TechCrunch Archive
In Lieu of News, Here's a Soap Unicorn
I am busy doing a lot of exciting things. The problem is, I can't really talk about them because I don't want to say what my next job is yet. (Watch me dodge questions on Bloomberg earlier this week here.) So in lieu of that, here's a picture of Eli in the bath with a soap unicorn horn on his head.
Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, I'm trying to lay-low for the rest of the year. I'm focusing on work stuff that has to get done and enjoying the final moments of my "maternity leave." It's either been the least successful or most successful maternity leave in the world, depending on your metrics.
The TechCrunch Drama Continues
In case you missed it, I quit TechCrunch Friday. It wasn't an easy decision. Here's the post I wrote:
"This won’t come as a surprise to a lot of people, but I am leaving TechCrunch.
My departure is something people have speculated about since Michael Arrington’s ouster two months ago, but it wasn’t an easy decision for me. This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction out of loyalty for my friend, nor is it about making a big “F-you, AOL!” statement. I’ve spent the bulk of my maternity leave agonizing about whether to stay or go– the first half of it trying to find a way to stay and feel good about it, and the second half standing firm in my decision to leave, despite a lot of persuasive arguments to stay.
Even with the high-profile departures of Mike, Paul Carr, MG Siegler– and potentially Heather Harde if you believe the unconfirmed reports– there’s still a team here that I love working with. It’s a team that can band together with scant resources and pull off phenomenal things. That was made obvious to the world with our amazing first international Disrupt conference held earlier this month in Beijing. If you were up at 3 am watching the live stream and saw the talk I gave before handing out the Disrupt Cup, you know every reason I joined TechCrunch and every reason leaving has been hard.
This was a blog that wasn’t just a snarky observer of the tech scene– it was an inexorable part of it. Has that made it a messy, convoluted and conflicted ride? Yes. But that’s also what has made TechCrunch something a world of startups and entrepreneurs can’t live without.
I’ve bounced between a lot of jobs in the last few years– writing for BusinessWeek, hosting a show for Yahoo Finance, writing two books, and traveling the world to find great entrepreneurs– but TechCrunch was the first place in my career where I felt like I totally fit. It was a place I felt I could stay for a long time.
And then Mike sold the company. Things went better than I expected for the first year. And then this fall, all hell broke loose. You could produce a Lifetime movie of the week about the behind the scenes drama of the last few months. Publicly, I’ve stayed silent during much of it, but it has been every bit as gut wrenching for me as it’s been for my colleagues.
The CrunchFund was announced on the due date for my first baby. That weekend as my contractions started, the TechCrunch drama unfolded too. Mike would text me things like, “Are you in sitting on the couch drinking tea kind of labor or screaming, blood all over the walls kind of labor? Because I need to talk to you.”
The following week, as I waddled around San Francisco trying to induce more active labor, I was also awaiting word on whether we’d be able to buy TechCrunch back. I’d committed to come back as the editor if we were able to pull it off– a commitment Mike and Heather were always respectful enough not to ask me to make until after I’d given birth. As has already been widely reported, we weren’t able to pull it off, and when I came out of the labor and delivery room the next day, I discovered a job Mike and I had talked for years about me doing had been given to someone else.
Even still, I wanted to stay, and I had many conversations with Arianna Huffington, Heather and others trying to figure out something that made sense. They made many generous offers, and I don’t leave feeling unappreciated. But I can’t help feeling angry and sad over a lot of internal morale devastation and external brand destruction that simply didn’t have to happen.
I don’t think this is the time or the place to talk about what I’m doing next, but the plan isn’t to be a stay-at-home-mom. Ultimately this decision wasn’t about what went down with AOL and with Mike, it’s about me moving onto something I’m really excited to do next. And something that I hope will carry on the spirit of what Mike and Heather built at TechCrunch.
