People You Should Know Archive

Why I Can't Go to Le Web

I keep getting hassled to go, but this is why I can't. I've traveled so much this year, he's literally started to pull out tufts of hair. So I promised Vinnie (and Mr. Lacy) I'd stay home one full month and there's only one month left in the year! And I've already sort of broken it with 24 hours in Boulder. Bad wife/mom.

BREAKING: I Actually Like a Republican

So apparently there was some big Orange Festival-Carnival-Dance-To Do or something in Houston that anyone who is anyone goes to….the same night as my signing. Brilliant timing right?

Actually, yes. I’m always secretly happy for a small intimate crowd because you can actually have deep conversations with people. I had quite a few last night. One guy marched up, barked a few questions at me including “WHAT VCS DO YOU KNOW?” to which I blankly stared and finally asked how long he had. I mean, it’s pretty much been my job for ten years to know as many as possible. It’s a bit like asking an Eskimo to describe all the snowflakes he’s ever seen. Said guy also informed me if you had an innovative new drill bit you could start a company in Houston. Otherwise, you leave. Period. Not a single good software developer to be found in the city limits. He was there for “free babysitting” and then getting the hell out. And then he marched off. As someone who loves efficiency and bold statements, he was a man after my own heart.

Olivia and I also got personality tests that showed—among other things—we have no secrets and my husband is like candy to me: The sweetest part of my life, but it can also give me a toothache at times. Also, Olivia sees problems in life like a little chipmunk she can solve by patting them on the head. (Delusional!) I see them as a big grizzly bear on hind legs charging at me. What do I do? MACE THE BITCH! (Bad ass!) We lifecasted the “readings”….posts to come later.

But I have to say the single best conversation I had was with David Wallace, with whom I shared the event. David wrote “One Nation Under Blog” and is the former mayor of Sugar Land, Texas. He’s a Texas republican who was introduced to me by my new BFF Erica O'Grady as the man who will one day be President. Another republican Texan as President? You can understand my hesitancy to shake his hand.

But it was perfect at this moment in American history and my own life to do an event where politics and Web 2.0 were colliding. David’s book is about how Web 2.0 is determining the future of politics; my book chronicles the rise of those very technologies. He’s a politician who can’t stop thinking about the Web and its impact. I’m a tech reporter who can’t stop thinking about this upcoming election and its impact. We probably could have talked for about 45 hours, each wanting to somehow can-opener the other’s brain and just cherry-pick the contents.

From the conversations we did have, I have to say W has given Texas republicans an unnecessary bad name. David isn’t a fear-based, reactionary politician. Although terrified by the ugly side of the net-- think pedophiles lurking on MySpace and anonymous bloggers calling him a drug dealer-- as mayor David worked to understand the net and educate parents and schools how kids should be careful using it—not lobby banning it or somehow trying to regulate it. He’s also an avid Twitter user—writing his Twitters himself, not outsourcing it to a staffer. (Wait: does that mean he’s a terrorist?)

During our public chat—which is Qik’ed below—I prefaced a lot of obnoxious statements with “I’m just a crazy San Francisco liberal…” as my way of apologizing in advance for the jerky partisan statement-masquerading-as-a-question I was about to ask. (The recording stops before I go too far, sadly.) One of the things I just had to know was his opinion of McCain picking Sarah Palin as a running mate. He said he was horrified and said we could talk about it more later. We did. And I was impressed with how many issues a crazy San Francisco liberal and a Texas Republican politician could actually agree on. Perhaps the most important thing we agreed on: We both voted for Obama. Boo-ya. I left with a huge appreciation and hope that a non-Karl Rove republican party actually exists in America in larger numbers than it seems and that maybe Sarah Palin isn’t the future of the party—maybe people like David are.

I also got a copy of his book, which I’ll read and review once, um, Erica ships it because apparently I waltzed right out of Caroline Collective leaving it on the table.

More on that Vegas Party....

Olivia and I are sitting in a coffee shop in Memphis doing a little co-working. She's forcing us to plow through a backlog of neglected media interviews, signing some books we owe people, responding to emails and of course sifting through all this flipcammed video before we can go to ....wait for it... THE MIDSOUTH FAIR. Funnel cakes and roller coasters here we come!! I'm just hoping there are pig races or a mechanical bull I can ride...

Speaking of the Flipcam, it's a wonder that little thing hasn't broken. I think we can all agree it was the best $150 Sarahlacy.com ever spent. Here are a few outtakes from our amazing Vegas party with Tony Hsieh of Zappos. It features Ranvir Gujral-- one of our FAVORITE people we've met on the UGBT road. He's better known around the Sarahlacy.com offices as the Chong to Gregarious' Cheech. (And by "offices" I mean the roving collection of planes/hotels/coffeeshops/bars/my living room where Olivia and I sit glued to laptops, finishing each other's sentences of late.) 

