#sarah lacy

[startupvitamins]

‘’The biggest barrier to starting a company isn't ideas, funding or experiences. It's excuses.’’ - Sarah Lacy, Founder of Pando

[denyinghipster]

Hear that, victims? YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO WIN. You are just supposed to cower. Anything else makes you a hypocrite. So if you’re actually, you know, smart and knowledgeable and stuff, just keep that to yourself. Wouldn’t want to bug anyone.

Your Backlash Against Sarah Lacy Is Misplaced -- Medium

[tommaxwelll]

Sarah Lacy Responds to Uber

All the angles of the Uber-Pando scandal were a bit hard to keep up with over the past week. This interview on Bloomberg West with Sarah Lacy is a good summary of what exactly happened: 

This whole snafu feels a lot like the sort of thing Facebook went through with its ill-fated Beacon launch. Here's a choice paragraph from Peter Thiel's Zero to One on new companies that I'm reminded of: 

Bad decisions made early-on -- if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example -- are very hard to correct after they are made... As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

While I don't think Emil Michael or anyone else at Uber actually intended on spending $1 million annually to go after journalists, there does still seem to be an underlying culture issue at the company. Their intense focus on execution has left much to be desired in the way of consciousness for the well-being of those they touch. Data security (i.e. scrutiny of the use of God View) probably fell far down on the list of priorities for the company in light of fights with regulators and increasing competition from Lyft, just to name two things. 

Will this result in a mass exodus of customers for Uber? If we're being honest with ourselves, no. When you spend most of your day interacting with the outside world through the lens of Twitter (me) these events can feel like a huge deal because they're reverberating through an echo chamber. But I'm sure many of their users don't even know about this situation, and of those who do many use the app on a daily basis and probably don't feel the moral imperative to switch to Lyft. Did Emil actually say those things? Was he serious or did he say them in a joking manner? I'm making some assumptions, sure, but they're grounded in anecdotal evidence as well as from talking with my friends in the industry over the past few days. 

After further consideration I didn't even hold anything against Uber for their driver-poaching tactics. Aggressive but reasonable for various reasons I won't go into here. My biggest concern now is data security and Uber's respect for the customer. Sometimes the company's brand just feels "slimey," for lack of a better term. They don't feel warm and if some rogue employee started watching my every move taken through the service it really wouldn't surprise me, which is a problem -- stuff like that can compound. And I would be really sad if we all ended up loathing Uber like the taxis they set out to disrupt. Until then, however, I think I'm going to keep using the app and hold out faith. 

[jsugarb-blog]

Uber. *tee hee hee*

What is so wrong about digging up dirt on shady journalist? @pando @TechCrunch @Uber

Really? I just started paying attention to this within the last hour and I can figure this out.

Apparently Uber is in the news again, because they wanted to do “opposition research” on journalists who aren’t so friendly to them. The comments were focused on one journalist in particular- Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily. This was in regards to an article she wrote entitled The horrific trickle down of Asshole culture: Why I’ve just deleted Uber from my phone

She was upset over an ad campaign being run in France, and I can’t disagree. I mean I understand that sex sells, but given the business you’re in, you should be more responsible for the female employees who would have filled that role. I feel they were implying certain things about this service, even if they had no plans on delivering. At any rate, it was stupid campaign and once it was found out they pulled it. She used them as an illustration of what she felt was misogyny within Silicon Valley. I looked at that article as an opinion piece and I feel that it was obvious to anyone who read it.

However, I do think companies have a right to defend themselves if they feel they are being mischaracterized.

So again, what’s wrong with digging up dirt on shady journalists?

What exactly is a shady journalist? Personally, I don’t think journalism has ever existed… at least not in the virtuous form we have heard so much about. There is no such thing as being unbiased. We can try, but we are never really unbiased. However, based on virtuosity, I would have to define a shady journalist as one who purposefully distorts facts to suit an agenda and then presents that information as unbiased. But most of the news we consume today comes in the form of opinion pieces mostly, and believe most people understand that. Lacy’s piece, actually the title itself, screams opinion and she’s allowed to that. I can hardly call her, or anyone else in the blogo-news-sphere, shady. I don’t think she tried to present that piece as anything other than what it was; there was no attempt to mislead the reader.

