Salò, or the Funding Round
This is what really happens at Y Combinator Demo Days:
Entries Tagged as 'Silicon Valley'
Zynga Man’s Man Boobs
Zynga is an ethically challenged company that churns out Skinner Box “games” almost but not completely devoid of class or originality. It’s also been noted for being no less shy than most of the other post-Bubble get-big-fast startups such as Facebook or Groupon about accepting money from dodgy Russian outfits such as D.S.T. backed by hard men with criminal backgrounds such as Alisher Usmanov. More recently, Zynga has been noted for raping its early employees and being a toxic Taylorist work environment where many of the sociopathic management refugees from the EA Spouse fiasco a few years have set up shop. Fundamentally, Zynga operates as a classic Silicon Valley sweat shop designed to grind up young, naive (mostly male), relatively socially isolated nerds, using them and their output as chummy feedstock for the VC sharks who actually run the show. But these are all tl;dr compared to the single burning question raised by this week’s NY Times article: What’s up with Marc Pincus’s man boobs? He’s failing to adequately support at least a B-Cup there:
Zynga Man's Man Boobs
Capital Irony
The New York Times has an article reviewing a book which basically worries that Silicon Valley “innovation” is hollowing, consisting mainly of me-too companies with low barriers to entry being funded by cautious, herd-chasing VC cash and bought by large technology companies flush with dumb public stock market funds that have lost the ability to generate internal innovation. The first irony is that the book is written by a person who profitted handsomely when her streaming video startup (“funded in 6 minutes“!) was bought by Cisco in the late 1990s using a no-money-down dilutive stock swap at the tail end of the streaming multimedia mini-bubble.
The second irony? Right under the article, the first entry in the “Related” posts is Cisco Buys E-Mail and Calendaring Start-Up for $215 Million. Yes, in the middle of 2008, Cisco can still piss away $215m buying a three-year-old open-source, Linux-based email/calendar startup. In 2008, email/calendaring must be such a difficult, virtually intractable problem that it requires outside solutions.
Rolling Stone Template Journalism
Beginning of Rolling Stone article on Facebook, 2006-04-20:
Beginning of Rolling Stone article on Facebook, 2008-06-26:
Apparently the weather in Palo Alto is improving.
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