At least two sources have told me that that Adobe paid well north of $100 million. (Added on December 21: A well placed source tells me that the final number is closer to $150 million.)  What may seem like a lot of money is reflection on reality of the modern software business — not only does a company need to offer software via the cloud, it also has to have a community of engaged users to keep enhancing the value of that offering. Behance team makes those points in a post on Behance blog.

Creation should be inherently collaborative – and must evolve more frequently than typical software upgrade cycles. If the tools we use to create are connected with how we showcase and discover creative work, we can help usher in a new era of idea exchange and collaborative creation.

David Wadhwani, who spearheaded this acquisition on behalf of Adobe writes on the company blog:

 As we start to roll out increasingly integrated workflows across the services, you’ll start to see the benefits of combining the creation of content with the ability to seek feedback, showcase your work and distribute it across devices.

Behance was started in 2006 and raised $6.5 million from Union Square Ventures, Jeff Bezos, Dave Morin, Yves Behar, Chris Dixon and several others. It had a million members and was host to three million projects.

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These deals don’t really tell the story of Gurley. I first met him when he was a former Wall Street analyst and our relationship began with me questioning his analysis. He switched teams and joined Benchmark at the height of the first Internet bubble. Gurley, who in the past used to write the Above the Crowd column for C/Net, took a step out of the limelight. Of course, that is par for course, investors at white-shoe firms tend to be less public than analysts, so our interactions decreased overtime.

When I moved out to San Francisco almost a decade ago, we touched base again, and since then have made it a point to see each other at least once every quarter. He has a very unique point of view about Silicon Valley, the technology industry and the kind of companies he likes to invest in. Polite as he is, he doesn’t sugarcoat anything and has given me advice over the years that was a bitter pill to swallow at the time, but in hindsight, turned out to be exactly what I needed. The only thing we don’t agree on: his love for sports that don’t make sense to a short, somewhat rotund guy like me, basketball and college football — the American kind.

Last year Chris Albrecht and I did a lot of documentary style interviews with folks such as angel investor Chris Dixon, Square COO and angel investor, Keith Rabois and Zimbra co-founder Satish Dharmraj, but this year I took a step back, mostly because I wanted to regroup and rethink whom I wanted to interview. I wanted to bring fresh insights from people whom I respect and believe have something interesting to say. I couldn’t find anyone better than Bill Gurley to kick off this occasional series.

In this interview, Gurley talks about a whole bunch of things including the craft of being a VC, the changing VC landscape, and most importantly, his thesis around reinvention of everything local. The interview was 45 minutes, so we have made it simpler by creating six chunks for easy consumption. We will post the entire interview later. Enjoy the videos.

What it takes to be a VC.

What is the role of a VC? Questions every entrepreneur should be asking.

How network effects reshape local commerce.

What it takes to survive downturns.

Beyond the obvious: What are the opportunities in venture capital?

On Above The Crowd [Slight audio issue here.]

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Dixon said in his personal blog that he’ll be specializing in consumer internet startups, but will be open to any interesting technologies. And while he’ll be based in California, he’ll still be investing in a lot of New York startups. AllThingsD first reported this past weekend that Dixon was in talks to join Andreessen.

Dixon framed his decision as less of a departure and more of a chance to help bring Andreessen Horowitz to New York. He told Pando Daily he will keep his apartment in New York. “You can think of it as I’m abandoning New York or I’m beginning the process of bringing the best venture firm in the country back to New York. I like to think of it as the latter,” he said.

While Dixon has been an active investor in New York startups, his portfolio was already leaning toward California, with about 2/3 of his companies located there. He’s had a pretty good eye on investment opportunities, backing companies like Skype, Foursquare, Kickstarter, Stripe and Pinterest. Founder Collective also just raised $70 million in September. 

I’m sure we’ll see Chris in New York all the time. As is increasingly the case, the lines are blurring a little between New York and Silicon Valley with people jetting back and forth often and setting up offices in both places. Chris will give Andreessen another smart founder, who knows how to spot and nurture talent. And he has plenty of contacts on the East Coast, which will help Andreessen Horowitz get in on even more big deals.

Here’s some video interviews we did with Chris in 2010, the same year he was named top Angel Investor by Businessweek.

