A few weeks ago, I learned about a dystopian gathering called OzyFest where people paid real American dollars to gaze longingly at thinkfluencers and hear soup-brained psychopaths like Karl Rove host panels. The Silicon Valley–funded Ozy—which is somehow not an incisive performance art piece about our culture’s…
Throughout Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s excellent new book about fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, the $9 billion company keeps running into the same problem: would-be investors or retailers want to see a demonstration of its technology. This is an issue for Elizabeth Holmes’s…
Great news for insane people and morons: Amazon has disrupted the lock! Now, you can choose to pay money to grant this giant faceless hell-corporation the ability to send strangers inside your locked home when you’re not there. Just like you always wanted.
Of all the amazing sentences and couplets and paragraphs in this wonderful Bloomberg story about the troubles of a juice and juice-press technology company called Juicero Inc., I think the following is my favorite:
Stanford University in the springtime is immaculate. There are no clouds in the sky and none of the aerated haze of the East Bay or the fog of San Francisco. Off to the west, the Santa Cruz Mountains gently form the outer boundary of Palo Alto. As I got lost looking for the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s…
On March 15, 2002, 15 Saudi girls burned to death inside their school in Mecca. They were not trapped by fallen debris, or unaccounted for by firefighters. The mutaween, Saudi Arabia’s religious police, would not allow the girls to leave their burning school because they were not covering their hair or wearing their…
Here’s Draymond Green going off on Paul Pierce and the other NBA-adjacent critics of Kevin Durant’s choice to join the Warriors. I’m less interested in him saying there are “so many guys in this league that are so stupid” than I am in his extended analogy comparing Durant joining the Warriors with Silicon Valley CEOs…
The Golden State Warriors are the team of the megalomaniacs and bloodsuckers of Silicon Valley, and they are run by a trophy-fucker who thinks he invented smallball. From their continued obfuscation of their own ridiculous luck with a teleological argument about how their success was predetermined by their…
Kobe Bryant rang in the New York Stock Exchange yesterday and unveiled his new career: heading up a $100 million venture capital fund. Along with Jeff Stibel—a former Web.com CEO—the creatively named Bryant Stibel will invest in “technology, media and data companies.” Apparently, the fund will succeed because Bryant…
The Warriors spent all season strutting around the NBA with their chests puffed out, telling anyone who would listen that they were better than the elite teams of the past, were horny for trophies, and had successfully re-engineered basketball from the circuits up to create a new, unforeseen way of playing the game…
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan did not write a letter to their daughter yesterday. They issued a press release, and called it a letter. I can point at my cat and call it a dog, but guess what, it’s still a cat. One of the richest entrepreneurs in the country took their daughter’s birth announcement and used it as…
Tech companies make my blood boil. I live in San Francisco, where I'm surrounded by them. What's worse, I'm surrounded by their employees—by droves of social-media strategists and integrated-marketing specialists, by dev-ops leads and database engineers, by bro-grammers. So, so many bro-grammers. This phylum…
A month before I turned 21, I returned home from the Bay Area, where I was attending college, to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family in Minnesota. On a Tuesday evening, I was sitting in the living room, about to head upstairs to go to bed, when my phone buzzed with a text from Dave Finocchio, founder and general…
