"Entrepreneur" is rapidly becoming our culture's worst and most diluted term: we're not really sure what it is anymore, but we know that people who describe themselves as such tend to really suck a lot. The next step is to teach our kids to be little capitalistic jerks, too.
Soylent
What if the perfect liquidity event for Silicon Valley was not a blockbuster IPO, or an acquisition that paid out at some insane multiple, but a literal exit from the United States of America? No more lumbering bureaucracies, no lobbying incumbents, no "petty" laws, no obstructionist unions. That's what a Stanford lecturer and genetics startup cofounder Balaji Srinivasan proposed at Y Combinator's annual startup school this weekend.
David Pogue, veteran non-reporter
You'll have to ask Ben Grossman, Head of Global Operations for Twitter Media, to repeat this poignant remark about San Francisco's new transit strike—because he deleted it. But not before we saw it.
Most crazed collections of likeminded nuts have something you could call an agenda. Maybe it's "startup assholes drinking wine on a mountain
Yesterday, the blog ad network IndieClick sent an email to clients announcing that it had "chosen to disband" from Demand Media, the online content company that was once touted as the "future of journalism
Do you think investing you real money in the unknown future performance of a capricious, injury-prone pro-athlete sounds like a wise money move? Fantex Holdings—which just sounds so charming—says yes.
If Twitter's transformation from "that micro-blogging service" to publicly traded advertising titan works out, it's going to have a painful tax bill. But there's good news! Twitter is already pulling an Apple and setting itself up with Irish money loopholes.
"This will not be like Facebook. This will not be like Facebook. I'll come in on Saturday if I have to, but dear god we can never repeat the chaos of Facebook."-everyone at the New York Stock Exchange in charge of Twitter's IPO.
It's pretty simple: if you're the guy behind a wildly popular dating app, you rely on the goodwill of strangers. If you rely on the goodwill of strangers, don't say racist things on Facebook.
Someday, we'll be able to replace the public good with some sort of app or Twitter-connected mug—but for now, tech's strategy seems to be just ignoring notions of "society" and "cooperation." For many powerful figures in Silicon Valley, the federal shutdown was proof they don't need to care about you.
Your standard variety gentrification is trifling compared to what the Twitter IPO is about to do to San Francisco. The situation is so untenable that urban policy experts have started using a new term to describe it: hyper gentrification.
The world-changing aspirations of Twitter and Facebook are a drop in the bucket, a single bloom in an Arab Spring, compared to what former Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale wants to do with Formation 8, a venture capital firm that raised $448 million to modernize and disrupt all of Asia's power centers, basically. The leaked emails (below) show how Lonsdale intends to recruit engineers to his cause: by making them “feel special because they think they've been identified by technology [i.e. Palantir] that helped locate bin Laden.”
The mysterious 'collector' who spent $866,000
I'm no marketing wizard, but if you try to trick your classmates into believing there is a violent criminal act occurring on campus, the stunt might just blow up in your face. The crew at Bevii is learning this the very hard way.
Yesterday's amended IPO documents brought more news than continued unprofitablility
If you're looking for housing in San Francisco and aren't literally Ev Williams, you might want to consider just killing yourself or trying to find a place in prison: Curbed reports "more than 100 people" just tried to buy condos in the Mission that are setting records for insane overpricing.
What is the secret to unlocking your personal potential and creating a more harmonious society? A San Francisco company says you can find it between every woman's legs. Gawker's Nitasha Tiku investigates, step by step.
The next stop on Sheryl Sandberg's Sheryl Sandberg Publicity Tour: our shuttered nation's capital, where the shutdown means government officials are happy to meet you, but unable to explain to anyone why.
Twitter tossed out a little update to its pre-IPO disclosures, and the soon-to-be-public company is still far, far away from profitable.
Dave Morin's social networking app Path laid off 13 employees today, which represents 20 percent of the company's staff. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the layoffs, saying, "We're working to realign the company to support continued innovation and Path 4.0."
@bfeld tooling around #techstars via robot (he’s in Keystone) pic.twitter.com/CxS4O3ttP7
— Mark Solon (@marksolon) October 15, 2013
How do you get single venture capitalists, tech executives, and other assorted one percenters to pony up $45,000 for an multi-day singles mixer? By billing it as an "intellectually rigorous" extension of TED and Aspen Ideas Festival circuit and hosting it on Richard Branson’s 74-acre Caribbean island.
Chrisann Brennan became involved with Apple's founding tyrant
Cool, more things to be terrified of: the Washington Post has more Ed Snowden slides detailing our federal government's data mining operations, and they are bad. Hundreds of millions of address books across Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and other various inboxes are subject to secret NSA collection.
After the discussion of a blog post about rape went south in typical
We knew Snapchat had policies
Soon, 36-year-old Jack Dorsey will be the chairman of a publicly traded Twitter, and worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A decade prior, before screwing
Waywire—which served briefly
