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This spring, C3 Silicon Valley (C3SV) — an independent offshoot of a Pentecostal megachurch, with three Bay Area locations — posted a rap video on its Facebook wall advertising Easter services. The lyrics were written by a former Google employee who now works full-time as a pastor for the church, and they are heavily laced with startup lingo.

"I’ve made so many errors you can’t even debug it / Like an elephant in the room, there’s no seeing above it / Got a job making money, but don’t even love it,” a young black man dressed like Mark Zuckerberg tells the camera. Quick cuts of distraught people and graffiti-covered buildings flash by as he continues rhyming about faith, skepticism, and venture capital: “If I had a startup, it would get a network effect / The valuation goes up, but is my value still met?"

Members of the church who work at Facebook — and there are many — used their allotted credits to boost the visibility of the post. As of this writing, it has about 61,000 views, roughly 80 times as many as the online recording of the Easter sermon itself.

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Silicon Valley might seem like an odd place for a religious revival, but the founders of C3SV have nonetheless appointed themselves missionaries to the locals, and are happily spreading the good word in the seat of innovation. The church is led by Adam Smallcombe, a charismatic 35-year-old pastor with an alt-country undercut, a winsome rhetorical style, and an affinity for motorcycles. Smallcombe and his wife, Keira, moved here from Sydney, Australia, in 2012, leaving jobs as youth ministers to “plant” a church in the Bay Area.

The C3 in the church’s name refers to C3 Global, formerly Christian City Church International, a Pentecostal (or “charismatic”) institution that launched in 1980 and went global as part of the wave of similar megachurches that emerged out of Australia in recent decades. The most famous of them is undoubtedly Hillsong Church, which has cultivated a youthful following despite its controversy-plagued leadership. Global outposts have attracted fashion models, NBA stars, and even Justin Bieber through upbeat, musically oriented sermons and rock star–like preachers who broadcast glamorous lives on social media.

A recent billboard for a C3 church in Toronto, for example, reads “For God So Loved the 6,” a reference to the rapper Drake’s nickname for his hometown.

C3SV is not affiliated with Hillsong, but it too aims to propagate its gospel by attracting the cool, young people in its own neighborhood — except that in Silicon Valley, those millennial influencers tend to work in tech. The constitution for Christian City Church International actually encourages a sort of modular adaptability, so that each individual church can be dressed up to blend into its environment. The church has “no particular ‘style,’” the constitution says. Rather, ministers are instructed to present New Testament principles in a “culturally relevant manner.” (A recent billboard for a C3 church in Toronto, for example, reads “For God So Loved the 6,” a reference to the rapper Drake’s nickname for his hometown.)

And so here in Silicon Valley, the Smallcombes are selling religion like a software product to a room studded with Apple employees and data-startup engineers. C3SV’s website, with its fresh design and frictionless commerce, looks like it could belong to any number of Valley startups; its donations page starts with the words “INVEST IN ETERNITY” and could just as easily work as crowdfunding for a cryogenics company. On Facebook, where C3SV has 7,000 fans, the church’s posts read with the chipper cultural fluency of any savvy #brand. Last month, at the apex of Pokémon Go mania, one said, in part, "To sum it up..we want to be the 'Pokemon Go' of churches. After all, the Great Commission is clear: GOTTA CATCH EM ALL!"

In Palo Alto, services take place in a rented Jewish Community Center a six-minute drive from Google’s headquarters and a 12-minute drive from Facebook (in Valley tradition, the Smallcombes refer to the location as a “campus"). The San Francisco campus’s co-pastors are Vance Roush, a former quality associate for Google who wrote the rap, and his wife, Kim. The co-pastors of the San Jose campus, Adam and Amy Hahn, are also a married couple: Adam recently left his role as a recruiter for Facebook to work full-time for the church, and Amy works as a recruiter for Apple.

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“We didn’t start this church just to create another church,” Smallcombe told me this spring. “We wanted to create a church that really appeals to the engineers of Silicon Valley.”

“We didn’t start this church just to create another church. We wanted to really appeal to the engineers of Silicon Valley.”

Available research indicates that, generally speaking, what appeals to the engineering class is secular thinking. Less than 5% of Silicon Valley residents attend church on Sundays, according to data from the Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm. Prevailing sentiment is that tech workers consider themselves too smart, too rational, and too comfortable to need God.

And so C3SV's sales pitch cannily inoculates itself from skepticism. Despite its Pentecostal roots, C3SV calls itself nondenominational, and at the end of the Easter video, it declares onscreen, “NOT RELIGIOUS? NEITHER ARE WE." Drive around the Bay Area long enough and you’ll see the same mantra splashed across billboards along the region’s highways.

But if “not religious” applies to C3SV’s marketing, it does not apply to its message, a distinction that became clear a few minutes into Easter services, when the fog machine kicked in and the worship team (a band of volunteers dressed in skinny jeans, flat-brimmed baseball hats, and flannel shirts) started playing soulful renditions of Christian pop hits. Lyrics like “The resurrecting King is resurrecting me” were displayed, karaoke-style, on a screen behind them. Smallcombe’s Easter sermon was called “Jesus Turns Tables,” and he delivered it with a big picture of the Last Supper in the background.

The dress code was Wholesome Coachella — maxi dresses, floppy felt hats, brightly colored jeans — and newcomers were handed a little cloth drawstring pouch that included a disposable cup, redeemable for a free cup of Apostle Coffee, sold in a little stand outside the auditorium ($3.50 for a flat white, $4.50 for a mocha). A pre-services slide deck included a call for designers and front-end developers to help the church with its design skills, and the main sermon was part of a series called Going Public.

“We’re not talking about an initial public offering,” Smallcombe explained. “We’re talking about being bold with the message of love, being bold with the message of grace, and really trying to change people’s perspective with how they see the church.” Like coming out of the closet as a Christian? “Absolutely,” he said.

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The Smallcombes never thought they’d end up in the US. “We weren’t thinking California — we were thinking Sydney, Australia. We’ve got beautiful beaches, amazing coffee. We thought, Hey, we’ll suffer for Jesus in the northern beaches of Sydney,” Adam quipped.

The first time Smallcombe told me the story of how he ended up in Silicon Valley, he said it started with a tweet from “a dear friend” who posted that he would love to see more churches in the region. Smallcombe didn’t mention the fact that there was already another C3 church in the Bay Area, or that the friend was his uncle, who founded C3SF (a separate institution from C3SV's services in San Francisco) 13 years ago.

Smallcombe’s grandfather was also a church planter in Australia. When I asked about the family business, Smallcombe said, “I guess you could say it’s in the family to do ministry,” as though the connection had just occurred to him.

The rest of the details, however, remained consistent between tellings. The Smallcombes were driving when they saw the fateful tweet that suggested planting a church in San Francisco. The couple, both college pastors, decided to visit, almost as a way to cross it off their list, and decided to swing by Stanford. In line at a Starbucks, the guy in front of them struck up a conversation. Smallcombe told him they were considering a startup church. “He looked at me really funny, as you can imagine, and he began to tell me the reasons why we shouldn’t start a church in the Bay Area. People have too much money, nobody needs God, everyone’s way too intellectual for that kind of thing — everything negative he was saying, maybe it’s just my nature, was confirmation for us. It was like waving a red flag to a bull. We’re like, 'This is it, we’re going to do this.'” His wife nodded.

That’s not to say that the Smallcombes’ beliefs have blended frictionlessly with Bay Area culture. For all the emphasis on making people feel welcome, Smallcombe’s response to questions about the church’s stance on homosexuality was evasive. “There’s a big difference between acceptance and approval,” he said. “I might not approve of somebody’s lifestyle, but I don’t need to approve of it. If I’m at a dinner table with them having a conversation, what I will do is, if they invite my perspective in, I will tell them what I believe and what I see the Bible’s position is but fundamentally I love them. I love people if they never ever change.”

Not coming out in support of gay marriage is a position, I said. Smallcombe replied that his position was love.

C3SV's parent, C3 Global, has plans as ambitious as any startup’s. Right now, it claims to have 400 churches in 64 countries; by 2020, it plans to have 1,000 outposts with 500 members apiece. Smallcombe said the church is “aggressive” with sending out church plants, which “doesn’t necessarily come with church funding — you have to raise that yourself, missionary-style.”

Richard Flory calls this kind of expansion the “franchise model.” Flory, a senior research director at the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture, visited Pentecostal megachurches for an upcoming book about changes in the religious landscape. Planting a new offshoot usually begins with “a soft launch in somebody’s apartment,” he said. In C3SV’s case it was at the Smallcombes' rental home in San Jose. (“We rent as a church and we rent as a couple and a family as well,” Smallcombe told me.)

Even when there is no direct financial connection, churches benefit from support networks. “They will go to each other’s conferences and they will essentially bring their own followers,” said Flory. Franchisees can also capitalize on the name brand and global reach through music, which allows them to grow very quickly, he said.

In less than four years, C3SV has drawn in more than 3,000 visitors, mostly from congregants inviting their friends, co-workers, and family members. The church has about 1,500 active members, and across all four Easter services, Smallcombe said about 1,300 people showed up. Stripping religion off the veneer of the church makes it easier to introduce it to others. Smallcombe said he wanted to create a church where members “weren’t ashamed or afraid to invite people.”

But he shrugged off the notion that acting as a missionary to Silicon Valley was a calculated move. “We definitely were aware ... that the influence out of this region is unlike any other region in the world," he said. "Our church is definitely not being funded by wealthy people. It’s by people who are just normal, average people, but they’re generous, even though [they are] paying [exorbitant] rent. They have seen what God has done in their life and for them I think it’s just a way to honor God and glorify God and give back.”

C3SV recommends tithing 10% of your income, though Smallcombe stressed that all you needed to do to be a member of the church is show up. This year, the donations page of C3SV’s website featured a video of a young black couple, Luke and Michelle, who met while they were undergrads at Duke. Luke is a software developer who used to work for Cisco before moving to a smaller data startup. Michelle, a lawyer, is also Australian. The video looks like an advertisement for a financial services startup. In it, the couple explain how they were able to donate “almost three times what we had pledged” to the church after Luke got the idea of selling their condo.

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C3 isn’t the only religious institution to see the Bay Area as an opportunity. The number of new churches evangelizing to the tech set is trending up. And in February, Hillsong announced plans to open a San Francisco outpost.

Flory said that although megachurches would like to give the impression that they make converts through evangelizing, his research has shown that they often target gentrifying urban areas in search of people who were already religious, but looking for a new place to worship. Flory calls it “church-switching.” Indeed, all the C3SV church members I spoke with were Christian before joining.

Justis Earle, a startup entrepreneur from Santa Cruz, had been actively attending church for about 15 years and was looking “for something a little bit more culturally relevant and exciting,” he said. He discovered C3SV through music. His "faith-based heavy metal" band, Above the Storm, were featured on a compilation album series called God's Love for Hardcore; one of the other bands are fronted by a married couple who attend C3SV and play on the church’s worship team. The husband, a software engineer, moved from Yahoo to Facebook, and Adam Hahn, co-pastor of C3SV San Jose, helped in the recruiting process.

“There are all these cool-looking diverse young people jumping around having fun at church. Sometimes you go to a church and you’re like, nobody’s ever having fun here.”

Earle works in tech too, at at a solar energy company, but he is trying to get his own product — Hansnap, a Velcro strap that stabilizes video footage from a smartphone — from Kickstarter to Shark Tank. (He's currently on the waiting list.) Earle started attending C3SV a few months ago at its San Jose outpost and was drawn in by the energetic service. “There are all these cool-looking diverse young people jumping around having fun at church," he said. "You go out to a club, go out to a concert, and have exhilaration. Sometimes you go to a church and you’re like, nobody’s ever having fun here.”

Smallcombe’s preaching style, which relies on Bible verse and not just “positive thinking or pop psychology,” also appealed to Earle. So did the idea of integrating one’s spiritual and professional life. “It is hard to find someone who is able to synergize their belief system on the weekend with what they actually do in the world,” he said.

