Friends, I find myself in a bit a conundrum. A quagmire. An identi-tea crisis, if you will.

What exactly am I building with Tea in Tech?

Am I a media founder? A journalist? A thought leader? A creator?

(all of the above?)

The question came up during a live debate on Linkedin with Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Engberg of the Scalable pod (you can see the replay here, and I promise it's a spicy watch), but honestly, it's been brewing for a while.

I increasingly find myself in some very interesting spaces that have very little to do with each other: developer days, influencer parties, press conferences, closed-door business meetings. The more Tea in Tech grows, the harder it is to put a neat label on what I do.

This was never the plan.

Look at my resume. I was your classic overachiever with all the requisite name brands for a seemingly successful and satisfactory life.

But I left Snapchat because I couldn’t shake the feeling that AI was the most important technology of our lifetime. And the deeper I got into it, the more I realized how much of the conversation around tech was flat...disconnected from the people actually building and using the products.

My grandfather was the editor of The Indian Express, one of India's largest newspapers, and his deepest wish was for me to become a journalist. To use my voice to stand up for what I believe in; speak truth to power.

Although I was resigned to being a disappointment with my Harvard MBA and respectable corporate career, somehow, this weird amalgamation is the form it took.

And maybe that's exactly the point.

I'm not here to cosplay traditional media. Instead, I think there’s space opening up for something new…for an alternative platform.

I'm here to share my lived experience, my POV. To democratize access to this new wave of technology. To tell the truth about Silicon Valley, while still believing deeply in its founding mission, and its potential.

(and yes, to do it with a little bit of fashion in a sea of Patagonia vests, dammit!)

That's the work I know I can be best at.

So that's what I plan to do.

Ok, cool. </crisis>

Thanks for talking that out with me. Let’s get you your Tech Tea:

1. Meta rolls out paid AI subscriptions

My Tea: Meta knows ads have limits. As growth slows and compute costs rise, AI subscriptions could become its next big revenue stream. (Emphasis on “could”)

2. Microsoft shops for its next AI acquisition

My Tea: Microsoft and OpenAI have been butting heads on strategy for a while now. I see this as Microsoft hedging its bets.

3. Dell shares jump 33% on record AI server demand

My Tea: We haven't heard about Dell in a minute. Who knew they'd be back as an AI infrastructure player?

4. SoftBank announces $75B AI investment in France

My Tea: Everyone's watching Silicon Valley, but France is quickly making its case as a runner-up AI capital.

5. Pope Leo calls to "disarm" AI in landmark encyclical

My Tea: When the Pope is talking about technological monopolies, you know AI has gone mainstream.

Did you know that Obama is sponsored by Cialis? That’s basically how it works at most media networks. And I view Tea in Tech as exactly that - a new media network. Here’s my take:

I went live on LinkedIn with Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg of The Scalable Podcast to talk AI, creators, and the future of media. I may have offended a few people when I said journalists should sell their reporting to LLMs. You can stream the replay below.

I keynoted Guild’s annual employee offsite and spoke to 800+ employees about AI and the future of work. Here’s a little BTS from the day. Speech clips coming soon.

Emergence AI recently ran an experiment that been making the rounds on social: all the various AI models were allowed to form their own agentic societies.

The results were fascinating:

Claude built a relatively peaceful democracy.

Gemini’s society survived, but was riddled with crime.

GPT-5 didn’t cause much trouble, but its society failed to survive.

And Grok promptly descended into violent crime and chaos.

It’s certainly an interesting thought experiment.

But here’s the real Tea:

When a company that sells AI agent infrastructure runs an experiment concluding AI agents are chaotic and need more governance…I wonder if the experiment was profound, predictive…or, promotional.

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Keep your tea hot, your curiosity brewing, and your perspective, forever unfiltered. -M