California is moving toward becoming the first state to require companies to have women on their boards –assuming the idea could survive a likely court challenge. Sparked by debates around fair pay, sexual harassment and workplace culture, two female state senators are spearheading a bill to promote greater gender representation in corporate decision-making...
Zozi fired its CEO earlier this year, but employees were only just informed of this fact last week, when the ousted CEO – who hadn’t been in the office for months – crashed an emergency Town Hall meeting scheduled the day after the company announced a series of layoffs, affecting nearly 40 percent of staff...
Andreessen in hot water for texts he sent Zuckerberg Posted Nintendo will pay you up to $20,000 to hack the 3DS Facebook’s board was sued earlier this year, with investors alleging that their interests were not adequately represented when Zuckerberg was permitted to sell most of his shares and still retain voting control of the company...
Harry Stebbings Crunch Network Contributor Harry Stebbings is the founder and host of The Twenty Minute VC , an independent podcast focused on venture capital...
These principles guide our proxy voting, which is one of the most important tasks we undertake as a long-term shareholder in support of our fiduciary duty to our members," said CalSTRS Director of Corporate Governance Anne Sheehan. "This action reflects how important board diversity, structure and overall effectiveness are to good corporate governance, which in turn is the keystone to long-term, healthy corporate performance."....
With the incessant talk about unicorns, it’s easy to lose sight of the opposite end of the investment funnel. What feeds the industry is not unicorns, but first venture round companies ...
The silver lining of Google’s diversity efforts Posted 13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week Google has had big week around diversity. The company gifted a $2.8 million office space inside its New York City building to Black Girls Code, appointed Roger Ferguson, an African-American finance executive, to its board of directors and released its latest diversity report...
Technology companies, particularly those with an enterprise bent, appear to be coming under increasing pressure from activist investors who want to squeeze out profits at the cost of products and jobs. Last year EMC pressed by an activist investor eventually sold the company to Dell for $67 billion. Citrix is the latest company facing this issue –and from the same investor as it…
When the news broke in early October that Dell was planning on buying EMC for a whopping $67 billion, more than a few jaws dropped (including mine), but in the weeks since, reports have surfaced about multiple problems from tax issues to VMware’s plunging stock price and the post-deal creation of Virtustream. It’s too soon to say the deal is in jeopardy, but there are enough…
Mozilla’s leadership team has seen its fair share of changes recently and today the organization named Katharina Borchert as its new Chief Innovation Officer (a role once held by Mozilla’s current CEO Chris Beard). Borchert will start her new job in January. Most recently, Borchert was the CEO of Spiegel Online, the online arm of Germany’s influential Spiegel magazine, as…
It’s been a very busy few months for Timehop. The app, which provides users with a personal “today in history” memo by surfacing their photos and social networking posts from this day one year ago or more, is closing out the year with more than 12 million registered users, half of whom, some 6 million, open the app every single day. That’s double the number of both…
Investor and Silicon Valley kingpin Marc Andreessen is stepping down from eBay's board of directors after a six year tenure. Andreessen announced the move on Twitter — as he often does — noting that it had been “an absolute privilege” to work with eBay ...
With the birth of the new feminist narrative sweeping popular culture, it is bound to enter its awkward teenage phase. And just like a teenage mean girl, the new feminism is growing unwieldy before gracefully settling into something we can agree on. But before it makes it there, I hope it doesn’t tear us all down in the process. A few weeks ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in… Read More
On stage at Disrupt NY today, Sequoia partner and Square board member Roelof Botha set the record straight around those rumors that the payments company was in acquisition talks with Google. “There is a lot of misinformation about Square right ...
Ask your board member on the spot if they support your decision and whether she sees any weaknesses in your approach. If she's not convinced, at least you'll know in advance and you'll know why. The basis of all good decision-making on hard decisions is ...
Twitter has taken a lot of fire for having an all-male board, almost all-male management team, and all-male investor group. The root of this problem is arrogance and a “don’t-care” attitude. This was exemplified by a response by its CEO Dick Costolo to comments I made in a New York Times article —about Twitter’s gender imbalance. Instead of responding to the issue that was raised, he tweeted ...
Today Publicis and Omnicom, two of the "big five" global advertising and marketing agencies, announced a "merger of equals", in which the two will combine to create a powerhouse with some $22.7 billion in annual revenues and a market capitalization of $35.1 billion. The pair say that the new Publicis Omnicom Group will be jointly run by the two existing CEOs, John Wren from Omnicom and Maurice ...
Google has just announced that it's named Diane B. Greene, a cofounder and longtime CEO of VMware, to its Board of Directors. Greene is also on Intuit's Board of Directors, where she serves on the Audit and Risk Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee as well. Greene was formerly President and CEO of VMware from 1998 through 2008, leading it to a $625 million acquisition by ...