In the latest installment of mediabistro.com’s “So What Do You Do…?” interview series, BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy talks about her new book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, and about bouncing back from arousing the Internet’s scorn during an interview with the founder of Facebook at the SXSW conference earlier this year:
“I had come across so many other examples of things like that happening to other people that I wasn’t particularly shocked by it because I was very aware there is an ugly side to empowering people so much. It was more hurtful and stunning on a personal level then it was a case of “Oh my god, how did this happen?” … I think this was very exclusive to SXSW. I’ve been on stage several times since then and never been abused. I mean, SXSW is known as ‘Internet spring break.’ There are a lot of CEOs who are very big into that crowd, and then there are stuffy business people who would never speak there for that reason. A ton of powerful Valley CEOs and others wrote me after the conference and said ‘I never want to do that conference after watching what happened to you.’ I’d be stunned if Mark Zuckerberg did it again.”