Sarah Lacy returns to Austin after SXSW fracas
Austin Business Journal - by Laura Hipp ABJ Staff
Tech journalist Sarah Lacy will make her first appearance in Austin next week after experiencing the wrath of Twitter at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival last spring.
Lacy will be the featured guest at the Austin Tech Happy Hour and sign her book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good - The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, which was released earlier this year.
The event is from 6-8 p.m. Sept. 11 at The Marq in downtown Austin. To learn more about attending the event click here.
Lacy writes the “Valley Girl” column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance.
She made headlines of her own in March when a South By Southwest audience turned against her during an interview with Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Displeased with her questions, a few audience members jeered and complained on the microblog site Twitter.
She takes the view that “any press is good press” from the experience.
“It’s just the scene and the world we live in,” she says. “The good thing is, you know what people are thinking and that’s always valuable feedback whether you agree or not.”
She took time to answer a few questions on her first book and her return to Austin:
Q: First, why did you write this book?
A: As Web companies started to bubble back up (after the crash), I was still watching the scene and the venture industry (largely) missed the trend early on at the most lucrative phases and missed a larger trend of the Web disenfranchising them the way it did the music industry and other industry gatekeepers in the 1990s. That lead to a very, very different Web wave this time around and, culturally, I was fascinated by how it built on the bubble — but never forgot the bust. I was equally as fascinated with the people around the trend.
Q: Austin tech entrepreneurs are always comparing their efforts to their Silicon Valley peers. What differences do you see between the two tech communities?
A: I haven’t spent enough time in Austin yet to answer that authoritatively. Each community is different, but there are some surprising similarities between them. Washington D.C. and Seattle have some obvious similarities since they boast large Web powerhouses. Portland and Omaha were surprisingly similar in that they draw a lot of strength in terms of innovation and ideas from their strong creative classes. Creativity is as important to Web 2.0 as actual technical chops, since so much of the underlying technology is standard on the Web now. I’d guess Austin’s creative class would be an influence on the scene there as well and it seems Austin has a strong venture firm in Austin Ventures.
Q: What are your thoughts on Austin’s tech scene?
A: It seems I always hear more hype about Austin’s great tech scene than I see truly great startups growing out of it, whether in terms of sites and technologies I use everyday or hot IPOs/acquisitions. And according to (Dow Jones) VentureOne, the whole state ranks seventh in terms of startup activity with the number of deals falling slightly year-over-year since at least 2002, with the exception of 2005. That said, Austin seems to be a place the tech world loves though, so who knows? More could be budding than is showing up in the numbers so far. If this tour has taught me anything it’s that people are doing cool stuff everywhere, so hope to meet some of those people at the event.
Q: Are you looking forward to your return to Austin?
A: For all the hoopla 60 percent of the 500 or so negative Twitters about the SXSW keynote came from three people, and I got more than 10,000 heartfelt Twitters, Facebook messages or e-mails all from different people supporting and defending me. So it was pretty much the textbook definition of a vocal minority. Believe it or not, it was actually quite a feel-good experience towards the end. Some of the support was public; most of it was private, which is fine. I’m grateful for both. And as you know reporters are supposed to fire people up. Um, job well done I guess, right?
Q: Looking back months later, what did you learn from all the hoopla?
A: I didn’t lose a single job, source, friend, or fan as a result of it, and frankly, those are the people that matter to me most. I’ve never even gotten hate mail directly —which is pretty stunning if you think about it, because sending an e-mail isn’t really that gutsy — but the vast majority is anonymous over the Web. People in the Valley get attacked all the time, and almost all of them will tell you it’s almost always a net positive. I do a lot of speaking about companies’ need to embrace the social web and how to do it right. The biggest fear is the lack of control about what people say about you, and I argue that you always gain insight and ultimately benefit as a result of that.
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