(light music) I'm Rachel Horgan. Join me each episode as I sit down with a guest co-host covering the latest business stories in the Seattle area. We'll read the news so you don't have to. This is "The Weekly". (light music) Okay, welcome everybody. We were in another studio, and I'm gonna introduce my guest right away because again, we're on video. We've got my buddy Andrew Taylor behind the camera, and today I am with a good friend of mine, a former boss, and if you're an OG listener, you're gonna remember her name, Emily Parker's hello. Hi Rachel, it's good to be here. Good, good to be here as well. It's such a beautiful view. I'm getting a little distracted by the mountains and everything, we're at the Columbia Tower Club. I do just wanna do a little shout out about Columbia Tower Club. It's a members only club, and it's part co-working space, part social club. We're sitting here kind of in the middle of the restaurant. There's a bar to my right, there's co-working space to the left. They didn't tell me to say this, but I really like it because it makes me feel, it's important but not pretentious. I like that. Yeah, it's like not old money, but not too hipstery to start up new money. That's the more tween. There you go, that's your new marketing. (laughs) Anyway, thanks again for Columbia Tower Club hosting us. If you're interested, I'll put some notes in my episode. And if you come up here, you have to use the women's restroom because it has the best restroom view. That's true. Yeah, that's very true. Okay, so for those people that didn't listen to this second, you were my second guest ever, and if they didn't listen to it, you were previously a VP at 6AM City, which is a media company. And then before that, you were the publisher of Puget Sound Business Journal prior to that, the editor in chief. And before that, a whole loads of history doing reporting. And you are on the board of Cornish calls to the arts, or you are currently still, yeah. Anything else that I missed on your? That's fine. That's fine. Okay, so part of what I wanted to have you back on is to check in what's been going on since we last talked. I know I was trying to break news as you taught me to do in the last episode, or the one you were on. And you said you couldn't quite talk about what you were up to yet. Well, and you're officially a journalist now. I listened to last week's podcast and she added you as a journalist. So I think you have to own that now, Rachel. Yes, so since we last talked, I have launched a media company, it's called Formidable. And the concept behind it is that it is the news, but through a women's lens. And what I mean by that is basically, the news is written through a men's lens and has been for hundreds of years. It's just kind of the way it is. And as a journalist, I've been a journalist for about 20 years, you're taught to write for the audience that you're trying to target. And when all of the audience surveys happen, the newspapers find out, oh, our audience is predominantly men. And so the journalists are then instructed to write for that audience. And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the industry. And women generally get left out of the conversation and our point of view is left out of the conversation. And just a slight change in how you view the news can make a huge difference in how it's perceived. So what did you do about that? So we have a daily newsletter that we push out and we're doing podcasts, the Formidable Podcast. And to do that, we are interviewing and intentionally going after women's sources for news stories. So these are not women's issues, whatever that means. I think all issues these days are women's issues. We're going to just cover the news, but we're going to find women experts to comment on the news. And that's a really important thing because they're going to have a slightly different point of view. They have a different lived experience than men. And it's often left out, as I mentioned. So intentionally targeting women experts to comment on the news will both lift them up and create more opportunities for them and their careers, ideally, as well as provide a different point of view on the news. So it's called Formidable. It is. And it's a website with some articles, but also mainly a newsletter right now along with the podcast. Yes, and you can find it at bformidable.com. bformidable.com. So CEO and founder, Emily Parker. It's so exciting. I'm so proud of you. It's been so fun to watch your journey on this. We are going to do a regular episode this time of covering the top five stories. But before we dive into that, I just wanted to touch a little bit on what you said about news through a women's lens. And some of our listeners, they're not journalists or reporters like you are. So what does that really mean? Because you could kind of think, oh, a company. Company A is acquired by Company B. That's the story. How do you have a women's lens on that? I have an example. I don't know. Take it away. Well, just the way in which the sounders-- OK, the sounders is the men's soccer team here, and the rain is the women's soccer team. So we covered this story in a couple of episodes before in that some of the headlines are saying the sounders bought the rain, meaning the