My departure is something people have speculated about since Michael Arrington’s ouster two months ago, but it wasn’t an easy decision for me. This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction out of loyalty for my friend, nor is it about making a big “F-you, AOL!” statement. I’ve spent the bulk of my maternity leave agonizing about whether to stay or go– the first half of it trying to find a way to stay and feel good about it, and the second half standing firm in my decision to leave, despite a lot of persuasive arguments to stay.

Even with the high-profile departures of Mike, Paul Carr, MG Siegler– and potentially Heather Harde if you believe the unconfirmed reports– there’s still a team here that I love working with. It’s a team that can band together with scant resources and pull off phenomenal things. That was made obvious to the world with our amazing first international Disrupt conference held earlier this month in Beijing. If you were up at 3 am watching the live stream and saw the talk I gave before handing out the Disrupt Cup, you know every reason I joined TechCrunch and every reason leaving has been hard.

This was a blog that wasn’t just a snarky observer of the tech scene– it was an inexorable part of it. Has that made it a messy, convoluted and conflicted ride? Yes. But that’s also what has made TechCrunch something a world of startups and entrepreneurs can’t live without.

I’ve bounced between a lot of jobs in the last few years– writing for BusinessWeek, hosting a show for Yahoo Finance, writing two books, and traveling the world to find great entrepreneurs– but TechCrunch was the first place in my career where I felt like I totally fit. It was a place I felt I could stay for a long time.

And then Mike sold the company. Things went better than I expected for the first year. And then this fall, all hell broke loose. You could produce a Lifetime movie of the week about the behind the scenes drama of the last few months. Publicly, I’ve stayed silent during much of it, but it has been every bit as gut wrenching for me as it’s been for my colleagues.

The CrunchFund was announced on the due date for my first baby. That weekend as my contractions started, the TechCrunch drama unfolded too. Mike would text me things like, “Are you in sitting on the couch drinking tea kind of labor or screaming, blood all over the walls kind of labor? Because I need to talk to you.”

The following week, as I waddled around San Francisco trying to induce more active labor, I was also awaiting word on whether we’d be able to buy TechCrunch back. I’d committed to come back as the editor if we were able to pull it off– a commitment Mike and Heather were always respectful enough not to ask me to make until after I’d given birth. As has already been widely reported,  we weren’t able to pull it off, and when I came out of the labor and delivery room the next day, I discovered a job Mike and I had talked for years about me doing had been given to someone else.

Even still, I wanted to stay, and I had many conversations with Arianna Huffington, Heather and others trying to figure out something that made sense. They made many generous offers, and I don’t leave feeling unappreciated. But I can’t help feeling angry and sad over a lot of internal morale devastation and external brand destruction that simply didn’t have to happen.

I don’t think this is the time or the place to talk about what I’m doing next, but the plan isn’t to be a stay-at-home-mom. Ultimately this decision wasn’t about what went down with AOL and with Mike, it’s about me moving onto something I’m really excited to do next. And something that I hope will carry on the spirit of what Mike and Heather built at TechCrunch.

I wish the TechCrunch team the best of luck in the future. I hope the editorial expansion into China that I championed over the last year continues in my absence. The staff, the readers and the entrepreneurs we were lucky enough to champion every day will always have a special place in my heart. Goodbye everyone.

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 to the search giant’s massive headquarters– which spans more than one million square feet– to see if we could find any torture chambers. Big thanks to our gracious host and good sport, Baidu spokesperson Kaiser Kuo.

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 tablecloth. We never found out who that belonged to. But I just found out another deal happened at this past year’s party when LA entrepreneur JR Johnson met Tony Conrad of True Ventures.

Johnson’s company, Trippy, will announce the funding today. The $1.75 million round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and included SV Angel and individual investors Rob Solomon, Tim Ferriss, Brian Lee, Gil Ebaz, Brandee Barker, Chase Jarvis, Randi Zuckerberg, Jason Mraz, and Rachel Zoe.

Trippy is a social travel site that gives people a painless way to help plan friends’ trips. Trippy debuted at Disrupt in San Francisco and is Johnson’s second company in the travel space. His first, VirtualTourist, was a pioneer in the social travel space. It was acquired by Expedia in 2008.

Johnson started working on Trippy the moment his non-compete elapsed, and his expertise in the space shows. For instance, unlike competitors it only allows people in your social graph to make recommendations, which cuts down on the rampant spam problem of sites like TripAdvisor.

Trippy’s UI is also one of the best I’ve seen at taking away all of the hurdles to sitting down and emailing a friend a list of suggested hotels, bars and restaurants. It cleverly  leverages Facebook’s APIs to make it drop-dead easy to make recommendations– or even just echo ones made by other friends.

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 even in Silicon Valley, a place where decades of ecosystem formation have provided entrepreneurs with soft-feathered nest of funding, mentoring and support. Outside the Valley it’s downright terrifying. 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 because there is no angel money, no mentors, no employees that will work for a startup, I always wonder how much of these gripes are truly insurmountable odds to new company formation and how much are the grousing of someone looking for someone else to blame. Perhaps someone who likes the idea of starting a company, but doesn’t really want to put in the hours.

