In addition to low costs of living, there are very real tax advantages to being based in Tennessee or Nevada and likely other states that I know less about. And given my near constant complaining about San Francisco and California’s downright hostile attitude towards startups, you’d think that one would be appealing.

But there’s a reason I never talk up taxes or cost of living as reasons other startup ecosystems will take off: Because none of the people who really matter give a shit about these things.

Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz said this best at one of our very first PandoMonthlys. Someone in the audience asked why he didn’t start Asana in a place like Nevada, and he was almost confused by the question. Here’s how he answered it:

The clip took on greater meaning the week after our talk when Eduardo Saverin — another Facebook founder by way of a lawsuit — renounced citizenship to avoid taxes just before the Facebook IPO. It showed a sharp distinction between the way Saverin thinks and the way Moskovitz thinks.

To put it bluntly: The kinds of people you want in a new ecosystems aren’t the Eduardo Saverins. They are the Dustin Moskovitzes. In the early days of Facebook, it was Moskovitz who left Harvard to move to the Valley and build Facebook into something great. Saverin stayed back East and hedged his bets. It was Moskovitz (and Mark Zuckerberg) who didn’t to throw banner ads all over the site to maximize immediate revenue. It was Saverin who wanted to do that. And it was Moskovitz and Zuckerberg who earned their billions by building a company.

Great entrepreneurs aim for the best case scenario and optimize for taking as much risk out of the equation as they can. Prioritizing the location of your headquarters based purely on cost aims for the worst case scenario, at the risk of putting your company farther from investors, potential acquirers, and talent — three things that could have very real consequences on your ability to scale or even just stay in business.

Note that while the irascible Bryan Goldberg is noisily leaving California because of regulations, he is building his new company in New York – not exactly a haven of operating cheaply. Rather than optimizing for cheap and going to, say, Nevada or Detroit, he’s he’s optimizing for the less arduous ecosystem where he can also have the tools he needs to build an online media company.

Ecosystems should just stop making this argument. They’re never going to get top entrepreneurial talent, and will only attract those people not aiming high enough, who are motivated by saving money, not making it, and not building something great — the mercenaries, rather than the missionaries. Take a lesson from the daily deals space which got overrun by bargain hunters and rabid couponers who would never translate to customers paying full price.

Aim for the dreamers, not the bargain hunters.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

As you read first on the Wall Street Journal, Paul Carr’s NSFWCORP has raised more money. Hooray! Also: Thanks for the exclusive, jerk.

At least we’ve got the backstory for you here during our latest installment of WITN. We shot this one during our most recent LEAN IN! trip to New York, so there’s a baby involved. But there’s also talk of funding rounds, profitability v. growth, and various other smack-talk.

And for those who will be annoyed at Paul holding the camera wrong at the beginning — don’t worry, he figures it out…eventually.

Enjoy!

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

Forgive us for dwelling on it, but there were just so many great moments in our fireside chat with Fred Wilson last week. It was really one of my favorites this year. And two of my favorite moments were about the venture capital business.

Wilson — a man known for his strong opinions — was at his most rabid on the topic of corporate VCs. “I am never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to do that again,” he said. Adding in one more “ever!” just in case we didn’t quite get it. He explains why in the clip above, and notes that Intel Capital and Google Ventures might be two exceptions to his rule. But those two aside, Wilson says it’s repeatedly gone so badly in the past that it might be the one thing that makes him leave a board in the future. (He’s not the first to throw mud at corporate VCs on this site…)

This exclamation aside, Wilson spoke elsewhere in the evening about how he was at a disadvantage as a VC when it comes to giving a lot of advice, because he never had operating experience. It took him longer to learn how to excel as a board member as a result and says he wouldn’t recommend his particular career path to those wanting to break into venture capital.

There’s just one benefit to his lack of operating experience, he says: He will never assume he can do a better job than the CEO. “I have a lot of respect for the job the CEO is doing, and I don’t personally feel that I could do it better,” he says.

Huge thanks to Wilson for sitting down with us. If you’re in San Francisco, there are still tickets available to this week’s fireside chat with Github founder Tom Preston-Werner. We’d love to see you there!

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

If Reid Hoffman really were a Saint of the highly-valued niche social network, he’d be smiling down on last week’s $1 billion-plus acquisition of Waze.

