sure these customers are successful.

Tip: Don’t charge for implementation support. It’s too early at this stage. If these are your first customers, the ROI of them truly using your product and loving it outweighs any dollars you’d get from professional services or consulting. You want them in there, using it, seeing its value, and telling others about it.

5. Amplify their personal brand

This one is underrated. Many of the people you’re selling to (whether directors, managers, or individual contributors) have never had their personal brand out there in the world. They’ve never been featured in anything professionally. No one has ever asked them to do a case study, appear in a video, or talk publicly about their work.

So when you go to them and say, “We’d love to do a case study with you,” most founders frame it as a favor. “Would you be willing to help us out and lend your name to our company?”

Flip that around. Position it as, “We want to amplify you. You’re taking a unique approach here. You’re doing something forward-thinking that other people in your role should know about, and we want to feature that. We want to share it with other customers and potential customers.”

Do a case study, record a video, and post it on LinkedIn, tagging them. For a lot of people I’ve done this with, it’s the first time in their career that anyone has featured them or their work.

I had someone tell me once, “You did this. You put me out there. And I actually got a bunch of job offers because other people saw what I was doing at my company.”

You get a case study and social proof. They get career advancement and visibility. It’s not a favor, it’s a trade that benefits both of you.

Tip: Make it easy for them to say yes. Provide a brief on the key discussion points you want to include so they can come prepared, confident, and aligned on the narrative.

6. Go overboard with personalized swag

This one sounds stupid, but it works.

Most companies handle swag the same way: They get the cheapest hoodies, slap their logo on them, and send them out. The customer gets it, says “thanks,” and it sits in a drawer forever next to all the other swag they’ve collected.

Do the opposite, get creative. Send them something that makes them feel special. Think limited-edition, personalized, and high-quality swag like a Timbuk2 backpack or Yeti Tumbler. It should be something they value and that they can tell you put serious thought into.

When we were a 10-person company, we printed 60 hoodies. We sent 50 of them to our first 50 customers and kept 10 for our employees. That’s it. Those were the only people who had that hoodie, and we told them that.

“Only the first 50 customers and our 10 employees have this hoodie. Thank you for being a part of this with us.”

We also took the time to write real thank-you cards and had everyone at the company sign them. Does this take time and money? Yea. But it’s about thoughtfulness.

I even sent swag to an entire IT leader once so they could distribute it to their entire team. They were so excited about it that they posted photos on social media wearing our gear. Years would pass, and customers would show up at our booth at conferences wearing the hoodie with our original logo, and they were so proud to show it off. You can’t buy that kind of organic visibility.

Tip: Spend more than you feel comfortable with. Get creative with it, and do something unexpected. You don’t always need to do this, but in the early days, this is a great way to stand out, make an impact, and be memorable.

7. Ask for feedback on prototypes before building

Let’s say a customer requests a feature in one of those monthly calls. Great. You agree it makes sense to build, and you add it to the roadmap.

But there are hundreds of different ways you could build that feature. Instead of just going off and building based on your best guess, interview them, and then show them a clickable prototype. Have other potential users click through the prototype and get their feedback and do this before you write a single line of code.

This does two things:

First, you get actual product insights. You find out whether your approach solves their problem or if you’re missing something. You catch issues before they become expensive rebuilds or lead to disappointed customers.

Second, they feel valued and involved. They’re not just requesting features and hoping you build them correctly. They’re actively shaping how those features work. That reinforces the idea that they’re part of building this product with you.

It’s collaborative instead of transactional, and that difference matters.

These things aren’t scalable, and that’s okay

You can’t do monthly CEO calls with 1,000 customers. You can’t send personalized swag to every user. You can’t have a dedicated engineer fixing bugs for every single person who reports one.

But you don’t have to do these things forever. You have to do them now, in the early days.

What you’re really building here isn’t just happy customers. You’re building your company’s DNA and culture. You’re establishing how you treat people, how you think about customer relationships, and what you’re willing to invest in to make people feel valued.