men's soccer team bought the women's soccer team. What really happened is that the ownership group of the sounders, which consists of Adrian, who's a majority owner, and 14 other families that own it, along with a private equity firm, both added-- they added rain to their portfolio. And so I think there's a difference there in the language. And I don't know if a woman would have written that differently in some of those headlines, but that's what comes to mind for me. Do you have any thoughts? It's a really interesting point. When you were describing that, Rachel, what I thought about is just some common language from our lexicon, right? When we say-- when you're talking about, oh, ladies and gentlemen, that's maybe the only time we ever start with ladies. For the most part, it is men and women. It is-- we lead with the male experience and tend to default to that as well. Oh, so instead of saying the rain was acquired by this private equity firm, but you start with the sounders bought them. Oh, well, that's interesting to think about that part. Yes. OK, well, let's dive into the top five stories today. So we have number one, a fair start is reopening. Number two, a little bit of a recap on the Seattle startup scene. Number three, there's a new museum coming. Number four, Saltchuck buys a company for a casual $430 million, but we're going to talk about what that number actually means. And number five, I had to-- we had to cover the Boeing CEO drama. If you're on TikTok or Instagram or social media, you already know about this, but we're going to talk a little bit about it. So you ready? I'm ready. Fair start is reopening. Fair start closed in the pandemic, and it's reopening in Denny Triangle. It was founded in 1992. It's a nonprofit that provides industry training-- so restaurant industry training and job training to people are experiencing homelessness or other economically challenged situations. They will serve counter-breakfast and lunch and host guest chef knights, and they also do box lunches for group events. Angela Don Levy was the CEO for five years to step down. She-- she's so cool. She intimidates me. Angela, if you're listening, I love you. And then right now, we have Patrick. Demelios is current CEO. So is there anything I missed on what fair start does, anything that comes to mind for you for a fair start? I think that was a good high-level overview. Yeah, I think what comes to mind for me-- it's very cool because I think about training and experience because some companies post that they need so much experience. And this company is talking about the restaurant industry, but it really applies to a lot of different companies. I know when I'm-- I've been looking at jobs lately, and it's requiring 10 years. But sometimes it's so specific, too, of like 10 years in a Bellevue company that's doing gaming as project management. It's like, can you just do project management for five years? Is that-- you know what I mean? So I know in your previous companies, at 16-year-olds, how many people did you end up hiring? It was like more than 100 in three years. Hired more than 100 people in three years. So you were doing a lot of that. And I know at PSPJ, you're obviously detiring. You made a great choice of hiring me. One of the best hires I ever made. Oh, gosh. Thank you. So how did you look at past experience? Were you looking for a certain years of experience or types? Like, what was your thought on that? I think it depends on the position, first of all. I love what Fair Start does. Because I think that what they're doing is providing a pathway to opportunity for people who might not otherwise have that pathway. It's really powerful. I'm so glad to see that they're reopening. I just want to say that. Yes. The chef dinners, as soon as I read through the list, I think I'm going to go to as many of those as I possibly can. They look amazing. It's a brilliant fundraising model. I think it's really smart and just such a boon to the industry here, which, as everybody knows, is struggling to find talent, to find people. So if Fair Start can get up and running and help fill that pipeline, that's really powerful. So I wanted to say that first. To answer your actual question, so a lot of the roles that I was hiring for at 6 a.m. City, these were across the entire country, were journalists. And I think one of my key takeaways from that experience is that somebody who can be good at a role, they're not all going to look the same. And it's better if they don't. Because if you have too many of the exact same people with the same background and the same experience, your product is going to look exactly the same. You're basically McDonaldizing your talent pool. And you're not going to have any diversity of thought. You're not going to have any new ideas. It's hard to innovate. But people who come from a wide array of backgrounds-- and I mean that in terms of their job experience, their lived experience, their gender identity, like everything, if they come from a wide array of backgrounds, they're going to come to the table with different ideas. Did you ever take a chance on somebody like had no journalistic experience? Frequently. Really? Yeah, we frequently hired people. I was hiring a lot of people who had, I don't