When reports were swirling that Facebook was interested in Waze, it was called an Instagram-like bid for more users. But that’s not really what either of those deals was about.

Waze’s users would barely be a rounding error for Facebook — or Google for that matter. And really, what are the odds that people who are using an early adopter mobile traffic app aren’t already users of either Internet titan?

No, this was a deal done despite relatively modest user numbers of less than 50 million people. While it’s true that Instagram didn’t have much more than that at the time of purchase, far more of them were in the US and contributing content. And it was on a steep growth rate. And really, Instagram wasn’t about sheer users either. It was a defensive move to keep a large social network centered around photos out of a competitor’s hand, and a way to solve Facebook’s “mobile problem.”

Waze on the other hand was a deal about data. It was about making maps something more dynamic and social than fixed points on a grid. It was about taking human beings and using their insights to create a more dynamic, accurate and useful map of the world.

Sound familiar?

Yesterday we brought you a clip of investor Fred Wilson talking about how the value of Foursquare isn’t about check ins, rather it’s about “maps with people in them.” Okay, Foursquare doesn’t have real time traffic updates. But you could — and I would — argue that the data Foursquare is collecting on where people go and what they do is potentially more varied, rich, valuable and usable for different applications. That’s particularly the case when you factor in Foursquare’s API which is also used by Path, Instagram, Uber, Evernote, Garmin, Vine, Magellan, and – you guessed it! – Waze.

Right now there are some 40,000 developers building on Foursquare’s API, and while a lot of that data never comes back to Foursquare, a lot of it does and that makes Foursquare’s maps even richer and more dynamic than their four billion checkins would have you believe.

You add to that the fact that Waze and Foursquare aren’t too far apart on user numbers. Waze claims some 47 million users, but most are outside the US and only about 70,000 submit information around traffic. By comparison, 35 million people use Foursquare, and Foursquare.com sees some 50 million people per month. And it gets location data about way more places and people through its widely used API.

You can argue how much more valuable US users are, or the value of a user that contributes data on places versus one who just consumes it. But ultimately, the numbers are similar enough that a big question emerges: Is Waze overvalued or is Foursquare undervalued?

Earlier this year, Foursquare experienced well documented struggles matching the valuation of it’s previous round of venture capital. The company decided to do a debt round, largely to put off the topic of valuation for the time being. Should Foursquare prove a big breakthrough is around the corner, it’s a brilliant move. If not, the inevitable is only delayed.

Given the gamble, Foursquare can’t help but be encouraged by the recent weeks since that $41 million fundraising was closed. Tumblr — the other big New York based tech company that was facing a slow road to monetizing — was worth more than $1 billion to Yahoo, and now Waze — a company that uses data to create more dynamic maps on mobile using Foursquare’s API — is also worth more than $1 billion.

I even see a link between this theme of dynamic maps and the surging popularity of Snapchat — another company rumored to be raising money at a valuation north of $500 million. Even if those prices bear out, a venture valuation isn’t remotely the same thing as an acquisition. Still, Snapchat has tapped into a new, distinct way to communicate.

Recently, my husband and I have started using Snapchat to communicate with each other throughout the day more than we use email or text. (Get your mind out of the gutter. We’re not sexting. I just had a baby for Christ sake.) Rather Snapchat allows you to send messages in a more visual, whimsical way. It’s similar to how people are hand writing out status messages to communicate in text over Instagram. Just as Twitter helped compress time and space by letting you know what your friends were doing at any point in time, Snapchat has allowed my husband and I feel closer. It’s the little seemingly disposable moments that create intimacy. Showing him something I know he’d roll his eyes at if he were with me or seeing a photo of wheels down rather than a text that says “landed” just makes you feel more connected.

Wilson and I spoke about this as well last week, and he talked about how Snapchat isn’t really a social network as some have said. It’s more of a messaging app. And again, during the Q&A section our talk, he noted that making utilities on the phone more fun meant they were used more. It strikes me that Foursquare is a more fun maps app at its core; the way Snapchat is a more fun and engaging messaging app. As phones become the core of our Internet-enabled lives, we use them dramatically differently than we used feature phones. But many of the central utilities like address books, texting and even dialing haven’t changed much. Why shouldn’t it become more enhanced, smarter, more social, more useful and more fun in the process? Given how much mobile has changed to we really expect these core utilities to stay static?

