• Kim Perell is a serial entrepreneur who became a multimillionaire by age 30.
• Her dad, also an entrepreneur, often talked about his business failures.
• She says sharing mistakes and normalizing failures should be encouraged.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kim Perell, author of "Mistakes That Made Me A Millionaire." It has been edited for length and clarity.

Ever since I was a kid living in Oregon, my life has been a roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship.

My parents were entrepreneurs who experienced big highs and big lows. Running their own business created a lot of stress in my household. We never knew if we'd have enough money to turn on the heat during the winter. There was tension between my parents and my two siblings, and I felt it, too.

When we sat down for dinner each night, my dad would ask about the worst part of our day, which always led to him talking about business troubles. He didn't ask about school or sports, but was always up for talking business, so we saw the difficult parts of entrepreneurship up close.

I didn't want to become an entrepreneur until I got fired

I didn't want to be an entrepreneur because I had seen the stress and inconsistency it caused in my family growing up. All I wanted was a stable job with a paycheck every two weeks. So, I went to college and got just that — or so I thought.

After about two years, the company I was working for went bankrupt. I was fired and broke.

That was an important lesson: whether you're an entrepreneur or an employee, there's no such thing as certainty and security. If nothing is guaranteed, the best bet you can make is on yourself.

I waited too long, but then jumped into digital advertising

After that, I was interested in starting a company, but I made the mistake of waiting for the ideal time. I've since learned that launching a business is like becoming a parent: there's no perfect time. You've just got to jump in.

So, I took a $10,000 loan from my grandmother to start a digital ad agency. My grandma didn't understand what the internet was, but she believed in me, and her loan allowed me to start the company at my kitchen table.

I sold my company for $20 million when I was 30

Growing up as a twin, I learned early on to differentiate myself. That gave me a lone wolf mentality that was hard to shake. That's another mistake I made: trying to do everything alone. Once I finally hired help, I was able to grow and scale. The company flourished.

When I was 30, I sold my digital ad company for about $20 million in cash and equity. I remember going to the ATM, and my bank balance had too many digits to print on the receipt. That was the best day of my life. My maxed-out credit cards and 3 a.m. worries had paid off. I had created security for myself.

As a mentor, I aim to normalize failure

I'm 48 now. Since selling that first company, I've become a serial entrepreneur, investor, and business mentor. I speak with my clients not only about my success, but about the failures I've had along the way.

I'm not sure my dad did the right thing by sharing his business woes at the dinner table each night, yet that normalized failure for me. If failure isn't normalized, you can become paralyzed by fear and get stuck. To succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to know you're going to make mistakes and do it anyway.

My failures have contributed to my success

I want my four kids to be comfortable taking risks. Make mistakes; think big; and fail occasionally. That's where you grow. Our children are going to need that adaptability and willingness to try new things in a world that is changing more quickly than ever.

As a young adult, I wanted consistency, but I've learned the only constant is change. Embracing change and failure has led to my biggest successes.

• Tech giant Dell carries out an annual employee engagement survey known as "Tell Dell."
• BI obtained a transcript of the internal video update where leaders shared results from the survey.
• The employee satisfaction score dropped by double digits for the second year in a row.

Every year, Dell asks its employees in a company survey how likely they are to recommend the company as a good place to work.

Last year, the results weren't great.

This year, they're worse.

On Tuesday, Jenn Saavedra, Dell's chief HR officer, announced that the employee net promoter score (eNPS) — an industry-standard measure of employee satisfaction — had fallen to 32, according to a transcript of an internal video update obtained by Business Insider.

The results mark a double-digit drop in the eNPS for the second year running at Dell — it fell from 63 to 48 in 2024 — and an almost 50% decline in two years.

Saavedra said the eNPS score was "below the benchmark we do aim to achieve, and we take that seriously," per the transcript.

Saavedra told employees that Dell had been "navigating a lot of change both within the company and in the broader environment," adding that the pace and scale of the change has been "a lot."

Dell declined a request for comment from BI for this story.

'Tell Dell' survey results

The eNPS score is the key metric from Dell's annual survey, called "Tell Dell."

One question asks employees to rank how likely they would be to recommend Dell as a great place to work to someone they know on a scale from 1 to 10. The eNPS is calculated as the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.

Four Dell employees who spoke to BI about the Tell Dell results raised factors like Dell's RTO, ongoing layoffs, fatigue with the company's AI push, and a shift in culture as reasons for the eNPS decline. They spoke on the condition of anonymity. BI has verified their identities and employment.

"There's been a general decrease in trust with all the regular layoffs and feeling like the company isn't listening to employee concerns," said one employee who is based at Dell's Round Rock headquarters.

