Oh... My... God.... Lyons is a fucking god. As a journalist in the valley, I can just say that the first paragraph he's written here hits the nail right on the fucking head.
---"It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any brighter than you are and in fact many of them don’t seem very bright at all. So of course you get jealous. And then you start thinking maybe you could find a way to cash in on this gold rush. But how do you make gobs of money when your only marketable skill involves writing blog posts?"
I feel this way all the time! But there's a distinct difference between acting on these feelings and just feeling them. Arrington would be just fine and above reproach, these days, if he'd keep his fucking mouth shut now that he is ludicrously compromised and un-objective.
If he'd quite being a "journalist" he'd not look like such a douche...
Perhaps this is why I haven't jumped the fence yet... I don't think I could give up the journalism. It just gets in your blood. And once it's in, the thought of compromising yourself is sickening. Unless you're Arrington.
But that's the whole point of the article: the whole value of the CrunchFund (and its ilk) is that Arrington (and his ilk) will be a douche on your behalf. If it were just the money, it wouldn't be worth it for the companies they invest in: the amounts are too small. It's an alternative compensation scheme for a PR flack who masquerades as a journalist. There's no ethical way to run the fund, because it would be worthless if it were ethical.
Can this post be kept in a special place at the top of Hacker News forever. Just so that people understand that the world isn't fair and to concentrate on their cool hacking.
It is self limiting to look at it in terms of earning money. Clearly happiness is life's goal --- not money (nor prestige, nor power). If you are smarter, as Lyons says he is, then it should be possible to transcend the environment. I'm not talking Christian-like self abasement. If you try hard enough, you can figure out ascension points to higher planes of understanding and flourishing and self growth. In the process, you might get rich as a by-product, but by then the money should be irrelevant.
"It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy."
Um, forgive me if I don't sympathize? My job will probably never make me wealthy either, but that's not why I do it, and it's sure as shit not a reason anyone ever went into journalism.
It's tempting to dismiss this as just e-lebrity gossip, but I think that this kind of rottenness is probably more dangerous to the Valley than threats from Washington or talk of bubbles. If who you know and how well you can politic overshadows what you did and the results you got, then you're in trouble.
If somebody is an unscrupulous douchebag, don't to business with them, don't read their blogs, don't upvote their articles. Treat them like the trolls they are.
If who you know and how well you can politic overshadows what you did and the results you got, then you're in trouble.
For me its just another sign that 'tech' is growing up. Pretty much any industry creates an economic flow, and the flow is a source of power (some would argue the only real source in peace time), and one can harness that power by having influence over the flow.
Back when the Homebrew Computer Club was meeting and Steve and Steve were there and nerds gathered at the ByteShop to see the latest S-100 board that Geoge Morrow had dreamed up, the total flow was measured in less than a million dollars a year. Few 'professional' power brokers even noticed. Today the total economic impact of 'tech' is approaching a trillion dollars by some estimates, with that kind of flow comes real power. You also get a different class of players in the game.
We joke about people who would sell out their families for a million dollars, however that number gets uncomfortably large as you go up in decimal orders of magnitude. 10 million, 100 million, a billion ?
The stakes are higher today, some people are the barrier to entry you have to get past. It hasn't been a "gentleman's game" for some time now. Kinda sad really.
I completely agree. Would you trust Yelp for restaurant reviews if Yelp invested in the restaurants it provided reviews for? Of course not. Like you said, the only way to really punish behavior like this is to stop using their product.
Speaking of bubbles, the optimistic part of me thinks that this really is a bubble, and that the next time the Valley crashes, all the sharks and trolls will be reaped and only honest people will be left to rebuild. It's better to imagine it than the alternative.
I've never understood the enormous popularity of M.G. Siegler. His articles are often published without any attributions or even basic spell checking. Yet somehow he's ridden on the coattails of Apple's ascent by positioning himself among the fandom as a "champion of good taste". In interviews he doesn't even come off as particularly pleasant.
Fanboys on either side of the aisle love to pat themselves on the back and reaffirm--almost daily--that yes, they did buy the best product imaginable. It's the same reason Gruber makes half a million a year writing snarky one liners.
Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing.
