tentatively happy times....i *might* have found the perfect personal assistant! SANITY MAY BE IN REACH!

We're happy for her! The tipster who spotted the message is not and even suggested a headline: "Sarah Lacy wants you to know she's important." But we already knew that!

• Boston — A literate city, where Technology Review editor Jason Pontin would make an excellent host.
• Chicago — Local entrepreneur Dick Costolo has a lot of time on his hands after Google acquired FeedBurner.
• Montreal — Oh, Canada? Why not! Austin Hill of Akoha is the go-to guy for startups north of the border.
• Raleigh, N.C. — Likewise a college town. ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo is plugged into the local tech scene.
• San Antonio — After South By Southwest, Lacy's had enough of Austin, and I'm sure the feeling is mutual. But why not San Antonio, headquarters of AT&T, where they're just starting to hear about this "Web 2.0" thing? Brad Mays, AT&T's blogger-wooing PR guy, can organize it.
• Seattle — No sense in skipping this town if Lacy's going to Portland.
• Washington, D.C. — Or more properly, northern Virginia, the cluster of technology companies sprawling between the Beltway and Dulles Airport. Brian Loew, CEO of health startup Inspire, is a good local contact.

One date per week, a minimum of a hundred minutes of alone time, not in his apartment and definitely not at Facebook.

Chan recently squired Zuckerberg to his sister Randi's wedding. No word on who caught the bouquet, and Facebook insiders are mum about the couple's prospects of an engagement. Come to think of that, perhaps that's a good thing. If dating was this tough, can you imagine working out the prenup?

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy
• R is for Rose, who made Digg his toy
• T is for Twitter, which turned blogging small
• Z is for Zuckerberg, the richest of all

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg


• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big


• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"


• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow


• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy


• R is for Rose, who made Digg his toy


• T is for Twitter, which turned blogging small

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• 
  
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• 
  
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• 
  
• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
• 
  
• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy
• 
  
• R is for Rose, who made Digg his toy
• 
  

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• 
  
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• 
  
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• 
  
• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow
• 
  
• P is for Parker, the Valley's bad boy
• 
  

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg


• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big


• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"


• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg


• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big


• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• 
  
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• 
  

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg

Lacy, we hear, has a book coming out next week, full of Valley-insider secrets. But she finished writing it long ago. There's no longer any point in hoarding the gossip she gathers. Sarah, here's a suggestion: Please write a post telling us 10 other things nobody knows, but that you don't consider news. You might find it surprising that we find them surprising.

But her dismissive tone strikes me as disingenuous. Had Lacy landed an exclusive with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams on the financing, wouldn't we be reading a breathless analysis in BusinessWeek on how microblogging is the next big thing? Perhaps there's something else going on here: Lacy was much abused by Twitter users during a poorly received keynote at the SXSW conference. Can one blame her if she's now shooting the messenger?

As a bonus, the 100-word version of Lacy's post:

Twitter has raised between $15 m and $20 m according to CNET. Scrambling around trying to get the scoop. I haven't. Twitter raising a fat round of venture capital is in no way surprising. As I've reported, anyone who has a good Web business is bulking up on cash. If you read between the lines Evan Williams has essentially previewed this deal. Anyone even bringing up the lack of business model has no basic understanding of how Silicon Valley works right now. As is written about to death in my book. At any price, a stake in Twitter — not to mention a chance to cozy up to a true Web visionary in Evan Williams — is a steal. I've wasted a long post telling you why.

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.

• Say what you think, not what you think others want you to say.
• Listen carefully to what others are saying.
• Assume that a speaker is saying what they mean. If it seems unclear, try to find meaning. Give them the respect of hearing what they want you to hear.
• Demonstrate self-confidence and project a friendly, informed image.

A criticism leveled at Lacy: She didn't ask tough questions. That charge is baseless. Zuckerberg just didn't answer the tough questions she posed. "We're not focused on that," said Zuckerberg in what's becoming his now-standard dodge. Zuckerberg couldn't articulate what Facebook was focused on, except for vague talk of "building a platform." (As panel host Heather Gold proved at a later session with Twitter's Evan Williams, if you ask a startup founder what a platform actually is, you'll never get a meaningful answer.)

A second critique: There was no real news. Lacy did herself no favors by trying to argue that getting Zuckerberg to confirm old revelations, like Yahoo's offer to buy Facebook, constituted a scoop. Facebook à la française? Quelle surprise.

What Zuckerberg needs to learn from his hero: The art of saying something. Jobs keeps his magic alive by only appearing on stage when he has something to announce. Zuckerberg is the boss; he could have held news for this event, or pushed to get products launched in time for him to talk about them.

