Y Combinator has been Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent start-up incubator for 20 years. But the organisation that helped launch Airbnb and Reddit only hired its first full-time lobbyist in 2023.
These days, Big Tech companies are constantly fighting lawsuits and regulators over complaints of anti-competitive behaviour. But when Luther Lowe started calling foul over Google’s treatment of rivals in its search results in the early 2010s, Silicon Valley’s giants seemed invincible.
An activist at college who grew up in a family with long-standing ties to Washington DC, Lowe joined local reviews site Yelp in 2008 and led the San Francisco company’s legal campaign against what it alleges is Google’s “illegal self-preferencing” in local search.