David Herrold

Trainwreck 2008: Mark Zuckerberg & Sarah Lacy SXSW interview

Posted by Dave | Filed under Communication

If hair-twirling and vapid questions qualified one to interview internet superstars, Sarah Lacy executed a 360 slam-dunk today. Between shameless self promotion of her upcoming book (pre-orders on Amazon *giggle*), name-dropping of her past Silicon Valley interviews (Kevin Rose *twirl hair*), bragging about her journalistic credentials throughout the interview, Sarah Lacy managed to drive the interview so far into the ground the crowd reached the boiling point in the last 15 minutes of the 60 minute epic torturous interview.

After verbally battling with the crowd for several minutes (bad move for any interviewer) Lacy turns to the audience and asks if someone would tell her what she did wrong.

A young man shouts “Give me your email address!”

Another one shouts “Check Twitter!”

(The Twitterverse was filled with angry and puzzled tweets from the audience, yours truly included).

I was really looking forward to hearing Mark speak at the keynote. He is possibly one of the most interesting self-made men on the internet, with 60+ million users on Facebook in 2008 and some amazing ideas for where Facebook is headed.

The audience was extremely interested in what he had to say. Some of their jobs depend on Facebook as a platform for development. Unfortunately, what the audience got was a pretty shallow interview from a hair-twirling, name-dropping, Silicon Valley groupie. We didn’t get any insight into who Mark Zuckerberg is as a person. What does he do on a daily basis? How much influence does he have in the development, design process of Facebook? What’s the last good book he read?

Note to Sarah Lacy – the next time you are in a room filled with thousands of nerds, don’t try acting coy or cute.

Try acting smart.

We’ll love you for it. Honest, we will.

Tags: mark zuckerberg, sarah lacy, sxsw2008