Reed Hastings Rides Into The Sunset

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Welcome to the TechBoo ride home for Friday, April 17th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Netflix beat on revenue and income, but dropped on week Q2 guidance as Reed Hastings exits the building. Anthropic launches Clawed Design, OpenAI overhauls Codex Desktop with computer control, and DeepSeek seeks its first outside funding at ten billion dollars plus. Here's what you missed today in the world of

Netflix reported earnings last night. Revenue was up sixteen percent and net income was up eighty-three percent. But since they forecast Q2 earnings per share and revenue would come in below estimates, the stock dropped more than 10%. I think actually more than twelve percent. Quoting Bloomberg, it was the biggest intraday decline since April twenty twenty two. Before the results, the shares had gained twenty seven percent since Netflix abandoned its pursuit of Werner Brothers in late February.

In its first time reporting since the collapse of the Warner Brothers Discovery acquisition, Netflix delivered a lackluster set of results, said Ben Berenger, head of technology research at Quilter Chevrolet. With a double whammy of mediocre results and the departure of a key figure, it is not surprising investors are trimming positions. After the collapse of the Warner Brothers deal, quote, this isn't exactly what we would expect from Netflix nor what we have become accustomed to.

In a letter to shareholders, co chief executive officers Ted Serandos and Greg Peters said Werner Brothers quote would have been a nice accelerant for our strategy, but only at the right price. On a call with investors, Sarando said the bidding process taught them, quote, so much about deal execution. While mergers and acquisitions remain a tool to help achieve our goals, he said, pulling out of the Warner Brothers fight. showed that we'll remain very disciplined as to how we approach it.

Now Wall Street is looking for signs Netflix can keep subscribers engaged. Management said customer retention had improved in every region during the first quarter. The company raised its subscription prices in March, boosting its standard plan without ads to Two dollars at twenty dollars a month.

Those are great numbers. What people wanted was even better numbers, Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, told Bloomberg TV. They didn't up their guidance for the year, which I think people were hoping for. Sarando St. Peters sought to reassure investors that they remain confident and have a plan for the future, outlining three key priorities delivering more quality programming, implementing new technologies, and generating more money from members.

The company plans to boost spending on programming this year, which is a big reason its earnings for the current quarter may disappoint. End quote. On that making more money front, Netflix says it expects its ad revenue to reach around$3 billion this year, 2026, doubling from 2025. And it now works with more than four thousand advertising clients, which they say is up seventy percent year on year. But the headline news was also this, quoting the journal.

Netflix chairman and co founder Reed Hastings will step down from the company's board after his term expires in June, the streaming giant said Thursday, ending a nearly three decade run at the Direct Consumer Pioneer. Netflix said Hastings has decided not to stand for reelection to its board so he can focus on philanthropy and other pursuits.

Hastings' departure marks an end of an era for Netflix, which under his leadership transitioned from a DVD by mail business to a juggernaut in subscription streaming that disrupted Hollywood by changing how people consume and make entertainment. Hastings co-founded Netflix in nineteen ninety seven and served as its chief executive for twenty five years. He became CEO in nineteen ninety nine and remained in the post until eventually ceding the role to co CEOs Sarandos and Peters.

Netflix changed my life in so many ways, Hastings said in a statement included in a company letter to shareholders. A special thanks to Greg and Ted, whose commitment to Netflix's greatness is so strong that I can now focus on new things. Hastings serves on the boards of Bloomberg and Anthropic, as well as several educational nonprofits, according to his company bio. He has been active in politics as a major Democratic donor. End quote.

And Throbic just launched what they're calling Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude. Quoting TechCrunch, the company says Clawed Design is intended to help people like founders and product managers without a design background share their ideas more easily.

With Claude Design, users describe what they want and Claude will create an initial version. From there, users can refine the visuals with direct edits or requests. For example, you could ask Claude to prototype a serene mobile meditation app. It should have calming typography, subtle, nature-inspired colors, and a clean layout. You could then tweak the colors, the size of the typography, or ask Claude to add a dark mode toggle.

While Claude Design may initially seem like it's looking to compete with popular design apps like Canva, which has just expanded its own AI capabilities, Anthropic told TechCrunch that it's intended to complement it rather than replace it. The company said its new product is built for people who aren't starting from a design tool and need to get from an idea to something visual quickly.