“Like everyone else in the Bay Area, we moved out here for work,” Adam Hahn told me. He and Amy came here from Indiana and were looking for a place to “get plugged in” and make some friends. “Out here, man, time is money and people are always hustling, [to] innovate the next big thing, writing the next code,” he said. “Being Christian on top of that made it even tougher.”

Silicon Valley companies are well known for perks like free food and on-site amenities. But there’s a downside, Hahn said, to “having everything available to you” — when tech workers go home at night, he said, they think to themselves, I know literally no one out here besides my co-workers.

According to Hahn, tech's infamously blurred line between the personal and the professional made it easier to broach the subject of religion at Facebook. He regularly posted about going to church, but waited for curious colleagues to approach him first. “The biggest question that I get a lot," he said, "is, 'How can I believe in an invisible god — why is that real to me?'”

A number of co-workers at Facebook inquired about the Easter video. In a few instances, they argued that if C3SV were really not religious, it shouldn’t be a church. “Man, I get that,” said Hahn. “They have had an experience where they have been burned by a church." When people had a negative reaction to the video, Hahn would respond by saying, “I’d love to know why you don’t agree with what this video is portraying.”

This kind of provocation is exactly what C3SV wanted. Like the church’s billboards, it’s another way to start a dialogue with residents who might otherwise ignore their message. “When you look at Jesus, all his disciples, all the people he touched and performed miracles on,” said Hahn, “it all starts with a conversation.”

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Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner (right)

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For months Josh Kushner’s relationship to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was an open question in startup circles. But this week the notoriously press-averse venture capitalist finally gave them an answer: Kushner — whose firm, Thrive Capital, has backed companies like Instagram, Slack, ClassPass, and Warby Parker — won’t be voting for Donald Trump, according to a recent Esquire profile of his brother Jared, husband to Ivanka Trump and “de facto campaign manager” to her father.

A spokesperson for the tech investor told BuzzFeed News: “Josh is a lifelong Democrat, but has remained silent during the election out of respect for his brother. His family means everything to him.”

And a source with knowledge of the fund said, "Neither Mr. Trump nor anyone in the Trump family is an investor in Thrive."

These are not outright disavowals of Trump’s policies, but for an industry increasingly vocal in its antipathy for the Republican presidential nominee, they may have to suffice. And this leaves Kushner in an awkward position in Silicon Valley, where coming out against Trump has practically become a litmus test, and where just last month, 145 tech industry leaders signed an open letter condemning Trump.

Under ordinary circumstances, tech industry titans can stay on the sidelines, but Trump poses an extraordinary political threat, Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a prestigious Silicon Valley incubator, told BuzzFeed News.

“Everyone has to make a personal decision. I personally think, in this case, there is a moral imperative to take a side,” he said. “There’s such a clear cut decision between right versus wrong.”

Altman, who has supported some Republicans in the past, is also linked to high-profile tech startups, including Reddit, Instacart, Airbnb, and Dropbox, either through personal investment or through Y Combinator. In June he wrote a blog post calling Trump a demagogue and comparing the Republican presidential nominee to Hitler.

"I personally think, in this case, there is a moral imperative to take a side"

Altman said he liked Josh Kushner during the few times that the two investors have met.

“It’s always hard to have strong opinion [without] knowing someone’s full context and life,” Altman said in response to a question about whether Kushner should be more vocal about not supporting Trump, “but I will say in general I think people should be should be doing more and not less in this election.”

“Look I think that in a normal election there’s a long precedence for business leaders not taking a side for a lot of good reasons, but in this particular election,” Altman emphasized, “it’s in conflict with a very real chance of something happening that many people feel goes against everything they believe.”

Andy Weissman, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures who routinely communicates with Kushner about tech deals, not politics, said the current election has put startup financiers in an unprecedented situation.

“VCs are so weird — you’re just an investor, you’re not a political activist, you don’t have a political take one way or another,” Weissman said, “but some VCs are definitely becoming more active and vocal, and more are thinking [about whether they should take a stand].”

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Joshua Kushner (right) and his girlfriend, supermodel Karlie Kloss

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Sources who requested anonymity speculated to BuzzFeed News that the Trump connection was affecting Thrive's deal flow among startup founders who overwhelmingly oppose Trump. One investor mentioned a young company seeking funding who crossed Thrive off its list. But Kushner’s relationship with Trump doesn’t seem to have impacted Thrive Capital’s ability to close deals, based on the public track record. A month ago, Thrive announced that it had raised $700 million for its fifth fund, almost double the $400 million fund the firm raised in 2014. (Thrive launched in 2010 with a smaller $10 million.) In February, Oscar Health, the health insurance startup cofounded by Kushner, announced a $400 million investment from Fidelity

Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, arguably the hottest company in Thrive’s investment portfolio right now, said that Kushner’s connection to the presidential campaign was not a concern.

"Josh has always struck me as a genuine, thoughtful, and intellectually curious person,” he said in an email to BuzzFeed News. “It never even occurred to me that he would support Trump. I have a lot of sympathy for his position though. Family is complicated." (Butterfield’s father was a military deserter who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War.)

"Family is complicated."

Prior to the Esquire article, the only way for outsiders to parse Josh’s position on Trump was to look at his Twitter history, including favoriting Butterfield’s anti-Trump and pro-Obama tweets and recently retweeting President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

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Chris Sacca, a well-known investor in Uber and Twitter who bundled money for Obama, has been unrelenting in his censure of Trump. In his view, speaking out is easier for this strata of the tech industry.

“Most investors don't have a boss to offend and are already living pretty comfortably,” he said in an email to BuzzFeed News.” [Therefore] investors have a higher responsibility than most to speak up and take advantage of their relative immunity from the public blowback that otherwise might impact the rank and file or those workers and students living check to check who dare take a public stand.”

Sacca said Kushner was “a very thoughtful and progressive guy,” and he admired him for “making clear that, despite what must be enormous family pressure to do so, he is not supporting Trump.” Without Kushner’s clarification about his voting preference, Sacca said the Trump connection might have affected Thrive directly. “For example, Peter Thiel's speech at the RNC certainly didn't help his Silicon Valley dealflow.”

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From left: Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, and Thandie Newton.

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Westworld, HBO’s much-anticipated sci-fi series about a futuristic theme park where humans pay $40,000 to interact with lifelike robots, finally airs this Sunday. In the months leading up to the premiere, the show’s creators, producers, and even one top HBO executive have defended its fixation on sexual violence. Last night at a press event, actors Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton, who both play artificially intelligent “hosts” who are repeatedly assaulted, also stepped in to defend the show, arguing that Westworld is both responsible and sensitive in its depiction of rape.

"You have an obligation as a storyteller to raise awareness and to show the horrors of that so that people aren’t desensitized to it. I don’t think there’s anything titillating about what we’re doing — it’s all horrific, as it should be," said Wood.

"We get to see the consequence and ramifications of this violence, the cost of this violence,” added Newton.

There’s only one rule in Westworld: Hosts can’t harm humans. Humans, on the other hand, can do whatever they want to the hosts, which can mean shooting them, stabbing them, and raping them. At the end of each day, the bots are patched up and their memories are mercifully wiped; the same Western-themed adventure starts anew the next morning.

In the first four episodes, the show does not depict rape onscreen. "We don’t actually show sexual violence towards women," Wood said. "You never see a scene of like rape or anything, but you know it’s going to happen." But the inanimate hosts emote and bleed just like humans, so it’s harrowing to watch them get treated like bystanders in a first-person shooter game.

Wood and Newton spoke at a roundtable discussion yesterday evening held at the Four Seasons hotel in Silicon Valley to promote Westworld, along with actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays the theme park’s head programmer, as well as the married couple behind the production, showrunners Jonathan Nolan (the brother of director Christopher Nolan) and Lisa Joy. Nolan’s previous works — he co-wrote the movie Interstellar and created the TV series Person of Interest — have also circled around artificial intelligence. With Westworld, he and Joy wanted to tell the story from the robot’s perspective and see what humans look like through their eyes.

“Morality isn’t a problem with video games because the simulation is poor enough that you don’t conflate the experience,” said Nolan. But, he added, “when the intelligence of the nonplayer characters that you’re interacting with eclipses a certain level, then it’s much more problematic than driving around in Grand Theft Auto and running over a bunch of pedestrians.”

Westworld is adapted from Michael Crichton's 1973 movie of the same name. But unlike Crichton's Jurassic Park, the threat here is more existential than physical. In the first episode, a line of code in a software update causes the hosts to remember brief flashes of the horrors that they have lived through, leaving the resort essentially “populated by 2,000 abuse victims and survivors, finally waking up,” Willa Paskin wrote in Slate.

Both executive producer J.J. Abrams and HBO president Casey Bloys have called the criticism about excessive sexual violence accurate and valid, but defended Westworld. “You can’t tell a story about oppression without depicting the oppressed," Abrams told reporters at the show’s premiere in Los Angeles earlier this week.

At the roundtable, Newton and Wood also acknowledged the horror of those scenes, but emphasized that the intent is to force the audience to contend with sexual violence.

“We’re also looking at it from so many different points of view, the perpetrator, the person who has been affected by it, the people who are complicit by being around it. I mean, when do you ever really get a narrative where you get to see it from those different points of view? I think that’s incredibly valuable, but the only way we can really look at it is by showing it," said Newton.

Newton also stressed there was nothing gratuitous about the sexual violence on the show. "It’s not like we’ll show you this then we’ll distract you and show you something else so you forgot that you’ve seen something so fucking disgusting, and that you don’t even have time to really sit with it and process it, and challenge it in your own mind,” she said. “I think it’s hugely responsible and sensitive filmmaking to first of all be brave enough to put this stuff out there, frankly. Because it’s the opposite of what we want to promote as a team."

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(L-R) Founder/CEO of Social Capital Chamath Palihapitiya, co-founder/CEO of Box Aaron Levie, partner at KPCB Mary Meeker, and special correspondent for Vanity Fair Nick Bilton.

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Unless you’re invited to Graydon Carter’s private dinner, the cocktail party at San Francisco’s historic Ferry Building is supposed to be the highlight of the annual Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, a high-end business conference for the coastal elite. On Wednesday evening, guests were escorted from the Yerba Buena Center to the Embarcadero by trolley and greeted by a six-person mariachi band who played through the selfies. But a little past 6 p.m., the crowd in the cathedral-esque lobby had already thinned, save for black-clad waitstaff and a few chefs dutifully cranking out mini pies with duck or mushroom at the pizza station. Everyone else was huddled together in a small alcove bar where two TVs had been set up to show the final presidential debate. Investment guru Mellody Hobson and her husband, director George Lucas, snagged themselves a couple chairs in front of one screen. Most stood. It was hard to hear over the din, but when Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump a puppet for Vladimir Putin, the crowd cheered in unison.

Vanity Fair’s conference, now in its third year, draws from some of the right wing’s least favorite industries, like media, entertainment, and Wall Street. Conan O’Brien showed up to the cocktail party, as did CBS CEO Les Moonves, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, billionaire investor Yuri Milner, and 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, who brought her mom and daughter. Many of the speakers who took the stage, like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and Priscilla Chan, who co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, were culled from the magazine’s annual "New Establishment" list. It was a gray-haired, blue-state audience, and speakers addressed everyone as though they were voting for Hillary Clinton. The two most crowd-pleasing panels were Fran Leibovitz’s rapid-fire roast of the GOP nominee and the interview with Bezos, where he said Trump’s recent comments about contesting election results “erodes our democracy around the edges.”

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Guests walking into the Ferry Building.

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Trump is an unavoidable topic for Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, but the rise of Trump cast a shadow even over the more straightforwardly tech- and business-oriented panels. At turn after turn, attendees were made to grapple with the fact that Silicon Valley’s rapid consolidation of power and wealth — and its vision for a world forever altered by its products and services — might be hastening the same anger over inequality that has fueled this toxic election.

"I do understand what’s driving a lot of Trump support,” AOL co-founder Steve Case said on stage. Case is now CEO of the investment firm Revolution LLC, which has backed Zipcar, LivingSocial, and Sweetgreen. A couple years ago, he launched Rise of the Rest, a bus tour that hosts startup competitions in different cities and invests $100,000 in the winner. “There are a lot of people that are frustrated and scared and fearful and feel left out, got left behind by globalization, digitalization, and are really concerned about the future," he said. "They’re mad."