Siegler falls into the category of "irritainment", entertainment via irritation. He's the type of guy you love to hate and I believe a lot of his popularity stems from that. I can't stand the guy and I think he's completely full of shit. And yet I read almost all of his blog posts.
The only other TechCrunch writer that I regularly read is Devin Coldewey and that's because he has interesting articles and actually seems knowledgeable about technology. In other words I have learned things from his blog posts.
Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.
Silicon Valley has not fundamentally changed over the decades and I can say that from the perspective of someone who has lived here for over 40 years and who has been in the thick of the startup world since the early 1980s. Opportunism has always existed and always will. But great ventures are not fundamentally built upon opportunism. They are built upon incredible skills, daring forms of risk-taking, amazingly hard work, and like traits that are quite admirable. Those traits showed themselves strongly here in the Valley 30 years ago and they continue to do so today. Indeed, the heart of the Valley consists of anything but the "upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers" that the author here attempts to depict. Sleazy elements exist as they do whenever money is at stake but to suggest that they are what most defines the Valley is to slander a lot of good people who are doing great things and who have nothing whatever to do with the world of which the author writes.
The author is an excellent writer but this piece is seriously flawed by an intemperate tone, extreme ad hominem attacks, and gross overstatement. In my view, such flaws seriously weaken it as a piece of advocacy. And the lurid headline does not help either, especially when one writes to criticize "click whores." It is not that the piece is bad on substance. It just could have been so much better had the author chosen to strike a more judicious tone.
Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, CrunchFund, Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Menlo Ventures, Lerer Ventures
Many of these are top class investors and certainly don't expect a return on their money from a startup tech blog. But they might expect favorable reviews of their portfolio companies when launch time comes or when shit hits the fan.
Exactly, I fear this too. I like Sarah Lacey, and I think she does have integrity.
But I can't help but feel this is the investors simply moving up the food chain to protect their startups. Rather than rebutting against the media when their own startups are attacked, they have obtained an inside position at source.
I don't believe Sarah thinks this will happen (or she feels she can push back and mitigate) but I'm [sadly] confident this kind of internal pressure will occur at some point.
Fuck it, if I'd invested in her media venture I'd want preferential treatment. And I'm ex BBC with a 'no bias' agenda beaten into me it hurts.
Although this was a beautiful piece I can't help but feel Dan Lyons just gave Uncrunched, ParisLemon, TechCrunch and PandoDaily another million pageviews between them for the many rebuttals we're about to see.
HN already auto-deads submissions from several domains; wonder if it'd improve quality around here if those were added to the list, adding some friction into the game they're playing.
Dan isn't innocent here - some of his older posts are sickeningly obvious puff-pieces or hit jobs... of course, he's not excusing himself here or claiming he's not part of the muck he's deriding.
But every once in a while (esp. when he did FakeSteveJobs), Dan hits it out of the park, and this is one of those articles. The crunchfund conflict of interest is concerning.
The interesting thing to me here is how the story is no longer about Path and whether their actions were right or wrong. In the course of attempting to defend their portfolio company, Arrington and Co. have created a new debate about the role of journalism in the tech world, pitting the VC-backed insiders and their well-oiled hype machine vs the hordes of unconnected outsiders seeking to break down the gates. This dynamic is reflected by the passionate reactions coming fast and furiously from both sides. It could get ugly, but in the long run it's probably a good thing for everyone to have this discussion.
As Lyons notes, the debate around pay-to-play or other more subtle conflicts of interest in tech journalism has been around for a while, and is probably here to stay.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that anyone publicly sided with Path after their app behavior was exposed. There just is no spin spinny enough for that job. That it was Arrington and MG giving it the old college try just adds some extra lulz/wtf to the scene.
So basically it's only a matter of time before the ideals of the "gold rush" go away and everyone's just in it for the money?
I came to Silicon Valley to escape that (the alternative, at the time, was Wall Street). Unfortunately, this kind of behavior (and these kind of people) seem to 'follow the money'.
*Note: This is both about the conversation that companies are abusing consumers and then apologizing later, and the tech blogger community and Lyons' accusations
I get the same exact feeling. The frequency of lax startup ethics seems to be increasing by the count of HN articles reporting it. I left wall street for the same reason you mention. More and more we hear 'this time it's different', but from SV investors. Always a troubling sign.
