🚀Welcome to the first edition of the Macro Talk newsletter!
It’s a fitting week to launch: Q2 kicked off, NASA sent humans toward the moon for the first time in over 50 years, SpaceX reportedly filed for an IPO… and the second season of “Your Friends & Neighbors” premiered on Apple TV.
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Read on for the most revealing business and economic news of the week:
March jobs report
Sam’s Club raising membership prices
Q1 global mega deals reach new high
AI helps 2-person telehealth company reach $1.8 billion in sales in two years
Two CEOs cite AI as a factor in their decisions to step down
Data center builds stymied by local opposition
Microsoft’s “mid-class” AI play
U.S. brands struggle in China
OpenAI reportedly paid nine-figures for tech talk show TBPN
Plus: I sit down with Cents CEO and co-founder Alex Jekowsky on the Macro Talk podcast to talk competitive moats in the age of AI, selling SaaS to Main Street, and the startup’s $140 million Series C round.
Next week: I’ll be in SF hosting main stage interviews at HumanX and a CEO summit. You’ll be the first to see those recaps here.
March (Jobs) Madness
It’s not you — monthly jobs data has been all over the place.
“Yo-yoing,” Heather Long, Navy Federal Credit Union’s Chief Economist, tells me in an email
“Volatile,” says Kory Kantenga, Head of Economics, Americas at LinkedIn, in an upcoming episode of Macro Talk
A rollercoaster ride, is how Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s Chief Economist, describes it
Zig zags are what Guy Berger, Workforce Economist in Residence at Guild, sees
So don’t feel bad if you can’t keep track. Consensus is the job market is generally in OK shape, but not great.
“Across most demographics, unemployment held steady, which tells us the labor market is still holding up,” Kantenga told me Friday afternoon. “That’s not to say it’s a healthy labor market.”
The big picture: Only 260,000 jobs have been added in the past year, with basically all of them in health care, Long notes.
What to watch: For business leaders and workers, wage growth is the number to track. Long calls it the biggest story in the labor market.
Wage gains cooled in March to 3.5%, the lowest level since May 2021.
“And that wage gain is about to get swamped by a 4% inflation print this spring (likely in April),” she tells me.
“That’s a game-changer for the economy and it means even less bargaining power for workers and job seekers, likely for the rest of the year.”
K-Shaped Everything
↗️ Walmart-owned Sam’s Club is raising membership fees. It could trigger competitors to follow suit.
Starting May 1, Sam’s Club Basic will cost $60 per year, up from $50.
“We assume [Walmart] would not raise fees if renewal trends were at risk,” Jefferies analyst Corey Tarlowe wrote in a note, per Marketwatch.
The play: Warehouse clubs are capitalizing on their growing popularity in an inflation-conscious environment.
↗️ Corporate deals valued at $10 billion or more reached a record 22 transactions in Q1, WSJ reports, citing LSEG.
But smaller deals ($1 billion-$5 billion) in the U.S. have fallen by both volume and value from a year ago as buyers are more willing to put them on hold and PE firms sitting on a record number of portfolio companies hesitate to make moves.
The play: Dealmaking may be moving at a slower pace amid Q1’s market turmoil, but many companies have taken a shot at bigger deals under more relaxed antitrust enforcement under Trump 2.0.
AI vs. Humans
The first text I woke up to Thursday morning.
↗️ A 41-year-old man built a company on track for $1.8 billion in sales thanks to AI.
Medvi is the name of the telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. It generated $401 million in sales in its first full year of business in 2025, and is on track for $1.8 billion in sales this year, NYT reports.
Matthew Gallagher “is suited to the moment because he knows marketing and how to use cutting-edge A.I.,” Upfront Ventures investor Kobie Fuller told NYT.
He’d previously built a watch startup with 60 employees that never turned a profit.
He used ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and other AI tools to build Medvi’s website, created AI agents to enable his software to communicate with one another, tapped Midjourney and Runway to create media and ads — spending $20,000 on the software and the first month of marketing.
As his company’s grown, he’s hired his younger brother as the only employee, along with contract engineers, media agencies, lawyers and accountants, and account managers who use AI to oversee several hundred clients each.
The play: AI tinkering can lead to serious payoff. Fortify your competitive moat, because your next competitor may pop up faster than you think. And they may even be your next employer.
↘️ Two major CEOs cite AI as a factor in their decisions to step aside.
Coca-Cola needs “someone with the energy to pursue a completely new transformation,” outgoing CEO James Quincey told CNBC.
Former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon also previously told the network that he “could start this next big set of transformations with AI,” but “couldn’t finish.”
