Business

The best ideas win. Sometimes. The numbers tell us that Silicon Valley prefers helping largely white, male, urban-centered companies achieve billion-dollar valuations, lucrative exits, and mass political influence. That’s a problem for founders and technologists who are Black. Fewer than 1 percent of venture-backed companies are led by Black people and fewer than 5 percent …

Then, last week on Twitter, a VC named Balaji Srinivasan wrote a mocking reply to one of Lorenz’s tweets, involving alleged misbehavior of the CEO of the luggage startup Away. Lorenz defended herself and called out what she characterized as previous harassment by Srinivasan and others on a variety of platforms, including Clubhouse. A battle …

Civil rights leaders who instigated an unprecedented ad boycott of Facebook renewed criticism of the social media company for tolerating hate speech, misinformation, and harassment. In a meeting with Facebook executives on Tuesday, and a civil rights “audit” released Wednesday, activists demanded the company act more forcefully against specific posts, and change its management structure …

Since Uber and Lyft transformed urban transportation with ride-hail services, there’s been a big outstanding question: How much do drivers make? Dueling papers released Monday—one from Cornell University commissioned by the ride-hail companies, and one by researchers from The New School and UC Berkeley commissioned by the city of Seattle—will do little to resolve the …

Two schools of thought have emerged for altering US policing practices following the killing of George Floyd and widespread Black Lives Matter protests: reform the way police do their jobs, or defund or even disband police agencies. Reform-based initiatives like 8 Can’t Wait, endorsed by Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, call for new rules, …

The world came together to build 5G. Now the next-generation wireless technology is pulling the world apart. The latest version of the 5G technical specifications, expected Friday, adds features for connecting autonomous cars, intelligent factories, and internet-of-things devices to crazy fast 5G networks. The blueprints reflect a global effort to develop the technology, with contributions …

The UK company P2i adds water-repelling nanocoatings to smartphones and other gadgets. Normally, it flies engineers to its clients’ factories to identify and solve quality-control problems. That’s not an option in a world where flights are grounded, borders closed, and security tightened. So in some plants, P2i now relies on a system that uses artificial …

The future of gaming lives inside metal cages, if you believe some of the biggest gaming companies out there. Piled on hardware racks, blinking with little green lights, it’s calculated inside stacked-together computers and pumped out of a remote server through big underground tubes. It is distributed across the globe—Shanghai, London, Prague, Virginia—from nondescript, city …

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says his company wants to be the “Amazon for transportation.” Friday, Amazon made clear that it intends to be the Amazon for transportation. The ecommerce giant said it had agreed to acquire Bay Area–based autonomous vehicle company Zoox, a deal reportedly worth more than $1 billion. (Amazon did not respond to …

Spencer Donnelly, who goes by TheRussianBadger on YouTube, has cultivated an audience of nearly 2.7 million subscribers for his gaming videos. For years, business has been rosy. YouTube shares a percentage of the ad revenue on each of his videos, and the money is good enough that playing videogames on camera has become a full-time …