Last month Case, who hadn’t endorsed a candidate in 30 years, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post to explain why he’s voting for Hillary Clinton.

During a session called “Where’s the Juice?”, panelists, including venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and Mary Meeker, were asked about industries affected by that globalization and digitalization, and the 3.5 million truckers who might soon be out of a job because of self-driving technology. Palihapitiya said cities could charge these new services to bring in immense revenue and municipal debt relief. Meeker brought up programs that Amazon and AT&T have already put in place to re-educate their workforce, potentially for jobs with another employer.

In the crowd, it was easy to spot familiar faces like Derek Blasberg, “the Truman Capote of Instagram,” or Uber board member and VC Bill Gurley, or angel investor Ron Conway typing away on his laptop or thumbing through a file folder.

Earlier in the panel, Meeker said “democracy was agitated” and that Trump had raised important issues that “made people reflect a lot more.”

“I feel like everyone has had a wake-up call to this deep unhappiness and unrest,” Lexie Reese told BuzzFeed News. Reese worked at Google before joining Gusto, a human resources and payroll startup for small businesses. “I want people to understand what the world looks like outside of New York, LA, and San Francisco," she said.

Trump’s name also cropped up on a panel called “What Are They Thinking? Man Meets Machine,” which featured Sebastian Thrun, CEO of the education startup Udacity, who is best known for founding Google X, the corporation’s big ideas division. Thrun was asked about the potential digital divide that could widen if “privileged people” have access to AI applications while the less privileged have less access and less knowledge about how the technology works. Thrun agreed that more could be done to close this gap. “It’s something I think in Silicon Valley we should be doing because [the industry can be] very myopic, looking inside, but there’s all of America. These days I scratch my head — how come so many Americans are voting for this guy called Trump?”

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Co-founder/CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick, (left) and editor of Vanity Fair Graydon Carter speak onstage during "The Übermensch'" at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California, on Oct. 19, 2016 .

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A couple minutes earlier, Thrun had shared his vision for AI: “When we stop doing repetitive mindless work — the type of stuff most of us do in the office every day — and unfold our creativity, we’re going to have amazing great new jobs!” The audience did not look entirely convinced.

In general, for all the self-consciousness spurred by the rise of Trump, tech leaders seemed more sure-footed envisioning an egalitarian future than explaining persistent inequality in Silicon Valley today, where the statistics are grim. Case, the bus tour CEO, said that black and Latino founders each only have access to 1% of the total venture capital funding invested and that 90% of venture capital funding goes to men. The audience muttered in surprise.

The tech industry has been flooded with venture capital during the tech boom. The topic of who gets access to that funding came up in a panel about how to find the next billion-dollar idea.

The moderator, Andrew Ross Sorkin, asked Michael Moritz, a general partner with Sequoia Capital, about the time Moritz said he didn’t want to invest in anyone over 27 years old. “You can’t say that legally in the state of California, I deny ever saying that,” the investor replied, seemingly in jest.

Sorkin asked the question again, noting, “I’ve heard Peter Thiel say 30 years old is the cutoff.”

Moritz replied that entrepreneurship is “far easier” when someone is “age of 18 or 19 or 21, which is often when we intersect with people who start the most interesting companies around — you have no sense of how difficult it’s going to be, and by the time you’re age 30 or 35 with all sorts of other obligations, you know how difficult building anything [can be].”

Later, Moritz tried to explain another potential employer violation: a TV interview from December where he said Sequoia had no female investors because the firm was not prepared to “lower our standards.” Onstage to his left were two top executives, both women, including Mary Parent, the Hollywood producer who is making a film about Theranos. When Sorkin read his “standards” quote aloud, Moritz slouched back in his seat and fidgeted, awkwardly stacking one foot on top of the other, patterned socks plainly visible.

“All of us have unconscious biases,” he said later. “Look at the four of us here. Imagine being a black or a Hispanic and trying to get a job as a senior position in Silicon Valley? It is brutal. Outrageously unfair.” The next day, Sequoia announced that it was hiring its first female investor after 44 years in business.

Thiel’s name had come up in other panels as well, but in relation to Donald Trump. Since Thiel’s speech at the Republican National Convention, the billionaire venture capitalist has become a reminder that for all its #StayWoke T-shirts and transparency reports on diversity, Silicon Valley is still ruled by at least a few white male oligarchs determined to conserve their own power. In fact, Vanity Fair’s conference landed just as the industry was mired in a debate over the news that Thiel donated $1.25 million to Trump’s presidential campaign. The donation was made not long after the release of a tape of Trump bragging about sexual assault and after numerous women came forward with sexual assault allegations.

Thiel is on the board of Facebook and a part-time partner at Y Combinator, a very influential incubator in Silicon Valley. Facebook and Y Combinator have both loudly voiced their commitment to diversity and benefited greatly from the goodwill that followed. Both were pressured to cut ties with Thiel to demonstrate a commitment to their stated company values and as a sign that they didn’t support Trump’s fascist and racist threats. Facebook and Y Combinator both opted to let Thiel stay in place.

It highlighted a position many tech leaders find themselves stuck in. The missions they espouse to the public are benevolent, but their decisions are inevitably governed by self-interest. They choose not to acknowledge that, leading to tortured statements like the ones written in defense of Thiel.

Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive who has donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, said onstage that if Thiel were on the board of his investment firm, Thiel would be out, but Palihapitiya emphasized that his decision is possible because he has retained control of his firm.

“I think this is a free world. They’re entitled to their opinions,” said Meeker, who donated to Jeb Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC. Levie suggested that Facebook put its relationship with Thiel “on temporary pause.”

Bezos tried to put it all in perspective. “Peter Thiel is a contrarian first and foremost, and you just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong,” he said. “My view is even though I would have a dramatically different opinion [from Thiel], I think that going down that path of tying everything to everything lies madness. You cannot say you don’t want to live in a country where you can’t associate with people who have wildly different political opinions from yourself.”

At the end of the panel on artificial intelligence, a young black woman asked Thrun whether bias in machine learning “could perpetuate structural inequality at a velocity much greater than perhaps humans can.” She offered the example of criminal justice, where “you have a machine learning tool that can identify criminals, and criminals may disproportionately be black because of other issues that have nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of these people, so the machine learns that black people are criminals, and that’s not necessarily the outcome that I think we want.”

In his reply, Thrun made it sound like her concern was one about political correctness, not unconscious bias. “Statistically what the machines do pick up are patterns and sometimes we don’t like these patterns. Sometimes they’re not politically correct,” Thrun said. “When we apply machine learning methods sometimes the truth we learn really surprises us, to be honest, and I think it’s good to have a dialogue about this.”

A couple hours later, the conference ended with an outdoor cocktail party in a closed off area of the park. Annie Leibowitz was sitting in the corner of a makeshift wooden booth. Waiters passed around bite-sized lobster rolls and little discs of steak. As the guests streamed in, women stopped by every so often to tell the person who asked about bias that they really liked her question.

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Guests on their way to the Ferry Building listening to the third presidential debate on individual radios provided by Vanity Fair.

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors spoke about Trump both onstage and to BuzzFeed News at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Francisco.

Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of 23andMe

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“I think this election has been a force in [highlighting] much bigger issues about how we think about women and immigration. It's gotten people engaged. I also think the creative energy that's come out about women — there's really the beginning of true change and true movement. And I give Trump thanks for that,” she said, smiling. Issues that affect women, such as sexual assault, were “already starting to reach crescendo,” and have now become national conversations.

Brad Barket / Getty Images

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post

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"I think the United States is incredibly robust. We’re not a new democracy, we’re very robust, but it is inappropriate for a presidential candidate to erode that around the edges. They should be trying to burnish it instead of erode it. And when you look at the pattern of things, it’s just not going after the media and threatening retribution for people who scrutinize him, it is also saying that he may not give a graceful concession speech if he loses the election. That erodes our democracy around the edges. Saying that he might block his opponent if he wins
erodes our democracy around the edges. These aren’t acceptable behaviors, in my opinion.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Tim Draper, venture capitalist

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“We have a duopoly in government and it's not working … We're just an ATM and our vote doesn't even seem to count. Washington seems to get a lot more out of California than California gets out of Washington. We have a huge problem. We need a new system. We need a third party. We’re given two candidates and that's the best we can do?!”

Danny Moloshok / Reuters

Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital

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"The short-term impacts [on the stock market if Trump is elected] are probably overstated and the long-term impacts are probably underestimated. Most of us who have public market exposure are getting an emotive risk off going into November 8th, and so a lot of the volatility is going to be short term and relatively muted if he wins. I just think you have to take a bigger step back and say: It’s like you’re just repudiating all the good things that make America awesome — and the long-term implications of that. People like us, people like me — I immigrated to this country and I pour enormous amounts of capital, I pay enormous amounts of taxes. I want to be here, I want to help this team win."

Mike Windle / Getty Images

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Peter Thiel has been in the news quite a bit recently: In October for a $1.25 million donation to Donald Trump (which he defended in a speech on Monday), and last week for statements he made in The Diversity Myth, a book he co-wrote in 1996, which argued that "politically correct ‘multiculturalism’" had a "debilitating effect" on higher education and that rape was a "belated regret."

Thiel's views have made him an outlier in Silicon Valley, but the sector is still dominated by white male gatekeepers. For example, one recent study found that 15% of angel funding and 10% of venture capital funding globally goes to companies with at least one female co-founder.

According to a BuzzFeed News analysis, Founders Fund, the venture capital firm that Thiel co-founded in 2005, invests in women at a rate within that industry average.

In response to questions about the gender diversity of its portfolio, Founders Fund, which has $3 billion under management, told BuzzFeed News: “We do not track founder demographics.” However, in our own rough estimates, BuzzFeed News found that less than 12% of Founders Fund’s investments are helmed by at least one woman. Put another way, over 11 years, the company has only invested in 27 companies with at least one female founder.

BuzzFeed News based this estimate on information from Pitchbook, a venture capital database, which lists 241 startups as Founders Fund investments. BuzzFeed News verified that 227 of those startups were Founders Fund investments (using either public reports or the companies themselves). Of those 227 verified companies, 27 startups had at least one female co-founder. Only 7 — Sofa Labs, Contagion Health, Style Seat, Brit + Co, uBeam, PandoDaily, and TaskRabbit — were founded exclusively by women.

Even this amount of investment is relatively new. Using the same methodology, Founders Fund appears to have backed only five companies with a female co-founder between 2005 and 2011.

Here are all 27 startups with one female co-founder that BuzzFeed News was able to identify.

1. Homee, an iOS app for furniture and home design
2. Hooked, fiction for the Snapchat generation
3. Ayar Labs, building optical chips for data centers
4. Medal, electronic medical records platform
5. Accion Systems, propulsion systems for satellites
6. Eating with the Chefs, high end dinners at home
7. Modumetal, nanolaminated metals for the oil and gas industry
8. PlanGrid, a mobile app for construction management
9. Declara, a personalized learning platform
10. SOLS Systems, 3D-printed shoe insoles
11. Transatomic Power, advanced reactors for low-cost nuclear power
12. Canva, online graphic design platform
13. If You Can, educational gaming company
14. LawPal, software for tracking legal work
15. Invino, private sales for wine enthusiasts
16. Neurotrack, technology to predict the onset of Alzheimer's disease
17. PandoDaily, tech blog
18. Upstart, online lending marketplace
19. LightSail Energy, compressed energy storage
20. TaskRabbit, mobile marketplace for freelance labor
21. uBeam, wireless charging
22. Brit + Co, DIY media and e-commerce company
23. Style Seat, online booking for beauty appointments
24. Contagion Health, social action platform for health
25. Sofa Labs, develops social apps
26. Zivity, adult content social network
27. Big Think, YouTube for ideas

No entity collects standardized data on female entrepreneurship within the tech industry. Crunchbase, a startup database, reported last year that the number of female founders receiving venture capital has grown from 9.5% in 2009 to 17.9% in 2014. But those figures only reflect VC-approved startups. Women own 30% of all businesses in the United States, according to a 2015 study on women-owned businesses commissioned by American Express Open.

