Why Hollywood babes are trying to bag a tech titan, not a rock star

Stock shares aren’t the only bonus that comes with being a tech titan.

Despite their penchant for fleece vests and cargo shorts, Silicon Valley (and Alley) moguls are landing the sort of megababes who once fancied rock stars, pro athletes, Hollywood hunks and Wall Street wolves.

Last week, Evan Spiegel, the 26-year-old co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, which has been valued as high as $20 billion, got engaged to ex-Victoria’s Secret beauty Miranda Kerr, who was formerly married to actor Orlando Bloom.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and violinist

“We’re in an era where smart guys are finishing first. It’s an era for the geeks,” says Amanda Bradford, 31, the CEO of the League dating app and formerly a business development manager at Google. “Women like ambitious guys going after their dreams.”

But others are a bit more cynical about it.
“[Spiegel] never would have wound up with [Kerr] if he didn’t have all that money,” says Josh, 32, a lawyer for startups who declined to give his last name.

Kerr and Heard are hardly the only boldface TWAGS — tech wives and girlfriends. Actress Emma Watson is dating William “Mack” Knight, a 35-year-old Princeton grad and tech manager. Her fellow starlet, Allison Williams, wed Ricky Van Veen, co-founder of the Web site CollegeHumor, in a 200-person ceremony at a Wyoming ranch in September 2015.

 

Left) Co-founder of Snapchat Evan Spiegel and his fiancée Miranda Kerr. (Right) Allison Williams and her husband Ricky Van Veen, co-founder of the Web site CollegeHumor.  

“Tech guys are typically extremely strategic, and they know that partnering with a successful Hollywood
 celebrity brings more publicity,” says Bradford. “Being involved in consumer tech is also a way for celebrities to increase their presence and brand at the same time. It’s win-win, so why not merge empires?”
Geeks with far smaller empires are also getting babe benefits.
“It’s like when I told [women] in 1998 that I play guitar. Now I tell them I have a tech startup,” says Blake Ian, 37, founder of Tawkers, a chat app with offices in Tribeca.
He describes debaucherous soirees and summer BBQs, where coding geniuses make up for being socially excluded in high school and college.
“Pretty young things hang out all the time with me and some f - - king nerdy guys,” Ian says. “They’re the cream of the crop — they’re beautiful, but they’re not dumb,.”

Roy Lugasi, 25, founder of the new nightlife app Weepo, is also enjoying the perks.
“It’s an amazing feeling. I can meet a different girl every night. It’s pretty easy,” says the millennial, who parties with models and fancies himself “sort of famous.” “Tech is cool. And people want to be a part of something cool.”

Jonathan Chanti, a 28-year-old senior VP at HyPR, a new startup based in lower Manhattan, describes ladies throwing themselves at successful CEOs at conferences.
“[These women] all grew up on Facebook, or on social media, so it’s like meeting a rock star,” he says.
But it’s not just the “cool” factor that’s attracting women, of course. Guys readily admit that cold, hard cash is key.

“You can be doing as much cool stuff as you want, but if you don’t have the company and money to back it up, you don’t have the female interest,” says Steffan Hoffman, 31, founder of Niyama, a new startup that focuses on health and wellness.

For New York women looking to land a digital dude, Ian says Coffee Shop in Union Square is to tech guys what Cafe Wha? was to Dylan and Hendrix. “[We’re] like a fraternity,” he says. “We do a lot of lunches, meet-ups and roundtable events.” NYC matchmaker Lisa Clampitt recommends hanging out at the Starbucks next to the Google offices on Ninth Avenue.

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“Tech guys drink a lot of coffee to fuel those notorious coding all-nighters,” says Clampitt, whose clients include a 30-year-old man in the industry who sold his company for $20 million.
Women aren’t only the ones getting turned on by techies. Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez is dating Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of the genetics startup 23andMe, which was valued at $1.1 billion last fall.
Clampitt notes that wealthy techies can be more fiscally attractive than even their investment-banking counterparts.


“They’re young, smart and wealthy at an extremely young age, which makes them appealing because they avoided the Wall Street culture where you have to wait your turn to make money,” she says. Clampitt also thinks that some women find that Silicon Alley guys are “safer” than those in finance, because they’re more interested in settling down than sleeping around.

But Hoffman says app developers can be just as loathsome as derivative traders.
“[Guys in tech] think they’re so cool after a big fund-raising round,” he says. “They’re doing their designer drugs, they’re partying [and] abusing their bodies, just like a successful guy on Wall Street.”
The founder of a multimillion-dollar startup who asked to remain anoynymous says that techies are simply perceived as more interesting than bankers.

“It’s still a novelty,” while Wall Street guys are just perceived as “creating nothing” and “just moving money,” he says. “When you have a guy who’s worth billions because of a hedge fund and another guy who’s worth billions because he invented Snapchat, it’s no wonder why [the Snapchat guy] is with Miranda Kerr.”