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silicon valley tool

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silicon valley tool

Seagate CEO is totally Valley's grossest dad


In an otherwise interminably boring Dean Takahashi interview, Bill Watkins, CEO of hard-drive maker and Robert Scoble sponsor Seagate, offers up this observation: "I had a discussion with a guy on one trip. I told him that the most important thing in my life was to get my daughters through high school without them becoming pregnant." This is the same guy, we'll remind you, whom we named a "hero" for forthrightly admitting, "We're building a product that helps people buy more crap — and watch porn." More »

12:20 PM on Thu May 22 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,746 views, 12 comments

Latest by Jimmy the Saint: "For the crime of oversharing, Watkins has gone from hero to zero" Ricki Lake is now writing for Valleywag? more »

salim ismail

Silicon Valley Tool tries to cozy up to Valleywag

Near the end of a Stirr mixer in San Francisco on Tuesday, I ran into Salim Ismail, the head of Yahoo Brickhouse and our newest Silicon Valley Tool, though he'd yet to get the prize for being one of the Bay Area's most annoying executives when we met. I noticed he had the name of his startup, Confabb, on his nametag instead of Yahoo. When asked why he wasn't representing Yahoo, he responded he wanted to "get the $10 fee" — the price Stirr charges for startup founders, instead of paying the $20 general admission fee. (Okay, he's cheap, but you'd be cheap, too, if you'd started seven companies without a single successful exit.) We chatted for a bit about Brickhouse. Then, when I started jotting down notes and he realized I might quote him about dodging the event's full fee, the conversation with the wantrepreneur turned downright silly. More »

7:20 AM on Thu Nov 15 2007
By Megan McCarthy
2,040 views, 9 comments

Latest by Stawker: You can see the 12-minute gap above where Boutin got his coffee. He's right though. No way would Denton or more »

silicon valley tool

Yahoo Brickhouse exec in the doghouse

When you can't take market share, take credit. That's the unspoken motto of Yahoo since Google overshadowed the Web pioneer, and no one has mastered the art like Salim Ismail, the desperately unpopular VP in charge of Yahoo Brickhouse, the San Francisco incubator charged with inventing the company's future. One Yahoo insider calls him "notoriously slimy," and points to Ismail's recent announcement of Fire Eagle as an example of how Valleywag's latest and lamest Silicon Valley Tool does his work. More »

Feature

12:36 PM on Wed Nov 14 2007
By Owen Thomas
2,883 views, 2 comments

Latest by mandarin: Somehow Yahoo and Slime seems to mix very well these days... more »

silicon valley tool

AdBrite CEO wants employees to work 10 hours a day

Philip Kaplan once ran the website InternalMemos.com, a compendium of leaked company missives. Now Valleywag has obtained one from AdBrite, the online-ad network Kaplan founded. AdBrite is now run by CEO Iggy Fanlo, who earns our Silicon Valley Tool award for railing at his employees about their work hours: "I continue to see too few folks here at 9 AM; and too few folks here at 6 PM." Let's leave aside the issue of whether Fanlo is violating California overtime laws; long hours are part of the startup culture. We just want to know if Fanlo has considered that employees might be avoiding the office in order to minimize contact with the company's erratic founder. The full memo, as Kaplan himself would have run it: More »

3:58 PM on Fri Nov 2 2007
By Owen Thomas
3,705 views, 18 comments

Latest by Groovy Gnome: Is anyone tracking his hours to check if he's chained to his desk and setting a good example? He should more »

silicon valley tool

If a venture capitalist falls in the woods ...

Meet Jon Staenberg, the latest Silicon Valley Tool. Here's an assessment you won't get on LinkedIn: "Every time I meet him, I feel like I need to take a shower," says a Valleywag tipster. Why the unclean feeling? It's not clear why Staenberg should generate such visceral dislike. And yet he's a sort of Silicon Valley Everyman. He worked at Microsoft from 1988 to 1994, which means he got a firsthand education in how to scream at your colleagues and made a lot of money on stock options. He's now an "advisory partner" — translation: not a real VC — at Rustic Canyon Partners, one of the VC firms foolish enough to back perpetual money-raiser Visto. And he's on the board of LimeLife, a wireless-content startup which targets women. I guess it's board meetings at that last company which drive Staenberg out into the woods to get reacquainted with his masculine side. After the jump, an email Staenberg sent to friends, casual acquaintances, and at least one frenemy, recounting his recent trips to the "Family Farm," a Bohemian Grove-like elite retreat in bucolic Woodside, Calif., close to the VC epicenter of Sand Hill Road, and to Buenos Aires. More »

4:28 PM on Tue Oct 23 2007
By Owen Thomas
1,580 views, 11 comments

Latest by N/A: Earlier this year, in connection with an important nonprofit endeavor, a colleague and I had a brunch with Jon in more »

silicon valley tool

Buy CNET or the terrorists will have won

Reformed stock promoter Henry Blodget has a suggestion for CNET: Take it private, with the help of former CEO Shelby Bonnie. An excellent idea. From all we hear, morale couldn't be lower at the tech-news portal. And current CEO Neil Ashe isn't helping matters. His idea of a pep speech? "We should be more like Al Qaeda," he told an assembly of employees. You mean, hated by everyone on the planet? Judging from how his underlings feel, Ashe is getting a head start on that project inside his own offices. Cheer up, Neil! You just won the latest prize for being a Silicon Valley Tool.

