Think Airbnb + Kickstarter

Last year, Ellen Pao sued her former employer, venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for allegations of gender-based discrimination. Though she ultimately lost her case, Pao inspired much-needed conversations about Silicon Valley’s diversity problem. Her fight against discrimination in the tech world also blew up at Reddit, where she resigned from her job as the interim C.E.O. after factions of the online community revolted against her decision to shut down subreddits that encouraged harassment.

Gawker is filing for bankruptcy. Peter Thiel, who is a Facebook board member and Donald Trump delegate, secretly sued Gawker in a proxy lawsuit and, even though the case is unresolved, it was enough to bleed and bankrupt the company. And so much of the Silicon Valley establishment cheered Thiel on.

A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation? Nancy Jo Sales investigates. The waiter with the handlebar mustache encourages us to “participate in the small-plate culture.” Geraldine’s, the swank spot in Austin’s Hotel Van Zandt, is brimming with tech guys, some loudly talking about money. The college student at our table recommends the ribs—she’s been here before, on “dates” with her “daddies.”

Although Donald Trump just lined up Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel for a Republican National Convention speech, a new open letter makes it clear that much of the tech industry remains concerned about the prospect of a Trump presidency. In the letter, posted today to Medium, luminaries of Slack, Facebook, Instagram, and several other companies and organizations say that "Trump would be a disaster for innovation." Signers include high-profile names like Tim Wu, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Butterfield, Padmasree Warrior...

Marissa Mayer may be ending her tenure at Yahoo on a sour note. Yahoo is writing down the value of its Tumblr acquisition by $482 million, citing lower projections for the social network's future performance, the company announced Monday. This comes after Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30) took a $230 million similar writedown last quarter on its Tumblr buy. In total, Yahoo has now written down more than half of Tumblr's value since acquiring it for $1.1 billion in 2013 -- rendering Mayer's biggest acquisition to date effectively worthless.

A lawyer and artist in Washington D.C. hopes to gain tens of thousands of dollars from a prescient decision he made years ago. Jeremy Peter Green, a 28-year-old who goes by the pen name Jeremy Pegg, bought the ClintonKaine.com domain for $8 in 2011. Now that Hillary Clinton is officially the Democratic Party nominee for president and has chosen Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate, Pegg says he wants $90,000 in exchange for handing over the domain name and control of the site.

When the interviewers at a startup told John Wheeler he wouldn’t be a good “cultural fit,” he knew they were referring, at least in part, to his age. Wheeler, who lives in Temecula, California, doesn’t believe he was outright discriminated against, but at 37, he knows his interests are likely different from the 20-something “brogrammers” commonly found at startups. “The interview was generally positive,” he writes in an email. But after reading two stories this week about age discrimination in the tech industry...

Gawker Media LLC has asked the judge overseeing the company’s bankruptcy to authorize a probe into the relationship between billionaire Peter Thiel and the lawyer representing former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan as well as several of the media group’s other creditors. In a filing Tuesday in bankruptcy court in Manhattan, Gawker’s lawyers said they believed that Mr. Thiel may have been involved in financing as many as eight...

The Wall Street Journal's earlier report about an expected record-setting 2016 in regards to chinese investment in the United States was right. Newegg Inc., one of the most popular online tech-related retailers, is now reportedly owned by chinese company Hangzhao Liaison Interactive Information Technology Co., Ltd. (Liaison Interactive). After September's reports of a significant investment from the Chinese company on Newegg, which would allow the California-based company to "accelerate the pursuit of the company's strategic initiatives" and into high-growth markets such as eSports...

For the last year, the tech industry has been fretting about a bubble. Investors on all sides argued over whether valuations were too high or whether the tech sector as a whole was still undervalued. Yet while Silicon Valley was obsessing over the startup bubble, it collectively failed to realize it was living in a completely different kind of bubble: a political bubble.

The Trump-loving VC tried to prove that brilliant kids don’t need college. Here’s what happened.

Belarus is run by a former collective-farm manager and is known for manufacturing tractors. Now the former Soviet republic wants to be known as the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe.

Dan Chan, a magician to the stars of Silicon Valley, has a trick that makes top software engineers shudder. He’ll take a volunteer’s iPhone, show the crowd it’s locked, and then, after some hocus pocus — studying the volunteer’s fingerprints, say, or counting dramatically — he’ll hand the phone back, unlocked.

Bro C.E.O.s like the head of Uber will keep destroying companies until people stop paying them.

Venture capitalists are bright, clannish and almost exclusively male.

The belief that “natural” is better has animated many food and health trends in recent memory, with natural as a shorthand denoting purity, a lack of processing, or rejection of modern medicine: raw foodism, enthusiasm for raw dairy, the paleo diet, and organic evangelism. Next up: “raw water.”

If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss.” “I love risk.” “I want flexible work hours.” “I want to work on tough problems that matter.” “I have a vision and want to see it through.” “I saw a better opportunity and grabbed it. …” It never crossed my mind that I gravitated to startups because I thought more of my abilities than the value a large company would put on them. At least not consciously. But that’s the conclusion of a provocative research paper, Asymmetric Information and Entrepreneurship, that explains a new theory...

Most people think of entrepreneurship as a young person's game. But the highest-growth firms in the US come from entrepreneurs who are 45 years old.