I'm really surprised that Google trusts and would still let MG Siegler review their products before launch (like they just did with Chrome for Android), when 80% of his posts now are about trashing Google. It's like begging for attention from an abusive boyfriend or father: "Come on, MG..just one little nice word about our new product...please?"
They must think that it's better this way, than to give it to someone who already likes Google, because it's more "fair" and he'd be seen as more "objective". Seriously, MG objective? Does anyone still think that by now? There's not a paragraph in his reviews where he doesn't compare anything to Apple, whether it's necessary or not, and of course Apple always comes out on top in his view.
Apple on the other hand gives out their products before release only to people who are totally on their side like Pogue and Walt, so the initial reviews of the product always come out favorable, and they get to influence other laggard reviewers, too.
Hopefully more people will start realizing that this is what techcrunch has always done.
I remember watching a techcrunch50. I showed some people I knew the swype demo and everyone was blown away. That's so cool! What won? Yammer. Twitter for the enterprise.
There's no way Yammer could possibly have won other than silicon valley tunnel vision/influence circle.
That was the only tc50 I watched. I also only ever read tc very briefly because the quality was awful. For the occasional scoop they got (and fewer right) it's just wasn't worth wading through the drivel.
At least now they have a new business model I suppose.
It started stinking from the time CrunchFund was announced and I couldn't understand all the "moral highground" support bullshit that Arrington was getting - most notably from the TC staff.
Journalism is a lot about perspective - I dont care if you occupy the highest moral grounds, your perspective changes dramatically once you have significant interest and money invested into something you are talking about. What you would normally call a Spade now becomes a Diamond.
Arrington's and MG's responses to the Path issue is proof enough for this - can you imagine both of them so mellow and supportive if Path was not CF funded was not around? I think not. And ohh yeah, I nearly puked reading MG's "rant" few days back. For someone who is so hypercritical of anything on the borderline of wrong (except if its from Apple - or any CF company it seems now), it felt especially nauseous.
To their credit, they do have disclosures - which definitely make a difference - if that is enough, I'm not sure.
Credibility is built by calling a spade a spade. It also tends to take the fast route down if you stop doing that.
Personally, I'm really happy to see the tech blog echo chamber start slinging mud at each other instead of whatever the tech company to hate du jour is. The more they make themselves the story the more irrelevant they become.
"Siegler is constantly mocked by readers as a laughable troll – a mean-spirited, egomaniacal buffoon who is not very bright but thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room, and who, in all of his manic blogging, has left a string of cock-ups and false “scoops” behind him."
I feel you could replace the first word in that with Lyons and it would also be an apt description.
Is there any better mudslinging match in the tech-blogosphere than Lyons vs Apple bloggers?
I feel like this is a part of the larger conversation of how the dynamics of Silicon Valley are changing (at least from my insulated perspective). I'm not going to sit in my arm chair and smatter Silicon Valley but I enjoyed and respected the culture and environment of SV much more 5 to 10 years ago. It may be untrue but I feel like SV is becoming increasingly dominated by hustlers and scheisters and it has become more difficult to effectively collaborate with the many true technologists there. Actually took a job last year outside of the traditional SV circle of companies to take a break from the atmosphere and have found it to be surprisingly more fun from a technological perspective than the consumer internet products I was building previously.
Dan Lyons is afflicted with the combination of being a very talented writer, but a terrible journalist. He's late to a lot of stories--I mean, he's JUST NOW writing about Arrington's conflicts?? And, he's frequently 180 degrees wrong about the stories he does cover--see his coverage of SCO for the most infamous example.
I remember my reaction when it was revealed that Dan was behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog. It was approximately, "Huh? Who's that?" And every time I read a non-Fake-Steve-Jobs piece from Dan I am reminded of why I had that reaction. The guy is just not a good tech journalist.
He's an incredibly entertaining writer though. I wish he would take his talents south and put out a sitcom or movie or something creative.
> I mean, he's JUST NOW writing about Arrington's conflicts??
