Behind the glittering fundraising rounds and viral product launches, a different kind of database has been quietly taking shape in Silicon Valley.
Sources tell The New York Post that a private spreadsheet, passed hand to hand among women in the tech world, now lists more than one hundred men accused of sexual misconduct — several of them described as prominent investors and businessmen.
A young tech worker who spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity said she froze the first time she scrolled through the names.
“Some of them were very prominent names, you know? People who were famous investors. Businessmen who were in the scene, I had seen them at parties before,” she recalled.
Rather than remaining a passive observer, she eventually contributed her own account of alleged sexual misconduct to the document.
She said the invitation came only after word of her experience had spread informally through conversations with other women.
“I met some women who ran the ‘whisper network,’ it has hundreds of cases,” she told The Post. “I only found out about it because I started asking around.”
Insiders familiar with the spreadsheet say its entries span accusations of drugging, sexual assault, and rape, and touch some of the most recognizable names in the tech and artificial intelligence sectors.
None of the individual claims have been independently verified.
Fear of professional fallout, according to several sources, keeps many women from ever contacting police.
One contributor to the list explained the calculation bluntly: “I was worried that if I tried for justice in my case and I lost, I would be blacklisted from every investor in town.”
A recurring backdrop to these allegations is the “hacker house” — a shared residence where roommates frequently double as business partners, investors, or future employers.
That blending of personal and professional life, sources say, creates conditions ripe for exploitation.
A second insider described a pattern in which some men build friendships specifically to learn a target’s vulnerabilities before crossing boundaries.
Victims, the insider said, tend to fall into two very different categories: the isolated and newly arrived, or the accomplished and hard to reach.
“Some predators want the shiniest star, the harder you are to take down, the more powerful they feel. It’s a conquest,” the source said.
That same insider linked the behavior to founder culture itself, suggesting that an industry built on refusing “no” in business can bleed dangerously into social conduct.
Both victims and abusers, the source stressed, cut across gender lines.
Yehong Zhu knows the pattern firsthand.
A veteran of several hacker houses and the founder of the app Zette, Zhu says she was raped in 2021 by a man she once counted as a friend — a former resident of the San Francisco house Genesis.
She filed a police report that December, but says the accused disappeared and was never arrested.
Support from her community, Zhu says, evaporated fast.
A friend fretted over the accused’s reputation, while a house organizer pushed for a mediated committee vote instead of his removal.
“I kept saying no [to him],” Zhu told The Post. When she asked mutual contacts for help locating the man, business ties took precedence. “We invested together. We did business together,” she said of those who refused.
An attorney for Genesis founder Jeremy Nixon told The Post his client had no knowledge of the specific allegations but “would support and encourage law enforcement and just complying with the law in any situation like that and prioritize safety.”
A different San Francisco house, Muse, produced its own written account of an alleged January 2025 date rape involving ketamine.
The anonymous author says she declined sex while sober, only to be assaulted after receiving repeated doses of the drug.
She claims a house leader downplayed the incident and pushed for mediation over expulsion.
By the account’s telling, she was the one asked to leave — while the accused stayed on long enough to attend a farewell gathering before her exit.
Muse never issued the public acknowledgment she requested, and the house did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Not every house handled a crisis the same way.
A former Launch House resident in Beverly Hills said she and other women reported a man for suspected drugging and unwanted touching — and watched leadership act immediately.
“They got rid of him immediately, he was kicked out of the house,” she said.
Co-founder Brett Goldstein and a colleague changed the locks and offered to help the women contact police, though she ultimately declined, unable to recall key details of the incident.
She says the man later harassed her and her company online. Goldstein told The Post that Launch House has since restructured and built new safety protocols with outside consultants.
None of this is entirely new territory.
AI researcher Keerthana Gopalakrishnan raised similar alarms in 2022 about coercion within Effective Altruism communities, criticizing informal mediation as a substitute for addressing assault claims directly.
For Zhu, going public was about more than her own case.
She hopes her story helps other women come forward — and hopes her company, Zette, eventually defines her name more than the assault does.
“I don’t want this issue to be the only thing attached to my name,” she said. “I have so many dreams to build.”