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Although he was brought back into the company (with much fanfare) to help guide the product’s evolution, Dorsey is apparently not really involved with day-to-day decisions any more. So who is Twitter’s product visionary now, and what does that mean for the future of the service? According to Bilton, the co-founder has stepped back from having more of a day-to-day role within the company, in part because other employees said he was difficult to deal with and found his product direction confusing. As the NYT writer puts it:

“Mr. Dorsey’s role has since been reduced after employees complained that he was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product directions. He no longer has anyone directly reporting to him, although he is still involved in strategic decisions.”

Who is Twitter’s chief visionary now?

As Bilton describes in his piece, Dorsey — who famously drafted the original idea for Twitter on a notepad in 2006 — left the company under less-than-auspicious circumstances in 2008, after Evan Williams took control and forced him out as chief executive, something Dorsey later said was “like a punch in the stomach.” But not long after Costolo took over as CEO of Twitter in 2010 (and Williams left to start a new startup incubator called Obvious), the company asked Dorsey to come back as executive chairman and help revitalize the product. At the time, Dorsey said on Twitter that he was “thrilled to get back to work at Twitter leading product.”

Over the next year, Twitter redesigned its mobile app and also its website, launching new features that allowed content to be embedded inside a tweet — something the company has since extended with what it calls “Twitter cards,” which allow videos and excerpts of other types of content to appear inside a frame. Some sources close to the company say this effort was the evolution of something called “annotations,” which Twitter promised it would roll out in 2010 but never implemented. Twitter cards are also seen by many as the key to the company’s future revenue plans.

Bilton doesn’t say when Dorsey’s role at the company was scaled back, although reports earlier this year from Business Insider and All Things Digital suggested he was no longer as involved as he had been, in part because his other company — the mobile-payment company Square — had started taking off (it has since become a major player with an estimated market value of $3 billion). And while the NYT piece says Costolo “looks to Dorsey for ideas,” and director of consumer product Michael Sippey also works with him to make sure the product is “Twittery,” it’s not clear exactly what Dorsey has been involved with when it comes to recent features.

What does Twitter want to be when it grows up?

So Twitter now has product leads in charge of consumer features, advertising and international, but it doesn’t have anyone driving the broader vision related to the service except for Costolo — who doesn’t have a product background — and Dorsey in what appears to be a part-time role. Some see that as a bad thing for a startup that is trying to balance the conflicting needs of users and advertisers, something that sources close to Twitter say is causing dissent even within the company. As angel investor Chris Dixon put it when Dorsey returned to the company last year:

“The history of tech companies shows again and again that having a great product-focused founder at the helm has always been the best thing for the company and for its customers/users.”

Twitter has been the target of a lot of criticism from developers and power users recently, for clamping down on the way external apps and services (such as Tumblr and Instagram) use the company’s API, and forcing them to display tweets in certain ways. The company and its supporters maintain that this is not meant as a crackdown on the Twitter ecosystem, but instead is a desire to implement a “consistent user experience” — the same reason the official iPad app was recently replaced, even though some users complained that features they liked were no longer supported.

Users and designers say Twitter’s crackdown on external apps would be a lot easier to tolerate or even support if the company’s own products were more appealing to use. So are the shortcomings in the service and its offerings a result of Dorsey’s vision, or the result of a lack of vision because he has stepped back from a day-to-day role with the company? Either way, those vision problems could cause Twitter even more growing pains in the future as it tries to go mainstream.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jack Dorsey and Pinar Ozger

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The money will help continue Behance’s momentum as it tries to attract more creative professionals looking to showcase their work. The site highlights more than 2 million creative projects covering categories such as photography, graphic design, animation, fashion, interior design and others. That’s up from 1 million projects just eight months ago. Visitors have viewed the projects more than 1 billion times and “appreciated” them more than 22 million times.  Behance gets more than 30,000 projects a week and uses a curation team to narrow its selections. And more than 10,000 personal websites have been created using Behance’s ProSite portfolio builder tool.

For many years, the company was happy to eschew funding but with the recent growth, it saw an opportunity to take Behance to another level. CEO and co-founder Scott Belsky wrote in a blog post that the team is looking at building more products that can serve creators. Albert Wenger, a partner at USV, wrote that Behance will be enhancing its Prosite offering and developing more tools to support collaboration among creatives and between creatives and their clients.

