The tech world has been up in arms this past week about "Silicon Valley," an upcoming Bravo reality show documenting the lives of five aspiring entrepreneurs making their way in the world of Bay Area startups.
The Federal Transit Administration will provide $900 million to extend San Francisco's rapid transit rail line from the Bay Area into the fast-growing Silicon Valley, the Department of Transportation announced Monday.
There's a trillion dollar virus that is spreading throughout Silicon Valley right now. It's called social networking. This virus, a relentless kind of digital blob, feeds on our most intimate data.
Silicon Valley's startup scene is mostly young, male and white. In response, the NewMe Accelerator brought eight black tech entrepreneurs together for a two-month immersion program in San Francisco.
In the tech world's startup scene, where investors gamble millions on promising ideas, accelerator programs operate as kingmakers. Get into a top one and you'll have access to seed funding, mentors and the industry's leading venture capitalists.
"The pipeline problem." That's the catch-all phrase that keeps coming up in discussions of diversity in Silicon Valley.
Watch or record "Black in America: The New Promised Land -- Silicon Valley" when it airs on CNN on Sunday, November 13 at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT and re-airs Nov. 13 at 11:00p.m. ET/PT. By recording the documentary, you agree that you will use the program for educational viewing purposes for a one-year period only. No other rights of any kind or nature whatsoever are granted, including, without limitation, any rights to sell, publish, distribute, post online or distribute in any other medium or forum, or use for any commercial or promotional purpose.
How diverse are Silicon Valley's offices and executive suites? Activists have been trying for years to answer that question, but some of the industry's largest and most influential employers -- including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook -- closely guard that information.
Every U.S. company with more than 100 employees is required to file a one-page form each year with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent federal agency. Called the EEO-1, the form categorizes each company's U.S. workers by their self-identified race and gender.
Skilled developers are Silicon Valley's scarcest resource. With big companies throwing around giant salaries and startups competing fiercely for talent, the technical ability to build what they envision is often a make-or-break issue for new ventures.
CNN's Soledad O'Brien is chronicling the NewMe Accelerator journey in Black in America 4, which airs November 13.
At about 5:30 on a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was running out the door to get home when I ran into several colleagues sitting in a circle and drinking some Scotch. They invited me to celebrate the end of the week with them, and after hesitating a bit, I joined the little group. Yes, I enjoyed the single malt they gave me, but I enjoyed the conversation much more. These are people I see all the time, but nearly all of our interactions are rushed and task-oriented.
Facebook is about to switch zip codes. The fast-growing company is poised to move its headquarters from Palo Alto, Calif., to another nearby Silicon Valley outpost.
Those living in the sunny innovation capital of the world better up their game or they will be left in Chinese tech dust.
Silicon Valley -- or Silicon Alley? To non-techies, that's the San Francisco Bay Area versus New York. If you're an internet startup company, it's a debate that's probably plagued you at some point.
Silicon Valley operates on potential. Employers may not like it, but talented engineers switch jobs like Pony Express horses so they can be at a company that has a shot at dominating the future. Google and Apple (after the return of Steve Jobs) were those kinds of companies. Today, places like Facebook have people lined up knocking on the door to get in.
Think of it as Silicon Valley's seven-year itch. That's about the length of time needed for the typical investment, employment, and emotional bubble to inflate and then burst in the global center of the technology industry. The last bubble, known forever as the dot-com craze, started and ended in the Valley.
Question: I'm 27, make about $50,000 a year, and I still live at home. I've got about $80,000 in CDs and a money-market account, another $22,000 in a 401(k) and Roth IRA, and I have no debt. My problem is that the housing prices where I live in Silicon Valley are just way too expensive for me to be able to buy anything. What do you think I should do? - Keith, San Jose, California
Mission West Properties, a real estate investment trust that manages properties in the Silicon Valley, said a private equity fund was negotiating to buy it for about $1.8 billion.
At first glance, private equity and venture capital are kissing cousins - same partnership structure, same investment pool, same pedigreed MBAs. But ever since the Senate Finance Committee this spr...
There's a new bubble in Silicon Valley, and I'm in the office of John Doerr, watching it expand. Doerr, of course, is the legendary venture capitalist and inflator-in-chief of the last glorious inv...
A funny thing is happening in Silicon Valley. As white-knuckled investors fear the worst from the stock market's recent hiccups and the media trots out de rigeuer photos of bald Wall Street traders breaking out in a sweat, the next generation of entrepreneurs keeps quietly working on the next big thing in garages and dorm rooms.