know, maybe a couple of years of work experience totally. So they were closer to their college experience. In some cases, that was not exclusively true. But it did tend to be people who were a little earlier in their careers. And sometimes we hired teachers. We had a couple of extremely successful reporters who came from education, which was fascinating. We had people who came from events backgrounds. We had people who came from marketing. And so it just kind of ran the gamut. And what we found was if you had two people in a city-- because we would hire two reporters, at least in every city-- if they came from really different backgrounds, the content would be better. Because they would have different interests. And they would each kind of dive into different things. And that was good. It was really healthy. It was really good. So I don't know. I get a little bit frustrated as well when I see the just lists of ridiculous requirements. It was so arbitrary, too. Like, I remember when I was hiring for a coordinator, I was like, hmm, two years of experience. Like, I just made it up. And so I think that there's a lot of people that are posting jobs being like eight years' experience. And so if you don't have that, I think it's OK. Because there's so many skills that are transferable. And women typically opt out if they don't check every box. So when you look at a job description, women will say, oh, I check half of those boxes. And whereas a man will throw their hat in the ring. So if you write a job description that has just too many requirements, you're just not going to get the diversity to get it. I think the opposite problem, we're like, I don't know. I could probably do that. We're still entrepreneurs. Thank you. OK, so anything else I'm fair to start? OK, congrats to them. I want to get a nice story because I feel like I'm all into lawsuits and fraud. And I feel like I should do an upbeat one. OK, so this next story was covered by GeekWire. And basically, there was an event called the AI Investor Summit and Showcase. It was hosted by the Technology Alliance. And they were talking about what does Seattle need to do to be a better ecosystem for startups, for startups to flourish. There was four speakers on the panel. So this article just kind of recapped what these speakers said on the panel. I'll go through really quickly who they were. Francisco Almedo, partner at K&L Gates, Ken Hornstein, founder and partner at Pack Ventures, Heather Redmond, co-founder and managing partner at Flying Fish Partners, and Leslie Feinzeig, founder and general partner at Graham & Walker, who you know Leslie, right? I think Kirby was on there too, right? Kirby Winfield. Oh, possibly. Possibly, thank you for reading these articles so closely. So part of what they said is that the lack of VC-- what is seemed to be lack of VC funds and money in Seattle isn't really the problem. And they list some other things. So I guess I'm going to start off with you are starting your own company. You are trying to get some funding, right? Yes, I'll say that quite loudly. Yeah, exactly. I am. Do you think that there's not enough money in Seattle? Do you think that's an issue? Do you agree with the panel or not? Because they were kind of nuanced in their responses if I remember correctly and saying that a lot of the funding is coming from outside the city, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Seattle's not a financial center of the universe whereas San Francisco and New York are. And that's just the reality. I don't disagree with them on that. Of course, there's going to be hubs of that. And that's understandable. Thankfully for Seattle, San Francisco is very close by. So it's not a huge commitment to go do that for a lot of the startups that are growing up here. I think what's really interesting is just the narrow view that traditional funding models can take on what is a company worth funding. And so the example there is, if you're a venture capitalist, your whole goal is to invest a small amount of money. And then when the company exits, you increase your outcomes there. And so they're going to look for companies that are going to go 10x, 20x, revenue. Otherwise, it's not worth their time to wait for a company to mature. And they want it to mature very quickly. So that's going to be a very narrow group of companies. It's going to be right now, just put AI in the name of your company. And I feel like they'll throw money at you whether you're doing anything with AI or not. And I don't mean to be glib, but they're looking for a very specific type of company. And that leaves out a lot of other businesses, a lot of consumer-facing businesses, a lot of-- it certainly leaves out media. There's no media company that's going to exit for 20x anymore, anyway. So it leaves out a lot of categories of companies, which means they have to find other ways to raise money, which is what I'm doing. There's alternative funding models and a lot of impact investing. There's a growing number of organizations that are looking to invest in women and minority-led startups. And they can't go for the traditional funding models. Women get, what, 2% of venture capital money right now? Why should I go try and fight for the scraps? That doesn't seem worth my time. So