“We have an exciting product pipeline we want to make happen,” Belsky wrote. “So, for the first time, we debated the option of continuing to bootstrap vs. raising funds. Ultimately, the team wanted to kick things up a notch: We want the resources to do our life’s greatest work in serving the creative community.”

Online channels are proving to be a great way for people to find talent through services like Stack Exchange, Github or Kickstarter. There’s still a lot of opportunity in helping people connect to jobs and organize with other people in their industry. Since its first redesign in March, Behance has seen searches for creators on the site jump by 70 percent.

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OMG! These returns!!

The investment team at the Kauffman Foundation believes the venture capital industry is broken and they — or rather investors in VC funds — are partially to blame. The report condemns venture firms for being too big, not delivering returns, and not adjusting to the times. But then it blames the situation on a misalignment of incentives: Namely, limited partners that invest in venture firms have done so in a way that encouraged VCs to raise huge funds at a time when huge funds weren’t really warranted. And now, for the Kauffman Foundation at least, the chickens have come home to roost. From the report:

The most significant misalignment occurs because LPs don’t pay VCs to do what they say they will — generate returns that exceed the public market. Instead, VCs typically are paid a 2 percent management fee on committed capital and a 20 percent profit-sharing structure (known as “2 and 20”). This pays VCs more for raising bigger funds, and in many cases allows them to lock in high levels of fee-based personal income even when the general partner fails to return investor capital.

A smaller VC industry is needed

The solutions to the problem — changing the compensation structure, investing in smaller funds where the partners have also committed at least 5 percent of their own capital, investing directly in startups or alongside funds at later stages, and taking more money out of the over-saturated VC market — are already happening. Look at the widespread trend of angels or smaller funds created by a few investors. Or look at the rise of hedge funds or Digital Sky Technologies’ investing directly in hot companies like Twitter or Facebook at crazy valuations.

It’s unclear if other LPs will take the advice issued in this report, but the trends around VC investment these days are fairly clear. There are plenty of firms willing to put small amounts in at an early stage, so they have the option to keep playing if the deal gets hot. And they are just as likely to drop firms quickly around the second (Series B) fundraiser if they aren’t shaping up into a Pinterest or a Spotify. This hit-driven style of investment is a symptom of too much money chasing a new type of startup, and it’s likely that venture investors will compete until much of the return is squeezed out of a hot deal. And that’s no good for limited partners either.

The Kauffman report lists the ways it has decided to solve the mismatch between LPs and venture firms, and it goes into a lot of depth on how to improve the industry overall. But if one agrees with the assessment and solutions offered in the report, it also will result in some serious questions about the startup economy. The venture industry invested $28.4 billion into 3,673 deals in 2011, according to the NVCA and the PWC MoneyTree report. About 50 percent of their total investments were in seed and early-stage companies.

Does less venture money mean fewer startups?

Following the Kauffman Foundation’s suggestions means the pool will shrink. In many ways this is a good thing, as there will be less money chasing the few standout deals, but it also opens the door to thinking about building companies in a connected era. Angels are already picking up some of the VC slack and will likely continue to do so. Once Facebook goes public, I expect we will see a host of newly minted millionaires playing at being an angel or perhaps taking their riches and using it to build something new.

For those without soon-to-be-liquid options, Kickstarter and the gold rush promised by the JOBS Act are also likely to fill the gap. So it’s entirely possible the pool of venture capital will shrink while the pool of startups will remain about the same. In such a scenario, VCs, angels and then the rest of us play the role of investor. It’s a role millions already undertake, with Kickstarter’s seeing $200 million pledged and 22,000 projects funded since its founding.

And the passage of the JOBS Act means startups can now beg for money among the ranks of friends and family who aren’t accredited investors. I for one am leery of this development, believing it ripe for scams. The law also has the side effect of cloaking information about companies until right before they hit the public markets, which I think is the exact opposite of what a bill that encourages consumer investment ought to do. But still, there will be legitimate companies that will be able to start businesses thanks to the bill.

And as lawyers and entrepreneurs get comfortable with the law, new funding platforms should arise. So perhaps the Kauffman Foundation will find itself on the cusp of a trend, from the old-school style of fundraising where an entrepreneur has few choices and has to play by the VC industry’s rules to a crowdsourced and connected era of raising capital that mimics how the Web is changing a variety of businesses. Maybe the VC industry is like Motown. And it’s going to have to adjust to the new reality.

