Gawker: valleywag, lala

Lala founder forgets to lay off 20 percent

Paul Boutin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:40:00 EDT

Serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen just relaunched Lala's music service in the middle of layoff mania. The new version — high audio quality, no DRM — is pretty good. But I have to ask: Why bother, Bill? This is Lala's fourth or fifth attempt at a business model. Nguyen could get funding for another boring enterprise wireless startup like Onebox or Seven tomorrow. Those things make money.

I think I've outed Bill Nguyen's secret: In a Valley full of people who want to be Steve Jobs, he wants to be David Geffen — the maverick behind the scenes in the music business. Stoking the starmaker machinery behind the popular song! Too bad the truth is more like that other Joni Mitchell line: "I deal in dreamers, and telephone screamers."

UPDATE: Bill replied after I hit Publish too soon. I'll just paste it in:

Hi Paul,

You're not going to believe this but I just saw Leslie. I'll try to find a photo to send over in 20 minutes if you didn't get one. I definitely go to work to return capital but much of the decision for lala is the amazing economic challenge. It's great fun to wake up everyday with a team that includes Geoff Ralston (former Chiief Product Officer of Yahoo, Anselm-Baird Smith, creator of first java server and contributor on HTTP 1.1, and Billy Alvarado who ran all of engineering at SEVEN.)

We get to take on a challenge in an industry that's over hyped but lacking in revenue. So instead of following everyone into the advertising model, we went our own way to build the best app we could void of any advertising and driven by commerce. The result is an amazing new product, $20M in the bank, and opportunities we could not have imagined as competitors fold under the weight of the market.

It's the best time ever to building. And yes, it definitely helps that we play with music :-)

Bill Nguyen
co-founder, lala.com

Oh, Lala: Kevin Rose explains haircut, doesn't explain date

Megan McCarthy — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:12:09 EST

We noted Digg founder Kevin Rose's tragic haircut when we first saw a glimpse of it in picture from last month's Lobby conference. We saw the entrepreneur at a party Saturday night and can tell you that the cut looks better in person than it does in pictures, though four weeks worth of growth probably helps. So why did Rose shed his trademark shaggy locks in the first place?

He told Valleywag that he was worried about the Hawaiian heat of David Hornik's The Lobby conference, and decided to go short. By himself. Using the No. 5 setting on his electric razor. And we're willing to wager that the barber's blood-alcohol content was a bit north of .08, cause, really, who cuts their own hair while sober?

Now that the haircut question is settled, let's ponder a more tantalizing query: Why was Rose seen arriving and leaving the party with Lara Doucette, better known as Lala on the Web video show TikiBarTV? We had high hopes for his reunion with ex-girlfriend Sarah Lane once we saw them together in Hawaii a few weeks ago. Perhaps this is a rekindling of another old flame? Kevin and Lala looked awfully cozy at last year's Revision3 launch. (Photo by b_d_solis)

Reminder of past mistakes or harbinger of future doom?

Tim Faulkner — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:12:18 EDT

TIM FAULKNER — A Wall Street Journal article discussing Lala, the online music play with many different strategies (CD exchange, online radio, album downloads, etc...), and its maverick founder Bill Nguyen reveals that the executive keeps the most enduring icon of the dot-com bubble on his desk: the Pets.com sock puppet. Nguyen intends it as a protective talisman to remind him of what can go wrong, but with an expense-laden business (they expect to lose $40 million over the next two years) that requires massive growth of the consumer base to break even, one worries that the business concerns are a little too similar. That the socket puppet talisman is acting more like the tiki that brought the Bradys such bad luck in Hawaii than as a nostalgic motivator.

Everyone must get sold

Nick Douglas — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 21:33:09 EDT

CD-swapping site LaLa used some of its nine million bucks to buy an resurrect a dead Internet radio station, WOXY. Just when you thought a site already made obsolete by Amazon, eBay, and iTunes couldn't get any more irrelevant, ya know?

So maybe this will pit LaLa against popular customized Internet radio sites like Pandora and Last.fm. Hahahahahanope. Those services actually play the music someone wants. Because it's meant for wide broadcast ("wide" here meaning "less than the local country station"), WOXY will run crippled playlists under heinous laws for Internet radio. A CNET writer reports:

LaLa has been very careful about following the letter of the law, which includes obtaining the proper licenses and imposing certain rules on the DJs. The stations must be at least three hours long, you can only use two songs per artist, and you cannot listen to your own station (bummer). But, hey, it is free, so I'm not gonna complain too much.

"But, hey, it is free, so I'm not gonna complain." Not quite the perfect tagline.

LaLa.com revives WOXY [CNET]