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That mistake you made at work yesterday? Don’t sweat it. Even the most successful people mess up sometimes. Take Apple CEO Tim Cook, for example, who said the 2012 launch of Apple Maps was his “first really big mistake,” after the glitchy app led to backlash and a leadership switch-up. But he says his blunders were all part of growing Apple to a $4T company. Before you go confessing your slip-ups to the boss, note that Cook said this after announcing he’s stepping down as CEO.

Question of the week? Wee will be evaluating this int he weeks to come, subscribe to not loose any insights.

Kalshi penalized three political candidates accused of participating in insider trading. The prediction market forbids politicians and athletes from betting on events they can control. Matt Klein of Minnesota and Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas both face fines of less than $1k and suspensions of up to five years, while Mark Moran of Virginia has received a five-year suspension and a fine of over $6k. Moran posted to X that betting on himself was all part of his plan to get caught and give attention to “how this company is destroying young men.”

AI gaming startup Latitude revealed Voyage, its new AI-powered RPG platform. Currently in expanded beta, users can design and customize their own worlds by describing settings, quests, gaming mechanics, characters, and more. Players can also explore a variety of text-based games run by AI systems that narrate what’s happening, interact with players, and remember player decisions. TechCrunch noted that because these bot-run gaming sessions are unscripted, they can get a little weird.

Meta will allow parents using its supervision tools to see the topics their teens ask Meta AI about on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. While parents won’t get word-for-word transcripts, they will be able to see which topic category their child discussed with a bot — ranging from “school” and “entertainment” to “health and wellbeing” and “lifestyle” — and click into a topic to see subcategories.

Remember those jokes about New York City having a Starbucks on every corner? Not anymore. Over the last several months, Starbucks has closed roughly two dozen Manhattan shops and several more in Brooklyn and Queens.

Meanwhile, Atoka, Tennessee, an exurb ~30 miles outside of Memphis with 10k people (up from less than 700 in the 1990s), recently got its first store.

But Starbucks isn’t just chasing population growth. It’s becoming an exurban company because, unlike in denser cities, there’s plenty of room for drive-throughs.

The pandemic changed a lot in this country, including fast food habits. University of Texas, El Paso professor Partha Sarathi Mishra, along with co-authors Sunil Chopra and Ioannis Stamatopoulos, studied store-visit data at Starbucks and a handful of other popular chains from 2018 to 2025 and found:

That doesn’t mean nobody wants to sit inside a Starbucks (the company is renovating many stores to improve their third-place feel). It just means that locations with drive-throughs are far more successful, prompting an expansion into areas where there’s enough asphalt for people to wait in line in their cars.

An extremely random website called Starbuckseverywhere.net, operated by a guy who wants to visit every single Starbucks, tracks the brand’s openings and closings.

In 2026, Starbucks plans on opening ~650 stores. On a recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Brian Niccol suggested they could add ~10k more US stores in the coming years, a huge increase above the ~18k it currently operates.

The exurban future of Starbucks, then, might look a bit like its urban past. Except instead of a Starbucks on every corner, it will be a Starbucks off every highway exit.

🔗 PUBLISHED APRIL 21, 2026

Thank you for reading!

Stay awesome,

Monika