PandoDaily
» see pando.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the goodbye ~
PandoDaily was the kind of thing american tech journalism produced in the 2010s. i was engineering in ankara through the whole run of it, aware of the site through hacker news links but never a subscriber to the paywall. It launched on 16 January 2012, founded by Sarah Lacy after she left TechCrunch and took a portion of the reporting culture with her.
Lacy raised $2.5 million from a lineup of investors who would end up being the subjects of the blog she was starting: Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Tony Hsieh, David Sze, Jim Breyer, Chris Dixon, Josh Kopelman. The obvious contradiction of covering the same people who funded you was the running joke about PandoDaily from day one. Business Insider called it "TechCrunch 2.0" at launch, which was accurate as a demographic aim and misleading as a description of what the site actually became.
The name came from Pando, the aspen colony in Utah that shares a single root system across thousands of trunks. Lacy's metaphor was that Silicon Valley was one connected organism pretending to be a lot of individual companies. The site's tone tracked that: skeptical about the ecosystem, personal in voice, willing to publish grudges the trade press would not.
~ the chronicle ~
| Born | 16 January 2012 by Sarah Lacy |
|---|---|
| Peak | 2014, breaking Uber leadership and culture stories |
| Killed | 23 October 2019 (sold to BuySellAds) |
| Lifespan | 7 years, 9 months |
| Made by | Sarah Lacy |
| Killed by | founder burnout, harassment, silicon valley coverage exhaustion |
~ how it landed ~
PandoMonthly, the live event series with a founder or investor on stage in front of a paying audience, ran alongside the blog. Michael Arrington did some of the interviews. Paul Carr took the politics beat; M.G. Siegler and Farhad Manjoo passed through the staff for various tenures. In November 2013 Pando acquired Paul Carr's NSFW Corp, which was the moment the site pivoted toward harder-edged investigative work.
The Uber coverage was what most people remember. Lacy went after Travis Kalanick and Uber's leadership culture starting in 2014, publishing stories about the company's willingness to threaten journalists that eventually contributed to the arc that ended in Kalanick's ouster in 2017. In the middle of that reporting, a Uber executive publicly floated the idea of digging up dirt on Lacy specifically. She was one of the reporters who paid a personal cost for the coverage.
~ the long tail ~
In June 2015 Pando moved to a paywall subscription model at $10 a month or $100 a year, with new articles going to members first. That was the transition from tech-blog into small-membership publication. It sustained the site for another four years but the daily rhythm was over. On 23 October 2019, Lacy sold PandoDaily to BuySellAds and announced she was leaving journalism. She cited a decade of harassment and threats that had come with the coverage.
The archive is still online at pando.com in 2026. The Uber stories are still up. The PandoMonthly interviews are still up. Everything after October 2019 is BuySellAds housekeeping. That is what a tech blog looks like when it wins on the coverage that mattered and then quietly stops publishing.
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