Tech Bro 2.0. Shifting culture in Silicon Valley. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Nevisafo.

Raya Jetta spends a lot of time thinking about the tech industry's internal dynamics.

She's a tech culture reporter at the San Francisco Standard.

She had a colleague interviewed nearly two dozen male startup founders, predominantly in their 20s,

to build a new profile of the so-called tech bro.

Gone are the computer programmers, self-proclaimed nerds, of an era mostly focused on software development. Jetta says the new tech bro is of the

heart tech era, with emphasis on the charisma needed to raise huge sums of money for expensive hardware

innovations and AI technologies.

The emergence of this new tech bro has to do a lot with the new technology that we're seeing

in Silicon Valley. So as money has stopped pouring in from VCs, they're turning to areas like

defense tech, which requires government contracts. they're pursuing AI. And the more

physical that this technology has become, we're seeing this change in how they personify themselves

and the kind of pursuits they do outside of work. And so in our reporting, we set out to

figure out what are their habits, what are their worldviews, what are their politics, and how are they different from before?

And what did you find?

I think you can think of it in terms of like the 2010s being the HBO show Silicon Valley

and the 2020s being the HBO show Mountain Head.

And what I mean by that is the 2010 show Silicon Valley really shows care-free tech

bros building consumer apps that they hope will go viral. These are apps for ride share,

for dating, for ordering food. There's a utopianism in the 2010s that has been completely replaced in the

2020s with a more hard-edged cynicism. And we're seeing the tech bros emoji now as more

moscenary than missionary. We're seeing them care more about geopolitics, whereas before,

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