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Sarah Lacy launches PandoDaily (with former Techcrunch writers)
- suking 15y agoWhen I see "I do not want to sell this company" in bold - that means to me - I really want to sell this company asap. Do we really need another site covering startups?
- diego 15y agoI'm not sure that's the right question to ask. In 2003, people asked "do we need another social network?" The answer was surely no. However, (speaking for myself) I do want at least one good social networking tool and at least one good source of tech news. There are countless sources of tech news, most of which are not particularly good (Sturgeon's Law I guess). If Sarah Lacy can manage to build a better version of what Techcrunch was at its best, that would be nice. It remains to be seen of course.
- dpcan 15y agoI came here to post something very similar. "I do not want to sell this company" .... for less than a billion dollars :) She should have kept bolding. I think there's always room for competition, even in startup blogging. Being so saturated, however, they WILL need to find a way to do something different - no matter how small - something to keep us coming back.
- OoTheNigerian 15y ago>Do we really need another site covering startups? Yes. Nobody covers startups in the aspirational way TC used to do. TC of old made you want to do a startup. TC of now/RRW/AllThingD etc, tell you about startups. just like any news site.
- yuhong 15y agoPersonally, I think Arrington do have it's problems but I would not suggest the other writers to leave over it.
- veyron 15y agoShe already sold the company (to investors). If she didnt want to sell the company she should have bootstrapped.
- suking 15y agoAgreed. Not like a wordpress blog and design cost that much.
- ChrisNorstrom 15y agoIf you know Sarah in any way from her past articles and personal blog, she loved working at TechCrunch. As soon as it was sold to AOL things went downhill so she's just letting everyone know she's not making the same mistake Arrington did.
- antidaily 15y agoMy thought was, "Sell what?"
- hello_moto 15y agoYes. We need more echo out there so the IT industry can flourish. More users == more money channelling in. Heck even without users as long as there's hype, there will be money. I may sound sarcastic but can we say no to money to keep our hobby?
- rewind 15y agoWhat do the investors get out of this if Sarah is never going to sell it?
- diego 15y agoDividends? That would be a novel concept.
- rewind 15y agoOnly if the dividends are going to return 10-100x over the lifetime of the investment.
- jonknee 15y agoDividend paying investments can still be sold, so the dividends themselves don't have to return 10x.
- rewind 15y agoBut doesn't that bring us back to the issue of who would buy those investments off the original investors if there is never going to be a liquidation event?
- waitwhat 15y agoHave you looked at the bond markets recently? Total return doesn't need to be 1,000-10,000% to make a good investment.
- rewind 15y agoWe're talking about early-stage investors and what they expect from an investment when they put their money into a startup.
- robryan 15y agoI think it's kind of like color, this team has been around for a long time, proven themselves and probably know most SV seed investors. To convince a lot of them to each make a small investment shouldn't be to hard.
- harold 15y agoI’ve also raised a bunch of cash from some of the people I respect most in the industry. This includes: Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, Jeff Jordan and Matt Cohler, all investing as individuals. Also investing are a handful of seed funds including the CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel’s Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs. Is the coverage of any startup funded by these folks off the table? Seems like objectivity will be questioned from the start.
- puls 15y agoCall me cynical, but having all of this disclosure up front leaves me trusting her objectivity a lot more than the seemingly obvious alternative where unknown back room deals leave you wondering.
- uptown 15y agoI don't think cynical is the right word for what you're trying to say.
- mtr 15y agoOn a related note, if she's declared very publicly that selling this venture would be a failure, what's the exit strategy for her investors? Or (conspiracy alert) they're hoping that her coverage will help the exit strategies of their investments...?
- ChuckMcM 15y agoI don't know how she is running her show, but I note that there is a place for 'revenue' companies. These are companies that pay a dividend on their stock quarterly. This 'old school' concept is based on a the notion that the enterprise in question generates X revenue, and then Y gross margin on that revenue, and divides up the net margin as dividends on a per share basis. That has been a very common way for investors to participate in the success of the company they are invested in. The economic impact is that the share price then moves based on the return compared to other securities in the market (like t-bills, junk bonds, Etc.)
- acangiano 15y agoI don't understand this trend of leaving RSS icons/buttons out on technical blogs. Yes, I know http://pandodaily.com/feed/ http://pandodaily.com/feed/ is there, but don't make it an ordeal to subscribe to you.
- lkrubner 15y agoCan you name a single RSS service nowadays that doesn't auto-find the RSS feeds for you? Google Reader, and Netvibes, and Bloglines have all had auto-discovery for many years. (When I wrote a history of RSS back in 2006, most of the services I mention already had auto-discovery: http://www.category4.com/2006/10/24/rss-has-been-damage-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-have-developed-it/ http://www.category4.com/2006/10/24/rss-has-been-damage-by-i... ). I think sites like PandoDaily.com make the reasonable assumption that you can just paste "http://pandodaily.com/ http://pandodaily.com/ into your service, and your service will find the feed. I just tried this with my Netvibes account and it worked perfectly.
- acangiano 15y agoThere are two issues at hand: 1) Convenience. 2) Conversion rate (from visitor to subscriber). Not having an RSS icon makes it less convenient for the user and "out of sight, out of mind" guarantees you less subscribers as well. Why less convenient? Well, consider your workflow: 1) Double click in the URL address bar. 2) Copy. 3) Type in or click on your RSS reader bookmark (e.g., Google Reader). 4) Log in if you haven't already. 5) Click "Add Feed". 6) Paste the URL. 7) Click OK. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with it. Just that I find an RSS icon less cumbersome. If you are a technical blogger, not having an RSS icon means shooting yourself in the foot and providing a disservice to your readers (particularly now that some browsers have stopped autodiscovering feeds and presenting you with their icon in the bar).
- jonknee 15y agoCounterpoint: users who don't know/care about RSS will no longer be confused when clicking a prominent icon. RSS has awful UX. RSS usage is small and the usability is bad, don't expect this trend to change. If you still use RSS, use a browser that integrates it or a plug-in to do the same. Even better than an icon on the site.
- samstave 15y agoLets just hope that whatever tool they use to write stories for this site actually includes a spell check. Or maybe they will do grammar checks on their articles finally. I cannot recall a TC article I have read that didn't have any errors.
- jonknee 15y agoEven better would be an editorial flow. Unless you want mistakes, writers should not be allowed to post on the site directly.
- samstave 15y agoAgreed, but I dont think TC writers know the definition of those words. Remember - they are "evangelists" "bloggers" and "technologists" not journalists.
- googoobaby 15y agoThey misspelled 'PanderDaily'.
- jgrahamc 15y agoIs it pronounced pander-daily?
- clowntown 15y agoHow much space will be dedicated to fawning over Mark Zuckerberg?
- iusable 15y agoLike Sarah (and the 'valley way') or not, she's really good at what she does - well written long-form pieces with some sort of historical perspective. She's been around the block a few times and whether you agree with her or not, she almost always makes a compelling case for her point of view. I know that it's kinda common on here to be negative first, but I am glad that somebody like her is throwing their hat in the ring for 'my' attention. Short, sensationalist pieces are great for quick reading, but I welcome an experienced journalist's pen for what I love - startups. Let the flaming begin.
- Terretta 15y agoFeels more like a Tumblr than a professional news site when you first stumble onto the home page. But if you visit from a tablet, the reflowed design is clean and easy to read. Unfortunately, the article page design with a vertical line down the left margin implies every article is a long quote, so back to feeling like a reblog.