Last Friday, 60 people shared a meal, but no one could see what they were eating. All sat blindfolded at the dinner table in a Mission District basement, where they could feel, with their hands, a steamer in front of them, a jar of water, a pile of napkins, and not much else. They had come for a “dinner in...
Mission tech workers reacted to a proposal for a tech tax to curb the city’s growing inequality with comments ranging from skepticism to wondering why such a tax had not been imposed earlier. Mission-based tech worker Erini Blakey said that while the tax would rightfully “force tech companies to be good citizens,” she questioned its efficacy since it targets only...
A seven-year itch led former Google executive Azhar Hashem to trade her corporate career for her 66-seat dream – a restaurant space at 206 Valencia st., where she will open the Mediterranean eatery “Tawla” on Thursday. Tired after years of working long hours at Google and a daily commute between the Mission and Silicon Valley, Hashem decided it was time...
To his friends and his colleagues at Google, Jack Halprin was an intelligent tech leader and a kind, generous man. To his tenants, he was an unwilling landlord engaging in a years-long struggle to evict them from their homes at 812 Guerrero. Both are now extending condolences. Halprin died from cancer Thursday morning, according to a Google employee and a childhood friend. The...
Tenants at 812 Guerrero, who have been fighting their evictions by Google employee Jack Halprin for more than a year now, learned yesterday that their landlord would appeal the decision to quash their evictions. That decision was handed down in the cases of three units in the building last week; the fourth unit’s tenant is fighting her eviction separately and...
A San Francisco Superior Court judge has halted the evictions of the remaining two tenants fighting to stay in a building at 812 Guerrero St. that is owned by the Google lawyer and new Mission landlord Jack Halprin. The decision hinged on Halprin’s failure to pay the first half of the tenants’ relocation fees, the same reasoning behind last week’s decision to stop tenant Claudia Tirado’s eviction...
Today’s discussion takes off with the memory of the latest Google bus protest, which turned into a bizarre parade led by a fleeing Google lawyer pursued by the tenants he is evicting from his house. Google’s name has been getting a lot of attention, and its response has largely been to stay out of it. Does the company care about...
This sensationalist story (first spotted on SFist) was just too outrageous not to post: the BBC has a profile on homeless Google employees: An ex-Google worker has revealed how he lived at the firm’s campus in Mountain View, California, for 54 weeks between 2005 and 2006, kicking off a trend. Matthew Weaver told the BBC that he had been dared...
The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that conservatives are looking to woo the traditionally liberal-minded techies of Silicon Valley, both to gain their political support and some of their funding: People who lean to the right are vastly outnumbered in the nation’s high-tech hub, and say they sometimes have to downplay their views. “It does make you stand out a little bit....
After interrupting Google I/O to protest her potential eviction from a building owned by Google lawyer Jack Halprin, Claudia Tirado was escorted off stage and told us she had a surprisingly friendly conversation with Google’s senior VP of communications, Rachel Whetstone. In an email message to Mission Local, Whetstone confirms her promise to help out Tirado. “I promised to look into the situation for her...
Google I/O, the tech titan’s largest conference for developers, is underway at the Moscone Center. As with all things tech these days, such an event does not go on without a good helping of dissent. We’ve received word that housing activists and union members will be on hand outside Moscone to challenge Google to the task of living up to...
Calvin Young and Noah Ready-Campbell left Google in 2011 shortly after being there less than a year, ready to start their own business. So they did — about four times. First they tried an online coffee delivery service, then a news service and finally a payment service. “There just wasn’t a market for those other ideas,” Ready-Campbell said. Merchants, for...
Soon, Googlistas could roam a building that once served the Black Panthers, police officers, underground cartoonists, sexually open swingers and many more. Luring all these groups to one location was the promise of professionally printed pages from a massive off-set printing press run for 51 years by the Howard Quinn Printing Company. The family-owned company operated at 298 Alabama Street...
