Joss Whedon

The Biggest Fanboy In Silicon Valley Just Paid $20K For Lunch With Joss Whedon

Someone in Silicon Valley has a lot of money and is a secret fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Or maybe Firefly.

We can’t provide his name, but at a charity event for African nonprofit ThriveGulu Thursday night, PR maven Brooke Hammerling submitted a winning bid of $20,000 for lunch with famed screenwriter and producer Joss Whedon.

Whedon is known for writing the Buffy and Dollhouse TV series. He also directed and wrote the screenplay for this year’s hit movie The Avengers.

Hammerling told Business Insider that she made the bid on behalf of an anonymous donor. (Proceeds went to ThriveGulu.) But she wouldn’t name Whedon’s new lunch buddy.

So let’s run through the likely candidates.

Hammerling’s firm, Brew PR, reps Automattic, the maker of WordPress, and NetSuite, an enterprise software-as-a-service company, among many other clients. So we can count WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg and NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson as possibilities. She also formerly counted Zynga, run by CEO Mark Pincus, and social network maker Ning, cofounded by Marc Andreessen, on Brew’s roster.

We can only imagine a Zynga game spun from Whedon’s superlative imagination.

Hammerling, who made Business Insider’s PR 50 list of influential tech communicators, is also known for her personal friendships with Valley moguls like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners.

It wouldn’t surprise us if any of these guys dropped $20,000 for lunch with Whedon, frankly.