TC Alum Sarah Lacy Launches New Tech Blog, PandoDaily

In case you hadn’t noticed, the state of technology reporting isn’t exactly refreshing these days. There’s a lot of the same news getting rehashed over and over. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that isn’t getting discussed at all because it doesn’t have the word ‘Apple’ in the headline. And there are some bylines that used to appear on this site that have been unceremoniously pushed out of the building.

Sarah Lacy — formerly Editor at Large at TechCrunch, who spearheaded our conference in Beijing this past fall — is looking to help improve the situation. Today Lacy announced the launch of her new site, a startup-focused tech blog called PandoDaily that, among other things, is going to “bring more civility into the blogosophere” (yay!). And she’s also gunning to break plenty of news.

From her post:

We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle. That sounds simple but it’ll be incredibly hard to pull off. It’s not something we accomplish on day one or even day 300. It’s something we accomplish by waking up every single day and writing the best stuff we can, and continually adding like-minded staffers who have the passion, drive and talent to do the same.

Lacy also reels off a slew of PandoDaily’s top-tier investors (Gigaom reports the round totaled some $2.5 million):

Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, Jeff Jordan and Matt Cohler, all investing as individuals. Also investing are a handful of seed funds including the CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel’s Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs.

But while she’s raised a considerable amount of money, Lacy writes that she has no intention of selling the company. Which, to be fair, is what everyone says until they do. But knowing Sarah, I’m inclined to believe her.

Lacy hasn’t named her entire staff of full-time writers, but she will have some familiar names as part-time contributors, including Michael Arrington, MG Siegler (who remains TechCrunch’s Apple columnist), and Paul Carr. Farhad Manjoo, whose name you may recognize from Slate, is also on board.

Obviously PandoDaily is going to be competing with TechCrunch — with some of TechCrunch’s former writers, no less — but I’m happy about this regardless. There are enough sites out there gunning for page views with shoddy slideshows and overly-sensationalist headlines, and it sounds like PandoDaily is taking a different route. My hope is that Lacy’s site helps raise the bar for everyone — and I have no doubt that the competitive, eager reporters over here at TechCrunch will more than rise to the challenge.

Best of luck Sarah. The site looks great.