Startup & Silicon Valley News, Culture

2013 was a stellar year for Greater Bay Area companies attracting venture capital investments.

The 100 largest Bay Area VC recipients pulled in $5.7 billion in 2013, up from $5 billion in 2012. Even more notably, the top five companies grabbed a quarter of that money all on their own.

The Bay Area’s housing shortage seems to be getting worse by the minute. But what if the tech companies could, in one sweeping move, take care of the whole problem?

In a series of new 3D visualizations, Berkeley designer Alfred Twu imagined what Silicon Valley would look like if tech giants replaced the parking around their headquarters with on-site housing. In order to accommodate all of the workers, Twu filled the campuses of Apple, Google, and Facebook with 20 to 50-floor towers, all filled with 800-square foot apartments.

The line between work and play is blurry in the tech world. And as more young people flood into the city for work and look for friends, networking events have become a new sort of party circuit, one that mixes the trending startup lingo (“iterate,” “game change,” ted talks) with more traditional fare (booze, games). The team behind the Startup and Tech Mixer events think the demand for raucous and potentially career-building events is huge, and they might be right: This was their biggest work-centric rave yet, by far.

Wealth in itself is not a bad thing. But wealth causing a talent drain as people leave the Bay Area because they can’t get ahead is a problem -- and it’s only getting worse.

At the world's largest and most bewildering trade show brands like Unilever and Univision are sending their C-suite execs out with startup founders.

Google Ventures, the search giant's venture capital unit, no longer a Silicon Valley punch line, is shaking up the business.

For the second time in two weeks, protesters angry with tech-boom gentrification in the Bay Area surrounded and temporarily blocked corporate shuttle buses full of tech workers -- both in San Franc...

The rising housing prices and sense of inequity led to community protests this morning atValencia and 24th Street, with the intent of blocking a Google private bus, for many a symbol for all that is wrong with the tech bubble. The protestors demanded $1 billion dollars from the tech giants in order to fund affordable housing.

Of course, no one, tech rich or not, wants to pay $3,000 in rent for a one-bedroom apartment. The collective startup world cringed as news broke of a particularly insensitive response to the protestors: “Why don’t you go to a city where you can afford it? This is a city for the right people,” screamed someone who purported themselves to be a Googler.

According to the reporter who originally uploaded the video, the confrontation was actually a staged performance by who looks to be University of California union organizer Max Alper. (Update: Alpers confirms it was a stunt.)

Millions of California homeowners and businesses have installed solar panels on their roofs to generate their own electricity. Now a small but growing number of them want to pull the plug on their utilities by storing that energy in batteries and tap that power when the sun isn’t shining. And that has set off a fight over who will ultimately control the state’s power grid—California’s three big monopoly utilities or their customers empowered by companies like SolarCity and Tesla Motors.

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SolarCity, the Silicon Valley solar installer, has quietly begun to offer some homeowners a lithium-ion battery pack made by electric carmaker Tesla to store electricity generated by their rooftop photovoltaic arrays. Stem, another Silicon Valley company, will sell or lease a $100,000, 54-kilowatt-hour battery pack to businesses so they can arbitrage the grid by storing electricity when rates are cheap and then using that energy when they’re high.

There's a war brewing in the streets of San Francisco, and a lot of people could get caught up in it if the tech world doesn't start changing its self-centered culture.

Every day in every way, from rising rents to rising prices at restaurants to its private buses, the tech world is becoming an object of scorn. It's only a matter of time before the techies' youthful lustre fades, and they're seen as just another extension of Wall Street.

And when that happens, tenant advocates, community activists, labor unions and Occupy types are going to start asking why we're giving away the city to all these white-male-dominated businesses that don't even hire locals.

As key US tax incentives for renewable energy begin to disappear in the coming years, expect the pace of deal making to accelerate as investors try to lock in the tax advantages.

Between downtown San Francisco and the new Twitter offices six city blocks to the west, things get sketchy. There is a strip club, a budget motel with weekly rates and, on the gentrified edge of this no-man’s land, the offices of Medium, the new venture of Evan Williams, one of Twitter’s co-founders.

The 100 or so tech workers, packed into a Mission District bar with activists and politicians, expected a dialogue about San Francisco's high-speed gentrification - and how to stop it.

15 minutes in, they had already been told by activist Alicia Garza that the people responsible for the "flavor" that draws people to the city are "the folks who were living here before."

Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, the next housing rights advocate at the mike, reminded the crowd that the people who give San Francisco its character - think murals, street festivals, and the city's progressive roots - are being forced out due to the booming tech economy. Sherburn-Zimmer's voice was shaky as she continued, but she found enough confidence to tell tech workers that they benefit from privilege when it comes to media coverage, since reporters dotted the room that night but are usually absent from activists' protests.

The "Tech Workers Against Displacement Happy Hour," led by a union organizer and a tech worker, had advertised itself as a place where tech workers "sick of being blamed for SF's housing crisis" could come together to find solutions.

Brian Hanlon, a 31-year-old Forest Service employee, told tech workers to leverage their companies' resources and encourage employers to "do the right thing." "If your firm is having trouble finding a great new acquisition target and they have tons of money sitting around, maybe you can encourage them to donate some of that to these (housing) nonprofits as well," he said. Another man who didn't want to give his name, but said he was from the dot-com boom and called himself "part of the new upper class of Silicon Valley," encouraged tech employees to "acknowledge our privilege" and "listen to people's stories of eviction instead of looking at our phones."

Techies tired of making the daily pilgrimage by bus to Google's Mountain View headquarters may soon have another option: the search giant has plans to rent or buy space in the Mission, according to...

Thanks to all its money, Google is a big winner in the war for talent in Silicon Valley. The programmer told the startup thanks for the offer, but Google was currently paying him $3 million per year in cash and restricted stock units.

If you've ever had an internship, or seen "The Devil Wears Prada", you know that sometimes working as an apprentice means fetching coffee, making copies, and doing the busy work no other salaried employee feels like doing.  At big tech companies...

San Francisco-based social media startup Buffer just did something unprecedented: It published the salaries of every one of its employees online, available for the public to see.

For several hours on Saturday, Uber was maybe the most hated company in America.

Just got back to SF. I've traveled around the world and I gotta say there is nothing more grotesque than walking down market st in San Francisco. Why the heart of our city has to be overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash I have no clue. Each time I pass it my love affair with SF dies a little.

In San Francisco tech crowds, Uber is seen as the messiah. Other than Tesla Motors, there's probably no Silicon Valley company that has more insane expectations swirling around it. Plugged-in people in the Bay Area will tell you things that are hard to believe: Uber is the most exciting company in the Valley. Uber will be a $100 billion company in five years.

As the largess from tech companies has flowed into San Francisco, some residents say their workers are driving up housing prices and spoiling the city’s bohemian identity.

Across San Francisco and the region, young technocrats are taking over the leases of grand estates and transforming them into modern-day communes. Unlike hacker hostels, these "co-living spaces" are meant for entrepreneurs seeking a more permanent home and adopting a lifelong philosophy of communal living: shared groceries, family dinners and an emphasis on group perks (i.e., yoga rooms and bowling alleys) over personal space.

San Francisco-based Twitter’s hitch-free IPO seemed to to cement it.

In the decades-long tug-of-war between San Francisco and New York, the tech-and-housing fueled economic engine that drives the city by the Bay is purring, while New York, the epicenter of the recent financial crisis, still hasn’t quite returned to pre-crisis form. Here’s a quick look at how the two regional US titans—they both rank among the country’s most affluent areas—stack up in a few key areas.