Robert Scoble has allegedly continued to sexually harass women after going sober
After decades … Matt Bell : I know Quinn and trust her narration of reality. Tweets: Hadi Partovi / @hadip : This article implicitly suggests sexual harassment is excusable if it was 2 years ago, under influence of alcohol. It's not. http://twitter.com/... Guy Pearson / @gtlpearson : @jguynn he's not “ashamed”, he's just waiting for it to “play out for a few days” before returning to paid speaking. Rcv'd 20 mins ago. pic.twitter.com/nDB7pXjiaa Andy Baio / @waxpancake : Robert Scoble, married father of three, groped Quinn Norton and tried to have sex with a drunk Foo Camp attendee. http://medium.com/... @neeraj : @grlalx @ProductHunt This sums it up, “ Do I want to call him out, or do I want to advance my career?” Via @TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/... Norton Auto-Updater / @quinnnorton : Since I published my account quite a few people have come forward to say this is not in the past but ongoing. http://techcrunch.com/... @buzzfeednews : New tonight: Another woman has accused high-profile tech evangelist Robert Scoble of sexual harassment https://www.buzzfeed.com/... Kyle Russell / @kylebrussell : And then don't go to Scoble to get publicity for your AR/VR startup https://twitter.com/... Tim O'Reilly / @timoreilly : Yes. We banned Scoble from future events, and added a code of conduct, but we should have done more. See https://medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Scoble reporting lands mid-wave: it follows [[a:920240|Dave McClure's exit from 500 Startups after an internal investigation into harassment of female entrepreneurs]], and comes two months after SoFi CEO Mike Cagney stepped down under a harassment suit. What makes this installment distinct is its timing argument — the allegations say the behavior continued after he got sober, which removes the alcohol-mitigation defense before it can form.
That framing drew immediate pushback from inside the industry: Hadi Partovi publicly objected that the article implicitly treats harassment as excusable if it happened years ago under the influence, while Guy Pearson reported Scoble was waiting days for the news cycle to pass before returning to paid speaking. The arc did not end here — by December, five women accused Uber investor Shervin Pishevar of misconduct in professional meetings, confirming this as a sustained reckoning rather than a single scandal.
First-order effects
- Scoble's conference access collapses immediately: per the relationships record, O'Reilly Media bans him from future events and adopts a code of conduct, cutting off the Foo Camp-style circuit where the alleged incidents occurred.
- The sobriety defense dies in public: Partovi's objection reframes the debate from 'when did it happen' to 'did it happen,' leaving accused men with no mitigation timeline to hide behind.
Second-order effects
- Event organizers face pressure to follow O'Reilly's move from ad hoc disinvites to written codes of conduct, since informal gathering formats like Foo Camp are exactly where unsupervised misconduct thrives.
- The pattern documented at 500 Startups and SoFi now extends beyond founders and CEOs to the influencer-speaker layer, forcing conferences and venture networks to vet whom they platform rather than trading on their reach.
Third-order effects
- If the sequence holds through the Pishevar allegations, accountability migrates from operating executives to the industry's connectors and amplifiers — people whose value is network access, which institutions can now formally revoke via conduct policies.
- Written codes of conduct shift from optional PR gestures to standard infrastructure for tech events and firms, replacing case-by-case judgment calls that previously let serial behavior persist across organizations.
The trend: Silicon Valley's 2017 harassment reckoning is expanding from founders and CEOs to the influencer-and-speaker circuit, with institutions responding by converting informal social sanctions into formal codes of conduct.