Adrienne Chan‘s pivot away from a career in tech could more aptly be considered a pirouette.

The former Microsoft product manager is the co-founder of a new ballet school in Redmond, Wash., where she’s reconnecting with the dancing she practiced growing up, and seizing on a desire to run her own business.

“I knew I had to do this because I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Chan told GeekWire. “I loved my job at Microsoft, and I wanted to do both … but 24/7 my mind was only thinking about the ballet school.”

Bellevue Classical Ballet opened in September in Redmond Town Center with a mission to serve students of all ages and skill levels. Chan is serving as executive director, and her co-founder, Eric Hipolito Jr., a former dancer and instructor with Pacific Northwest Ballet School, is artistic director.

Chan first interned at Microsoft in 2017 before spending almost four years at the tech giant working on Azure products. She left in 2022 to get her Master of Science degree in entrepreneurship from the University of Washington before returning to Microsoft for another 11-month stint.

While at the UW, Chan utilized her engineering background and worked on a dance education app as part of her degree program.

“Something still felt a little off for me,” she admitted. “I felt that maybe I wanted to stray a little bit more away from tech.”

She met Hipolito and made the leap back into dancing. And along the way, she found tech was still a suitable partner.

Intrigued by entrepreneurship

Chan grew up in Toronto and transitioned from gymnastics to ballet as a kid, falling in love with the art form at age 9 thanks to her teachers. She eventually took up other styles of dance in productions within the Chinese community in Toronto.

She studied systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and as an undergrad, her first internship was at a startup incubator.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Chan said. “The drive that people have, the motivation — they just want to get work done. They’re so passionate. And that really sparked my interest in entrepreneurship.”

Her feelings were lining up with memories she had of a “career class” she took in high school where she had to list 10 things she might want to be when she grew up. Engineering was on the list. And so was CEO of a dance company.

Although she wanted to pursue her master’s directly after undergrad, she had already committed to Microsoft and moved to Seattle to begin her career.

Adaptability, iteration and more

Chan’s parents and others were a bit surprised when she left a high-paying tech job to go back to school, and even more so when she left that job again to open a ballet school.

Even though she was touching products used by millions of people, Chan wasn’t connecting with those people on a day-to-day basis. She wasn’t using those products herself, and they didn’t align with her aspirations.

“I really did enjoy my job at Microsoft, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted long term,” she said. “I wanted something more meaningful, something that felt like I could make an impact on people.”

Chan is a big believer in the notion that everything has led her to where she is today. And she feels that her tech background is making an impact on the ways she thinks about running a small business — something she’s been writing about in posts on LinkedIn.

“If I pursued dance in college, I don’t think I would be as successful doing this now,” she said. “I think that tech background really helped me do this.”

Managing a product is a lot like managing a business, Chan said, calling out the ambiguity of both. At the ballet school, she finds herself leaning on the adaptability and decisiveness that helped her at Microsoft, and iterating as she goes — a mindset she calls very common in tech.

But she’s not using AI.

When she had to crunch 100 different schedule options for the school, Hipolito asked why she didn’t just throw all the variables into an AI model and ask for the best result.

“I said, ‘No, I want to use my brain,'” Chan said. “I trust my brain.”

Chan also chuckles at the irony of her life now — teaching the kids of Microsoft workers while some of those parents are outside her dance studio working on laptops, doing code reviews or whatever else.

When people call her a risk-taker or commend her courage for the change she’s made, Chan doesn’t see it that way.

“It’s stressful. But I’m stressing for what I really want to be doing, what really matters to me,” she said. “I don’t think that’s replaceable at all. I don’t think there’s any other option.

The morning after heavy rain pummeled Seattle with its wettest day of the year, another rush of water arrived in the city in the form of the name for a new women’s pro hockey team.

The Seattle Torrent unveiled their brand identity on Thursday as the team gets set for its inaugural season in the Professional Women’s Hockey League.

“Torrent” in this case is a nod to “powerful waterways that shape and connect Washington’s unique landscape, symbolizing the team’s determination to carve its own path,” according to a release by the team, and a new video on Instagram. The team’s “S” logo and slate green and blue color palette is meant to represent “a rush of water” and “flowing curves mirroring river channels.”

While the name is in keeping with other weather-related women’s sports brands in the city — Storm, Reign — in a tech town, our immediate thoughts on torrent went in a different direction: file sharing.

