Felt this one in SF 😳

How will the newly formed OpenAI Foundation eventually spend billions of dollars? Apparently, not on affordable housing in its hometown of San Francisco. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

ICYMI: here's what happened on Day 1 of Dreamforce in San Francisco this week. Benioff avoided politics for most of the day, then brought "special guest" David Sacks on stage to talk about Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, AI and crypto. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Will Eat Just IPO? How many ways can it use a mung bean? And why is CEO Josh Tetrick prepared for this to be his "last year"? I recently sat down with Josh at the company's Alameda headquarters to talk about this and more. Here's our full conversation. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Tim Draper has raised $200 million for a new VC fund at his firm Draper Associates which has made a bunch of new investments this month.

ICEBlock on CNN! #resist

"Everybody's got a price." Meta tried to buy Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence. Who might be the next big acquisition target? Here's what one expert told me last week after Mark Zuckerberg poached Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.

Forcibly removing someone for asking questions at a press conference and then telling bystanders they can't record cops putting them in handcuffs is authoritarian and contrary to everything the First Amendment stands for.

Could a VC fund create a new revenue stream for local governments? Berkeley Mayor Adena Ishii wants to find out. More details from my conversation with the mayor here. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Elon Musk confirmed in a new legal filing that he dropped just shy of $45 million into OpenAI before he left the organization in 2018. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

My latest cover story looks at University of California, Berkeley and its new approach to venture capital. Can the school catch the next trillion dollar company that emerges from the UC system? www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

"You are not going to get replaced by AI” … but "you are going to be replaced by people who know AI." I talked to Glean CEO Arvind Jain ahead of Glean Go in San Francisco. Here’s what he had to say about agents, jobs, raising funding and IPOs. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

"We're doing this to bring back this idea of starter homes." I talked to the co-founder of Berkeley startup Type Five about how it's using modular design and software to make homebuilding more efficient and affordable. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

It's 2015. President Barack Obama has accepted a "sky palace" jumbo jet from the Qatari government, which he'll own after he leaves office. "Everybody relax," he says in an interview with the New York Times. Everyone does. The networks then televise the military parade in his honor on his birthday.

Just curious, what’s the tariff on a $400 million jet from Qatar?

This new vibrating belt could be a game changer for women with osteopenia. Made by a Bay Area company, it slows down bone density loss and might even help reverse it before osteoporosis develops. I talked to CEO Laura Yecies who uses the belt herself.

“I don't love easy. I love being a driver, not a passenger," Instacart CEO Fidji Simo told me last year. Her next chapter will be driving operations at OpenAI. Here's my story and interview with Fidji from December. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

"This went from a radical concept that was very risky to something that now looks very institutional, systematic, repeatable." I talked to SignalFire co-founder Chris Farmer about the firm's new $1 billion fund and adapting to shifting headwinds. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Despicable. ICE targets a prominent union activist who has been working on US farms since he was 14.

UPDATE: OpenAI Startup Fund has now raised $129 million across five SPVs, according to filings that I reviewed. Here's how it all breaks down: www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Earlier this month, I attended a dinner featuring food made with a new type of vegan butter developed by San Jose startup Savor. It's not "plant-based," though. Here's what I ate and what the company is up to. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Berkeley is one step closer to launching a new venture capital fund after a UC Regents committee advanced the proposal to the full board. We also now know how big the fund might be. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

"Twenty years from now, it really should be that everybody in the country has a primary care dietitian right alongside his primary care doctor." I talked to Foodsmart founder Jason Langheier and new CEO Kurt Knight about what the nutrition telehealth is up to. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Healthcare AI company, fresh off a $250M round, looks to hire 150 people, most of them in San Francisco www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Felt that one for several seconds in the Mission. Magnitude 4.2 near Dublin. 🫨 earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/...