That becomes embedded in who you are as you grow. It sets the standard for how your team operates in the long term. And in markets with 100 copycats and new competitors spinning up faster than ever, this is how you stand apart.

Your competitors can copy your features, and they can undercut your pricing, but they can’t replicate the relationships you built when you were small enough to treat every customer like they were part of your team.

Key takeaways

• Your first 10 customers are worth exponentially more than customer #500 because they give you momentum and help you build.

• Raving fans give you references for customers and investors, market intelligence from competitors, and leeway to mess up when your product goes down or prices increase.

• The tactics that create raving fans aren’t scalable, but it builds company DNA and culture that can last forever, differentiating you from the competition.

• Not all early customers will become raving fans, but you’ll create a nucleus you can mobilize, leverage, and trust for years.

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FAQs

• How many customers should I treat this way? Start with your first 10. After that, you need to start thinking about scale, but the culture you build doing those things should persist as you grow.

• What if I can’t afford to give away free implementation help? The ROI from these customers who actually use and love your product far exceeds any service revenue. This is an investment in building advocates, references, and long-term customers who will buy from you again when they join a new company.

• When should I stop doing monthly CEO 1:1s? Let growth dictate the transition, no arbitrary timelines. I went from monthly to quarterly as we scaled, then eventually phased them out at a larger scale. But in the early days, that recurring time is critical.

• Isn’t this just good customer success? Yes, but it’s beyond that. You’re treating your first customers like employees when it comes to access, attention, and investment. Standard customer success doesn’t typically involve the CEO doing monthly calls. These tactics are deliberately excessive and not scalable.

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• Shift In Economic Strategy: The federal oversight of technological advancement has transitioned from original support for basic scientific research toward direct government investment and subsidies for private commercial industries.
• Evolution Of Defense Funding: The Pentagon and other government agencies now utilize mechanisms such as loans and equity stakes to influence private-sector firms and bridge gaps in domestic supply chains.
• Integration Of Private Capital: Defense-related innovation increasingly relies on venture capital, with startups securing government partnerships by self-funding research and development to win competitive military contracts.
• Debate Over Research Priorities: Policymakers and experts remain divided on the necessity of maintaining traditional federal basic science funding versus prioritizing resources for commercially viable, industry-focused projects.
• Structural Political Challenges: Shifting administrative mandates and fluctuating budgetary priorities have introduced uncertainty into the long-term stability of government-supported scientific research institutions.

By

Sharon Weinberger

Gregori Saavedra for WSJ

“USA250: The Story of the World’s Greatest Economy” is a yearlong WSJ series examining America’s first 250 years. Read more about it from Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.

In 1990, a Pentagon official had a bright idea.

The military wanted to guarantee a reliable domestic supply of a critical computer chip. So the Pentagon official had the agency he led make a direct $4 million investment in a company working on the chips, a Silicon Valley outfit called Gazelle Microcircuits. After all, the government was already pouring money into research on manufacturing semiconductors, and the official had broad authority to make investments in technology.

The idea didn’t go over well. In fact, the official who suggested it, Craig Fields, lost his job as head of Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The idea that the government would pick winners and losers—as part of an effort to support industries and companies deemed critical to the nation’s interest—was anathema to key Republicans in the George H.W. Bush White House.

How times have changed. Several years ago, the U.S. government started putting tens of billions of dollars of direct subsidies into the domestic semiconductor industry. And the Trump administration last year reached a historic agreement to take a 10% stake in Intel, a leading American manufacturer of semiconductors.

Away from basics?

The new strategy is part of a shift in the U.S. government’s relationship with scientific and technological innovation that is giving priority to private-sector research over basic science. For decades, the federal government supported basic scientific research, hoping for breakthroughs that would eventually reach industry and the military.

Now, fearing competition from China and the loss of U.S. manufacturing, the new industrial policy is being embraced across Democratic and Republican administrations. Both sides point to a new reality about tech: Private-sector companies are doing a lot of the R&D work that the government used to support at universities and other research institutions.