The person said that office conditions, such as "noisy rooms and desks that feel temporary," were also contributing to low morale.

"Most people I know are not feeling secure in their jobs," they added.

"I was more negative on my Tell Dell than I have ever been," a Dell engineer who has been at the company for more than eight years, told BI.

The engineer said they felt the company's RTO push and layoffs had damaged Dell's reputation as a good place to work.

Previously, managers were flexible, workforce reductions were rare, and employees enjoyed a good work-life balance, the engineer said.

They said they felt company culture had changed as they had been "gradually and with decreasing compassion and understanding forced back into the office."

"The constant layoffs are just the cherry on top," the engineer added.

Dell has been steadily ramping up its RTO policy since February 2024, when it asked all US employees to classify themselves as either hybrid or remote — roughly 50% opted to stay remote. In September, the sales team was called back to the office five days a week, and in January, all staff living near a Dell office were told they were required to be in five days a week from March.

Vivek Mohindra, Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy, previously told BI that having staff in the office brought "huge benefits," including "learning from each other, training, and mentorship."

"For all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction," CEO Michael Dell told staff in an internal memo when the 5-day RTO was announced.

Alongside the RTO push, Dell's workforce has shrunk significantly in recent years. An SEC filing from March showed that the company's staff numbers have fallen by 25,000 in the last two years — a 19% reduction. As of January 2025, Dell employs 108,000 people.

One tech support employee based at the company's RoundRock headquarters said the fall in head count had led to increased workloads on their team. At the same time, the ongoing workforce reductions have held back internal movement and promotions, the employee said.

Dell's leadership was a bright spot

While the survey shows employee satisfaction has fallen, Dell workers responded favourably to questions about leaders.

The leader net promotion score (NPS) was 76, with employees saying their leaders were supportive, collaborative, and helped them champion modernization, Saavedra said in the update.

Dell has been steering the company toward an AI future, rolling out AI across its internal operating model in 2024 and positioning Dell as a leading provider of the key infrastructure and servers that companies require as they deploy AI.

Dell's ISG division, which develops AI servers, has grown 29% year on year, the company reported in its latest annual results.

Total annual revenue was up 8% in its 2024 financial year to hit $95.6 billion — its third-highest result after the pandemic-era boom in sales helped push annual revenue to a peak of $102.3 billion.

Improving employee satisfaction

In the six-minute video update, Saavedra said Dell would be "increasing visibility" through quarterly updates and people leader meetings to help develop more transparent communication.

"Everyone wants direct communication from leadership and clarity on where we're headed and why," Saavedra said.

Leaders would also be reviewing their team's Tell Dell results and turning feedback into action, she said.

The HR lead encouraged more frequent two-way conversations between leaders and teams, and suggested employees use available well-being resources.

"Hopefully, the score getting cut in half over 2 years means they are going to make popular pro-worker changes," the tech support worker told BI.

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• Business Insider interviewed seven Gen Zers about the viral "Gen Z Stare."
• Ranging in age from 17 to 27, some agreed with the criticism — others flatly rejected it.
• "I think you're just talking to a rude person," one Gen Zer said. Another suggested Gen Zers may stare blankly while high.

A 21-year-old from Boston thinks the "Gen Z stare" is overblown. A 20-year-old from the Bay Area said she sees it all the time. A 17-year-old heard from her parents that she had been inadvertently doing it.

Conversations with seven Gen Zers indicate young people are divided on the idea that their generation often responds to questions with blank, wide-eyed stares, as many millennials on TikTok have gleefully suggested.

Some told Business Insider they flatly rejected the idea that there is such a thing as the "Gen Z stare" — others said they saw it firsthand.

Those who said there could be some truth to it floated potential contributing factors, such as lingering effects of COVID lockdowns, an adolescence spent online, or maybe that blank stare is simply coming from someone who is high.

While not everyone agreed, they all had thoughts on the viral debate.

So listen up, millennials. It's time to pass Gen Z the mic.

Brenda Alarcon, 20

On a recent visit to Coldstone Creamery, Brenda Alarcon asked a young worker for their favorite flavor. The employee stared back at them. "The transaction was made with minimal words," Alarcon said.

Alarcon said she's seen the "Gen Z stare" in professional settings, too. At a recent networking event, she noticed that the other Gen Z networkers would "freeze up."

"I'm the one that's keeping the conversation going," she said. "It's not just one time, it's multiple."

She has her suspicions as to the root cause. The COVID-19 pandemic is an obvious answer, she said. Another theory stems from her earlier days as a waitress, when she would serve blank-staring young customers.

"It's because they hit their pen," she said, referencing the slim, THC oil vape pens that became popular in the last five years.