So what did Uber, specifically Emil Michael, want to use to combat this cabal of shady journalism? From Buzzfeed-

Michael, who Kalanick described as “one of the top deal guys in the Valley” when he joined the company, is a charismatic and well-regarded figure who came to Uber from Klout. He also sits on a board that advises the Department of Defense 

Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

[…]

Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

  So Sarah expresses an opinion about Uber based on their very public actions and now Uber feels the need to look into her personal life and her family? Well that just sounds beyond childish and petty. But the killer part was this- “prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.”

…Hmmm? That reminds me of something…Oh, I know!

In high school, when people would break up, sometimes one of them would go around the school to spread rumors about the other. The rumors could be based on the truth or completely fabricated. At its core, that is all this would have been (or will be, since they may actually be crazy enough to do it).

L. O. L. It seems that money would be better spent in hiring a PR firm to coach Uber’s executive team on how to conduct themselves. In this world, perception is reality. Most companies keep a lid on their true feelings, but maybe I should give Uber a round of applause for daring to be honest. Horribly, horribly honest.

Although this part made me laugh heartily-

At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.

More likely? Nah. I initially thought the odds were about the same until I did a quick search. It turns out for Taxi jobs the applicant has to undergo a drug screening, criminal background check and be fingerprinted. Whereas Uber’s screening process has proven to be meh at best and “Fix It Jesus!” at its worst. (If you believe those whisper confessions.) Taxis are hardly the safest places in the world, but given that info, you may fare better in a cab. It’s just odds.

But to hold her personally responsible for a sexual assault because a woman took a cab instead of Uber is... Fxck it. I’ll chalk this up to “heat of moment, just saying shit ‘cause I’m pissed” type stuff.

I don’t use Uber and I rarely take cabs. If the car is not an option, I will gladly take public transportation. At least then, I’ll have witnesses. Why hasn't Mass Transit jumped on this?

Tagline: Worried about the cabbie? Scared of Uber? Just take the bus.

Tagline: We may be rude, but at least we won’t assault you.*

*Only available at participating locations

But I feel most for the company’s PR team and their spokeswoman Nairi Hourdajian- aka the cleanup team. These people should be getting paid double based on the amount of work Uber is piling on them lately.

[pyrosmiley]

And I was wondering if Uber could get any worse.... Hoooly shit

[datoscrudos]

94:35

Sarah Lacy interviews Jeremy Levine. I really appreciated how often Jeremy Levine referenced both luck, and uncertainty, surrounding VC investments. I wouldn't call him contrarian. But definitely unorthodox. Refreshing in this current era of ideologue VCs.

via pando

[akhlis-blog1]

#icebucketchallenge: Why?

Yesterday it was uber tech blogger Sarah Lacy whom I saw on YouTube accepting this ice bucket challenge from the bearded LinkedIn executive Jeff Weiner. Her colleague Paul Carr and her toddler son Eli was spotted helping her throwing the chilly water right on her top of head in the middle of the day, when the summer sun was shining at its highest brightness.

The other day I happened to read news…

View On WordPress

[dragoni]

A lot of VCs are full of bluster and bombast, with larger than life personalities informed by working in one of the toughest businesses around.

But perhaps befitting an investor based in a land of more modest returns like Boston, Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet, is a creature of humility. Soft-spoken but brutally intelligent, the early Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare investor shared wicked insight on a number of topics at our most recent PandoMonthly in New York, including: what’s kept Boston from becoming as big a technology hub as Silicon Valley, the ethical dilemmas facing the venture capital world, how New York can mature as a market by playing to its strengths, and whether or not Biz Stone can turn things around at Jelly.