what does alternative funding mean to you? Yeah, so there's a lot of different ways to do it. I think there's a really interesting organization here in Seattle called Realize Impact. And what they do is they convert donor-advised funds, which is a very popular thing right now for people with some wealth. They'll put money in a donor-advised fund instead of just donating directly to nonprofits. And that has great tax incentives for them to do that. Well, this organization will convert those dev grants into investments in companies that are doing something good for the world. And then when there's a return on that investment, they then reissue the DAFA grant. And so the DAF grows. And they can donate more money or do more impact investing in the future. It's just a really clever model. And we're seeing more and more sort of creativity around ways that these companies that are started by people who don't look like-- I don't know-- to the traditional white man who gets the funding, some other models. Because the kinds of companies that they're starting aren't always as attractive to traditional funders. Yeah. So Leslie was saying that one of the issues she's seeing is that we're not seeing enough founders supporting other founders. I thought that was interesting. But we're proving you're wrong, Leslie. Look at us. We are definitely supporting each other right now. But meaning financially, like other founders build up their company, and then they want to go back and help other people out. What do you think? I feel like Leslie's not wrong there. And that is something-- so when I started here in Seattle as a reporter 14 years ago, I think now, I was covering that same phenomenon. And that same complaint was here. Was that there were people who had exited from Microsoft and people who had had great exits on their startups. And then they were going down to the Bay Area and investing in companies down there instead of staying up here. So I do think that there's probably-- there needs to be more of those kinds of folks who stay here and create these spaces that are supportive of the startup environment. There's some. But it's just not as robust as maybe some other areas. So I know with Permittable Year, starting a-- would you call it a membership program? I do. I do. You are feeling supported by other founders, right? A little bit? Well, these are-- the members tend to be my readers. Right? So these are people who are passionate about what I'm trying to do when they want to support me in that work. And it's looking like some of those folks might end up being funders as well. So again, these are not going to be your traditional investors. These are people who think, this is a good thing. I want to see more of this. And so they'll go out of their way to support it, even though this is not-- I think most of my funders right now are not people that you're going to see in traditional angel investing and venture capital spaces. Yeah, it's very cool. Anything else you want to say about the Seattle startup scene? No, it's good. OK. It's good. Well, good luck on your pitches, by the way. Thank you. OK, number three. Museum of Illusion opens. There's not a lot to talk about here, but I just think it's cool to highlight that a new museum is opening up. It'll be open at the end of this month. It's a Croatia-based museum. Oh, if you hear that, that is. We are in a working, co-working space. So doing some events there. OK, it's a new immersive attraction. Museum of Illusion is a Croatia-based museum. They're trying to stay permanently. So other things have come in temporarily, like the Bango exhibit, if you remember that. The friends pop up. I think the WNDR-- there's been a handful of ones that are doing more temporary, but this wants to be more permanent. I did a quick Google. I couldn't get an exact number, but do you have a guess on how many museums are in Seattle? 40. All I could find was that all they said was more than 25. And I couldn't get an exact number. Interesting. Yeah, so I'll keep googling around, but my initial search. I'm curious what qualifies as a museum, too. Yeah, that's true. Right. Maybe that's why they say more than 25 and figure it out. OK, so what I thought was also interesting about museums-- again, my quick little googling-- is that they're non-profit and they rely heavily on fundraising, as most non-profits do, but it's way less on ticket sales than you might think. So I was sitting here thinking, OK, are enough people going to go to this museum? But really, the question you should be asking is, are enough people going to be donating to this museum? Because it was roughly around 60% of the income for museums is fundraising, roughly around 40% as like cafe, gift shops, education programs. And that's like-- so like 1% to 3% thrown in there for ticket sales. This is, again, I will put the website on the show notes. But yeah, I guess, what do you think it's going to stay? Do you think it's going to last? Do you think it's going to be one of these like Instagram moments, and it's gone? I don't want to be a Debbie Downer. That ladder feels realistic to me. I will say one thing about the ticket sales. As somebody who comes from the event world, you know that the ticket sales don't cover the cost of the event. I