Sarah Lacy’s PandoDaily Raises $2.5 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:09:03 +0000

Sarah Lacy is the author of “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” and a columnist at BusinessWeek. Michael Arrington hired her to write for TechCrunch.com, but she quit shortly after the technology blog was acquired by AOL. Today it was announced that Lacy has started a new website called PandoDaily and it is backed with $2.5 million in funding. PandoDaily is a daily technology news blog and it will focus on the startup community. The website name was inspired by a colony of trees in Utah called Pando Trees.

PandoDaily will feature regular columns from Michael Arrington, M.G. Siegler, and Paul Carr. Farhad Manjoo will also be a columnist at the website. The $2.5 million in funding came from individual investments from Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, Jeff Jordan and Matt Cohler. Aside from these seed investors, PandoDaily has also received funding from CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel’s Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs.

Lacy said that she has no intentions of ever selling PandoDaily and if she does, then she believes she has failed. She was heavily opposed to TechCrunch being sold to AOL at the time, but believed that Arrington deserved to get rich. Personally I’m excited for Sarah and the fact that another tech blog has received funding reaffirms the business model.

[PandoDaily]

OpenTable Going IPO

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:28:59 +0000

OpenTable is an online reservation system for restaurants that started eleven years ago. Thus far about 90 million table reservations have been made on OpenTable. They have filed an S-1 with the SEC indicating that they are ready to go IPO. OpenTable is hoping to raise $40 million from the IPO and wants their stock to be listed under the NASDAQ. Merrill Lynch is bookrunning the deal.

The company has made $41.3 million in revenues based on the first 9 months of 2008. This is a 41% increase from the year before. Revenue is generated by restaurants that pay subscription fees (54%) and reservation fees (42%) that show up through the system. Installation fees generate 4% of OpenTable’s revenues.

Through the IPO, OpenTable is hoping to raise an additional $40 million. Between 1999 and 2000, OpenTable raised about $48 million in VC funding. Fortunately former eBay executive Jeff Jordan was able to street the company through the bubble and make it as far as IPO. When a web 1.0 company makes it this far, you just have to commend it.

[via CN and TC]

Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Jeff Jordan

Sarah Lacy’s PandoDaily Raises $2.5 Million

OpenTable Going IPO