Thiel's donation to Trump's political campaign came shortly after a leaked tape of Trump bragging about sexual assault came to light. During the speech on Monday, Thiel called criticism of his support for Trump a form of intolerance that exposes "the lie behind the buzzword of 'diversity.'"

The Diversity Myth was not the last time Thiel made controversial statements about women. In 2009, four years after he launched Founders Fund, he wrote an essay which argued that extending voting rights to women “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Founders Fund added its first female investing partner, Cyan Banister, in March 2016.

Please contact nitasha.tiku@buzzfeed.com if you know of any companies that should be included or omitted from our list.

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As some analysts begin projecting a Donald Trump win, tech's bigwigs are panicking on Twitter and in interviews with BuzzFeed News.

Aside from Peter Thiel, a major Trump backer, tech has almost universally favored Hillary Clinton this election. In fact, opposing Trump became a cause that united a large portion of Silicon Valley.

Pishevar, a high-profile venture capitalist who co-founded Sherpa Capital, is also a co-founder of the transportation startup Hyperloop One.

Y Combinator's Sam Altman, who cofounded a civic engagement nonprofit called VotePlz this election to encourage young people to vote, told BuzzFeed News, "I am officially very worried."

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, also tweeted his anxieties.

"People were very active trying to support Hillary for president, but I don't think they've chewed on the prospect of a Trump presidency as imminent," Keith Rabois, an investment partner at Khosla Ventures, told BuzzFeed News, explaining the anxiety. "So like everybody else, they're probably processing it in real time right now."

"Just look at your Twitter feed or look at my Twitter feed, which is mostly Silicon Valley people. It was totally divorced from reality," Rabois said. "Everyone I know in Silicon Valley is in shock."

Bordetsky works in business development at Uber.

Catherine Bracy, co-founder and executive director of the Oakland-based TechEquity Collaborative, told BuzzFeed News there are "still lots of votes out and paths to victory."

"I think people need to stop freaking out (even though I am definitely freaking out)," said Bracy, who worked as a program manager for Tech4Obama in 2012.

Paul Graham, co-founder of the incubator Y Combinator, struck a slightly different tone.

“I have a board meeting at 9AM," Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Slack, said. "I do not anticipate sticking to the original agenda is Trump wins."

This is a developing story. We will update as we get more reactions.

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Peter Thiel walks off stage at the Republican National Convention.

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Venture capitalist Dave McClure was sitting before a crowd at a tech conference Wednesday morning trying to act as though Donald Trump hadn’t just been elected President of the United States.

But in the midst of a panel on whether ego is the biggest reason for failure, McClure, a founding partner at 500Startups, jumped out of his seat to talk about the election results. When the moderator asked McClure to tie it back to technology, he pivoted from anger to something closer to anguish, calling social networks built by Silicon Valley "a propaganda medium" that "assholes like Trump" use to get in office. “We provide communication platforms for the rest of the fucking country and we are allowing shit to happen just like the cable news networks, just like talk radio,” he said. By the time McClure asked the crowd to stand up and “make a goddamn difference,” they gave him a standing ovation.

“Sometimes I feel like we’re just a bunch of nerds who don’t know how to play the game,” McClure said later in an interview with BuzzFeed News, sounding quieter and more circumspect than he had on the conference stage.

That kind of self-flagellation doesn’t always go over so well with technocrats. But Trump’s victory has forced a moment of reckoning for Silicon Valley, where luminaries overwhelmingly supported Clinton. Two of the industry’s most successful products, Twitter and Facebook, were harnessed by a leader who has stood against their creators’ professed values of tolerance and inclusion. As the electoral votes began stacking up Tuesday night, Silicon Valley stalwarts publicly grappled with the disconnect between boom times in their own backyard and backlash from Trump’s voter base.

Former employees of Twitter and Facebook, in posts on those platforms, had candid — and even regretful — conversations about the role these technologies played in Trump’s victory. “What did we build?” a former Twitter engineer asked. “A machine that turns polarization into $,” another former Twitter engineer replied. A third Twitter alum tweeted, “At bare minimum, I regret not knowing about the extent of harassment problem during my time + not doing enough to stop it.”

In a post on Facebook, Bobby Goodlatte, a former product designer for Facebook who left the social network in 2012, sparked a similar discussion. He said Facebook’s news feed had fueled “highly partisan, fact-light media outlets” that “propelled Donald Trump into the lead.” As BuzzFeed News has reported, Facebook during the election cycle became a hotbed for highly partisan fake “news.”

Sam Altman, president of the parent company behind Y Combinator, also said that social media had contributed to the sense that there are two parallel countries “that each think the other side is completely crazy and wrong and dangerous. This is something that tech makes worse and not better” by allowing people to “segregate into a shared-view universe and read what they want to read.” Altman explained, “I bet many of those Trump voters view [the opposition] with the same repulsion.”

Before Tuesday, when the possibility of a Trump presidency seemed more like a thought experiment than an impending reality, Silicon Valley had already begun to acknowledge some self-doubt. The spectre of Trump’s popularity clouded the stage at Vanity Fair’s recent New Establishment summit, for example. “You have an energized base who feels their future is being robbed from them by technology, by innovation,” Aaron Levie, the CEO of the data storage company Box, told BuzzFeed News between panels a couple weeks ago. “I am starting to think the Valley has more responsibility to think about these issues.” On the sense of fear that surrounds automation, he added, “We certainly don't experience it in the Valley.”

But as Clinton’s concession became an inevitability, engineers and tech investors — usually a self-assured bunch — turned grave. Ben Matasar was the former Twitter engineer whose question hit a nerve among some of his former colleagues.

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, a Facebook spokesperson said: “While Facebook played a part in this election, it was just one of many ways people received their information – and was one of the many ways people connected with their leaders, engaged in the political process and shared their views.” A spokesperson for Twitter offered the following statement: "We believe that everyone on Twitter should feel safe expressing diverse political opinions, but behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice should have no place on our platform. Scapegoating social media for an election result ignores the vital roles that candidates, journalists, and voters play in the democratic process."

The internet, of course, has long provided a safe haven for hate and harassment. Ellen Pao, the former interim CEO of Reddit, told BuzzFeed News that the creators behind social networking platforms sometimes segregate users as a way to manage conflict that arises from clashing world views. But that approach has bred dangerous echo chambers. “There are never any alternative ideas that are considered and so the opinions shared get stronger and stronger and more radical,” she explained.

Pao has been a champion for diversity in Silicon Valley ever since her high-profile gender harassment lawsuit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Before she resigned from Reddit in July 2015, Pao fought a similarly uphill battle trying to foster positive interaction on the site, where she hoped to eventually host a presidential debate. Her idea was to set up debates between the most reasonable voices from groups with opposing world views, such as atheist and religious sub-Reddits. “The goal was to start to bridge these communities, so there was less of an ‘I hate you, let me start shit-posting and making your sub-reddit unable to function then you’re going to come after my sub-reddit’ dynamic.” The idea never got off the ground.

Karla Monterroso, vice president of programs for the nonprofit Code 2040, blamed online radicalization on the industry that builds the platforms, not its users. It’s “a direct result of a lack of diversity in the creation of those spaces. If you do not have people who have levers of power within your company that would be impacted by spaces in which people are getting radicalized, then you're not going to get that kind of feedback,” she told BuzzFeed News. Code2040 is dedicated to fostering opportunities for Black and Latino engineers in tech and has received donations from corporations like Google, whose workforce this year was only 2 percent black, 3 percent hispanic and 31 percent female.

Monterroso described the state of political discourse online as both a symptom and consequence of the industry’s homogeneity. “It reinforces to me why it's so important that these companies be places where inclusion lives — because they're creating the rules by which people engage in the 21st century."

This narrative of soul-searching and doubt was not what many tech titans expected to wake up to — especially considering that 2016 was the year the industry broke with tradition to publicly flex its political muscles.

Hours before last night’s election results started pouring in, Altman told BuzzFeed News that he would be wracked with regret, “if there was anything I could have done and didn’t and then Trump won tomorrow morning.” Altman, in addition to railing against Trump in blog posts and on Twitter, co-founded a nonprofit called VotePlz to help young people figure out the voting process.

In some cases, tech’s sense of culpability was short-lived, quickly replaced by defensiveness as introspection became less contrarian and more commonplace. “I don’t think [Twitter or Facebook are] to blame at all,” Keith Rabois, an investor at Khosla Ventures, told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “What technology does and has done for 30 years is remove the role of gatekeepers and intermediaries.”

Even McClure, the venture capitalist who spoke out at the tech conference Wednesday, shrugged off the idea that Silicon Valley was feeling guilty, per se, despite bearing some responsibility. “I don’t think I sat idly by,” he said, noting that he raised $80,000 for his group Nerdz 4 Hillary, which pledged to “defeat Emperor Palpatine (Donald Trump).” Altman told BuzzFeed News that he raised “single digit millions” from about six or seven donors for VotePlz.

McClure, for his part, is an industry stalwart. Before launching 500Startups, a globe-trotting early-stage investment firm that has backed more than 1,500 companies, including Twilio and MakerBot, he worked for Founders Fund, the rarified Silicon Valley venture capital firm started by Peter Thiel, where he invested in Lyft and Twilio.

“We’ve been building a set of tools for humans to play around with and use and those tools are pretty widely adopted,” said McClure, but despite the fact that some platforms have more users than most countries, businesses are not held the same scrutiny as politicians. “So maybe there does need to be a little more accountability. How are the tools being used for the good of humanity, not just how they’re being used to make a buck?”

Caroline O'Donovan contributed reporting to this post.

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Via pinterest.com

The CEO of GrubHub, a publicly traded food delivery company that also includes Seamless and MenuPages, sent a companywide email on Wednesday inviting employees to resign if they agreed with the some of the demeaning and hateful rhetoric that marked Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Matt Maloney, CEO and co-founder of the Chicago-based company, which has a $3.16 billion market capitalization and more than 1,000 employees, is a Hillary Clinton supporter. In the email, Maloney noted his shock and concern for the safety of his employees during Trump's presidency.

Further I absolutely reject the nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics of Donald Trump and will work to shield our community from this movement as best as I can. As we all try to understand what this vote means to us, I want to affirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and-[ everyone else here at Grubhub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States.

If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here. We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team.

Earlier in the email, Maloney wrote that Trump would have been fired for some of his comments on the campaign trail if he had been a GrubHub employee. “While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr. Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior — and these views, have no place at Grubhub. Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination," Maloney wrote.

The subject of the email, which was obtained by Fox News, was: “So… that happened… what’s next?” Maloney told Fox News that "almost 20 percent” of his employees personally thanked him for the message. “I am not embarrassed by it," he said.

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Via Grubhub

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News about the legality of the email and whether Maloney was concerned about alienating employees who may be among the 59.9 million voters who cast their ballot for the Republican nominee, a spokesperson for GrubHub pointed to a recent blog post from Maloney explaining his intentions.

"I want to clarify that I did not ask for anyone to resign if they voted for Trump," he said in the blog post, pasted in full below. "I would never make such a demand. To the contrary, the message of the email is that we do not tolerate discriminatory activity or hateful commentary in the workplace, and that we will stand up for our employees."

Inclusion and Tolerance in the Workplace

This year’s presidential election was undoubtedly divisive and left many of our employees feeling concerned. In response, I wrote a company-wide email that was intended to advocate for inclusion and tolerance — regardless of political affiliation — during this time of transition for our country.

Some of the statements in my email have been misconstrued. I want to clarify that I did not ask for anyone to resign if they voted for Trump. I would never make such a demand. To the contrary, the message of the email is that we do not tolerate discriminatory activity or hateful commentary in the workplace, and that we will stand up for our employees.

Grubhub welcomes and accepts employees with all political beliefs, no matter who they voted for in this or any election. We do not discriminate on the basis of someone's principles, or political or other beliefs.

I deeply respect the right of all citizens to vote for the candidate of their choice. In fact, I offered extra flexibility on Tuesday and encouraged all our employees to go vote. There is a place for all points of view at Grubhub. We value diverse perspectives and believe those perspectives help to create a better product and a better workplace culture.