Once teams create presentation decks or prototypes, they can export them as PDFs, URLs, PPTX files, or send them to Canva. Once in Canva, they are fully editable and collaborative, Anthropix says. Claude Design can also apply a team's design system to every project it creates so that the results are consistent with the company's overall visual style.

Anthropix says Cloud Design is able to do this by reading a company's codebase and design files. Additionally, teams can refine these components and maintain more than one design system. The new product is powered by Claude Opus four point seven and is available in research preview for Claude Pro, Max Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

The launch highlights Anthropic's ongoing push into the enterprise and prosumer categories as competition intensifies around AI workplace tools. In January, Anthropic rolled out Claude Cowork, an agentic assistant built for complex tasks. A few weeks later the company brought agentic plugins to co work that are designed to automate specialized tasks within a company's various departments, end quote. I would also say

This highlights again Anthropic's insane shipping cadence recently. Like maybe they really are using Claude to make more Claude because they're shipping like it's going out of style.

But then there's this, and I'm surprised OpenAI has beat Anthropic to the punch on this one because it seems so potentially powerful. OpenAI has updated its Codex desktop app with features like computer control, also an in-app browser, image generation, and automation memory. There's also plugin support and more, quoting ZDNet.

While the capabilities are undoubtedly powerful, the message is a little murky. In a briefing yesterday, OpenAI recognized that Codex Desktop is still targeted at programmers but includes additional productivity tools that go beyond code generation. A key feature of the new Codex desktop is computer use, which means the AI inside Codex Desktop can operate your computer.

This release lets the AI run applications in the background, so while the technology runs in automation, you can do other tasks in other applications. The computer use feature is only available for Mac OS at least for now.

One interesting and long overdue feature is the ability to click on an element in the browser and have the AI understand where you're clicking. So rather than trying to explain You want the font changed and the third headline in column two, you can click the item you want changed and tell the AI to change this to that.

If this feature is reliable, it will definitely save some serious time. ChatGPT has had excellent image generation capabilities for quite some time, but Codex Desktop has not. Now, however, you should be able to create an agent that generates an image. chart or diagram automatically as part of the overall automation. Automations can now be added to existing conversational threads.

allowing the AI to pick up on context from earlier discussions and interactions. Codex can assign itself work that according to OpenAI means it can wake up automatically to continue a long term task potentially across days or weeks. Although ChatGPT has had a memory feature for a while, the Codex app was particularly problematic because it had to be brought back up to speed on every relaunch.

Now the app has a memory capability that according to the company can remember useful context from previous experience, including personal references, corrections, and information that took time to gather. OpenAI said this helps future tasks complete faster and to a level of quality previously only possible through extensive custom instructions.

Codex now has a nag feature that launches with the app as well. Here's how the developers describe this feature. Codex now also proactively proposes useful work to continue where you have left off. Basically, when you jump back into codex, the AI will try to see what you were working on and will propose continuing those workflows.

Finally, Codex Desktop is shipping with access to more than a hundred plugins. In AI speak, plugins are apps that combine skills, app integrations, and MCP servers for more in-depth capabilities. Given open clause problems with user contributed skills that have led to a flood of malware, I asked the developers how they are addressing plugin issues. I was told that OpenAI curates plugins before they're made available.

The new Codex desktop is available to any OpenAI tier with Codex Access. Obviously, running more automations and long run projects will use up token allocations more quickly, so proceed with caution and test before you let an agent run unattended. The new Codex desktop is available for Mac and Windows, although the computer use feature is only available on Mac OS and is not yet available in the EU. Turn your market hunches into trades with liquid.

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Sources tell the information that Deep Seek is in talks to raise outside capital for the very first time, seeking at least$300 million at a valuation of at least ten billion dollars, which what am I missing here? That seems insanely low to me. Deep Seek is owned by Chinese hedge fund High Flyer Capital Management, which has financed the startup so far. Deep Seek, whose AI model R1 took both Silicon Valley and Wall Street by storm last year.

has previously turned down multiple funding offers from China's top venture capital firms and tech giants. If Deep Seek goes ahead with the fundraising, it would be a big shift for its founder and CEO, Liang Wen Feng, who is known in the industry as a technology idealist who wants to keep Deep Seek independent and free of commercial pressure. Deep Seek didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Deep Seek has not released a new generation model since the breakout success of R1 in early 2025, and the startup has lost some star researchers recently. Luo Fuli, a key contributor to Deep Seek's V3 model, in recent months, joined Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi to lead its fledgling AI department. Gao Daya, another researcher central to Deep Seek's previous models, recently joined ByteDance at a much higher pay level, according to Chinese tech outlet Late Post.

