"This is my last story about Uber CEO Travis Kalanick" (and some thoughts for investors)
That's Sarah Lacy's headline in the quotation marks, not ours. We'll probably have more on Travis over the next few years.
Sarah was the primary target when Emil Michael and co-conspirator Kalanick decided to do oppo research and initiate their "politics of personal destruction" campaign against journalists.
The effort was funded to the tune of a million bucks.
We looked at those goings-on a few times:
...Or the time they tried to destroy the life and business of Sarah Lacy, founder and editor-in-chief of tech website Pando:
The moment I learned just how far Uber will go to silence journalists and attack women
"Uber has an asshole problem"Those last two are from 2014 so, yeah, we've been posting on this stuff for a while....
"Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists"
***
I used to say there were two women we linked to on Uber, the FT's Izabella Kaminska and Pando's Sarah Lacy::....Besides the fact Izabella was one of the first journos—along with Pando founder Sarah Lacey who had the advantage of being the target of an Uber smear campaign funded to the tune of a mil. to tip her off that something was not right over on Market St., San Francisco, CA, USA—besides the fact Ms Kaminska was on the story back in 2014 she has additionally posted more on the Ubester than most folks alive....And here is Sarah saying goodbye.
From Pando, October 23:
Sarah Lacy: "We sold Pando"
If there is a single moment when it seemed like my journalism career suddenly caught fire, it was the 2006 Business Week cover story I wrote about the rise of Web 2.0 companies.
It was hated. It was loved. It inspired weird half-assed halloween costumes. And it won me a book deal which allowed me to buy a house in San Francisco and then led to my job at TechCrunch (v1), and eventually to founding Pando.
At the time I wrote that cover, I was the most junior, least pedigreed member of the BusinessWeek tech team, but I knew a good story when I saw it. Just as importantly I was young enough that I could see the ever-changing Silicon Valley ecosystem through fresh eyes. A lot of much more experienced journalists expressed doubt over the story and subsequent book, arguing that I was wasting my time shadowing “has beens” like Marc Andreessen or upstarts like Mark Zuckerberg who was merely playing at the next incarnation of Friendster. Was this guy really the future of Silicon Valley?
The reason I’m thinking about this story today - fifteen years after that first big cover story - is because this post marks another personal and professional milestone for me.
This is my last post as editor in chief and CEO. Paul Carr and I have sold Pando to a brand new owner. And for the first time in my career, I am no longer a journalist.
I have so much to say about the sale, which is to BuySellAds - a company we started working with at Pando back in 2012. I want to tell you why I’m so excited about this deal. I want to tell you why I’m so proud of Pando’s legacy, and the dozens of fearless journalists who helped us build this brand. I want to talk about what I plan on doing for the rest of my career.
But mostly, I want to explain to Pando readers why I’m leaving journalism.
As I watched colleagues peel off for other easier more lucrative careers over the decades, I thought I was the one who’d be a lifer. But I realized in the last few years that I’ve become like those jaded journalists a generation before me who could no longer see the Valley through fresh eyes.
Simply put: Over a 20-year run spent ahead of the story, chasing the story and sometimes becoming the story, too much has happened between me and Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley was a place that I so fervently believed in that I got here by any means necessary in my early 20s and rebuffed any offer for higher paid, more prestigious journalism jobs in New York. It’s a place where I’ve gotten to know some of the most fascinating people on the planet and made many lifelong friends. It’s a place where people have believed in me enough to give me millions and millions of dollars to build my own companies. It’s the only place I’ve lived and worked outside my hometown, and I’m only a few years away from having lived here longer.
And yet.
It’s a place where I’ve been sexually harassed more times than I can remember. It’s a place where I’ve been lied about, where VCs have arm-twisted editors to fire me, where billionaires have threatened those doing business with me to cut all ties. It’s a place where I’ve had people turn on me again and again and again simply for doing my job. It’s a place I’ve been betrayed by people I trusted. It’s a place where one-time friends threatened my children because I wrote about things they did.
And of course I’m not the only one, and my experience was far from the worst: In the last few years I have been overwhelmed by stories of sexual assault and harassment told by so many incredibley women in the Valley, holding back so much talent and driving so much talent out of the industry.
I have absorbed so many more stories than I have reported, more than I can ever report, about the dark side of Silicon Valley. And if you are a Pando subscriber, you know that’s saying something.
Increasingly I feel like I’m suffocating from all the ghosts of my career in San Francisco. A few weekends ago, I went on a hike to the highest point in the city and looked down a view that once made me pinch myself. A view that I saw for the first time in my early 20s and vowed I’d do whatever it took to make it here. But the other day, all I could think was, “I’m so fucking sick of your shit, San Francisco.”....MUCH MORE
That Sarah Lacy— the journalist who’d run out of fucks to give— was the perfect version of me to cover the run up, apex and colossal destruction of the bro era of Silicon Valley yet, where chasing unicorn valuations was really about chasing masculinity. An era I’ve called the bursting of the toxic masculinity bubble. While the early Web 2.0 era may have inspired a version of me who could believe in the Valley again, the era that has culminated in the evaporation of $40 billion in WeWork worth needed someone who could report out the absolute worst of the Valley without flinching. There’s a reason that in story-after-story Pando was months— if not years— ahead of peers in reporting the worst of the Valley. (We wrote lots of positive stories too, but we know from the data and every conversation I have with readers, those aren’t the ones you remember.)....
HT, TalkingBizNews:
Tech site Pando sold; Editor and founder Lacy departs
We'll post another of our Pando favorites this weekend.