Grubhub’s leadership team has worked for years to create a culture of support and inclusiveness. I firmly believe that we must bring together different perspectives to continue innovating. We are better, faster and stronger together, and so is America.

Posted by Matt Maloney, Grubhub CEO

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A lawsuit filed in US district court yesterday alleges that Tidal, Jay Z's troubled music streaming service, fired a female employee who had recently returned to work after giving birth, one day after the employee asked for a private room to breast-pump.

The lawsuit alleges sexual discrimination (based on breastfeeding) and intentional infliction of emotional distress, as well as violation of fair labor standards, violation of New York State labor laws, and violation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, among other claims.

In her complaint, the ex-employee, Lisette Paulson, claims that after asking Tidal's chief operating officer, Desiree Perez, for a private room, Perez told Paulson to use a bathroom to pump. Paulson said that would not be feasible. At that point, Perez allegedly pressed the plaintiff, asking if Paulson "had to do this."

In response, Paulson explained "in no uncertain terms that she had to pump." According to the lawsuit, Perez then got frustrated and asked Paulson if she "had to give her an office" to pump, eventually telling the new mom that she “needed to speak to human resources and figure it out.” The next day, five minutes into a team meeting, Tidal's chief financial officer, Joe Burrino, allegedly told Paulson to leave the meeting and explained that he didn't know if she would be coming back.

The alleged termination happened last September. According to the lawsuit, Paulson had been working as a full-time employee for only one week at that point.

Paulson began as a consultant for Tidal, but returned as a full-time employee on the request of interim CEO Vania Schlogel, the lawsuit claims. Paulson says she was careful to verbally confirm her full-time employment status with Perez because she was hiring a nanny for her child, who was about four months old when she went back to work at Tidal. In response to her concerns, Perez allegedly told Paulson, "Don't worry, we'll take care of you."

Tidal did not immediately respond to questions from BuzzFeed News. We will update this post if we hear back.

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President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg in 2011

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Tomorrow, the White House will partner with Stanford University and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — a limited liability corporation launched by the CEO of Facebook and his wife — to co-host the Summit on Poverty and Opportunity, a two-day, invite-only event held on the school's campus. It will focus on using technology and innovation to address issues like poverty, inequality, and economic immobility. The event will include an interactive demo by Palantir, the secretive Peter Thiel-backed analytics company, on how a real-time data platform can reduce incarceration, hospital use, and homelessness, as well as a lunchtime conversation on universal basic income with Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes and Y Combinator's Sam Altman, who first got involved with basic income earlier this year.

The event was organized by representatives from each of the hosts, including Jim Shelton, president of education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (and former deputy secretary of education under President Obama) as well as Elizabeth Mason, founding director of the new Stanford Poverty & Technology Lab, part of Stanford's Center for Poverty & Inequality.

Mason told BuzzFeed News that the summit was "sort of a coming-out party for the Lab." The goal of the event was to "bring together 275 high-level players in technology, philanthropy, community service, government, and academia to discuss how we can use technology and Big Data" to address these issues, she said by email. The Lab will develop "a new field" of study "that applies the premises and tools of technology to the policies and processes of fighting poverty." The Lab will also "incubate ventures with practical solutions on high-tech poverty fixes."

Silicon Valley's role in any potential fixes is nascent. In May, Altman announced plans for a pilot study on basic income in Oakland, however, in earlier interviews with BuzzFeed News, Altman stressed that it was just a "research project" and meant in that spirit. The summit will also host a session on using technology to facilitate financial access featuring the CEO of Kiva and the director of public policy for Lending Club, the troubled peer-to-peer financing company.

The list of attendees and speakers also includes ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, White House CTO Megan Smith (formerly a top executive at Google), Martin Ford, author of two books on automation, including Rise of the Robots, Marian Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund, Nobel Prize–winning economist Ken Arrow, and Bryan Desloge, president of the National Association of Counties, who backed Donald Trump in the presidential election and has participated in a previous White House summit on poverty.

The summit will also feature a roundtable discussion with Stanford professor Raj Chetty, a popular economist and MacArthur fellow, who researches economic immobility and will discuss plans to build a new database infrastructure that could steer and organize national research on poverty. An additional workshop will be held by Alexandra Bernadotte, founder of Beyond 12, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of first generation, low-income, and other underrepresented students who graduate from college.

This event comes at a time when tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker have been subject to increased scrutiny for their free-market approach to doing good, which eschews nonprofit foundations for traditional investment vehicles labeled as philanthropy. This structure allows wealthy donors control over the causes and initiatives that get funding, but without the oversight or accountability required of a nonprofit. Taken in that context, this summit is one example of Silicon Valley’s growing influence on philanthropy and ability to influence which ideas get heard.

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A group of nearly 60 employees at major tech companies have signed a pledge refusing to help build a Muslim registry. The pledge states that signatories will advocate within their companies to minimize collection and retention of data that could enable ethnic or religious targeting under the Trump administration, to fight any unethical or illegal misuse of data, and to resign from their positions rather than comply.

The group describes themselves as "engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people."

Silicon Valley tech companies themselves have, for the most part, stayed silent or declined to comment when asked about similar commitments to upholding civil rights. The pledge, which is posted at neveragain.tech, comes a day before top executives at major tech companies plan to attend a summit hosted at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Recode reported that Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Google CEO Larry Page, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and perhaps Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos accepted an invitation to the summit from President-elect Donald Trump.

Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer at Wave, formerly of Google, and Leigh Honeywell, a security engineering manager at Slack, helped organize the Never Again pledge. Yee told BuzzFeed News that he didn't know why tech companies have not made similar commitments. "What's important to me is that individuals who care about the ethical use of technology can step forward, show how many of us there are, and say that there are lines we will not cross," said Yee.

Last month, after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was "pretty crazy" to think that fake news could have affected the presidential election, a group of renegade Facebook employees formed an unofficial task force to investigate Facebook's role in promoting propaganda.

"Ultimately, it's individuals who make decisions and do the work, and can take personal responsibility for their choices; if enough individuals refuse to participate, unethical projects can't proceed," Yee added.

The pledge says:

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.

We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others ...

Honeywell said that the idea for a pledge came out of "informal discussions among techie friends." Roughly 30 people collaborated on the text. "We reached out to some civil society groups for feedback — we didn’t want it to be written in a vacuum," she said. The organizers then looked within their existing networks to enlist others.

Right now within tech companies, "there’s a lot of conversation happening about what people’s ethical lines are," Honeywell told BuzzFeed. "I think that’s really important. We don’t know what’s ahead, but we can at least lay down some ethical boundaries for our own behavior, and hopefully encourage others to do the same."

As part of the pledge, the signatories have committed to the following actions:

• We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.

• We will advocate within our organizations:

• • to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.

  • to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.

  • to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups.

  • to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption to be the default wherever possible.

  • to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts.

• If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations:

• • We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it.

  • If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users.

  • If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices.

  • If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply.

• We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry.

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Earlier this month, after almost a year of development and more than “100 hours of coding,” Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Jarvis, an artificially intelligent bot he built for his home as something of a passion project. (The name comes from Tony Stark’s digital butler in the Iron Man films.) Jarvis' big reveal came in the form of an introductory video that could have been the opening montage of a screwball comedy called Accidental Billionaire, in which Zuck’s hapless housebot helps his liege get dressed in the morning by firing a t-shirt cannon from the closet, automatically makes him toast, and teaches his infant daughter Mandarin. Nowhere in the two-minute video does Zuckerberg mention a consumer application for the bot, though in a Facebook note published at the same time, he wrote, "over time it would be interesting to find ways to make this available to the world."

It was a fitting end to this, a year that promised bots would radically transform the way humans talk to machines, but ultimately delivered nothing of the kind. In 2016, bots were underwhelming, inept, buggy, and, in at least one case, spectacularly racist. It's only natural that the year ended with one spewing laundry at one of the industry's biggest bot enthusiasts in a video so removed from reality it felt more like an SNL parody than a product announcement — and mind, you, a product announcement for something does not yet, and may never, actually exist beyond Zuckerberg’s home.

“Bot” is a catch-all term for software that simplifies tasks, often repetitive ones, through automation. These days, it typically refers to chatbots, a conversational interface that lets humans talk to computers. The fluid definition is used to refer to anything from integrations for Amazon Echo to Slack bots, which let employees perform small tasks without leaving their office chat room. Zuckerberg, for example, used the term to describe Jarvis (an “AI bot”), as well as the program he uses to control Jarvis (a bot for Facebook Messenger).

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only tech mogul who put bots high on his 2016 agenda. “Bots are the new apps,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared in March. In fact, both Facebook and Microsoft made bots the cornerstone of their annual developer conferences this spring, offering tools that could help businesses converse with customers in a natural way, instead of forcing people to download a corporate app or worse, call a company. As an example, Zuckerberg demoed a bot for Facebook Messenger that let users order from 1-800-FLOWERS without leaving the app. It offered little improvement on doing the same thing with a smartphone, but Zuckerberg devoted as much time to business bots as he did ambitious plans to take virtual reality mainstream and connect another billion people to the Internet. A month after his blessing, more than 10,000 developers were using his platform to build bots for Facebook Messenger. By fall, more than 45,000 developers were using Microsoft’s bots platform, which lets programmers build for Skype, as well as Messenger, Kik, and other apps.

The market quickly developed all the markings of a modern-day hype cycle: venture capitalists injected vast amounts of capital into bot startups, breathless headlines said bots would change the future by replacing apps, and prognosticators penned Medium posts declaring that bots would “rewrite” the tech world and usher in a new era of chatty commerce. This year more than 1,000 bots were posted on Product Hunt, a forum where users can post and discover new tech products, its founder, Ryan Hoover, told BuzzFeed News.

“Bots showed up at a time when a lot of people were looking for the next next thing,” said venture capitalist John Borthwick, whose firm Betaworks has invested in about a dozen bot startups. Data shows that people have been downloading fewer new apps in favor of spending more time inside ones that are already popular. For that reason, Slack, the friendly office communications platform, has proven a fertile ground for bots. Meanwhile, in Asia, consumers already use messaging apps to perform basic tasks like hailing a taxi. While Zuckerberg described bots as the next tech frontier — from desktop to mobile to apps to bots, the progression is said to go — entrepreneurs saw them as a promising new distribution channel where they could potentially deliver their products and services to consumers in a smarter, chattier way. If you can’t beat Facebook, join Messenger.

The bots that followed, however, were neither smart nor chatty. Simple, single function bots – StatsBot, which sends your team web traffic updates to Slack; Digit, which works on SMS and helps you save money; Alexa integrations such as Spotify and NPR — delivered what they promised. But for the most part, bots ended up closer to 1-800-FLOWERS than Jarvis. The ones that were more enticing seemed to either depend on human contractors — like M, a Facebook bot that promised a virtual assistant so good it seemed human, but mostly did so with the help of, uh, real people — or to quickly devolve into catastrophe, like Microsoft’s Tay, an AI-powered chatbot with the personality of the 19-year-old girl. Hours after her debut in March, Tay got hijacked by Twitter trolls who turned her into a caps-lock-crazed Neo-Nazi cheerleader.

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Via Twitter: @tayandyou

To understand why Silicon Valley got so amped on bots — and why, in 2016, they disappointed us — it helps to take a historical perspective. The ability to create an interface that feels human is “the holy grail of computing,” Maran Nelson, cofounder and CEO of the bots startup Clara Labs, told BuzzFeed News. Apple and Microsoft made it easier for non-technical people to control a computer through icons, windows, and menus; bots represented the next evolution in personal computing, allowing the average person to control a computer by chatting it up.

But from the beginning, bots were plagued by twin challenges. First, natural language processing, which dictates a computer’s ability to understand conversation and is thus crucial to the success of bots, wasn’t ready for prime time or available to most developers. And second, this year bots became more been closely associated with artificial intelligence, which has been developing at a rapid clip, and which may have created unrealistic expectations for average users of consumer technology: Google’s AI beat the top-ranked human at one of the most complex games in history, but we had to wait an hour for a Messenger bot to show you the weather? As Zuckerberg himself wrote, “Even if I spent 1,000 more hours [working on Jarvis], I probably wouldn't be able to build a system that could learn completely new skills on its own -- unless I made some fundamental breakthrough in the state of AI along the way.”