Silicon Valley's technology workers may be among the most likely to succeed, but they aren't usually voted best tressed.
Amid all the post-election noise, Democrats haven't been subtle about their top priorities once they take control of Congress: boost minimum wage, reform Medicare, rescind the 2001 tax cuts, and clean up "the swamp" of Washington lobbying.
Morning meetings
For a location where so much money is made, Silicon Valley struck me as remarkably friendly. With so many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists running around hoping to hook up and make a fortune together, I guess, everyone appreciates that social capital is a valuable asset.
When working in the tropical sun becomes too much for Ivko Maksimovic, the lanky Serbian heads to one of the Dominican Republic's pristine white-sand beaches. He first gathers up a black hat, mosqu...
(FORTUNE Small Business) - Investing is different for small-business owners. The guidelines that financial experts tout make sense for the masses - keep credit card debt low, diversify your holdings, don't put your home at risk - but many successful entrepreneurs break all three of those rules on their first startup.
The right time to raise the first round of money varies from startup to startup. Some companies -- mostly software or Web-based ventures -- need little cash to get off the ground.
Are children too young to learn to be entrepreneurs?
If you want to view the entrepreneurial future of space travel, start in Los Angeles. Drive 100 miles northeast until you reach sun-baked Mojave (population 3,800). Head to the local airport. Don't expect to see launchpads or fancy command centers--there are none to be found. Yet history is being made here: In 2004 the Federal Aviation Administration certified Mojave Airport as a civilian spaceport. Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, has its headquarters near the runways, and it was from here that his SpaceShipOne became the first private spacecraft to carry a passenger beyond the stratosphere.
When you jam 150,000 people into a couple of square blocks, everyone is so busy waiting in cab lines, lunch lines and restroom lines, that it can be hard to think about anything more important than getting through the day. But as the hoards of gadget salesmen, geeks and technology executives head home from the giant four day Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, one important theme is emerging: Hollywood and Silicon Valley are learning to get along.
Tour Silicon Valley and it's hard to believe there ever was a dot-com crash. You'll hear geeks boast how the web is changing the world. You'll see search engines and blogs supported by online adver...
You'd think it would be every nerdy country boy's dream. Kord Campbell, a 38-year-old coder from Oklahoma, started a search engine company called Grub back in the day and sold it in early 2003 to a...
Job losses in the once booming Silicon Valley have slowed to about half of their rate a year ago, a published report said Monday.
Here's a sign of the times: Even poll questions have turned pessimistic. Search firm Christian & Timbers recently asked more than 200 executives to choose the place they would never want to work, f...
The first real conversation I ever had with Josh Quittner, Business 2.0's editor, was, fittingly enough, about the future of Silicon Valley--about whether the Valley has a future, that is. This was...
Executives in Silicon Valley are whining loudly about the increasingly likely prospect of having to expense stock options. Their complaint is not just that they fear anything that eats into their h...
The deal flow has slowed in Silicon Valley, but budding entrepreneurs in Japan can still get funding on Money no Tora ("Money Tigers"), a hit TV show that crosses a business-plan pitch session with...
One of my editors asked me why Silicon Valley wasn't producing major startups anymore--companies like Hewlett-Packard, Intel Corp., and Apple Computer.
The dot-coms have withered, would-be VCs are moving on, and investors have stopped fixating on Silicon Valley. But the most tangible reminder of the tech boom still looms large over the Valley: The...
Nothing has stirred up Hollywood lately like Ted Waitt's talented Holstein. Waitt is CEO of Gateway, the nation's fourth-largest PC manufacturer, and the cow is his company mascot. It's the Holstei...
They did not think of themselves as Masters of the Universe, at least not yet. They were just a bunch of startup folks, gathered in a startup office, listening to that startup pep talk that everybo...
It has been a rough year for the big idea. Lots of risk (for once) and little reward. A sudden craving for old-economy stability, and a shudder at the very sounds of the new economy. With founders ...
Any kindergarten teacher can tell you that sharing is a virtue. And while we may not have exactly embraced the notion in our short-pants days, the idea is back--in a way that even has the flat-line...
Every two years or so Silicon Valley, that world-famous factory of futures, has a new eternal verity. In 1997, as the first dot-com millionaires were crawling out from under their desks into the pa...