Torrenting gained popularity in the 2000s as a way to download content — such as music or movies — using a peer-to-peer network. The technology spurred the sharing of copyrighted material without permission that is considered illegal in many places.

According to the PWHL, the league led the design process for Seattle’s team identity and collaborated with creative agency Flower Shop for the name and logo.

The Torrent will play home games at Climate Pledge Arena, home of the Seattle Kraken NHL team.

Vancouver, B.C. is joining Seattle as a PWHL expansion team in the now-eight-team league. That city went with “Goldeneyes” as team name. Maybe a bit of a James Bond reference will work up there.

Other teams in the league include Boston Fleet, Minnesota Frost, Montreal Victoire, New York Sirens, Ottawa Charge and Toronto Sceptres.

Seattle opens its regular season schedule Nov. 21 at Vancouver.

Ten years after Glowforge was founded in Seattle, the startup’s longtime leaders are rebooting the laser-engraver business.

Following months of turmoil involving multiple rounds of layoffs, a failed funding round, and the closure of a Seattle manufacturing facility, Glowforge has undergone a restructuring through an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, a state-level process that’s an alternative to bankruptcy.

Co-founder and CEO Dan Shapiro told GeekWire that the company — which had raised $183 million from investors — arrived at this moment “after spending a painful nine months looking at every possible option for the business.”

But it’s not the end for the maker of a line of desktop 3D laser cutters/engravers that took the home crafting world by storm back in 2015.

Shapiro said he and co-founder Mark Gosselin, the startup’s CTO, negotiated with the entity that was assigned Glowforge’s assets — which was otherwise ready to liquidate the company — to acquire the trademark and brand, the hardware platform, software, and rights to manufacture more machines in Seattle.

“The board of directors ran a sales process led by an independent third party,” Shapiro said. “When there weren’t any bidders, Mark and I put in a bid from our own savings.”

He said the company makes enough money out of the gate to support a team of about 20 former Glowforge employees, and that he and Gosselin plan to “get back to basics,” improving hardware and software and serving customers.

A difficult few years

Shapiro said Glowforge was “weeks away from going public” in 2022 before it was derailed by what he called “a collapse in the crafting market” that took out key strategic partners like JOANN, which filed for bankruptcy in 2024.

While he credits millions in capital and a growing staff for enabling the startup to do things “we never dreamed of,” Shapiro said it’s been a three-year struggle to keep serving customers.

“The need to scale at all costs, to optimize for the next funding round, to hit growth metrics that justified ever-higher valuations … it pulled us away from what mattered,” he said.

In early 2025, Glowforge moved assembly of its highest-end machines from Mexico back to the U.S. and Seattle with the opening of a production facility in its SoDo headquarters space. The work employed 15 people, and Shapiro said at the time Glowforge employed just over 90 full-time and contract employees.

But following layoffs in August that impacted multiple teams, the production facility was shuttered in September in the wake of more layoffs.

“I’m not going to pretend this year was anything but brutal,” Shapiro said. “Layoffs are painful. Restructuring is messy. And there are people who believed in the original company who are understandably disappointed.”

Create ‘almost anything’

Shapiro founded Glowforge in 2015 with fellow startup veterans Gosselin (founder and former CTO of Cequint) and Tony Wright (founder of RescueTime, Jobby and CubeDuel), who left the company in 2017. Shapiro previously sold the startup Sparkbuy to Google, and he created Robot Turtles, a coding board game for kids that was one of the most successful campaigns ever on Kickstarter.

Glowforge’s machines let people use raw materials including leather, paper, plastic, fabric, or cardboard to intricately cut and engrave products with the push of a button.

Via its cloud-based software users can design and develop creations from a web browser on a computer, tablet, or phone. You can create “almost anything” with Glowforge, Shapiro previously said, including jewelry, decorative items, smartphone engravings, wallets, toys, and more.

Glowforge backers included Brad Feld’s Foundry Group and True Ventures, which led the company’s $9 million Series A round in May 2015. MakerBot co-founder Bre Pettis, former MakerBot CEO Jenny Lawton, Wetpaint founder Ben Elowitz, KISSmetrics founder Hiten Shah, and former Swype CEO Mike McSherry are among other investors.

The company set a crowdfunding record in October 2015 with a 30-day campaign that generated $27.9 million in sales.

“Mark and I started this because we believed something simple: everyone should be able to make beautiful things,” Shapiro said this week. “Not just people with engineering degrees or expensive workshops, but everyone. And we created a desktop laser market that nobody had even imagined could exist.”

In August 2016, the company raised $22 million, but it was dealing with shipping delays that stretched into 2017 and caused mounting customer frustration and order cancellations. In 2018, the company raised another $10 million, and $43 million more in 2022.

Glowforge initially focused on direct-to-consumer and later partnered with large craft retailers such as JOANN and Michaels. The company also expanded to serve schools and universities in 2021. 

The startup eventually sold two higher-end machines including the Glowforge Plus ($4,995) and Glowforge Pro ($6,995). In 2023 it released the $1,200 Aura and in 2024 the $699 Spark in an attempt to attract a wider audience of consumers.

New focus

Eternally optimistic throughout Glowforge’s years of ups and downs, Shapiro exhibits that same characteristic in the face of starting over.

He called it a “rebirth” and a return to the vision that he and Gosselin had in 2015, with a team “that’s here for the mission, not the vanity metrics” and to serve customers “rather than optimizing for investor presentations.”

“The cost of being a growth-first company is massive, and not always obvious,” Shapiro said. “When we stripped the business to its essentials, we could see what we actually needed to serve our customers.”

The same hardware and software products will be offered, and Shapiro said improvements are coming. New features are also being launched now and next week, including: Box Builder, which uses generative AI to let users describe a custom box in plain English before Glowforge creates the design; and Snapmarks, in which users can print anything on a regular inkjet printer (stickers, iron ons) and load it into a Glowforge laser for cutting.

Shapiro also said they plan to continue the manufacturing formula they previously developed to build machines in Seattle.

He called the new Glowforge a great business from day one — “awesome product, amazing customers, and profitable,” adding that the startup is now “simpler, more focused, and more committed to the long haul. And Mark and I are all in.”

Hearvana, a Seattle startup using AI to create “superhuman hearing capabilities,” raised $6 million in pre-seed funding.

The company was launched this spring by University of Washington computer science researchers, including co-founder Shyam Gollakota, a renowned tech inventor.

Gollakota previously told GeekWire that Hearvana is “creating AI breakthroughs that are shaping the future of sound” on-device, using the technology to quickly process audio without requiring large amounts of power or computing.

He predicted the tech would be part of billions of earbuds, hearing aids and smartphones.

In a new LinkedIn post on Wednesday, Gollakota shared more about Hearvana:

“Hearvana AI is a result of years of research and experience creating super-human and proactive audio AI systems. Our platform represents a major leap in real-time and on-device audio augmentation and comprehension, enabling AI assistants, hearing devices, smart glasses, and voice-driven products to listen, interpret, and manipulate audio with unprecedented quality and latency. Hearvana empowers devices to perceive the world beyond human capability, grasping intent and context in complex, noisy environments, and helping people communicate more effectively with each other and with machines.”

A professor at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Gollakota is head of the Mobile Intelligence Lab. He previously co-founded Sound Life Sciences, a UW spinout that developed an app to monitor breathing that was acquired by Google in 2022. And he’s the co-founder of Wavely Diagnostics, which uses a smartphone app to detect ear infections.

Malek Itani, a research assistant and PhD student at the Allen School, is a co-founder of Hearvana. Itani was an intern at Meta, where he worked on smart glasses.

The pair conducted previous research on a headphone prototype that used AI to create a “sound bubble” in noisy environments and could learn the distance for each sound source in a room. 

Hearvana is being incubated at the AI2 Incubator in Seattle.

The investment round was led by Point72 Ventures and SCB 10X with participation from the AI2 Incubator, SBI US Gateway Fund, Forston VC, Ascend, J4 Ventures, Pack Ventures, Moai Capital, and Amazon Alexa Fund.

Axios first reported on the funding.

Seattle-based Zuper, which provides software for companies with field workers, is getting into the smart-glasses game with the release of Zuper Glass, an AI-powered product built for skilled tradespeople.

Zuper Glass is designed for a range of professionals, including roofers, electricians and plumbers. The voice-activated glasses use AI to help workers capture photos or record video, perform inspections, and communicate safely while keeping their hands free.

The glasses are integrated with Zuper’s mobile app, syncing in real time to Zuper’s software platform, which handles work order management, dispatching, scheduling, proposals, payments, customer communications, and more.