I wish the TechCrunch team the best of luck in the future. I hope the editorial expansion into China that I championed over the last year continues in my absence. The staff, the readers and the entrepreneurs we were lucky enough to champion every day will always have a special place in my heart. Goodbye everyone."
---
Thanks to everyone for all the nice emails and Tweets and comments. Don't worry, I'm not going far. More on what I'm doing next in a future post. Watch this space.
March of the Penguins
We're kicking off the main conference portion of Disrupt this morning. I can't believe it's finally here! This is one of the biggest moments of my career so far, and I haven't exactly had a sleepy career. I've invested plenty of effort and money to pull crazy things off before-- but typically it's a solo project like a book. This is the biggest thing I've ever done that required a team of people and will bring together so many other people.
As such, I have a million people to thank-- principally Mike Arrington and Heather Harde who trusted me enough to invest huge parts of the company's resources putting this conference together. It's that sort of faith in me that's made me intensely loyal to both of them. As I've said, the team also deserves huge credit for making this a reality. Tanya, Jeanne, Susan, Vineet, the editorial team here on the ground and Jon and the TechcrunchTV crew have all been working around the clock since we arrived to make the impossible possible.
There are a lot of firsts we're pulling off with this event. It's the first time TC has done an international Disrupt conference. From what I understand it's the first time an international tech conference here will have simultaneous translation for attendees as livestream in English and Chinese-- something that's technically been near-impossible to pull off. It's the first time a US tech blog has launched a major event on the mainland. Most exciting for me-- in about two hours Tencent CEO and co-founder Pony Ma will be interviewed on stage by a foriegn journalist for the very first time.
I had a near-panic attack last night when his flight into Beijing was cancelled. Fortunately he was able to get a later one and we had tea last night to talk about the interview. So I finally have real evidence that the most powerful and most elusive person in the Chinese Internet scene actually exists. He even brought a penguin dressed like a rabbit for my son. (He and I are both year of the rabbit.)
Wish us luck today! This is a big moment for TechCrunch.
Neither Smog, Wi-Fi Failures nor a Pre-Halloween Blizzard Can Stop Us
I just went over to see the beginning of the Hackathon presentations and got chills when I saw the TechCrunch green Disrupt logos behind the stage in the ballroom of the China National Convention Center. I can't believe this is really happening! It's so exciting!
Of course, most of the staff is so neck-deep in problem solving mode, they're not stopping to gush quite as much. We've had legendary wifi issues-- the tech conference curse no matter where you are in the world. Flights from Shanghai to Beijing got cancelled today stranding at least one of our Battlefield companies until tomorrow. The Beijing pollution is the worst I've ever seen it. It is totally grey out of my hotel window. And -- the worst weather news for me-- Peter Goodman, executive business editor of the Huffington Post who was supposed to co-emcee the event with me is trapped in New York thanks to a blizzard! What the hell is a snow storm doing in New York this early??
So it looks like there's going to be a lot more me on stage the next few days...
Speaking of me and microphones, I took some of the speakers out karaoking last night, while the rest of the staff worked on the hackathon. There were huge five liter glass vases filled with beer, the regular whiskey and green tea concoctions and a lot of baaaaad singing. Sometimes my job is just awesome. I'm trying to get photos from Ben Huh to post on TC later today.
Go Team TechCrunch!
Sorry for posting yet another baby photo, but my husband sent this last night to cheer me up. It's adorable.
Eli does this fist bump constantly, btw. He cheers for food a lot. I'm not sure where he's picked it up, because we've never once turned on Jersey Shore...
The TechCrunch editorial team is off to shoot several episodes of Cribs today, while Tanya nails down conference logistics, Susan and Greg greet incoming speakers, guests, and staff, Vineet makes sure we have WORKING WIFI for the Hackathon and Heather works with the competing startups on their demos.
Unfortunately Jason Kincaid couldn't join us at the last minute for personal reasons, so I'm a last minute Cribs host sub. Hope I do him proud!
Oh and BTW...
