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.
Boutique tech investment bank Pacific Crest Securities has purchased Pacific Epoch, a Shanghai-based investment research firm specializing in technology. This gives Pacific Crest fifty more bodies on the ground in China to deliver investors better investment research than “This is the (fill-in-the-blank-Western-Internet-company) of China.”
That lazy marketing strategy has helped companies like … → Read More
There are two things we love to do on our Why Is This News? show on TCTV. The first is to break news about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley. The second is to find excuses to promote our respective books (about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley). Rare indeed though is the occasion when we’re able to combine both of those things and break news about one of our… → Read More
There are two things we love to do on Why Is This News. The first is to break news about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley. The second is to find excuses to promote our respective books (about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley).
Rare indeed though is the occasion when we’re able to combine both of those things and break news about one of our respective books, from… → Read More
NetSuite, one of the handful of companies to build a big company out of the early 2000s software-as-a-service funding frenzy, is now making a push into cloud based enterprise software, according to several announcements being made this morning by CEO Zach Nelson at SuiteWorld, the company’s user conference being held in San Francisco.
As with most of these user conference announcements, there… → Read More
LAGOS, NIGERIA– I’m in Lagos to speak at an event and decided to come a week early to check out the country’s tech and entrepreneurship scene.
Apparently Arrington thought I was kidding when I told him this. But he should know by now, I don’t need a lot of arm twisting to visit a country of 150 million people chaotically surging into modernity. Where there’s that much opportunity, there’s always… → Read More
In the 1990s, peer-to-peer networks were a revelation. They allowed people to pool together tiny parts of their computers, and those pooled together parts could do far more together than the average computer or connection could do on its own. It enabled everything from swapping pirated music to making cheap transcontinental calls via Skype.
But what if you could do the same thing with tiny parts… → Read More
Accel Partners has invested $35 million in the crowdsource design service 99designs– a monster of a series A. Of course, 99designs is not your average early-stage startup. Born in Melbourne, Australia out of an older company called sitepoint.com, 99designs is bootstrapped, profitable and growing revenues at a rate of about 120% a year.
A few strategic angel investors also participated including… → Read More
LetsLunch, the service that helps you network less-awkwardly, is expanding from its comfy Silicon Valley confines and launching in New York today. We first wrote about the service here, and it’s gotten a nice niche following since then. People have scheduled more than 1,000 lunches through the service, and about 70% of the time people take time to write a testimonial of the lunch afterwards.
I… → Read More
Kevin Rose has completed a hefty $1.5 million angel round for his new mobile development lab, which we first reported in March, Milk. Rose went for the more-is-more approach, pulling in a wide-syndicate of Valley elites, including TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.
Other angels include Ron Conway, Tim Ferriss, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, Shervin Pishevar, Joshua Schachter, Anthony… → Read More
After a brief hiatus, Why Is This News? is back! In this week’s episode, Paul checks in from his Las Vegas hotel room to discuss Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s plans to regenerate downtown Las Vegas by moving the company’s HQ into the former City Hall.
In fact, there’s far more to Hsieh’s plan than that, as Paul explained over on the Huffington Post. In the video below, Paul waxes lyrical about Hsieh’s… → Read More
You know what’s awful about every politician blindly saying he or she “supports our troops”? It’s usually a hollow sentiment uttered just to get applause.
You know what’s great about every politician blindly saying he or she “supports our troops”? When presented with something that demonstrably helps the troops, there’s zero political capital in obstructing it.
And hence, Gunnar Counselman may… → Read More
It’s been a big month in the Marino-Choy household. No sooner did Lisa Marino get promoted to CEO of the would-be comeback-kid RockYou, than did her husband Ro Choy get named COO of the surging Q&A site Formspring. → Read More
We’ve all got iPhone mania in the Valley, never mind that Apple tracks our every move and won’t explain why or that AT&T users can’t actually make calls.
But in Asia– and much of the rest of the developing world– the anticipated mobile giant is Android. Android phones are just starting to hit Japan and China, and a flood of cheap new models are expected to come on the market within the next… → Read More
Last week, we invited big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly into the TechCrunch Studios to talk about Hoffman’s definition of “Web 3.0″– a torrent of innovation that’s going to be unleashed by all of this personal data being collected about us. In the first segment we talked about the scary implications of this wave of companies, and in the second segment we talked about the… → Read More
It’s time for the much-awaited part two of our sit down with Internet big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly. We invited the two in the studio last week to talk about what Hoffman has called “Web 3.0″– the use of an explosion of data being collected about our real lives online.