mean, and so it's the same concept, right, in a museum. It's just never going to cover the cost. It's like, I'm on the Cornish College of the Arts board. Tuition doesn't cover the cost of running a college. You know, you need additional funding sources. So nonprofits, that's not super unusual. I think what's interesting about this particular museum, as I was reading through it, is they have 25 locations. So while one of them is in Seattle, it's not like the Seattle Art Museum. It's not like the mopop where that's just one entity. That's the point, yeah. And so all of the funding needs to come through that one entity, and they need to be very well supported by the local community. This organization, I'm not sure what their funding model actually looks like. It might be more complex than we think, because it is 25, you know, locations across the country, the world, I'm not sure. But it's going to have a slightly more diverse funding model, I suspect, as a result. And maybe it will have more longevity as a result. - Maybe, I also feel like, sometimes you go to a certain place for that museum. Like, I went to the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta. It's not like that Coca-Cola Museum is in every city, 25 locations, so. - True. - I don't know, yeah. I want to be helpful, but I'm skeptical that this is going to be kind of a flash of the pan thing. We shall see. - We shall see. - Onto the next. I really want to throw these note cards. I don't know why you should, like. We're done with the museum story. Okay, number four, Salt Check is buying OSG, which is the Overseas Shipholding Group. And you and I know so much about shipping. Don't, don't just kidding. We don't, but that's the point of this podcast, is that we learn and hopefully everybody else can learn. But Salt Check is Washington's largest privately held company based on PSBJs reporting, so meaning whoever submitted their numbers to PSBJ. They're on the top of the list. They had 4.8 billion in revenue last year. They have 7,000 employees. They're a major shipper of US cargo, and they have six lines of business. Basically, it's a massive company that I think that we don't talk about in Seattle. We talk about the Googles, the Starbucks, like all that. And here we have the shipping company, Salt Check that's just massive. So the headline that came out was that they fully purchased OSG Overseas Shipholding Group, which is one of the largest fleets of oil tankers in the US market. They paid $480 million cash, and Fun Fact Salt Check is a family owned company. So let's start with, well, first of all, let's start with the 480. We were talking before we started recording. I was like, oh, that's so much money. And you said. - Well, so that was the cash remaining that they paid for the company. But the total transaction value is $950 million, so close to a billion dollar transaction. It's a massive transaction. And probably isn't making the headlines that it would if it was a tech company, right? We would have heard about this if it was a tech company. But it's in maritime. It's just not as sexy, I guess, to talk about maritime. But what an amazing company to be based here in the Seattle area. - You see, we're sitting here looking out on LA Bay, and we can see a number of salt chuck ships in the harbor right now. The tugboats that you see pushing the boats out, those are FOS maritime, which is part of salt chuck. So, tote maritime, part of salt chuck, a lot of the brands that we know here, how kind of part of this organization, which is, like you said, family run, but run by four families, which makes it even more unique. - Oh, really interesting. Really interesting business. So yes, it was a massive, massive transaction of a huge company that was publicly traded, and they've now acquired the remaining shares. - So let's talk about family owned businesses. We did an event together every year, family business awards or something like that, yeah. So, I was asking at the time when we were hosting out event, why do we do a separate event for family businesses? What's special about this? Like, trying to help me understand, and you had some interesting insights as to why that family businesses run differently than not. - Can you imagine running a business for your family? - I mean, my parents listen, I'm maybe. (laughing) - I can't. - No, I mean, it's challenging, right? And so in that way, you have your typical business dynamics, right? You've got a big business with, you know, whatever challenges that industry has, add on top of that family drama. And it's impossible to discount that because that is truly a part of the family business. - Yeah, well, in capitalism, I mean, that's so hard to avoid. - And there's that too. And maybe you don't want to avoid it. - Right, I mean, it's not always bad. You can have like a great person in your network 'cause it's your so-and-so's cousin's husband, whatever. But like, yeah. - But it's hard. It's really hard. When you look at the transition from generation to generation. - Let's say that's the biggest thing, is you start a family business, you give it to your son or daughter, where do you typically see the family business cut off? - Yeah, so the first generation builds it, the second generation grows it, the third