Gawker: valleywag, david ulevitch

Gizmodo, Ars Technica party all night

Owen Thomas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:01:49 EST

Poor Ars Technica and Gizmodo. The gadget sites invited San Francisco's thirsty class over for some pre-Macworld booze at Harlot in SoMa last night, and the assembled crowd drank the hosted bar dry in 35 minutes flat. I ran into a host of familiar faces there, including a certain Farker who goes by the unforgettable login of "catbutt." So unforgettable that I called him ... well, something else instead. And no, I'm not throwing David Ulevitch the shocker — just a gesture that looks a lot like it. Fake Steve Jobs blogger Dan Lyons, making his Macworld debut, drew a tight bubble of fans around him everywhere he went.

Photos by Randal Alan Smith

Lotus Vodka offers release from the tech scene

Megan McCarthy — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:45:10 EDT

A tip for those of you trying to mingle with successful entrepreneurs and VCs: Attend more than just the standard tech meet-and-greets. The people who are really in a position to help you with your startup never go to them anyway. So where to go instead? Check out events like last night's Lotus Vodka release party at SoMa's Euro-inspired restaurant Supperclub. You'll find founders and the moneymen behind them willing to chat and unable to prejudge you based on your nametag. Refreshing. Bonus: The nontech people who attend these things make for a far better-looking crowd. Far better-looking. The full report, and a gallery of photos, follows.

So, what does vodka have to do with tech? Rob Bailey, founder of Delicious Brands, maker of Lotus Vodka, is an ex-Yahoo business-development exec who came up with the idea of creating a vitamin-infused vodka after mixing the spirit with Glacéau Vitamin Water. It's sort of like disintermediation, except with alcohol! After quitting his position at Yahoo, he cashed in a bunch of stock options and started up Delicious Brands. He also convinced a few techie friends, like Jonathan Abrams of Friendster and Socialzr fame and Saar Gur of Charles River Ventures, to invest or advise.

Who would you have seen if you squeezed onto the packed invite list and made it out to Supperclub on Harrison Street? The uberconnected Auren Hoffman, pictured above, arrived in crutches, the result of a nasty soccer injury. He got plenty of sympathy. Yelp's pretty-boy founder Jeremy Stoppelman and his model brother Michael showed up. The newly 30 and effortlessly charming Jared Kopf came out with his team at yet-to-launch Adroll, his stealth advertising startup. Other people spotted in the crowd: venture capitalist Eve Phillips from Greylock Partners, OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch, Foundation Capital VC Mike Brown, Robert Pazornik from LicketyShip, and Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook's guy in charge of data.

Supperclub is rarely, if ever, the scene of a dotcom party. There's a large circular bar by the entrance, making the room crowded, stuffy, and difficult to maneuver around. And it's loud, too. Lotus hired DJ Solomon to spin tunes and keep the crowd moving all night, making it all but impossible to hear in sections of the bar. Not exactly the best setting to give an elevator pitch, but perfect for learning if your VC is someone who knows how to get down.

Pownce founders party in pot-laden pleasure palace

Megan McCarthy — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 14:38:32 EDT

MEGAN MCCARTHY — "Pownce is the new pink," declared Valleywag's capricious new editor Owen Thomas in assigning me to go cover a party thrown by Leah Culver and Kevin Rose, cofounders of Digg. The new pink? More like the new pot. The microblogging site, which people use to send around URLs, MP3s, and updates on their lives, is just as coveted — invitations are still up for sale on eBay — and seems to leave its users just as unproductive. So what better place to hold a party than a pink castle of a house in the Castro owned by Dennis Peron, one of the heads of California's medical marijuana movement? A list of Internet-glamorous attendees, a crime scene, and a photo gallery, after the jump.

Peron's place, which Culver is renting, is amazing. The backyard is built like a treehouse, with hidden stairways leading to the an outbuilding that doubles as a blacklight garden and hot tub. A model of the Golden Gate bridge serves as a walkway connecting the second floor to the guesthouse. Oh, and there are full-grown pot plants everywhere you turn.

The party had the feel of a high-school kegger, as if Web 2.0 High prom king Kevin Rose had convinced his venture capitalists to go away for the weekend and leave the liquor cabinet stocked. Pownce cofounder Leah Culver danced around the kitchen lip-synching to "Lip Gloss." On a screen, Randi Jayne, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister, debuted her latest viral video, a very clever iPhone parody. By 11 p.m., the kegs were kicked, and people stood around holding red plastic cups, hoping in vain for more liquor. Attendees included just about every boldfaced name from the San Francisco Web scene: StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp; Om Malik and Liz Gannes from GigaOm; Sarah Lane, Martin Sargent, and David Prager from Revision3; and recent New York Times profile subject David Ulevitch from OpenDNS.

And of course, there was some drama. A group of wannabe gangbangers walked into the party and, eyewitnesses say, walked out with a MacBook and at least one purse. My purse, to be exact. After I noticed that my purse was missing, three of the alleged thieves came back to the party, apparently hoping to steal more stuff. Partygoers detained one of them, who was then arrested by San Francisco police on a conspiracy charge. Good thing they didn't check out the back yard. For a glimpse of the scene, here's a gallery:

The domainers' worst enemy

Owen Thomas — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 12:21:55 EDT

Trust the Gray Lady to suck the drama — and the sense — out of a tech story. The New York Times profiles David Ulevitch of OpenDNS, an entrepreneur who's trying to make the Internet's domain-name system work better and faster. That means, of course, killing off the practice of "typo-squatting." Since the Times couldn't manage a decent explanation of this conflict, we'll oblige.Typo-squatting is a particulary unsavory side of the domain-name business. Clumsy Web users mistype website addresses all the time. Domainers, those wily entrepreneurs who register domain names in the hopes of making a profit, register common misspellings like "google.cm," and throw ads up on those websites, making a cheap and fast buck. (Business 2.0 recently profiled Kevin Ham, a domainer who's built a $300 million business on typo-squatting and other domain-name maneuvers.)

Ulevitch's OpenDNS would make typo-squatters an endangered species. By redirecting mistyped Web addresses to the correct site, Ulevitch makes life easier for Web surfers — and impossible for domainers. But then how does OpenDNS make money? Through advertisements displayed when an OpenDNS user accidentally types a search-engine query into his browser's address bar. Sounds like Ulevitch, just like his enemies, aims to profit from your mistakes. (Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times)