Wearable technology and the advent of smart glasses has reached some of the largest companies, including Amazon, which unveiled augmented reality glasses for delivery drivers last month. The Seattle-based tech giant said the glasses are a tool to improve safety and the driver’s experience.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has billed his company’s AI-powered smart glasses as “the ideal form factor for personal super intelligence.”

Founded in 2020, Zuper is led by CEO Anand Subbaraj, a former Microsoft leader. The 210-person company has offices in Seattle and India.

“Zuper Glass is a breakthrough in how field work gets done and how it will evolve in the future,” Subbaraj said in a news release. “It is inspired by the people who do this work every day — technicians, roofers, and field teams whose hands are full, whose focus matters, and whose safety comes first.”

Zuper raised a $32 million Series B round led by Seattle-area VC firm FUSE in December 2023.

When Marissa Coughlin left her latest tech job to open a romance bookstore and crafting hub in Seattle, she didn’t leave technology behind completely.

In fact, alongside her partner, Constantine Vetoshev, who still works in tech, artificial intelligence has become a major player in this next chapter of their lives.

Coughlin worked in a variety of communications and content roles for companies including Airbnb, Textio, Highspot, and most recently, T-Mobile. Vetoshev is a software developer at Brook.ai, a Seattle-area health technology startup that uses AI to help clinical teams deliver remote care.

Both big readers, the pair first started looking at spaces and developing a bookstore business plan in 2023. But with two small children, they were waiting for better timing. When a space became available on Market Street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood they finally made the leap, and opened Swoon City last month.

While Coughlin has no interest in seeing AI used to write the books or illustrate the covers that line her shelves, she’s a big believer in how the technology can help the back end of the business.

“I think more businesses should be using this stuff, especially small businesses, if they can figure out how to tap into it,” Coughlin said. “It’s super useful, but you have to know that it’s there and what it can do, and be a little bit creative and figure out the solutions.”

Here are some of the ways Swoon City is tapping into AI, leveraging Coughlin and Vetoshev’s know-how:

• To help pick the store’s inventory of 3,000 books, they used analysis based on Seattle Public Library data of the most-borrowed romance novels over the past 18 months.
• They built a custom generative AI tool to categorize all the romance novels they bought into sub-genres so people can quickly find their favorites. For example, the book “Thirsty” would typically just be categorized under romance or maybe paranormal romance, but Swoon’s system categorizes it as paranormal romance, LGBTQ, enemies to lovers, vampire romance, romantic comedy, and urban fantasy.
• GenAI was used to build a customer loyalty program. Vetoshev, who said he is “all in” on Anthropic, asked the AI assistant Claude to analyze some requirements they had for different programs. Claude wrote back and said, “You could go with this one, or you could just build it yourself. Here’s how.”

“I feel like there’s a lot of things that we’ve created for this store that other people who might be curious about doing something like this could tap into and be able to leverage for their own stuff,” Coughlin said.

Vetoshev said he can come home from his day job, put the kids to bed and then focus on something that needs to be built for the store.

“A couple of hours of work with a [large language] model, and we’re off to the races,” he said.

The technology is all in service of a genre that is exploding, especially among young readers.

Romance is the leading growth category for the total print book market thus far in 2025, and the volume for the category has more than doubled compared to four years ago, with 51 million units sold in the past 12 months, according to industry analysis.

NPR credited romance interest driven by Gen Z readers, especially on BookTok, a subcommunity of TikTok for recommending, reviewing, and discussing books.

Swoon City is hoping to follow in the successful footsteps of The Ripped Bodice, an independent brick-and-mortar romance bookstore with locations in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, N.Y.

Coughlin looks forward to bringing people together not just around books, but by hosting various events and building out crafting classes for embroidery, stained glass, jewelry making and more.

“I feel like part of what was exciting for a romance bookstore is the community, because it is often not a genre that’s as well respected in the book community, even though it’s huge,” she said.

The City of Seattle is interviewing candidates for a City AI Officer position to lead how artificial intelligence is utilized across departments and offices.

The new job is in line with the city’s recent release of a “responsible AI plan,” which provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.

The CAIO will report to Rob Lloyd, the city’s chief technology officer, who said the job posting attracted 3,000 visits in the first week it was live. From roughly 40 highly qualified applicants, nine are being invited to interview, with backgrounds ranging from the private sector, federal government and academia.

Lloyd, who started as CTO last year, said the “very competitive” applicant pool also includes a few ex-Microsoft employees. A hire should be made by next week.