Then-President Joe Biden at Intel in 2024, announcing that the U.S. will grant up to $8.5 billion to help fund chip plants. Kevin lamarque/Reuters

President Trump in March 2025 announcing a $100 billion investment by Taiwan chip maker TSMC to expand in the U.S. Samuel Corum/Press Pool

But there is still a debate going on—about whether the government should still keep backing basic research in a big way, or devote the lion’s share of resources to helping industry.

Democrats say the U.S. needs to keep helping basic research, because it remains a pipeline for innovation. Private companies, they say, will mostly focus on R&D in areas that seem profitable at the moment—and not always ones that may yield unexpected gains in the longer term. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has proposed cutting basic research deeply, saying the public has lost trust in scientists and the government should back only projects that meet a “gold standard” of credibility and usefulness. Critics of the administration, meanwhile, fear that this is simply code for targeting research—and institutions like universities—that the White House disagrees with politically.

A new frontier

Much of the conventional wisdom about the relationship between the government and innovation dates back to 1945, when Vannevar Bush, the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, delivered his report, “Science, the Endless Frontier” to President Harry Truman. In it, Bush argued that funding basic science, the “pacemaker of technological progress,” was imperative for downstream advances.

“A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill,” his report stated.

Vannevar Bush of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development testifying in Congress in 1945. Associated Press

What followed were decades of support for science, in everything from computers to biology. But by the late 1980s, some key research areas, like computer science, had moved beyond the labs, and Silicon Valley was no longer heavily reliant on the government for contracts or funding.

The emerging consumer market was more attractive for many companies than the military, but market forces sometimes weren’t enough to guarantee survival for innovative companies, or protect those companies from foreign investment. That is part of the reason Darpa wanted to invest in Gazelle: The Pentagon was trying to ensure a foothold in a market that was increasingly dominated by commercial interests.

Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which was a catalyst for many changes across the national-security establishment. The traditional defense manufacturers, operating under cumbersome Pentagon contracting requirements, were well behind the private sector in computer technology.

“When 9/11 hit, one of the discoveries in the commission report and many others was that our big defense contractors, the companies traded publicly, were woefully behind the times when it came to digital information technology, just way behind the times,” says Paul Bracken, emeritus professor of management and political science at Yale University.

Startups step in

The 9/11 attacks created an opportunity for new companies to win business. Usually, when the government awarded contractors a deal, it shouldered a lot of other costs for the companies, such as the R&D involved in making the product. A small number of startups, though, figured they could win fat government contracts by funding the R&D themselves with private capital—and offer the government lower prices than the established contractors could.

A couple of now-familiar names entered the fray. Palantir, for instance, got its start helping the CIA and others with counterterrorism software. More than 20 years later, what started as a trickle of private investment has become a flood: PitchBook estimates that venture-capital deals in defense startups reached a high of about $49 billion in 2025.

The Pentagon has in recent years largely embraced this new world of venture-funded defense companies, and has created a patchwork of new divisions, like the Office of Strategic Capital, which offers funding and loans to private companies developing cutting-edge technology important to national security.

The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital employs loans, guarantees and other financial tools not typically used by the military. Eric Lee for WSJ

Depending on venture capital for defense innovation carries risks, however. Even if they get early assistance from the government, these fledgling companies won’t survive unless they win actual government contracts. And there is no guarantee that they will land those deals.

“I think the downside is, how much patience will they have before they demand to see production contracts?” says Heidi Shyu, who as the Pentagon’s top technologist in the Biden administration pioneered some of the efforts to support defense startups. “And that is the difficulty for them. All these companies, VC-funded companies, struggle to try to find a production contract. And I can tell you also, some of them die on the vine.”

The basic question

The bigger question may be what happens to the government’s funding of basic science, which in the past has created a pipeline for research now being commercialized by private companies.

For instance, Elon Musk’s SpaceX was built on the foundations of billions of government spending, particularly through NASA, on rocket science (the company also received a Darpa contract in its early days). Another Musk-owned company, Neuralink, owes a debt to Darpa’s brain-computer interface work in the 1970s. And artificial intelligence, which is poised to reshape the U.S. economy, is built on decades of government support for computer science, from Darpa and other agencies.