Scoop: UC Berkeley wants to launch a new VC fund that would invest in startups and other funds affiliated with the UC system. It would also return nearly all of its profits to the Berkeley campus. Here's what we know. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Rati Levesque was employee #1 at The RealReal. Now she's CEO. I chatted with her about competition from fakes, emerging trends like loud luxury, and how growing up in the Bay Area in an immigrant family has influenced her life. 📸 by @adampardee.bsky.social www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Check out our new Accelerator cohort in the San Francisco Business Times! @sarambee.bsky.social highlights the 10 organizations using tech to drive impact. Read more: www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

This new complaint against DOGE is truly cranked up to 11 from start to finish. What a way to start a lawsuit storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... h/t @mikesacks.bsky.social

What's an AI agent worth? $20/month? $200/month? How about $20,000/month? OpenAI is exploring some eye-popping subscriptions. www.theinformation.com/articles/ope...

Here's the story behind the headless robot. Many thanks to @jrdnbwn.bsky.social for talking to me for this story. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

NEW: Marocco has tried shutting down nearly all USAID programs & freezing foreign aid. He’s led the charge to place nearly all USAID staff on administrative leave. Officials said they see the move as retribution against those who opposed his earlier work. By @annamaria.bsky.social + Brett Murphy

No to ethnic cleansing’: over 350 rabbis sign ad in Feb 13 New York Times assailing Trump’s Gaza plan https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/13/rabbis-ad-trump-gaza-plan Full list which is growing https://www.saynotoethniccleansing.org #Trump #NYTimes

So RFK Jr came out of the gate with a broad statement decrying medication for depression, anxiety, ADHD, weight loss, and god knows what else. you know what went unmentioned? HGH. Look at him (or almost any guy in Hollywood these days) and ask yourself... www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

I am just going to keep on posting this every day until the White House stops unconstitutionally punishing the AP for not using "Gulf Of America." We're on Day 3 now.

While almost everyone else is chasing artificial intelligence, a San Mateo cybersecurity startup is already looking beyond the current AI hype towards a future when quantum computing starts breaking traditional encryption.

Car sharing company Getaround is shutting down its U.S.-based operations but maintaining its business in Europe. Nearly all U.S. employees will be laid off.

A new AI safety nonprofit called ROOST.tools launched yesterday during the AI Action Summit in Paris. Google, OpenAI, Discord and Roblox are among the founding partners. Can you guess which major tech companies aren't?

“Until Donald Trump and unelected billionaire Elon Musk stop their relentless spree of illegal power grabs that are inflicting pain on the middle class and damaging our national security, I’ll be voting no on all remaining top-level cabinet nominees,” Duckworth said in a statement

I linked DOGE staffer Marko Elez to a deleted X account that advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act, backed a “eugenic immigration policy,” and wrote, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity." He just resigned. www.wsj.com/tech/doge-st...

Last month, I visited @archive.org and chatted with founder @brewster.kahle.org about the old internet versus the new internet, free markets, competition, copyright, algorithms and how everything feels like it's monetized today. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

Silicon Valley's meritocracy in full force. Or perhaps Daniel Penny is a DEI hire?

General Motors is laying off an estimated 1,000 or more Cruise workers, with the remaining 50% of staff being offered jobs within GM. Here's a look back at Cruise's volatile final 18 months. www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...

GM finalizes Cruise acquisition as layoffs loom for workers

If Trump's tariff on Chinese imports actually happens tomorrow, the price of all the cheap shit Americans (especially poor shoppers) purchase will go up. And it won't just be 10%. A quick explainer on the de minimis loophole that might close tomorrow: www.theverge.com/news/605483/...

Former NFL quarterback Joe Montana has raised $100 million for a new fund at Liquid 2 Ventures, his San Francisco-based venture capital firm, according to a filing.

All the "cost of living" solutions focus on passing prices to consumers. No mention of, for instance, rent control or other measures to address real estate price gouging in the wake of the wildfires. Or anything that would truly upset corporations. www.kqed.org/news/1202312...

Scoop: People involved in WH discussions about TikTok say Oracle and Microsoft having talks about taking control of TikTok’s global operation, with ByteDance retaining minority stake www.npr.org/2025/01/25/g...

Muni’s on-demand Bayview shuttle is exploding in popularity

Krugman says the editors at the Times editorial page were increasingly trying to water down his columns and arguments www.cjr.org/analysis/pau...