That is because he wanted to work at Techcrunch (there was a perennial discussion within TC on hiring him, and his wage demands were massive). now that Arrington can't give that to him any longer, he can speak out against him. Speaking of conflicts.
If what Dan Lyons wrote here is correct then this article is the most useful and interesting I have ready in years about Silicon Valley. It is describing / implying a widespread problem of "payola" (pay for play) in the tech media.
What you are saying is kind of outside the scope of this article right? Without going into his shortcomings or strengths do you agree or disagree with anything he says in this specific post?
I stopped reading techcrunch about 9 months ago, after realizing that the majority of articles were friends of the author - and realizing it was almost impossible to get featured on there unless you were connected in some kind of monetary way.
And finally, in 2012, after mocking and lambasting traditional reportage and journalistic standards for years, the Internet finally learns that journalistic standards, expectations, and ethics are a set of rules learned the hard way, that are as relevant on the web as they were in print.
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for "it's just a blog, man".
I agree with the overall argument and sentiment of Dan's article.
My ideal blog about technology startups would be about Silicon Valley as it is. It would be hard to run this blog. I'm not even sure it could be profitable, because most interesting information about what's happening in Silicon Valley is not written about. It's shared directly between people working here, and there's very little reason for those conversations to go public.
You see the same problems with journalists covering Washington and national politics. The journalists are willing to be used by politicians because it furthers their careers. It's so tempting to just give in. It's certainly more profitable.
On the other hand, if you take TechCrunch for what it is, I don't think it's unethical per se. You just have to know how to read between the lines.
Dan's article would be better if he didn't confuse angel and VC investment, though. Michael Arrington is certainly an angel investor, and he was one long before he started CrunchFund. He's probably an investor in CrunchFund's first fund, but as a General Partner he's acting as a VC, not an angel investor.
The key distinction being whether he's investing his own money (an angel investor) or LPs' money (a VC).
How about we start to act on this by not posting and/or flagging every post from pandodaily, techcrunch, and uncrunched? I think we'd have a better HN experience all around.
How about a few of us here get together, throw up a wordpress install, and start a self-serve tech/startup site. I've got RobotSays.com. Basically anyone can be an author, they create a guest post, upload their content and their picture, and submit the post for approval and we the editors fix up anything out of place and approve only the best content for the front page. A lot of design blogs allow guest post submissions and it works out very well.
Basically when it comes to tech/startup news this is all I want to know:
1 - when new startups launch
2 - important new game changing features that existing startups are implementing
3 - advice and interviews (Ask me anything) from startup founders
4 - new game changing gadgets coming out
5 - when startups are hiring
6 - when startups are sunsetting and why
That's it, no dirty laundry being aired, no drama, no egos, no kings, no divas.
[+] [-] VonGuard|14 years ago|reply
---"It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any brighter than you are and in fact many of them don’t seem very bright at all. So of course you get jealous. And then you start thinking maybe you could find a way to cash in on this gold rush. But how do you make gobs of money when your only marketable skill involves writing blog posts?"
I feel this way all the time! But there's a distinct difference between acting on these feelings and just feeling them. Arrington would be just fine and above reproach, these days, if he'd keep his fucking mouth shut now that he is ludicrously compromised and un-objective.
If he'd quite being a "journalist" he'd not look like such a douche...
Perhaps this is why I haven't jumped the fence yet... I don't think I could give up the journalism. It just gets in your blood. And once it's in, the thought of compromising yourself is sickening. Unless you're Arrington.
[+] [-] glyph|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayhano|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redcircle|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funkah|14 years ago|reply
Um, forgive me if I don't sympathize? My job will probably never make me wealthy either, but that's not why I do it, and it's sure as shit not a reason anyone ever went into journalism.
[+] [-] martythemaniak|14 years ago|reply
If somebody is an unscrupulous douchebag, don't to business with them, don't read their blogs, don't upvote their articles. Treat them like the trolls they are.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|14 years ago|reply
For me its just another sign that 'tech' is growing up. Pretty much any industry creates an economic flow, and the flow is a source of power (some would argue the only real source in peace time), and one can harness that power by having influence over the flow.