In China, the complaint du jour is that the entrepreneurs are trying to push beyond just founding companies that are clones of Western Web brands, and it’s the VCs that won’t take the risk on truly new ideas. Over two days of backstage deliberation at Disrupt Beijing, I got to see first-hand how the mind of the Chinese VC works. And I have to say, Chinese entrepreneurs have a valid point. Pushed to make a decision on which startups should move forward and which should not, Chinese VCs frequently picked the company with the clearer market over the company with the cool new technology and the gorgeous UI.

This is not entirely a bad thing. In part, the emphasis on solving an existing problem and building a business was refreshing to hear. I’ve long argued we don’t ask these questions backstage at US Disrupts enough, and when I’ve disagreed with the winners in the past, that’s usually been the reason why. In fact, given the arguments over Qwiki v. CloudFlare or Sonar v. BillGuard or Shaker v. anyone else, I might lobby to have a Chinese VC on our judging panels from now on. So it was surreal for me to be the one arguing against an obsession with the market, saying to judges last week, “Remember! These companies are starting for the first time; they don’t have to have all of the answers yet!”

There were a handful of companies shot down by Chinese VCs that would have been received far differently at a US Disrupt. I have a hunch 8 Securities with its slick UI and social engineering would have been a crowd favorite in the US. (It certainly got Jason Kincaid and Erick Schonfeld all hot and bothered.) Likewise, several members of the TechCrunch staff were surprised at how little support there was for UnitedStyles– a user-generated fashion design site built by people with deep industry domain expertise and with a well-thought through user experience. The delightful make-your-own animated ebook company Moglue was another one that seemed to captivate Valley judges in attendance, but was brushed aside by Chinese VCs as clever technology and little else.

In each of these cases– and several others– Chinese VCs had the same complaint: Not a clear enough market for the product. In fact, one thing that set eventual winner OrderWithMe apart from the pack was how well the founders knew their target market and how clearly they could articulate that market’s need for easier-to-source Chinese products. (They deserved the win no matter what continent we were on and were the clear judges, staff and crowd favorite. See our post-win interview with the winners here.)

The bias towards market size makes sense. Size is after all what China’s Web scene has historically had going for it. How much of Tencent’s domination is management and product and how much is its whopping 600 million person audience? It’s impossible to know, but it’s clearly a mix of the two. After all, plenty of companies fail in huge China. But no Tencent, Alibaba or Baidu has come out of India or Brazil to date. A massive domestic market not easily tapped by the West has clearly given Chinese startups more room for error than counterparts in other countries.

Most Westerners have written off Chinese entrepreneurs as unoriginal, and maybe that’s how it started. But it’s clear that at least half of the problem comes from investors. When I asked VCs about their over-reliance on funding clones over new ideas, no one really denied it: The Chinese Web has been characterized by speed and land grab, like the US in 1999 but on steroids. Culturally, the Chinese excel at efficiency and the surest, quickest, easiest way to grab large tracts of Web land was to copy what had worked in the US. The innovation has come in delivery and monetization– many of the so-called copy cats of China are totally different from US companies in practice. But they get their start as the “fill-in-the-blank” of China, and that’s the marketing when they go public too. At the beginning and the end, it’s the game they have to play to get money.

Many investors have become addicted to this sure-thing copy-cat model, although a few investors pointed to increasing investments in areas like the mobile Web that are still developing everywhere. Our runner up– which got the majority of the votes among the Chinese VCs– was Anquanbao, arguably a clone of CloudFlare. (Fittingly, the original was a Disrupt runner up too.)

Anquanbao was the only clone in the finals, and some of the judges seemed to gravitate to it for that reason. Matthew Prince, CloudFlare‘s founder, was a judge of an earlier session and I asked his thoughts on the company. Although he humbly thought CloudFlare’s technology was better, he admitted Anquanbao was the surest bet of all of the Battlefield contestants to build a big company. As he explained it, the market need in China for a security product like this is just so huge. And while CloudFlare is doing plenty of business in China, Prince expects a local company will be the one to win big. That makes Anquanbao perfectly positioned for success.

As an investor, how can you ignore a near-certainty like that? Looking at Disrupt finalists as our own venture portfolio, it was powerful logic for us too and a big reason Anquanbao made it into the finals and won the title of runner-up.

But for Chinese entrepreneurs to get to the next level of Web innovation, investors are going to have to stop making the easy bet. As I reminded VCs on our venture capital panel, they’re supposed to be taking risk. (The normally reverent crowd of Chinese entrepreneurs applauded.)

There’s a groundswell of entrepreneurs who want them to. We not only saw it with the imperfect-but-original company pitches we saw from the Hackathon and the Battlefield, but we heard it from entrepreneurs in the hallways. Pony Ma, founder of Tencent, opened the conference by arguing it was the crucial next step for Chinese Web companies, and said that fears of whether Tencent will keep up with this new generation are what keeps him up at night.

