Valleywag: Lane Becker

Get Satisfaction all about customers pleasing themselves

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:20:00 PDT

Cra-zazy customers hardly need to be told where they can take their complaints: They just need an outlet. Get Satisfaction aims to automate the bitchfest. Bonus: Its president is Lane Becker, one of Valleywag's most lovably lubricated crush objects — clothed, bespectacled and interviewed in this clip from Web 2.0 in New York. Becker's founding cohotties are Thor Muller and Amy Muller. The "frictionless" solution to demanding customers, who will blog about your inadequate service as soon as look at you, was hatched out of the mayhem caused by their mail-order grab bag business for previously free conference tchotchkes, Valleyschwag.

Venture capitalists, they're just like us

Jackson West — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 PDT

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures carrying his own lunch order from Shake Shack in Manhattan's Madison Square to a group of tables where he was entertaining wantrepreneurs in New York for the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo. Not pictured: Lane Becker, president of online customer-service startup Get Satisfaction, who kept his distance from the assembled nerds, pacing around a tree and chatting on his cell phone.

The cure for the common hangover

Owen Thomas — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:20:54 PDT

AUSTIN, TX — I almost didn't sleep last night. At 4 a.m., after posting party reports for ~~you ungrateful bastards~~ my gorgeous, intelligent readers, I considered just powering through until my breakfast meeting with the boss, who was flying back to New York in the morning. Instead, I caught a disco nap. Even so, I arrived at the PureVolume ranch looking more rested than the weary souls shuffling in for free breakfast tacos. If you haven't had an Austin-style breakfast taco — soft tortilla with eggs and bacon or chorizo — then you should reflect on the direction your life is taking and what you can do to amend your ways.

Get Satisfaction president Lane Becker and CEO Thor Muller, who bought the tacos, delivered a spiel about their company's widget-based platform for Web-enabled kvetching. (Okay, I wasn't really paying attention, but I think that's close.) I chatted up the likes of Google design czar Jeff Veen and Blogger veteran Jason Shellen, freshly hired at LiveJournal. Shellen talked up the large team of engineers based in Russia now at his disposal. I don't think he liked my suggestion that they develop an algorithm to automatically filter out LiveJournal users based on statistical measures of their irrelevance.

Julia Allison crashes SXSW, explains it all

Melissa Gira Grant — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:17:58 PDT

Professional funnylady and amateur gossip Heather Gold just invited Julia Allison, professional gossip and amateur tech event crasher, onto her panel on — ha, ha — Gossip. "Explain to Shaila [Dewan, New York Times correspondent] what you do again," asks Heather, "since her coverage is of real disasters and not the Internet." Her response?

Provided by an audience member: "How much did you pay Julia, Owen, to come up here and make Valleywag more sympathetic?"

Update: The audience is now actually liveblogging our liveblogging. We stand by our "slutty, cheap" headline about her panel crashing, including the photo accompanying of the official SXSWi admittance badge hanging around her neck.
As for the rest of the crowd?

Six Apart's Anil Dash thinks it's all of our fucking faults.

Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction says "this was the best SXSW panel ever" —

— and then thanks Valleywag emeritus Nick "Leave Julia Alone!" Douglas for running that hot tub photo years back.

Secrets of the worst websites -- revealed!

Owen Thomas — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:30:57 PST

Andy Baio created Upcoming.org, a plausibly good group-calendar site he sold to Yahoo. Shirt-doffing VC David Hornik of August Capital has funded some plausibly good companies like Six Apart and Splunk. The two served as judges for "Worst Website Ever," a gag panel at SXSW where entrepreneurs gave their all to the worst startup pitches they could come up with. The ideas were funny enough — Sickr, Image Search for the Blind, My Happy Netbox, and the like. (See the photo gallery, after the jump.) But there was something sour about the whole business.

Why didn't the premise of the panel sit right with me? Because venture capitalists laughing at bad startup ideas isn't subversive; it's the status quo. Sure, the crowd was rolling in the aisles. Merlin Mann killed them with his prize-winning social network for thought leaders, Flockdup, which promised to "leveragate your friends."

But in retrospect, it would have been much funnier if the comics had come up with bad pitches for really good businesses, under other names. Would Hornik have funded YouTube if it had been pitched as a way to put videos in auction listings, or Twitter as a podcasting service? (That's how each of those startups got their start, by the way.) Venture capitalists like to think they're so smart — Hornik is just a prime example of the type. If Baio had sent up the likes of Hornik, rather than his fellow entrepreneurs, the laugh might have been on the investors. For a change.

SXSW: Battledecks!

ndouglas — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:43:40 PST

Come see Battledecks!

I'm not sure what Battledecks is, other than what Adaptive Path co-founder Lane Becker says on its SXSW event page:

Hot consultants will drop bombs and display mad skills as they battle at the freestyle PPT presentation event of the season.

But whatever it is, I'm on the panel of judges, so if you're in Austin for SXSW Interactive, come to the Room Day Stage at 10:30 Saturday and watch...the things...and then say hi to Valleywag. And Adaptive Path.

BattleDecks: Southwest Invitational [SXSW]