Sarah Lacy has reported on startups and venture capital in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade. She writes Valley Girl, a biweekly column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance. Sarah is an award winning journalist and author of a brand new book called “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” (Gotham Books, May 2008).
This is by far the best interview I’ve ever conducted. I promise you will take away at least one piece of advice from listening to Sarah’s story. With hard work, determination, a network and a little bit of luck, I see no reason any of you can’t rise to the top like Sarah did. I’ve shared four personal branding success stories on this blog and this one certainly is a fifth for the collection. You can view Sarah’s blog here if you have deeper interest in her background or simply want to connect or leave a comment.
—
How has journalism, more specifically your experiences with BusinessWeek and Yahoo!, helped you build your personal brand and network with those who supported your book efforts?
Sarah Lacy: Well, the most obvious way is just having the platform and tacit endorsement of the largest circulation business magazine (in BW) and the largest media audience ever (in Yahoo). I’m incredibly lucky not just to have had both in my career—but to be able to do work for BusinessWeek and Yahoo simultaneously.
Even so, there are no quick ways to build a brand the right way. It seems to a lot of people like I appeared out of nowhere in 2006 with the Digg cover and subsequent book deal, but really so much of building my brand had been a decade of effort. I’ve never wanted the brand to be about me, so much as the work that I do and what makes it unique. That takes an actual career, building sources, credibility and just getting better at it through great editors and mentors. Anyone can look at a business and come up with a quick, snarky blog post. Really have substantive business analysis takes reporting and sources and experience.
So much of my book was steeped in a decade covering tech and finance, making contacts along the way that I had no idea would prove to be as valuable as they have. Reporting is a true relationship business, when it’s done well. That’s the most lasting way to build a brand, one relationship at a time. Whether that’s a relationship with peers in the industry, sources or even readers. That way whenever there’s a silly “controversy” about you, the people who matter know you and don’t care.
The whole reason I got this book deal was because I had incredibly unique access to the players. That’s something not even the best pedigreed publication can get you. It just takes building your credibility and trust over time. Put another way: your brand within your small sphere is crucial to build before you can build any sort of larger brand in the world.
What influenced you to write your new book, “Once You’re Lucky. Twice You’re Good“? Did you know you wanted to be an author when you first started your career?
Sarah Lacy: It was actually news to me that I even wanted to be a reporter, much less a business reporter! I’d never taken a journalism class or a business class in my life! I interned at a business weekly and just fell in love with it. I think people are intimidated by business and they shouldn’t be. First off, it’s important as corporations really do rule our lives in one way or another. And second, business reporting done well are just stories about people. People love stories about people.
I knew I wanted to write a book back in 2001 when I read “Infinite Loop” by Michael Malone on a red-eye to New York. I couldn’t put it down. It was so obvious how much more richly you could explore the things about journalism I love in a book—like the people, relationships, conflicts, redemption. By the time the plane landed, my goal was to write a very narrative non-fiction book. But that’s also every reporter’s goal, so I thought I’d be lucky if it happened to me one day. I never thought I’d be lucky enough to do it at such a young age, and for a mass market publisher like Penguin. I actually freaked out a little once I closed the deal realizing I needed a new career goal!
When it came to this book in particular, I knew after working for months on the BusinessWeek cover about Kevin Rose I had a much bigger story that needed to be told, that I was in a unique position to tell. It was all I could think about.
Out of all the web moguls you interviewed, such as Max Levchin from Paypal, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook and Marc Andreesen, who was the most interesting you? Which story was most surprising?
