Last year, Nicole Landis Ferragonio and Joe Luchs decided to leave Amazon and launch an AI startup . They'd been planning the transition for months, but for Ferragonio, the tipping point was Amazon's five-day return-to-office mandate in January 2025. "It raised some questions about how much agency you really have in Big Tech and what would be possible on our own," she said. Luchs pointed to the rapid rise of "game-changing" AI technologies, which he felt there was a limited window to capitalize