Trinity Starr Rutledge, 17

Trinity Starr Rutledge told BI she thought the trend was "pretty stupid." Working as a cashier and desk assistant, she's had many millennials stare back at her requests at small talk.

"I think you're just talking to a rude person," Starr Rutledge said. "I don't think it's right to label our generation as people who have this stare."

To the millennials posting about the stare, Starr Rutledge had a message: "It's not our fault that we're cooler."

Megan Easton, 26

Megan Easton said she accepts the idea that her generation is more socially awkward than the others, especially the younger members of Gen Z who grew up on social media. (At 26, Easton identifies as a "Zilennial.") Still, Easton said she mostly believes that her generation's stare is an air of nonchalance.

"It comes from a lack of caring as much what people think," Easton said. "Where an older generation might think it's rude or not socially acceptable, Gen Z is more to the point, and their humor's a little drier."

Easton said that the stare shouldn't make older generations think Gen Z is "disrespectful or unintelligent." It's merely a difference in how different generations communicate, she said.

Lindsey Cook, 27

Lindsey Cook likes to start her interactions with Gen Z baristas by saying, "I'm ready to order when you are, no rush." That way, if the barista does have social anxiety, it allows them to work on their own timeline and not just stare back.

"It's very uncomfortable," Cook said. "Things need to be relearned now that we're resuming life as normal as possible after COVID."

Online, some young people have retorted that small talk isn't mandatory, or that they didn't consent to a conversation. "But when they take a job in hospitality or customer service, it's their job to make people feel welcome," Cook said.

Emerson Hubbard, 17

Emerson Hubbard thought she was too nervous to give off a "Gen Z stare." Then, she talked about it with her parents.

"I was talking to my family today and they were like, 'You have done it before,'" Hubbard said. "I get it. Sometimes I just zone out in the conversation and I'm just staring at them."

Hubbard said she doesn't think of the stare as much of a problem. She sees a "one-sided" debate between millennials and Gen Z, especially in her TikTok comments, where she said a lot of millennials were "going ham."

Eli Toy, 25

Eli Toy was raised by Gen Xers, not millennials. Toy said that she's "open to conversation" — but that other Gen Zers may be less fluent in small talk because of that generational difference.

"From what I've seen, a lot of Gen Zers that were raised by millennials had more technology in their childhoods, so that could impact it," Toy said. "The biggest tech I had was a pink Nintendo."

Netta Dar, 21

Netta Dar has seen the "Gen Z stare" before.

She referenced the character April Ludgate from the TV show "Parks and Recreation," who often stared down her colleagues with non-responses. Interestingly enough, April, played by actor Aubrey Plaza, is a millennial in the show.

That could suggest that the "Gen Z stare" isn't specific to Gen Z, but to people who are still developing their social skills.

While Dar hasn't seen the stare among her college-aged friends, she said she does notice some social awkwardness in her younger sister's friends.

"It definitely depends on the age as well, and how far along you are in your development, where the frontal lobe is at," Dar said.

• xAI hired contractors to help Grok climb a popular AI leaderboard with the goal of overtaking Anthropic.
• Training documents show xAI wanted to "beat Sonnet 3.7 Extended," Anthropic's coding rival.
• AI leaderboards have become a key battleground for labs chasing clout and investment.

Tech companies are fiercely competing to build the best AI coding tools — and for xAI, the top rival to beat seems to be Anthropic.

Elon Musk's AI company used contractors to train Grok on coding tasks with the goal of topping a popular AI leaderboard, and explicitly told them they wanted it to outperform Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet tool, documents obtained by Business Insider show.

The contractors, hired through Scale AI's Outlier platform, were assigned a project to "hillclimb" Grok's ranking on WebDev Arena, an influential leaderboard from LMArena that pits AI models against each other in web development challenges, with users voting for the winner.

"We want to make the in-task model the #1 model" for LMArena, reads one Scale AI onboarding doc that was active in early July, according to one contractor who worked on the project. Contractors were told to generate and refine front-end code for user interface prompts to "beat Sonnet 3.7 Extended," a reference to Anthropic's Claude model.

xAI did not reply to a BI request for comment.

In the absence of universally agreed-upon standards, leaderboard rankings and benchmark scores have become the AI industry's unofficial scoreboard.

For labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, topping these rankings can help attract funding, new customers, lucrative contracts, and media attention.

Anthropic's Claude, which has multiple models, is considered one of the leading players for AI coding and consistently ranks near the top of many leaderboards, often alongside Google and OpenAI.

Anthropic cofounder Benn Mann said on the "No Priors" podcast last month that other companies had declared "code reds" to try to match Claude's coding abilities, and he was surprised that other models hadn't caught up. Competitors like Meta are using Anthropic's coding tools internally, BI previously reported.

