Dear Sarah Lacy,
First of all, congrats on the launch of PandoDaily! I’m looking forward to reading (and responding to) your sharp commentary on the startup world. A publication focused exclusively on the ecosystem makes sense, and I’m glad to see you join the ranks of the founders that you’ve covered for most of your career.
I also like the idea of the PandoTicker, which is where you aggregate the top news in the startup space. Honoring embargoes for the Ticker while reserving long-form content for exclusives is also a smart move.
But I still have two questions that I’m hoping you could answer:
- Where are you going to draw the line for what you cover as a “startup”? In other words, when does a company cease to become a startup? AdAge reports that you’re going to be exclusively focused on startups and that we shouldn’t expect a lot of coverage of Microsoft or the other big companies. That’s fair, but when does a company cease being a startup and start becoming a big tech company? Is it when it IPOs, when it reaches a certain number of employees, or am I just splitting hairs here?
- Is your ambition to focus solely on PandoDaily, or do you intend to launch other sites in the future? I ask this because the name of the company is PandoMedia, which gives you wiggle room to expand. I’m curious whether you intend to expand this out into a media empire or keep this as a one-site organization.
Again, congrats on the launch, Sarah. I expect that your venture will do very well. I’ll definitely be reading.
Best,
~ Ben
Image courtesy of Flickr, Robert Scoble
Hey Ben-
Thanks! It’s been a fun– if terrifying– week!Â
Answers:
1. So in calling ourselves the “site-of-record” for the startup ecosystem, we want to cover everything startups need to know. A lot of time, that will include news and analysis about big tech companies (as we wrote plenty of this week) because big tech companies compete with and buy small companies. Startups need to know what they’re doing. So there are no hard and fast rules here. But primarily we do what we do because we love meeting and writing about great entrepreneurs.Â
2. That’s a very astute question 😉 This week was intended to be a very soft launch. There’s a lot more to come from PandoDaily. We have a very big vision, and I hope we get to make it a reality. It all stems from writing really great content day-in-and-day-out about startups. If we don’t succeed in that– nothing else will work. So we’re 100% focused on that for now. But to answer your question directly, right now the plan is that it all leverages off of PandoDaily, not a family of sites. But startups change all the time as you know!
Hope you keep reading! There’s a lot more to come from us!
Sarah