I’m not arguing that Foursquare is worth more than its already-rich last round valuation of $600 million. I had a few interesting conversations about the business while I was in New York last week that made me think it could be, but it’s hard to know enough about the inner workings of a private company from the outside.

Regardless, one thing is certain: Either Waze is dramatically overvalued or investors aren’t giving Foursquare enough credit. I wouldn’t count Dennis Crowley out just yet.

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

God damnit.

I hate to do this.

I really, really hate to do this.

But I have to hand it to Nashville. The city is suddenly doing a great job of being nationally relevant.

Evidence of this seems to be popping up all around me. Whether it’s the Forbes magazine I was reading on the plane this past weekend saying that Nashville is the second hottest job city after San Francisco. Whether it’s CondeNast Traveler saying Nashville is one of the top five cities to visit in the world this year. Whether it’s Country Star Trace Adkins somehow beating out Penn Jillette on the All Star Celebrity Apprentice– a finale that was billed as Nashville vs. Vegas and everyone assumed Vegas would win. Whether it’s Blake Shelton’s whole damn team racking up the votes on the Voice every week. Or whether it’s more meaningful statistics to my world: Like the fact that Nashville is surging when it comes to investment and startup growth, relative to the rest of the state and a lot of the South.

I simply can no longer deny that Nashville is doing something well. And last week, I got a glimpse of it up close at the inaugural Southland Summit, held at Nashville’s historic Cannery Row just before Bonnaroo.

I am a native Memphian and the two cities are intensely competitive. I’ve always argued that Memphis is very authentic, while Nashville tends to constantly claim to be new things. There are places that even claim to be the home of Elvis in the city. ELVIS! At the Nashville Airport there’s a deli that says: “Authentic Nashville New York Deli.” I don’t even know what that means, but it sort of says it all. When Paul Carr visited Nashville a few years ago he picked up on this calling it sort of a sanitized theme park of the south: Here we have New Orleans land, and here we have Elvis town, here we have fried chicken, and here we have country music…

At the opening night dinner for the conference, the Mayor of Nashville Karl Dean talked about how Nashville has pivoted from one industry to the next–from publishing to finance to for-profit healthcare. I’ve observed the exact same thing. In fact, the Mayor’s praise is the exact knock I’ve long had on the city. Economically such nimbleness is good.  But, to me at least, it’s always left Nashville feeling like it didn’t in and of itself stand for much. Cities have to give me a reason to love them.

Memphis on the other hand is a place haunted by its past. There are ghosts around every corner, whether it’s Elvis, the assassination of Martin Luther King, or our just-barely-making-it roots that came from being a transient port city on the Mississippi. The blues are more than Memphis’ musical heritage. It’s a familiar blanket that settles over the city and never seems to leave. That’s part of what I adore about Memphis. As downtowns across America become identical rows of chain stores, Memphis stays utterly unique. They say you can never go home, but I absolutely can. And yet, economically, there’s no denying Mayor Dean’s point: It doesn’t grow at the same rate as Nashville, because it’s less nimble and opportunistic.

As the Southland Summit neared, James Dowd of the Memphis Commercial Appeal put this in stark, tough love relief for our mutual home town: In 2001, Memphis and Nashville were roughly tied when it came to income from local business owners. Ten years later, Nashville’s entrepreneurs reported some $11.6 billion in income, double that of Memphis, which had barely moved at all, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

I’ll admit it: I felt like a traitor going to speak at a Nashville conference. And I was mostly doing it as a favor to a friend, truth be told.

But two things surprised me at the Southland conference that both– grudgingly– made me feel a warmth towards Nashville for possibly the first time in my life.

The first is that Nashville is doing a better job of embracing its own historical uniqueness of late, rather than chasing Atlanta or other whitewashed cities of the South. Now, there’s some of that opportunism the Mayor described at play here. Country music has become decidedly mainstream of late and being the home of it suddenly has big-time international currency.

I’m not a fan of new country– at all– but old country is another matter. My kids’ middle names are “Cash” and “June.” Every time I’ve been to Nashville before I’ve felt all the new. Southland was wise to put the old stuff front and center. Sitting on the stage of the historic Ryman Auditorium on the opening night of the conference and listening to Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell sing Pancho & Lefty to a private room was the first time Nashville has given me chills. Sorry, Memphis. But it happened.