A SpaceX Super Heavy booster carrying the Starship spacecraft lifts off on its 11th test flight in 2025. Steve nesius/Reuters

President Trump’s cuts to basic research—which haven’t been fully explained beyond asserting a crisis in public confidence in science—have been largely reversed by Congress, but academics and scientists say they remain worried about steady funding. The White House this month has again proposed deep cuts to the science budget for next year.

The political atmosphere is making scientists realize that the postwar compact with the federal government is over, says Jonathan Moreno, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, who has looked at the intersection of science policy and national security.

“The longstanding assumptions that the world of science made about its relationship to the American government is never going to be the same,” he says.

Write to reports@wsj.com

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Sharon Weinberger is a reporter in residence at Omidyar Network and a former national-security editor at The Wall Street Journal. 

Previously, she was the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Yahoo News, and before that, the executive editor for news at Foreign Policy magazine.

Her third book, published in 2017 by Knopf, is "The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World." She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

She has written on military science and technology for the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Wired magazine, Nature, BBC, Discover, and Slate, among other publications.

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Videos

• Longevity Improvement: Oral Therapy SRN 901 Increased Median Remaining Lifespan In Mice By 33 Percent
• Health Span Benefits: Treated Subjects Showed A 70 Percent Reduction In Age Related Frailty Progression
• Disease Mitigation: Research Data Indicated A 30 Point 53 Percent Decrease In Tumor Incidence Among Subjects
• Multi Pathway Design: The Compound Combines Urolithin A Quercetin Nicotinamide Riboside Alpha Lipoic Acid And SRN 820
• Systemic Retuning: The Formulation Targets Multiple Biological Processes Including DNA Repair Inflammation And Metabolic Efficiency
• Comparative Performance: This Combined Approach Outperformed Single Agent Studies Such As Those Conducted Using Rapamycin
• Biological Resilience: Interventions Focus On Maintaining Cellular Function And Structural Integrity Throughout The Aging Process
• Future Economic Impact: Progress In Multi Target Therapies Could Potentially Alter Workforce Longevity And Healthcare Expenditures

Oral combination therapy boosts lifespan 33% and slows frailty, pointing to a more holistic approach to aging.

What if the reason we haven’t “solved” the mysteries of aging yet is that we’ve been treating it like a single disease? That’s the question underneath new data from Seragon Biosciences, which has just published preclinical results on its investigational longevity drug, SRN-901.

The headline figure is hard to ignore: a 33% increase in median remaining lifespan in adult mice [1]. However, the more interesting story isn’t just that the mice lived longer; it’s how they aged along the way.

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get our biggest longevity stories, handpicked for you each day.

In longevity research, there’s a growing understanding that adding years isn’t enough. The real goal is to stretch the “good years,” the time when the body still works the way it should. Here, SRN-901, which includes urolithin A, quercetin, nicotinamide riboside, alpha-lipoic acid and Seragon’s SRN-820, appears to do both.

Mice treated with the oral therapy didn’t just survive longer; they stayed healthier, deeper into old age. Frailty progression, a measure of how quickly the body breaks down over time, was reduced by 70% compared with untreated mice. Even late in life, treated animals looked visibly healthier, maintaining posture and grooming habits that typically decline with age.

There was also a 30.53% reduction in tumor incidence, hinting at a broader protective effect against age-related diseases.

Taken together, the data suggest that extending lifespan may be less meaningful unless it comes with preserved function and this drug seems to move both levers.

Why single “antiaging” fixes keep falling short

For years, longevity science has chased individual compounds that target specific pathways – think of them as trying to fix one faulty wire in a much larger, tangled system.

Some of these approaches have shown promise. The well-known drug rapamycin, for instance, extended lifespan in this same study – but by 21%, noticeably less than SRN-901. Other popular molecules like NMN and NR didn’t significantly move the needle at all.