At his keynote yesterday, Zuckerberg talked a good game about learning to be a CEO, giving up direct oversight of the product in exchange for "setting the tone" for Facebook. He's talking a good game — but under pressure, he reverts to geek form. Later today at SXSW, Zuckerberg is crashing a Facebook developer meetup, where he's going to take questions — the Q&A the audience howled for at the end of Lacy's interview.

Doesn't he have an evangelist to whom he can delegate the mundane task of placating needy Web programmers? He does, but he won't. For Zuckerberg, talking shop comes naturally. Running one is hard.

When it became obvious that the audience was hostile to her — cheering Zuckerberg when he told her to ask a question — she acted hurt, as if this hour was about her. Worse, she told us how tough her job was. It wasn't tough. It was a privilege and she was blowing it. And at the end, when she said that people should send her an email telling her what went wrong, she was so 1994; she didn't understand that the people in the crowd were already coalescing in Twitter and blogs into an instant consensus. Oh, if only there'd been a back-channel chat projected on the screen beside her. Then, she could have seen.

• Facebook now available in French.

• jonnygoldstein: did sarah lacey suck on purpose to make zuckerberg look good by comparison?
• JoynerEmily: so glad to be out of the zuckerberg keynote.....wow. train wreck. hopefully the afternoon will go better.
• brendathompson: Lacy's interview w/Zuckerberg truly embarassing (for her) and awkward (for him and for audience).
• ceonyc: Other potentially better interviewers: The MicroMachines Guy... Helen Keller... My nana (shes 90 and has never used a computer)

Of course, Robert Scoble chimed in, saying "I've never seen such a bad interview of someone on stage here. Totally disappointing."

Lacy herself responded on Twitter, saying "seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things."

2:07 p.m.: Zuckerberg says now that Facebook's available in Spanish, people are using Colombia to organize resistance against guerrilla armies. Wait — does that mean it's actually a tool of oppression?

2:08 p.m.: Facebook is about communicating "efficiently," Zuckerberg keeps saying. Efficient? Does he even use Facebook?

2:09 p.m.: Lacy asks Zuckerberg about terrorism. "Facebook has a relatively large population in London," says Zuckerberg. "Terrorism comes ... from a lack of empathy and understanding. People are growing up, they're relatively poor, they spend a lot of time studying with their imam. At the same time, they'll go out with their friends and drink on Friday nights and try to meet girls. Then they take pictures of themselves with their religious leaders holding guns. There are people who are at a point in their lives, a crossroads, deciding whether they're going to pursue terrorism. And people have told me that Facebook has helped them maintain connections with friends in Europe, in America, and maintain that empathy."

In other news, Zuckerberg's shoe:

2:13 p.m.: Lacy recounts the first time she interviewed Zuckerberg. "He's wearing a white T-shirt, and he was so nervous, he was sweating through his shirt," says Lacy. "The first time I inteerviewed Mark, I kept asking broader and broader questions, trying to get him to talk. Finally he said, 'I don't know how to answer that question. It's too broad.' I said, 'Mark, I'm trying to get you to say more than two words.' Mark said, 'That's really hard.' I said, 'Three words.'"

Right after Lacy's tale, Mark said, "What was the question?"

2:16 p.m.: I think Zuckerberg is talking about how antipoverty activists used Facebook to organize protests at a senator's church, home, and office.

2:18 p.m.:"We're running the business at breakeven," says Zuckerberg.

2:19 p.m.: Sarah Lacy just totally stole Zuckerberg's line. "So you're launching in France tonight," says Lacy. "How'd you get to that before me?" asks Zuckerberg. "Sorry, Brandee," says Lacy. Anyway: Facebook en français, tout de suite. Chouette!

2:23 p.m.: "There's this sense that you have this revenue from Microsoft that's not sustainable," says Lacy. "Are they happy with the deal?"

"I'm very sure that they're very happy with it," says Zuckerberg.

2:24 p.m.: Lacy asks Zuckerberg about his infamous "once every hundred years, media changes" line. "We got a little ahead of ourselves," he says. "We hadn't figured out as much as we thought we had."

2:26 p.m.: "Let's talk about Beacon," says Lacy. "WTF?" Zuckerberg's long answer:

Beacon isn't even a part of our ad team. It's part of our platform team. We think these large social networking sites are going from large monolithic sites like facebook.com ... to social services. A lot of them aren't even things we're building. Some of them are going to be inside facebook.com. An increasing amount of that is going to be outside facebook.com. What we were trying to do with Beacon was taking the first step with letting people take actions on other parts of the Web and feed back into what their friends are doing. It also ties into the ad system, because it can be an endorsement — someone you care about is doing something, that's much more effective.