Last week, we talked about the undeniably scary aspects of Web 3.0– data and privacy and how we can trust… → Read More
We filmed this week’s Ask a VC on Tuesday, and I started out by asking Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital about the danger of venture capitalists investing in competitors. There was no ulterior motive on my part. It’s just a question I’ve seen coming up increasingly as dealmaking heats up and VCs invest across a bigger variety of company stages than ever before. And, I’d recently seen that Sabet did… → Read More
It’s time for Ask a VC, and this week Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital was back. We talked about whether it’s worth it for startups to launch at a conference like DEMO or Disrupt, the decision to turn a profitable lifestyle business into a venture-backed, cash-burning startup, how entrepreneurs in other countries can find US mentors and the value of MBAs.
In one of our more personal questions from… → Read More
We invited Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly — two of the biggest thinkers in the Valley– into the studio to talk about what Hoffman calls “Web 3.0.” He argues the next wave isn’t as simple as MOBILE! As he first discussed at SXSW, it’s about companies running on any platform or in the real world using the last few decades of data being gathered on our virtual and actual selves to build stunningly… → Read More
This is the post I haven’t wanted to write for weeks. This is the post no one wants to write. No one wants to say Twitter is in trouble. That’s like shooting your best friend’s dog.
But I’m increasingly convinced that Twitter is operationally in trouble, for a lot of the same reasons that Fortune’s Jessi Hempel outlines in her cover today, and other reasons I’ve been hearing about for months. → Read More
This week, I invited Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital back to Ask a VC, because it’s been a while and there were a ton of questions we didn’t get to last time. Sabet is in the middle of some of the most interesting companies on the Web today including Tumblr, Twitter and Boxee. And as you can see from his last time on the show, he’s a great guest. Last time we talked about everything… → Read More
Izhar Armory of Charles River Ventures was my guest on Ask a VC this week and he answered a host of reader questions including whether Twitter should be making money from celebrity Tweets, whether MBSAs aspiring to be entrepreneurs should drop out of school, what role academia still plays in the startup economy and why entrepreneurs today aren’t starting more substantial, life-changing… → Read More
Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel… → Read More
As regular readers might already know, Paul is in Las Vegas for a month, hanging out with strippers reaffirming his belief in the American dream. As a result, this week’s Why Is This News is even less tech-focused than usual.
Still, no matter whether you subscribe to Sarah’s view that 33 days in Vegas is 33 wasted days or Paul’s insistence that there are still stories to be found on and around… → Read More
Just the antidote for a restless Friday morning: A cartoon rendering of the Twitter-tax controversy complete with a groggy Biz Stone masquerading as Twitter’s CEO, the role of Zynga played by a frontiersman, and a cartoony but pretty realistic view of the Tenderloin.
Video on the jump. → Read More
Fair warning: This is where I get all MG on you guys.
As someone who just spent forty weeks traveling around the world, there is no category of consumer Web sites that makes me angrier than online travel sites. More than any other category on the Web, the early incumbents– online travel agents like Expedia and Travelocity– rafted on an early tidal wave of massive convenience and cost savings… → Read More
Ask a VC has been sporadic with my travel schedule, but we’re back this week. My guest is Izhar Armony of Charles River Ventures. He brings a different perspective to the show for a few reasons. For one thing, he’s from the East Coast. And as a former member of the Israeli army– aka the country’s entrepreneurial finishing school– and a former exec for Tel Aviv-based… → Read More
Forgive the snarky headline, but history has shown that navigating a once-hot consumer Web company through the trough of the hype cycle is one of the hardest jobs in Silicon Valley. And very few come out with a billion winner on the other side. (Cough, cough, MySpace, Digg, Six Apart…)
But if anyone is going to pull a turn-around off at RockYou, it’s Lisa Marino. Marino joined RockYou in better… → Read More
I guess $1 billion under management just wasn’t enough. Andreessen Horowitz has just announced a new growth fund of $200 million. The fund with co-invest alongside the firm’s most recent $650 million fund, providing more capital for the kinds of late stage deals that have been raging in the Valley of late. (Check out our three part series on the trend here, here and here.)
That “co-invest” part… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
