Peter Andreas Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of US$11.2 billion and was ranked 212th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Kara Anne Swisher is an American journalist. She has covered the business of the internet since 1994. As of 2023, Swisher was a contributing editor at New York Magazine, the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher, and the co-host of the podcast Pivot.
TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high-tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
Matt Cohler is an American venture capitalist. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008 and was formerly a general partner at Benchmark. Cohler has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors and in 2019 was named to the New York Times and CB Insights list of top 10 venture capital investors. Cohler made the Forbes 'America's 40 Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40' list in 2015.
Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic. He is Distinguished Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Engineering at Silicon Valley and Distinguished Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He is also author of books Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back, Driver in the Driverless Car,Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, and Immigrant Exodus.
PandoDaily, or simply Pando, was a web publication offering technology news, analysis, and commentary, with a focus on Silicon Valley and startup companies.
Bloomberg Beta is an early stage venture capital firm with $375M under management, capitalized solely by Bloomberg. The fund exists to expand Bloomberg's horizons by investing in companies built by extraordinary founders that are creating profound change in the way business operates, with a focus on machine intelligence and the future of work. Bloomberg Beta was recognized by VC review site CB Insights as the #2 investor in AI.
Titstare is a fictional mobile application centred on pictures of men staring at women and their breasts. It was introduced at a 2013 hackathon at TechCrunch's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, California by two Australian developers. Titstare became the subject of public controversy, with the skit being described as symptomatic of sexist attitudes in Silicon Valley's startup culture. Conference organizers later apologized for the misogynistic presentation.
Sexism in the technology industry is overt, subtle, or covert occupational sexism which makes the technology industry less friendly, less accessible, and less profitable for women. While the participation of women in the tech industry varies by region, it is generally around 4% to 20% depending on the measure used. Possible causes that have been studied by researchers include gender stereotypes, investment influenced by those beliefs, a male-dominated environment, a lack of awareness about sexual harassment, and the culture of the industry itself. Margaret O'Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, in 2019 concluded that Silicon Valley is uniquely influential locale that is shaping our world. But she points to problematic failures regarding diversity. Male oligopolies of high-tech power have recreated traditional environments that repress the talents and ambitions of women, people of color, and other minorities to the benefit of whites and Asian males.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Nellie Bowles is an American journalist. She is noted for covering the technology world of Silicon Valley. She has written for the English-language Argentine daily the Buenos Aires Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, The California Sunday Magazine, the technology journalism website Recode, the British daily The Guardian beginning in 2016, then for Vice News, The New York Times and most recently The Free Press.
Cyan Banister is an American angel investor and entrepreneur. She is a partner at Long Journey Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund. She was an early investor in Uber, Niantic, Postmates, DeepMind, Carta, Thumbtack, Flexport, Affirm, and SpaceX, and co-founded Zivity, an adult-themed social networking site. Banister was the first woman investing partner at the venture capital Founders Fund, where she led seed and early-stage investments.
Astral Codex Ten, formerly called Slate Star Codex (SSC), is a blog focused on science, medicine, philosophy, politics, and futurism. The blog is written by Scott Alexander Siskind, a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, under the pen name Scott Alexander.
Uncanny Valley is a 2020 memoir by writer Anna Wiener. The book focuses on Wiener's transition from the publishing industry to a series of jobs at technology companies, and her gradual disillusionment with the technology industry.
Taylor Lorenz is an American journalist. She is a podcaster for Vox Media, hosting a show called Power User, and founded the Substack publication "User Mag". She was previously a columnist for The Washington Post, a technology reporter for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider, and social media editor for the Daily Mail. She is particularly known for covering Internet culture. In 2023, she published a book called Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.
Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco.
Erik J. Larson is an American writer, tech entrepreneur, and computer scientist. He is author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do.
Avery Trufelman is a millennial podcaster and radio producer. She is best known for her work on 99% Invisible (2013–2020) and its spin-off, Articles of Interest (2018–present).
Aubrey Hirsch is a writer and illustrator from Cleveland, Ohio, who has published personal essays and comics in the New York Times,Time Magazine, Vox, The Nib, and elsewhere. She published a short story collection, Why We Never Talk About Sugar, in 2013, and her essays and stories have been published in anthologies and collections, including Roxane Gay's Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, and Pittsburgh Noir. Hirsch is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing and a 2022 Sustainable Arts Foundation award winner for graphic memoir.
Casey Newton is an American technology journalist, a former senior editor at The Verge, and the founder of, and writer for, the Platformer newsletter.
