Sarah Lacy launches PandoDaily to report news on startups
Tech reporter Sarah Lacy, who recently quit TechCrunch, launches PandoDaily with $2.5 million in investments to focus on dispatching news about startups.
Former TechCrunch reporter Sarah Lacy launched a tech news site today called PandoDaily that is geared toward documenting every startup that pops up in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Lacy, who has covered tech for more than 15 years, says she quit TechCrunch in November because its AOL buyout was affecting the site's content.
In a manifesto called "Why I Started PandoDaily," which Lacy wrote and published on the news site, she said that her goal is to not sell PandoDaily. "Selling is not success to me. If I wind up selling, I've failed in some way," she wrote. "Success is that I wake up and write about startups on this blog every day for the rest of my career."
To help get the site up and running, Lacy raised $2.5 million, according to Gigaom, and got a host of investors to sign on, including Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih (Zappos), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon (FounderCollective), Saul Klein (IndexVentures), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), Jeff Jordan (ex-CEO, Open Table) and Matt Cohler (ex-Facebook and Benchmark Capital). She also got seed funds from CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel's Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs.
She emphasized that reporting on startups using their investment money could be seen as a conflict of interest but swears it won't be a problem. "I mean, they've already written the checks, so it's not like they can take the money back, right?" she wrote. "Either way, we'll disclose everything."
Lacy also promised not to invest in any startups herself, along with her staff writers, which include her former TechCrunch colleagues Michael Arrington, M.G. Seigler, and Paul Carr, along with former Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo.