<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, dynasties]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, dynasties]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/dynasties http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/dynasties <![CDATA[Lyle Lodwick, Dynastic Fameball]]> The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Eric Lodwick is the brother of hipster Web millionaire Jakob Lodwick. He's also now Lyle Lodwick, at least as far as his modeling career goes. Is it fair to tie the Topshop poster boy to his notorious fameball brother?

Perhaps not, if only because Lyle (née Eric) has been more successful in his overshares. His brother uploads videos of scary knife play and intimate moments to the video website he started, while Lyle runs naked through a forest in a Sigur Rós video, according to New York's The Cut. And we haven't heard anything about Lyle turning up topless at business mixers.

Then again, in Lyle's line of work, that would actually be appropriate. When you're prancing about for the likes of Burberry and Lanvin, you're moving beyond fameballing and toward outright stardom. Big brother could probably learn something from his example.

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<![CDATA[Google Founder Larry Page Has Impregnated Model-Ph.D. Wife]]> Larry Page, the dorkier half of Google's founding duo, has mastered at least one basic human function: His wife, former model and Stanford bioinformatics Ph.D. Lucy Southworth, is pregnant.

Took him long enough. The pair married in December 2007, with Page (net worth $18.6 billion) planting a kiss on his bride on Richard Branson's exclusive Necker Island. Co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, have already popped out a billionaire baby boy. We wonder: Will the Pages go with a squad of Stanford-trained nannies, or take their child to Google's gold-plated childcare?

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<![CDATA[Twitter, the Next Generation]]> Twitter CEO Ev Williams is working on a new product release, currently in beta testing inside wife Sara Morishige's womb: The couple's first child.

Ev and Sara being Twitter's First Family, they've been teasing the news out on the microblogging service. We're curious: When Morishige referred to Williams's "Christmas present" in a tweet last week, did she mean a bit of procreation? Do the math: She wrote that she "ordered it" in early December, and the baby's due in August.

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<![CDATA[San Francisco's First Lady Pregnant with Gavin Newsom's Campaign Prop]]> We hear Jennifer Siebel, the actress wife of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, is pregnant — and furious with the friends who let word slip. But we bet her pro-gay marriage husband is thrilled.

Newsom, a Democrat, has declared himself a candidate for California's governor seat, a wide-open race taking place next year, since term limits are keeping Arnold Schwarzenegger from running again. A rising star in the Democratic party, Newsom has hurt himself with gaffes both personal and political.

He and his first wife, Fox News TV host kimberly Guilfoyle, divorced in 2006. While going through the divorce, Newsom had an affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the wife of his campaign manager, Alex Tourk. The divorce and affair ruined Newsom's Camelot-by-the-Bay image.

His wedding last year to Siebel, a cousin of wealthy software entrepreneur Tom Siebel, was a step towards restoring his tattered image. (Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin ferried guests in their private jet to the wedding site on a Montana ranch.)

But then came Proposition 8, California's ban on gay marriage, a cause Newsom has championed since he defied state law in 2004 by issuing marriage licenses to gay couples (including the author of this post). At a rally, Newsom declared that gay marriage was coming to California "whether you like it or not," a sound bite Prop 8 supporters aired endlessly in TV commercials and was cited in many election post-mortems as a factor in the passage of Prop 8.

With memories of his messy personal life still fresh, and his main cause defeated in the last state election, Newsom's push for the governor's seat looked like it was off to a rocky start. In the Democratic primary, he faces California Attorney General Jerry Brown, the former Governor Moonbeam.

But political observers say Brown may strike potential voters as too old. With Newsom's wife expecting a child in the fall, he will have the perfect family-man campaign prop. What better way for a claimant to the throne to seem young and vital than to have his very own heir?

Update: The mayor's office has confirmed that the Newsoms are expecting. Spokesman Nathan Ballard said:

We are pleased to confirm that Mayor Gavin Newsom and First Lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom are starting a family. The Mayor and the First Lady are thrilled to be embarking on this adventure together, and they appreciate your good wishes.

Guess who wasn't expecting this? Gavin's dad and Jennifer's mom, both of whom told the San Francisco Examiner that their children hadn't let them in on the secret.

