Attention: Enterprising Millennials. Do you want to work for a startup that's raised $15 million from a Sand Hill Road steamroller like Andreesseen Horowitz, but refers to the funding as "15,000 racks"? What if the gig involves meticulously vetting shower stools? If so, you're in luck!

Palantir, that CIA-funded, Silicon Valley creephouse that funnels in humanity's data and spits out... more data... has a lot of secrets. We don't know exactly which parts of the government it works for, or what it does for them. But we do know one of its execs thinks he's locked in a Lord of The Rings battle between good and evil.

OK, now we're really heading past the Rubicon: a little app by the name of Elevatr has one task: help you crank out startup ideas as easily and quickly as possible. Because nothing says stable economic sector like a constant stream of easy business ideas.

It's odd to have a decent answer to "What was the worst ____?," but Color was the worst app. It did nothing amid fanfare, secured $41 million in order to accomplish this nothing, and then it just evaporated without warning. An obscene, expensive pixel farce. Watch its creator try to explain a startup Bay of Pigs.

Jean-Louis Gassée occupies an odd, disdained corner of Apple's corporate history, a French exec ousted in by infighting and products that bombed. But he's still got lots to say about the place—and might be the first Apple exec to publicly state the obvious. (Spoiler: gay)

"I knew that was going to happen. I also knew that I couldn't say anything," MakerBot CEO and cofounder Bre Pettis told Valleywag this morning at the grand opening of the company's new 50,000 sq. ft. production facility in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. Pettis was referring to a question about yesterday's report that MakerBot was in acquisition talks and might sell rather than raise more venture funding.

Om Malik says Snapchat—which is free, a potential privacy disaster, and makes zero money, in any currency, whatsoever—is "close to snagging about $100 million in new investment at a valuation nearing half a billion dollars." Let's think this through.

No one knows what Palantir—named after a magical rock in Lord of The Rings that granted remote vision—exactly does. But we know enough to know it's not just another California startup. The secretive data-mining company works directly with the American government, has a product named "Prism," and some very close ties to Facebook, one of the NSA's top targets.

Google. CNBC reports that the haute nerd face computers were verboten at Google's shareholder meeting yesterday, due to privacy concerns. Due. To. Privacy. Concerns. Google!

Mary Meeker, the former securities analyst for Morgan Stanley who managed to evade the "grisly ends" met by fellow dotcom hype men like Henry Blodget, peddled some dubious misinformation in her latest annual report, earnestly studied by industry insiders as the "Internet Trends bible."

You've never heard of the NSA's "PRISM" project, but it might know lots about you: according to a new report by the Washington Post, the agency has been secretly collecting enormous, intimate troves of internet data from the biggest tech companies in the world. They can watch you as you type.

The last time we checked in on AVOS Systems, the company launched by YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, morale was bottoming out, the venture couldn't find its way out of the red, and a former employee called it a "gigantic waste of money." Now, the company has launched Wan-Pai, which even TechCrunch admits is a Chinese "clone" of Vine, Twitter's six-second video sharing sensation.

John Gruber, a lively Apple blogger and probably the company's preeminent pro bono spokesperson, has a large following. It's a devoted following, too: so much so that he can sell $5 app that doesn't do things $0 versions do, and people lick it up.

Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman, only brushes his teeth once a day #NewsFromShareholderMeetings

If meritocratic, colorblind Silicon Valley were a pie, there would be no slice for African-American entrepreneurs.

It's true, this wasn't a Game of Thrones wedding. It was a Game of Thrones, Lord of The Rings, Avatar crossover wedding. And it certainly wasn't "subtle." This brand new photo will either make you weep or gag.

According to a source, Amazon may have settled on a location for the mammoth office space the company began seeking in February: the Williamsburg waterfront.

Oh, Sean. This isn't how you get people on your side.

So you want to put a giant construction site inside an ancient redwood forest so you can have artificial ruins on your wedding day. Fine. It'll take a lot of money. It also helps if the most powerful people in the state are sitting on those ruins.