Sarah Lacy, the veteran tech journalist who founded Pando, is selling the company and quitting journalism over what she described as a toxic culture in Silicon Valley.
Lacy, the site's editor-in-chief, announced the sale in a scathing blog post Wednesday lambasting Silicon Valley.
"It's a place where I've been sexually harassed more times than I can remember," Lacy wrote.
"It's a place where I've been lied about, where VCs have arm-twisted editors to fire me, where billionaires have threatened those doing business with me to cut all ties. It's a place where I've had people turn on me again and again and again simply for doing my job. It's a place I've been betrayed by people I trusted. It's a place where one-time friends threatened my children because I wrote about things they did."
Some incidents she mentioned were related to Uber's threatening her over her reporting of the company's misconduct.
Lacy said Pando was being sold to BuySellAds, though she did not share any financial terms of the deal.
Lacy started Pando in 2011 while on maternity leave from her previous position at TechCrunch. In addition to experiencing sexual harassment herself, she relayed many stories of women in Silicon Valley being held back because of harassment.
"I have absorbed so many more stories than I have reported, more than I can ever report, about the dark side of Silicon Valley," she wrote.
Pando's biggest investors include Marc Andreessen, Accel Partners, and Greylock Partners.
Lacy said Pando had been working with BuySellAds since 2012. "I'm also intrigued by BSA's strategy of buying much beloved but somewhat neglected online media brands and reinventing them for a whole new audience while still serving the existing audience with (hopefully) an even better product," she said.
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