There are hints of a new generation of angels in China who may push the envelope further, even if VCs won’t. Chinese entrepreneur and angel Lei Jun spoke at Disrupt about how he invests differently, despite his most notable win being an Amazon clone. Today, he says he doesn’t merely back a pre-existing idea, he partners with entrepreneurs to create new companies that evolves overtime along with what the market wants.

If TechCrunch didn’t believe in Chinese innovation, we wouldn’t have held our first international conference there. And if the current crop of investors aren’t going to champion it, the market is big enough and there’s enough talent there now that others will. It’s up to the entrepreneurs to push the market forward, not just give the investors what they want.

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 liked and couldn’t agree on which one to eliminate. So in the spirit of rule breaking, we decided to pick six finalists. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Anquanbao
Anquanbao’s presentation

8 Securities
8 Securities’ presentation

Moglue
Moglue’s presentation

OrderWithMe
OrderWithMe’s presentation

TouchPal Contacts
TouchPal’s presentation

UnitedStyles
UnitedStyles’ presentation

These companies will duke it out in front of our finalist judges just before lunch. You won’t want to miss the drama!

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.

Tuesday, November 1st

9:00am – 9:10am
Opening Remarks by TechCrunch

9:10am – 9:40am
Fireside chat with Lei Jun (Angel Investor, Co-founder of Xiaomi), with Sarah Lacy

9:40am – 9:50am
Xiaomi Demo

9:50am – 10:15am
Founder Stories with Kevin Systrom (Instagram), with Gang Lu (Editor of TechNode.com)

10:15am – 10:40am
Attack of the Clones: How Some of the Largest Group Buying Companies are Killing Groupon in China: Yinan Du (24quan), and Xing Wang (Meituan), with Bill Bishop

10:40am – 11:00am
BREAK

11:00am – 11:30am
Ecommerce Panel: Ecommerce Finally Takes Off In China, Lu Dong (La Miu), Ye Haifeng (Mbaobao), Fangfang Wu (Greenbox), with Bill Bishop (Digicha)

11:30am – 12:00pm
Why do Westerners Always Fail in China? With Fritz Demopolous (Qunar.com) and Sarah Lacy

Startup Battlefield with Richard Robinson

12:00pm – 1:15pm
Final Session

Judges:
Peter Fang (Innovation Works)
Steve Ji (Sequoia Capital)
Hurst Lin (DCM)
Hugo Shong (Accel-IDG)
Greg Tseng (Tagged)

1:15pm – 2:30pm
LUNCH

1:45pm – 2:30pm
Lunch-time Startup Marketing Roundtable; experts provide tips for best marketing practices
Hosted by Ogilvy & Mather

2:30pm – 3:00pm
Building the Anti-Zynga: Founder Stories with Phil Libin (Evernote), with Sarah Lacy

3:00pm – 3:30pm
Is the IPO Party Over? The Future of Returns In China: Steve Ji (Sequoia Capital), Rocky Lee (Cadwalader), Hugo Shong (Accel – IDG), Hans Tung (Qiming Ventures), with Sarah Lacy

3:30pm – 3:45pm
BREAK

3:45pm – 4:15pm
Founder Stories with David Li (YY.com) and John Biggs

4:15pm – 4:45pm
ShoeDazzle: Where Chinese Manufacturing Meets Kim Kardashian: Brian Lee (ShoeDazzle), with Sarah Lacy

4:45pm – 5:15pm
Internet Memes and How Everyone is Ruining Content with Ben Huh (Cheezburger)

5:15pm – 5:45pm
Closing Awards Ceremony

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 TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011 at 6pm PST. We’ve embedded the livestream of the event below.

You can also keep up with the action by searching for the #disruptbj hashtag on Twitter.

Stay tuned and be sure to tune in! The full agenda for today is below.

Monday, October 31st

9:00am -9:10am
Opening Remarks by TechCrunch

9:10am – 9:40am
Fireside chat with Pony Ma (Tencent), with Sarah Lacy

9:40am – 10:10am
Fireside chat with Peter Vesterbacka (Rovio), with John Biggs

10:10am – 10:40am
Why Silicon Valley Needs China To Survive: Hosain Rahman (Jawbone), with Sarah Lacy

10:40am – 11:00am
BREAK

11:00am – 11:40am
Fireside chat with Kai-Fu Lee (Innovation Works), with Sarah Lacy

11:40am – 12:10pm
Android Fever: Why China Is Betting So Heavily on Android: Wang Hua (Innovation Works), John Lagerling (Google), David Chao (DCM), with Greg Kumparak

12:10pm – 12:40pm
Founder Stories with Steve Chen (YouTube), with Sarah Lacy

12:40pm – 1:50pm
LUNCH

1:50pm – 2:20pm
Fireside chat with Niklas Zennström (Atomico, Co-founder of Skype), with Sarah Lacy

Startup Battlefield with Richard Robinson

2:20pm – 3:20pm
Session One

Judges:
John Lagerling (Google)
Rocky Lee (Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP)
Wallace Pai (Motorola Mobility)
Hans Tung (Qiming Ventures)

3:20pm – 3:30pm
BREAK

3:30pm – 4:30pm
Session Two with Duncan Clark (DBA)

Judges:
Robin Chan (GX Groupe)
Elton Jiang (NLVC)
Derek Ling (Tianji.com)
Benjamin Joffe (+8*)

4:30pm – 4:45pm
BREAK

4:45pm – 5:45pm
Session Three with Duncan Clark (DBA)

Judges:
Chris Evdemon (Innovations Works)
Sebastian Kübler (Taishan Angel Fund)
Matthew Prince (CloudFlare)
Si Shen (Papaya Mobile)

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 and Tudou.