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The office at 625 6th Avenue will be headed up by Chris Dixon, founder of Hunch, which eBay bought in November. The center, which will have its grand opening this fall, will be dedicated to big data and improving eBay’s recommendations technology. When fully built out, a majority of the workers will be developers, data scientists and statisticians. Dixon said he hopes eBay’s center will be the second largest development office in New York after Google.

For now, there should be plenty of space. Hunch will bring over about 25 people from its cramped office. The new office will be the new home of PayPal’s Shopping Showcase, which has been on display for retailers in downtown New York. It will also host community events and provide free working and incubation space for friends of eBay.

Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon

For New York, the investment is another boost of momentum. Facebook has set up an engineering office not far from Twitter’s recently opened New York office. Google already has more than 1,000 technology workers operating out of its massive Meatpacking district office. Microsoft just announced it’s starting an R&D lab here. The city has also approved a new applied sciences campus led by Cornell University.

Mark Carges, eBay’s CTO told me he started his career in New York at Bell Labs but had to move to Silicon Valley to continue his career. He thinks New York is now in a place to be a magnet for talent and hold on to rising tech workers who might have migrated west in the past.”What is different now is we have big anchor tenants and a strong start up community,” said Carges. “Now, I can stay here and build my career. That wasn’t a choice before.”

Carges said eBay isn’t done shopping in New York and may be looking to pick up other start-ups. The company might also considering expanding the scope of the New York office, perhaps to incorporate more design work. The New York office joins other eBay centers of excellence in Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, Portland, Seattle and Austin.

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The debate over whether we are in a technology bubble — and if so, what kind of bubble it might be — flared up again over the weekend, sparked by a piece in the New York Times that said venture-capital investors are encouraging startups to forego revenue so they can fetch higher valuations. Others immediately took issue with this idea, however, saying there is no bubble and repeated attempts to find one are just an attempt to stir up controversy. So which is it? That depends a lot on what you mean by the term “bubble.” Does it mean the kind of investment mania that resulted in a public-market bloodbath a decade ago, or just any sign of overvaluation?

Bits writer Nick Bilton says in his NYT piece that venture investors are all busy denying there is a bubble, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, because they have an obvious vested interest in perpetuating a hype-filled investment atmosphere:

Acknowledging any possibility that tech companies aren’t worth what you say they are worth would be followed by the sound of a giant pop, and the money and investments would dry up. The machine could grind to a halt.

In fact, says Bilton, venture capitalists are busy inflating the bubble as quickly as they can by telling the companies they invest in to avoid making money as long as possible. Why would they do this? So that valuing the enterprise is as difficult as possible and investors can then propose all kinds of inflated numbers, something financial analyst and venture investor Paul Kedrosky calls “mark-to-mystery” financing. “As long as there are no numbers, I can have whatever mark I want for an external valuation,” he says.

Is this just 1999 all over again?

Bilton also quotes Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, as saying what we are seeing in Silicon Valley right now is “1999 all over again — but this time, it’s gotten worse.” The professor adds that companies are “throwing around funny money” and that the “economic values don’t add up.” Technology veteran Dave Winer also says he believes the market is fundamentally bubble-oriented at the moment.

It’s not clear what Pfeffer is referring to exactly, but it’s not a stretch to think he’s probably talking about deals like Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram, which sent shock waves through the startup scene. But is that the sign of an impending bubble? It might be if you assume that Facebook itself is overvalued and therefore was able to pay a ridiculous sum of money for a small startup. The most obvious sign of whether Facebook is overvalued or not, of course, will come when the company starts publicly trading and investors of all kinds get to weigh in on what they think of its future prospects.

Venture investors like Dave McClure of 500 Startups argue that Pfeffer is mistaken and there are no signs of a 1999-style bubble in technology.

.@nickbilton there are FAR fewer crazy business models, lack of revenue, bullshit vapor ware startups these days than ever before.

—
Dave McClure (@davemcclure) April 29, 2012

If public stocks aren’t overvalued, is there a bubble?

And McClure is right in a sense: The kind of mania the tech sector witnessed in the late 1990s, with unprofitable and even revenue-less startups going public at massively inflated valuations, has yet to manifest itself in today’s markets. You could argue that Zynga, Groupon and other companies are overvalued, but they have suffered share-price declines that show a substantial amount of skepticism — the kind of skepticism that was in short supply in the late 1990s. Apart from Facebook, there are few signs of any kind of mania for public technology stocks.