(Photos by Getty Images)

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<![CDATA[Google Billionaire's Baby Benji Already a Web Mogul]]> Some Google users feel lucky. And others are born lucky. Benji Brin, the baby son of Google cofounder Sergey Brin and biotech entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki, falls in the latter category.

Valleywag has just learned the name of the first heir to the Google fortune, who was born in late December. But domain records suggest his parents may already be planning young Benji's career on the Web. (Either that, or some mischievous sort privy to the family's secrets snapped up the kid's name as a website address.) On Friday, benjibrin.com got registered using a private-domains service to hide the customer name.

For modern parents, registering a baby's name is relatively normal, a trend USA Today deemed mainstream two years ago. Thank goodness for that. If Benji Brin's baby shower, where his parents and guests dressed up in diapers and footie pajamas, is any indication, he's in for a weird if wealthy life.

(Photoillustration of Benji Brin's likely appearance, based on his parents, via MakeMeBabies.com)

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<![CDATA[Sergey Brin's Weird, Weird Baby Shower]]> Googlers do things differently. But Google's founders are quirkier than you might imagine. Take the diaper-fetish party Larry Page threw to celebrate the coming birth of Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki's first child.

Page and his wife Lucy Southworth, the model-pretty, Stanford Ph.D.-smart scion of a family connected to the Bushes, threw the party for Brin and Wojcicki in a San Francisco warehouse space a couple of months ago, we're told. The dress code: baby clothes. Guests wore adult diapers, footie pajamas, and other infantile getups.

Most guests, that is: Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's sexaholic mayor, refused to play dressup. "Dignity," he explained. We suspect that a team of Googlers, at this very moment, may be working to eradicate dignity as an obstacle to their goal of organizing the world's information.

(Oh, and that sighting of Brin at a maternity ward last month? A bit too early, but Wojcicki did have their child a few weeks later. We know all kinds of things about this baby, thanks to Wojcicki's oversharing on Oprah — likely to be lactose intolerant, unlikely to have blue eyes, high risk of Parkinson's — but not its name. Anyone care to fill us in?)

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<![CDATA[Google heir born? Sergey Brin spotted at maternity ward]]> What to expect when you're expecting a billionaire? A tipster reports seeing Google cofounder Sergey Brin running into a hospital, orange Crocs and all. Here's what that means: His wife, Anne Wojcicki, is nine months pregnant with the couple's first child — who will be born into a fortune still worth $10 billion or more, even with Google shares plummeting. The spot where Brin was sighted, El Camino Hospital, has one of the Bay Area's best childbirth practices, and is close to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. When we last saw Wojcicki, she was on Oprah talking about 23andMe, her genetics-testing startup, with the TV host herself begging Wojcicki to give birth already. It's possible that Brin was just there to tour the hospital, a common practice before birth, but his haste suggested otherwise, our tipster claims:

I saw Sergey Brin (in all his blaze red-orange Croc glory) eating outside the Marya Cafe in the Melchor pavilion. After he was done eating he ran across the street towards the Orchard pavilion which is the maternity ward for El Camino hospital in Mountain View.

Brin and Wojcicki drew notice for the way they got married in May 2007 in the Bahamas, swimming to the sandbar. But they also got attention for the way they handled a conflict of interest; Brin lent 23andMe his own money to start up, and then Google repaid the loan and became an investor. The company's board approved the deal, but it has never lost the appearance of self-dealing.

In what quirky way will they celebrate the birth not just of their first child, but the first member of the great Google dynasty? In Japan, the successor to the throne was greeted with shouts of "Banzai!"

But we suspect Brin will be more low-key. Perhaps he will order up a new doodle for Google's homepage. We'll let you know as soon as we know more about this momentous occasion — the advent of the generation which will save us from the mistakes of the Google era.

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<![CDATA[What else must Jason Pontin do to prove he's not gay?]]> Congratulations to Technology Review editor-in-chief Jason Pontin. His wife, Boston Globe editor Anne Nelson, has validated his long-rumored but heretofore unproven heterosexuality through the birth of a son, Alonzo Pontin. Heir, heir! Jason, Valleywag will keep a summer internship slot open for Alonzo in 2027, provided he doesn't inherit his dad's obnoxiously fake British accent.

