Bay Area Ventures: June 24, 2019

John Rahaim is the Planning Director for the City and County of San Francisco. Mr. Rahaim is responsible for overseeing long range city planning, development entitlements and environmental reviews for most physical development in San Francisco. He was appointed Planning Director in January 2008. Mr. Rahaim started his professional career with the City of Pittsburgh’s Planning Department in 1984, where he later became the Associate Director for the department. He was in charge of development review and rewrote the City’s Zoning Ordinance. Mr. Rahaim moved to Seattle in 1999 where he became the founding Executive Director of CityDesign, Seattle’s Office of Urban Design, and the Executive Director of the Seattle Design Commission, the city’s primary design advisory panel for public projects and related urban design initiatives.

In 2002, Mr. Rahaim later served as the Planning Director for the City of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development. During his tenure in Seattle, Mr. Rahaim managed the early stages of the Central Waterfront Plan and created the Center City Strategy for downtown Seattle and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Mr. Rahaim holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan and a Master in Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Twitter- @sfplanning
Full Profile

Brad is Senior Executive Editor for global technology at Bloomberg News, where he oversees a team of 50 reporters and editors that cover high-tech companies, startups and internet trends around the world. Over the last few years, as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, he’s authored over two dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese internet juggernauts Didi, Tencent, and Baidu.

Brad also co-hosts a weekly Bloomberg podcast, Decrypted, and contributes to a morning email newsletter on technology, Fully Charged. He’s a regular presence on Bloomberg Technology, the daily hour-long broadcast devoted to global technology news which is seen around the world on Bloomberg TV, and is a co-producer and co-host of Bloomberg conference franchises such as Sooner Than You Think and the Bloomberg Player’s Technology Summit.

Additionally, Brad is a best-selling author, most recently of The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley, published by Little, Brown & Co. in January, 2017. The book was named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2017.

In 2013, he published The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. The book, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, has been translated into 33 languages and won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Brad is a graduate of Columbia University and a native of Cleveland, Ohio.

Twitter – @BradStone

Personal Site – Brad-Stone.com

Book – https://www.amazon.com/Upstarts-Airbnb-Companies-Silicon-Changing/dp/0316396818
Full Profile