Is This the Woman Who Will Save Uber? A little over a year before Bozoma Saint John became the first chief brand officer at Uber, the transportation company’s best hope to rehabilitate its tarnished image, she hailed a ride from the Four Seasons hotel in Austin, Tex., to a nearby business dinner. What pulled up was a wreck. “Hey, nothing’s going to happen to me in this car, right?” Ms. Saint John said half-jokingly to the driver. “You can drive, right?” [ NY Times ] Silicon Valley's First Founder was its worstMisbehavior doesn't flourish in a vacuum; it's usually a product of family dynamics. And more than any other individual, Shockley was the founding father of Silicon Valley. Today he is a mostly dishonored patriarch, for good reason: He spent the second half of his career, from the 1960s on, espousing a racist eugenics agenda, taking occasional breaks to help promote a high-IQ sperm bank. He ended up a disgraced bigot—ostracized and (as his biographer speculates) perhaps mentally ill. Genetics wasn't even his field—he was a physicist. After leading the Nobel-winning team at Bell Labs that invented the transistor, Shockley gathered a platoon of young engineering hotshots and decamped for Palo Alto, CA, where he'd spent part of his youth and his mother still resided. There, in 1956, he launched his own company, Shockley Semiconductor—and, as the saying goes, "put the silicon in Silicon Valley." Although the region already harbored tech innovators like Hewlett-Packard and research juggernauts like Stanford University, Shockley is why the Valley today grows chips instead of apricots. [ Wired ] Scout Programs Spread in Silicon Valley Hunt by big firms for early-stage forces founders to navigate risks. Sequoia Capital has become well known in Silicon Valley for building an extensive network of scouts that help the firm get a crack at startups at their earliest stages. Now at least nine other venture firms have followed suit in some form or another with their own kinds of scout programs, though few firms openly talk about them. Indeed firms often keep the existence of their programs a closely guarded secret, but many of them... [ WSJ ] Dear tech dudes, stop being so dumb about womenwant to talk about a relatively little-discussed aspect of the venture-capitalist sexual-harassment revelations that have rocked the Valley of late. In their wake, I have seen, first- and secondhand, men react with statements which can be collectively paraphrased as “Now I’m nervous about hiring women / investing in women / being alone in a room with a woman, what do I do?” [ TC ] SoftBank's Son Finally Explains How All Those Deals Fit Together
Nineteen million Americans are interested in buying life insurance, but have gotten stuck somewhere in the process. Clunky forms, fine-print PDFs, inconvenient medical exams, seemingly high costs—the list of headaches is long and frustrating. Perhaps as a result, the individual life insurance market has been roughly flat in the U.S. for over a decade, with total premiums landing around $120 billion each year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. The RealReal’s CEO says the company’s goal is to IPOThe RealReal CEO Julie Wainwright tells TechCrunch in a video interview that she’s preparing the luxury consignment e-tailer to go public someday. “That’s the goal,” she said when asked about IPO plans. “We really aren’t in the mood to sell the business, we’re in the mood to go public at some point in the future.” It makes sense that a startup that’s raised $173 million in funding would be expected to provide liquidity for its investors eventually. Just last month, the company announced a round of $50 million led by private equity firm Great Hill Partners. Previous investors include Canaan Partners and Greycroft Partners. [ Tech Crunch ] The 52 most powerful people in enterprise tech in 2017Businesses spend a huge wad of cash every year on tech. They'll dole out $3.5 trillion in 2017 alone, according to Gartner. 2017 has seen a dramatic increase in cloud spending and the rise of new technologies in the work place like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. It's seen a crop of new public companies, and some startups that are leading the way in their areas. At the same time, powerhouses like Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft still dominate their respective markets. And with that kind of money comes power and lots of it. [ Business Insider ] The fabulous life of Airbnb's Brian Chesky, one of the youngest and richest tech founders in AmericaLA Tech Map: The Most Well-Funded Tech Startups By City In Greater LAThe Quickest Way To Estimate How Much Your Startup Needs To Raise |