Making passes at girls in glasses Can hip glasses startup Warby Parker make a love connection? One Warby Parker employee who helped a man pick out his glasses seems to have also run away with his heart. The dude did what all millennials do when they see an attractive girl, and posted a Missed Connection about her on Craigslist: Read More
If the sunny, overblown drama of Bravo’s Start-Ups: Silicon Valley has left you aching for a bleaker take on Valley culture, then we have some wonderful news for you. Deadline reports that HBO has just greenlit a new pilot called Silicon Valley, produced by cult comedy icon Mike Judge.
The show will be a single-camera affair, offering a dark take on the “high tech gold rush of modern Silicon Valley, where the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success.” You know what that means: hoodies! Read More
When we arrived at the Dream Hotel on 55th, there was already a substantial crowd of would-be attendees worrying that the one-hour open bar at #techdrinkup’s holiday party would end before we made it upstairs. Ahead of us, two young men were debating the relative merits of Sean Parker in the wake of Airtime’s abysmal numbers: “I’m a fan,” said Mr. Parker’s defender. “Everyone has success and failing.”
What no one mentioned within our earshot: Gotham Casting would be in the house, looking for personalities to feature in a possible New York spinoff of Start-ups: Silicon Valley, Bravo’s oft-maligned, Randi Zuckerberg-produced reality show. Read More
Do you like Start-ups: Silicon Valley, but think it could use just a bit more jiggle? Do you enjoy mocking cast member and “lifecaster” Sarah Austin for her admittedly ill-advised shenanigans? Boy, have we got the single-serve site for you.
Devan Koshal, the founder of a payments startup called Swipe, has created Fuck Yeah Sarah Austin. It’s nothing but a single GIF of Ms. Austin shimmying into what appear to be skinny jeans. At the bottom is a note which we take to be a disclaimer of sorts: “You guys were thinking it, I just built it.” Read More
Season 1 . . . Episode 2 . . . no end in sight . . . I’m not sure how much more I can take.
Now that the dust has settled from the PR, subsequent Valley backlash, promos, more backlash, and last week’s premiere, we actually get to see what we have here with Bravo’s “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley.” Basically, it’s formulaic reality show. Read More
With 634,000 viewers tuning in for last week’s premiere of Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, newly-minted Bravo TV producer Randi Zuckerberg already has her sights set on New York. According to the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg Media, Bravo and the production house responsible for Start-Ups, Den of Thieves, have all confirmed that they’re planning a tech-focused show based in NYC. It won’t be a Start-Ups reboot for the Manhattan set, but according to the Journal, “Ms. Zuckerberg and her team are looking to expand and see what techie opportunities there are.” Read More
Silicon Alley Smackdown One of the many tech events on rain delay because of Hurricane Sandy was the Big Apple Smackdown ping pong tournament, whose guest list included an impressive number of familiar names from the New York tech scene. (Betabeat is one of the media sponsors, so we may be a little biased.) Among the techno-athletes scheduled to play was Gilt Groupe CEO–and soon-to-be Gilt Groupe chairman–Kevin Ryan. Apparently, we missed quite a show.
The tournament was scheduled for Sunday, “and I played on Friday and on Sunday just to get ready for it!” Mr. Ryan told Betabeat. Really? “Oh yeah, because I won a tournament about a month ago.” That was an invitation-only affair for ping pong ringers at the Hamptons manse of ABC Carpet & Home’s Ken Pilot. “You had to put $100 into the pot and the winner got two-thirds of the pot, so I was pretty excited about that,” Mr. Ryan enthused. Read More
