To Jesse Draper, the Laugh’s on Them

“YOU feeling relaxed and pink-ified?”

It was about 10:30 a.m. on a Thursday in May, and Jesse Draper, the creator and host of the Silicon Valley Internet talk show “The Valley Girl Show,” was on the set greeting her guest, Drew Houston, a founder of the popular file-sharing service Dropbox.

If Mr. Houston had missed the flush of color surrounding him, it wasn’t because Ms. Draper wasn’t trying. The walls of the set were cherry blossom and magenta; the table where a platter of miniature cakes was placed, Barbie doll-shoe pink. On a nearby rack was Ms. Draper’s wardrobe: 25 dresses in various hues from rose to crimson (polka dots, stripes, chevrons) and 7 pairs of shoes, including pink stilettos, Uggs and a pair of ballet slippers she wears offstage.

Ms. Draper, who is 28, vibrates with enthusiasm when she is on camera; the 29-year-old Mr. Houston, she effused, was “the king of cloud computing.” Mr. Houston’s net worth is estimated near $400 million by Forbes. He looked around his chair. “Where is my crown?” he asked.

It was a silly exchange, but Ms. Draper celebrates the ridiculous. She handed Mr. Houston something called “the fabulous cup” and asked him to free-associate about several words written on paper and stuffed inside, including “lottery ticket,” “wedgie” and “stiletto.” He agreed to hold an empty cardboard box in the air and drop it on command. It landed with a thud, as did the joke.

Mr. Houston drew the line, though, at wearing a tiara when the crown went missing. As Mr. Houston left the studio to return to his office, Ms. Draper slipped in his hand a goody bag filled with a Go Girl energy drink and a coffee cup filled with pink saltwater taffy.

The interview, one of 25 over four days, was a winner, she concluded later. “I mean, if you interview someone from Facebook or Google, they have, like, 100 public relations people and they are all over you,” Ms. Draper said. “He was, like, cool.”

If Silicon Valley is a bubble about to burst, as many here suggest, Ms. Draper is certainly close to the pop. Something happened after the 2010 debut of the film “The Social Network,” which made Mark Zuckerberg and his band of Facebook friends famous: the public became enthralled with technology geeks much as it was with movie stars.

“That movie really Hollywood-ized Silicon Valley,” Ms. Draper said later, at a restaurant blocks from the studio she had rented for the week. “People said, ‘I want to be a rock-star entrepreneur like Mark Zuckerberg.’ ” Ms. Draper, who knows a thing or two about celebrity, mostly as a former actress on a popular Nickelodeon show, is happy to oblige them.

She started “The Valley Girl Show” in her parents’ home in Atherton, Calif., in 2008 (a cross between Disney’s animated “Take Two With Phineas and Ferb” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show”) with guests initially culled from her well-connected father’s Rolodex (he is Timothy C. Draper, a third-generation Silicon Valley venture capitalist).

Now, four years later, and after a nine-month hiatus last year to shore up video distribution, she is one of a number of (mostly) young women seeking to capitalize on the public’s fascination with California’s new moneyed class. Among those is Randi Zuckerberg, Mark’s colorful sister who left Facebook last summer and recently signed on to be an executive producer of a Bravo reality show that will chronicle the hard-partying life of 20-something entrepreneurs.

Ms. Draper, who lives in Los Angeles and films her show in the Bay Area, has not yet made the leap to cable. But like a number of her Internet peers, including Amber MacArthur, a Canadian technology show host who worked in San Francisco, and iJustine, an Internet personality who has her own clothing line, Ms. Draper has attracted a following. She has licensed her show to or shares revenue with sites like SFGate.com and Mashable.com, and has expanded into unconventional venues, including on television screens in restaurants like Taco Bell, and by the end of the summer, in doctors’ offices and airports.

“The best part of what Jesse does is to force overly serious people to take themselves less seriously,” said Kara Swisher, a longtime Silicon Valley journalist who is a producer and host of D: All Things Digital, a conference owned by Dow Jones. Moreover, she is clever in eliciting personal details under the guise of fun. “I think that is quite sly,” Ms. Swisher added.

Ms. Draper has a Silicon Valley pedigree worthy of a Hewlett or a Packard. Her great-grandfather was William Draper Jr., a former Army general and one of the first venture capitalists to open an office in California in 1959. His son and Ms. Draper’s grandfather, also named William, became a venture capitalist, too, making his own fortune investing in start-ups. Timothy Draper started his firm in 1985. “They are Silicon Valley royalty,” said Heidi Roizen, a close family friend. “Like the Barrymores, in Hollywood.”