generation ruins it. It's generally the way that that goes. - I've never heard that, okay. - With Soul Check, that's not, that's not been true. They've been extremely successful. But you see this in family businesses all the time. It's, I mean, they make TV shows out of it, just watch succession. - Oh, right, the truly, yep. So it is truly drama. Media is notorious for this, you know, succession certainly painted a picture of that, but the Seattle Times is experiencing this right now. Transitioning from the, transitioning from one generation to another, I think it's the third to the fourth now. - Yeah, interesting. One more question before we get to our last story is that, so we talked about how big Soul Check is, and typically when a company gets as big, especially in tech, their next step is to go public. Do you have any thoughts on like, why they haven't, are you surprised they haven't? Do you want to take, would you want to take your company public? - Right now? No, it's a terrible market right now. So no, but the tech companies are typically going public 'cause they need capital, right? They need capital for whatever. So more development of something. That's the reason you make an IPO, is you need additional capital. In Soul Check's case, the only thing I could imagine them going public for is to raise capital for another acquisition. If they have a billion dollars lying around, I don't think that that's gonna be an issue for them. Why open yourself up to public scrutiny if you don't need it? They clearly are doing just fine. And this acquisition paint a very clear picture about how confident this company is about the future. - Yeah, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I could take my company public, but I don't want to. I just wouldn't want all that pressure 'cause then your company becomes about pleasing the shareholders, we've all heard that. And you kind of lose your mission and your purpose, but the employees get rich, so that's nice. Sometimes, sometimes. Okay, our last story is the Boeing CEO's Underfire. So this story comes to us from a formidable article. I'll be linking it. I signed up for the newsletter and I read about this. So David Kahoon, so Boeing is a Seattle company if people don't know, sort of, Everett, no. Technically Chicago, what? So Boeing's headquarters is in Chicago, used to be here, it moved to Chicago. I don't remember exactly the year, but it's been a while. And, but the production of many of the jets is in Renton and Everett, and then they have a very large facility in Charleston, South Carolina. - Okay, so the news is that the CEO was grilled by the congressional panel over the company's safety and manufacturing practices. There were whistleblowers saying that they were told to conceal evidence. There's been whistleblowers saying a lot of crazy things about Boeing company, what they're doing. So he sits down in front of this congressional panel and the Missouri senator was the harshest, Josh Hawley. And I don't know if you've seen some of those clips, but he was, I'd say a little theatrical. We can talk about that. But something that was brought up was that his compensation package was $32.8 million, which was a 45% increase from the year prior. So that's kind of big picture, I guess, but like what other comments, I know we're gonna get to the other part of this, but like anything else I'm missing in that? - No, I think that's a good high-level overview. And it's probably worth noting that this is all related to the safety issues that Boeing has had stemming, really culminating in the door plug flying off the plane that had left Portland. - I think it's also adding on to those two crashes too. Like I know that those were a long time, like not 2019, but I think this door plug is like, there's already that built up frustration from the other crashes or anything. - Absolutely. - Yeah, yes. So I think what's really to your point about it being theatrical, that's the point. That's why these congressional panels happen, right? This is an opportunity for a little bit of performative work on behalf of the lawmakers. Is it also about calling out, you know, truth to power here, maybe a little bit of that too. I don't find myself agreeing with Josh Hawley very often, but this one feels, he definitely made some good points there. I'll give him that. Certainly, David Calhoun at one point said that he's very proud of Boeing's safety record. And I think what he means by that is the vast majority of the work that Boeing is doing is very good. And the company's under a lot of pressure right now, as well it should be. These are pretty serious issues that it's had. I think some of the things that I've been reading about this that are really interesting is about the transition that they're in right now where a lot of the machinists and the engineers are retiring. This is a generation of people retiring from Boeing's production. And the younger people coming in, they just don't have the institutional knowledge. And that's normal, right? This is a generational shift from basic, because my generation, Gen X, there weren't that many of us. So we didn't, there weren't enough of us to fill the ranks for the boomers retiring. And so this generation coming up behind us is the