Blake McDowall

executive recruiting @Stripe

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

Cool launch @btaylor. You mentioned you and Clay "have always believed that your AI agent will become your company’s digital front door." Would you consider replacing your "about sierra" contact form with an ai interface? It could flag to sales when a prospect is asking the right questions, and more importantly show off your agent chat capabilities

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

New Aimé Leon Dore quarter zip just dropped... from OpenAI

https://t.co/HwgebodVzT

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@NolanChurch This was a good read and an interesting perspective, but resist the urge to grow pessimistic with age. Life is good, and there is so much progress being made.

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

Interesting read. Appreciate your perspective @JohannKurtz

Some of your points about rising prices in labor sectors can be explained by Baumol’s cost disease. Sectors where output is fundamentally human time (teaching, nursing, childcare) can’t shed labor with innovation, but they must pay wages competitive with sectors that can. Manufacturing productivity compounds; a string quartet still takes four musicians. So their relative price rises indefinitely even with zero dysfunction.

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

Xbox division of $MSFT reducing by 3200 employees in the coming months; mostly from management layer and trimming several of their studios. Helen Chiang will move to COO and manage most games and hardware teams (she’s formerly head of Minecraft).

A necessary simplification of the business; Xbox has long seemed bloated and directionless.

Minecraft remains a monster growth engine and revenue driver, and seems King is doing well. Bethesda and Blizzard will also stay.

[ASHA @asha_shar]

This is an important email I sent today to all employees at XBOX:

Team,

We are beginning the most significant restructure in XBOX history. After careful consideration, I've made the difficult decision to reduce our team by approximately 3,200 throughout FY27. This will include approximately 1,600 role eliminations today, and in addition, four studios will leave XBOX to new management. I recognize that a year-long restructuring creates additional challenges. Unfortunately, it is not possible to make all the necessary changes in a single day, and I wanted to be direct about the scale.

I know this is painful. These changes will directly affect people who have poured their creativity into building XBOX. Many joined us through acquisitions, while others were recruited here, or sought us out because they loved this industry and loved XBOX. Today's decisions do not reflect their talent or dedication.

Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We entered Gen 9 with a smaller install base and a higher cost structure. To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added more teams, more investment, and more time, hoping for a better outcome. And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history. We must reset XBOX.

First, we will reset our content portfolio.

Since 2018, we have aggressively expanded our studio portfolio while the number of games created each month across the industry now outpaces the last ten years combined. We now find ourselves competing not only with the largest publishers, but also with smaller independent studios. It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested. As we reset XBOX, we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision.

Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to management and transition to independent studios with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3. In France, Arkane’s management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options.

We are also making reductions across other units, and in some cases, shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. These changes vary in size across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and XBOX Game Studios. None of our first party publicly announced games or projects are being cancelled as part of these reductions.

In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me. These two studios have increasingly become platforms and are our largest by monthly active players. They bring critical geographic, demographic, and differentiation to XBOX.

Second, we will reset our platform.

We know that great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger. Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. Our platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined. That complexity has slowed decisions, blurred accountability, and made it harder to deliver for players. As we reset XBOX, we will simplify.

We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3. We will deliver success through a flatter organization that is built around makers (individual contributors focused on building), player-coaches (leaders who remain deeply involved in the work while developing their teams), and directly responsible individuals (DRIs) who own key decisions and outcomes. And we will streamline how we work across our tools, with a cleaner code base, shared services, and 50% reduced vendor spend.

Third, we are resetting how we operate.

As XBOX grew our headcount, we became more fragmented. Teams, studios, and functions often operate independently, and it became harder to work towards a shared goal, make the right tradeoffs, and get things done.

For the first time, we are establishing a Chief Operating Officer with end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services. Helen Chiang has been promoted to this role and will report directly to me. Over nearly two decades at XBOX, Helen has helped build some of our most important businesses, from XBOX Live to leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise. She will bring our businesses together under one operating model, making sure we make clear investment decisions, learn from our successes and failures, and hold ourselves accountable for results.

Thank you, Dave McCarthy, who is retiring after 17 years with XBOX. Dave has played a defining role in building the platform that millions of players rely on every day and has been a trusted partner through many of the biggest moments in XBOX's history. We wish him all the best.

These changes are about a bigger future for XBOX, not a smaller one. The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global, and more creative than anything we've seen before. This year, we'll invest as much in XBOX as we ever have, but we'll invest with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity, all in service of making XBOX where the world plays and creates.

I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect. I know we can achieve this goal. XBOX has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history, talented studios around the world, and we will return to growth in 2027.

History is full of companies that mistake longevity for inevitability. We will not be one of them.

Asha

[David Bui @ghosttyped]

I feel like we’re really in the era of super ICs crushing it and being rewarded for it

The sky’s the limit if you are really good at what you do

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@theoharvey @MTSlive Billions already do

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@PanasonicDX4500 Japan even got a surprise early strike in

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

Book cases, art, maps, loose mockingbirds. Dream office.

[Jeffery Tyler Syck @tylersyck]

Thomas Jefferson had the best White House office of any president.

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

Some founders aren’t meant for the hill, and that’s ok. That’s what Mark paid Nick Clegg and now Dina Powell for

[Gizmodo @Gizmodo]

Anthropic’s White House Negotiations Are Reportedly On Track After ‘Weirdo’ Dario Amodei Was Replaced https://t.co/3gqTc1mg7c

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@VeinRichard @kanwetwitty I was whelmed by your use of whelm

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

first nuclear power by a startup

[Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors @isaiah_p_taylor]

Good morning.

Last night at 8:51pm Mountain Time, the Valar Atomics Nuclear Operations team brought Ward 250 to 10kW thermal output. We held this power level throughout the night.

This is another historic milestone from the Valar team, marking first nuclear power by a startup.

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@vu0tran Congrats @vu0tran

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@ethimedes Likely big names leaving their ai labs

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@eileenomara @patrickc @stripe @collision Congrats @eileenomara !

[Eileen O'Mara @eileenomara]

After seven extraordinary years building Stripe's go-to-market engine, I'm stepping into a new role: Vice Chair of @stripe. As Vice Chair, I'll represent the company with business, government, and policy leaders around the world, alongside @patrickc and @collision.

The internet economy is at an inflection point. Governments, regulators, and multilateral bodies are making once-in-a-generation decisions about how digital commerce is regulated and enabled—decisions that will set the operating conditions for entrepreneurs for decades. Stripe serves millions of businesses in nearly every country on earth. We have both the standing and the responsibility to shape those decisions. That's what I'll be doing: engaging heads of government, trade bodies, and global business leaders to advocate for decisions that advance entrepreneurship and increase the economic dynamism that too many parts of the world have been starved of.

I've spent the last 25 years of my career building things, teams, markets, relationships. This next chapter is about using all of that on behalf of the businesses that trust Stripe to power their growth.

As I start this new role, I'm delighted to have @tybryson take over as Stripe's Chief Revenue Officer. Tyler brings two decades of experience building, scaling, and leading revenue-generating teams and has had a tremendous impact leading our Americas business. He knows our customers, understands what they need and we’re all very excited for his leadership as Stripe’s CRO.

https://t.co/SQrDRh3bjW

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@wcathcart Congrats Will. I’m excited to see what’s next for you

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@siimland @rabois Nice! I’m taking all but NAC. Creatine has a ton of other cell regen, anti aging, and mental benefits.

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

So many exec exits at deepmind. I wonder what’s up.

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold along with Demis Hassabis, has left Google DeepMind to join Anthropic.

[Blake McDowall @runbmc]

@realmasroork @aakashgupta Reads like ai slop