Daily Pulse: Pao Drops her Appeal, Clear Sailing for the Iran Nuclear Deal, The Return of Brian Williams

Movin’ On: Ellen Pao dropped her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins for gender discrimination and retaliation. Pao appears to have surrendered unconditionally in deciding to end the suit, which mesmerized Silicon Valley as what seemed a test case about inequality and indifference in a male-dominated tech culture.

Pao's unexpected decision is cleary aimed at getting the matter behind her — she didn’t even negotiate away a court order to pay for some of KP’s defense, which she said amounted to “nearly $1 million in its expert costs and court fees.”

“I am now moving on, paying Kleiner Perkins’ legal costs and dropping my appeal,”  the former KP partner and reddit CEO said in a <re/code> post. “My experience shows how difficult it is to address discrimination through the court system.”

In the closely-watched case Pao alleged KP was rife with casual as well as career-ending sexism, that she had been passed over for a full partnership unfairly and then fired for complaining about it. A jury decided in KP’s favor on all counts.

#Quote

I have a request for all companies: Please don’t try to silence employees who raise discrimination and harassment concerns.

— Ellen Pao

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What Bubble? ThredUp just completed a funding round which values the second-hand clothing site at $500 million. The $81 million investment by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners “appears to be the largest to date in a company specializing in the sale of second-hand clothing,” writes Jason Del Rey at <re/code>. I would certainly hope so.

ThredUp is hardly the only startup in the space but CEO James Reinhart told Del Ray it’s “the best business nobody’s ever heard of.” Its customers are women and their children and, according to the company, “more than a third of its customers have a household income north of $100,000.”

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Iran Deal a Go: The US Senate defeated an effort to derail a landmark nuclear accord with Iran on a procedural vote which prevents the measure from even being debated. The 58-42 tally — providing President Obama a filibuster-proof margin by a single vote — spares the administration the spectacle of a longer, messier process that would have inevitably ended in his favor anyway.

The House may still vote on something, but anything they vote out would be DOA in the Senate and will never reach the president’s desk.

While a nice-to-have, the magic number of Senate backers was 34, not 41. Overturning Obama’s certain veto would have required 67 votes, and he secured that requisite number to block that last week. 

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Resurrection: Former NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams will return to the small screen on Sept. 22. Williams, suspended earlier this year for embellishing his reporting experiences, will anchor the first day of Pope Francis's US visit in his new home at MSNBC, providing the humbled news man a prominent assignment with which to make his return.

Williams campaigned to return to the nightly news and even had support from his boss, NBC chairman Andy Lack. But it was not to be, especially as journeyman NBC correspondent Lester Holt — known as "Iron Pants" in the business for his willingness and ability to handle up to any assignment — became a familiar figure as the network's anchor.

Whatever else Williams might have had going for him, the atmospherics of treating the first African-American US network anchor as a seat warmer for a disgraced colleague would have brought more negative scrutiny to the network and Williams, whose offenses were clear and, though my hero and his friend David Carr disagreed, might be consider disqualifying in a trade which depends entirely on trust.

The platform for his return is a homecoming: Williams grew to prominence as the host of MSNBC's “The News with Brian Williams,” which debuted on cable network's first day in 1996 and ran (later on sister network CNBC) until 2004. In 2002 Williams was tapped as the eventual successor to Tom Brokaw. In 2004 he assumed the big chair he would ultimately lose in disgrace to Holt.

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The Most Important Meal: The cost of breakfast has plummeted to a five-year low in the Financial Times breakfast index (paywall). There’s not a ton of science behind the index, which measures the cost of equal weights of wheat, milk, coffee, orange juice, sugar and lean hogs. But “ it does reflect the food deflation that is affecting farmers, as well as consumers, this year.”

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Cover Art: Ellen Pao speaks to the media after losing her high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers in San Francisco, March 27, 2015