Hi, welcome to your Weekend.

Next week will mark The Information's 10-year anniversary, and we'll be commemorating the last decade of tech by publishing a series of top 10 lists, plus some reflections from our founder Jessica Lessin. 

But before we look back at the Valley's greatest hits (and misses), we also wanted to look forward, peering through the eyes of Vinod Khosla, whose powers of prediction are idolized by many in Silicon Valley. For this week's cover story, we asked veteran tech journalist David Kirkpatrick to spend some time interviewing Khosla, learning how he navigates the innovation economy and gathering stories from those who know him best. 

Over the venture capitalist's 40 years of investing, he's nurtured countless startups, and placed early bets on some of its biggest names, from Google a generation ago to OpenAI today. He's also responsible for harming his own reputation by buying up some beachside property south of San Francisco and reducing the public's access to a popular surf spot. A man of the people, he's decidedly not. 

In these ways and more, Khosla represents much about the Silicon Valley of today and yesterday. And given that he wants to keep doing the job for another 25 years, as he tells David, he's likely going to influence it for a lot longer.  

Now onto this weekend's stories...

the big read

Vinod Khosla Can See the Future. It Just Got Hazy for a Minute

The famed investor foresaw the internet, AI and climate-tech revolutions, bet early (and big) on OpenAI, and is about to raise a record $3 billion for Khosla Ventures. But even a legendary predictor can be blindsided. David Kirkpatrick spoke to Khosla in the midst of the OpenAI maelstrom about the next chapter of his investing career. 

the top 5

The Top 5: Where to Host Your Silicon Valley Offsite

In our new series, we round up five superlative options for a pressing tech need. First up: where to hold your next team retreat. Here, five unique spots, all within a few hours of San Francisco—traffic depending, of course.

first person

My Year of Eating by Aircraft

When a drone delivery startup descended on finance editor Nate Becker's town in North Carolina, he got a taste of an investor-fueled frenzy—as well as hamburgers from the heavens. 

Surveying: The decline of interpolitical marriage
Everyone knows our country is politically polarized. And everyone knows we’re lonelier than ever. What if the two social phenomena are directly connected? In a recent opinion piece, The Washington Post’s Editorial Board pulled data from the annual General Social Survey to show that political divisions exacerbated during the Trump era are making it harder for young people to find romantic partners. Much of this is due to the fact that the ideological divide, driven by polarized social media diets, seems to be breaking down by gender: While Gen Z women are getting more liberal, Gen Z men are getting more conservative. Combine that with a survey that found that 71 percent of Democrats would not date someone with opposing views, and, well, you do the math. As marriage and birth rates decline, maybe real efforts will be made to rethink the political fracturing of the country. Reuniting families over the holidays would be a nice side effect. —Julia

Noticing: Another photo app falters 
In October, our colleague Kate Clark sent me a cryptic text, all lowercase: “get this app,” paired with an “Early Access Invite” to Lapse, a new photo-sharing social platform. I did as I was told and soon learned that in order to gain access to the Lapse, new users had to invite five other people. The seemingly casual “get this app” text was a pre-programmed pyramid scheme. The app itself isn’t anything special—similar to once-popular Dispo, you take or upload a photo and it “develops” it (applying a filter to make it look like a film photo) at a random time later in the day. You can also organize photos into albums and monthly photo dumps. But these features haven’t proved novel enough, TechCrunch reports, as downloads have fallen 70% from their October peak. Invite schemes are clearly effective at getting users on your app—but they certainly don’t make them stay there. Could Lapse pick back up again? Perhaps, but it’s more likely to be one of the many flash-in-the-pan social apps (Dispo, Poparazzi, BeReal) that have risen, then fizzled, the past few years.  —Annie

Reading: One way to solve tech’s inequality problems 
A tech conference, Devternity, finally solved the industry’s struggle with gender parity: just create fictional women! In a scathing X thread, tech analyst Gergely Oros uncovered how several of the female speakers listed on Devternity’s website didn’t actually exist. The women’s LinkedIn profiles claimed they worked at places like Meta, Coinbase and Microsoft, yet Oros said their jobs never existed. Journalists at 404 Media dug even deeper, finding evidence that the conference’s founder Eduards Sizovs has for years listed fake women as speakers for his conferences, presumably as a way to quiet concerns about overwhelmingly male lineups. The backlash has been swift, with many of the real, human speakers pulling out of the conference—although it’s certainly a bad sign that, for years, no one noticed all the fictitious femmes. —Margaux 

Makes You Think

Wrapped's chokehold escapes no one. 

Until next Weekend, thanks for reading.

—Jon