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<![CDATA[Mena Trott's future millions to fund daughter's therapy sessions]]> In June, Six Apart's Mena Trott told a CBS reporter, on camera, that she thought her baby was ugly. "Babies that age are kind of meh," she said. "I mean, Penelope has always been cute in our eyes, but looking back at pictures we think 'this is cute?' Not throw-up ugly, but definitely not as cute as now." Her comments did not air, but she inexplicably posted them on her blog, where Penelope — who is actually very cute, as the above still shows — will surely read them years from now. Her husband Ben, who cofounded the blog-software maker, made it on TV with an appropriately fatherly statement: "We just actually feel that she is that cute." Ben, who's pretty cute himself, has always been the shyer one in the Trott family. But we're starting to think he might have the makings of a better spokesperson than the loose-lipped Mena. Ben's TV appearance:

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<![CDATA[Happy anniversary! Jerry Yang finishes first year as CEO, barely]]> Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang became the company's CEO one year ago today. Highlights include spending the first 100 days pondering the company's "sacred cows," a reorg or two, February layoffs, and of course, failed merger negotiations with Microsoft. On the bright side, Yang and his wife Akiko Yamazaki had a second daughter recently — as good an excuse as any for Yang to "spend more time with his family." (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

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<![CDATA[New daddy Jeff Weiner takes a hit]]> Jeff Weiner, head of Yahoo's network division, recently became a father, and he's taking some time off. Mazel tov, Jeff, and well deserved! Nothing surprising about a new dad spending time with his child. What's got us interested is the way his underlings are buzzing about his paternity leave, which he extended from two weeks to a month — a move which may have prompted the cancellation of a planned press dinner, says AllThingsD's Kara Swisher. It's atypical for the hard-charging, micromanaging Weiner to spend so much time detached from work, says one, who wonders if it's a sign Weiner has a foot out the door. Another Yahoo thinks Weiner is just indulging in the joys of fatherhood. Heard any other whispers about Weiner? Send them in. (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

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<![CDATA[Quick, Ballmer, make your offer while Yang's busy caring for his newborn daughter]]> Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang Yang's wife, Akiko Yamazaki, gave birth to the couple's second daughter this week. BoomTown's Kara Swisher reported the news, citing sources close to the company, and then warned Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to "give Yang a break and back off, at least for today." For Yamazaki's sake, we hope Ballmer ignores this advice and takes an upped offer to Yahoo shareholders today, while Yang's too busy in the maternity ward to fend it off. Without a job, Jerry will have no excuse to ignore the 4 a.m. wailing.

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<![CDATA[Anne Wojcicki and Sergey Brin begin baby-making beta test, results expected in 9 months]]> SergeyBaby.jpgGoogle cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife of nearly a year, Anne Wojcicki are expecting their first child, the New York Post screams. We're confident Wojcicki's easy access to DNA materials at her biotech firm 23andme will assure the creation of a much more attractive child than the one we've imagined here.

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<![CDATA[Jerry Yang's next big product release]]> Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang may be shooting blanks in his takeover tussle with Steve Ballmer, but he's still a stud in the sack. He and wife Akiko Yamazaki are expecting their second child, a girl. (Photo by Stanford News Service/Steve Gladfelter)

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<![CDATA[Six Apart founders' heir presumptive]]>
Who is Penelope Trott? According to a Twitter sent by Six Apart executive Anil Dash, a close confidante of Ben and Mena Trott, the founders of the blog-software company, she's made him "smile all day." We can only guess that Penelope is the name of the Trotts' long-expected offspring. If so, congratulations. We await the day when Mena and Ben bring their daughter to work and declare, "Some day, all of this will be yours. Well, except for the parts we sold off to our venture capitalists."

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<![CDATA[Happy birthday to the Trotts]]> Ben and Mena Trott, expectingIt's a big year for Ben and Mena Trott, the husband-and-wife founders of Six Apart. The blog-software company was named after their six-days-apart birthdays; Mena just turned 30 yesterday, while Ben begins his fourth decade on Saturday. (Such a cradle-robber, that Mena.) Six Apart's board of directors just gave Mena the best present a founder could ask for — a new CEO, in the form of the eminently capable and blogging-savvy Chris Alden. Putting Alden, the former CEO of the Red Herring (back when it was an authority on tech, not its current incarnation) in charge should do much to clear up the company's bouts of less-than-transparent behavior. It's hard to top that kind of gift. So if you're in a generous mood, save it for the next generation of Trotts. The Trottlet, as some around the Six Apart office call Ben and Mena's next product release, is expected next month, according to their baby registry.

