Books Archive

Big News! Also, Yes, I Am Back at TechCrunch

As loyal readers know I’ve been spending quite a bit of the last few months quietly working on some pretty radical and exciting career changes. I’ve already blogged about my role shifting at Yahoo's TechTicker, and the fact that I’m cutting out almost all conferences this year. I'm finally able to talk about the last two pieces of news today, and you’ll see why it was crucial for me to make a little more time in my schedule. 

The first one is something I’ve been working towards since December 2007: I’ve finally closed my next book deal. Before I tell you about it, let me step back and say that the experience of writing “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” was probably the most exhilarating and challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life. I knew I wanted to do another book, but I was worried that anything would pale in comparison.

Business reporters are rarely in the middle of something that’s also a mass cultural movement, the way Web 2.0 was. And it’s even rarer to be the reporter in the middle of that trend early-on, with near-unfettered access. The book was also the culmination of ten years of covering startups and the Web, with so many of the themes of the book coming out of articles I’d written week-after-week and conversations at endless breakfasts, lunches and dinners with investors, coders and nearly everyone who makes up the Valley ecosystem. I worked hard, but I was also in the right place at the right time, and I didn’t think it was possible that I’d find another book that I could be that passionate about again.

Then, a month after finally turning it into my publishers in 2007, I was sitting on a beach in Mexico and my next idea hit me. (My husband may never take me on vacation again.)

The new book is about global entrepreneurship. What I don’t mean by that is globalization or social entrepreneurship. It’s the story of real, ambitious, risk-taking entrepreneurs in emerging markets around the world who are taking advantage of the turmoil all around them to build huge businesses, the Western venture capital money that’s trying to invest in them, and the cultural chasm the two are, so far, having a hard time crossing. To tell this story right, I’m going to spend between 30-40 weeks on the ground in Israel, China, India, Africa and Mexico/South America over the next year and a half. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I've actually already started. It works out to roughly 2-3 weeks at a time overseas, followed by 2-3 weeks here, and a few months with no travel here and there for sanity. My publisher is John Wiley & Sons and, yes, I was border-line insane to try to sell a book in this market. Huge thanks to them for believing in the project so much, and my agent, Daniel Greenberg, for pulling off the impossible once again.

I’ll still keep a foot firmly planted in Silicon Valley—after all, it’s an integral part of this story, too. And I’ll still write my Valley Girl column for BusinessWeek and do three-to-four interviews per month plus my daily Valley Buzz post for TechTicker. I’ll also still appear on NBC’s Press:Here during the weeks that I’m in town.

So, to sum up, we've got a column, I'm hosting one show, commuting an hour to be a regular guest on another and traveling around the world to write a book…is that enough to keep me busy? Hardly. That’s why I’m also announcing that I’ll have an ongoing gig with TechCrunch. Actually, Michael Arrington already did. Given my other responsibilities, I won't be there everyday, but I’ll be writing two-to-five posts per week, likely a lot on the weekends, a lot on airplanes and a lot from the road. You're better off sending announcements about your latest product launch wherever it is you send them now, because I’ll be focusing on analysis of the business of Silicon Valley, emerging markets and the collision between them.

While I've been working on pulling the book together for more than a year, no one is more surprised than I am at the TechCrunch announcement. You should have seen the Cheshire cat "I won" grin on Michael Arrington's face when we finished negotiating it all. He and I have had an ongoing Abbot-and-Costello routine about how I'd never write there because I was too busy and liked writing on this site too much.

But when I filled in for him in February, my thoughts changed. Trolls aside, I was blown away by the level of engagement and love for that blog among entrepreneurs around the world. It's not just a blog about Silicon Valley and Web 2.0. Subscribing to newspapers or business magazines doesn't really mean you read them. (Ask the tall plastic-wrapped stack in my hallway.) But TechCrunch readers read every single thing on that site, chew it up, digest it, spit it out and talk to their friends about it. It seemed the perfect place to write about what I was seeing on the road as the book unfolds, because I'm well aware I can't write this book alone. It needs a community. After all, a world of entrepreneurs is a pretty big topic.

I'm not killing SarahLacy.com. I'll be cross-posting my TechCrunch stuff here, linking to BusinessWeek and Yahoo stuff, and writing more personal posts about my experiences on the road as I travel. And yes, we'll have FlipCam footage.

I said in an interview late last year that my next book would be "stupidly ambitious" and I think I've delivered on that promise. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I know I will.

Amazon: The Exception to all the Rules

My new goal is to get Jeff Bezos on TechTicker. That's right. Fair warning Mr. Bezos: You are the new Moby Dick. (Larry Ellison, you toyed with me for too long.)

Since I've historically been a Valley beat reporter, I've never gotten to interview the Seattle-based Amazon CEO, and I am increasingly amazed with his leadership. Om Malik put it best on TechTicker several months ago, when he said Bezos is the closest thing any Internet company has to a Steve Jobs. Before you hit that comment button: Larry and Sergey aren't CEOs, and Facebook is too young to call.

First off, there are almost no tech founders who remain CEOs from starting a company through its IPO and beyond, particularly given the short-sighted nature of Wall Street these days. The only other one I can think of is Ellison, who I've said before deserves to be the highest paid CEO in tech, for his uncanny ability to get where his business is going from a technology point of view, a market point of view and a business point of view.

But more than that, Ellison is that rare breed who can inspire and terrify his people at the same time, and exert enough authority that Wall Street doesn't question him. Ok, maybe the question him, but they'd never dream of ousting him even in the bad times. In fact, over the last few months while everyone has been saying no other tech CEO has the same value to his company as Jobs, I've argued Ellison is a less-sexy version of the exact same dynamic. (By "less-sexy," I mean he sells databases and middleware, not iPhones. I only swoon for Mr. Lacy and this man.)

Bezos is the only CEO of the Internet generation cut from Ellison cloth. He has routinely stood up to Wall Street and was often considered an absolute dog next to eBay's "monkeys-could-run-us" lean and mean business model. Nonetheless, he thumbed his nose at Wall Street with his famous chortling laugh, which you can hear in the clip below.

Similarly to Ellison, Bezos was a visionary in terms of product (cloud computing and the Kindle), knowing his customers (a brilliant user interface, pioneering recommendation engine technology that actually works, and Amazon Prime) and business (investing more money and continuing to discount quarter-after-money-losing-quarter believing volume would win out in the end).

So I know what you're thinking: What about that Internet "four year curse"? Well, it only holds true for the do-no-wrong Internet darlings like Yahoo, eBay and Google. Amazon never quite fit that. It never had a golden-goose of a business model, so it never got lazy. It never had the luxury to get lazy.

In fact, Amazon is increasingly the exception to not only to the four year curse and the horrific 2008 fourth quarter, but a lot of stories I write. Back in August, I wrote about the antiquated publishing industry. One solitary bright light: The Kindle, which the fourth quarter results showed actually boosted book sales, something so counterintuitive even Amazon-bull Henry Blodget totally mis-calls it in the above video. In a time when Borders is fighting for its life and Barnes & Noble had to cut jobs for the first time in its corporate history, that's nothing short of amazing. (And as a reporter pitching a new book, I'm nothing short of grateful.) You have to wonder whether Bezos sold his soul to the devil during one of those post-2000 quarters when it looked like the company was going to go belly-up.

Then there was my December column on how stagnant ecommerce has been since the 1990s. My one exception? You guessed it: Amazon. There are a zillion small reasons why I always try to make purchases on Amazon, despite that old conventional wisdom that you can't build loyalty in ecommerce because it's so easy to click to a cheaper competitor. Among my reasons: Amazon's superior user interface and search, the ease of one-click purchasing and free overnight shipping via Amazon Prime, and the affiliate system. Amazon has given me more than $1,000 in credit this year, thanks to people clicking through my site to buy my book and other items on Amazon. Speaking of, anyone need to do some shopping? That link is up and to the left...