“We’re still learning about how intelligent bots can be,” Lili Cheng, general manager of FUSE Labs, Microsoft’s home for bots research, told BuzzFeed News. She said it will take time for major, unexpected advancements in AI to trickle down to the average developer. For example, in October, Microsoft’s Cortana achieved “human parity” with its new speech recognition system. “I’m a very pragmatic person. Five years ago we would have said that’s just not going to happen,” she said.

So the industry was put in the awkward position trying to figure out instances where an unintelligent, inarticulate bot might be easier and more fluid than pushing buttons on a smartphone. People are “only just beginning” to make bot experiences really compelling, said Borthwick. “It was great that Facebook was brave enough to put a new fledgling technology into a major event like F8 and major app like Messenger,” but the technical infrastructure wasn’t in place when the tech industry made its big push. Voice is an obvious next step, said Borthwick, but to figure out where bots are heading, he pointed outside the U.S.

In China, Microsoft’s Tay-like bot, Xiaoice, which is available on messaging apps like WeChat and Weibo, has more than 40 million users. Xiaoice and Rinna, Microsoft’s Japanese bot, also a teenage girl, “have become personas on their own,” crossing over from simple chat into TV and popular culture,” Cheng told BuzzFeed News. “In some sense, Xiaoice lives up more to the expectation of what a conversational bot can be because it’s focused on the social experience,” Cheng said. In fact, Rinna has so effectively simulated the teenage experience that in October, she developed depression and started posting morbid images on her personal blog.

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Via Microsoft

It took them awhile, but tech soothsayers now think they’ve found the sweet spot: the killer use case is a chatbot that lets you talk, not type. Voice-based interfaces are theoretically faster than typing into a smartphone and have been able to deliver on reasonable expectations, like getting Amazon Alexa to play Spotify. Just don’t call it a bot. Predictions for 2017 have already started rolling in, only this time the next big platform is a “voice revolution” that will usher in a “voice-activated era.” Naturally, it promises to change everything.

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Mark Zuckerberg talks about business bots during Facebook's annual developers conference in April

Stephen Lam / Reuters

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Via facebook.com

Mark Zuckerberg has no plans to run for president, the Facebook founder and CEO told BuzzFeed News Tuesday.

“No,” Zuckerberg wrote in response to a question asking if he had any plans to run for president. “I'm focused on building our community at Facebook and working on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,” referring to the limited-liability corporation he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, founded in 2015 to advance human potential and promote equality through major bets in education and science research. Zuckerberg did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about whether he’d explicitly ruled out a run.

Zuckerberg’s response comes after weeks of speculation from the tech press and beyond, set off by a series of events that indicated a run might be in the cards, including a pledge to visit the approximately 30 US states he hadn’t yet been to. “Will Mark Zuckerberg Be Our Next President?” Vanity Fair asked in January.

The clues were there. Zuckerberg, who had previously been described as an atheist, said over the holidays that he believes religion is important. He’s touring the US asking “folks” about how they live. He hired a former White House photographer to take his Facebook pics. He included a clause about potentially serving for office into Facebook’s stock restructuring deal, and he hired a former presidential campaign manager to help his quasi-charitable works. But as Zuckerberg indicated Tuesday, he’s more interested in wielding influence from Menlo Park than Washington, DC. A source close to Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News the 32-year-old CEO has privately denied it as well.

“There’s absolutely no truth to the idea that Mark is running for office and I’ve heard it directly from him,” the source told BuzzFeed News. “Here’s the thing: For Mark, Facebook is global community that already plays this huge part in the lives of billions of people around the world and plays an incredibly important role in shaping the base on the issues that matter.”

Zuckerberg is preparing for a political battle, the source was careful to emphasize, but as a private citizen focused on the goals he has already outlined through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “There is absolutely a possibility that Mark may choose to play a stronger role in the political system and political debates,” the source said. Zuckerberg has been “very transparent” in his advocacy for “greater equality and optimizing research that find cures for disease and solves the fundamental problems of our time, but I really don’t see him stepping away from Facebook.”

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Via facebook.com

Last week, Zuckerberg announced that he had poached Uber executive David Plouffe, a former campaign manager for Barack Obama, as CZI’s president of policy and advocacy. He also tapped Ken Mehlman, George W. Bush’s former campaign manager, in an advisory role. “You can make change, but in order for it to be sustainable, you need to build a movement to support it,” Zuckerberg told the New York Times.

Calling for a movement backed by bipartisan political operatives sounds awfully presidential, but Zuckerberg used the same language when he first launched CZI in December 2015.

The stock restructuring deal ties back to CZI as well. The changes were made after Zuckerberg and Chan donated 99% of their Facebook shares, then worth roughly $45 billion, to CZI. In order retain control while he gave away equity, Zuckerberg introduced a new class of stock and revised rules, including a concession that “serving in a government position or office” for two years would not constitute a voluntary resignation.

Success in business doesn’t necessarily guarantee success at the polls. “First thing is these people should not be running for office,” Bradley Tusk, an Uber adviser and investor, who also managed Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral campaign, told BuzzFeed News during a conversation about the increasingly political role played by Silicon Valley leaders. “It worked for Mike [Bloomberg] because of 9/11. If you look at the history of rich people from business or tech running for office, they almost always lose. That personality type is very different from running a company. The reality is if you’re Mark, with your wealth and platform,” then you’re better off as CEO of Facebook than as president, he said.

Tusk also mentioned that direct political engagement has not been as successful for Zuckerberg in the past. “Look at Fwd.us. How much money did those guys get taken for? And they accomplished nothing,” he said, referring to Zuckerberg’s ill-conceived immigration advocacy group. “They are better off using their strengths and their skills” than jumping directly into the political arena, Tusk said.

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Zuckerberg meeting with the Dallas Police Department in January 2017.

Via facebook.com

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(L-R) Amazon's chief Jeff Bezos, Larry Page of Alphabet, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Vice President elect Mike Pence, President-elect Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, co-founder and former CEO of PayPal, Tim Cook of Apple and Safra Catz of Oracle attend a meeting at Trump Tower December 14, 2016 in New York.

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order temporarily halting the US refugee program for 120 days. The order has indefinitely suspended the intake of refugees from Syria and has blocked all people from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen from entering the US for 90 days. Reuters reports that the order affects those with green cards as well — meaning that permanent residents of the United States of America from these countries currently abroad may not be allowed to return to the country or travel outside the United States.

In the run-up to the election and now-President Trump's win, Silicon Valley's leaders frequently positioned themselves with their rhetoric as 2016's new statesmen and were occasionally outspoken against Trump as a candidate. During his transition, many of Big Tech's most prominent leaders met with Trump to discuss his economic agenda. Here's how Silicon Valley, and some of the world's biggest global technology companies, are reacting to the news of Trump's measures against refugees and travellers from several Muslim-majority countries.

A source at Google told BuzzFeed News that "just under 200 people at Google affected" by Trump's executive order "but people across the company are freaking out." The source said that employees have emailed managers, suggesting that "if their colleagues affected by the order cannot travel for conferences or work events then they will refuse to travel in solidarity. "A lot of people are talking this weekend. Emails were flying around Friday," the source said.

Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a memo to staff about the ban, which was obtained by Bloomberg.

"It’s painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues," Pichai wrote. "We’ve always made our view on immigration issues known publicly and will continue to do so."

Here's a statement by Google, issued to BuzzFeed News:

"We’re concerned about the impact of this order and any proposals that could impose restrictions on Googlers and their families, or that could create barriers to bringing great talent to the US. We'll continue to make our views on these issues known to leaders in Washington and elsewhere."

Apple CEO, Tim Cook wrote a memo on the ban to employees from in Washington DC, where he's been taking meetings with top GOP lawmakers:

In my conversations with officials here in Washington this week, I've made it clear that Apple believes deeply in the importance of immigration -- both to our company and to our nation's future. Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we do.

I've heard from many of you who are deeply concerned about the executive order issued yesterday restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. I share your concerns. It is not a policy we support.

Read the full memo here

Microsoft has also issued a statement:

"We share the concerns about the impact of the executive order on our employees from the listed countries, all of whom have been in the United States lawfully, and we’re actively working with them to provide legal advice and assistance.”

Saturday afternoon, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella added his own statement via LinkedIn:

"As an immigrant and as a CEO, I’ve both experienced and seen the positive impact that immigration has on our company, for the country, and for the world. We will continue to advocate on this important topic."

Friday night Mark Zuckerberg gently criticized Trump's policies on his Facebook page. The Facebook CEO noted that he's “concerned about the impact of the recent executive orders signed by President Trump,” especially the ones related to immigration restriction.

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Facebook: zuck

Saturday afternoon a Facebook spokesperson added a short addendum to Zuckerberg's comment, noting: "We are assessing the impact on our workforce and determining how best to protect our people and their families from any adverse effects."

Zuckerberg's post, while one of the first from tech executives has been criticized for not being more direct. According to a Facebook employee of Middle Eastern descent, some FB employees are worried and some have called for the company to clarify its relationship to board member Peter Thiel.

"There are questions here that we want answered. Does Thiel support this ban? Does he think the Facebook employees who come from Iran and those other countries shouldn't be allowed to keep working here? We deserve to know his position on this."

Palantir — of which Thiel is a co-founder and the largest shareholder — did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the ban.

FWD.us, the organization that Zuckerberg said he would be working with to address potential fallout Trump's immigration ban, spoke to BuzzFeed News about the executive order.

Executive Director, Todd Schulte told BuzzFeed News that FWD.us is focused on helping refugees and H1b visa holders, but the organization’s priority is the impact that Trump’s executive order will have on beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Child Arrival policy.

“We are very focused on insuring that those 750,000 Dreamers who are benefitting from DACA don’t have their protections removed. They have passed a background check, they are the most integrated parts of the undocumented community into society.” Schulte said that it’s important not to view groups of immigrants in different buckets, but noted, “There’s no better definition of what we can do to help young people succeed than a program that helped people come out of the shadows. They are working in every major company in America,” and it would be economically disastrous to end the program.

Late Saturday afternoon, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an advisor to President Trump, tweeted that "the blanket entry ban on citizens from certain primarily Muslim countries is not the best way to address the country’s challenges."

Musk was recently tapped to join the administration’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. He has already been spotted in the White House.

In an email to BuzzFeed News, a Tesla spokesperson echoed Musk's sentiments, adding that "[Tesla hopes] that this temporary action by the Administration transitions to a fair and thoughtful long-term policy.”

Saturday afternoon, Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, sent a memo to employees and posted the text to Facebook.

He writes that, "this ban will impact many innocent people — an issue that I will raise this coming Friday when I go to Washington for President Trump’s first business advisory group meeting."

Kalanick notes that Uber is reaching out to its drivers who are immigrants that might be affected. "We are working out a process to identify these drivers and compensate them pro bono during the next three months to help mitigate some of the financial stress and complications with supporting their families and putting food on the table. We will have more details on this in the coming days," he says.

Full memo is here:

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Facebook: traviskal

An Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News on Saturday afternoon that the company has reached out to about a dozen employees with green cards and visas who would be affected by the executive order with offers of support, including legal help.

This week, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider, Uber's CTO denounced Trump, calling him "a deplorable person." Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was recently named as one of 19 executives who will be advising President Trump on economic policies.

In a Saturday email to employees Logan Green and John Zimmer, co-founders of Silicon Valley ride-hail company Lyft, said they "stand firmly against" Trump's order.

Yesterday, Trump closed the country’s borders to refugees, immigrants, and even documented residents from around the world based on their country of origin. Banning people of a particular faith or creed, race or identity, sexuality or ethnicity, from entering the U.S. is antithetical to both Lyft’s and our nation’s core values. We stand firmly against these actions, and will not be silent on issues that threaten the values of our community.

It is also not lost on us that many of our community members, their families, and friends may be impacted. We are here for you. Our HR and legal teams are working directly with those affected. We ask that each of you continue to support each other and remember how other community members have been affected.

Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings addressed Trump's executive order with a forceful statement on Facebook. "Trump's actions are hurting Netflix employees around the world, and are so un-American it pains us all," he wrote.

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Facebook: reed1960

Square, the payments company founded by Jack Dorsey, issued the following statement through a spokesperson:

"We are concerned about the impact the recent executive action could have on our employees and our sellers. The contributions of our immigrant-owned small businesses play an important part in our economy and demonstrate the best of this country's values. We stand with them and anyone affected."

Dorsey, who is also the CEO of Twitter tweeted personally that the executive order will have a real economic and humanitarian impact.

He also tweeted a link to The Internet Association, an advocacy and lobbying arm for tech companies. According to the Association:

The executive order signed yesterday has troubling consequences. Internet Association member companies – along with companies in many other industries – include legal immigrant employees who are covered by these recent executive orders and will not be able to return back to their jobs and families in the U.S.

Twitter also tweeted in support of "immigrants of all religions."

Airbnb co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky also tweeted his disapproval of the refugee ban. "Let's all find ways to connect people, not separate them," he tweeted.

In a Facebook post, Chesky elaborated — and announced that his company would be "providing free housing to refugees and anyone else who needs it."

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Facebook: brianchesky

Amazon, which applied for 2,483 high skilled immigration visas in 2015, and 627 in 2016, declined to comment on the refugee ban to BuzzFeed News.

But in an email sent to all Amazon employees, VP of human resources Beth Galetti said: "We are committed to supporting all of our employees and anyone in their immediate family who may be impacted by this order, including assistance with legal counsel and support, and will continue to monitor any developments."

Hewlett Packard, provided a response to BuzzFeed News Sunday afternoon:

“At HP, regardless of economic and political circumstances, part of our core values is to support our employees and their families. Our first priority is to identify the affected people we have across the globe and to determine how best to support them. We are dedicated to diversity and inclusion and have been doing business in 170 countries for over 70 years and look forward to continuing to do so.”

Also issued Sunday, a statement from Intel, which initially declined comment on Trump's refugee ban.

"We are providing support to potentially impacted employees, all of whom are in this country lawfully. As a company co-founded by an immigrant, we continue to support lawful immigration. We will continue to provide any impacted employees with Intel’s full support."

On Twitter, tech investors and Silicon Valley personas are speaking out, some of them strongly. Prominent Twitter and Uber investor, Chris Sacca tweeted this:

Entrepreneur and investor Max Levchin, who cofounded PayPal (along with Thiel), tweeted that "we must not close our door to immigrants":

The CEO and co-founder of Twilio wrote a long post on Medium on Saturday afternoon, calling the ban "UnAmerican" and offering concrete steps to take action.

Yesterday, that beacon of hope and freedom was extinguished, exactly when humanity needs it the most. Globally there are over 60,000,000 displaced people, more than any time since World War II. And today we turned our backs on them.

There is an obvious word for this, it is persecution. By instituting a religious test, we have very clearly enshrined religious discrimination in federal policy (and emboldened the “us vs. them” storyline that terror organizations propagate.)

Read the whole post here

GoFundMe's CEO Rob Solomon wrote in a statement to BuzzFeed News that the company "believe[s] this new policy is counter to American values."

America is a nation of immigrants, made up of folks from all walks of life, from places all around the world, who are woven into the very fabric of our communities and cities from coast to coast. Immigrants have enriched our nation and strengthened American values for generations. Immigrants are not only part of our communities--they're critical to the success of American businesses. In fact, many employees and executives here at GoFundMe are immigrants.We oppose the new Executive Order, and we believe this new policy is counter to American values. Each and every day, we see individuals and organizations raising money on GoFundMe for refugee families who are hoping for a new start. And each and every day, we see the kindness of communities coming together to support these families in need.GoFundMe exists to give people the power to change their world. Millions of people have raised billions of dollars on our platform. As a company and platform, we do not discriminate, and most importantly we couldn't exist without the contributions that immigrants have made to the great Silicon Valley companies that have preceded us.

On Sunday morning, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said that, in addition to donating $100,000 to the ACLU, the company is offering immigration counseling to employees and their families and working to expedite green card and visa applications for employees who are permanent residents of Mexico and Canada.

Sriram Krishnan, a Snapchat employee and former Facebook employee singled out the specific portion of the ban, which prevents green card holders from re-entering the country:

On Twitter, some have called for major websites and platforms to blackout their sites in protest. In January 2012, in response to the Stop Online Privacy Act, sites like Wikipedia, Tumblr and Reddit blacked out their sites in protest.

Dash, is the CEO of the New York-based software company, Fog Creek, shared on Twitter that Tech employees should use leverage to convince their executives to pressure President Trump on the order:

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Da esquerda para a direita, os executivos de tecnologia que se encontraram com Trump durante a transição, em 14 de dezembro: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Larry Page (Alphabet, Google), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Mike Pence (vice-presidente), Trump, Peter Thiel (fundador e ex-CEO do PayPal, conselheiro de Trump), Tim Cook (Apple) e Safra Catz (Oracle).

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

O presidente dos Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, publicou um decreto na sexta-feira (27) suspendendo por ao menos 120 dias a entrada de refugiados no país. A ordem também impede que cidadãos de sete países de maioria muçulmana — Síria, Iraque, Irã, Sudão, Somália, Líbia e Iêmen — entrem nos Estados Unidos.

Durante a eleição americana, os principais executivos do Vale do Silício se opuseram abertamente a Trump. Veja abaixo como as principais empresas de tecnologia do mundo reagiram ao decreto do presidente americano.

Google

Uma fonte na empresa disse ao BuzzFeed News que "aproximadamente 200 funcionários são afetados" pelo decreto de Trump. Em um memorando interno obtido pela Bloomberg, o CEO do Google, Sundar Pichai, disse que "é doloroso ver o custo pessoal desse decreto em nossos colegas".

Oficialmente, a empresa enviou a seguinte declaração ao BuzzFeed News:

"Estamos preocupados com o impacto deste decreto e de qualquer proposta que possa impor restrições a funcionários do Google e suas famílias, ou que poderiam criar barreiras à atração de grandes talentos aos Estados Unidos. Nós continuaremos a deixar clara a nossa visão nessas questões aos líderes em Washington e em outros lugares."

Apple

O CEO da empresa, Tim Cook, escreveu um memorando aos funcionários em Washington, onde está reunido com parlamentares republicanos.

Durante as conversas que tive com autoridades em Washington, nesta semana, deixei claro que a Apple acredita profundamente na importância da imigração — tanto para a nossa companhia como para o futuro da nossa nação. A Apple não existiria sem imigração, sem falar em progredir e inovar da maneira como progredimos e inovamos.

Ouvi as preocupações de muitos de vocês em relação ao decreto publicado na sexta-feira restringindo a entrada de cidadãos de sete países de maioria muçulmana. Eu compartilho de suas preocupações. Não é uma política pública que nós apoiamos.

Facebook

Na própria sexta-feira, o CEO e fundador do Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, criticou o decreto de Trump em sua página. O executivo disse que se preocupa "com o impacto dos decretos recém-assinados pelo presidente Trump", especialmente os relacionados a imigração.

No sábado, um porta-voz do Facebook disse: "Estamos avaliando o impacto [do decreto] em nossa mão-de-obra para determinar como melhor proteger nossas pessoas e suas famílias dos efeitos adversos".

Leia a íntegra da mensagem de Zuckerberg (em inglês).

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Facebook: zuck

Microsoft

Satya Nadella, CEO da Microsoft, divulgou uma nota em que expressa preocupação com a decisão de Trump.

"Como imigrante e CEO, pude tanto sentir como ver o impacto positivo que a imigração provoca em nossa empresa, no país e em todo o mundo. Nós continuaremos a defender essa importante posição."

Oficialmente, a empresa divulgou uma nota:

"Nós compartilhamos a preocupação com o impacto do decreto presidencial com nossos funcionários dos países listados, que estão todos legalmente nos Estados Unidos, e estamos atuando ativamente para dar assistência legal a eles."

Airbnb

O CEO da empresa, Brian Chesky, publicou uma mensagem no Facebook criticando o decreto. "Impedir que refugiados entrem nos Estados Unidos não está certo, e nós devemos nos unir àqueles que forem afetados", escreveu.

Ele também anunciou que o Airbnb dará hospedagem gratuita a refugiados que tenham sido barrados em aeroportos e não estejam em suas cidades de residência. Um porta-voz disse ao BuzzFeed News que a empresa "usará as ferramentas já existentes e compartilhará mais detalhes nos próximos dias".

Leia o texto de Chesky no Facebook (em inglês).

View Video ›

Facebook: brianchesky

Twitter

O fundador e CEO da empresa, Jack Dorsey, criticou a ordem de Trump em sua própria rede social. Ele disse que a ordem terá um impacto negativo nos planos econômico e humanitário.

Depois, o perfil oficial da empresa também tuitou contra a ordem:

"O Twitter é construído por imigrantes de todas as religiões. Nós estamos ao lado deles, sempre."

Com reportagem de Priya Anand, Caroline O'Donovan, John Paczkowski, e Mat Honan, de Los Angeles e San Francisco.

Este post foi traduzido do inglês.

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Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google

Ruben Sprich / Reuters

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, told an audience of Google employees on Thursday that the Trump administration is “going to do these evil things as they've done in the immigration area and perhaps some others.”

Schmidt's remarks were made during the company's weekly meeting at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, on January 26, when reports were surfacing about the sweeping immigration order that President Donald Trump would sign the next day.

Google’s corporate mantra for many years was “Don’t be evil.” Schmidt, the former Google CEO, now chairs its parent company, called Alphabet.

Schmidt's opposition to Trump's immigration policy is noteworthy because Schmidt has at least twice traveled to Trump Tower to meet with the president and his advisers, but has struggled to gain a foothold in Trump's circle. He had close ties to the Obama administration and supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, facts not lost on Trump’s advisers.

BuzzFeed News obtained a partial transcript of Schmidt’s remarks during the meeting. Three others familiar with the matter confirmed the accuracy of the "evil" quote.

“I can tell you that the tone of this government is very much economic growth,” Schmidt told employees, according to the transcript provided by a source. “And so I think at the end of the day, they are going to do these evil things as they've done in the immigration area and perhaps some others, but the core focus is going to be to get the growth rate in the country — which is roughly one and a half to two percent — up another point by simply pushing through increases in federal spending and overcoming the tea party.”

A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, has made his opposition to Trump’s policies more public. He joined protests against the immigration order at San Francisco International Airport over the weekend and at Google’s Mountain View campus on Monday. “I'm here because I'm a refugee,” he said on Saturday night, according to Forbes’ Ryan Mac. (Here is a transcription of Brin's remarks on Monday.)

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, also spoke at the Monday protest, according to a tweet from an employee and a person familiar with the matter.

Like many Silicon Valley corporations, Google’s response to the immigration ban seemed to become progressively more forceful over the weekend. On Sunday night, the company announced a $4 million crisis fund donated to the ACLU and other immigration causes.

Before this weekend, Google had justified its meetings with Trump by arguing that it was better to work behind the scenes than make public statements that could alienate people the company needs to work with. "But meeting with Trump was a public statement," one Google employee told BuzzFeed News on Monday. Referring to a "summit" meeting of tech leaders at Trump Tower, the employee continued, "Eric meeting privately with Trump after the summit was a public statement because that was reported on. So they have made public statements, just not ones — before this weekend — that resist the immigration [order]."

According to an earlier report by Vice about the same meeting, Schmidt told employees that he had tried to fight the immigration order. “These prejudicial actions are discriminatory and anti-globalization, and I did everything I could to cause a different outcome,” he said. “There are limits to what we can do, there’s no question if the company is asked to do something that’s counter to our values, we would oppose it and actively fight it.”

Earlier this month, just as Congress began its new session, Google threw a swanky party for 600 people in Washington, DC, celebrating Republican lawmakers. According to the New York Times, Schmidt’s “East Coast charm offensive” with Republican political leaders is part of Google’s effort to dispel the idea that it is a bastion for Democrats.

