Gawker: valleywag, get satisfaction

Get Satisfaction all about customers pleasing themselves

Melissa Gira Grant — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:20:00 EDT

Cra-zazy customers hardly need to be told where they can take their complaints: They just need an outlet. Get Satisfaction aims to automate the bitchfest. Bonus: Its president is Lane Becker, one of Valleywag's most lovably lubricated crush objects — clothed, bespectacled and interviewed in this clip from Web 2.0 in New York. Becker's founding cohotties are Thor Muller and Amy Muller. The "frictionless" solution to demanding customers, who will blog about your inadequate service as soon as look at you, was hatched out of the mayhem caused by their mail-order grab bag business for previously free conference tchotchkes, Valleyschwag.

Venture capitalists, they're just like us

Jackson West — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures carrying his own lunch order from Shake Shack in Manhattan's Madison Square to a group of tables where he was entertaining wantrepreneurs in New York for the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo. Not pictured: Lane Becker, president of online customer-service startup Get Satisfaction, who kept his distance from the assembled nerds, pacing around a tree and chatting on his cell phone.

The cure for the common hangover

Owen Thomas — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:20:54 EDT

AUSTIN, TX — I almost didn't sleep last night. At 4 a.m., after posting party reports for ~~you ungrateful bastards~~ my gorgeous, intelligent readers, I considered just powering through until my breakfast meeting with the boss, who was flying back to New York in the morning. Instead, I caught a disco nap. Even so, I arrived at the PureVolume ranch looking more rested than the weary souls shuffling in for free breakfast tacos. If you haven't had an Austin-style breakfast taco — soft tortilla with eggs and bacon or chorizo — then you should reflect on the direction your life is taking and what you can do to amend your ways.

Get Satisfaction president Lane Becker and CEO Thor Muller, who bought the tacos, delivered a spiel about their company's widget-based platform for Web-enabled kvetching. (Okay, I wasn't really paying attention, but I think that's close.) I chatted up the likes of Google design czar Jeff Veen and Blogger veteran Jason Shellen, freshly hired at LiveJournal. Shellen talked up the large team of engineers based in Russia now at his disposal. I don't think he liked my suggestion that they develop an algorithm to automatically filter out LiveJournal users based on statistical measures of their irrelevance.