The gap points to a deeper issue. Aging isn’t driven by one process; it’s a network of interconnected changes: inflammation, DNA damage, metabolic slowdown, cellular stress. Tweak one, and the others keep pushing forward.

“Developing interventions to delay aging and improve lifespan and healthspan is a critical goal in aging research, yet individual geroprotective compounds fail to address the complexity, interconnectedness, and dynamic nature of biological systems,” said Dr David Scieszka, MBA, Chief Scientific Officer at Seragon Biosciences.

SRN-901 takes a different approach. It’s a combination therapy designed to act across multiple aging pathways at once.

Aging, but with the brakes on

To understand what SRN-901 is doing, it helps to think of aging as a slow drift out of balance. Over time, the body’s internal systems – repair, energy production, stress response – start to fall out of sync. Cells become less efficient, damage accumulates and resilience fades.

According to the study’s multi-layered analysis (which examines genes, proteins and metabolism together), SRN-901 appears to counteract that drift. It boosts pathways linked to DNA repair while dialing down those tied to inflammation and cellular stress. It also reshapes metabolism in a way that makes older mice look, at least internally, more like younger ones. Here’s a simpler way to understand it: instead of fixing one broken part, the drug appears to retune the system.

It’s still early (Note: these are animal results, not human trials), but the implications are already rippling beyond the lab. Longevity biotech has long struggled with a credibility gap. Bold claims often run ahead of solid evidence, and translating mouse data into human outcomes has historically been hit-or-miss.

Nevertheless, studies like this begin to shift the tone because they align with a more mature understanding of aging biology: that meaningful intervention likely requires multi-target strategies. Also, a therapy that can delay multiple age-related conditions at once could reshape healthcare costs, workforce longevity and the economics of aging societies.

Where this leaves longevity

The real story here isn’t just about one drug or one dataset. It’s about a shift in mindset. For decades, medicine has treated diseases of aging as separate battles. Longevity science flips that perspective, asking whether we can intervene earlier, at the level of aging itself.

And Seragon is not operating in a vacuum; the competitive picture also shows how unusual SRN-901’s design is. In the longevity biotech landscape tracked on DLT, only a small handful of companies are pursuing clearly comparable multi component aging interventions rather than single-pathway bets. Combilytics is advancing a quercetin-fisetin senolytic combination for aging and healthspan, Profound Products is built around the better-known dasatinib plus-quercetin pairing, and ROKIT Healthcare is exploring an earlier-stage anti aging platform that combines an NAD+ precursor with fisetin and quercetin. Other overlap is more ingredient specific than formula-specific: Amazentis and Abinopharm are active in urolithin A, while Senescence Life Sciences has a formulation that includes alpha-lipoic acid. Put differently, pieces of SRN-901 are already familiar to the field, but its attempt to stack mitochondrial support, senolytic logic, redox control and NAD+ biology into one oral program still stands out as a relatively differentiated strategy rather than a crowded me-too play.

SRN-901 doesn’t answer that question about earlier intervention just yet, but it sharpens it. If combination therapies can consistently show this kind of dual impact – longer life paired with sustained function – they may mark a turning point, from chasing lifespan in isolation to engineering resilience across the entire arc of aging.

[1] https://www.newswise.com/articles/seragon-publishes-data-for-longevity-drug-srn-901-showing-significant-lifespan-and-healthspan-extension/?ad2f=1&aid=846665

