Back from a sheltered-in-place July 4th vacation, complete with Hamilton and a disastrous attempt at s’mores. They’re more complicated than you think!
The Plain View
You could argue that Taylor Lorenz was Clubhouse’s biggest fan. When the New York Times tech culture reporter noticed the new app in April, she instantly signed up. She had no idea that the real-time audio-based social network would soon become invite-only, with rank-and-file journalists not welcome. (Including me, I figured, so I haven’t asked to get in.) The very limited membership in the app’s testing stage was dominated by Silicon Valley insiders and celebrities, who tantalized the hoi polloi on Twitter with hints of the cool conversations they were enjoying. But Lorenz was allowed to stay, with no restrictions, and this paid off for Clubhouse when she, along with colleague Erin Griffith, wrote a positive piece about the new venture. The story came soon after VC firm Andreessen Horowitz reportedly put $12 million into Clubhouse, valuing the two-person company with about 1,500 users and no revenues at around $100 million.
None of that VC stuff interested Lorenz, who was more excited about the platform itself, which allows people to open up virtual rooms and host voice conversations. The hosts invite people to a stage where their microphones are turned on, while those in the audience listen, awaiting approval from the moderator before speaking. To Lorenz, Clubhouse’s value did not lie in the big discussions in rooms where rich VCs got schooled on social issues by the likes of DeRay Mckesson and MC Hammer. The questions asked by the elite attendees were not especially useful, she thought—certainly not as good as questions journalists would ask. (Lorenz recalls one VC asking an FBI hostage negotiator how he washed his vegetables before barbecuing.) But she was truly engaged by smaller rooms, where the audio-only discourse allowed her to quickly bond with like-minded people—generally younger people on the lower rungs of the VC world, who were more connected to pop culture. “I became tight friends with them and loved hanging out on the app,” she says. At one point Lorenz was spending three to four hours a day on Clubhouse.
But the relationship turned sour. All too often she found that as a young woman, she had difficulty getting recognized to speak in the bigger rooms when she had something to say. And she found herself singled out as a working journalist. “I’ve heard a lot of anti-media sentiment,” she says, which was unusual for her, since she generally covered TikTok stars, not VCs.
Then, last week on Twitter, a VC named Balaji Srinivasan wrote a mocking reply to one of Lorenz’s tweets, involving alleged misbehavior of the CEO of the luggage startup Away. Lorenz defended herself and called out what she characterized as previous harassment by Srinivasan and others on a variety of platforms, including Clubhouse. A battle of tweets ensued, and a wider argument erupted around the increasing animus between press and venture capitalists.
The controversy moved to Clubhouse that night, when a roomful of VCs and others continued the discussion. (There is a record of this, courtesy of
