Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

The Draper Family Will See You Now

Hoo boy, are you going to enjoy this frothy piece coming from Fast Company magazine about the Draper family.

I mean: The Drapers of Silicon Valley!

Taking on the venture-capital-spawned dynasty, the article reads like the family is a tech version of the Kardashians, except with better eyebrows, and much smarter.

“Over the course of a half-century, the Draper family has carved out a name (and a fortune) in a place where breeding and ancestry are thought to be irrelevant,” reads the tag line of the story. “Now it’s time for the debut of the youngest generation.”

And so it is, as the article notes:

“The Draper VC dynasty began with General William Draper’s founding of Draper, Gaither & Anderson in 1958. A few years later, his son Bill started the Draper & Johnson Investment Co. (1962), followed by Sutter Hill Ventures (1965). Bill’s son, Tim, founded Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1985. The fourth generation is striking out on its own — but still staying close to home. Jesse, 28, is a producer and host of The Valley Girl Show; Adam, 26, is a cofounder of the firm Xpert Financial; Billy, 23, is founder of the startup Mobber.net.”

It is a pretty impressive pedigree and well worth the read.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald