Peter Thiel, foremost among Silicon Valley's loopy libertarians and the first outside investor in Facebook, has written an essay declaring that the country went to hell as soon as women won the right to vote.
In an otherwise interminably boring Dean Takahashi interview, Bill Watkins, CEO of hard-drive maker and Robert Scoble sponsor Seagate, offers up this observation: "I had a discussion with a guy on one trip. I told him that the most important thing in my life was to get my daughters through high school without them…
Near the end of a Stirr mixer in San Francisco on Tuesday, I ran into Salim Ismail, the head of Yahoo Brickhouse and our newest Silicon Valley Tool, though he'd yet to get the prize for being one of the Bay Area's most annoying executives when we met. I noticed he had the name of his startup, Confabb, on his nametag…
When you can't take market share, take credit. That's the unspoken motto of Yahoo since Google overshadowed the Web pioneer, and no one has mastered the art like Salim Ismail, the desperately unpopular VP in charge of Yahoo Brickhouse, the San Francisco incubator charged with inventing the company's future. One Yahoo…
Philip Kaplan once ran the website InternalMemos.com, a compendium of leaked company missives. Now Valleywag has obtained one from AdBrite, the online-ad network Kaplan founded. AdBrite is now run by CEO Iggy Fanlo, who earns our Silicon Valley Tool award for railing at his employees about their work hours: "I…
Meet Jon Staenberg, the latest Silicon Valley Tool. Here's an assessment you won't get on LinkedIn: "Every time I meet him, I feel like I need to take a shower," says a Valleywag tipster. Why the unclean feeling? It's not clear why Staenberg should generate such visceral dislike. And yet he's a sort of Silicon Valley…
Reformed stock promoter Henry Blodget has a suggestion for CNET: Take it private, with the help of former CEO Shelby Bonnie. An excellent idea. From all we hear, morale couldn't be lower at the tech-news portal. And current CEO Neil Ashe isn't helping matters. His idea of a pep speech? "We should be more like Al…
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, conducted from his home office in ritzy Atherton, Calif., Guy Kawasaki drops a couple of gems. On defending the poor response to his investments while turning down Valley successes:
One can conclude that, if one is a self-serving, self-promoting, quasi-successful angel…Meet Michael Baum, the CEO of recently funded enterprise software company Splunk. Is he a hero for raising so much money at a splendid valuation, when all the Valley's buzz is on profitless consumer plays? Or is he deserving of our Silicon Valley Tool award for being a colossal jerk? Our commenters are leaning…
Stan Oleynick, the smug guy pictured here, wants to sell his name to raise capital for his new startup. The highest bidder will win the chance to rename the 23-year-old and a 10 percent stake of the entrepreneur's planned "revolutionary" venture. To sweeten the pot, Stan promises to break a world record, thereby…
Entrepreneur, programmer, man about town — if by "town," you mean "Palo Alto." That's our Dave McClure, part of the PayPal gang and now, in geek semi-retirement, an extreme fan of Facebook, the buzz-ridden social network. I've known Dave a long time, and respected his critical thinking skills (as well as his avid …
I've been thinking, obsessively, about the revelation Google CEO Eric Schmidt made in last week's earnings call that his company had overhired. Even more curiously, Schmidt defended the hiring binge, expressing his delight in the quality of the people Google's overeager recruiters had brought on board.
David Lawee, Google's vice president of marketing, gets a slavishly unquestioning interview on BusinessWeek's website. Lawee stayed relentlessly on message, painting the usual rainbows-and-unicorns picture of life at the Googleplex. His PR handlers surely must have been pleased. As long as no one bothered, that is, to…
