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Earnings season continues this week, with Q3 reports due from AT&T, General Motors, United Technologies, Caterpillar and Chipotle (Tuesday), Boeing and Visa (Wednesday), and what Jim Cramer calls “a virtual World Series of tech” on Thursday, when we hear from Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel and Twitter. [Elizabeth Gurdus / CNBC]
Amazon’s C-suite stands out as an all-boys club even in a tech industry rife with gender and racial disparity. Among the company’s 18 most powerful executives, there is only one woman: Beth Galetti, SVP of HR. And as Amazon deals with the aftermath of a sexual harassment scandal involving its now-former studio head Roy Price, questions are being raised internally about how the company can justify having so few women in its leadership. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft spent a combined $14.2 million lobbying the federal government last quarter around issues like Russian election meddling, sex trafficking and immigration. The increased spending on lobbying is a reflection that Silicon Valley is finding itself in an unprecedented political hot seat. [Tony Romm / Recode]
Call it the Silicon Valley blind spot: A lot of venture-backed, e-commerce startups are built around the tastes of venture capitalists and big-city entrepreneurs. But the biggest recent e-commerce IPOs — Dollar Shave Club, Zulily, Wayfair and, maybe soon, Stitch Fix — prove that you can succeed by going after what seems like an obvious customer base: Mainstream America. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Setting aside Steve Jobs’s return to Apple, David Hall might be Silicon Valley’s greatest second act. After four decades of inventing, five product categories and a lot of wrong turns, Hall stumbled onto lidar, the high-tech widget that is poised to become an essential piece of a trillion dollar self-driving auto industry. It all started with Drillzilla, Hall’s homemade gladiator robot in the 2001 Robot Wars Annihilator Challenge. [Ben Popper / The Verge]
Pop-up disaster relief groups are navigating a devastated Puerto Rico. Abetting the efforts of big tech companies like Alphabet, which helped restore internet connectivity with its LTE-equipped Project Loon balloons, ad-hoc groups founded spontaneously in the wake of hurricanes Harvey and Irma have brought in tons of supplies by plane or ship. The American Black Cross, founded by Black Lives Matter activists in Dallas, chartered a plane from Miami to Aguadilla and unloaded water, food and generators to power dialysis clinics around the island. [Sean Captain / Fast Company]
Recode presents ...
Do you have questions about the role social media is playing in American politics? Kara Swisher, Lauren Goode and Recode’s Tony Romm will be on our Too Embarrassed to Ask podcast this week, talking about the 2016 elections, Russia and what happens next. So tweet your questions with the hashtag #TooEmbarrassed or email them to TooEmbarrassed@recode.net.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
