Sarah Lacy writes for PandoDaily, a news site which she founded.
She is also an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” (Gotham Books, May 2008) and “Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos (Wiley, February 2011).
Lacy has been a reporter in Silicon Valley for nearly fifteen years, covering everything from the tiniest startups to the largest public companies. She was formerly a staff writer and columnist for BusinessWeek, the founding co-host of Yahoo Finance’s Tech Ticker, and a senior editor at TechCrunch. She lives in San Francisco.
Baidu is one of the most known of the Chinese Internet giants. Some of the buzz is admiration for Robin Li, one of the pioneers of the Chinese Web scene who built a global giant that succeeded in a political environment where Google cried “uncle.” Others have painted Baidu as the mirror image of Google’s lofty “do no evil” credo.
So on our recent trip to Beijing, we decided to take our cameras… → Read More
Let this post be a lesson to would-be entrepreneurs: Don’t turn down any party invitations. This advice is obvious if we’re talking about fancy dinners as the homes of moguls. But apparently the Valley is so rich with venture capital, it even applies to backyard BBQs at the homes of bloggers.
My husband and I have an annual August BBQ, and two years ago we found a term sheet sketched on a paper… → Read More
The biggest barrier to starting a company isn’t ideas, funding or experience. It’s excuses. And you can understand why: Starting a company is scary. It’s little wonder that even the best entrepreneurs go through a period of doubt and excuses not to take the plunge.
So when I hear complaints from entrepreneurs in other areas of the US or in other countries about how they can’t start companies… → Read More
Memo to Chinese startups: You made for a late night of deliberations. We typically pick five finalists. There were a few companies that were clear picks, captivating everyone– from the judges to the staff to people we talked to in the hallways. Then there was another group that each had passionate advocates on staff, making for some tough decisions.
Ultimately, the staff got down to six we… → Read More
We are kicking off the last day of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011 at 6pm PST. Thanks to Ustream, we’ve embedded the livestream of the event here.
Be sure to tune in and don’t forget to follow along by searching for the #disruptbj hashtag on Twitter!
The agenda for today is below. → Read More
After many sleepless months, our first ever international Disrupt conference will be starting at 9 am Beijing time/6 pm PST. Even if you didn’t make the trip over, you can still catch all the excitement on our livestream thanks to Tudou and Ustream.
In case you can’t watch the whole event, check out Alexia and my top picks for today in the video above.
We are kicking off the first day of… → Read More
Maybe you couldn’t join us in Beijing for our first international Disrupt conference, but all is not lost!
Step one: Order your favorite Chinese takeout.
Step two: Tune into the livestream from Beijing, brought to you through the Great Firewall courtesy of Ustream.
Step three: Tweet what you love and hate the same way you would sitting in the conference hall in the US. The hashtag is… → Read More
The Disrupt Beijing Hackathon starts in a little more than 24 hours, and we’ve been working hard over the last few days to make it even more of a no-brainer for local Beijing developers to attend.
In addition to the chance to be the next GroupMe or win valuable prizes, we have decided to give all Hackathon attendees who complete a hack and present in the 24-hour period free tickets to the… → Read More
It has begun. Some eight hours ago, eight more members of the TechCrunch team landed in Beijing. Giddy and jetlagged, we are spending every minute between wheels down today and curtain up Monday morning working on the Hackathon, shooting videos, meeting with Chinese speakers and showing Western speakers a bit of this amazing country. Most important, we’re working with the startups competing in the… → Read More
These are bittersweet days for Tony Fadell. The man who oversaw 18 generations of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone is finally launching his new company, Nest Labs, today. It has been eighteen months in the making and marks a new era for thermostats– and quite possibly other neglected categories of home electronics.
But he’s also recently lost his former boss and long time… → Read More
Even if you read our story earlier tonight on iPod Godfather Tony Fadell’s new company Nest Labs and its new Learning Thermostat, you may still be wondering how anyone could make a thermostat an object of beauty. So we sat down with Fadell to get a video demo of the device that brought him out of retirement and has been eighteen months in the making.
True to the Apple aesthetic it’s one big… → Read More
For the last eighteen months, the tech world has been anxiously awaiting news of what iPod godfather Tony Fadell is up to. His staff has been sworn to secrecy since word got out he was leaving retirement to do something new. Despite reporters camping out in front of his office with cameras, the news somehow stayed a secret– no small feat in the ever-leaky land of Silicon Valley.
No doubt the… → Read More
With all the recent TechCrunch drama– not to mention my own busy September giving birth– you might think our upcoming Disrupt Beijing conference had gotten pushed to the back-burner. You’d be wrong.
We’ve been busy ferreting out and booking more of the hottest names in the Chinese startup scene to augment our already announced keynotes by Tencent CEO Pony Ma, Chinese angel and entrepreneur… → Read More
We’re not done announcing our all-star lineup for Disrupt Beijing. In addition to top Chinese Internet names like Tencent co-founder and CEO Pony Ma, proven successes like YouTube’s Steve Chen and top up-and-coming Western names like Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka and Evernote’s Phil Libin, we’ve got even more startup experts lined up.