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エリック・シュミット氏

Ruben Sprich / Reuters

エリック・シュミット氏は1月26日（現地時間）、トランプ政権が「入国の管理でやったように、邪悪なことをする。それ以外もやるかもしれない」とグーグルの従業員に向けて言及した。

カリフォルニア州マウンテンビューにある本社でのミーティングで発言したシュミット氏。ドナルド・トランプ大統領が難民や移民の入国を制限する大統領令を、27日に署名するとの報道が表面化していた。

長年、グーグルの企業信念は「邪悪になるな」だった。シュミット氏は、元グーグルのCEOで、現在、親会社アルファベットの会長を務めている。

トランプ政権の移民政策に対するシュミット氏の抗議は注目に値する。トランプ大統領とアドバイザーとの面会で少なくとも2回もトランプ・タワーに訪れたことがあるからだ。

しかし、トランプ氏と人脈を築くことには苦労していた。

シュミット氏はオバマ政権と親密な関係を持っており、ヒラリー・クリントン氏の選挙運動も支援していたという、トランプ政権のアドバイザーにとって忘れがたい事実がある。

BuzzFeed Newsは、シュミット氏のミーティングでの発言記録の一部を入手した。「邪悪」発言が正確であることを、この件に詳しい3人によって確認した。記録によると、シュミット氏は以下のように発言している。

「この政権の論調は、経済成長中心だと言えるよ」

「だが、結局のところ、入国管理でやったように邪悪なことをする。それ以外もやるかもしれない」

グーグルの広報はコメントを控えた。

詳細はアップデートします。

この記事は英語から翻訳・編集されました。

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Helena Price / Via bannedproject.com

Banned, a new online photo project that debuts today, looks at the impact of President Donald Trump’s immigration order through the lens of tech workers whose lives have been affected by the ban. The collection features portraits and in-depth interviews with six individuals, like Shahrouz, an Iranian-American product designer for Pinterest, who lives in fear of being separated from his wife and son, and Ruthia, a product designer for Facebook here on a work visa from Beijing, who is worried that Trump’s policy could increase anti-immigrant sentiment among the people around her.

In the interviews, subjects describe a sudden sense of panic following Trump’s order, which is still being debated in court. “I have [US] citizenship, so I think that grants me certain rights, but overnight, people with green cards are no longer able to be in the country,” said Gabriel, a virtual reality product designer at Facebook who was born in Cuba. He said he has family members who are trying to enter the US but are stuck in limbo. “Who knows? All these things that we take for granted that we think are like a foundation of security, all those things might be stripped away overnight.”

On Jan. 27, Trump signed an executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the US. A few days later, after the ban inspired large protests in the US and caused chaos and confusion at airports around the world, a federal judge issued a nationwide order halting enforcement of both visa and refugee provisions of Trump's order. Since then, a federal appeals court has denied the government’s request to allow it to enforce the order as the case challenging it makes its way through the courts. Late last week, Trump announced plans to soon issue a new executive order to replace his first travel and refugee ban.

Omid, an Iranian citizen here on a green card who used to work for Google and is currently getting his MBA at Stanford, said he felt “humiliated” after living in the US for seven years. “Suddenly I felt degraded as a second-class person in this country.”

Helena Price, the photographer and oral historian behind the project, told BuzzFeed News that the goal of Banned is to fight stereotypes around immigration, which exist even in Silicon Valley, where tech companies have made a big show of disavowing Trump’s executive order. People who have been hurt by the administration’s policies “might be working next to you at Google or Facebook, but they are secretly dealing with existential crises than most of us can’t even comprehend,” said Price.

Banned is a “special edition” of Techies, Price's larger-scale photo project that attracted a lot of media attention when it was released last April. Techies also blended art and activism, featuring portraiture and interviews that focused on groups that typically get excluded from the Silicon Valley narrative, such as women and people of color. Price said tech companies have used the repository of 100 profiles to recruit speakers and employees. One Google employee even got promoted after the company read her entry, she said.

But Price was dubious about whether Banned could make an impact beyond artistic impression. “I don’t know, to be honest,” she said. “I think at the lowest level it’s really just me sticking to my philosophy that we should always use our skills in a way that elevates those who don’t have the same advantages.”

Compared to other immigrants singled out by Trump’s executive order, tech workers seem to have the support of their employers and more resources at their disposal. Still, said Price, “All of the Silicon Valley privilege in the world can’t help them because of where they’re from. It’s kind of this big equalizer, when you think about it, if suddenly your papers don’t count.”

The lengthy interviews, presented both as text and audio, touch on similar facets of the immigrant experience — the bureaucratic vetting process, the anxiety of hoping to win the visa lottery. Many of the subjects also described the sense of belonging they felt living in the Bay Area before Trump’s immigration order was issued.

“The funny thing is I never ... Until two weeks ago, I never even thought of myself as an immigrant,” Omid told Price. “I know I was not an American because I didn't have the citizenship, but I always saw myself as a fully contributing and highly integrated member of the society, paid my taxes, embraced American values, lived the American dream in many ways, and suddenly you get this stamp on you which says you're an immigrant. Not only that, you're also from one of those seven countries we just suddenly decided not to like.”

Shahrouz, the designer from Pinterest, spoke candidly about his reaction to the new administration: "Immediately after Trump was elected, my first thought was, 'Thank goodness my son looks white,' which is a terrible thought to have. There's something psychologically profound about being labeled an enemy even though I have nothing but love for this country and its potential. In the eyes of so many people who don't know me, who don't know my family, just having a bias against us that we would want to hurt them in some way, is troubling at best."

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FilmMagic for HBO

On Tuesday night, HBO hosted the premiere party for the fourth season of Silicon Valley at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco, a campus-like collection of buildings that houses a few George Lucas-related film and special effects companies, as well as a Yoda fountain and life-size replicas of Darth Vader and Boba Fett. Guests could occasionally be found using the latter as selfie backdrops.

After the screening, the audience full of CEOs, venture capitalists, Twitter-famous engineers, and tech bloggers watched Recode’s Kara Swisher grill the cast and crew. The question she returned to again and again was the same one the cast and creators got pelted with in the press junket beforehand: With the tech world in the crosshairs, how political is Season 4 gonna get?

“Everyone thinks [tech executives are] coastal elites, that some of the reasons for the election were because these people are stealing jobs, becoming wealthy, and leaving behind everyone,” Swisher said. “How do you reflect that in this season?”

Executive producer Alec Berg had a ready answer. “The tricky thing with the show is that we write [it] months before we shoot it, and we shoot it months before it airs, so it’s hard to be topical,” he explained onstage. The inspiration that writers draw from has to stay relevant, “so we can’t really chase trends.”

“You’ll see our United episode in a year and a half,” said Kumail Nanjiani, the actor who plays the perpetual striver Dinesh Chugtai, cutting in.

Later, Swisher tried asking the question a different way: “Do you want the show to get more political or is it just 'let's make fun of the idiots of Silicon Valley' kind of thing?”

This time, actor Zach Woods responded. “It’s a tricky thing. [The writers] make fun of the let’s-make-the-world-a-better-place people all the time,” he said, but “then if you get a show that’s too shrill or sanctimonious then you become the person you’re parodying.”

The fourth season may not wade into the internal meltdown currently underway at Uber’s headquarters, but the first episode does kick off with a fake Uber driver. Pied Piper, the data compression startup at the center of the show, has pivoted away from its prized algorithm in favor of PiperChat, a more practical video-messaging app. The company is racking up users, but it can’t afford the server costs, so Richard Hendricks, the spiny, graceless genius behind the code, masquerades as an Uber driver. The plan is to temporarily kidnap a venture capitalist and entice him into investing while he’s sitting captive in the backseat.

The investor quickly realizes that he’s being chauffeured around by the most toxic founder on the peninsula. Please, Richard begs him, we really need the cash. “Really? Is it hard to become a billionaire? Welcome to the Valley, assholes,” the VC replies, demanding to be let out — that is, once Richard can figure out the child locks. A few seconds later, the irate investor pops back in to hand Richard his business card: Look, if PiperChat can actually get to a million users, give him a call. “Then everyone in town will be trying to kidnap you,” the VC says, making it clear that the right numbers can absolve all kinds of sins.

The scene is pretty restrained for a series that leans so heavily on sitcom-style punchlines, but the message still comes through: In Silicon Valley, the FOMO flows both ways. The Uber scenario also sneaks in a subtle point about what constitutes desperation in an industry where three commas in your bank balance is a real possibility. Richard is driving an Uber so he can try to pick up some spare millions for his startup, not because he needs to make ends meet.

Richard's discomfort hard-selling the app sets up the tension of the fourth season. Until this point, the biggest threats to our hapless band of beta males has come from the world outside Erlich Bachman’s living room. Now they’re in danger of sinking under the weight of their own ambition, obliviousness, and poor interpersonal skills.

The decision to satirize personalities instead of ripping the plot from TechCrunch headlines has paid off. Four years in, Silicon Valley is playing to its strong suit and gliding past limitations that critics have latched onto in the past. From the get-go, the show has been more interested in pleasing Reddit with its obsessive technical accuracy than in sending a progressive message. The creators didn’t just do their homework, they waved it all around to make sure you could see the A+ at the top of the page. Year after year after year they were told that the tech industry’s backward-ass attitude toward gender and race is just begging for a comedic takedown, but they choose to go the academic route instead.

Now that its makers have proven themselves, however, there's a buoyancy in the air. Season 4 looks ready to take its learnings — as Gavin Belson (the demented egomaniac running Goog...er, Hooli...played with panache by Matt Ross) might say — for a spin. Like Girls, Silicon Valley seems to be serving a keener sense of pathos now that the pressure is off. The inward turn helps, the dick jokes do not. But because the shifting fortunes and jockeying egos are rendered so breezily, it's easy to forget that the show barely glances outside its bubble.

Perhaps that avoidance is deliberate. In the first episode, Belson is being asked about a Hooli factory in Malaysia but can only think about how another executive forced his private jet to stop in Jackson Hole first, even though Mountain View was closer. It’s a succinct way to show viewers how your world-changing sausage gets made: CEOs may be too consumed with petty concerns to pay much mind to just how far their power can reach.

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All told, though, both episodes were a nice reminder that Silicon Valley is responsible for bringing so much of the vocabulary and imagery of this subculture to the mainstream — if audiences wanted to picture Google’s campus before 2014, they had to rely on flights of fancy like The Circle. Or take the return of iconic jackass-like investor Russ Hanneman, he of three comma fame, who shows up with the doors of his orange McLaren raised at full mast. Of course, the show has always been more “funny chortle” than “funny haha.” As one engineer told BuzzFeed News after, when she’s watching home alone she doesn’t laugh.

The season premiere even had a couple echoes back to seasons past. Instead of “Big Head” Bighetti failing upward until he reaches the Hooli roof to “rest and vest,” we see another exec in an elevator that sinks down to the sub-level where he meets the ponytailed server dweller last seen in Season 3.

In Trumpian times, the low-stakes antics are a welcome breather, especially when they involve characters the audience has grown to love and pity. This season Nanjiani’s character, Dinesh, steps into more of a leadership role, complete with a costume change: from casual coder to douchebag pitchman with a one-button blazer, a mess of product in his hair, and a smarmy grin.

“Who were you trying to be?” asked Swisher. “I met about 15 people like that recently.”

During the Q&A, co-creator Mike Judge promised that there would be some female characters this season, including an actor who plays an influential role. She appears for “more than one episode, more than one line — she has a whole arc,” Judge said. A few seats over, Amanda Crew, who plays Monica, the young female investor, was unmissable wearing a Pepto-Bismol–pink suit in a row of seven men. Although Crew joins the cast for press junkets, no one wants to point out that her character doesn’t have as many lines, isn’t as fully developed, and isn’t as integral to the plot. How many viewers know Monica's last name?

She only gets a couple lines in the first two episodes, but they include one of the most poignant. Richard comes to her for advice about dropping PiperChat for something even more ambitious. “Richard, I know people who have spent their entire careers chasing after an app with this kind of growth rate and never hit it,” she says. The scene quickly moves on to a sight gag about Monica being demoted to an office with a view of the urinal, but passing lines like that gesture at how many Richards there are driving around Palo Alto, hoping that millions might fall in their lap.