Technology

New San Francisco clubhouse represents a milestone moment for executive women in tech

Published

3 years ago

November 28, 2022

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Executive women platform Chief opened a new clubhouse in San Francisco this week.

Chief

In a bustling building in New York’s Flatiron district, two executive women who work at separate companies discuss marketing strategies for their respective businesses. Next to them, three retired women in their sixties share a champagne toast. Across the room, several other women, sitting at single wooden tables, have their heads down at their laptops. Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman” plays in the background.

“I’m in the middle of a career transition,” says one woman to another she just met at the nearby bar. She says she works for Cushman & Wakefield but plans to change careers from her job in human resources.

“I’ve done big companies for far too long and I think it’s time to move on to something smaller,” she continued. “Covid did us all in,” the other woman said, agreeably nodding.

It may sound like a typical professional networking environment but one thing about this building is different: there’s not a single man in sight.

‘Sense that this is a first’

On the opposite coast, a counterpart executive clubhouse just opened in San Francisco and it holds great meaning beyond its four walls.

Start-up Chief launched an exclusive networking platform for executive women in 2019 and saw a surge in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic. It subsequently opened physical clubhouse spaces in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Men are allowed in but members are exclusively executive women.

Earlier this year, Chief received a $100 million Series B investment led by Alphabet venture arm CapitalG with plans to use the money to open a new club where founders say they were getting the biggest demand: The San Francisco Bay Area.

Chief’s San Francisco clubhouse includes a full-service bar.

The recently-opened clubhouse is located adjacent to the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco’s financial district. Silicon Valley had the highest demand from members, said founders Lindsay Kaplan and Carolyn Childers. The region is home to 2,000 local members working for Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Zoom and Stanford among others.

The 8,600 square-foot space features a full-service bar with specialty coffee, open lounge space, meeting rooms, private call booths and a Mothers Room. All the artwork in Chief’s clubhouses comes from the women-led company Uprise Art, founded by member Tze Chun.

Over 300 members attended the launch event at the San Francisco clubhouse. Members flew in for the clubhouse opening night in late October. Some arrived straight from the airport. “So exciting!” one woman rolling a suitcase said as she greeted Childers and Kaplan with hugs. “I’ve f—–g earned this,” Kaplan recalled another saying.

Susan Cevallos Coleman, a global vice president at GoPro attended the opening night. “I just looked around and had a moment,” Coleman said.

“You have the profound sense that this is a first,” said Attica Jaques, Global Head of Brand Marketing at Google who also attended the opening night.

‘Full Circle’

A month after the San Francisco Chief club’s opening, women say they already see it as a milestone moment that represents more than just a new building.

Silicon Valley has historically had the highest density of homogeneous demographics that favored white men in executive ranks. It’s also historically been unfriendly to women as exclusionary “boys clubs” long overtook the world’s tech epicenter. Unlike other nearby clubhouses like the Battery, Chief’s new clubhouse is a place designed just for them.

“I know deeply the feeling of the tech industry led by white men,” Jaques said. “It’s interesting coming full-circle and it feels long overdue.”

Executive women platform Chief opened a new clubhouse in San Francisco this week.

Chief

Jaques, a San Francisco native who moved back to San Francisco from New York in 2019, said “we tend to always feel like we have to pull up a seat at the table if it’s not there, so we’ve built a muscle around it.”

Coleman added: “The women who have somehow, some way made it to where we are now, can now influence the younger women who may be hesitant to dip their toes in the lake because what they read is it may not be a friendly place for them.”

“But when I walk into the Chief space, that premise that tech is exclusionary no longer feels true,” she said.

Coleman, who’s spent her career working in tech auditing in Silicon Valley since the early 2000s at Sun Microsystems, said she’s looking forward to using the space as a central meeting place for her core group of Chief members dispersed across the Bay Area. Jaques said she’s looking forward to networking happy hours and programming speakers. The platform hosted a virtual event with speaker Melinda French Gates in early November when around 2,000 Chief members tuned in.

“This is the physical manifestation of what I’ve been benefitting from,” Coleman said after the opening. “I saw so many amazing women, including one I worked with three companies ago.”

The Covid-19 pandemic bolstered Chief’s business as women flocked to Chief’s platform, which served as a support system during a time of solitude, members said. More than 20,000 senior executives have signed on from over 8,500 companies including HBO, American Express, Nike, Google, Goldman Sachs, NASA and Apple. Annual membership starts at $5,800 for women at the vice president level and $7,900 for C-suite executives. About 70% of members are sponsored by their employers.

With backing from Alphabet’s venture arm and a business model that relies on subscription to its digital platform, it’s more sustainable than a real-estate-focused business like The Wing, which was forced to close its doors over the summer.

The platform has a massive waitlist of 60,000 people, but Childers and Kaplan say they should be able to start vetting applicants more quickly now that the company has additional money to hire people and build out the technology.

Less ‘pantsuits and bad cheese plates’

Kaplan briefly worried about a dusty rose art piece at the center of the main San Francisco clubhouse room. “We might have to change that,” she remarked. “It’s kind of pink. I just don’t want it to be like ’this a space for women and this is pink.'”

“So often, executive spaces for women look like a space full of pantsuits and bad cheese plates in the corner but we’re in a moment where we can redefine what it looks like,” she added.

A large open floor plan with leather couches and chairs and high ceilings with bookshelves makes it feel more like a living room for casual, serendipitous interactions, members said.

Bathrooms have brushed gold finishes on faucets and around mirrors. Marble countertops lie under Chief-branded disposable towels by each sink while low-volume music plays overhead. The bar features a mid-century modern design with wooden paneling and a large chandelier made of hundreds of glasses.

The space has several “phone booths” with ring lights built in for Zoom meetings. A room on the other side of the main space is much lighter with eggshell-colored walls, a grand piano, and plush white lounge chairs that appear like furniture from a spa.

“There’s a relaxed atmosphere, no competition,” Coleman said. “We’re just finding ways to support one another.”

“It’s a beautiful space to accompany this feeling that things are profoundly changing,” Jaques said. “Being able to walk and have a new space that you feel welcomed in and meeting other women is going to be incredible and it just feels like there’s no going back to what was before.”

Technology

Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Published

16 hours ago

July 11, 2025

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.

Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.

As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”

The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.

Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.

“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.

Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.

This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.

Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.

The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.

WATCH: Google pushes “AI Mode” on homepage

Technology

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Published

1 day ago

July 11, 2025

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.

Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.

Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.

The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.

Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.

Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Published

1 day ago

July 11, 2025

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.

The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.

Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.

The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.

In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.

Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.

As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.

One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.

HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.

Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.

There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.