.jpg "Why Facebook borrowed $100 million for servers")
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once you're lucky, twice you're good
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sarah lacy
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once you're lucky, twice you're good
once you're lucky, twice you're good
F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick is a prankster, as evidenced by his Halloween costume last year, when the new Googler dressed up as Facebook to mock his coworkers' fears of the social network. I'm told that in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's new book about Web 2.0, there's an anecdote about Fitzpatrick submitting an expense report — successfully! — for "hookers and blow" when he worked at blog software startup Six Apart. That was likely a reference to the early days of LiveJournal, when users made ridiculous accusations that Fitzpatrick was spending money meant for servers and bandwidth on "hookers and blow." We'd love to hear more, but alas, Fitzpatrick only got 8 out of 294 pages, according to the book's index. Here's the page for "D" through "F": More »
caption contest
An impromptu "Tweetup" at Medjool from the online shoe salesfolk at Zappos lured reporter Sarah Lacy out to Medjool. The promise: free booze if you promoted the website with a backhanded mention. Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments. Yesterday's winner: "This picture brought to you by Seagate" by Duncan. (Photo by Scott Beale)
Handvertising is the new banner ad
An impromptu "Tweetup" at Medjool from the online shoe salesfolk at Zappos lured reporter Sarah Lacy out to Medjool. The promise: free booze if you promoted the website with a backhanded mention. Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments. Yesterday's winner: "This picture brought to you by Seagate" by Duncan. (Photo by Scott Beale)
once you're lucky, twice you're good
B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
Few people outside Silicon Valley have heard of Roelof Botha. But the former CFO of PayPal is famous here. His two claims to fame: negotiating that company's $1.5 billion sale to eBay, and later, as a partner at Sequoia Capital, investing in YouTube and quickly flipping the startup to Google for $1.65 billion. Is it a coincidence that that figure is 10 percent higher than his PayPal score? Few insiders think so. Botha gets four pages in Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good — more than Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Other figures who appear on the second page of her Web 2.0 book's index: John Battelle, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Facebook board member Jim Breyer, blog blowhard Jason Calacanis, and YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, whom Botha made quite wealthy. More »
once you're lucky, twice you're good
A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
Digg cofounder Jay Adelson is now asked by the likes of Kara Swisher how he'd fix big media companies, as in this clip. But there was a time when he barely knew what to do with his own Internet startup, Equinix. That tale and more covers 54 out of 294 pages in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's soon-to-be-released book about Web 2.0. The first page of the book's index, one of many to come: More »
once you're lucky, twice you're good
The index to Sarah Lacy's Web 2.0 book, revealed
In Silicon Valley, it's all about keeping score. The question entrepreneurs are asking about Sarah Lacy's Web 2.0 book: Am I in it? And how many pages? Michael Wolff's chronicle of the first Web bubble, Burn Rate, had a clever conceit: The index was published online at burnrate.com, driving people online to see if they were included in the tell-all, and then to the bookstores to see what Wolff had to say about them. (Too clever by half: The website is now abandoned, and there's no trace of the online-only index.) Lacy's instant history of this frothy time, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, could benefit from having its index published. The book is coming out a week from tomorrow, but it's already in the hands of most of the people she wrote about. Don't you think the likes of Kevin Rose, Max Levchin, and Mark Zuckerberg are counting the number of pages Lacy devoted to them? Soon you can, too. I'll be running all the pages from the index here over the next few days.
sarah lacy
So far inside Silicon Valley, she's forgotten there's an outside
In person, Sarah Lacy's fierce dishiness is charming. On the screen, her insider know-it-all schtick becomes harsh and grating. Take Lacy's latest post on LinkedIn seeking a $1 billion valuation. The 30-word version: "I've I I I am not giving people the news as I write in my book, I hear from insiders. Imagine that! perhaps I can get to that later today." She has learned exactly nothing from an earlier post on Twitter, whose funding news she failed to break, yet also declared non-newsworthy. More »
great moments in hr
Decker: Yahoos upset over Microsoft are just tired and old
The people who really matter — Yahoo shareholders — are angry about the way Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang handled negotiations with Microsoft. But there are angry Yahoo employees, too. Problem is, top Yahoo management doesn't seem to want to hear from either group. Watch this excerpt from Tech Tickeras Yahoo president Sue Decker dismisses Yahoo dissenters as people who are "tired and feeling late stages in their career."
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Decker: We only told shareholders about Microsoft's $31 offer
Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock told reporters that shareholders supported Jerry Yang's decision to refuse Microsoft's bid for the company, even when it reached $33 per share. But yesterday, major shareholders Bill Miller and Gordon Crawford — who combined control about 13 percent of the company — said they did not agree with the way Yang handled negotiations. In this excerpt from Yahoo's own Tech Ticker, Sarah Lacy asks Yahoo president Sue Decker, "Who are these institutional shareholders who are supporting $37, $38 per share? Can you shed any light on that?" Watch as Decker explains that what Bostock really meant is that Yahoo's board supports Yahoo's board, which only really ever told shareholders about Microsoft's $31 per share offer. "And that's the end of the story."
