Life in London: Does Fun Have an ROI?

I did very little blogging while I was in London, but it wasn't because I didn’t find anything interesting to write about. It’s because I was talking, laughing, eating or drinking nearly every moment of my two-week trip. I proudly announced to my husband that I hadn’t taken a single Ambien during the visit. Unfortunately, it wasn't because of some no-jet-lag magic, it was because I only got about two hours of sleep a night.

Every time I visit London I find a city with zero downtime filled with entrepreneurs, investors and the like who are offering to take me for afternoon tea or a drink to talk about the industry or well, just talk into wee hours of the morning. One Oli Barrett even serenaded me with several songs from Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang late after the TechCrunch Europa awards. After all, that’s how we Americans all think the British talk, right? That’s pretty accommodating stuff.

And look no further than these pictures to see how much fun Scoble was having. Even Last.fm had a sense of humor when a TechCrunch editor stormed their offices somewhat unannounced. (Michael Arrington? Less of a sense of humor about that post. Sorry, Mike.) People are intense about their companies, but there’s a sense in the UK that it’s not the only thing that matters.

The joviality is all the more surprising given the rough times UK start-ups are having, as I detailed today on TechCrunch. Money available for early stage start-ups is perilously low and good many entrepreneurs I know have already closed their companies or sold them on the cheap. But here they are all still hanging out, supporting one another, having wild parties and enjoying life. It’s as if (gasp!) the world doesn’t revolve around the Internet.

As a business reporter, I’m of two minds on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I’m a big believer that there’s no such thing as work-life balance when it comes to start-ups—a view that frequently gets me in trouble especially when I’m talking about why there aren’t more women in the business. But sometimes the Valley takes the macho-look-at-me-working-24-hrs-a-day thing too far. Startup or no, I’m not sure I know anyone who works just 40 hours a week here, and I know I don’t know anyone who isn’t checking their email every minute of the day. The debate about whether that’s healthy is one thing—but does it actually make us more successful?

Typhoid Sarah

It's another one of those up-early-because-I-can't-sleep-but-yay!-the-house-is- quiet-enough-to-blog mornings. The reason I'm up too early is because I was horribly ill last night from taking the pill form of the Typhoid vaccine. I'd felt so bad-ass that I'd found a way to avoid the Typhoid shot several days ago. Now, I'm dreading the fact that I have three more to take this week and wondering if the shot might have been a better option. Hint: When they say drink several large glasses of water; they mean it. Every bit of moisture seems to be sapped from my body. I can barely even blink without my eyelids sticking! (TMI?)

All the vaccines signify a change in my travel plans for 2009. While I'm having to be coy on exactly what they are, let's say there's a significant project or two brewing that's going to involve some extended international travel. While some of the projects are new, the growing obsession with studying entrepreneurship around the world isn't.

I grew up in a family of seven with parents who are teachers; we had no money for international travel. When I got my first reporter job for $21,000 a year-- I wasn't exactly flush with funds either. More than ten years of being a beat reporter with two weeks vacation hasn't helped matters. So ever since I quit BusinessWeek to write my book, I've been making up for all that lost travel time. Last year, I went to Israel, Cannes, London (twice) and Mexico, but the bulk of my traveling was my 15-city-book tour.

That book tour was amazing, but exhausting. Part of what made it so exhausting was that I was wedging tons of small trips into my already packed schedule. So I'd wake up at 5 a.m., go shoot at Yahoo all day, hop on a plane to, say, Omaha, go to a late night tweet up, get up for a few more events the next day, stay out talking to entrepreneurs until 2 a.m., wake up at 4 a.m. for a flight home, write a BusinessWeek column on the plane, then race into Yahoo to shoot more. I'm not exaggerating.

So this year, as my job switches from book promotion back to reporting, my new travel plan is focus, especially because most of my travel is self-funded. I am only doing two types of trips: Ones where there is a very specific reporting ROI-- where I am following a specific, amazing story that has not been written-- or ones with a more literal ROI-- ie, where I'm getting paid to speak to support the former travel.