The second surprise was even smarter and even more surprising: This wasn’t a Nashville conference. It was a conference for all of Tennessee. (It claimed to represent all of the Southeast, but I didn’t see much about Mississippi, Alabama or Arkansas on display.) I was expecting more of a tech conference’s version of the Tennessee Titans– a team that other cities in Tennessee desperately wanted but Nashville got. Although they gave it the state’s name, as a nod towards inclusiveness, the team has always been regarded as a gloating Nashville victory lap.

But aside from the Mayor’s boasting remarks about Nashville, Southland felt different. The conference as a whole displayed that Nashvillian ability to be a chameleon, adapting to whatever is hot at the moment, but at the same time, it unapologetically played up unique Southern culture and heritage. It was a combination of what has made Nashville economically ascendant and that quagmire of heritage that I love about Memphis at the same time.

Part of that is because of the efforts of LaunchTennessee– the organization behind the event. Bill Hagerty, the Commissioner of Tennessee’s Department of Economic and Community Development and the chairman of LaunchTN, is serious about making this a statewide push. When his budget was recently cut by more than 40%, he cut costs centrally and invested more in areas outside of Nashville, bankrolling a network of accelerators throughout the state. The state matches venture capital contributions to companies in these incubators, but it doesn’t pretend it can do the heavy lifting of a venture firm all on its own. “We’ll never lead a deal, at least not on my watch,” he said. That’s the same approach Israel took, to legendary success.

LaunchTennessee did something else important too: It made Charlie Brock– a Chattanooga native– CEO. I spent a good deal of time with Brock last week. I wasn’t aware that the resentment towards Nashville plays out on the other end of the state as well. It sent a strong signal that Hagerty didn’t name a Nashville guy as CEO. In organizing Southland, Brock brought in people from around the state too– including those with Tennessee roots who’ve left like Mike Tatum, who roped in other Tennessee natives like me.

Brock, Tatum and crew did an excellent job of highlighting Tennessee’s unique culture at the event. In addition to the opening night at the Ryman, speakers got super VIP passes to the nearby Bonnaroo music festival. (Or those who didn’t have to be at an event the next day in New York did…) There were relevant panels on music and the business of whisky in addition to the regular startup demos and VC panels. Biscuits and fried chicken replaced the regular bagels and muffins for breakfast. It was an event I could easily talk people into attending.

That said, there were some things that could have gone better. Having multiple tracks was a mistake for an event this small, and the speaker curation could have been tighter. There should have been more BBQ. And they could have done a better job of highlighting huge success stories from the state alongside the flown in speakers. There are huge entrepreneurial success stories: Memphis has FedEx, Nashville has a lot of medical device wins, and Chattanooga has labs doing hardcore research. Rather than just listening to success stories from the Valley, organizers should show off the billion dollar companies Nashville has created.

That was the model I took with putting together Disrupt Beijing years ago, and both groups of speakers learned a lot from one another. Similarly our PandoMonthlys are about highlighting local heroes, not dragging Valley VCs and entrepreneurs around the US. They could take another page from the TechCrunch Disrupt playbook and get some country music moguls on stage. People may roll their eyes at celebrities, but they pack the rooms.

But those suggestions aside, I came away from Southland bullish that this could be much more than just a regional conference if the organizers are willing to listen to advice, court the whole state to participate, and continue to invest in the franchise. Commissioner Hagerty described how medical devices had become Tennessee’s greatest export: It’s as much about the technical talent in the East of the state and the powerful logistics and distribution chops of Memphis as it is about Nashville’s track record at for-profit healthcare.

Neither of these cities on its own will be the next Silicon Valley– or even the next New York-level tech scene. Working together is best model for how Tennessee becomes a hub for fast growing companies. It may come at the expense of geographic density, but cities have been trying to copy the Valley model for decades now and failing. It’s time for a new model that leverages the unique strengths of the whole state.

Whether I like it or not, that needs to be centered in Nashville. I wish it were Memphis, but Nashville is hot right now. It’s the perfect time for the state to get over petty municipal differences and get together to pull in cash, investors and attention like a tractor beam.

