Sarah Lacy wrote the much read and celebrated cover story on Kevin Rose of Digg.com for Business Week. From there she went on to launch one of the early experiments of independent investigative journalism with her site Pando, breaking a lot of journalistic ground.
So why am I sharing this here? Because of the long note (Oct’19) on why Sarah Lacy decided to leave journalism. And this is what her post is about. She writes how she loved being in the Silicon Valley and writing about cutting edge tech but she also exposes its ugly underbelly –
“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.”
This is a piece worth reading if only to ensure that we retain the balance in our minds while we race to create the next Unicorn.
Where I learnt this #412
We sold Pando
