Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo: Jeff Chiu (AP) Throughout Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s excellent new book about fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, the $9 billion company keeps running into the same problem: would-be investors or retailers want to see a demonstration of its technology. This is an issue for Elizabeth Holmes’s company, because their shit…
In September, I met with a prominent entrepreneur looking for positive press on his new project. Meetings like these are a common, usually formulaic, part of my job—except in this one, the conversation drifted to the tech industry’s year of bad headlines. As we discussed the latest sexual harassment scandal, he posed a question: Will…
I first met Amy Cuddy in January, soon after she moved into a new office at the Harvard School of Public Health. Cuddy was, at the time, officially on the faculty at Harvard Business School, but she was taking a temporary leave, her small box of an office filled with boxes. As she talked about…
Illustration: Jim Cooke Congratulations to all the wieners. Mark Halperin (and sidekick John Heilemann), Bloomberg Just about the only good thing you can say about Mark Halperin (and John Heilemann) is that they managed to swindle a lot of money from prickly billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who hired the two of them in 2014 for a…
The War Room It was late morning on Friday, October 18, when Elizabeth Holmes realized that she had no other choice. She finally had to address her employees at Theranos, the blood-testing start-up that she had founded as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, which was now valued at some $9 billion. Two days earlier, a damning…
Gawker.com is shutting down today, Monday 22nd August, 2016, some 13 years after it began and two days before the end of my forties. It is the end of an era. The staff will move to new jobs on other properties in Gawker Media Group, which are lively and intact, and the whole operation will…
An app to locate rentable driveways for parking. An app to locate rentable yachts. An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.” An app that guides mindful meditation. An app that imparts wisdom. And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings. We are overloaded daily with…
What is it Like to Wake Up and Have the Press Ready to Torpedo Your Business? In case you missed it, the press yesterday ran several stories questioning the viability of a wireless charging company I invested in called uBeam. Obviously my day turned out very differently than I had anticipated when I woke up,…
Hi Marc, how’s your weekend going? Mine has been fantastic so far. The weather in SF is gorgeous and my hike from Ocean Beach to the Presidio was wonderful. On the way home, I picked up some breakfast at Tartine. The line was actually bearable this morning because all the halloween drunks are still in…
Amazon has posted an aggressive response to the “everyone at Amazon is miserable but also paid well but also crying all the time” story in the New York Times. That story was published 64 days ago, which, according to my proprietary productivity algorithm, works out to about 21 words per day. This will presumably be…