The Scale AI dashboard and project instructions did not specify which version of Grok the project was training, though it was in use days before the newest model, Grok 4, came out on July 9.

On Tuesday, LMArena ranked Grok 4 in 12th place for web development. Models from Anthropic ranked in joint first, third, and fourth.

The day after Grok 4's launch, Musk posted on X claiming that the new model "works better than Cursor" at fixing code, referring to the popular AI-assisted developer tool.

In a comment to BI, Scale AI said it does not overfit models by training them directly on a test set. The company said it never copies or reuses public benchmark data for large language model training and told BI it was engaging in a "standard data generation project using public signals to close known performance gaps."

Anastasios Angelopoulos, the CEO of LMArena, told BI that while he wasn't aware of the specific Scale project, hiring contractors to help AI models climb public leaderboards is standard industry practice.

"This is part of the standard workflow of model training. You need to collect data to improve your model," Angelopoulos said, adding that it's "not just to do well in web development, but in any benchmark."

The race for leaderboard dominance

The industry's focus on AI leaderboards can drive intense — and not always fair — competition.

Sara Hooker, the head of Cohere Labs and one of the authors of "The Leaderboard Illusion," a paper published by researchers from universities including MIT and Stanford, told BI that "when a leaderboard is important to a whole ecosystem, the incentives are aligned for it to be gamed."

In April, after Meta's Llama 4 model shot up to second place on LM Arena, developers noticed that the model variant that Meta used for public benchmarking was different from the version released to the public. This sparked accusations from AI researchers that Meta was gaming the leaderboard.

Meta denied the claims, saying the variant in question was experimental and that evaluating multiple versions of a model is standard practice.

Although xAI's project with Scale AI asked contractors to help "hillclimb" the LMArena rankings, there is no evidence that they were gaming the leaderboard.

Leaderboard dominance doesn't always translate into real-world ability. Shivalika Singh, another author of the paper, told BI that "doing well on the Arena doesn't result in generally good performance" or guarantee strong results on other benchmarks.

Overall, Grok 4 ranked in the top three for LMArena's core categories of math, coding, and "Hard Prompts."

However, early data from Yupp, a new crowdsourced leaderboard and LMArena rival, showed that Grok 4 ranked 66 out of more than 100 models, highlighting the variance between leaderboards.

Nate Jones, an AI strategist and product leader with a widely read newsletter, said he found Grok's actual abilities often lagged behind its leaderboard hype.

"Grok 4 crushed some flashy benchmarks, but when the rubber met the road in my tests this week Grok 4 stumbled hard," he wrote in his Substack on Monday. "The moment we set leaderboard dominance as the goal, we risk creating models that excel in trivial exercises and flounder when facing reality."

• Uber is investing hundreds of millions into the robotaxi wars.
• The company partnered with Lucid, which makes the Gravity EVs that Uber will use in its robotaxi fleet.
• Lucid's stock was up more than 43% in premarket trading.

Uber is turning to Lucid as it looks to play catch-up in the robotaxi wars.

More than four and a half years after Uber sold off its autonomous vehicle division, the company is pouring hundreds of millions into Lucid as part of a new robotaxi deal.

Lucid will make the vehicles for Uber's robotaxis, based on its Gravity EV. Uber is also partnering with self-driving technology company Nuro, which will power the autonomous driving capabilities. Uber expects the tech to launch "later next year in a major US city."

"Autonomous vehicles have enormous potential to transform our cities for the better," said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. "We're thrilled to partner with Nuro and Lucid on this new robotaxi program, purpose-built just for the Uber platform, to safely bring the magic of autonomous driving to more people across the world."

Lucid's stock price jumped more than 43% in pre-market trading following news of the partnership, while Uber's stock price was slightly up before the opening bell.

Uber said it plans to deploy a fleet of 20,000 robotaxis over the next six years. The company said its first prototype is "already operating autonomously on a closed circuit at Nuro's Las Vegas proving grounds."

The robotaxi wars have been heating up over the last year, with market leader Waymo, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, operating autonomous rides in multiple states.

Tesla launched a limited rollout of its robotaxi program in Austin earlier this summer. While the cars drive themselves, Tesla employees still ride in the vehicles with passengers for safety reasons.

Uber agreed to sell its autonomous vehicle division to startup Aurora in December 2020. At the time, it was grappling with a pandemic-induced downturn in its ride-hailing business.

Since then, Uber has offered rides in autonomous vehicles in Atlanta and Austin through a partnership with Waymo. Riders can request a ride in an AV through Uber's app in those cities.

If adopted widely, robotaxis would present a way for Uber and other ridesharing services to bypass human drivers. In January, Khosrowshahi said that Uber doesn't expect robotaxis to replace the company's gig-worker drivers for the next decade.

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