Step three: Tweet what you love and hate the same way you would sitting in the conference hall in the US. The hashtag is #disruptbj. (Seriously, stop giggling, twelve-year-olds and Michael Arrington.)

It’ll be almost the same as being here for thousands less. And you don’t even have to pull an all-nighter to get the highlights. All the Hackathon action starts at 8pm PST Saturday night and the conference begins at 6pm PST Sunday afternoon.

You definitely won’t want to miss the Monday morning Beijing time/Sunday afternoon Valley time programming. The conference kicks off with a frank fireside chat with Pony Ma, CEO and co-founder of Chinese giant Tencent. Tencent is the fourth largest Internet company in the world and the largest in China. It employs more people than Zynga and Facebook combined and is a pioneer in the worlds of micropayments, virtual goods and online gaming. If you work in social media or online gaming, missing this keynote would be an occupational hazard.

Ma is pretty reclusive– particularly when it comes to Western media. I tried for years to get a meeting with him and failed no matter how many favors I tried to call in. But now that Tencent is eyeing International expansion and starting to acquire Valley startups, the company is opening the kimono a bit– to mix international metaphors.

Ma will be followed by a fireside chat with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, who we haven’t heard much from since his blockbuster sale of the company in 2006. He’s investing some of those proceeds in China, via Innovation Works. The day continues with Rovio Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka, Innovation Works Co-founder Kai-Fu Lee, a panel of Android experts, Jawbone’s co-founder and CEO Hosain Rahman, Skype co-founder and investor Niklas Zennstrom and the first three rounds of the Startup Battlefield. I’m biased, but I think it’s one of our strongest Disrupt lineups yet.

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 Disrupt conference Monday and Tuesday. That’s a $1,000-plus value for some hungry coders with a good idea and the desire to make it happen. You don’t have to have a team to participate. Just show up and we’ll help match you with others.

No English? No problem! The entire Disrupt Beijing event is open to Chinese and English speakers. We’ve got translators on hand and during the conference, we’ll have real time translation headsets so everyone can follow along.

Our TechCrunch and CrunchGear writers will also be roaming the Hackathon halls, looking for hot stories and standout coders to highlight on the blog and on TechCrunchTV. And check out this list of some of our esteemed Hackathon judges.

Dowson Tong, Senior Vice President of Tencent

Dowson Tong, SVP of Tencent. Dowson joined Tencent in 2005 and has been responsible for the management of product platform as well as research and development of Internet Business since October 2008. Prior to Tencent, Dowson worked in Oracle for database development and testing; and was involved in ERP system development and testing in Oracle Applications. He also delivered Oracle DBA course in UC Extension. Dowson also worked for Sendmail Software in managing the development teams of operator-scale messaging system and anti-spam filtering system; and later on involved in new product planning and business development. Dowson received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1991 and a Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1997.

Ming Yong, New Development for Google China

Ming is from New Business Development for Google China. Ming works on various initiatives like Chrome and Commerce. Before Google, Ming was founder of Socialwok, a Facebook for business on Google Apps and worked in product management, business development, sales and marketing. Ming earned a Master’s degree in Biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan. Before his masters, Ming worked as a research engineer for the Data Storage institute of Singapore, a government research agency. Ming did his undergraduate studies in Applied Engineering Physics at Cornell University.

And if all of that isn’t enough, we’ve just gotten word that Tencent, the largest Internet company in China, will award the winning company a get-to-know-you breakfast with Jeff Xiong, Co-Chief Technology Officer and SEVP of Tencent.

If you want a job with a big tech multinational or have even thought about starting your own company, why wouldn’t you attend? It’s not too late. Here’s what to do. Just sign up here!

We want to give a special thanks to Andy Mok, founder of Red Pagoda Resources. Along with being the organizer for our Beijing Disrupt Hackathon, he is also a talent-hunter for audaciously visionary internet companies in China. When he’s not trolling Zhongguancun or the Internet for game-changing developers and product managers, he also organizes Startup Weekend Beijing to help developers meet investors as well as talented and like-minded product managers and UI/UX professionals.

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 Battlefield to hone their pitches for their six minutes of International glory early next week.

It’s fitting that the conference is being held spitting distance from Olympic village. Like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Disrupt Beijing is a story of China’s coming of age as a unique and complex global force of the startup world and of the simultaneous opportunity and threat that poses for the West.

TechNode editor Gang Lu stopped by the TechCrunch war room tonight, and on a stroll to the Watercube, I asked him what he was most looking forward to next week. Video above.