StockTwits co-founder and venture investor Howard Lindzon (see disclosure below) says the only bubble that exists is in the oversupply of what he calls “wantrepreneurs” — people who are chasing the pot of gold at the end of the startup rainbow. That kind of impulse has likely been accelerated by stories like Instagram’s but also by the ease with which startups can be built and grown in today’s digital world, thanks in part to “crowdfunding” platforms like Kickstarter and the availability of cheap computing services in the cloud, which have dramatically lowered the barriers to entry.

Even if there is a lack of public-stock mania, however, that’s not to say there aren’t still risks. If the flow of investment money at the angel and seed-stage level gets too large, it can inflate bubbles that can in turn help produce bubbles further down the spectrum. And if that pressure overflows into the public markets, it could start to look a lot more like the 1990s fairly quickly. But for the moment, whatever financing pressure there is seems to be concentrated at the smaller end of the market.

Bubbles, yes — but not a capital “B” bubble

This is the conclusion that angel investor and entrepreneur Chris Dixon comes to in a smart post on the topic, in which he looks at the different elements of the bubble case. Public stock prices don’t really look overvalued at all, Dixon says, and one-off deals like the Facebook purchase of Instagram aren’t compelling evidence either. And while there are signs of inflated valuations in certain parts of the ecosystem such as the seed stage, he says — driven by people trying to find the next Facebook — there are signs of undervaluation in other parts, including at the Series A level.

One of the parts in the New York Times story that got the most reaction from venture investors — apart from just the general suggestion that they are inflating a bubble — was the accusation that “[M]ost venture capitalists . . . are not interested in building viable long-term businesses. Rather, they’re interested in pumping up enough hype and valuation to find a quick exit through an acquisition at an eye-popping premium.” Some critics said this is true by definition, since venture investors are interested primarily in short-term returns. But Dixon argues that even if it is true, smart investors don’t take that approach:

No good venture investors invest in companies with the primary strategy being to flip them. This isn’t because they are altruistic — it is because it is a bad strategy. You are much better off investing in companies that have a good chance to build a big business. This creates many more options including the option to sell the company. Acquisitions depend heavily on the whims of acquirers and no good venture investors bet on that.

So while some venture funds may be doing their best to inflate expectations and cash in on high valuations, that appears to be causing problems only at the small end of the startup pool — for now. Without any obvious signs of a public-stock mania that puts individual shareholders at risk, it’s hard to argue that we are in a 1990s-style bubble yet (although some critics fear that the new crowdfunding bill could accelerate the problem). Whether Facebook’s IPO triggers a broader inflationary atmosphere remains to be seen.

Disclosure: StockTwits is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Photo Clinique and Bill S

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In the wake of ensuing outrage, the company changed its policies and is now asking for explicit permission. It also issued an apology and deleted the data uploaded to its servers. As hours (and then days) went by, it was obvious that Path wasn’t the only company or mobile app that was indulging in this behavior. Other apps, such as photo-sharing service Instagram, quickly changed their policies and issued software updates.

The whole issue seems to have boiled over with Nick Bilton’s piece in the New York Times – So many apologies, so much data mining. Today, we have seen a lot of discussion, including some like angel investor Chris Dixon wondering why is Apple allowing this behavior and not forcing apps to ask for permission? These are all legitimate arguments and counter arguments.  However, the most important question is, what do we learn from all this and where do we go from here? What is that question we should be asking ourselves?

Do The Right Thing

Apologies, outrage, anger and blaming Apple for not being more strict overlooks one of the most important aspects – the moral imperative. As I sit here are watching the white-hot arguments, I wonder why we aren’t talking about doing the right thing. Why do I bring this up? Today’s apps are inherently more social and thus by extension more human. The relationships on this social web are going from increasingly virtual to more real. In a sense, these apps have started to reflect our daily lives. As many have said before, we are the social web and the social web is us.

Dave Winer in his post, How industries react to crisis writes:

It’s time to make this change in tech, once and for all. Your products are not toys, they are used seriously by real people. You need to show respect for your product, and that means respect for your users.