millennials, they're younger, they don't have as much experience. And so it's gonna take a while to get there. And so they're losing a lot of that institutional knowledge. And I think that's part of it. The other part that we were talking about is that Boeing has been under price pressure for years, for years. So Boeing's number one competitor is Airbus, which is based in France. European Union supports Airbus in a variety of ways. Airbus might say that that's not true, but the World Trade Organization agreed with Boeing, which had been fighting to essentially compete on a fair level with Airbus, because if Airbus was getting money from the government to build and develop planes and Boeing wasn't, Airbus is gonna be able to sell them for cheaper, right? And so that's gonna drive the cost of the planes down. Boeing has to respond, they're gonna sell the planes for less, and therefore they're gonna have to cut costs somewhere. Now, you could argue they could cut profits, but per your point about publicly traded companies earlier, there is a lot of pressure on that end as well. And it's impossible to discount that. So there's, I think, a bigger economic picture here, which is they're being asked to compete with companies that are supported in different ways. Now, Boeing and Airbus kind of put that whole tariff dispute behind them fairly recently to focus on China, because the Chinese market is huge for both of those companies. And China is trying to develop its own airplane manufacturer called COMAC, and they've been doing that for a while. It's hard to create jets that are safe as we're seeing. And so it's taken them a long time of research and development to get to a point where they can actually sell jets to their own airlines. And but they're doing it now. And so Boeing and Airbus have sort of come together and said, okay, the big scary competitor is actually the one that's owned by the Chinese government. Talk about competition, there isn't any. China can just say to all of its airlines, thou shalt buy COMAC planes. End of story, competition goes away. And when the Chinese market is as huge as it is for both of these companies right now, that's a real threat. - Yeah, I think my takeaway from this is that, yes, we are wanting to hold CEOs accountable, sure, but not that he's a scapegoat. He does deserve some pressure, but let's talk about the board that approved the 45% pay raise or like came up with it. Let's talk about like how all the CEOs are being paid, millions of dollars more than their employees. Yeah, let's talk about the competition. The stock's like, I think that there's, it's not just he's this one evil guy. I think that he's a guy in a system. And something to know is that he previously came from private equity. So I am not super surprised to see that he's trying to cut costs everywhere. That's what private equity does. He came into the CEO position. Another thing to know is that he came in in 2020. And so I think, you know, during the congressional hearing, they were talking about the crashes and things like that, which yeah, he should be, he is a CEO, but it is important to know that he wasn't the CEO when those things happened. So part of me feels like a lot of the US wants to put everything on David, whereas like there's a bigger picture here, there's a structure, there's a system and, you know, - Well, and he's leaving at the end of the year. - I know, he was like, why haven't you resigned? It's like, bro, he is at the end of the year. He already said that. - He is. And I think what's really interesting though, while Street Journal, I think had a story the other day, nobody wants the job. - I could see that. I could see that. - Yeah, like hot potato right now, nobody wants the Boeing CEO job. - No, thank you. - And some really high profile people have reportedly turned it down. So it's a huge challenge. It's a huge challenge. You'd have to really want to try to balance all of these things that we just talked about and keep the shareholders happy. - No, I mean, it's not like lose it if somebody gets mad at an event that they had a bad experience. I can't imagine like somebody's life in my hands. So, okay, we're at time, but I want to give you a second. If there's anything you want to plug or anything you want the audience to know about Formidable or anything. - Nope, just be sure to check out bformidable.com, sign up for the newsletter, it's free. And then I have a podcast as well, which is awesome. - It's great, I listened to it. - Thank you. It's on all the podcast spots. We just dropped a new episode this week with featuring Connie Collingsworth, who was the COO of the Gates Foundation for 22 years. So we had a great conversation. - Oh, very cool. Yeah, I'll have to listen to that. - All right, well, thanks so much. Thank you, Emily, and thank you to the team. Thank you to Rachel, the GM of Columbia Tower Club and Jessie, and again, Andrew Taylor behind the camera. Thank you, Emily. - Thanks, Rachel. (upbeat music) - This has been The Weekly. Make sure to check back next Sunday for the latest local business news. We love listener feedback. So if you have any story suggestions, comments, or complaints, email us at theweeklyseattle@gmail.com. We'll see you next time. (keyboard clicking) [BLANK_AUDIO]