Lucky you, you don’t even need to leave the couch to get a piece of the action! Thanks to Ustream, the conference will be live streamed for your convenience. So don’t forget to tune into the Hackathon at 8 PM PST Saturday and the conference on 6 PM PST Monday and Tuesday. And wish us luck!

But he’s also recently lost his former boss and long time friend Steve Jobs. In this final segment of our sit-down interview with Fadell, he talks about the Steve Jobs he knew. He also talks about the future for Apple, and what he hopes Apple’s legacy will be for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

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 dial you can spin and push to control a sophisticated array of features.

It’ll be the first thermostat marketed directly to consumers. Can they get excited enough to plunk down a couple hundred dollars? My husband and I are finally putting a new heating system in our drafty San Francisco Victorian. After this demo, I was sold. How about you?

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 anticipation raised expectations in fan boys’ minds that the next great entertainment or communication device was going to be unveiled by the former DJ who oversaw 18 versions of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone.

Fadell is well aware that those fan boys may be in for some confusion or some disappointment today. Because he’s announcing what finally got him to come out of retirement and start a new company: A desire to reinvent thermostats.

That’s not a moniker for some cutting edge game device– Fadell’s new company, Nest Labs, is bringing Apple-level design and cool to the those little boxes on the walls of a quarter of a billion US homes and offices that control the internal temperature. Why? Because all the ones on the market are ugly, they are too hard to use and they control a whopping 50% of the average American home’s energy budget. His goal is to take something we never think about and make it more than just sexy– he wants to make it a “beloved” object in the home.

Fadell got the idea designing his green home in Tahoe. He was shocked there wasn’t a single attractive thermostat on the market so he decided to build his own. The size of the market and the potential impact on the planet convinced him it was a great business. And if he didn’t do it, who would? The unit uses the guts of a smart phone and required someone who knows how to build drop-dead-easy user experiences.

When Fadell left Apple, he promised Steve Jobs he wouldn’t build a device to compete with what he’d done at Apple. Instead, he’s taking the design philosophy to an utterly different industry. Will consumers bite?

We sat down with Fadell for his first video interview about Nest last week. In this segment, he talks about why he feels this opportunity was too good to pass up. Stay tuned for part two of the interview, when Fadell will demo the Nest Learning Thermostat.

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 Lei Jun, and a host of Western entrepreneurs who are traveling to China along with the TechCrunch staff.

One of our most anticipated keynotes is no stranger to Silicon Valley: Innovation Works founder and former head of Google China Kai-Fu Lee. Lee is one of those rare executives who has deep experience in the US with top companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google and deep connections in China as well. He made waves in 2009 when he quit the top job at Google China and opened an incubator for Chinese entrepreneurs in the same office complex. Innovation Works recently raised an additional $180 million.

Lee was one of the first people to lobby hard for a TechCrunch conference in Beijing during one of my reporting trips to the country a few years ago. He said he’d do whatever we needed to help make it happen, and we took him up on his offer, making Innovation Works our local partner for the event. We appreciate all their help so far.

Some of our other speakers may not be as well known in the Valley as Lee, but they are up-and-coming rockstars of the Chinese tech world.

David Li is the CEO of YY.com, a social media company in China that allows people to connect in groups around certain activities and interests over voice, video and text. It first debuted in July 2008 and already has more than 200 million registered users and fifty million monthly active users. More staggering: On average each active user spends a whopping seven hours per day on the site. YY.com is one of several widely anticipated IPO candidates leading China’s tech scene.

A few other Chinese startups being watched closely by investment bankers are the trio of group buying giants: Lashou, Meituan and 24quan. There are thousands of group buying clones in China, but these are three of the largest, and we’ll have their founders and CEOs on stage together. If you’re a Groupon hater, you’ll love this panel, because these guys are absolutely murdering Groupon in the market.

Ecommerce has lagged entertainment and gaming in the Chinese Web scene, but it’s suddenly getting a lot sexier. We’ve invited some of our favorite up-and-comers on stage, including Fangfang Wu, founder and CEO of kids’ clothing etailer Greenbox and Lu Dong, the CEO of La Miu. La Miu– an online lingerie company that has succeeded where Western brands like Victoria’s Secret have failed– is literally one of the sexier ecommerce companies in China.

We’ll also have a panel discussion about the state of investments, exits and valuations, after a challenging summer for Chinese IPOs. VCs from top firms like DCM, Qiming, GSR Ventures, Northern Light Venture Capital and others will talk about what they’re seeing in the market. Some of them will hang around to judge the Startup Battlefield. Stayed tuned to the Disrupt Beijing site for more details on the judges.

Lastly, it wouldn’t be a conference by a Silicon Valley-based media company in China without addressing the elephant in the room: Why do so many Silicon Valley companies fail so badly in the country? We’ll put the question to one Westerner who has succeeded wildly in China: Fritz Demopoulos. Demopoulos cofounded Chinese sports portal Shawei back in 1999, selling it to the Tom Group before the market crashed. He followed that up by cofounding Qunar, which recently raised $306 million from Baidu.