• Mouse Study Observations: Researchers At Osaka Metropolitan University Investigated The Metabolic Impacts Of Wheat Bread Consumption On Lab Mice
• Weight Gain Correlation: Subjects Exhibited Increased Body Weight And Fat Mass Despite Consumption Of Similar Caloric Levels As Baseline Diets
• Metabolic Rate Reduction: Wheat Bread Intake Resulted In Reduced Overall Energy Expenditure Even When Caloric Intake Remained Constant
• Fat Storage Mechanism: Genetic Analysis Revealed That Wheat Bread Consumption Activated Biological Pathways Responsible For Converting Carbohydrates Directly Into Stored Fat
• Dietary Preference Influence: The Research Identified That Subjects Demonstrated A Strong Natural Preference For Transitioning To Carbohydrate Heavy Snacks Over Standard Diets
• Reversibility Of Effects: Restoration Of The Initial Balanced Diet Effectively Ceased Weight Accumulation And Reversed The Identified Negative Metabolic Shifts
• Research Methodology Limitations: Findings Remain Based On Rodent Models Necessitating Future Human Trials To Verify Similar Physiological Responses In People
• Broader Nutritional Objectives: Ongoing Research Aims To Better Understand Complex Interactions Between Food Processing Methods Dietary Fiber And Human Energy Metabolism

New research in mice shows how eating bread can cause body weight and fat mass to increase, even though caloric intake stays at a similar level.

The research, led by a team from Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, highlights how carbohydrates can contribute to weight gain as well as excessive fat intake – which is what dietary advice tends to focus on.

This isn't the first time nutritionists have talked about bread and carbohydrates and their contribution to weight gain, but there hasn't been much detailed research into the relationship – especially wheat flour – or into what might be happening at a metabolic level.

The team discovered that eating more wheat bread was associated with reduced energy expenditure, pushing the metabolism towards a state where fat storage is prioritized, even when the calories in a diet stay at a similar level.

The researchers analyzed the difference that bread in the diets of mice had on their weight (A) and fat tissue (B, C). (Matsumura et al., Mol. Nutr. Food Res., 2026)

"These findings suggest that weight gain may not be due to wheat-specific effects, but rather to a strong preference for carbohydrates and the associated metabolic changes," says nutritionist Shigenobu Matsumura of Osaka Metropolitan University.

The researchers set up experiments in which lab mice were given a choice between their normal, healthy cereal-based diet and either simple bread, baked wheat flour, or baked rice flour. The mice were then monitored to check their weight and how their bodies burned calories at rest and when active.

Using blood samples, the study team also examined hormone, blood sugar, and metabolite levels in the animals, while post-experiment tissue analyses assessed gene expression in the liver.

The experiments showed that the mice strongly preferred to switch from their standard diet to carbohydrate-heavy snacks, which then led to weight gain and more fat tissue in the mice, particularly in the males.

Further analysis and follow-up tests suggested that these two key changes were being driven not by overeating or a lack of exercise, but by the foods themselves. In the wheat flour diet, fewer calories were being burned overall, while genes responsible for turning carbohydrates into fat were activated.

Another follow-up test focusing on the wheat flour group showed that when the chow diet was restored, the weight gain stopped, and the metabolic shifts were reversed.

"In the future, we hope this will serve as a scientific foundation for achieving a balance between 'taste' and 'health' in the fields of nutritional guidance, food education, and food development," says Matsumura.

The findings are more evidence of how what we eat can cause changes in how our body processes food and burns the calories it contains. In the case of bread, it seems to slow down the body's metabolic engine.

One limitation of the study is that it used mouse models, rather than human volunteers. While it's likely that similar processes are happening in people, it's not certain – so that's something future studies can pick up.

The researchers also want to experiment with a broader selection of foods to identify what exactly it is about bread that causes this reaction.

No diet study like this exists in isolation, of course. We know that a variety of other factors can also impact how our metabolism reacts to food and drink, including age and hormone-related changes.

Related: There's a Surprising Link Between a Key Nutrient, Obesity, And Alzheimer's Risk

Further research should help establish the role that wheat and bread can play in a diet and how the simple "calories in, calories out" rule isn't always straightforward.

"Going forward, we plan to shift our research focus to humans to verify the extent to which the metabolic changes identified in this study apply to actual dietary habits," says Matsumura.

"We also intend to investigate how factors such as whole grains, unrefined grains, and foods rich in dietary fiber, as well as their combinations with proteins and fats, food processing methods, and timing of consumption, affect metabolic responses to carbohydrate intake."

The research has been published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research.