I’m thrilled to announce that Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom… → Read More
As we announced last week, we’ve been busy securing some of the most exciting names in China for our Disrupt Beijing conference this October including Tencent Founder and CEO Pony Ma and Chinese entrepreneur and angel investor Lei Jun. But it wouldn’t be a TechCrunch event without bringing a little of that Silicon Valley magic too.
In selecting people to bring to China we wanted a mix of some… → Read More
Hopefully, anyone who has attended our Disrupt San Francisco and Disrupt New York conferences knows why we charge $2,995 for tickets: Between the Hackathon, Startup Alley, the big names on stage and the Startup Battlefield, we essentially cram four conferences into one.
Our challenge in bringing Disrupt to Beijing was to find a way not to skimp on the conference, but produce an event that more… → Read More
Earlier this year at All Things D, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason said one of his regrets was not opening an office in Silicon Valley earlier. The implication was that he was talking about not taking advantage of the superior coding talent, but I took it another way.
Being in Silicon Valley is like playing for the Yankees. You get knocked around more than anywhere else, the glare of the media… → Read More
It seems Sarah wasn’t kidding about working right up until she gives birth. In this week’s positively-last-before-the-birth episode of Why Is This News?, Sarah and Paul are prompted by the ongoing reports of Dropbox’s mega funding to talk about valuations.
The typical outrage is over whether a company like Dropbox is “worth” $4 billion, but as we argue, that’s misses the point. Venture… → Read More
Even before I worked at TechCrunch, Disrupt was one of the few industry conferences I looked forward to every year. There were two big reasons why: The enthusiasm and excitement of the startups who launch there, and the unparalleled lineup of the most exciting people in tech engaging in frank, honest conversations.
When we expanded the franchise to New York, it was natural to bring the most… → Read More
A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can’t innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
These people will hate this post because it’s about a company called … → Read More
MyHeritage, Israel’s best hope of having a big Web 2.0 winner, keeps marching along, leaving Geni further in the dust and proving a surging challenger for already-public Ancestry.com.
The company has nearly 60 million registered users, who have uploaded 20 million family trees, 800 million profiles and 125 million photos on the site. All of that inventory is helping fulfill the early promise of… → Read More
CouchSurfing International is one of those rare Web companies– like Mozilla or Craigslist– that has eschewed the normal Silicon Valley values of growth, greed and venture capital.
It’s one of those startups that uses the word “community” to mean people that have lasting, real-world connections to one another, not just the new industry jargon for “eyeballs.”
And its CEO Daniel Hoffer still… → Read More
Bleacher Report may have spent much of its life quietly climbing the rankings of top sports destinations, but it’s not being bashful or patient anymore.
In a little more than a year, it has hired Brian Grey as its new CEO, a guy who used to run two of its four largest competitors, and it has passed Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports in traffic, beefed up its sales staff, starting hiring a… → Read More
A few months ago I was giving a talk in my hometown of Memphis, TN, and someone asked what the city could do to ignite more entrepreneurship among inner city kids. My immediate answer was teach coding– even basic app building skills– along with English and Math in every public school.
I was surprised that my brother– an engineer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley before relocating… → Read More
We’ve teased you with this news over and over again, but today it becomes official: TechCrunch is coming to China.
In late-October we are hosting our first international Disrupt conference ever, and the obvious location was Beijing, the hub of China’s surging entrepreneurial ecosystem.
And we’re not stopping there. → Read More
There are two kinds of bubbles. There are actual economic ones that artificially drive up valuations across broad categories in an unsustainable way, impacting markets on a mass scale. And there are psychological ones, where the real economic fall-out is limited to a small pool of insiders, but there’s a broad societal lack of trust; a disillusionment that results from everyone buying into a grand… → Read More
A new startup called Pago is launching today, and if you live in Mountain View your life may have just gotten a lot easier. You can now go to more than 50 local merchants– coffee shops, dry cleaners, bars and the like– and order what you want from your smartphone, pay for it, and then skip the regular line to get it. It aims to bring Web-efficient check outs to the real world. Clearly anyone who… → Read More
Watch me ruin your Sunday afternoon with one word. Ready? Here we go.
Patents.
This week on NBC’s Press:Here we talked about this topic most of our readers equate with a long, slow, painful root canal. Or worse. Laura Sydell of NPR was also on the show, and if you haven’t listened to her episode on This American Life called “When Patents Attack,” go do it now. We’ll wait. → Read More
A few weeks ago I was meeting with Peter Thiel and that pesky question of whether we’re in a bubble or not came up. In a debate both sides are getting bored with, Thiel made a point I hadn’t heard: That LinkedIn’s IPO wasn’t some Netscape moment that opened the markets up for everyone else. In fact, he argued, it was the opposite.
LinkedIn showed that you can have a compelling IPO and get an… → Read More
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