Back when the Homebrew Computer Club was meeting and Steve and Steve were there and nerds gathered at the ByteShop to see the latest S-100 board that Geoge Morrow had dreamed up, the total flow was measured in less than a million dollars a year. Few 'professional' power brokers even noticed. Today the total economic impact of 'tech' is approaching a trillion dollars by some estimates, with that kind of flow comes real power. You also get a different class of players in the game.
We joke about people who would sell out their families for a million dollars, however that number gets uncomfortably large as you go up in decimal orders of magnitude. 10 million, 100 million, a billion ?
The stakes are higher today, some people are the barrier to entry you have to get past. It hasn't been a "gentleman's game" for some time now. Kinda sad really.
[+] [-] beedogs|14 years ago|reply
I'm way ahead of you.
[+] [-] sgarg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avoutthere|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwwest|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldstrangers|14 years ago|reply
Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing.
[+] [-] doktrin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcantelon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjdagost|14 years ago|reply
The only other TechCrunch writer that I regularly read is Devin Coldewey and that's because he has interesting articles and actually seems knowledgeable about technology. In other words I have learned things from his blog posts.
[+] [-] grellas|14 years ago|reply
Silicon Valley has not fundamentally changed over the decades and I can say that from the perspective of someone who has lived here for over 40 years and who has been in the thick of the startup world since the early 1980s. Opportunism has always existed and always will. But great ventures are not fundamentally built upon opportunism. They are built upon incredible skills, daring forms of risk-taking, amazingly hard work, and like traits that are quite admirable. Those traits showed themselves strongly here in the Valley 30 years ago and they continue to do so today. Indeed, the heart of the Valley consists of anything but the "upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers" that the author here attempts to depict. Sleazy elements exist as they do whenever money is at stake but to suggest that they are what most defines the Valley is to slander a lot of good people who are doing great things and who have nothing whatever to do with the world of which the author writes.
The author is an excellent writer but this piece is seriously flawed by an intemperate tone, extreme ad hominem attacks, and gross overstatement. In my view, such flaws seriously weaken it as a piece of advocacy. And the lurid headline does not help either, especially when one writes to criticize "click whores." It is not that the piece is bad on substance. It just could have been so much better had the author chosen to strike a more judicious tone.
[+] [-] tucson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw911|14 years ago|reply
Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, CrunchFund, Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Menlo Ventures, Lerer Ventures
Many of these are top class investors and certainly don't expect a return on their money from a startup tech blog. But they might expect favorable reviews of their portfolio companies when launch time comes or when shit hits the fan.
[+] [-] dotBen|14 years ago|reply
But I can't help but feel this is the investors simply moving up the food chain to protect their startups. Rather than rebutting against the media when their own startups are attacked, they have obtained an inside position at source.
I don't believe Sarah thinks this will happen (or she feels she can push back and mitigate) but I'm [sadly] confident this kind of internal pressure will occur at some point.
Fuck it, if I'd invested in her media venture I'd want preferential treatment. And I'm ex BBC with a 'no bias' agenda beaten into me it hurts.
[+] [-] benologist|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] espeed|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tucson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattdeboard|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] r00fus|14 years ago|reply
But every once in a while (esp. when he did FakeSteveJobs), Dan hits it out of the park, and this is one of those articles. The crunchfund conflict of interest is concerning.
[+] [-] beaker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feralchimp|14 years ago|reply
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that anyone publicly sided with Path after their app behavior was exposed. There just is no spin spinny enough for that job. That it was Arrington and MG giving it the old college try just adds some extra lulz/wtf to the scene.
[+] [-] davidtyleryork|14 years ago|reply
I came to Silicon Valley to escape that (the alternative, at the time, was Wall Street). Unfortunately, this kind of behavior (and these kind of people) seem to 'follow the money'.
*Note: This is both about the conversation that companies are abusing consumers and then apologizing later, and the tech blogger community and Lyons' accusations
[+] [-] siavosh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|14 years ago|reply
And Silicon Valley has been "about the money" for 20-30 years now. When Wozniak left Apple is a good milestone for when it became "about the money".