Oh, and keep an eye on this blog for announcements of the upcoming America's Best Dance Crew-style dance off between Cheech and Chong's company Blue Whale Labs and Sarahlacy.com. Anyone at the TechSet after party last friday KNOWS Miss Olivia can bring it. Big time.

Vegas Baby from sarah lacy on Vimeo.

YouNoodle Makes Me Feel Much Better about My Finances

Here at SarahLacy.com you could say we're investing in the growth of the business. Think the User Generated Book Tour makes money? HA! My credit cards are wheezing from overuse. And the very talented Olivia certainly isn't volunteering, nor should she be. Combined with a new mortgage and an upcoming $10,000 electrician bill, Mr. Lacy is getting a little antsy about all the money flowing out of our accounts. YouNoodle just made me feel a whole lot better.

The new startup boasts an algorithm that crunches all kinds of data to tell you what your company will be worth in three years. SarahLacy.com will be worth...click for it....

Poor Kim. Lucky Me.

Ever have those days where you just can't connect the dots? Where you get really excited about something, before realizing what someone actually said? Or--like me in the last few weeks--where you terminally over book your schedule and promise people things only to forget them moments later?

It happens to all of us. Particularly, when you're stressed out of just have too many things to juggle. That's why I'm very happy to announce that Olivia Hine has joined the Sarahlacy.com family as of today. She's more than my personal girl Friday; she'll be blogging too and helping to organize my book tour stops and hopefully more fun events beyond that.

She'll be writing a post that more fully introduces herself to you later today, but for now, I just wanted to share the good news that I'll hopefully have a lot fewer days like this one:

What's Up, Bitches?

That's what I jokingly titled my column I just filed for BusinessWeek. (Late, again.) The column was about women in Silicon Valley, a topic my very benevolent, smart and good looking BW overlords asked me to tackle. (Can you tell I'm trying not to get fired for so many late columns?)

My first reaction was "Sure, I can write that in my sleep!" But it wound up being incredibly hard. For one thing, I think the position of women in the Valley is really at a crossroads and I wasn't initially sure how to wrap my head around a lot of conflicting data points. And contrary to popular opinion we don't all move in lock-step making sweeping generalizations pretty hard. Anyway, read the column later this week to see how I sorted it all out.

A woman's place in this industry has been heavy on my mind lately. First, there was that whole Playboy thing that so many people freaked out about, then this odd occurrence at the TechCrunch party (more funny in its textbook "what-you-don't-say" quality than truly offensive) and the most recent visit to the Valley from the girl no one can agree on: Miss Julia Allison. As you know from reading this blog, I like Julia. Is she any kind of serious tech or business journalist? No. But she's not trying to be. After having many a late night conversation with her about business and brand, I can say she's not just a fluke or a pretty face or a girl who had her career bestowed upon her by Nick Denton's magic wand. She's a savvy business woman and she's learned a lot in the last few years. I had her come by TechTicker to share her thoughts on why companies shouldn't be afraid to brand employees. Believe it or not, it's not too different from the advice Charlene Li gives companies in Groundswell. Clip below:

I get a lot of grief for being friends with Julia. But you know what? People also probably get grief for being friends with me. If there's one thing I've learned from my life on the Internet it's not to believe everything you read about people, but to meet them and judge for yourself.

My Mini-Moby Dick

I never thought I'd see the day Marc Benioff was a hard interview to get. In the earlier part of this decade, he helped make enterprise software sexy through his stunts and very quotable bon-mots anytime a reporter would ask.

But most of this year he was so busy jet-setting around the world on his customer tour to evangelize his force.com platform, he had no time for little old Sarah Lacy. Well, until this column. For the record, I wasn't so much trying to be snarky as I was legitimately curious why he was suddenly so MIA-- particularly given widespread rumors he wants to sell. That same press-accommodating Benioff clearly still existed though, because as soon as he saw it, he reached out to me. Within days I was flying back from my first UGBT stop, showering, and racing to Half Moon Bay to interview Marc at Fortune's Brainstorm conference. Huge thanks to my crew for jumping through hoops to make it happen on short notice and produce four lovely clips.

I used to cover software for BusinessWeek, so it was hardly the first time we've met, but I hadn't seen Benioff in a while and I was struck by how mellow he came across. I thought it was one of the best interviews I've ever done with him. Rather than Twittering all four links, I decided to just collect them here. (TT really needs a better system to link similar pieces together) I hope you enjoy! (We were all pretty amused by the Segway parade going on behind me. It was all my graphics editor could do not to edit in more ridiculousness just to see if we'd notice.) Clips on the jump!

Is Hate the New Love?