This means, I'm cutting out most conferences. It's a hard call, because conferences are fun. I'm sad watching via Twitter right now as all my friends arrive in Munich for DLD while I suffer through mini-Typhoid fever on my couch. But I can't be on the road as much as I was in 2008, for the sake of sanity, health, my marriage and my work and that means something has to go. And if I study my travel in 2008, I got way more out of trips where I filled my time meeting with new people without all the distraction and noise of a conference around us. Conferences are great for connecting with people and deepening relationships with people I already know. But increasingly I don't meet a lot of great new sources at them, and I don't get great new stories ideas. By definition, being at an event with a hundred other reporters keeps you in the echo-chamber.

That was the reason I reluctantly skipped Le Web in December. And why I'm on my couch, not in Munich right now. It also means I won't be attending SXSW; I'll be in another country instead. If you read my BusinessWeek columns you know I never attend Ted, and this year is no different. I will still attend AllThingsD and The Lobby (assuming there is a third Lobby), but those are two of the only ones set in stone on my calendar.

So you won't be getting conference circuit news, fun videos and photos here in 2009. But you will (eventually) get genuinely new and different stories that could never come out of a conference. Some of those will appear on the blog, some may appear in my BusinessWeek column, and some you won't read about for quite a while. But I'm pretty sure you also won't read about them anywhere else. And that sort of makes the Typhoid stomach-ache worthwhile.

We've Been in Idiot Land a While Now, Scoble. Get Comfortable.

Robert Scoble has a heartfelt post today that sums up his frustration with noise becoming more important than substance. Well, welcome to journalism in the Internet age. Actually, welcome to journalism period. It's just more pronounced in an age when we can measure how stories do and tend to place value on them solely for that reason. And it's in no way limited to Tech. If it were, CNN wouldn't be reporting on Paris Hilton.

This was a huge personal frustration when I was at BusinessWeek covering startups before they were hot again and important, but unsexy, technology trends like open source software. I would spend months breaking a story with huge impact, only to be dwarfed by traffic for a story that just rehashed the latest Apple rumor. To BusinessWeek's great credit, they still run those unsexy stories prominently, because the BusinessWeek brand of delivering all the news business people need is just as important as sheer page views. (Ahem, they also renewed my columnist contract for another year. Thanks, John Byrne!)

But is this the same in the blog world? Where the whole business is predicated on page views?

'Tis the Season of Disasterous Unintended Consequences

As I've said before, I'm starting to get irrationally freaked about the downturn and just how much worse 2009 could get. But my fears of every employer of ours going insolvent, and Mr. Lacy and I ending up in the poor house are-- by any stretch-- a long shot. Even the worst case scenario is likely some belt tightening, which we've done before and can do again. (Tip: Short Diane Von Furstenberg if this occurs.)

But there is something else I'm very scared about, and it's all too rational: Unintended consequences of government intervention. The TARP bailout was merely the beginning to a drunken spree of spending, regulation and scapegoats that'll continue at least through first quarter of 2009, and I'm betting even longer. It's a mad-dash to soothe the stock market, which is irrational at best. And you know what happens in mad-dashes? People fall and trip on scissors.

First, consider, a cautionary tale from the last bust: Here's a great piece in the Wall Street Journal by Mike Malone, one of my very favorite authors. (In fact, Infinite Loop is the best book written on Apple IMHO. Not too late to get one for your favorite fan boy for Christmas....) Malone's piece echoes several of the "Nontrepreneur" chapter in my book, and a good many columns I've written about the very real problems venture capitalists are facing, although I tend to point the finger at Wall Street more than Washington. As usual, Malone makes his points in elegant style.

And now a cautionary tale for 2009. Paul "It's only fairly apocalyptic" Kedrosky likes to come up with doomsday scenarios, and sadly in 2008 a lot of them were right on. But this situation he describes in our video below is one of the scariest. (Hint: ZOMBIES!)

This is what happens when we slap-dash regulations and bailouts to pacify voters and mob-investors. I don't know a single expert, journalist, commentator or luminary that said the bailout plan was well thought out. But at the same time there was high-pitched screeching when it wasn't immediately passed. This is just one unintended consequence of the "YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!" school of governance. Do you know how many we haven't even seen yet?

I started my career covering regional banks and you can't overestimate how much the fabric of America is woven into them. The U.S. Government certainly can't afford to bail them all out. Already we're stretched so thin, China is downgrading our credit rating for the first time.

I know, I know, not exactly happy Christmas wishes. The above video is far more suited for Halloween.

Controversy at Le Web? Sacre Bleu!

I had to skip this year's Le Web conference, and I have to say, as much as I enjoyed it last year, on Monday I was so happy not to be jet lagged (again) and cold. (Well, colder than it is in my non-heated house. Brrrrrrr!)

Of course, when I travel to conferences I never get the posh treatment of Michael Arrington, who has apparently picked a fight with Loic about American vs. European entrepreneurs. Loic answers back here. As someone who has gone on four trips to Europe in the last year and has met with hundreds of entrepreneurs, here are my thoughts.

First, Loic is right when he says at the end of the post that this is no longer an interesting or meaningful debate. That said, like it or not, we'll keep having it because of the stark and honest reality that Michael describes:

"...the joy of life is great, but all these two hour lunches over a bottle or two of great wine and general unwillingness to do whatever it takes to compete and win is the reason why all the big public Internet companies are U.S. based. And those European startups that do manage to break through cultural and tax hurdles and find success are quickly gobbled up by those U.S. companies. Skype (acquired by eBay) and MySQL (acquired by Sun) are recent examples.

The crowd jeered but the stark reality of it all is unavoidable. And the fact that the panelists on stage, all either American or living in America, suggested that you can somehow succeed with a startup while maintaining a healthy work-life balance is unfortunate. Too many people choose to be entrepreneurs as a lifestyle, without realizing that it takes everything you have and more to win. And if you aren’t in it to win, why not just take that nice job down the street that gives you five weeks of vacation."

I couldn't agree with Michael more. I think we're going to see entrepreneurship explode globally over the next decade; but as of now, there are very, very, very few examples of startups that have become billion dollar, stand-alone companies that are not at least headquartered in the Valley. So as a result, sharp entrepreneurs around the world who I've met want to know what the Valley does well. And what the Valley does well is tireless work. During several of my book tour stops in the Midwest and the South I was asked if you could have a family and be an entrepreneur. You can. But not if you are trying to build the next Google or Facebook. There is no work life balance at that level. Again, know the game you are playing.

That said, I am not sure what Silicon Valley Loic is living in when he writes this:

"There is a huge difference between being lazy and taking time to know each other. It is one of the main cultural differences I feel everyday as I moved to Silicon Valley: every minute, every coffee, every phone call must have a point. When you call someone in Silicon Valley for anything you will likely get "why are you calling me?" ...

...Don't even think about starting a conversation in Silicon Valley by "how was your week-end" or "how are your kids", they all want you to go straight to the point and no time to lose. I never thought inviting someone I really liked to know better to dinner would get me an email from his assistant "why would you like to invite him to dinner?". I do not think europeans are lazy taking the time to know each other and build deep long term friendships that are not limited to business and I do not think this hurts Europe in any way. On the contrary."

As hard as we all work, this is in no way my experience. Everyday I IM, email or have calls with people that all start out with us chatting about our personal lives. In fact, my favorite conference, the Lobby, is entirely centered around that, which is a big reason most of the attendees bring their families. Several times a week I have long meandering dinners with entrepreneurs and investors where we talk about everything from entrepreneurship to family life to politics to tech and, yes, business. This is why I love living in the Valley. I'm rarely bored in a conversation.

The most extreme example was the research for my book. Incredibly busy entrepreneurs at the most crucial stages of building their companies took hours at a time to talk to me about life and work, repeatedly over more than a year's time. I was never asked what they'd be getting out of it. In fact, a lot of people have asked me why they gave up so much time, and I never have a great answer, because I never once had to have that conversation. So I asked Max Levchin that at the Churchill Club event we did. He looked a little stumped, as though he'd never really thought about it that way either, and said that he just thought telling the whole story of the Internet from the bust through this generation of companies and doing it right was somehow important.

Perhaps Loic just needs new friends in the Valley? ;)

[PHOTOS: Me interviewing Kevin Rose on stage at Le Web last year by Adam Tinworth. Me laughing it up with Le Web's incredibly talented content creator Cathy Brooks after one of those amazing French dinners. Doc Searls took a zillion photos that night of Mr. Lacy and me, Evan and Sara Williams, Jason Calacanis, Jeff Pulver, Pistachio and others chilling in the hotel lobby. If Loic was right...would all those people have flown to Paris just to hang out?]

