As Airbnb prepares to go public, CEO Brian Chesky feels he has a great story to tell. Over the past decade, he has raised $3.2 billion from investors—and still has all of that in Airbnb’s coffers. It’s a fact he brings up repeatedly in interviews these days, as he no doubt braces for scrutiny that the public markets will bring.

It is indeed a significant achievement for a ...

As Magic Leap neared the release of its first augmented reality headset in August 2018, the company’s founder and CEO Rony Abovitz had a bullish target, telling investors and colleagues in meetings that he wanted to sell at least one million units within the product’s first year, according to four people who repeatedly heard the goal from Abovitz. 

Eventually, Magic Leap ...

Tech outsourcing firms known for bringing workers from India to the U.S. have seen rejection rates for new skilled worker visas surge under the Trump administration, according to an analysis of U.S. government data.

Most affected are companies such as Cognizant Technology Solutions, Capgemini America, Tech Mahindra, IBM and Tata Consultancy Services, according to data from U.S. Immigration and ...

LAS VEGAS—When Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy took the stage at the cloud giant’s annual re:Invent sales conference here this week, he showed a slide with a photo of an IBM mainframe sitting in a driveway, along with boxes labeled Oracle and Microsoft. The joke—part of a long tradition of Jassy slinging barbs at rivals at the event—was that the companies’ ...

DoorDash, an on-demand food delivery firm most recently valued at $12 billion which plans to go public next year, expects to lose $450 million this year—but it is faring better than its main rivals, such as Uber Eats.

The financial picture—including projections that DoorDash’s net revenue will be between $900 million and about $1 billion this year—are likely to be ...

We launched The Information six years ago to the day with a mission to conduct fearless and deep original reporting about the technology industry. The press was only telling part of the tech story. We focused on what was missing—from the early-stage companies that became the next unicorns to the scandals that have ousted CEOs. 

But there’s a second important role that trusted ...

The days of Alphabet, the Google parent company that Larry Page and Sergey Brin created as a playground for ambitious new bets, may be numbered. 

A broad-based belief in Silicon Valley is that new opportunities for social networks occur only with “platform shifts,” such as the growth of mobile. Only then, so this theory goes, do consumers have the cognitive bandwidth and interest to seek out new social products—and can  budding networks find cheap enough distribution avenues to grow efficiently.

This dogma is ...

At Airbnb’s board meeting two weeks ago, one topic took center stage: how to contain accelerating costs. It is a question that until relatively recently received scant attention inside Silicon Valley’s big-name startups. But a string of rejections by the public markets of some of the tech industry’s superstars has prompted companies once primarily concerned with rapid growth ...

ByteDance, the Chinese company behind the wildly popular TikTok video app, is looking to borrow around $2 billion from banks, according to people familiar with the matter. The money would add to ByteDance’s war chest as TikTok challenges Facebook and Snapchat in the U.S. and other parts of the world. 

The latest fundraising comes as ByteDance, the world’s most highly valued ...

This has been a year of intensified competition between a number of companies in both tech and media, as well as between tech and Washington.

A number of prominent tech and media executives left their jobs in recent months, for reasons ranging from a post-merger reorganization to business struggles to strategic differences with the top boss. In The Information’s latest batch of Free Agents, we profile some of these industry leaders who are between jobs. The group includes Airbnb’s COO, whose departure was announced on ...

In reporting, we all talk about the importance of getting out of our bubbles—which in my case means leaving Silicon Valley to spend time on the ground in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and beyond. 

The value of doing so was crystal clear this week as I sat across from producer Jason Blum to chitchat about the future of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the relationship between the two. ...