68 YEARS AGO TODAY, NASA OPENED ITS DOORS The agency began operations on October 1, 1958, two months after President Eisenhower signed the act creating it in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. It started with about 8,000 employees taken over from its predecessor, NACA, along with three research labs. Today NASA has a budget of about $24.4 billion, and private companies like SpaceX now fly many of the missions it used to run itself.

68% of leaders worry their AI efforts will fail because they aren’t embedded in their organization's workflows. In Ep. 6 of The Orchestrators with @IBM, Salima Lin of @IBMConsulting explains why companies must rethink roles, reskill people, and redesign how humans and AI work together, or risk being stuck in endless pilots. Watch:

68% of tech layoffs over the past six months were attributed to AI. That's 50.9k roles. We tag every tech layoff on by the mechanism the company actually stated. The split is telling: 56% of AI-attributed cuts were "AI now does the work", 28% were "freeing money to fund AI", and only 1% were "customers moved to AI". 14% named no mechanism at all. The nuance: the total is down 17% versus the prior six months. The wave that peaked in spring 2026 (Cloudflare ~1,100, Atlassian 1,600, Block cutting roughly half its staff) has cooled into a steady drip of 10-20% cuts at mid-size SaaS: 630, Rapid7 313, Sprout Social 260, Patreon 93. Latest in the feed: Zscaler, 3% of workforce, Sep 3. Our read: "AI did the work" is still mostly a framing for cost cuts. The bucket to watch is "AI took the demand". If it ever grows past 1%, that's the one that matters for software multiples. We track this daily in the AI Tech Layoffs play on FUNDA. All paid FundaAI subscribers currently receive complimentary access to this play at We plan to move this feature to a higher subscription tier in the future; for now, it’s included with your paid Substack subscription - subscribe now to lock this great perk.