Buy your tickets now, if you haven’t already! Early bird pricing ends October 10. If you want to understand the Chinese tech scene, you don’t want to miss this conference.

We’re also now selling entry-level exhibitor sponsor package directly on the Beijing Disrupt website on the ticket section. TechCrunch Disrupt is about integrating companies with the event experience — instead of creating standalone exhibition space, we incorporate demo areas in with the main traffic flow of the conference which is accessible to all attendees. We provide the tables, signage, power and Internet connectivity; Exhibitors only need bring a sizzling product and unbridled enthusiasm! Sponsors may also use the space as a meet and greet area. Exhibitors also receive a block of 4 full conference passes and inclusion in all the event online and printed on-site materials.

Stay tuned for more announcements! We’ve still got a few more speakers and special announcements up our sleeves…

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 will be joining us in Bejing as well. As co-founder of Kazaa back in the Web 1.0 days, Zennstrom was on the bleeding edge of the peer-to-peer music revolution that helped make the Web cool. He followed that up with a wonky plan to leverage peer-to-peer technology to make cheap international phone calls that initially no one wanted to fund.

That idea would become Skype– a company that sold to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005, was bought back, and sold again to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. Few entrepreneurs have managed to achieve multiple billion-dollar-or-more exits in their careers– fewer still have done it twice with the same company.

Skype is also one of the only Western Web companies of its generation to achieve huge success in China. Today, Zennstrom is interested in doing more investing in China through his London-based venture firm Atomico, so this is a keynote local Chinese entrepreneurs will not want to miss.

We’re also bringing Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom with us from the Valley. Instagram has been a runaway success locally and globally. On stage, Systrom will talk about the journey and what’s next for Instagram. Off-stage, he’ll be exploring China for the first time.

Not all the US speakers are new to China. In fact, China has been core to the success of two of our other speakers’s companies: Hosain Rahman of Jawbone and Brian Lee of ShoeDazzle.

The scorchingly hot Jawbone has raised more than $100 million in funding in the last year and has some of the biggest names in the Valley behind it– from Andreessen Horowitz to Sequoia Capital. It has achieved something few Valley companies have in the last decade: Building a cutting edge hardware company. And Rahman couldn’t have done it without Chinese partnerships.

Similarly, Brian Lee’s ShoeDazzle has leveraged China’s supply chain prowess to invent a new, highly-lucrative business model for ecommerce. Lee and Rahman will tell us about their experiences doing business in the country, and why more Chinese entrepreneurs don’t exploit these endemic advantages to create their own branded, product companies.

Stay tuned for even more speaker announcements of this can’t-miss conference in coming weeks. As a reminder, tickets are on sale here now, and applications are still open for the startup battlefield and the hackathon. Thanks as always to our partners at Innovation Works, who are working hard to ensure the event’s success.

If you have any doubts about whether you want to apply or attend, I encourage you to watch the footage from last week’s stellar Disrupt San Francisco conference.

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 people who are new to the country and others who have a long experience doing business there; people who are existing successes and those who have a fast-growing, tiger-by-the-tail right now. We also wanted a few people who could speak to the culture and whimsy that makes the Valley so unique.

We’ll start things off with Peter Vesterbacka the mighty eagle of Rovio, maker of Angry Birds. Vesterbacka is no stranger to China, where he says Rovio is busy building a $100 million business by the end of the year. That business spans everything from games to desserts to plush toys. I last saw Vesterbacka at the Next11 Conference in Berlin and the more he told me of his strategy for China, the more I insisted he be at Disrupt. He may even have some news to announce…

Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, will also be joining us on stage. Chen is an expert in a good problem to have: A company growing so fast it could bankrupt you. YouTube is one of the biggest phenomena the Web 2.0 world has ever seen. It’s played a pivotal role in everything from US presidential races to the rise of Justin Bieber. And it was the first Web 2.0 to have a $1 billion-plus exit.

The Valley isn’t all about fun ways to waste time. Phil Libin of Evernote calls his company “the anti-Zynga” because it seeks to make you smarter during the little holes in your day. Evernote has a rabid following among its users and is one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley right now, fresh off raising a recent funding round. Evernote rivals Foursquare in downloads, and unlike Foursquare it has no monetization problems, as Libin explains in this video.

These are just a few of the Valley names joining us in Beijing this October. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements and remember to buy your tickets and apply for the Startup Battlefield today. As a reminder, we’ll have translation headsets for all attendees so all speakers and startups competing can do so in their native language, and our global audience won’t miss a thing. Battlefield applications are available in English and Chinese as well.

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 than just expats with expense accounts could afford. As usual with our conferences, it’s all about the entrepreneurs and we want as many of them in attendance as possible.

So we’re happy to announce a special entrepreneur package for Disrupt Beijing that brings the price down from the already discounted $1,995.00 to $997.50. You can find all the details here. While less than some other international tech conferences in China, we realize that’s still a hefty sum for some startups. So we’re giving you more than just a conference ticket. You’ll have the option to display your company in Startup Alley and be invited to an exclusive VC and angel networking event. With any luck, you’ll leave Disrupt richer than you came.