Just finished reading Wired's cover on Julia Allison. Julia is a good friend of mine and I'm incredibly proud of her-- a fact people I know envy and abhor, sometimes at the same time. It's no secret one thing that's bonded us is our similar experience as Internet whipping girls, although I have never gotten it nearly as badly as Julia, but I also have a very different life and career. But having gotten to know her, I really  like Julia and I think this article captures her brilliantly. Her charm and her savvy. The mixture of poking her haters with a stick and begging them to stop. And this is what makes her more successful at the Internet fame game than I ever will be. I know in my head that controversy only makes me more well-known-- and to be crass-- makes me more money. But I hate it and I never court it.

And yet somehow, it seems to come out of nowhere to find me. Take today. Someone on Twitter blasted that I was bashing the New York "tech scene." I quickly thought through the latest interviews I'd been on either side of, blog posts, columns and couldn't come up with a time I'd bashed the New York tech scene. It turned out he was talking about this video, where I say-- as I have a zillion times explaining the title of my book-- that there's a unique cultural phenomenon in the Valley where true entrepreneurs are sucked into the game of starting another company because just doing it once isn't enough. I said New York reporters were frequently stunned asking "Why don't you go sit on an island?" Yeah. And? It's really more a cultural observation than "bashing." And it says nothing about the tech scene in New York. It's a minor example, but welcome to my life. (Update: I asked the guy about it via Twitter and he was actually pretty nice.)

It's weird to live on that fine line between love and hate, and even weirder to increasingly make your living on that line. The people who write the cruelest things are the ones who come back to my column, blog or yahoo show every single day. (Less so with the blog than the others.) They are probably my most loyal viewers/readers. Oh, and they frequently talk up why I should be fired or that they'll never -- ever-- buy my book or support anything I do. See that click? You just did. (Again.)

For months now, I've been trying to wrap my head around Internet fame and why it seems more powerful than real fame-- but at the end of the day, rarely if ever translates outside a niche. Magazines always profile people just before they break out. And then they don't. (Although I hope Julia proves me wrong with her Bravo show. She's certainly got a more traditional star quality than, say, the "Leave Britney Alone!" guy...) For instance, my husband pointed out to me that according to this, I rank number 90 on the list of 100 most famous people on the Internet. Sort of like my reaction to the Playboy thing, I felt a mix of how-can-that-be-possible head-scratching and flattery. That said, I don't kid myself: If you randomly asked ten people in San Francisco-- let alone the rest of the world-- who I was they'd have no clue.

I wonder if the discrepancy between Internet fame and real fame has something to do with being so hate-based? It's no secret the SXSW debacle and before that the Digg Cover caused much of this notoriety-- not my ten years of solid, and to some, boring business reporting-- and both were times I was slammed, even if then subsequently praised. (Both times I was also just trying to do my job.) But can you profit off hate offline? Would you, for instance, go see a movie starring someone you hated the way you will read a Gawker post and take the time to leave a nasty comment? I'm not so sure. I guess it all goes back to that ease of conversion online. Whether it's clicking on a paid search link, or tacitly endorsing a rising micro-celeb with your eyeballs.

What LinkedIn Doubters Need to Know

As I said in my previous post, it has been a busy week for me. The highlight was an interview with Reid Hoffman for TechTicker upon closing his venture deal valuing LinkedIn at a (Outrageous? Conservative?) $1 billion valuation. Of course, if you read this blog regularly you know I think it’s easily worth that. And really, Reid just confirmed it for me. In this piece below, he discusses why all this talk of a Facebook-LinkedIn rivalry just misses the mark. One of his claims is that work and play will not collide, which is funny because in my BusinessWeek column this week I talked about the growing realization that our worlds are doing just that and posed the question of whether people would change their real-world behavior or abandon such heavy use of sites like Twitter, Facebook, et all.

But if you watch this video, you see a lot of clues to why I think LinkedIn is the sleeper big, standalone public company that emerges from Web 2.0. There are so many moments where Hoffman – and I should add Dan Nye the current CEO—have resisted cheap growth, from both users and revenues, in favor of building a sustainable business. The business side of LinkedIn has always made it a little different from the rest of the Web 2.0 crop, which is fitting since it started in 2003—a beyond bleak time for Web companies when VCs were demanding some sort of business model. Although Reid decisively rejected that—and stepped in to fund a good many early Web entrepreneurs who did too—you can still see that thinking in how quickly the company got to profitability and how quickly it began building it’s own salesforce, rather than, say, off-loaded ad sales to a third party.

I could go on, but just watch the clip. Two other pieces below it with Reid: One on the $1 billion valuation and the prospect of a LinkedIn IPO and the other on Reid’s thoughts about Web 2.0 and it’s twin growing pains of monetization and persistent outages. I was lucky enough to spend hours at a time talking business and the Valley with Reid while I was writing my book, but haven’t seen him in a while. I forgot how much I enjoy his willingness to answer nearly every question you put to him in a direct and honest way. I’m  trying to think now of a single time he’s said “no comment” to me and coming up blank! Anyway, enjoy: