When Snap reports its first quarter earnings Tuesday afternoon, there will be one group of employees praying Wall Street likes the results. They’re the people, such as engineering chief Jerry Hunter, who got a special grant of stock in December. Mr. Hunter, for instance, has $1.8 million riding on the results.

Snap made the grants to employees deemed to be among the top 10% of performers, ...

Last month, Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts running for president, grabbed attention with a proposal to curb the power of big tech companies by pushing them to reverse past acquisitions.

But large deals of the kind Sen. Warren targeted are rare among the Big Five—as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google-parent Alphabet are sometimes ...

Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn Technology, lost both his first wife and brother to cancer. The deaths galvanized him to invest in a radiosurgery startup founded by the American neurosurgeon who helped treat his brother.  

Now the startup, Zap Surgical Systems, which recently came out of stealth mode, is seeking $80 million from outside investors ...

What is going to happen to small businesses in the U.S. in the coming years? The general thesis is that technology allows mega-companies like Amazon to scale, putting small businesses into a systemic decline. But I am not at all convinced this is the way the future needs to play out.

If the last wave of the internet empowered big businesses over small ones, it is possible that the next wave of ...

Many big tech companies—Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter and Snap—report their March quarter results next week, while Alphabet and Apple come the week after. The earnings dump is a great way to assess the state of the business.

Airbnb software engineers were struggling a couple of years ago to keep up with the number of technical glitches that were piling up with the site. At one point, employees halted all work on new features for a week to try to fix bugs in the code. To toast the effort, CEO Brian Chesky drank a cup of liquefied bugs—one for every problem solved—that was brought into the office by a ...

The percentage of African American and Hispanic decision makers in the U.S. venture capital industry fell last year from already extremely low levels in 2017, reversing three years of small gains. Female representation in the industry’s senior ranks edged up to just over 15% from 14.6%, while Asian presence climbed. Overall, venture investing remains dominated by white men, even though ...

Ex-Facebook executives Kelly Graziadei and Sarah Smith were sitting in Ms. Smith’s kitchen last year having a glass of wine and some cheese when the talk turned to startups, and how few women founders there are in Silicon Valley. The two agreed they should try to do something about it, and in the following months they reached out to their networks, emailing former colleagues and ...

There was a time when the leaders of software-as-a-service companies had to move their lips slowly when describing their business models to investors. No longer.  

After finally getting comfortable with how their businesses work, investors have flocked to the stocks of SaaS companies—which charge customers subscriptions for their software, rather than hefty upfront licensing ...

A little over a decade ago, Apple shelled out $278 million to acquire a chip startup, PA Semi, providing it with the know-how to create its own chips for the iPhone and putting it on a path towards independence from outside suppliers in the chip business.

On Tuesday, though, Apple took a detour on that journey when it settled a long-running legal battle with Qualcomm over royalty payments. ...

Disney’s unveiling of its upcoming streaming service last Thursday was a reminder of why Netflix has put so much effort into developing its own programming in recent years, making it less dependent on competing studios like Disney for content. But Netflix’s financial statements show that the streaming giant has a long way to go to be self-supporting when it comes to TV shows and ...

When employees at Lyft log into their computer to look up information about a Lyft customer or driver nowadays, a warning message flashes on their screen with a reminder that their actions are logged and could be audited. Introducing the warning is just one of a series of changes Lyft has made over the past year to better protect customer privacy after someone claiming to be an employee said ...

PAX Labs, the maker of a popular line of devices for vaping cannabis, is close to raising over $400 million in a financing round that values the company at around $1.3 billion, according to two people familiar with the deal.

Initially, the San Francisco-based company had sought to raise $150 million in capital, according to a presentation for investors viewed by The Information, but PAX ...

The cryptocurrency company ConsenSys is trying to raise $200 million from outside investors, according to several people with knowledge of the plans, as the startup looks to chart a new course just months after a widely publicized restructuring that included layoffs of around 13% of its staff.

The pitch might be an uphill battle for the company, which so far has prioritized experimentation over ...

Amazon Web Services has a knack for entering new businesses that its customers happen to be in, but one AWS customer—database startup Snowflake—has given the internet retailer’s cloud unit a taste of its own medicine.  

Snowflake launched its first product on the cloud computing service in 2015, putting it in direct competition with an AWS online database service called ...

After a scandal-plagued 2017, the perception of Uber has improved over the past year or so, at least among investors, employees and the media. So this week, with the release of its IPO prospectus, Uber could have been ready to take a victory lap. It was expected to show an improving financial picture, demonstrating that the company’s operations were moving towards profitability even as ...