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<![CDATA[Silicon Valley's baby boom]]> birth of Ollie Kottke to A-list bloggers Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan, to become quite such a saga, but news has a way of happening. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are no longer expecting a baby — they have a daughter, Sonnet Beatrice Butterfield, according to fellow Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz. Here's the rundown on the rest of the couples mentioned in yesterday's baby poll, which — well done, readers — you guessed correctly.
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Alaina Browne and Anil Dash The foodblogger and Six Apart executive are not pregnant, though Dash has been looking a little chunky.
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Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek: Flickr's community manager and the famous Web designer are not pregnant.
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Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield: Flickr's cofounders made no secrecy of Fake's pregnancy, which ended yesterday with the safe delivery of a newborn daughter.
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Jennifer Granick and Brad Stone: The lawyer and New York Times reporter are expecting, and are telling people about it.
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Maryam and Robert Scoble: Would you really expect Robert Scoble, whose blogger wife, Maryam, is pregnant, not to blog about the fact?
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Now we all know: Ben Trott proved so irresistably hot that his wife and fellow Six Apart cofounder, Mena, found herself in a family way. Until recently, she'd been trying to keep the fact private.

To the pregnant couples: Heartfelt congratulations and best wishes. To Fake and Butterfield: Mazel tov! To Browne, Dash, and the Powazeks: Get cracking! Valleywag is going to need readers in 2025.

(Photos by Anil Dash, edyson, granick, jacksonwest, Scott Beale / Laughing Squid, and simoncast)

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<![CDATA[What to expect when you're an executive who's expecting]]> Why make such a fuss over who's disclosing their pregnancies? I worked at Wired Ventures, then the publisher of Wired magazine, in 1996 and 1997, in the midst of the agony of its failed IPO attempt. One controversy at the time was the disclosure that cofounder Jane Metcalfe, the magazine's publisher, was pregnant and planned to take maternity leave shortly after the planned IPO. For the record, no one I know believes that Metcalfe's pregnancy had anything to do with Wired's troubles. But for a top executive to take a leave is always a strain on a young, growing company, and is a fact best disclosed, as Wired Ventures did. Hence my surprise that Mena Trott waited until now to talk about her news. Caterina Fake, the cofounder of Flickr and an executive at Yahoo, has, by contrast, written publicly and often about her pregnancy. More on the status of Fake's pregnancy, and the rest of the couples mentioned in our poll, shortly.]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=277684&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The pregnant A-lister comes out]]> Ben and Mena Trott, expectingMena Trott, cofounder and president of Six Apart, the blog-software company, is pregnant. There, I said it — and now, so has she. Trott blames her superstitions as a first-time mother for keeping the pregnancy a secret for so long. The lack of disclosure, though, has been uncharacteristic for Trott who, as a spokesperson for her company, has long made blogging about herself an integral part of Six Apart's publicity strategy. Six Apart's new blogging site, Vox, however, makes it easier to keep some posts limited to a small circle of readers — which is part of how Trott kept her pregnancy quiet. For a blogger, work and home life are never far apart.]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=277672&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Let's play hide the baby]]> Last week, the birth of a son (and future blogger) to Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan reminded us of another famous Web personality who triedhad a colleague try, bizarrely, to claim that the mom-to-be's pregnancy was "off the record." (Memo to other would-be secret-keepers: "Off the record" is always a matter of mutual agreement between reporter and source, not something you can declare unilaterally.) We asked for guesses on who it was, and you had lots of good ones. Now it's time to vote, picking out the baby-hiders from among these glamorous A-list bloggers. Pictures of the people you've speculated about, and a poll, after the jump.

The contestants: Alaina Browne and Anil Dash, Heather Powazek Champ and Derek Powazek, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield
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Jennifer Granick and Brad Stone, Maryam and Robert Scoble, and Ben and Mena Trott
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(Photos by Anil Dash, edyson, granick, jacksonwest, Scott Beale / Laughing Squid, and simoncast)

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