I've been in Beijing for about 18 hours and still haven't had a Jian Bing. Peter McDermott and Tom Limongello-- if you are reading this blog, we need to rectify that tonight! #yum
Missing This...
...but this is also pretty cool.
I met Gang Lu of TechNode on my very first trip to China years ago and he's been one of many God-sends who has gone over and above to make Disrupt Beijing a success. Like a lot of people who've helped us out, his biggest motivation has simply been believing TechCrunch's presence here could help some startups and wanting to do anything he can to support that. He's an awesome guy.
Including me, eight members of the TC staff landed in Beijing last night to join our events wizard Tanya Porquez here on the ground. You could spot us on the plane because we were all reading the Jobs biography. (NERDS!) I should note, everyone flew coach except the woman who's supposed to be on maternity leave and had to pump milk every three hours. (I still had major business class guilt.)
When we arrived, everyone checked into the hotel, threw their bags down and hit the ground running, working late into the night-- exhaustion and jetlag not withstanding. I went to bed around 1 am local time, and I think the rest of the team was still hard at work. At times like this, we still work very much like a scrappy startup without big corporate backing and with everything to lose.
Sitting around at dinner last night listening to our amazing team of eight tick through their to-do list and action items, I was incredibly humbled at the talented folks who jumped in and have made this conference something so much larger than my original vision. Our internal drama not withstanding, this staff is just phenomenal. The writers tend to get the attention, but there are so many people at TC -- like Jon Orlin, Heather Harde, Tanya Porquez and Jeanne Logozzo-- who are the best people I've ever worked with at the core thing they do.
I've definitely been swamped with editorial and agenda concerns, but it's amazing to know I don't ever even have to think or worry about things like sponsorships, live streaming, or logisitics and can know it'll just get done. I'm so grateful to the team for ignoring all the distractions, focusing and executing on such a challenging event. I hope everyone can take a moment in the next five days and be proud of what we're pulling off here.
PS: I'm here, so pay up on our bet, Andreessen!
CHINA. DISRUPT. OMFG.
The other day I got an innocuous email in my inbox from United Airlines making sure if I was prepared for my upcoming flight to China. Wait, what? That's still weeks away right? Why am I getting this email now?
....Oh......
As it turns out I leave for China on WEDNESDAY. That's right: Disrupt Beijing is almost here. It's as tantalizingly close as a warm Jian Bing from a Beijing street vendor. (My first stop, btw.) I spent years arguing we should do a Disrupt event in China, and honestly, I never really thought it would happen. I mean, for Mike Arrington, Seattle is an emerging market.
Even after it was greenlit-- sometime late last year-- there were still a million times it almost failed. There were many times Mike shook his head and said to me, "You don't have a conference." And indeed, I didn't for a while other than in my head. We had epic problems with the venue and dates. An unexpected pregnancy boxed us in on dates and meant I had to plan the agenda totally remotely. I had a devil of a time getting many US names to commit to coming, and a harder time working amid the schedules of the ones who wanted to come. Our first choice of venue was cruelly snatched away by a Ferragamo fashion show and I've boycotted everything Italian since. The astronomical costs weighed against the limited sponsorship and ticket revenues ensured this thing would never make money.
As I frantically tried to finish an agenda before my due date, I was gnawed by guilt that I'd talked our very fiscally responsible CEO Heather Harde into a money pit of a conference and wrecked the health and wellfare of our amazing conference coordinator Tanya Porquez, who has worked US and China hours for most of the last few months. (Tanya has probably invested even more sweat and tears into this event than I have. I hope her husband forgives me one day....) Worse was the fear that I'd have to write a post saying we weren't bringing Disrupt to Beijing after all. I discovered every reason more blogs don't launch major conferences in mainland China-- even with amazing help and local partners, it is just not easy.