So, keep up the good work Mr. Bezos, and just know that me and my camera crew are coming for you.

Michael Lewis: Sounds Like a Jerk, Makes a Good Point

I have some love/hate issues with Michael Lewis as a writer. He's clearly insanely talented at finding and telling a great story. On a structural level, I heavily borrowed from Moneyball to organize Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. If you look closely-- and I don't know why anyone ever would-- Max Levchin = Billy Beane as the spine of the book. The different various entrepreneurs rotate into the narrative the way, individual A's players rotate in to Moneyball. The philosophy of Web 2.0 provides the narrative glue, the way the philosophy of A's baseball provides the narrative glue of Moneyball. It's really borderline shameless.

But one thing I do not borrow from Lewis is his love of putting himself in his books. Ever since Liar's Poker I've found it incredibly self-congratulatory. I know people think I love to promote myself, but note there are about four occurrences of first person in my entire book and each is a passing reference making a bigger point about one of the subjects. Bottom line: If you come to a blog called SarahLacy.com, expect to read about me. If you pick up a book about entrepreneurs, expect to read about them.

So it's not surprising I had mixed feelings about Lewis' recent interview in The Atlantic. (Which, BTW, I'm subscribing to, because I keep getting linked to awesome Atlantic pieces.) The delightfully sassy reporter asked Lewis about the magazine industry, a timely topic, give that ad pages were horrific in the fourth quarter. Lewis smugly responded that he was faring just fine. Exact words below, the reporter in bold:

"And so I wonder what you think about that industry changing over the next couple of years. Especially since you're a guy who does long-form journalism and books, and those are arguably things that translate less well to the internet.

Well my personal experience has been very nice. The market for me has only gotten better!

[Laughs] That's not terribly helpful.

Well it makes it a little hard for me to prophesize doom. And I hate spinning theories to which I'm an exception. So my sense is, there'll always be a hunger for long-form journalism, and that it's just a question of how it's packaged. And that people will always figure out how to make it sort of viable. It's never going to be a hugely profitable business: it's more like the movie business or the car business in that there are all sorts of good non-economic reasons to be involved in it. The economic returns will always probably be driven down by too many people wanting to be in it.
 
But I don't feel gloomy about the magazine business at all.

Well that's nice! I feel pretty gloomy.

It's always inherently in a state of turmoil of one form or another. But let me put it this way: when I write a long magazine piece that gets attention I feel like it's more widely read now than it was ten years ago, by a long way. In fact, it feels excessively well read. Twenty years ago I might get a couple of notes in the mail and I'd hear about it maybe at a dinner party. And that would be the end of it, and it would go away very quickly. Ten years ago it would get passed around by email, and it would seem to have a life to me that would go on a little longer. Now the blogosphere picks it up and it becomes almost like a book: it lives for months. I'm getting responses to it for months. And I don't think the journalism has gotten any better. It's just the environment you publish it in is more able to rapidly get it to the people who are or might be interested in it. They're more likely to see it. So the demand side of things is not a problem. People really want to read this stuff. The question is how you monetize that."

Oh, it's just how to monetize it? Phew, I thought the industry had a real problem. Here's the thing: Lewis isn't wrong about his career; he's wrong to think it in any way reflects what media is facing in the aggregate. Yes, he is doing well and his pieces are more widely read, but that's because Lewis is one of the top writers in his field, and his fame just happens to parallel the increasing media calamity of the past few decades. Business being good for him is a reality, but it has zero to do with the state of media. 

So it comes across as incredibly smug to shrug off the widespread problems that almost all journalists who don't happen to be Michael Lewis are facing. Yes, even incredibly talented and successful ones.

