Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the 12th-most populous in the United States. Other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world, according to the Brookings Institution, and, as of June 2021, has the highest percentage of homes valued at $1 million or more in the United States.
Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington is a Greek American author, syndicated columnist and businesswoman. She is a co-founder of The Huffington Post, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, and the author of fifteen books. She has been named to Time magazine's list of the worlds 100 most influential people and the Forbes Most Powerful Women list.
Matthew McNair Carnahan is an American producer, writer, and director.
Bradley Whitford is an American actor and producer. He is best known for his portrayal of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman in the NBC television political drama The West Wing (1999–2006), for which he was nominated for three consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards from 2001 to 2003, winning in 2001. The role earned him three consecutive Golden Globe Award nominations.
Silicon Alley is an area of high tech companies centered around southern Manhattan's Flatiron district in New York City. The term was coined in the 1990s during the dot-com boom, alluding to California's Silicon Valley tech center. The term has grown somewhat obsolete since 2003 as New York tech companies spread outside of Manhattan, and New York as a whole is now a top-tier global high technology hub. Silicon Alley, once a metonym for the sphere encompassing the metropolitan region's high technology industries, is no longer a relevant moniker as the city's tech environment has expanded dramatically both in location and in its scope. New York City's current tech sphere encompasses a universal array of applications involving artificial intelligence, the internet, new media, financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency, biotechnology, game design, and other fields within information technology that are supported by its entrepreneurship ecosystem and venture capital investments.
Steven James Zahn is an American actor and comedian. His film roles include Reality Bites (1994), Stuart Little (1999), Shattered Glass (2003), Sahara (2005), Chicken Little (2005), the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series (2010–2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), The Good Dinosaur (2015), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017). On television, Zahn appeared as Davis McAlary on HBO's Treme (2010–2013), and as Mark Mossbacher in the first season of the HBO satire comedy miniseries The White Lotus (2021), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Zahn won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male for his performance in the film Happy, Texas (1999).
Stephen Leo Poizner is an American businessman, technology entrepreneur and former Republican California Insurance Commissioner and Gubernatorial candidate. Poizner also was an independent candidate in the 2018 California Insurance Commissioner election.
HuffPost is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and covers politics, business, entertainment, environment, technology, popular media, lifestyle, culture, comedy, healthy eating, young women's interests, and local news featuring columnists. It was created to provide a progressive alternative to the conservative news websites such as the Drudge Report. The site offers content posted directly on the site as well as user-generated content via video blogging, audio, and photo. In 2012, the website became the first commercially run United States digital media enterprise to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Robert Bruce Simonds Jr. is an American film producer, entrepreneur, and the founder & chairman of STX Entertainment, which creates, produces, distributes, finances, and markets film, television, digital media, and live events as well as virtual reality. The company bridges the gap between China and the US, with additional partnerships around the globe. According to The Wall Street Journal in its first four years, Simonds more than tripled the company's valuation to an estimated US$3.5 billion. In September 2017, it was reported that STX was close to an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (SEHK), and in April 2018, the company announced it had filed for an IPO. In October 2018, it was announced that STX would not go through with the IPO, as market conditions had changed. Prior to working at STX, Simonds was an independent film producer whose over 30 films have generated more than $6 billion in worldwide box office revenue.
J. Michael Arrington is the American founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in America and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.
Michaela Suzanne Watkins is an American actress and comedian. After several years performing with the Los Angeles comedy troupe The Groundlings, Watkins achieved widespread attention for her brief stint as a featured player on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live during its 34th season between 2008 and 2009. Since leaving SNL, she has starred on the Hulu series Casual and on the short-lived sitcoms The Unicorn and Trophy Wife. Watkins has also had recurring roles on other television series, such as The New Adventures of Old Christine, Catastrophe, Enlightened and Search Party and appeared in films such as The Back-up Plan (2010), Wanderlust (2012), Enough Said (2013) and Sword of Trust (2019).
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.
Lamorne Morris is an American actor, comedian, and television personality. He is known for roles such as Daniel in "Call Me Kat", Winston Bishop in the Fox sitcom New Girl (2011-2018), Darrin Morris in the National Geographic docudrama Valley of the Boom (2019), about the 90s tech boom, and cartoonist Keef Knight in the Hulu comedy Woke (2020-2022). He has also had supporting roles in the films Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016), Game Night (2018),Jumanji: The Next Level (2019), and Yesterday (2019).
sfGirl.com was an online community founded by Patty Beron (sfGirl), a social media pioneer. While sometimes referred to as a "legendary party crasher" and "queen of San Francisco's dot-com party scene," Beron was a web developer and programmer with a vision to create one of the first noted online communities in the Bay Area. The website was active as an online community from April 1999 until October 2002.
Silicon Valley is an American comedy television series created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky. It premiered on HBO on April 6, 2014, and concluded on December 8, 2019, running for six seasons for a total of 53 episodes. Parodying the culture of the technology industry in Silicon Valley, the series focuses on Richard Hendricks, a programmer who founds a startup company called Pied Piper, and chronicles his struggles to maintain his company while facing competition from larger entities. Co-stars include T.J. Miller, Josh Brener, Martin Starr, Kumail Nanjiani, Zach Woods, Amanda Crew, Matt Ross, and Jimmy O. Yang.
John Altschuler is an American television and film writer and producer known for his collaborative projects with Mike Judge and Dave Krinsky.
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.
SiliCon with Adam Savage is an annual pop culture and technology convention, at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California. The convention was founded by Steve Wozniak, Stan Lee and Rick White. The inaugural event was held March 18–20, 2016 at San Jose's McEnery Convention Center. The convention was rebranded as SiliCon in early 2020 and Adam Savage was appointed as the creative director.
John Timothy Karna is an American actor. He is known for his role as Noah Foster in the first two seasons of the MTV slasher television series Scream, based on the film series of the same name. He is also known for appearing in the films Bindlestiffs (2012) and Premature (2014).
Woke is an American comedy television series co-created by Keith Knight and Marshall Todd and starring Lamorne Morris. The series premiered on Hulu on September 9, 2020. On November 17, 2020, Hulu renewed the series for a second season, which premiered on April 8, 2022. In June 2022, Hulu cancelled the series after two seasons.