“We created the city AI plan [because] there’s lots of things that happen with AI for an organization to be effective at it,” Lloyd told GeekWire. “We defined a couple domains of activity that we have to be successful at.”

The CAIO will manage those domains, including:

• Technical excellence and orchestration: The city’s AI plan ensures that infrastructure, programming, data, and process engineering are aligned under a coordinated strategy. Lloyd said success depends on an “elite-level AI expert” to oversee frameworks, technology, and training.
• Learning, skilling, and responsible adoption: With 39 departments, the city must build a shared understanding of AI use. The focus is on preventing “AI product sprawl” and aligning solutions with city priorities — such as budget directives and executive orders—while improving AI literacy, consistent terminology, and awareness of AI’s impact on workflows and people.
• Partnerships and community activation: The plan connects internal AI efforts with academia, startups, and local organizations to strengthen Seattle’s AI ecosystem. By fostering collaboration and shared understanding around AI safety and innovation, the city enhances both its capabilities and its role as a responsible community partner, Lloyd said.

The use of AI has the ability to reshape how numerous city departments do their work and serve residents. Lloyd pointed to adoption already under way in the Seattle Department of Transportation, where AI and game theory are being used to analyze areas with higher accident rates and find patterns and anomalies in reports and help accelerate design options so safe intersections can be engineered.

Public utilities, public safety and permitting are also ripe for AI disruption, Lloyd said, but the approach is to augment human workers, not automate and displace them.

“There is plenty of space we can look at where staff are overwhelmed,” he said. “We’re not getting to the response level that we aspire to, and there’s areas where we want to make decisions even smarter, even faster. We can take AI and focus on those things, not to displace jobs, but to get to the service levels and decision making that we want to create.”

Seattle has been a leader in creating guidance for AI use, and claims to be the first in the nation to issue a generative AI policy in the fall of 2023. The city has policies requiring “human-in-the-loop” oversight, where employees must review generative AI outputs before official use and attribute any AI-assisted work to the specific technology.

When it comes to the new AI officer and the AI plan, Lloyd stressed the importance of “making sure that we focus on our values and how we apply AI in the organization and the community.”

The annual salary for the CAIO role is between $125,000 and $188,000, according to the job posting.

Whoever comes away with the job will join a city government that is willing and able to work with a number of local “assets,” as Lloyd called them, including the University of Washington, AI House, Ai2, Plug & Play, and more.

“We are the second biggest epicenter of AI talent,” he said. “It would be a really sad thing if we did not take advantage of that opportunity and play to that strength.”

Neil Kumar has been known to leave a water bottle or a jacket at school or the gym, marking himself among the millions of Americans whose forgotten belongings end up in a lost-and-found box or a landfill every year.

Now Kumar is the founder of FindIt, an app designed to provide an AI-powered solution to recovering what’s been lost.

The 15-year-old freshman at Bellevue (Wash.) High School was recently selected as one of four innovators to participate in the city’s Civic Innovation Challenge, an initiative seeking technology solutions to municipal challenges.

FindIt will be used on a pilot basis at Bellevue College to test the app’s usability and effectiveness among students, staff and visitors and evaluate its potential for broader deployment.

“I’ve always been interested in how technology can solve our real world problems,” Kumar told GeekWire.

According to statistics cited by the website Lostings, over 400 million items are lost and found every year in the U.S. The estimated value of lost items is over $5 billion per year.

Kumar wants his creation to help address the economic aspect of all of that loss, and also the sustainability concern. His tagline is “Buy less, lose even less.”

Available on iOS, FindIt works when someone in charge of a lost-and-found system, at a school for instance, takes a photo of a recovered item and uploads that photo. The image is processed by artificial intelligence, which generates a description, such as “blue water bottle with red sticker and white top.”

A student looking for a lost item types a description into FindIt, and the app’s AI scans uploaded listings to find the best matches.

Kumar said the easy process of searching via a mobile app eclipses traditional systems that require a person to physically return to a place where they may have left something.

He started working on the project a year ago and FindIt was among 23 competitive applicants reviewed and judged in the civic challenge. The three other companies and ideas that were accepted are:

• Certivo, a Seattle company with an AI-driven platform that provides visibility into vendor compliance across procurement and cybersecurity.
• Legislaide, a Denver company using AI to analyze municipal codes, legislative history and state statutes, allowing staff to run plain English searches across agendas, minutes, ordinances, resolutions, reports and more.
• Juganu, an Israeli company with a smart lighting solution to illuminate curbside activity while monitoring real-time usage patterns to support city and Bellevue College transportation and public safety initiatives.