2:29 p.m.: Lacy makes the apt point — argued earlier in Valleywag — that complaints about News Feed were much larger than Beacon protests, but suggests the larger concern about both features is privacy. Zuckerberg points out that people are much more likely to put their cell phone on Facebook because they're allowed to control which people see it.

2:32 p.m.: Why do I feel a strong urge to take a nap whenever Zuckerberg talks about "platforms" and "ecosystems"? I think he's saying he's trying to reduce application spam with algorithms. Because that worked so well with email, right?

2:34 p.m.: Lacy asks about rumors in the Financial Times that Facebook is talking to the record labels about building an iTunes killer. "What's up with that?" "I don't know," says Zuckerberg, deadpan. He then concedes that Facebook is talking to several companies, but there's "nothing to announce."

2:36 p.m.: "So you're Forbes's youngest billionaire," says Lacy. "We're just not focused on that," says Zuckerberg. Can't he just play a recording of the soundbite? That seems easier. The $15 billion valuation, he says, came about because the company wanted to raise the most money with the least dilution. "High expectations are tough," he concedes. "Having such a focus on money in the business can be tough for us, because it can self-select for people who are interested in that. We don't want people to join the company because they're going to make money very quickly."

2:39 p.m.: Ah, the IPO question. "It's not that we're opposed to going public," says Zuckerberg. "[The $15 billion valuation] throws down the gauntlet" to potential acquirers, observes Lacy. "For certain companies, that's the goal, to go public" or get sold, says Zuckerberg. "Yahoo offered us a billion dollars a few years back. The primary analysis that we were doing wasn't, 'Are we worth $1 billion?' We said, we have a chance to build a platform that fundamentally changes how people connect or communicate. How many times in your life do you have that chance? So we decided to go for it."

2:43 p.m.: "Did you get rid of some people who wanted to [sell to Yahoo]?" asks Lacy. "We made some management changes," says Zuckerberg. Is that a reference to recently departed COO Owen Van Natta? Or former CFO Mike Sheridan, who was replaced by Gideon Yu?

2:45 p.m.: "Let's talk about Sheryl [Sandberg]," says Lacy. "She's been called the token grownup." "We just passed this mark where we have 500 employees," says Zuckerberg. "That's crazy. I feel really lucky to have her."

2:46 p.m.: "How do you think she's going to negotiate that male-dominated environment?" asks Lacy. "She has a great track record of doing that. I don't think that will be an issue," says Zuckerberg. I note that Zuckerberg didn't dispute Lacy's observation.

2:48 p.m.: "Is it hard from you to step back from product management? Because you'd really be working on the product, right?" asks Lacy. (Zuckerberg recently tapped longtime Facebook executive Matt Cohler to run product management.) "CEO is more of a full-time job than I'd admitted," says Zuckerberg. "The CEO sets the tone for the organization. Being CEO is a good way to make sure the company focuses on that — that people keep their eyes on what's important."

2:52 p.m.: "You're a computer guy and you write longhand on paper," observes Lacy, who reveals that Zuckerberg takes notes in bound books. "Fantastic question," quips Zuckerberg, which provokes howls of laughter from the audience. Zuckerberg then takes away Lacy's glass of water, just to be safe.

2:57 p.m.: Audience questions. First one up is your typical privacy-and-sharing paranoiac. "I think the reason we don't have a lot of that stuff yet is that we haven't come up with both controls and good default settings so people don't have to do a lot of work," says Zuckerberg. "Facebook is still relatively constrained as a company. Things take time. We've realized that it's an issue."

3:00 p.m.: "Other than really rough interviews, what are the toughest obstacles Facebook faces?" asks a wiseacre. "Is he making fun of me or of you?" Zuckerberg asks Lacy.

3:02 p.m.: "Do you think Google's pissed that you have so much data trapped on Facebook?" asks an audience member. "They don't get pissed," says Zuckerberg. "They're nice guys." Then he gives some incredibly boring answer about "semi-private" and "semi-public" information. Five-word version: Good luck with that, Google.

Additional Coverage:

• 
  
• Twitterati lashes out at interviewer after Zuckerberg keynote
• 
  

I took this up with Sarah Lacy, who was on hand — finally, someone else at work! — filming for Yahoo Tech Ticker. I asked her, do people come to SXSW and party because they're too busy when they're home to go out and socialize? "No," laughed Lacy. "They're partying at home, too." There goes that theory. Pictures from the party:

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(Photos by b_d_solis, mf_cailloux, Lorena & David, and again, b_d_solis)