[+] [-] apaitch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
They must think that it's better this way, than to give it to someone who already likes Google, because it's more "fair" and he'd be seen as more "objective". Seriously, MG objective? Does anyone still think that by now? There's not a paragraph in his reviews where he doesn't compare anything to Apple, whether it's necessary or not, and of course Apple always comes out on top in his view.
Apple on the other hand gives out their products before release only to people who are totally on their side like Pogue and Walt, so the initial reviews of the product always come out favorable, and they get to influence other laggard reviewers, too.
[+] [-] smokinn|14 years ago|reply
I remember watching a techcrunch50. I showed some people I knew the swype demo and everyone was blown away. That's so cool! What won? Yammer. Twitter for the enterprise.
There's no way Yammer could possibly have won other than silicon valley tunnel vision/influence circle.
That was the only tc50 I watched. I also only ever read tc very briefly because the quality was awful. For the occasional scoop they got (and fewer right) it's just wasn't worth wading through the drivel.
At least now they have a new business model I suppose.
[+] [-] deepakprakash|14 years ago|reply
Journalism is a lot about perspective - I dont care if you occupy the highest moral grounds, your perspective changes dramatically once you have significant interest and money invested into something you are talking about. What you would normally call a Spade now becomes a Diamond.
Arrington's and MG's responses to the Path issue is proof enough for this - can you imagine both of them so mellow and supportive if Path was not CF funded was not around? I think not. And ohh yeah, I nearly puked reading MG's "rant" few days back. For someone who is so hypercritical of anything on the borderline of wrong (except if its from Apple - or any CF company it seems now), it felt especially nauseous.
To their credit, they do have disclosures - which definitely make a difference - if that is enough, I'm not sure.
Credibility is built by calling a spade a spade. It also tends to take the fast route down if you stop doing that.
[+] [-] bishnu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reidmain|14 years ago|reply
I feel you could replace the first word in that with Lyons and it would also be an apt description.
Is there any better mudslinging match in the tech-blogosphere than Lyons vs Apple bloggers?
[+] [-] krakensden|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moocow01|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|14 years ago|reply
I remember my reaction when it was revealed that Dan was behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog. It was approximately, "Huh? Who's that?" And every time I read a non-Fake-Steve-Jobs piece from Dan I am reminded of why I had that reaction. The guy is just not a good tech journalist.
He's an incredibly entertaining writer though. I wish he would take his talents south and put out a sitcom or movie or something creative.
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
That is because he wanted to work at Techcrunch (there was a perennial discussion within TC on hiring him, and his wage demands were massive). now that Arrington can't give that to him any longer, he can speak out against him. Speaking of conflicts.
[+] [-] tucson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeholder|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] potatolicious|14 years ago|reply
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for "it's just a blog, man".
[+] [-] man1sh|14 years ago|reply
It's no co-incidence. Techcrunch is the same as it was 2 years back, probably venom from Siegler has increased
[+] [-] jfarmer|14 years ago|reply
My ideal blog about technology startups would be about Silicon Valley as it is. It would be hard to run this blog. I'm not even sure it could be profitable, because most interesting information about what's happening in Silicon Valley is not written about. It's shared directly between people working here, and there's very little reason for those conversations to go public.
You see the same problems with journalists covering Washington and national politics. The journalists are willing to be used by politicians because it furthers their careers. It's so tempting to just give in. It's certainly more profitable.
On the other hand, if you take TechCrunch for what it is, I don't think it's unethical per se. You just have to know how to read between the lines.
Dan's article would be better if he didn't confuse angel and VC investment, though. Michael Arrington is certainly an angel investor, and he was one long before he started CrunchFund. He's probably an investor in CrunchFund's first fund, but as a General Partner he's acting as a VC, not an angel investor.
The key distinction being whether he's investing his own money (an angel investor) or LPs' money (a VC).
[+] [-] alapshah|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisNorstrom|14 years ago|reply
Basically when it comes to tech/startup news this is all I want to know:
1 - when new startups launch
2 - important new game changing features that existing startups are implementing
3 - advice and interviews (Ask me anything) from startup founders
4 - new game changing gadgets coming out
5 - when startups are hiring
6 - when startups are sunsetting and why
That's it, no dirty laundry being aired, no drama, no egos, no kings, no divas.