The play: Build teams with AI talent — and stamina — in mind. And know your own limitations.
↘️ Community opposition to AI data center builds is taking a toll.
The total amount of new capacity under construction in the largest markets fell in the second half of 2025 for the first time since 2020, the NYT reports, citing CBRE.
Number to know: At least $156 billion across 48 projects was blocked or stalled last year amid local resistance, NYT reports, citing Data Center Watch.
Developers facing pushback in places like Wisconsin, Oregon, and Michigan are moving to less populated areas of states with friendlier politicians, a lot of land, and sufficient power — including Texas and New Mexico. But backlash is growing there too.
Long term, AI companies still need their servers to be close to users to avoid latency, making the permitting problem hard to outrun.
The play: Factor infrastructure risks into AI bets.
↔️ Microsoft releases new “mid-class” AI model amid computing power constraints.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told the FT that it’s “competing in the mid-class range” as it balances data center capacity between its own AI ambitions and the needs of customers such as OpenAI.
A new transcription model debuted on Thursday is “half the GPU cost of the other state-of-the-art models,” he told The Verge.
Separately, he told Bloomberg, “[Microsoft] must deliver the absolute frontier,” and that “certainly by 2027, the objective is to really get to state-of-the-art" across models.
The play: Watch Microsoft closely as its stock closes its worst quarter since 2008.
↘️ MLB batters “shrank” a combined 23 feet after the league required precise height measurements for automated strike zone machines to track a ball’s location, the WSJ finds.
The play: AI integrity starts with us.
New Allegiances
↘️ Many U.S. brands are struggling in China as Chinese consumers turn to homegrown brands.
Among them are Nike, Starbucks, and Burger King. But Sam’s Club and Crocs are still doing well, per WSJ.
The play: Companies need to connect with Chinese consumers on a deeper level amid tensions between the world’s two superpowers. Simply using a Chinese model or celebrity or producing a Chinese New Year edition drop doesn’t cut it, Olivia Plotnick, the owner of a China-based marketing agency, told WSJ.
🤝 OpenAI has acquired TBPN, the tech-industry talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, WSJ scoops.
Sounds like an acquihire: “OpenAI’s CEO of AGI Deployment, Fidji Simo, has been thinking hard about how to evolve the company’s communications and marketing strategy. She’s still on the hunt for a head of communications, but she just added two comms and marketing savants,” Sources’ founder Alex Heath reports.
Reported price tag: “low hundreds of millions,” a source tells FT.
What Alex is watching: “The uphill battle to convince everyone that TBPN isn’t The OpenAI Show starts now.” Sam Altman said on X that he doesn’t expect them “to go any easier on us.”
Worth noting, but unrelated: Simo announced Friday that she is taking a significant medical leave due to a worsening neuroimmune condition, per CNBC.
The play: Emily Sundberg summed up TBPN's rise in Feed Me with a personal mantra I'm going to adapt: "You cannot compete with people who are having more fun than you.”
Hope’s personal view: TBPN always felt like a Cheddar 2.0. Similar content focus. Similar personality-driven tone. For reference, Cheddar sold for $200 million in 2019, three years after launch. Also — Support independent journalism like Macro Talk! 🙂
Podcast: How to Build a Moat When AI Can Copy Everything
Alex Jekowsky, the co-founder and CEO of Cents, has a 100% approval rating on Glassdoor. He just raised a $140 million Series C to expand the company’s laundry hardware and software platform too.
It’s not every day a pitch like this lands in my inbox. But it signaled a lot: that Alex appears to be a well-liked leader, that tech can generate predictable revenue streams in overlooked industries, and that investors are widening their search for that hard-to-build edge otherwise known as a moat.
AI is not helping a low-income person who's deciding whether to feed their family or do their laundry.
In the transcript of our podcast — which I’ve fact-checked and linked to primary sources — you’ll learn:
How to sell SaaS to Main Street
What Alex sees as the next catalysts for growth (hint: taking cues from gyms and Amazon Prime Video)
Why his outbound sales team is smaller than his customer success team
His target annual revenue per employee
Why this round was different
Final thoughts…
Thank you for reading to the end. If you jumped down here, that’s OK too. It means you engaged.
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A special thank you to Bob Frump, an award-winning journalist — and my first boss at Merrill Lynch! — for editing an early version of this newsletter.
Macro Talk’s mission is to help business leaders and early- to mid-career professionals make decisions about the future. Through newsletters, podcasts, and live events, Macro Talk reveals the forces shaping the economy and world of work — and how to play them.