The state has something other people would die for: Important people want to visit. They love our music; they love our food. By playing on that and hooking it to the front end of a music festival, Southland is mimicking what SXSW Interactive did well. By focusing on the strengths of a region, it’s doing what Big Omaha did well. If it combines the two, it could be the hot new emerging tech conference in a sea of ones getting stale.

[Image courtesy mikerhicks]

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

I’ve been leaning in so much lately I’m in danger of falling over.

As regular readers know, my own biological clock and career trajectory have coincided with an interesting time in women’s employment rights. Just as the debate has raged over whether or not the paucity of women entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley is some deep, dark sexist plot, various women have weighed in on your own likelihood of having it all. Sheryl Sandberg has offered advice on navigating an unfair system. Meanwhile, everything Marissa Mayer does as a new mom and a high profile tech CEO seems to be a noisy Rorschach test for America’s views on working moms.

I last wrote about this topic as the controversy around Sandberg’s book “Lean In” was reaching a zenith. My take in a nutshell: This is all highly personally and situationally dependent, and anyone who lets another woman tell her what she can or can’t have doesn’t deserve any of it. At the time, I was expecting my second child imminently. I’ve now had about 10 weeks on the other side of labor and delivery.

No real surprise: It hasn’t been easy.

Everyone says that two feels like way more than two. Particularly two under two. (My son is 21 months old, and PandoDaily was born in between them.)

Add to the chaos the fact that the two months after I gave birth have been PandoDaily’s biggest traffic months in the history of the company — by a significant margin — and last month, we doubled our revenue, outperforming our own ambitious goals. We’ve just hired our first director of sales (some six months later than I’d hoped), and I had to revise the sales goals up several times during the negotiation, because our contract sales team was just selling so damn much.

That may sound like I’m bragging to anyone who hasn’t built a company from scratch. Mo’ revenue is great, but it also creates a lot mo’ problems when it comes to servicing all that revenue. Simply put: At the exact moment I welcomed my second child into the world and my son neared his terrible twos, my company’s growth dramatically accelerated.

Not enough to juggle?

In the 10 weeks since we’ve become a family of four, the four of us have been in the same city for about three weeks. My husband is finishing an MFA in photography and working on an ambitious two-year photography project in downtown Las Vegas. Add in a PandoMonthly in LA, two in New York, and two conferences since Evie’s birth, and we’ve been criss-crossing much of the United States in endless combinations. Me and Evie and the night nurse. Eli and our nanny and my husband. Me and Evie and Eli and the Nanny. Me, Eli, Evie, my husband, and the nanny. And my least favorite combo: Just me and the breast pump. Every once in a while a Paul Carr is thrown into the mix.

Then there are the trips — like my recent one in New York — where it’s just me and the newborn, and all attempts to hire child care on the ground come up empty. Last Thursday’s PandoMonthly was particularly absurd, when my crying newborn was rocked and soothed by a combination of my staff and the CEO of our event’s sponsor, Smartling. That’s right: He paid us money and then babysat.

A lot of parents have a day when things go wrong, and they have to take a kid to work with them. It just doesn’t usually happen when you’re interviewing Fred Wilson in front of a beyond sold out crowd of 200 people. It’s well beyond Sandberg’s advice to have a 50 percent-50 percent marriage. My whole company, Fred Wilson, and our audience were all in on my parenting journey that night.

And yet, here’s the thing: It’s all still totally doable. Yep: Even if my highly specific, absolutely insane personal case of work-life balance that few women will ever be crazy enough to mimic, I am building a company (quickly) and am a very engaged mom to two young kids. The world isn’t just “letting” me — the world is helping me. On the other side of baby No. 2, I can say two things with more conviction than ever before: You can absolutely have a career and a family. More surprising: You can do this precisely because most people actually want working moms to succeed. Yes, even white men controlling way too much of the world.

I have been nursing or pregnant every day I have run this company. A media company, by the way, that has a 90 percent male audience, highly indexed to be single and childless. I have raised $3 million in capital — $2.5 million of that with a newborn in the room (sometimes crying) and another $500,000 of that weighing some 200 pounds, uncomfortably late into my third trimester. I couldn’t scream, “NOT A 20-YEAR-OLD PROGRAMMER WHO CAN DEVOTE EVERY SECOND TO RETURNING YOUR CAPITAL” louder even if I were to actually scream it. And yet, we’ve quickly closed funding at higher valuations than I expected with some of the best investors in the world, nonetheless.

