Dave Meehan

Dave Meehan is a technology writer in San Francisco.

One corner of the Internet was atwitter yesterday over this Valleywag post, which reprints some emails PandoDaily founder Sarah Lacy and writer/publisher Paul Carr sent to employees employees and cofounders of an event space in Los Angeles. If you don’t know who those people are, then congratulations. The only thing you need to know about Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr is that they think they are Very Big Players in their little world, which in this case is writing very boosterish things about tech companies. And Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr are indeed both quite well-known in that sphere. As these emails showed, they are also both raging assholes, drunk on entitlement.

The problem was, PandoDaily had an event at this space, and Lacy got upset about the event space putting its logo up somewhere, and also maybe some other random inconvenience of the sort that reasonable people get annoyed with but do not usually end up threatening extortion over. Lacy said this person could either “work off the $20k you stole from us” by giving PandoDaily free use of the space for eight additional events — no one “stole” $20 thousand from anyone, that is just what PandoDaily claims to charge for “brand sponsorship,” which is to say, putting a sign up in your own space with your logo on it — or else Lacy would “let people know why when they ask and we’ll reference it in our next post about our next LA event,” which means she will use her very large platform to disparage this event space. In short: Give us free things or we trash you.

The event space’s CEO point