This week, Google confirmed that it will soon offer checking accounts to its users. But one of the company’s biggest rivals—Amazon—doesn’t appear to be joining it with a similar product anytime soon. 

After exploring a partnership with banks early last year to offer an Amazon-branded checking account, Amazon quietly scrapped those plans in their early stages, ...

When a venture capitalist invited Jane Dinh, an entrepreneur in San Francisco, out for a second date a couple years ago, he had an unusual question for her. Would she be interested in pretending to be homeless with him for a night?

The venture capitalist, whom Dinh met through a dating app, told her he wanted to see if he could “live with less” just in case an investment fund he ...

I am thrilled to announce a brand new initiative for our subscribers who are earlier in their careers—free quarterly video conference calls on how to build your career in tech. 

As a founder and also a startup reporter for more than a decade, I have had a lot of exposure to the industry of consultants, coaches and recruiters who help make great leaders great. It is a passion of mine ...

The world’s second largest smartphone maker is going to have a harder time divorcing Google than it thought. 

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son plans to visit WeWork’s San Francisco office Thursday as the company’s senior leadership discusses decisions including potential layoffs of thousands of employees. The leadership team also is expected to consider a financial plan to present to the company’s board of directors in the coming weeks, people familiar with the matter said. 

Son ...

Disney’s launch of Disney Plus on Tuesday put in place the second of its three-part streaming strategy, following last year’s debut of its ESPN Plus sports service. Now, Disney executives are expected to turn their attention to the final piece, Hulu, the decade-old streaming service that became part of Disney earlier this year.

That has heightened tensions within Hulu, as staffers ...

Here’s a tip for Pinterest executives: Think about hiring some overseas ad sales people from Snap, Facebook or Twitter. 

Two of the younger digital media startups, The Athletic and Axios, are raising money to fuel diversification of their businesses, even as older media firms are consolidating.

The Athletic, a subscription sports news site, is raising around $50 million at a valuation north of $500 million, said people familiar with the situation. The company has raised a total of about $90 million in the past, ...

Apple is aiming to release an augmented-reality headset in 2022 and a sleeker pair of AR glasses by 2023, The Information has learned. 

Apple executives discussed the timelines, which haven’t been previously reported, in an internal presentation to employees at the company’s Cupertino, California, campus in October, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple Vice ...

SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon issued mea culpas about WeWork this week, admitting to mistakes and lessons learned. One of them: when backing a business with billions of dollars, it’s important to pay more attention to how it is going to make money. 

A shocker right? Yet an appreciation for the importance of profits is pretty much the explanation that ...

A decade ago, Mohit Aron and Bipul Sinha were on the same team—Aron as the co-founder of Nutanix, then an innovative new data-center software startup, and Sinha as an early investor and board member in the company. 

Now the two are enmeshed in one of the tech industry’s most bitter rivalries. In early 2013, Aron left Nutanix to start a new firm called Cohesity. It sells ...

Europe’s top antitrust enforcer, Margrethe Vestager, is so revered by advocates of tougher competition policy in the U.S. that one longtime antagonist of big tech, Yelp head of public policy Luther Lowe, keeps custom-made candles emblazoned with the regulator’s image on his desk. 

But those hoping for a European-style crackdown in the U.S. with heavy fines against tech industry ...

When Frank Gibeau became chief executive of Zynga in 2016, the mobile games publisher behind one-time sensations like “FarmVille” and “Words with Friends” was a shambles. With revenue in decline and a history of bungled acquisitions, Zynga had a market capitalization of around $2 billion, a tad more than the combined value of its cash, short-term investments and ...

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing will take a different approach to autonomous driving than its American counterparts Uber and Lyft are, according to Didi’s top autonomous car executive.

When Didi launches a fleet of self-driving cars for its ride-hailing service in the future, the Chinese company will initially use its own homegrown autonomous driving software for those cars, ...

In the last few years, everyone has become a seed investor. From veteran venture capitalists to hedge funds, private tech investors are looking to invest in companies earlier and earlier. 

But the number of deals has been flat—or shrinking. There have been about 1,000 seed deals for U.S. venture-backed companies per quarter since 2013, according to PitchBook. 

What’s ...