And no one — not a single one — has warily asked if I was done having kids, if I could get a male co-founder, or if I was really at the right stage of my life to build a company. On the contrary, when I returned to posting the week after giving birth, several of my investors reached out privately to encourage me to take more time with my family.

What about my team? Not only has everyone at this company joined knowing full well that I have small children, they spent nine months preparing for me to be gone from the company when I went into labor. Over the last two months everyone on the team has stepped up dramatically, without complaining, making our company considerably stronger as every metric since the beginning of April shows.

And our community? Rather than getting a load of tweets complaining about my crying baby backstage at two PandoMonthlys, I’ve gotten dozens of notes of “You Go Girl!” style encouragement. My somewhat messy integrated life appears to have won me more fans than it has detractors. When people were filing out of PandoMonthly last week, many of them stopped to peek at and say goodbye to Evie on the way out, several high-fiving Paul for his epic (and surprising) baby-soothing abilities.

In my experience, people — at least those in our community — root for working moms for the same reason they root for entrepreneurs. Those who haven’t done it find it unimaginable, and those who have done it remember the pain and empathize. I’m not the first person who has built a company while raising small children, I’m merely one of the most public about it for one big reason: I want to erase the FUD that this is all somehow impossible and that women have to chose between starting a company and raising kids. Is it messy and chaotic when I do it? Yes. But I am doing it nonetheless, and I’ve never been happier or felt more fulfilled.

And here’s the thing: I am not a millionaire. Nowhere remotely close. You can make that somewhat unfair knock on Sandberg and Mayer, but you can’t make it on me. I work on a startup salary with razor thin savings.

Oddly enough, when I was a young woman in my 20s in this industry, I was struck by how many people I didn’t know wanted me to fail. As a woman nearing 40 with two kids, I am stuck by how many people who don’t know me want to succeed. And thanks to social media, this isn’t really a “feeling” — there’s pretty good data to back both sentiments up. Maybe the haters have simply grown tired of hating me. Perhaps as I’ve aged, I’ve become less objectionable. Or more likely, maybe there is something that’s so universal and hard-coded into us about respecting motherhood that it changes whether people root for you. “Having it all” may not only be doable, it may come with actual advantages. 

I have already said I hate the over abundance of advice on “having it all,” but for what it’s worth, here’s mine:

Don’t think about it. I’m a fan of the Wile E. Coyote school of running off a cliff and not looking down. I know there’s nothing underneath my feet, but If I don’t look down I can still keep running in mid-air. When people have asked me how I’m doing it, I’ve simply responded, “I have no idea, because I’m not thinking about it.” This post is probably the most introspection I’ve given the topic in the last two and a half months. Doing and thinking about doing both take time and energy, and I just don’t have any of that to spare.

Let people help you. When people offer help, they want to help you. Let them. Let it take a village. That’s how it’s supposed to be. No child needs all of its needs met by one person. I have no idea when I last did laundry, and yet I have clean clothes. That’s so much better than either of the alternatives.

Avoid making promises. If I’m not sure whether I can make a dinner or not, I say that I’ll try. I made no pronouncements about maternity leave. Instead, I said I’d do work when I could. Promises box you in, and life with two small kids and a company is constant improvisation. There are already so many things you have to do; try not to commit to those that aren’t absolutely necessary. The last thing you need is to feel like you’re failing because of an unrealistic promise you made that other people didn’t demand. And that includes unrealistic promises you make yourself. Three people have asked me when I’m due since I gave birth. That is incredibly depressing. But it took nine months to put weight on, and it’ll take a while to take it all off. That’s just reality.

Thank everyone and be gracious. While you shouldn’t expect you can do this alone, you also aren’t entitled to have a village help you just because you got pregnant. Be grateful that anyone gives a damn about your kids or your vision enough to help you be the best at raising both of them. (Even if you pay them to help you. In fact, be even nicer to the ones you pay.) Hell, I’m even grateful you are reading this.