 

Boulder: A Redemption Post

Yeah, so yesterday's trek to Boulder could have been a recipe for disaster:

-Waking up at 4:30 am for an early morning flight (woof)
- Wandering aimlessly around the confusing Denver airport (two levels and four "islands" for passenger pick-up? seriously?)
- Walking in circles for 30 minutes in search of a burger joint. That was 300 feet away (left means right at 5400 feet apparently)
- Waiting on the street corner like idiots for a taxi cab that was dispatched to Denver by mistake (and accidentally clotheslining a monk with a heavy bag of books...yay karma)

Mix in some preconceived notions (which Sarah touched on here) and things were not looking so good. That is, until Matt Galligan changed our minds and stepped up to bat for a little one on one with the Sarahcuda (video after the jump)

Pssst. Hello, It's Boulder Calling. Just Don't Tell Anyone.

OK. Boulder. What a roller coaster!

Let's set aside the lack of sleep, charmingly odd doll house we stayed in, and continuation of bizarre UGBT cab drivers for a minute. As I've said, it was our last stop on the whirlwind, and honestly career-changing, User Generated Book Tour.   I already had mixed feelings about it coming to a close, but I'll save all that for another post. And as we've detailed even more I was getting a less-than enthusiastic response to my impending arrival. Still, I knew there was something in Boulder. And I was right.

Here's the thing. Boulder has a ton to offer. The companies that presented at New Tech were pretty amazing, and the people we hung out with where smart, confident, collegial and surprisingly effortless to be around. They just, um, don't want anyone to know?

This is what puzzles me about Boulder. It's a very, very tight-knit community. While entrepreneurs from London, D.C., Memphis, Los Angeles and several other cities have complained that it is hard to develop a regular startup "crew" because the cities were so spread apart geographically, Boulder is only a cuddly 100,000 people or so. There are twice as many bikes as people, so either people have calves of steel or everyone is just a quick cycle away. The New Tech event itself was like a more earth-conscious, savvy version of a Town Hall meeting in Stars Hollow. There was something so genuine and non-poser about it. It was unlike another one I've seen.

But for whatever reason, there's a general desire to protect that unique vibe by fencing out everyone else. More on this in the next post, which features a point-counterpoint between Matt Galligan of Social Thing/AOL and me, so I won't belabor my thoughts now.

But while my gut still tells me that kind of thinking inherently limits companies in Boulder, I love that the scene is its own animal and it feels utterly different than any other stop on the tour. As I've written throughout the tour, the single most important thing is that cities play to their own strengths. In Boulder, a core strength is clearly this community, cooperative vibe. After all, one of the biggest entrepreneur success stories is Celestial Seasonings-- right down to the early days when town's folk helped the founder pick herbs from around the town to go in our teas. (Which I'm inhaling as I write, thanks to a nasty cold.)

I'll be interested to see what develops out of Boulder over the next few years. Hopefully, some new hot shot will actually return a Silicon Valley call...

Now to that dollhouse...this video was shot before our pleasant surprise of an evening, hence the apprehension. (and Olivia's hair in progress)

Boulder of Love? from sarah lacy on Vimeo.

What Other Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Dogster

Pets.com may have been one of the most wasteful and frivolous of dot com companies, but Dogster is one of the most disciplined of the Web 2.0 generation. It's interesting since Pets.com had a clearer business model, and satisfied a more obvious need. Just goes to show execution wins, in a downturn or no. While a lot of Dogster's smart moves were made in the company's early days, there are plenty of tips in my TechTicker interview with Dogster CEO Ted Rheingold for cash-strapped entrepreneurs worried about 2009.

Clip one:

Clip two (featuring moxie!):

A Very Special Lacy Christmas

I met two very impressive gents at the Entrepreneur Summit in Cancun last week, and as a result I'm declaring a zero gift, all-giving Christmas at least for me, hopefully roping Mr. Lacy and other members of my family into this plan too. I've had an amazing year-- I never thought I'd be able to buy a house in San Francisco or publish a book or any of the other things that I've enjoyed in 2008. I don't need anything else, and so many people in the rest of the world do. This year I'm going to help give them shoes and water.

