I still remember the day in 2012 when I first crossed paths with Mike Moritz at a Sequoia Capital event in Menlo Park. The room buzzed with founders pitching moonshots, but Moritz—sharp-eyed, understated, with that Welsh lilt cutting through the noise—zeroed in on a scrappy AI startup I’d been advising. “Talent’s the only moat that … Read more
Remember that heart-stopping moment back in January 2025? I was in my D.C. apartment, scrolling through TikTok like half the country, when the app just… vanished. Poof. A stark message: “TikTok isn’t available right now.” It was the ban kicking in, the one Congress had rammed through amid all the spy fears, and for a … Read more
Stand outside a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands—vast, humming warehouses where petabytes of the world’s secrets sleep in the cool dark. Now imagine those servers holding echoes of ordinary lives: a Gaza mother whispering bedtime stories to her child, a West Bank farmer haggling over olives, a teen in Hebron venting to a friend … Read more
It’s a Friday evening in mid-September 2025, and you’re scrolling through your phone in a Seattle coffee shop, the kind with overpriced lattes and under-caffeinated coders like me. A notification pings: “Trump Signs H-1B Proclamation—$100,000 Fee Incoming.” My stomach drops. I’m not on an H-1B anymore—green card in hand after a decade of limbo—but I … Read more
It’s one of those rainy Seattle mornings that make you want to curl up with a book—or better yet, binge a show on Prime Video—while the world outside blurs into gray. But on September 25, 2025, inside the U.S. District Court in Seattle, the air crackled with tension just three days into a high-stakes trial. … Read more
Remember that rainy afternoon in San Francisco back in 2019? I was hunkered down in a dimly lit cafe off Market Street, laptop open, interviewing a fresh-off-the-boat engineer from Bangalore. He’d just landed his dream gig at a hot AI startup, eyes sparkling as he talked about building the next big thing in machine learning. … Read more
It’s a sweltering afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona, the kind where the sun beats down like a forge hammer on silicon wafers. Inside a sprawling Intel fab, workers in bunny suits scurry between clean rooms, tending to machines that etch circuits smaller than a virus. This isn’t just any plant—it’s ground zero for America’s chip renaissance, … Read more
Imagine this: It’s a humid summer night in 2020, and I’m hunkered down in a D.C. hotel room, laptop glowing like a forbidden artifact, pounding out a story on Trump’s first TikTok ban attempt. The app’s dance challenges were everywhere—my niece in Ohio was obsessed, lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac in her bedroom mirror. Cut to … Read more
Picture this: It’s a rainy afternoon in Brussels back in 2022, and I’m nursing an overpriced espresso in a dimly lit café near the European Commission headquarters. As a tech policy journalist who’s spent the better part of 15 years dissecting Big Tech’s battles with regulators—from Silicon Valley boardrooms to Beijing summits—I’m there to cover … Read more
I still remember the buzz in that cramped Austin conference room back in July 2023, when Elon Musk first unveiled Grok on a glitchy video link from SpaceX. The crowd—mostly devs and AI enthusiasts like me—leaned in as he pitched it as the “anti-woke” chatbot, built to seek truth without the guardrails of its rivals. … Read more