But somehow it has not only come together; it has come together more beautifully than I could have hoped. I've gushed about all of our speakers here, but the Battlefield companies are just as impressive. If you live in Asia and you aren't coming to this conference, you'll be sorry. If you're in the US and have always wanted to learn about China's startup scene and aren't coming, you'll be sorry. And if I asked you to speak and you said no, you'll really be sorry when you hear about how much fun the US speakers are going to have between karaoke nights, picnics on The Great Wall, and a potential evening with a mechanical bull in a Chinese Honky Tonk. I mean....a night of Chinese Urban Cowboy? That is just awesome.
My future at TechCrunch has been a little uncertain since the drama went down last month, but even if I wind up moving on, this conference will be one hell of a final swan song.
Of course, the conference is somewhat bittersweet for me, as I have to leave my six-week old baby for a week. Nearly every mother I know has spent the last ten months telling me how impossible this will be. Even Marc Andreessen bet me $100 I wouldn't wind up getting on the plane. I GET IT. it's biologically hard for any mom to leave a new baby. I'm not a robot. I feel a surge of sadness everytime I hand my baby off to the night nurse-- even on days when I'm exhausted and have been counting the minutes until she arrives. It's going to be tough. Pandora finding excuses to play "Cats in the Cradle" over and over again doesn't help.
I mean, look at this smile:
No one wants to leave that. But this is life as a working mom. I've spent most of my maternity leave working on final details, dragging Eli from meeting-to-meeting, vetting Battlefield companies while I burp him and feed him. At least the time zones have been less of a problem, since I'm awake in the middle of the night anyway. It's not ideal, but having a baby didn't change who I am. The insane love for my son didn't eclipse every other passion, it just added another huge one to the top of the list.
Hopefully he'll forgive me. I'm leaving him in good hands with his daddy and granddad (#twoandahalfmen) and I've left him a freezer full of milk and a bunch of mommy-smelling clothes in ziplock bags. Having fully Disrupted my work and homelife, we're officially ready to Disrupt Beijing.
(Yes, Tickets are still available.)
Rollercoaster
It's a rare moment of calm in my house.
The house is clean, and dinner is chopped, prepped and marinating in the fridge. My husband is asleep in the livingroom. My new baby is fed and changed and sleeping in his car seat on the table next to my laptop. My cats -- who have been in lockdown because they lunge at the baby whenever he cries-- are peacefully coiled at my feet. They are miraculously angst-free for the first time in weeks. And also for the first time in weeks, no one has called or emailed to ask me whether I'm staying at TechCrunch or to tell me whether I should stay or go. And in China, it's well into the weekend, so the endless flood of urgent emails about Disrupt Beijing has slowed too.
People really don't believe I'm taking time off with the baby. I get several emails a day that start out, "Congrats on the baby...." and continue with a story pitch. You guys aren't helping my work-a-holic tendencies.
It's probably no surprise that the last few weeks have been a bit of a rollercoaster for me between work and home: The Crunchfund was announced on my baby's due date, and the day before he was born I was walking around the mall trying to induce labor, texting with Mike as decisions that would forever change TechCrunch were going down in real time.
I've made a point of not getting into the public debate of everything, and I don't plan to now either. Except to say the two biggest things I miss being on maternity leave are breaking stories with Mike and laughing in my office with Paul. It's sad-- for me-- that neither of those will resume when I go back to work in January. But I'm happy to see good news for each of them today: Paul is starting a new company and Mike has finally launched his new personal blog.
As for me, I really am taking the rest of the year off to bond with my baby. How could I ignore this face?
...There are a few caveats to that, of course. Disrupt Beijing is in a matter of weeks. It's something I spent two years convincing Mike and Heather TechCrunch should do, and I've spent the last six months begging, bartering and pleading to put together an amazing lineup of Western and Eastern entrepreneurs and VCs as speakers and judges. Even though I raced to get the agenda locked before the baby came, there's still a million details floating around. And, yes, I am going to China to emcee the conference in late October, despite one VC who bet me $100 I would throw it all away once the baby came.