It all boils down to accepting that you aren’t Superwoman and that this is going to be messy and chaotic. But just like any stage of life or business, it won’t last forever. I drink lots of coffee and grab naps in those rare moments the kids are all asleep. Nothing is melting down; emails are all answered; and there’s already 15 stories on the site.

Am I luckier than most women? In many respects, yes. While my salary is less than half of what I would have made staying in my last job, the ability to raise funding meant I could pay myself a decent enough wage to afford an excellent nanny. Our company got enough traction early on that I was able to hire a team that takes initiative and doesn’t need me to micromanage them. I have a very engaged husband who doesn’t balk at being alone with two small kids. Indeed, we actually have debates over which one of us gets to take our toddler on a business trip. I also had a fantastic role model in my own mother — a teacher who had five kids.

But one of the things that I’m the most grateful for is that entrepreneurial stubbornness that tells you that you are somehow different, that you can do the impossible if you just work hard enough: Whether that’s balancing work and family or upending an established industry. No one hands you either opportunity. It’s up to you to tune out all rational thought and take it.

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

Certainly the Valley is built on household names. Apple. Netscape. Google. Facebook. Massive brands everyone knows that even become verbs after a point.

But there are also plenty of great companies built here that certain communities rabidly know, love, and live in everyday that the rest of the broader world may no nothing of. GitHub is one of these.

Last year when we broke news of GitHub’s monster series A funding round the story caught fire and the comments were almost universally developers high-fiving the bootstrapped company and saying the monster valuation was well deserved.

But what of the people behind GitHub? At this month’s PandoMonthly we are bringing you an in depth interview with Tom Preston-Werner GitHub’s founder and CEO. I first met him at a Valley BBQ where he expressed his annoyance that we broke his funding round. It seems he’s forgiven us.

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

You don’t have to look too hard in Silicon Valley to find someone who will tell you how over television is.

TiVo forever disrupted commercials, dooming the industry, right? Yahoo has long pointed to the amount of time people spend on the Web versus watching TV, arguing that at some point the flow of ad dollars will rush towards the Web. Netflix is creating its own programming to rival cable networks. Go ahead, cancel our favorite shows. We have Netflix now. And Apple CEO Tim Cook has a familiar old refrain about how the experience of watching television just hasn’t changed enough in the last 50 years. The implication is that companies like Apple and Google can do better.

To hear the Valley tell it, there’s little the TV set is doing that the Web can’t do better.

One Kings Lane’s CEO Doug Mack has a slightly different point of view. He loves TV. I mean loves it. He gushes about its promotional potential every chance he gets. He says its unique power is still completely and totally undisputed. And while most ecommerce 2.0 leaders are playing around with real world, brick and mortar showrooms, Mack is all about broadcast.

We first chatted about this last December when Mack announced a big ol’ $50 million strategic investment from Scripps Networks — owners of HGTV and other cable channels.

Like a lot of ecommerce 2.0 entrepreneurs Mack considers his company as much about content as commerce, and he wants to dominate all three screens: The Web, mobile, and TV. He thinks One Kings Lane can dominate in home improvement on the Web and mobile. TV? No way. He needed a partner and found a natural one in HGTV.

At the time of the deal, Mack said:

Scripps knows content. They know more about content than we could build on our own. I can’t share all the stuff we’re going to do together. But from a vision standpoint, we are so aligned. Both of us serve the affluent female customer, age 24-55. Their viewers are they people who view home improvement as a hobby, and that’s who we want to get to.

As Mack and I discussed at the time the Scripps deal was announced, the Valley is rife with strategic partnerships that never amount to much. Mack responded that he had done strategic deals with each company he was previously at and was well aware of how they frequently go. This partnership would be different, he vowed. Less than a year in, it seems that wasn’t just idle boasting.

During the premiere of “HGTV Star” on Sunday night, OKL was officially unveiled as a part of HGTV’s top rated show. HGTV Star is like Project Runway or Top Chef for interior designers. Throughout the season, OKL will have a “pop-up store” full of accents and accessories that the designers can use to polish off the rooms they design for each weekly challenge. It’s kinda like the Lord & Taylor accessory wall on “Project Runway.” In addition, the prize for the opening challenge was having an element of the winner’s design made and sold on the site.

