Margaux MacColl

5 days ago | sfstandard.com | Margaux MacColl

For five years, investors and founders across Silicon Valley have been on an unrelenting campaign: get the U.S. government to ban DJI, the behemoth drone manufacturer headquartered in Shenzhen, China. “Every single one of those drones is a potential surveillance platform by the Chinese Communist Party,” investor Marc Andreessen said on a podcast in late 2024. The rallying cry is a moral stance, as well as a profitable one.

1 week ago | sfstandard.com | Margaux MacColl

After six months of slashing budgets and gutting federal departments, Elon Musk took a chainsaw to his relationship with President Donald Trump this week as their simmering feud spilled out onto social media. It started with tweets about the Republican spending bill, which is projected to add $2.4 trillion to the national debt. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” Musk wrote on X Tuesday.

2 weeks ago | sfstandard.com | Margaux MacColl

A lot of my friends and family were not super happy that I was effectively going to go work for Trump. It certainly wasn’t the ideal situation. But I have a lot of faith in America as a democratic institution. What was the recruitment process like? Pre-inauguration, I went through three or four different Signal interviews, brief phone calls, etc., where they would ask me a couple of questions.

2 weeks ago | sfstandard.com | Margaux MacColl

Most people haven’t met a superbaby. I have. Last year, I attended a cocktail hour at a venture capitalist’s Presidio mansion, filled with founders from his firm’s portfolio companies. As the entrepreneurs lounged on couches, sipping craft cocktails and pitching their wealth management software and AI security systems, conversation suddenly sputtered. The investor’s wife, a startup founder herself, descended the grand white staircase, cradling the night’s real headliner.

1 month ago | sfstandard.com | Margaux MacColl

The young investor is the rare power broker who gives away no partisan preferences. That’s why everyone is listening to him. On April 29th, the self-described “three musketeers” of tech in Washington stood at a wooden podium in the National Press Club.