Not long ago, Peter deCourcy Hero, the 57-year-old president of Community Foundation Silicon Valley, sat down with a young dot-com mogul who had resolved to direct some of his newly minted millions...
College presidents seem increasingly beleaguered by their jobs these days, and no wonder. Unlike a corporate CEO, a university president has little formal power. He can't fire faculty, boss around ...
I sit up straight in bed, drenched in sweat. It is pitch-black. The alarm clock shows 3:17 A.M. I'm having a nightmare. I don't often have nightmares, but this one is a doozy. You could call it a b...
For Chris Shenon and his wife, Amanda, Nasdaq's recent dive couldn't have come at a better time. The thirtysomething couple had been looking for a house in Silicon Valley for months but had been be...
When, in the early 1600s, the astronomer Galileo began resurrecting a cockamamie notion from the previous century--that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe--the Florentine was...
Despite the bluster about the new economy, there's not much that's actually new. Productivity growth is no faster than in the 1960s. Inflation hasn't been tamed (look no further than Wall Street's ...
The Lucky Chances casino in Colma, Calif., a town just south of San Francisco known mostly for its endless cemeteries, has none of the glitz of a Vegas gambling palace. With its scruffy carpeting a...
Back when greed was good, in the 1980s, a lot of rapacious capitalists got together and decided it was okay to do some bad things, like selling junk bonds to each other and doing insider trading an...
Being a single guy in Silicon Valley isn't easy. For one thing, the numbers don't work in your favor. Officially there are 40,641 more men than women between the ages of 20 and 44 in Santa Clara Co...
In Silicon Valley, starting a company and selling it before it went public used to be a last resort. It meant admitting that you wouldn't get to be the next Bill Gates or Larry Ellison. Most of the...
A shrewd Silicon Valley friend recently adopted the practice of popping onto Amazon.com to send potential clients the gift of a relevant book right after meeting them. Almost without exception, he ...
Two weeks after I arrived at my startup, my boss asked me to present a product plan to my colleagues. I was shocked. He tried to reassure me: Just throw together some slides and tell us what you wa...
There has been much--perhaps too much--said about the approach of the new millennium. After all, what real change will Jan. 1, 2000, bring other than the resolution of our Y2K anxiety? Well, small ...
Many of the brightest ideas for new pieces of computer hardware emanate from companies like Adaptec, a Silicon Valley outfit that turns over most of its production to people on the opposite side of...
I contributed $1,000 to the campaigns of Both Bill Bradley and George W. Bush. A reporter at the Wall Street Journal picked this up and called to find out why I was working both sides of the street...
It doesn't pay to be in a hurry. The Silicon Valley insider never rushes to sign up with a company whose IPO is just around the corner. But how could I have known that when I started out?
Deep within a Mountain View, Calif., technology park, somewhere inside the headquarters of Silicon Graphics Inc., I encounter a noisy cluster of software engineers drinking champagne. It's 3 P.M. o...
Three years ago, shortly after I moved to Silicon Valley, a friend with years of experience in the high-tech scene gave me a bit of advice. "Stay with your job [I had just started working at an Int...
In early July, before the heat wave enveloped my hometown of New York City, I set out for San Francisco to spend the summer exploring how big money has changed life for Internet people there and in...
New presidents who win by landslides and newlyweds without jobs to go back to are allowed long honeymoons. And at least since the dawn of the World Wide Web as a commercial event (circa 1994), earl...
Chris Misner, the co-founder of a Web startup called itixs.com (business plan as yet undisclosed), sounds like others at Bay Area startups when he talks about choosing a law firm: "It's overwhelmin...
Mount Everest base camp, May 1999. In the frigid morning air, on a laptop charged up by a pair of car batteries, technology executive Charles Corfield furiously pecks out an e-mail to Silicon Valle...
When it comes to financial statements, tech companies like to think that they're special, that the old rules don't apply. After all, their investors certainly don't hold them to the same standards ...
The newest power brokers in Silicon Valley are not the people you'd expect. Forget about entrepreneurs and their ideas (they're plentiful) or investment bankers (they'll fund anything). Instead, th...
The New York City real estate lady is stammering, "That, that...that's ridiculous! Why would anyone do that?" Congratulate me. I have done the impossible. In the middle of the wildest housing marke...
For the second year in a row, FORTUNE's list of the best places for minorities to work has a glaring hole: Silicon Valley. Just two of the 50 companies on our list are based in the Valley: Sun Micr...