Gent #1 was Blake Mycoskie of TOMS shoes, an organization that set out to put shoes on poor people around the world back in 2006. It's on pace to donate 200,000 shoes this year alone. The premise is simple and perfect for the holidays: You buy a pair, and TOMS gives a pair. This Christmas it's setting out to give away 30,000 pairs and most of my loved ones will be getting TOMS shoes to that end. Here's a video that explains more:

Gent #2 was Scott Harrison of Charity: Water. Scott has an amazing story, and I'm not going to do it justice in one blog post. In short, he was living the high life (literally) in New York as a club promoter dating super models and ordering $400 bottles of Grey Goose at parties. He was miserable, so he set out to do the exact opposite and got a volunteer job on a Mercy Ship, which travels around performing free surgeries for poor people. Scott documented a lot of things we've never seen in this country, like people being choked by tumors the size of grapefruits. The most pressing need he found was for clean drinking water.

For just $5,000 his organization can give a village a well and 100% of the proceeds goes to the cause. In the interest of fair video play, here's a PSA Charity: Water produced. As you can see here and from the site, the organization has brilliantly used design to get attention, tell its story and raise money. But don't be fooled: this is a lean organization of just seven people.

Scott said he thinks Charity: Water can bring clean drinking water to some billion people who don't have it now. He estimated the cost at just over $10 billion. That's a lot of money. But pointed out that Americans spend some $450 billion annually on Christmas. So, I'm giving my family members and loved ones a choice: water or shoes. And they also have a choice for which to donate to instead of buying me a gift.

As a side note, I talk to entrepreneurs in the Valley all the time who've suddenly made millions and want to give, but don't know how. As people who've built nimble, scrappy businesses, entrepreneurs want to make sure the organizations they give to are just as, well, entrepreneurial. They're out there, and these are two great examples. These guys have not only used YouTube, Facebook and other Web apps to get awareness and make the world a better place, they've borrowed from the very ethos and soul of how a scrappy startup is built.

So, come on, who else is willing to forgo material items this year for the greater good?

So Fifteen Entrepreneurs Walk into a Cave...

So, I’m standing chest deep in freezing water wearing a bright orange mining helmet, some water shoes with holes in the toes and a rented wet suit that was already wet when I winced and shimmied into it about ten minutes earlier. (Ew.) I’m hundreds of feet below the earth in an ancient Mayan death cave that’s just been discovered two years ago. Apparently a local who thought a creepy jungle 40 minutes from civilization would be a good venue for weddings and Sweet 16 parties bought the property a few years ago. One day he saw an Iguana, which is apparently equivalent to Kobe beef in Mayan culture. Like some Mayan Alice in Wonderland, he chased the Iguana into a hole and kept digging while the hole got deeper and deeper. He found this enormous cave. How enormous? No one knows. They haven’t even explored all of it yet. In fact the Discovery Channel is coming next week to help. A white thread tells you when you’ve entered unchartered territory. That, and some skulls.  After all, they don’t call this a death cave for nothing.

I’ve already been told not to hurt the spindly crab spiders who also share the death cave, and I nodded, even though I know I’m smashing that guy into a rock if he comes near me. I’m trying to avoid jagged rocks and growing stalagmites on the floor of the cave and looking up to see a huge vaulted cave ceiling with thousands of sharp pointy stalactites over which is our van or a forest or something. Maybe even that MIA iguana. Being from San Francisco, I immediately start thinking about earthquakes and these thousands of spears coming crashing down on all of us.

Just then, the guide tells us in broken English that we’re about to turn off our helmet lights and sit in total blackness for a while. And I freak out, mostly because I can’t understand what he’s saying I just hear “total darkness” on top of the uncomfortable situation I’m already experiencing. “I’M NOT COMFORTABLE WITH THIS!” I shriek. Yeah, all those people who keep writing about how fearless and ballsy I am? A cave full of entrepreneurs now know the truth. Especially Tony Hsieh of Zappos, whose hand I squeezed so hard, a few fingers could be broken.

Did I mention I’d actually signed up for a lazy afternoon of snorkeling?