#silicon-valley

#silicon-valley

After years of always being the perpetual bridesmaid, Lisa Catalano of San Mateo laid down her soft-pink bouquet, hung up her strappy blue satin Maid of Honor dress and drafted a text to her friends: I'm officially announcing my retirement from being a bridesmaid, she wrote. The next wedding I'm going to be in will be with my own groom, TBD. Two years earlier, her fiance had died of a terminal illness.

"We want all the brightest minds to come to the United States. Remember immigration is the foundation of the American dream, and we represent the American dream," Huang said. "And so I think immigration is really important to our company and is really important to our nation's future, and I'm glad to see President Trump making the moves he's making."

The tech industry's embrace of President Trump has left many of us asking the same question: What the hell happened to Silicon Valley? Is this merely a Big Tech ploy to negotiate favorable business circumstances, or does it point to a long-term ideological shift? On Tuesday, WIRED's panel of experts will discuss the impact that Trump has had on tech, and vice versa.

For decades, Mark Lemley's life as an intellectual property lawyer was orderly enough. He's a professor at Stanford University and has consulted for Amazon, Google, and Meta. "I always enjoyed that the area I practice in has largely been apolitical," Lemley tells me. What's more, his democratic values neatly aligned with those of the companies that hired him. But in January, Lemley made a radical move. "I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness," he posted on LinkedIn. "I have fired Meta as a client."

Every Wednesday he'd head to the nearest Armadillo Willy's barbecue restaurant for the Pit-Smoked Boneless Chicken Sandwich, a juicy thigh topped with jalapeno-spiked barbecue sauce and fresh jalapenos. When I worked for Apple I went to the Cupertino location. Then when I worked for Nest I went to Los Altos. Then Google bought Nest, so we by then it was a group, the VIM, Very Important Meeting lunch club had to come to this location, he said, sitting in what was formerly the Sunnyvale Willy's.

President Donald Trump convened some of Silicon Valley's most influential figures Thursday evening at the White House, hosting a high-profile dinner that underscored the tech industry's evolving relationship with his administration. The gathering in the newly renovated Rose Garden brought together 33 attendees, including CEOs from major technology companies, venture capitalists, and administration officials. With 13 billionaires in attendance and many others worth millions of dollars, the event was easily one of the wealthiest gatherings in the history of the White House.

Yeah, it's a great point because, you know, going from, you know, Caltrain where most of the areas around those stations, and certainly in the city, but also in some of the peninsula cities where for those who have not visited the peninsula south of San Francisco and north of San Jose, it's dense in a way, like you might find on the mainline outside of Philadelphia or like a Boston commuter line.

"You'd think, wouldn't you, that if you were immensely powerful and rich like Elon Musk and all these other tech bros and members of that podcast community," the former politico told The Guardian, "that you'd reflect on your good fortune compared with most other people?"

On September 9, WIRED is partnering with KQED for Uncanny Valley's first live show of the podcast. Join us in San Francisco to see hosts Katie Drummond, Michael Calore, and Lauren Goode shed light on the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. Get your tickets here.

Sam Altman remarked that he believes AI could be in a "bubble," suggesting that investors are overexcited about AI, yet expects OpenAI to invest trillions in data centers.

By the time Intel was celebrating its 10th anniversary in 1978 - a huge party at Daly City's Cow Palace, complete with disco music and a stock gift to every employee - the company had already racked up a list of industry-defining accomplishments.

Bob Lee was stabbed multiple times in San Francisco during a late-night dispute with fellow techie Nima Momeni, leading to his tragic death.

"I don't think it was received super well... this isn't what we wanted."

Altman called the current talent market the 'most intense talent market I have seen in my career,' emphasizing the fierce competition for AI professionals.

Kayci Lacob’s debut feature, 'Everything to Me,' is a self-distributed film reflecting on the complexity of growing up in Silicon Valley during the tech boom.

Elad Gil has made early investments in companies like Perplexity and Character.AI, and his portfolio includes seed or Series A stakes in over 30 unicorns.

Immad Akhund, an angel investor in over 350 startups, asserts that simply emulating Silicon Valley playbooks often leads to failure, as they are context-specific and not universally applicable.

Khanna's House district encompasses the headquarters of valuable companies, showcasing his role in technology and politics, which he leverages as he positions for a presidential run.

The Marin Community Foundation sold more than 13.4 million shares in Figma's IPO, making it the largest selling shareholder, netting over $440 million.

As a new kind of dealmaking is sweeping Silicon Valley, forcing employees to be vigilant about how much trust they are willing to put in startup founders.

Feld offers a quieter kind of wisdom. He's a systems thinker, a long-term optimist, and one of the rare people in the industry who treats business as a philosophical practice. His philosophy emphasizes the importance of mentorship and relationships that transcend financial metrics.

The 'Nerd Reich' is a web of powerful, ultra-wealthy tech billionaires whose politics push the country away from democracy towards unrestrained capitalism and monarchy.

This breaks the Silicon Valley social contract. This is bad for startup employees. They're going to be less likely to join startups. What's the point of joining a startup and working your ass off if you might get screwed?

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, humorously referred to the recruitment gatherings in San Francisco and New York City as a 'party' while seeking finance professionals to develop artificial general intelligence.

Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, suggested that New York legislator Zohran Mamdani's culture is based on deceit and promotes lying to advance an Islamist agenda.