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To my ear, tone-deaf communications reached new decibel levels in 2018, with the tech world contributing mightily to the noise. It was a shrieking cacophony of a year, brimming with inept statements, videos, tweets and posts that offended, hurt, angered or baffled the intended audience—inevitably, to the utter amazement of the tone-challenged communicators. “Tone-deaf” inRead more

It took longer than people expected, but the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) came down hard on Theranos yesterday — banning the company and its CEO from owning or operating a medical lab for two years. As I’ve written before, this is an important story for Silicon Valley business and marketing leaders toRead more

Unicorns aren’t dead yet, though some would like them to be. Others claim we’re now in a “post-unicorn” world. Whatever the future holds, the class of $1B+ private companies continues to expand and contract weekly – providing a valuable microcosm to understand today’s tech trends and startup dynamics. To that end, we’re launching the first complete study thatRead more

Silicon Valley continues to be in the news for the wrong reasons. Theranos is the leading culprit – though not the only one – and it’s important for Valley companies to track what’s happening in the broader communications environment. Crises rarely just impact one company. They tend to drag down a category of like companies (at leastRead more

Silicon Valley has been in the hot seat recently, with several companies facing major and minor media firestorms. Tesla was accused of using low-paid foreign labor for its factories. Facebook is defending itself against charges of editorial bias. Palantir is responding (or not) to staff turnover and customer satisfaction questions. And Theranos is battling a series of disclosures aboutRead more

Unicorns are a phenomenon. Over the past 18 months, they have gone from mythical creature to tech meme – spawning greed and envy for global entrepreneurs, investors and recruiters, while feeding the tech media engine with endless news stories, leader boards and Fortune cover stories. The “unicorn” concept was coined in Nov’13 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, and refers to privately held start-upRead more

I’m not the first to say it, and I won’t be the last: Silicon Valley is a special place. Sure it’s where most of the world’s leading-edge technology was born, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a culture, it’s an organism — and dare I say, it’s a convergence. Where top brains meetRead more