11:51 AM on Wed Oct 3 2007
By Owen Thomas
954 views, 5 comments

Latest by fishneversleep: @tdiddy: @rexworld: You're both insane. Very amusing. But completely insane. more »

guy kawasaki

Can't spot a good investment, but he can run his mouth

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, conducted from his home office in ritzy Atherton, Calif., Guy Kawasaki drops a couple of gems. On defending the poor response to his investments while turning down Valley successes:
The only thing you can conclude is that it's a crap shoot. You have no idea what is going to succeed.
One can conclude that, if one is a self-serving, self-promoting, quasi-successful angel investor. Or rather, one can conclude that Kawasaki has no idea of what is going to succeed. The Silicon Valley Tool's attempts to befuddle his interviewer with truisms only gets worse when he starts defending his startup Truemors. More »

11:00 AM on Tue Oct 2 2007
By Tim Faulkner
2,188 views, 5 comments

Latest by andyfox1979: what an asshole. A person who thinks that "truemors" is the best thing to pour money in should not cast more »

silicon valley tool

Is Splunk CEO Michael Baum a hero or zero?

Meet Michael Baum, the CEO of recently funded enterprise software company Splunk. Is he a hero for raising so much money at a splendid valuation, when all the Valley's buzz is on profitless consumer plays? Or is he deserving of our Silicon Valley Tool award for being a colossal jerk? Our commenters are leaning strongly towards the latter. More »

2:04 PM on Thu Sep 20 2007
By Megan McCarthy
1,693 views, 6 comments

Latest by N/A: Baum is a tremendous douche but the attitude around Splunk is "he's our douche". I only met him briefly once more »

silicon valley tool

Stan Oleynick sets a record for Internet snake-oil sales

Stan Oleynick, the smug guy pictured here, wants to sell his name to raise capital for his new startup. The highest bidder will win the chance to rename the 23-year-old and a 10 percent stake of the entrepreneur's planned "revolutionary" venture. To sweeten the pot, Stan promises to break a world record, thereby getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, where his sponsored name will live on forever — or until someone else beats the former Oleynick's record by eating more hotdogs in an hour or whatever. Sound suspicious? We thought so, too. And it turns out this is just the latest of Oleynick's self-promotional stunts. More »

2:55 PM on Tue Sep 4 2007
By Megan McCarthy
620 views, 5 comments

Latest by cheesy: Why do you give these jackasses any coverage?! Any press is good press when you're a nobody like this looking more »

silicon valley tool

Who's Dave McClure, and why is he a Facebook fanboy?


Entrepreneur, programmer, man about town — if by "town," you mean "Palo Alto." That's our Dave McClure, part of the PayPal gang and now, in geek semi-retirement, an extreme fan of Facebook, the buzz-ridden social network. I've known Dave a long time, and respected his critical thinking skills (as well as his avid commenting on Valleywag). Which is why I've never understood why he joined right in the Valley's Facebook frenzy instead of standing back and, with all his experience, questioning the hype. For the answer, roll the tape. More »

4:23 PM on Thu Aug 2 2007
By Owen Thomas
1,968 views, 11 comments

Latest by rafer: And just for you, I changed my avatar to a shot in which I'm wearing a blue shirt. more »

toogle many googlers

Pick the Googlers who have to go

I've been thinking, obsessively, about the revelation Google CEO Eric Schmidt made in last week's earnings call that his company had overhired. Even more curiously, Schmidt defended the hiring binge, expressing his delight in the quality of the people Google's overeager recruiters had brought on board. More »

Feature

11:17 AM on Fri Jul 27 2007
By Owen Thomas
6,535 views, 17 comments

Latest by N/A: @playnice23, You must be a friend of Tracy Lee-Blumberg or a manager in OSO because you seem so adamant about more »

silicon valley tool

Meet the world's laziest marketer

David Lawee, Google's vice president of marketing, gets a slavishly unquestioning interview on BusinessWeek's website. Lawee stayed relentlessly on message, painting the usual rainbows-and-unicorns picture of life at the Googleplex. His PR handlers surely must have been pleased. As long as no one bothered, that is, to point out the obvious subtext: That Lawee's job has absolutely no point, and that he comes across as a complete tool. Ooops. I guess someone just did. Here are the lowlights of Lawee's interview, and why he wins our latest award for Silicon Valley Tool. More »

9:39 PM on Thu Jul 26 2007
By Megan McCarthy
3,885 views, 9 comments

Latest by valleydude: it is nonsense and hot air what you are saying. GOOGLE *absolutely* brought nothing to the picture with AdSense (that they borrowed more »