By raising outside money, Deep Seek could invest more on computing resources to continue working on Frontier AI models and could pay more for talent to prevent top researchers from leaving. As a Chinese startup, some US venture capitalists might hesitate about investing in Deep Seek though. According to two people familiar with the matter, the company has been accused by the US Congress of aiding Beijing's military rise, although it hasn't been added to any US trade blacklists.

Deep Seek had been planning to release its next flagship model, V4, in February, but the timeline has been pushed back several times due to engineering and other difficulties. Deep Seek's engineers have spent a lot of time making V4 compatible with Huawei's chips out of the box, the information reported. That contributed to the delay as Deep Seek's previous models were designed to run on NVIDIA chips.

Meanwhile, the competitive environment for AI has changed. AI models are evolving at unprecedented pace. And tech giants from both the US and China are increasingly exerting pressure on upstarts thanks to their deep pockets. That might have prompted DeepSeq to change its funding policy and raise money. End quote.

Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, did you know that India produces more than a million and a half computer science graduates every single year? But that scale is no longer an advantage with the rise of AI coding, right? So What's the plan there? Quoting Bloomberg.

India's three hundred and fifteen billion dollar IT industry is one of the main engines for the country's economy. For decades, coveted jobs at Emphosys and competitors HCL Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro offered millions of college educated Indians a path into the upper middle class. The work involved building software systems for foreign airlines, Wall Street banks, and Silicon Valley Giants. But these stalwarts are caught up in an existential crisis.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have called into question whether software companies even have a future. The release of specialized versions of Anthropic's Claude AI Assistant and autonomous agentic AI tools in February unleashed a global software, Megageddon, that wiped out about$800 billion in stock value in a single week. India's nifty IT index plunged almost twenty percent for the month, its biggest drop since the two thousand eight financial crisis.

For Emphosys and India's other outsourcing companies, which largely operate on a billable hours model, the advent of AI powered autonomous coding tools that are more widely accessible and deliver speedy results demands that they radically rethink the way they do business.

Speaking to investors in February, Infosys Chairman Nandan Nikolani said this technology transition is so dramatically different from anything else we've seen, partly because of the pace of AI's adoption, outstripping that of computers or the internet. The fundamental challenge is how to take your workforce and make sure they're reskilled and ready, said Nilakani, one of seven Indian engineers who founded the company in nineteen eighty one, end quote.

Then from the wrap, a look at Doug Lyman's$70 million movie called Bitcoin Killing Satoshi. which uses AI for sets, lighting, and more in post production, cutting costs from an estimated three hundred million dollars. So it was a three hundred million dollar budget, but it was only seventy million dollars to make. Quote. to make Bitcoin Killing Satoshi, which will be shopped to buyers at Conn in May as it seeks distribution.

The producers found a former car showroom in West London and converted it into a studio with offices and a soundstage they have termed the Grey Box. The room is completely wrapped in gray screen, blue and green tests produced subpar results.

with consistent neutral lighting. There were traditional wardrobe and props departments, and the construction team built proxy set pieces like stairs and platforms. The film's department heads include cinematographer Henry Brahm, From Superman and Guardians of the Galaxy Three, costume designer Richard Sale from Jurassic World Rebirth and Eternals, and production designer Oliver Shoal, Edge of Tomorrow, Spider-Man Homecoming.

Although the sets and lighting were generated with AI, the actors work will not be altered. They wore the costumes that will appear on screen and the actors had prosthetic work done as well as part of hair and makeup preparation. What the audience will see is the actual footage of the actor's performances, but everything else might be AI, end quote.

And from the when can I get on this gravy train file? Forbes takes a look at how the new gold rush in AI training data could be your old work slacks and emails. Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, their JIRA tickets, and their email threads. Operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data. No bonus content this weekend, but I intend to get to the whole AI show and tell thing this weekend. Your response to this has actually

Way bigger and way more interesting than I expected. That's why there's a delay, because I think there's something real here. I'm gonna try to figure out how I wanna do this going forward this weekend. One more ask, is anyone at OpenAI listening? I imagine you're about to launch your self serve advertising platform. Could I get in early? I've got several portfolio companies that

want in on this ASAP and frankly I'm dying to get in there for my own company. So if I can get in early, Brian at ridehomefund.com, email me.