Me in LA

Here's the clip of Andrew interviewing me in LA last week. Thanks a ton to Andrew and TechZulu for a great time and a great interview! DC next!

UGBT: The List

Ok, y’all. The votes are in, cities decided and dates somewhat settled upon. The User Generated Book Tour is so far eclipsing my wildest dreams with most cities hosting several events. Most of the plan is still pretty fluid so there’s time to let me know what kind of event you think would be best if your city has been selected.

Again: There is absolutely no demographic study or statistical research that went into deciding the cities. It was purely based on enthusiasm. Think of it like a school assembly "applause meter" where the principal holds his hands above people's heads and you clap and then he decides who got the most applause. This is the qualitative—not quantitative-- book tour.  And together we’ll see how it goes! Again, props to my publishers at Gotham for funding a haphazard and unconventional tour despite a general industry disdain for tours of all kinds.

The schedule on the jump!

LA Book Events: July 8!

As you know, I've already given up being a good daughter or a good friend who actually, say, calls people, stays in touch, etc. For a while, my blog and twitter were serving the purpose for me, but I've sadly dropped the ball on that too. I just got an email from my very understanding mother that read:

"Sometimes I can tell from the blog what is  happening,  I don't see anything about moving.  Did I miss it?  Is painting the red bedroom connected with moving? About needing a personal assistant--how about one less direction to be going in? Busy.  Busy."

Wow. When my Mom doesn't even know that we moved into our first house things are bad! At the very least, I need to blog more! (More on the assistant in a moment...)

First things first: I wanted to tell those of you who don't know I'll be at two events in Los Angeles tomorrow, July 8. One is at Yahoo in Santa Monica at 4:30 in the Building E Training Room, followed by beer and wine and book signing for all. It's open to the public-- details here. There are free books for the first 50 people, but anyone who has a copy and would like me to sign it is welcome to bring it!

The second event I'm somewhat crashing. It's Mixergy's Drinks 2.0 and Andrew Warner is going to interview me on camera about the book and other stuff. No books on sale at the event, but as always if you bring one I'll be more than happy to sign it! More info here. Sounds like it'll be a packed house!!

Hope to meet loads of you there!

Me, Wine, Valerie

Here's an interview I did for BuzzLogic's Vino Diaries podcast. The audio is a little awkward-- Guessing my mic job on my turtleneck was part of the problem so my apologies! I love that they actually LET you drink on this podcast, unlike Happy Hour where they only pretend!

Enjoy!

Portland Twitter Meet-Up Resounding Success!

OK, it'd be generous to call it a "handful" of people who showed up with just 30 minutes notice. But we still had a great time, with great conversation about the Web and entrepreneurship and where it's all going. It convinced me to absolutely do this in every city I go to from now on, so watch out Twitter because your city could be next! Speaking of, I'm loving all the responses from the Sarah Lacy User Generated Book Tour idea. DC seems to be getting the most love to date...

Here's a photo of me and Portlander John Weiss at the meetup last night. He got a signed book and a free drink! Your chance in your city coming soon...

Preview for Your City?

A video of the reading I did at Google last week

Bloggers Blog about Me and My Blog

Honestly, I don't mean any disrespect but having to register to comment on a blog is annoying and a huge barrier to entry to me commenting. I don't understand why so many people have that setting when we've got things like captcha to get spam and can block or remove any comments you want. Blogging is about conversation!!

At any rate, I wanted to leave a comment on here, thanking Zach for writing about my book and buying it and giving me some credit even though he thinks Web 2.0 is lame and annoying. Also wanted to respond to a few things he wrote. But I got impatient registering, so I'm doing it here.

Discuss the Book: Who Is Your Favorite Mogul?

So given the Twitters from a dozen or so people who tore through the book this weekend, it's time to start a series of discussion threads. (Yay!) They'll all be tagged under "Discuss the Book" so feel free to weigh in later, if you haven't started reading or -- gasp-- haven't gotten a copy yet. ;) I promise I will read every last one, and probably comment back to all of them too.

I always like to discuss books I've read-- I was a literature major after all-- so this is just for fun or in case anyone has questions for me. A book has certain disadvantages over a blog when it comes to interaction, so this is also a somewhat clumsy attempt to skirt that. If even one person responds, I'll keep posting questions for discussion once a week. If no one does, I'll cry. JK, but I will likely focus my energies on other posts.

