For those of us lucky enough to work remotely this past year, talking with colleagues has felt sort of like being in a chatroom with workplace messaging platforms full of GIFs and emoji. But bringing the culture of the internet to work can also be toxic. A recent study from Project Include found that some tech workers experienced more harassment on those platforms, particularly women, people of color and transgender and nonbinary workers. Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Caroline Sinders, who studies online harassment and founded Convocation Design + Research. She worked on the report and said the abuse took lots of forms.

For years, courts have been trying to hash out whether Google stole code from Oracle. Way back when Google was creating its Android mobile operating system, it decided to use some Java code that would make the system compatible with a lot of programs. But the Java code was owned by Oracle, which then sued, and it’s been in the courts ever since. The Supreme Court this week finally ruled that what Google did was allowed and didn’t infringe on Oracle’s copyrights. Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford, where he teaches copyright and internet law. He said the ruling means that a standard practice, of one company building on the work of another so that their products work together, didn’t get blown up.

The White House’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan proposes $100 billion for broadband. Right now, however, it is hard to get broadband to big parts of this country unless the infrastructure is in space. Low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations could bring high-speed internet access to those areas. Elon Musk’s Starlink is the best known, but there are a few other companies in the mix. Starlink is in beta with about 10,000 users. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood speaks with Sascha Segan, a lead analyst at PCMag who’s been following Starlink. She asked him who could benefit from this new version of satellite internet.

Votes are being counted in Bessemer, Alabama, this week from Amazon warehouse workers considering whether to unionize. Amazon has fought tooth and nail against the union effort and also against members of Congress. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren criticized its treatment of employees, and Amazon’s official Twitter account went on the attack. So did some Twitter users claiming they were very happy Amazon employees, and not all of them were real. Molly speaks with Jason Del Rey, who covers Amazon for Recode. He said this union vote is big, no matter the outcome.

Venture capital firms are known for being an incredibly exclusive group. The firms themselves are often small. Even smaller is the number of partners, the actual decision-makers who control hundreds of millions — sometimes billions — of dollars. At the biggest firms, there might be a dozen partners maximum. And if you’re an entrepreneur who wants some of that money, it definitely helps to have gone to college with one of those partners. Kapor Capital is trying to be more inclusive in whom it promotes and funds. One way it’s different: It finds founders primarily through a submission form on its website instead of networking. Molly speaks with Mitch Kapor, the firm’s founding partner.

There’s an idea that’s long been gospel in the venture capital industry, that investing in companies that have a positive social impact is a money loser — impact investing is “concessionary.” But what if it isn’t? Mitch Kapor is a well-known tech investor. He helped create the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and was an early Uber investor. But for the past decade, Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, have focused on companies that they say fill a gap, whether it’s social, information or opportunity. And in 2019, their firm, Kapor Capital, reported that in fact it does make money. Lots of it. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood talks with Mitch Kapor.

“Artificial intelligence” is now a household term, whether it’s powering driving directions, spotting tumors in cancer patients or driving big discussions over ethics, bias, autonomous weapons or the future of work. But despite the fact that the first neural network was created in the late 1950s, a lot of those advancements have taken place over only about 10 years. In his new book, “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World,” New York Times tech correspondent Cade Metz writes about the history of AI and the corporate forces that have shaped it since the mid-2000s.

We’ve been talking about all the potential of mRNA technology — better vaccines and virus detection for all kinds of diseases. Now, let’s talk about the money because the rush is on to invest in mRNA and the whole field of synthetic biology, which approaches the body and natural systems as programmable platforms like computers. However, the history of Silicon Valley and medical tech is mixed. You remember Theranos. Just last week, the founders of a once-hot biotech firm called uBiome were charged with fraud in a similar fashion. Molly speaks with John Cumbers, the founder of SynBioBeta, a network for entrepreneurs, engineers and investors interested in synthetic biology. He says billions of dollars are flowing into the field.

Slack rolled out a new feature this week to let people connect with anyone, even if they don’t work in the same company. One flaw became immediately obvious: Anyone with your email address could send you a connection invite and a message that could be harassing or harmful. Slack promptly changed the feature, and invites no longer contain customized messages. But it made us wonder: How can companies do a better job anticipating how features could be harmful and fix them before they get rolled out? Molly speaks with Sarah Kunst, managing director of Cleo Capital.

The COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer are in many ways modern miracles. As you know by now, they were developed using technology called messenger RNA, or mRNA, which basically gives the body instructions to create antibodies for the novel coronavirus. It’s the first time a vaccine has been developed in this way. And now that we have this technology, we can start using it on all kinds of viruses, like the flu. Molly speaks with Andrew Hessel, a geneticist and microbiologist. He co-founded Genome Project-write, an international research effort.