I also have a single coming out on the Byliner imprint in the next month or so. I wrote it in my spare time during the last few months of my pregnancy. You know, when I wasn't working a full time job, flying between four continents to promote my last book, planning a conference in China and hiring an editorial team there, and growing a human being. The due date for the single was the same as my due date for the baby. I filed it the morning after, as early labor was already starting.
The single is an extended thought-piece about one of the more popular TechCrunch posts I've written since I've been on staff. The first person to guess which post I'm referring to will get a free copy once it comes out.
I'm excited to see how it does. I've written before about how bullish I am about what Byliner is doing for longform journalism. And since the baby has likely put off my writing a third book for another year or so, I'm hoping an imprint like Byliner will be a good way for me to scratch the constant itch to do projects longer and more in-depth than a blog allows.
(Note: Shortly after writing that paragraph, baby started crying, cats freaked, all hell broke loose...)
My Three Days Hosting Live TV
I just got home from TechCrunch's second New York Disrupt Conference, and as detailed on this blog already, I was pretty exhausted from the travel and the pace. But it wasn't hard getting the adrenaline pumping each day. The conference was one of the best ones we've produced to date.
It occurred to me the other day that this is the happiest I've ever been working full-time for someone else. No one is more surprised at this than I am. I put off joining TechCrunch full time for years, in part because of my book, but also because I wasn't sure the massive egos of Arrington and me could fit under the same roof. And when AOL bought TechCrunch, I didn't think I'd last a month.
But Disrupt reminded me of every reason why TechCrunch is such a great fit for me. In short, it's all about the entrepreneurs. There was so much positivity and support around the companies launching, and everyone got so emotionally wrapped up in who they wanted to win. And doing backstage interviews with the finalists, just before we found out the winner, it was clear how much the platform had already helped their companies. That's an amazing and humbling thing to be a part of.
That sense of community and really rooting for great entrepreneurs is always what I've argued has made TechCrunch so succesful. In my previous jobs for traditional media companies, I hated the cynicism, the desire to shoot down anything just because it was new or differnet. Until of course, it hits a clear tipping point and then everyone pretends they believed in it all along. That doesn't serve readers in any way, and TechCrunch is the opposite of that.
But the other reason I love working there is they give me a big platform, pay me a nice salary, but let me do pretty much anything I want, whether that's flying to Nigeria or blogging from home in pajamas. I don't know another job like that in the media world. There's almost always a trade off with one of the three: Platform, pay or autonomy. It feels too good to be true. Hopefully, it lasts for a while. (At least until I give into that itch to write another book.)
The vareity also allows me to do a lot of different jobs in one. For Disrupt, I got to do three days of live television hosting the livestream backstage. I wouldn't want to do TV all the time, but for three days it was a lot of fun. Our head of TechCrunchTV, Jon Orlin, was in his element, building out an insane backstage studio and basically producing more than 24 hours of live programming. I'll be posting some of the interviews people may have missed on TechCrunch this week. You can watch most of them here.
I'm bummed I won't be able to do it again for a year: I'll be giving birth (or preparing to or recovering from giving birth) during San Francisco Disrupt and on stage during Beijing Disrupt.
New Book
An unforgettable portrait of the emerging world's entrepreneurial dynamos Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky is the story about that top 1% of people who do more to change their worlds through greed and ambition than politicians, NGOs and nonprofits ever can. This new breed of self-starter is taking local turmoil and turning it into opportunities, making millions, creating thousands of jobs and changing the face of modern entrepreneurship at the same time. To tell this story, Lacy spent forty weeks traveling through Asia, South America and Africa hunting down the most impressive up-and-comers the developed world has never heard of....yet.
Buy it from these sellers
Sarah Lacy is an award-winning reporter who has covered high-growth entrepreneurship for more than fifteen years. She is the founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of PandoDaily.com, the site-of-record for the startup ecosystem. She lives in San Francisco.
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