The Culture Wars Have Come to Silicon ValleyThe culture wars that have consumed politics in the United States have now landed on Silicon Valley’s doorstep. That became clear this week after Google on Monday fired a software engineer, James Damore, who had written an internal memo challenging the company’s diversity efforts. The firing set off a furious debate over Google’s handling of the situation, with some accusing the company of silencing the engineer for speaking his mind. Supporters of women in tech praised Google. But for the right, it became a potent symbol of the tech industry’s intolerance of ideological diversity. Silicon Valley’s politics have long skewed left, with a free-market’s philosophy and a dash of libertarianism. But that goes only so far, with recent episodes putting the tech industry under the microscope for how it penalizes people for expressing dissenting opinions. Mr. Damore’s firing has now plunged the nation’s technology capital into some of the same debates that have engulfed the rest of the country. [ NY Times ] Eric Schmidt’s VC firm Innovation Endeavors merges with Marker LLCInnovation Endeavors, the venture capital (VC) firm co-created by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has revealed that it has merged with Marker LLC, a VC firm with hubs in New York and Israel. Schmidt served as CEO of Google from 2001 until 2011, and founded Innovation Endeavors alongside Dror Brerman the year before he stepped down as Google CEO. He has also continued to serve as executive chairman of Google and Alphabet in the years since. [ Venture Beat ] A 32-year-old biotech CEO just raised $1.1 billion from SoftBank to give old drugs new life
A company that develops drugs that other pharmaceutical companies have abandoned just raised $1.1 billion in one of the largest health funding rounds. Roivant on Wednesday announced that it had raised the funds in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund, and joined by existing investor Dexcel Pharma. [ Business Insider ] The CTO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is leaving after less than a yearThe top technology exec at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic investment vehicle founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, is leaving the organization after less than a year. Brian Pinkerton, who joined CZI from Amazon last October to run all of its engineering efforts, emailed CZI staff this morning to announce he was leaving. In the email, Pinkerton implied that CZI’s engineering team had grown far bigger than he was interested in managing. The engineering team was just three employees when he joined, and now totals 96 people, according to a source. [ Recode ] HOW PETER THIEL'S SECRETIVE DATA COMPANY PUSHED INTO POLICINGWhen Sergeant Lee DeBrabander marked a case confidential in the Long Beach drug squad’s Palantir data analysis system in November 2014, he expected key details to remain hidden from unauthorized users’ eyes. In police work, this can be crucial—a matter of life and death, even. It often involves protecting vulnerable witnesses, keeping upcoming operations hush hush, or protecting a fellow police officer who’s working undercover. Yet not long after, someone working in the gang crimes division ran a car license plate mentioned in his case and was able to read the entire file. “Can you please look at this?” DeBrabander wrote to a Palantir engineer in an email, which was obtained by Backchannel in response to public records requests. [ Wired ] Initial coin offerings have raised $1.2 billion and now surpass early stage VC funding
The amount of money raised by cryptocurrency and blockchain start-ups via so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs) has surpassed early stage venture capital (VC) funding for internet companies for the past two months. ICOs are a way for start-ups to raise money from users, similar to crowdfunding, by allowing them to buy a stake. In return, the user will receive a token or digital currency, which are equivalent to shares in the firm. ICOs are popular among cryptocurrency and blockchain start-ups and have exploded in the past few months. [ CNBC ] 500 Startups’ Australia accelerator program is axed by its partner before it even launched
500 Startups continues to feel the impact of a sexual harassment scandal involving its co-founder and former managing partner Dave McClure. Two weeks after the closure of its Canada-based fund, its maiden venture in Australia is getting the chop before it even began. The U.S. firm doesn’t have a dedicated fund in Australia, but it did announce an accelerator program — 500 Melbourne — in May in partnership with LaunchVic, a $60 million entrepreneurship scheme backed by the government of Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state. Now, however, LaunchVic has terminated its partnership with the VC firm. SoftBank Filings Confirm It’s Taking Extra Risk in the World’s Largest Tech FundFilings by SoftBank Group Corp. show it has taken on outsize risk in its new SoftBank Vision Fund, which has said it would have at least $93 billion to put into big technology bets. SoftBank’s quarterly earnings report and balance sheet as of June 30, released Monday, offer clues into the workings of the fund, which is led by SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son. Investors include the government funds of Saudi Arabia and Abu... [ WSJ ] What’s keeping Texas from rivaling Silicon ValleyYesterday, Capital Factory CEO Joshua Baer announced a partnership with The Dallas Entrepreneur Center to bring Texas’ biggest accelerator to Dallas. In his post, The Texas Startup Manifesto, Baer proposed a “Texas startup Megatropolis” combining Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. The vision is exciting and highlights many of Texas’ obvious strengths:
A hot startup is using $12 million from Andreessen Horowitz to pursue a 'holy grail' of web technologyNetlify has landed $12 million in funding in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. * The startup is on the cutting edge of web development, letting programmers instantly deploy super-fast websites with a click. * Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Peter Levine will join the company's board. Sometimes, less is more. For the last decade or more, most major webpages have been designed to be dynamic — they rely on a complicated system of code and databases to offer a super-interactive experience. Facebook's site, for example, relies on a complex system based largely on PHP and other "server-side" programming languages. [ Business Insider ] ANDREW NG SPREADS THE GOSPEL OF AI WITH A NEW ONLINE SCHOOLANDREW NG IS a soft-spoken AI researcher whose online postings talk loudly. A March blog post in which the Stanford professor announced he was leaving Chinese search engine Baidu temporarily wiped more than a billion dollars off the company’s value. A June tweet about a new Ng website, Deeplearning.ai, triggered a wave of industry and media speculation about his next project. Today that speculation is over. Deeplearning.ai is home to a series of online courses Ng says will help spread the benefits of recent advances in machine learning far beyond big tech companies such as Google and Baidu. The courses offer coders without an AI background training in how to use deep learning, the technique behind the current frenzy of investment in AI. [ Wired ] |