OKL’s co-founder Susan Feldman was on the show to announce the tie up. Regular watchers of reality TV know that contestants always absurdly gush about the brands included. I mean everyone on “Project Runway” is just dying to get their hands on those HP tablets, right? The season opener of HGTV Star was no exception.

A contestant on Feldman:

“I almost tackled the woman! I am a super fan of hers!” 

And about the challenge prize:

“Bam! A dream come true!” 

“Are you kidding me? I mean this is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

“Winning this challenge and having my item featured on One Kings Lane is exactly what I’d want to do with branding and my own line!”

It’s a nice way for One Kings Lane to steadily show off room accents available on the site. You can’t have this whole room, but how about these throw pillows? After all, TV was the original native advertising. And I had to chuckle at the use of the trendy term “pop up store.” At our CEO Supper Club on ecommerce, Mack was the only one to defy the “pop up” trend, saying he’d rather have a TV network at his disposal than a more trendy brick-and-mortar showroom. In a way, he’s got both.

The partnership will run through the length of the season.

While Feldman was getting “almost tackled” on national television, Mack’s team was trying to make sure the site was ready to fulfill what HGTV was promising. The second the winner was announced, they had to make sure the site had the winning items on sale. (They knew which were the winning items ahead of time but couldn’t put them on the site before the episode had aired, lest they tip off who the winner was.) Additionally, the team made sure the items showcased in OKL’s pop up boutique were featured on the site the following morning at 8 am for their featured event of the day. And they had to make sure there was enough of the items to go around. “There’s a very real time aspect to this,” Mack says. “It’s a lot of work to make sure you are completely ready the minute the segment is on the air. The team did a really good job.”

This time. Mack had learned how important this was the hard way. OKL’s first partnership with broadcast was with Bravo’s “Million Dollar Decorator.” They had $100,000  worth of product available that were featured on the show, and they sold out within 15 minutes. “While it was successful, we so missed the upside of the opportunity,” Mack says. “We didn’t have nearly enough product to sell.”

So how’d it go this time around? He cut out the numbers, but here’s what the traffic graph of the site looked like as soon as OKL was mentioned on the show. The dark blue line is this week; the pale blue line is last week’s traffic:

Backing up the whole thesis that people shop on mobile while they watch TV, mobile app installs more than doubled during the apisode. The site is running a concurrent HGTV event, and when I spoke with Mack yesterday, he was only twelve hours into it, and it had already sold 50 percent of the amount forecasted for the whole three days. One Kings Lane also saw a 379 percent increase in sign-ups stemming from the premiere of the show, versus the normal rate of sign-ups. “All early signs are good,” he said. “I never cease to be amazed at the power of broadcast. The second ‘One Kings Lane’ is said, we see a spike in traffic.”

The best part? Unlike with the Bravo show, OKL didn’t have to pay upfront to be included on HGTV like a traditional ad. Instead, the deal called for HGTV to “share in the upside” of any “productive traffic” One Kings Lane gets. I asked Mack what that meant, and it’s a bit like an Amazon affiliate relationship. HGTV essentially gets a cut of the sales from all the traffic that comes in during the timeframe of the episode, as well as the traffic that comes in from HGTV.com, whether those people buy the items mentioned on the site or buy way more beyond that.

So did Mack know this was in the can when he assured me the Scripps relationship would amount to more than just a press release and some cash? He hoped. But there were no specifics at the time of the investment only a verbal intention to do this sort of thing.

A network that gives you ads without up front costs and also invests? Not a bad deal for the last man in Silicon Valley who unabashedly values the tube.

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

Jason Calacanis had a hard time narrowing it down between Twitter and YouTube…

Jason Hirschhorn agreed with Calacanis on the power of Twitter and YouTube but opted for something that seemed more fun…

Paul Carr took the opportunity to throw mud at another media entrepreneur (natch)…

And Peter Pham picked perhaps the most powerful and ambitious company on the Web…

Huge thanks to each of our Loudmouths and Sam’s by the Sea for a fun evening, one of the most trafficked video series to date on the site, and a lot of great content.

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.

Regular readers know that Paul Carr is no fan of Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick. Here’s what happens when he has dinner with one of Kalanick’s investors.

Warning: Very coarse language. (But you didn’t really need to be told that did you?)

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.