nerdfight
Sarah Lacy's Twitter snit
Having made her name on a cover story about Digg's Kevin Rose and a $60 million fortune he has yet to make, tech columnist Sarah Lacy has paused to sniff dismissively at (questionably accurate) reports that Twitter has raised $20 million in venture capital. Lacy has a point: It should not surprise anyone that Twitter is raising venture capital; there are few obvious companies which can use the money, and Twitter, whose microblogging service is growing in popularity but not, measurably, in revenues, is one of them. More »
caption contest
Sarah Lacy at Kinnernet in balmy Tel Aviv showing some leg. Got a better caption? Leave it in the comments. (Photo by Yaniv Golan)
"Maybe these shorts will shut up the Twitter users"
Sarah Lacy at Kinnernet in balmy Tel Aviv showing some leg. Got a better caption? Leave it in the comments. (Photo by Yaniv Golan)
we read twitter so you don't have to
"She's got legs, she knows how to use them"
BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy, in Israel for a conference, is feeling the heat, and this time not from a conference audience. Tipsters, don't fail us now: pics or it didn't happen!
we read twitter so you don't have to
"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now"
I hear that's what happens when you go from mere BusinessWeek columnist to published author. [Twitter]
nerdfight
Abstruse 3D chart shows just how much engineers dislike Sarah Lacy
When techies get mad, as they did when Sarah Lacy interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW, they Twitter furiously. When they're still seething later, it seems, they put those Twitters in a spreadsheet and analyze them. Hence, Somewhere Inc. CEO Kee Hinckley's Anatomy of a Mob, which charts the frequency of the top 50 words Twittered over the hour Lacy and Zuckerberg spoke. Hinckley's conclusion: "The Twitter transcript makes it clear that there was an early and constant stream of negative comments flowing from a large number of senders." Lacy has cited live blog coverage as evidence that the mood stayed positive until the last 15 minutes of the interview; Hinckley's analysis — though relying on Twitter — would seem to argue against that. Even so, Hinckley is sympathetic: "She didn't deserve the abuse that was dished out on Twitter, let alone what happened in the auditorium." After the jump, an annotated video showing the Twitter reaction in sync with the interview. More »
quotable
Sarah Lacy speaks out about Zuckerberg interview
Honestly, as painful as it was, I think it's ultimately a net positive for me. All most people hear is the vocal minority. I went to four parties Sunday night, was mobbed, and no one said a bad word. I haven't even gotten a single negative email. No one sees the hundreds of notes that have poured in supporting me, saying they were there and embarrassed, or the messages I've received from other Valley CEOs telling me they enjoyed the keynote and that we all get attacked at some point in our careers. It's just part of the job. Can't take the good without the bad.Sarah Lacy shares her view on her SXSW Mark Zuckerberg interview. Hold on, let me fix that for you. "I me I I me I me." There, that's better. [I Want Media]
party report
AUSTIN, TX — A confession: Between the rain pouring down and the rumors pouring in, I didn't even make it to the Austin Convention Center today for any of SXSW's official programming. A show veteran granted me absolution: "No one makes it to the third day." The third night, however, was not optional. The hot ticket: Facebook's Get.friends party at Pangaea. The Crush party at Six Lounge a half-block down Colorado Street was the chill-out alternative. Scott Kidder and I hopped between the two, snapping pictures all the while. Mazyar "Mazy" Kazerooni of OpenHulu fame joined up for the party tour. At Six, I found myself sandwiched between Sarah Lacy and Julia Allison, SXSW's two controversy magnets. Back at Pangaea, I spotted Dave McClure grooving ecstatically to BT, the electronica artist Facebook evangelist Dave Morin picked for the event. (Don't tell Morin: BT has a MySpace page.) The afterparty? It took so long to get going anywhere that we ended up having it outside on Colorado Street, where Wired's Megan McCarthy administered breathalyzer tests. More photos:
More »
SXSW bar crawl begins in earnest
AUSTIN, TX — A confession: Between the rain pouring down and the rumors pouring in, I didn't even make it to the Austin Convention Center today for any of SXSW's official programming. A show veteran granted me absolution: "No one makes it to the third day." The third night, however, was not optional. The hot ticket: Facebook's Get.friends party at Pangaea. The Crush party at Six Lounge a half-block down Colorado Street was the chill-out alternative. Scott Kidder and I hopped between the two, snapping pictures all the while. Mazyar "Mazy" Kazerooni of OpenHulu fame joined up for the party tour. At Six, I found myself sandwiched between Sarah Lacy and Julia Allison, SXSW's two controversy magnets. Back at Pangaea, I spotted Dave McClure grooving ecstatically to BT, the electronica artist Facebook evangelist Dave Morin picked for the event. (Don't tell Morin: BT has a MySpace page.) The afterparty? It took so long to get going anywhere that we ended up having it outside on Colorado Street, where Wired's Megan McCarthy administered breathalyzer tests. More photos:
More »
great moments in journalism
The Web comic BusinessWeek won't show you
BusinessWeek reporter Catherine Holahan dropped in on BitStrips, a Web-comics startup showing off its wares at SXSW. (Really, who goes to the SXSW trade-show booths?) In Holahan's blog post on the subject, she faithfully transcribed BitStrips founder Ba's thoughts on why he created a website that automates the production of cartoons which look like they were drawn by 5th-grade students. But oddly, she didn't hit on something far more topical: How Ba himself attacked her colleague Sarah Lacy for her keynote interview with Mark Zuckerberg in an "editor's pick." That comic strip, which I'm betting you won't see on BusinessWeek.com anytime soon: More »
clips