Sarah Lacy: It’s really like asking me to pick between children. I decided who was going to be in the book, not based on their businesses at the time, but purely on whom I found fascinating, whom I thought would be more relevant in 2008 when the book would be published and beyond. So the degree to which someone is in the book tells you exactly how fascinating I found them! (I’m sure Max Levchin has this graphed somewhere…)
I do have to say the chapter that focuses on Marc Andreessen, “Return of the King,” has always been one of my favorites. I’ve long been fascinated by what it must have been like to be Marc Andreessen. He was made to be such a symbol for everything right and wrong with the most insane period in Silicon Valley’s economic history, but really he’s just a guy. I didn’t come to the Valley until the peak of the bubble, and have always been sad I didn’t get to cover Marc in Netscape’s early days, before he was MARC ANDREESSEN. I’ve had the opposite experience covering Mark Zuckerberg so closely during the Facebook run up, so those two are sort of bookends for my reporting experience.
The chapters on Mark Zuckerberg were the hardest to write. He is the single hardest person in the book to get a handle on, and the most difficult to interview. But over the course of getting to know him I went from thinking he was a total train wreck to a very innately talented leader and visionary. I have a lot of respect for him now, and always feel bad that people misread him so badly. I’m proud of the chapters on Marc and Mark because they’ve been written about so exhaustively, but I feel you see a totally different side of each of them in my book. That was not easy though!
In contrast, the chapters on Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson and Max Levchin wrote themselves at times. I spent the most time with the three of them—I mean hundreds of hours— and they were each so incredibly open about their thoughts and feelings, it was really just getting it on the page and hoping they didn’t cringe too much when they read it months later!
What is your opinion on the fall of the dot-com era and the awakening of the new silicon valley with web 2.0/social media? Do you think there is new hope or is this just another cycle?
Sarah Lacy: Well I think the most positive and most damning thing about this wave of companies is that so far no one is going public. As I explain in detail in the book, I think there will be far fewer huge public companies to come out of this wave, but the companies themselves are far more socially transformative.
So while there’s no danger of Web 2.0 wrecking the Nasdaq and our economy, it’s also in many ways not as huge of a mainstream business story. It’s really more of a people story and a culture story.
After your cover story about Digg Founder Kevin Rose, how has your personal brand become more well-known? What opportunities were you given as a result and how has your life changed?
Sarah Lacy: My goal when I moved to Silicon Valley to cover venture capital was simple: I would work really hard, go to work at the Wall Street Journal or BusinessWeek, write a big A-1 feature or a cover, and get a book deal. No one is more astounded than I am that it actually worked out that way! It wasn’t that easy though. The economy crashed soon after moving here and reporting jobs were impossible to find. I worked at the San Jose Business Journal for years—through a lot of layoffs and regime changes, thinking I might never get a job at a national publication.
When I was interviewing at BusinessWeek (finally!) it was a long six month process. At one point, they wanted me to accept a job in Chicago. I went there to check it out and met Brian Grow—and ace reporter for BusinessWeek, who’d also had a bit of a bumpy journey getting to a staff position. He told me my first cover would change my life but I didn’t really believe him. I didn’t see why it’d be that much different from having a story in the magazine. It’s not always, but ours (I co-wrote it with Jessi Hempel, who’s now at Fortune) was not an average cover. That made it pretty brutal to push through BusinessWeek and pretty controversial once it came out. But it also made it a cover no one forgot, which is pretty special to be a part of.
And that was it. Penguin called us both. Jessi didn’t want to write a book, and I did. I got an amazing deal and quit my job about a month later and my life has never been the same since.
Because I was covering such a high profile scene, I basically lost all my privacy. I had to get used to being photographed, written about, and regularly trashed by anonymous commenter’s. It’s not fun and very hard on my husband and our families. But other than that, my life is better than I could have dreamed. I have so many opportunities and get to tell stories over so many media, whether it’s as old-school as a book or my video show on Yahoo Finance. I get to travel all over the world, meeting with entrepreneurs. That’s a big reason I write a column for BusinessWeek still—I’m very grateful for the opportunities editors there gave me.
If I had my wish, I’d probably still be an obscure byline on a story. But that’s not an option if you want to be an author in this day and age, You have to promote yourself constantly. It’s definitely worth it, but I hope to stop reading mean comments about myself one of these days! I can’t take my mother-in-law crying anymore!
