Los Angeles based tech chronicler Lalawag, which announced that it would be shutting down in September, is going to live on under the leadership of Jesse Draper’s Valley Girl media network. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Lalawag founder Sean Percival, who is the VP of Marketing at MySpace, will remain as the founder of the site and will be involved on a friendly basis. We are told Jesse Draper will be bringing on a number of new bloggers to contribute to the site and will officially re-launch later in the year.
Draper, actress and daughter of renown Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, founded the web video series The Valley Girl in 2008. You can read Lalawag’s feature on the site here. She’s interviewed a who’s who of the technology and media world, including Vinod Khosla, Elon Musk, Ted Turner, Ron Conway, and Eric Schmidt. On the web series, Draper is a blend of girly ditziness of Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods with the comedic style of Ellen DeGeneres (Draper is clearly acting in her hosting role).
The Lalawag acquisition is part of a bigger plan, says Draper. At the age of 26, she is trying to create a mini-media empire around covering startups in a “fun way,” (the site’s motto is “business made casual’). Lalawag will become the LA-focused site, will remain under the same name, and Draper, along with business partner Jonathan Polenz, plans to launch a New York-centric site in the near future. And Valley Girl has soft-launched a Silicon Valley-focused technology news and culture site, called Valleyloop.
For any loyal Lalawag fans out there, don’t fret. Draper, who is based in LA, plans to continue keeping the site as a casual voice for LA technology and culture. And Percival, who ran the site with his wife Laurie, is confident that Lalawag will continue to thrive under the Valley Girl masthead. An interesting side note—following our post on Percival shutting down Lalawag, around ten people inquired about acquiring the news site, one of which was Draper.
Valley Girl, Inc. is the web content company behind Jesse Draper’s “The Valley Girl Show”. Hosted by well known web personality the Valley Girl played by Jesse Draper (from Nickelodeon’s “The Naked Brothers Band”). The Valley Girl Show is a web series talk show focused on drawing out the personalities of well known CEOs and business moguls of all walks of life in a simplified and fun way. Draper interviews these guests on her pink set educating and entertaining...
Sean Percival is an American blogger and author from Los Angeles, California. For work, Percival is the Vice President, Online Marketing at MySpace; for play, he is the founder of the Los Angeles-based technology blog lalawag. Formerly with Tsavo, Mahalo and Docstoc, Percival taps the real-time web to identify and develop content around today’s biggest Internet trends. Along with his wife Laurie, the Percivals were featured in the 2009 LAWeekly ‘People of the Year’ issue. They were affectionately titled...
Jesse Draper is a professional American actress, entertainment entrepreneur, producer, writer and Twitterer. A graduate of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, she is most well known for her supporting role as Jesse, the nanny, from Nickelodeon’s hit show “The Naked Brother’s Band”. Hoping to inspire and educate those who live a life at the office, along with those who are intimidated and bored by “business talk”, she created “The Valley Girl Show” to spark the entrepreneur inside...
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