Of course, if you have a great startup about to launch, want to come to the conference for free, and get the chance to get money from us, we encourage you to apply for the Startup Battlefield. There’s more information here. Applications are available in English and Chinese, and you can present in either language during the competition.

Still not sure if you should attend? Check out the videos below to see if the event is a fit for you or your company.

Steve Martocci of GroupMe explains why developers should come to the Hackathon:

Our most recent Disrupt winners Sam Zaid and Jessica Scorpio of GetAround tell you what to expect from the Startup Battlefield:

Lastly, Gang Lu, the editor of popular Chinese blog TechNode, came over to the Valley to grill our own CEO Heather Harde on TechCrunch’s China plans. Read his post in Chinese here. (I’m hoping it says nice things…)

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 spotlight is more brutal and the expectations are higher than they’d be in any other city. You also get the coaching and, say, run support or bullpen arms that the most outrageously rich franchise in baseball history can afford. If you’ve got the chops, all of that undoubtably makes you a better player.

Don’t get me wrong: I hate the Yankees. But I can understand on a professional level, why so many players leave teams I love to go play there.

Similarly, a young wunderkind with a great idea coming to Silicon Valley will find no better place with more freedom to build his dream. This is perhaps the only place where millions are thrown at someone with no management experience, and board members will fight for a 20-something kid to stay CEO, even as mistakes are continually made. The cult of the founder can verge on reckless at times.

But there’s a flipside to that: Every founder who makes it– no matter how much of a maverick they are– surrounds themselves with mentors and staff who help them avoid pitfalls. Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, has always been headstrong and no one would say Facebook is run by committee. And yet, he’s constantly sought out mentors and others with more experience who could guide him in certain areas. He’ll be the first to say without Sean Parker, he wouldn’t have known the importance of keeping so much control of Facebook’s board– a move that saved the company from being sold prematurely.

Similarly, Marc Andreessen– another person who isn’t exactly shy and retiring– has frequently cited the impact of mentors like Jim Barksdale on his career, not to mention the sometimes moderating force of his partner Ben Horowitz. Most iconoclast founders I’ve covered in more than a decade in the Valley, bend far more from good advice than their personas would project. (Yes, even the headstrong Michael Arrington.)

Behind all of the founders we like to think of as playing by their own rules are a team of people they’ve chosen who are have experience they lack. People who have been there before. They don’t always listen to them, but they recognize the value of surrounding themselves with them nonetheless. It’s that old adage of understanding the rules before you can break them.

Mason simply hasn’t benefitted from the raft of mentoring, gut-checks, constant scrutiny, in part because Groupon is based in Chicago. But also because the company was such a phenomenon, growing so quickly, that many of its investors have come in on the company’s terms at much later stages. Like a spoiled only child, it has the dually corrosive reality of being a big fish in a small pond as the startup who put Chicago on the high-tech map, and a big fish in a big pond getting global attention, and all the kiss-ass press and money it could ever want. I don’t say this to knock Groupon or its CEO Andrew Mason. The company and the team have shown extraordinary natural ability. But like a child prodigy it’s been a victim of that easy success too.

Because as every entrepreneur knows and Groupon is learning now, that phase of being the darling doesn’t last forever. An entrepreneur who’s grown up in the somewhat schizophrenic Valley ecosystem– a place where they are constantly built up with valuations and cash but also constantly torn down by haters and the endless scrutiny of the blogosphere and competitors– rarely has quite the same honeymoon Groupon has had. Or if they do, they are well aware from looking around them that there’s a shelf life to it.

Witness the first backlash Groupon ever faced: Those Superbowl ads. They had to know, people would be offended. The ads were intentionally cheeky, like most things Groupon does. You don’t start an ad talking about saving the whales and then switch to a sushi ad and not expect to ruffle feathers. In terms of backlash, it wasn’t that severe, and yet the company pulled a dramatic about face pulling the ads and apologizing. People close to the company told me the executives were shocked at the modest hate mail being written about them, because frankly, they’d never experienced it before.

Oh, but the backlash from the S1 would be so much worse, and Groupon has had little it can do about it thanks to the quiet period. Or should we call it the “quiet” period because the company’s frustration with the press and potential investors’ concerns about its financials and the future viability of its business have been clearly telegraphed, through cheeky ”leaked” emails and memos and tantrums by PR firms.

Whatever Mason’s desired effect was, it’s not working. Even if it doesn’t piss off the Securities & Exchange Commission and derail the IPO, as Dan Primack of Fortune aptly Tweeted this morning, “It’s beginning to act like ex-child star who can’t believe the world is no longer enthralled by his cute-ness.”

Perhaps the biggest misstep Groupon has made: Filing to go public so early in the first place. Every other break out company of this era has had one thing in common: Learning from the past that there’s nothing magic about going public and no reason to rush. Zynga, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all have had the benefit of all their ugly secrets and skeletons coming out well before they were in a quiet period and couldn’t respond. It’s the lesson that was made so clear by Google’s IPO: Wait until you are dominant enough that you can do it on your own terms. It’s hard to believe that would have been lost on a Valley-based Groupon.