Our daily lives have many layers of trust built into them. There is an implicit social contract that implies that trust. Doing business with your bank, dry cleaner, green grocer and coffee shop is built on that trust. We are friends with others whom we trust. We work with people we trust. And that trust is what drives us to do the right thing. As my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote in his piece, Lessons from Path and Pinterest:

The lesson here is that for social apps, the trust of users is paramount, and the best way to maintain that trust is to be as open as possible about everything that is occurring, particularly if it involves a user’s personal data. Whatever you are doing with it may not seem like a big deal to you, but better to be open about it than have it revealed by someone else, at which point you look sneaky. As Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has put it, “Trust is the new black,” and it never goes out of style.

Social apps of today need to understand this concept of trust and doing the right thing. Just because Apple doesn’t have a “permission” behavior imposed on the apps, doesn’t mean that the apps have to do it. Just look at Marco Arment’s Instapaper. It uses the address book access on the iPhone in a manner that is respectful of his customers, their privacy and yet balancing it with the needs to grow his business. Here is what he wrote:

When implementing these features, I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty. Even though I was only accessing the data when a customer explicitly asked me to, I wanted to look at only what I needed to and get out of there as quickly as possible. I never even considered storing the data server-side or looking at more than I needed to. This, apparently, is not a common implementation courtesy.

Could he have grown faster had he followed the herd? Perhaps. What I am saying is that as the web becomes more social, we need to think about “people” first when designing software. Instead of asking for forgiveness, the app makers have to start by being explicit in what they do or don’t do.

As we look into the future, the web of today is not that of early adopters. It includes moms, grand-moms and others who may not be savvy about permissions and privacy. And that is why the imperative is on the app developers to do the right thing. Is it hard? Perhaps. Will it slowdown the growth of some of these companies? Maybe, maybe not — we won’t know until someone tries it. However, building trust and being upfront about how apps work and how our data is consumed and relates and impacts us can’t necessarily be a bad thing.

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Sarah Lacy, an author and veteran journalist (most recently with TechCrunch) is launching PandoDaily, a daily technology news blog focused on startups and the startup ecosystem. The name for the site comes from a colony of trees in Utah called, Pando Trees. Though spread across 43 hectares and weighing 6000 tons, the colony’s interconnected root system is the inspiration for this new site and Lacy is focusing on the startup ecosystem.

Lacy has roped in former colleagues – Michael Arrington, M.G. Seigler and Paul Carr for the new site as guest columnists. Farhad Manjoo, a columnist for Slate and Fast Company joins the group of writers who will write what Lacy calls “exclusives, edgy opinion posts, stellar product analysis, insightful people and culture stories and *real* breaking news.” She has also hired a couple of other bloggers for the new company and is in the process of hiring folks to help her with sales and organizing events.

The company is being funded by a $2.5 million investment from some of the most well known investors in Silicon Valley and some of the top seed funds. Investors in PandoDaily are – 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 & Benchmark Capital) – who are all investing as individuals. The seed funds investing in the company include the CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel’s Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs.

Lacy left TechCrunch and believed that selling it to AOL was a mistake. She says she doesn’t plan to sell this company and if she does, then she will have failed. In a blog post on her new site, she writes:

I’ve never been one of those people who just wanted to start a company for the sake of starting a company. I was more than happy to spend life writing about them. I’d thought about starting a blog in the past, but ultimately decided it would be more fun to work with Mike and Heather to make TechCrunch even bigger. We didn’t agree on everything, but I always felt TechCrunch got the important things right — things like giving a crazy founderthe benefit of the doubt that his plan might work and things like flatly calling out bad actors in the ecosystem.

So this fall, when AOL violated the promises not to meddle in TechCrunch’s affairs kicking off an exodus of talent and a subsequent decline of page views, I got a lot of very kind job offers. But I knew I had two real options: Stay and help put the pieces back together or and leave and start something that I could decide not to sell to AOL.

To do the former, I would have to get over everything that had happened. And I knew I couldn’t do that. And the idea of starting something new — starting with a clean sheet of paper, surrounded by great advisors and knowing with everything we’d learned at TechCrunch– was so intoxicating that in the end, that was the biggest reason I quit.

And while we might compete with PandoDaily for stories, as a fellow entrepreneur I am excited for Sarah. I am glad she made this move into entrepreneurship. I have watched  Sarah go from being a reporter for a local business newspaper in Santa Clara to a writer for Business Week and then an author of multiple books before ultimately finding her true voice at TechCrunch.

Good luck with the journey, Sarah!

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