I'm starting with the first question I always ask readers: Who is your favorite "character"? I have to put it in quotes, because these are actually all real people and the book is not fictionalized in any way. But because it's written in a narrative style, people who don't know them tend to talk about them as "characters." You can take this question in any way: who is the most inspiring, who is the most entertaining to read about, who do you love to hate.

So far, I should say most people I've asked feel they "know" Max Levchin the best, but the favorite -- particularly for people outside the Valley-- tends to be Jay "F--- the Sweater Vests" Adelson. What do you think?

The best answer will win a prize. By best I mean either articulate, surprising or, ahem, the only one. Prize TBD.  Maybe a Tech Ticker T-shirt, maybe a signed galley, maybe one of those annoying Yahoo! buttons that yodels when you press it, maybe my sxsw speaker's badge- ha ha.

Ok, ready, set, comment!

Just a *Little* Sad

I Twittered earlier today that I was a little sad today and assumed it was post-book launch let down. Don't get me wrong: 125 rank on amazon, great reviews, and an *amazing* party made for an unforgettable week. But as I watch my Amazon rank slide back into the 300s I can't help worrying that my book won't make that mainstream crossover that I so dearly want it to, because I think the stories in it are amazing and inspiring and so many people don't get what Web 2.0 and entrepreneurship in the Valley is really all about.

I was explaining this over brunch to Mr. Lacy and our "adopted son" Tim Briner, and I kept thinking of this passage from page 194 of my book about the early days of Slide. (For context: Max Levchin is raising money and it's going very well so this is a flashback):

"He thought back to a time when Slide had just come out of the Maxcubator and he and a small team were working day and night to get the Slideshow up and running. Back then, he was hardly thinking about pimping out MySpace pages. The word widget didn't exist, let alone the idea of taking this piece of a Web site and putting it on another Web site without knowing how to code. So when Slide launched, the idea was people would download it to their desktop, like a screensaver. Max took a deep breath and released it into the Internet wild. And then heard nothing.

No one was downloading it! Max couldn't believe it. For years, he'd been so focused on brining a new idea to life, it had never occurred to him that maybe people just wouldn't want it. As he watched the stats go nowhere, he realized that it didn't matter he was Max Levchin, millionaire, dotcom success, founder of PayPal. All at once it hit him: No matter how hard he worked, he simply couldn't will people to use his product. They didn't care who the great Max Levchin was or what he'd done. Even worse, they didn't care about his Slideshow. It was crushing."

Hey Look! My First Snarky Review!

From the San Francisco Chronicle. His main critique is that my title is misleading because I don't write about every single company in Silicon Valley. Wow. There are thousands of Web 2.0 companies, and frankly, most of them not that interesting. Even I wouldn't want to read that book. I wonder if he had a problem with Moneyball only being about the A's when the subtitle refers broadly to baseball? It's definitely a new one as critiques go, but Mr. Banks I am sorry to mislead you so.

And per the critique that the title doesn't apply to Jay or Zuckerberg, I'm not sure you got what the title means and reflects in terms of an overall Valley mindset. Quite possibly my bad. Jay took a company public that was worth more than $1 b. and is still in business today. That's actually considered a "win" in the Valley. Netscape ultimately was beat my Microsoft, so not sure if you're going to not count one you should probably not count both. [UPDATE: Marc sent me a note point out this was unfair. Microsoft "won" because of a monopoly, and AOL bought Netscape for a pretty penny.  I just meant a lot of huge wins aren't necessarily huge, profitable brands years later. But that doesn't take away the "win." It came out wrong though.] And the point re: Zuckerberg was he benefited from the phenomenon by being mentored by people trying to prove their second time; hence Facebook's financial structure and the reason Zuck has been able to hold onto such control.

But, my snarking back to him aside, they're valid points. What truly stunned me was this:

"Lacy portrays Adelson and Rose's mutual "man-crush" with good humor and relish, in a way that seems possible only because she is a woman. Despite their ritualistic grumblings about the media, the numerous men Lacy interviews have no trouble opening up to her over crepes at Ti Couz or drinks at the Fly Bar."

Wow. Usually it's only snarky gossip bloggers or anonymous Twitters that are comfortable being so outright sexist. Way to go, Mr. Banks! I applaud your absolute lack of a filter or political correctness! Of course, it could just be because I've been a business reporter in the Valley for ten years and built a lot of sources, but no, no you're right. It's because I'm a girl.