Sarah Lacy launches PandoDaily (with former Techcrunch writers) | Hacker News Reader

Sarah Lacy launches PandoDaily (with former Techcrunch writers)

pandodaily.com

68 pointsdiego54 comments

I’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.

Call 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.

I don't think cynical is the right word for what you're trying to say.

On 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...?

I 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.)

After Thinking about it some more I realized VC's usually don't think this way but angels could.

Personal failure != Economic Failure. Example: Facebook acquires your startup for 20M, shelves the product and tell you they bought the team. Ouch.

You're correct. And we will question it, rightfully so.

The days of these people being "independent" media and bloggers are over. They may have been at one point, but these are cash generating vehicles, designed to promote product. And, really, I don't blame them.

But let's be realistic. She started what appears to be a blog. Why is there a laundry list of the who's-who of SV investing in it?

Why is it a bad thing? I think any site doing startup coverage needs to publish the list of its investors as a disclaimer.

It's not the publishing of the list that the commenter's questioning, but the fact that they've invested in it in the first place.

Just look at one of their first posts. One would think they could have waited a while before running a blatant ad for one of their sister companies.

http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/16/wealthfront-the-antidote-to...

I think it would be impossible for a new blog to compete with TC/VB/etc. without serious funding.

Sarah did a terrific job at TC and I think she's worth some trust. Moreover since AOL mess TC has become so boring to read ... full of "Company X launch product Y" stories without any wit or insight ...

Personally I don't care who's funding her, I'm confident she'll create a great, trustable blog ... after all trust is the main value for a tech blog and she knows it. Moreover i'm glad to see Paul Carr, MG & Arrington back blogging :)

I don't understand this trend of leaving RSS icons/buttons out on technical blogs. Yes, I know http://pandodaily.com/feed/ is there, but don't make it an ordeal to subscribe to you.

Can 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-i... ).

I think sites like PandoDaily.com make the reasonable assumption that you can just paste "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.

There 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).

Counterpoint: 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.

> users who don't know/care about RSS will no longer be confused when clicking a prominent icon

Pandodaily is a site about startups. Their audience definitely knows about RSS.

I've just copy pasted http://pandodaily.com/ in Google Reader's subscribe field

and here's what I got: You have subscribed to "Most Odd - Facts of Interest." It discovered http://mostodd.wordpress.com/feed/

very odd indeed...

This seems like a strange bug, but I can not find the pattern. This link is on the page:

http://mostodd.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/pando/

No doubt that plays role. But why?

I was able to recreate your problem with my own Google Reader account. What is truly strange is that this URL is the 16th URL on the page. If you go here:

http://pandodaily.com/

and look at the source, you can see the link to Most Odd is way down the page. This bug would almost make sense if that URL was the first one, but instead Google skipped past 15 other URLs and grabbed the 16th one. (Nor is there an issue of time passing and new material being added to PandoDaily, I did all this checking within a minute.)

I am very surprised that Netvibes gets this right while Google Reader has such an odd bug.

Like 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.

What do the investors get out of this if Sarah is never going to sell it?

Dividends? That would be a novel concept.

Only if the dividends are going to return 10-100x over the lifetime of the investment.

Dividend paying investments can still be sold, so the dividends themselves don't have to return 10x.

But 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?

Have you looked at the bond markets recently? Total return doesn't need to be 1,000-10,000% to make a good investment.

We're talking about early-stage investors and what they expect from an investment when they put their money into a startup.

I 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.

You realize that the whole premise of selling a company for 10-100x is that the buyer believes the dividends will in fact exceed that, right?

I don't understand what's so complicated about my original question. She says she's not going to sell the company. It's reported that she took $2.5M. Let's say she gave up 50% of the company for that (which I'm sure she didn't). And let's assume that the investors want their return within the next ten years (they probably want it sooner). And let's assume it's 10x. So these are ALL very conservative numbers for early stage investors. Let's say she ends up with 50% net profit (never gonna happen). And let's say she pays out 100% of profits as dividends (never gonna happen). That means the investors have to average $2.5M/yr in dividends over the next ten years, which means she has to be doing $10M in gross per year, on average, with 50% in profit. For a tech blog, I think most people will agree this is probably beyond unreasonable. And remember, she said she's never going to sell it.

So again, all I'm asking is where are the investors supposed to get their returns?

It is a good question, your analysis is correct and I don't know why you are getting down votes.

I suspect the answer is three-fold.

1) Investors hope to get returns on private markets. Private markets provide a lot of liquidity these days.

2) Investors (and people who buy on private markets) hope that Sarah means "I want to retain control" when she says "I don't want to sell". It is a reasonable intepretation, and can provide excellent returns (did the Google guys "sell"? Did Zuck? Murdoch?)

3) Investors have a long term investment timeframe. They hope in 10 years time she feels differently.

A return when she changes her mind. The biggest risk is that the company will fail, not that it will be a big success and she'll turn down obscene amounts of money.

my cynical answer: better/more coverage of the startups they fund?

In the same breath that she proclaims she won't sell, she pretty much hedges herself and says she reserves the right to change her mind.

Access. Probably worth a lot more than their original investment.

EDIT: I forgot to wish her good luck. Good luck!

The minute she writes about the companies they have invested in, they got their money. We all know that the hardest problem for a startup is user acquisition.

Money in advertising, emotional value, ticket sales from conferences, etc...

Lets 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.

Even better would be an editorial flow. Unless you want mistakes, writers should not be allowed to post on the site directly.

Agreed, but I dont think TC writers know the definition of those words.

Remember - they are "evangelists" "bloggers" and "technologists" not journalists.

Feels 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.

How much space will be dedicated to fawning over Mark Zuckerberg?

Is it pronounced pander-daily?

When 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?

I'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.

I 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.

>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.

Personally, I think Arrington do have it's problems but I would not suggest the other writers to leave over it.

She already sold the company (to investors). If she didnt want to sell the company she should have bootstrapped.

Agreed. Not like a wordpress blog and design cost that much.

If 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.

My thought was, "Sell what?"

Yes.

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?

They misspelled 'PanderDaily'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com