That said, there's an important lesson in what he says: Even in the bleakest economic times, people at the top of their game still do well. While good times lift all boats, the inverse isn't true. It's a reminder to me to stop looking around at the broader economic collapse and panic. Rather, focus on content, content, content and pretend I'm living in my own Michael-Lewis-like bubble, until my income tells me otherwise. It's that fine line between letting panic hobble you and uttering famous last words you'll come to regret.

Mr. T vs. Chuck Norris: Who Is Your Money On?

My brilliant* editor Patrick Mulligan of Gotham Books has another Internet meme book coming out this week: "Chuck Norris vs. Mr. T: 400 Facts about the Baddest Dudes in the History of Ever." It's the sequel to the highly-successful "The Truth about Chuck Norris" that may or may not have landed my beloved publishers in legal hot water. (Can't say plus don't really listen when Patrick talks about other authors...)

Buy it here! Or better yet: WIN a FREE copy by telling me who would win a fight and why in the comments. Five best answers win. (I vote Mr. T for what it's worth...)

*I retain the right to revoke this adjective if he passes on my next book

A Christmas Miracle that Literally Warms My Heart

Regular readers know that I'm not buying or accepting material gifts this year. But I'm making a quasi-exception right now.

Background: If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know we don't have a furnace and decided with the uncertain economy and all, we'd put off buying one for another year. Unfortunately, we also had the ceiling of our garage taken out to update our electrical work and ripped out a huge, crumbling brick chimney running through the middle of the house, so there's even less insulation and a big hole in our house.

Simply put: We are *dying.* Olivia and Geoff and the cats and I are basically the grandparents from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, all huddled under a pile of blankets with coats, fingerless gloves, leg warmers-- whatever layers we can find. It's somehow colder in the house than it is outside. The cleaning people came in Friday and looked at me sort of stunned and said, "Wow, it's freezing in here!" YES. WE. KNOW. My coffee gets ice cold in about 10 minutes, and then I just have to drink cold coffee because we don't have a microwave either. This is the opulent world of San Francisco home ownership.

As a result, I've become this crazy heat obsessed junky who checks out heat sources in every home or business I've gone into. I was wowed by the heat generating power of these bad boys at my Pilates studio. So, we ordered THREE of them from Amazon in various sizes. And guess what? Thanks to all the Amazon affiliate money we made from people clicking on that button to your left and buying my book, we got them for free! Thanks to Amazon Prime the shipping was free! It's the closest thing to a Christmas miracle that my ice-cased brain can imagine. And they just arrived. Thank God I hewed closely to blogger central casting today and didn't jump in the shower and miss the FedEx guy bearing this beautiful gift of heat.

Just more reasons I'm convinced Amazon is the only first gen e-commerce company that gets it. And, of course, one more reason I am grateful to anyone who bought my book via sarahlacy.com.

U Can Haz LAME!

Ok, here's the deal. I am fully aware of how smart, funny and awesome my readers are. I am fully aware of how many of you READ my post for an LOLcats give away. Yet why do I have so few submissions? Sure I could award five books. But only a few *deserve* it -- like made me literally laugh out loud-- and I think you can do better.

You have 48 hours.

For help go to these Flickr feeds.
Brian Solis
Laughing Squid

Don't let me down :( I've had a rough day and need a laugh!

You Should Buy This. I Am.

I'm planning to read "True Enough" by Farhad Manjoo on some upcoming flight in the next month or so. (Only time I can possibly justify the luxury of reading these days. Sob.) It's not because he gave me such a glowing review last May, although it does convince me he knows a thing or two about good books. (Har) it's actually about a topic core to all the changes the media is grappling with as an industry. Here's a review from CrunchNotes.

U CAN HAZ FREE!!!

Yes, the "I Can Has Cheezburger?" book is coming out October 7. But you can get one FOR FREE now!

Why? Because we have the same editor.

How? By sending Sarahlacy.com a LOLCats-ed up photo of a Web entrepreneur or Valley personality. Here are two of me to get you inspired. We'll have five winners. Send to Olivia at sarahlacy dot com. NOW!

[Can't seem to embed this one. (FAIL!)]