FindIt was also selected for the Thermo Fisher Junior Innovators Challenge, and Kumar said he was recognized in the top 300 junior innovators in the U.S. this year. 

The app is currently deployed at Odle Middle School in Bellevue. Kumar envisions the tool someday being available to more schools as well as airports, workplaces, public transit agencies and elsewhere.

Kumar, who has worked with Sustainability Ambassadors, a program that helps develop student leadership skills, thinks FindIt is just the start, and he’d like to be an entrepreneur in the future.

“I like to solve problems using technology, and help people using those solutions,” he said.

In the midst of the Seattle Mariners’ win streak back in September, sports anchor Aaron Levine was going on a little run of his own, as a contestant on “Jeopardy!”

The episodes aired this week, and Levine, sports director for FOX 13 in Seattle, managed three wins in a row before bowing out in Thursday night’s episode of the popular game show.

Levine taped all four of his games over about four hours, with 15-minute breaks between them to switch outfits in the “champion’s changing room.”

“It’s a little jarring to win a game and then go back to change, and all of a sudden you’re pretending it’s a brand new day,” Levine told GeekWire on Friday. “No question there’s a mental fatigue aspect to it. I have a brand-new respect for anybody who can win multiple games in a day, let alone survive an entire day and then move on to the next tape day.”

A self-professed trivia geek, Levine majored in history at Stanford University and considers that category his strongest. It’s why he’s kicking himself for not getting Thursday’s Final Jeopardy question correct (about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello) in the category “historic homes.”

Elsewhere in the game Thursday, Levine found what appeared to be a couple of softball Seattle clues, especially one about the Seahawks that he got right. But he failed to buzz in on a clue about billionaires and their kids’ inheritance — who is Bill Gates?!

Earlier in the week he did get a Daily Double question correct about Stanford, and he was especially pleased to be able to shout out his alma mater with a “Go Cardinal” fist pump.

And along the way this week, he made a fun nod to a classic “Key & Peele” sketch with the way he etched his name — “AA ron” — on his podium screen.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Levine watched “Jeopardy!” every night with his family and always wanted to be on the show’s teen tournament. He scored an appearance on “The Price is Right” at age 18, but when he went off to college, trivia wasn’t a part of his life.

Levine landed on TV again in 2004 when he was the national runner-up on the ESPN reality show “Dream Job,” which was a search for a new “SportsCenter” anchor.

It wasn’t until he was living in Gig Harbor, Wash., that he started going to trivia nights, winning free food at restaurants, and watching “Jeopardy!” again. And he started making his note cards in 2019.

The numerous boxes of index cards look like something out of a library’s filing system, and they serve as flash cards for Levine to test his knowledge on a range of subjects — literature, music, art, geography, religion, etc.

In the decades that “Jeopardy!” has been on the air, plenty of Seattleites have made appearances. Good Thinking Games CEO David Erb is a notable past champion, and Amazon employee Stephanie Hubley got a shout-out from Jeff Bezos for her appearance back in 2016.

Levine enjoyed getting to meet host Ken Jennings, who lives in Seattle, during limited time in which Jennings interacts with contestants during commercial breaks.

“You don’t get a lot of time to talk to him, but I did feel a sort of familiarity and kinship with him, knowing that not only is he from Seattle, but he’s a big Seattle sports fan, and that he’s a huge Mariners fan,” Levine said. “It was also cool because he was familiar with my work being on TV here in Seattle.”

Levine’s three wins are a long way from what Jennings achieved (winning 74 games), but his goal going into the experience was to win just one game, and he came away with a “lifetime of memories.”

“To be able to walk away from that stage and say, ‘Hey, I’m a ‘Jeopardy!’ champion’ and to have done that three times and qualify for a postseason tournament is more than I could have ever dreamed of,” Levine said. “I hope I didn’t embarrass myself too much on the stage.”

There’s nothing embarrassing about the money he walked away with — nearly $50,000 — and his plans for what he’ll do with it.

“It’s going into a college fund for my son,” Levine said of his 8-year-old. “It’s so relieving to me to just have a sum of money that can hopefully grow for the next 10 years.”