I’m not saying the stodgy old men of the Valley (read: People in their 30s and 40s) are the experts on how things should be done. Quite the opposite. The best entrepreneurs know when to ignore sage advice. After all, the advantage of the 20-something founder who has never had a job is that he isn’t personally invested in all the rules he’s breaking. But there’s nothing wrong with being told what those rules are and having a founder who will listen.

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 backed valuations are always a function of a company’s promise and how much demand there is to invest, not what a company is worth right now.

But there are reasons to worry about companies getting into valuation traps as the price tags get significantly over the $1 billion level. We’ve cited Twitter as an example before. It’s the only one of the big five social media companies that hasn’t yet figured out how to make money, but has priced itself well out of the range of an acquisition. It’s go public or bust for Costello & Co. now and that doesn’t leave much room for execution error or broader economic woes.

Phil Libin of Evernote recently opted to do an inside round, forsaking a bigger valuation to avoid having more meddling hands in his company. As he says in this interview: Why do I care about a valuation right this second when I’m building a company for the next 100 years?

Well there’s one big reason many entrepreneurs care about interim valuations so much: They are cashing out significant portions of their shares at these mega rounds. Unlike the last time we saw inflated valuations, this isn’t about paper wealth and bragging rights.

VCs have liquidation preferences that insure they make their money back, the founding team is getting its payout, but should rank-and-file employees be worried as valuations reach new nosebleed levels?

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 exciting Silicon Alley names on stage. That has included people like Fred Wilson and Dennis Crowley, but also the top names in media like Charlie Rose and Arianna Huffington. We even threw New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the mix.

In thinking through the lineup for Disrupt Beijing– our first ever International conference– I wanted to make sure we were bringing some of the most interesting personalities from the West to China. But more important was that we anchor the show with the most interesting names in the Chinese tech scene we could find.

This is not a conference about Silicon Valley coming to China to tell the country how it’s done. China is the only other country in the world where entrepreneurs are already building $1 billion Internet powerhouses. This is a conference that seeks to bridge the gap between the two preeminent tech ecosystems in the world today.

So after many months of work and early morning transcontinental phone calls, I’m delighted to start announcing our lineup. It’s a mix of veterans and newcomers, investors and entrepreneurs, and of course East and West.

The conference will kick off with one of the most captivating people in the tech world today: Tencent CEO and founder Pony Ma.

While Alibaba’s Jack Ma or Baidu’s Robin Li are more common on the International conference circuit, it’s Pony Ma who has proven what a force Chinese entrepreneurs can be on a global scale. Tencent is not only the largest Internet company in China, it’s the third largest in the world. It’s a titan of China’s surging online game/virtual goods universe– the one area where the Valley are the copycats, not the Chinese. Tencent is the company you worry about if you’re a startup in China, and if you’re a startup in the US– like Groupon– it’s the company you want to do a joint venture with.

It’s the perfect time for Ma to headline a TechCrunch event. After years of focusing on the Chinese market, Tencent is starting to get more international, expanding its staff in the US and quietly acquiring US startups. If you can’t make it to China, this will be a keynote you’ll want to make sure you catch on the livestream.

Lei Jun isn’t nearly as well known as Ma, but when I asked friends and entrepreneurs in China who they most wanted to see on stage at Disrupt, nearly all of them mentioned him. He’s a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who’s been compared to everyone from Ron Conway to Peter Thiel. Earlier this month, he made waves with the announcement of Xiaomi’s upcoming Android phone in a Steve Jobs-styled keynote.

Xiaomi is one of the most ambitious startups in China right now. It’s aiming to make the first high-quality smart phone made by and for the Chinese market, priced cheaper than other locally made smartphones and at less than half the price of the iPhone. It will run on Android, but have features and apps specifically tailored for the Chinese market. It’s sure to set off a pricing war that will affect everyone from HTC to Google to Apple, and be one of the biggest tech stories of the fall.

We’ll be announcing more speakers over the next few weeks, so you might want to grab your tickets here now. And if you don’t speak Chinese or only speak Chinese– don’t worry. TechCrunch is investing in real-time translation headsets for the conference so every one of our guests can address the audience in their native language and everyone in attendance can follow along.

As I said at the beginning of this post, the other thing that makes Disrupt such a special event is the Startup Battlefield. We can stack an agenda with big names, but we rely on the TechCrunch community to make the Battlefield just as memorable. If you’re a startup, and you want to demo your product on the same stage as Pony Ma and Lei Jun, send us your application now. Application forms are available in English and Chinese, and the presentations can be done in either language as well. The Battlefield isn’t limited to just Chinese companies– as with all of our Disrupts startups from all over the world are welcome to submit.

Questions about whether your company is a fit? When in doubt, it doesn’t hurt to fill out the application. Only TechCrunch staff will be vetting the applications, and we want to see everyone great.

Stay tuned for more information about Disrupt Beijing in coming weeks and go here for tickets.