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.
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 Greenbox that flies in the face of those preconceived notions. → 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 sites like MyHeritage and Geni: Discovery. MyHeritage is enabling more than 20 million new “Smart Matches” a month.
Today it’s announcing its Family Graph API to enable more developers to build family-oriented apps on top of this unique set of connections. → 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 talks a bit like a man running a combination of an ashram or an online dating service: “We specialize in creating meaningful connections.”
But as of today, CouchSurfing is going all corporate on us. → 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 professional editorial team and raised a $10 million round of funding.
Today, it’s announcing another cash infusion: A $22 million growth round from Oak Investment Partners, with participation from existing investors Crosslink Capital and Hillsven Capital. → 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 to the Midwest– didn’t necessarily agree. “That depends on whether there are still enough coding jobs for them, or they’ve all gone overseas,” he said.
It was then that the great American panic of a few years ago came rushing back to me. → 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 euphoria that turns out to be misplaced.
What I’m unwilling to grant is that there’s such thing as a “Wag-the-Dog” bubble. In other words, a bubble that only exists in media reports and overwrought Twitter feeds, but lacks either a broad economic reach or a broad sense of euphoria.
If you do believe in such things, good news! Apparently it popped yesterday. → 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 spends their day chronically late (like me) would love this.
There are two potential problems. The first is that founder and CEO Leo Rocco may have taken that whole adage of building the company you’d like to see in the world a little too literally. → 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.
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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 insanely high P/E if you’re a 10-year-old, profitable company, growing revenues at more than 100% a year that can command a $5 billion-plus valuation. That, he argued, is what the market wants right now, and those companies are in short supply.
In our final segment with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner I asked him his view on what his company just did for Silicon Valley: Open the markets or close them for all but the big five or so private giants? → Read More
We caught up with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner yesterday, just after his first earnings call as a public company CEO. In an earlier segment we talked about the surprisingly good quarter LinkedIn had; in this one we talk about the company’s insane roller-coaster of an IPO.
I asked Weiner what that week was like for LinkedIn, a company that’s usually the boring social media giant with no pedophile scandals, privacy uproars or stories of meth pipes and abandoned cats. He insists the team wasn’t distracted amid the media frenzy….yeah, I have a hard time buying that too. But he points out that the added pride associated with working at a company worth upwards of $9 billion increased the intensity to execute. I wouldn’t be surprised if all that talk of the company being overvalued lit a spark in the company too.
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Wall Street was not in a happy mood yesterday. Thankfully for LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, the company made its debut on the quarterly conference call with surprisingly good earnings– particularly profits no one was expecting and significant jumps in user growth.
We spent some time with Weiner at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View yesterday to talk about a lot of things: The quarter, that valuation, whether LinkedIn has opened the market or proven you have to be a $5 billion-$10 billion whopper of a company to get out and sustain a good price, and the debate over whether people still want everything relating to their professional life siloed on one social network, or mixed in to Facebook and Twitter. → Read More
If you read the comments on any our recent stories about the Airbnb controversies, you’ll see plenty of people saying that Airbnb needs to take a page out of the Zappos playbook. It turns out, they tried. → Read More
For many years I loved Yahoo Finance. It was one of the only sites I used every single day, and the only Yahoo property I used with any regularity at all. But increasingly, I get angry when I go to the site.
So from now on I’m throwing my support (read: eyeballs) behind a lesser-known Chicago-based company called YCharts in Don Quixote-like hopes that one of two things happens: Yahoo eventually gets under fire enough it fixes its product or someone else (hopefully YCharts) finally builds a great alternative for free, detailed, reliable financial information. → Read More
As Paul Carr and I have written endlessly, we’re big fans of anything disrupting the hotel industry in a simple way that with a clear user value that doesn’t try to be all things to all people.
HotelTonight– a mobile service that allows you to book a last minute hotel in seconds– does exactly that. We test drove it in San Francisco the weekend before MacWorld to see if it really worked. Spoiler alert: it did.
So far HotelTonight’s iPhone app has been downloaded 600,000 times. And today, Android users who travel a lot and hate to plan can enjoy the service too. → Read More
Let’s say I’m driving along and texting even though I know I shouldn’t be. That’s me everyday right there. Now, let’s say I get pulled over, and for some reason the cop asks to see the phone to see what was so important.
Do I have to hand it over? If my phone has a password, am I obligated to type it in? If he starts getting pushy with me should I just start videoing the whole encounter as YouTube-revenge-backup-protection? → Read More
New technologies usually allow for more. In the move from print media to the Web the “more” was comments, slideshows and of course rapid-fire content. In the move from VHS to DVDs the “more” was all sorts of behind the scenes footage and director commentaries. In the move from Blackberries to iPhones, the “more” was a wonderland of new apps and a browser experience that didn’t make your eyes bleed.
In a world of eBook readers, more is starting to creep in, but it’s unclear whether this is a more that will actually sell books, or a more that only a handful of superfans care about. → Read More
Chinese search giant Baidu’s investment in Qunar officially closed this week, and the two teams are working on integrating Qunar’s search results into Baidu’s travel vertical now. I caught up with Qunar’s CEO Chenchao Zhuang for his first Western interview about the deal to talk about what the deal means for the company and China’s Web scene broadly.
This $306 million deal is not only a big one in dollar amount, but it could represent a seminal turning point in the Chinese Web. Until now, Chinese Web companies have had a strong bias towards going it alone. Much like earlier eras in Silicon Valley, success is considered to be an IPO not an acquisition. But there’s a lot of pressure on that to change, and most industry watchers feel it’s just a matter of time– and of course, price. → Read More
Dow Jones VentureSource released its second quarter numbers for the venture industry today, and there’s a reason they’re not dominating the headlines. They’re pretty boring: Overall investors put $8 billion into 776 deals in the US in the second quarter, a decrease of 5% in terms of invested cash and 2% in terms of deals. The median amount raised per deal was $5.2 million, up from $4.6 million a full year earlier. Yawn, right?
But the fact that the numbers are so unremarkable is what makes them interesting. It reinforces what people like me have been arguing for months: A handful of hot companies does not a bubble make. → Read More
Not enough startups have a good sense of humor. We all know Groupon is one of them, and Uber is following suit. Rather than flame me for my snarky early morning comparison of Uber’s immediate business ambitions to a lemonade stand, the company has penned a fake (we hope) post about its new business line– lemonade stands that track your movements as you get closer to them.
Of course, they have to be called “Uber Stands” thanks to restrictive California laws regulating lemonade stands. (That part is so plausible for this state, it actually made me wonder…) → Read More
San Francisco, CA