Tony Fadell is happy to hand you his latest business card--senior director of music strategy at RealNetworks. But in his desk drawers you'll find old cards, from Philips, General Magic, Rocket Scie...
Everyone knows that you can use the Net to hunt down rare books, find a scrumptious date, or engage in a gazillion other activities once limited to the telephone or (shudder) personal interaction. ...
In the beginning there were books. Then came CDs and videos. Travel vacations, toys, and prescription drugs followed. The latest e-commerce market to hit the Net? Pets. Until now pet owners haven't...
Kim Polese has never had a problem drawing a crowd. When she spoke last December to the Churchill Club, a nonprofit tech business group, some 350 people packed a room at the Santa Clara Marriott to...
Only in a country where we regularly pay farmers not to grow crops could a venture capitalist argue that if you have a good business idea, you might want to think twice about moving forward. But th...
It should come as no surprise that seven of our ten boomtowns are located in the West. After all, this part of the country has always attracted pioneers--in this case, entrepreneurs such as compute...
Anyone who has visited our Silicon Valley bureau in Palo Alto lately (it's in the quaint Victorian house located strategically across the street from the Gordon Biersch microbrewery) may have notic...
Given that tech stocks were hammered in August 31's stock selloff, you might expect people in Silicon Valley to be a little bummed out. But that, as I discovered when I went hunting for sob stories...
Looking back on it a few years from now, something surely will stand out, some signal that should have warned us that our infatuation with the stock market had gone too far. No, it won't be those s...
The pitch was irresistible: Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley, announced that the theme of its county fair this year would be "Hayrides and Hard Drives." There'd be prizes for Bill Gates l...
The end is near. Yea, I say unto you, we face apocalypse here in Silicon Valley. Consider this, my brothers and sisters: Whence will our food and our sustenance come when we attain the Holy Grail, ...
By all accounts it was the perfect Silicon Valley wedding. The venue was beautiful--a historic mansion in tony Woodside. Equally beautiful were the people. Matthew Sonsini, son of Larry Sonsini, ch...
Deep in the heart of every entrepreneur lies the secret and ever so slightly subversive desire to change the world. Not necessarily to stand reality on its head, but to take that one eureka! moment...
A diminutive 77-year-old, Tom Ford doesn't wear handmade Italian suits or own a yacht. He's never even met a model, much less dated one. But the 12 unassuming buildings he controls along Sand Hill ...
In a development that is causing panic from New York City's fashion runways to the fluorescent cubicles of Silicon Valley, the U.S. government is about to halt the flow of foreign talent into Ameri...
You might be inclined to think that the most important thing about a technology startup is, say, oh, the technology. Venture capitalists don't see it that way--and the way they see it is remarkably...
In late March, if all goes well, I'll move into a new house. In humble service to my faithful readers, I offer this new house--let's call it Digital Manor--as a test case of the new digital society...
You would think that with the cable industry's dark recent past--the way its stocks tanked after most of the cable-telco deals flopped, the way the information superhighway evanesced like a mirage-...
"You like me! You really like me!" No, it's not Sally Field. It's the gushing of an electrical engineer attending the Westech Career Expo, a job fair for hardware and software engineers. The June W...
David Weekly is in the process of forming two technology companies. His headquarters is cramped and messy, with tools on the floor and computer hardware crammed onto a small desk. Junk food and soc...
All those stock options floating around Silicon Valley have long been considered the perfect motivator for a hungry, creative work force. But recently some acute observers have reflected on the dow...
Every few weeks, Pete Davis gets another job offer. Recruiters call or E-mail, they dangle stock options and pay raises. He tells them no--politely, but firmly. He's happy where he is, working as t...
The armies of insect pests that destroy crops are winning. This despite the fact that, according to researchers at Cornell University, the U.S. uses 33 times as much pesticide as in the 1940s and t...
In the industries that have changed the world, from fertilizers to machinery to computers, the firms that make the big capital investment early are the ones that survive. The cost advantages are tr...
-- REGIS McKENNA, 49, longtime Silicon Valley public relations wizard, who is moving into other kinds of consulting: ''Public relations is dead as a concept.'' -- JAMES COLLYER, 47, metal finisher ...
NASTY and ruthless. That's how Wilfred Corrigan describes his reputation in California's Silicon Valley. He won this notoriety in the 1970s, when as president of Fairchild Camera & Instrument he le...
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