Bambi Francisco is a Filipino-American journalist, author, and businesswoman. She is the founder and

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

of Vator, a news website and social network dedicated to high-tech

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

s and

investor An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future Return on capital, return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital most of the time the investor purchases some specie ...

Career

Francisco is a former syndicated columnist and correspondent for Dow Jones MarketWatch. She covered Internet trends and investments across the public and private sectors. Her newsletter reached more than 400,000 subscribers. She started her career at MarketWatch in 1999 as Internet editor and morning business anchor for

KPIX KPIX-TV (channel 5) is a television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving as the San Francisco Bay Area's CBS network outlet. It is owned and operated by the network's CBS News and Stations division alongside ...

, a

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainmen ...

affiliate - at the time, MarketWatch was owned by CBS. In 2001, Bambi was named to the "blue-chip" financial reporting all-star team by The Journal of Financial Reporters, the leading organization for the business news industry. Adweek named her one of the top ten most influential journalists on the Web. When Spike TV launched in 2003 as the "first network for men", Bambi Francisco anchored daily business news reports on the current state of world markets and finance as host of "CBS MarketWatch" on Spike TV. Among the articles she wrote at MarketWatch was a diary-like account of her three-week trek to

Nepal Nepal (; ne, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne, सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mai ...

. In it she made a quick allusion to how hiking in the Himalayas was similar to watching the rise and fall of the Internet bubble. She left MarketWatch in April 2007 to manage her internet startup, Vator, full-time. Concerns were expressed by management regarding conflicts of interest concerning her ownership of the venture during her employment at MarketWatch. Before Vator even launched, Francisco's project received a tremendous amount of press from the front page of the Wall Street Journal, to television media conglomerates, such as the BBC, to respected tech magazines, such as

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fra ...

. Francisco is a frequent speaker on innovation and entrepreneurship. In the spring of 2014, she gave a talk in Las Vegas about what kind of foundation is needed for tech hubs to flourish. She has also become a leading proponent of bringing more tech opportunities to emerging areas, such as Oakland. She has also been credited for helping to boost Oakland's tech image.

Personal life

Bambi's father is

Noli Francisco Manuel "Noli" Francisco (November 13, 1941 – February 23, 2017) was a Filipino American poker player. He had worked as an importer, architect, and real estate entrepreneur. He had been a successful recreational poker player for over 25 yea ...

, a

Filipino American Filipino Americans ( fil, Mga Pilipinong Amerikano) are Americans of Filipino ancestry. Filipinos and other Asian ethnicities in North America were first documented in the 16th century as slaves and prisoners on ships sailing to and from New S ...

poker player and entrepreneur. Bambi and her family live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Published books

Francisco's book Unequally Yoked, was released in September 2020. The book explores what she claims is the false narrative that America is systemically racist.

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Fac ...

said this about the book: "Don’t treat this as a political book. It is a work of intelligence: Bambi has lived behind enemy lines of both factions in the American culture war; and both would do well to learn from her reporting and analysis.”

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Francisco, Bambi Living people American women journalists 1966 births 21st-century American women