Some things need to change
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I desperately want Michael Arrington to cover my startup as well, but I still can't understand those that threatened or spat on him. Michael, I hope you return to regular writing after Feb, but if you don't, thanks for all the great work so far.
"I desperately want Michael Arrington to cover my startup as well"
I don't really get this... startups don't fall or succeed based on tc coverage. It might spike traffic for a day with some geeks. That's all at the end of the day.
Seems like some of this is TC's own doing - they have made people believe you have to get techcrunched, or you won't succeed - which is completely false.
I think they do a great job in the main though.
And yet, for all of those startups, getting the TC story was a milestone of sorts.
Its like getting your first hundred users, it doesn't define your success or failure outright, but its a big psychological hurdle I think.
Completely agree, something I was involved in was on wired last year (twice) and I must admit it was a good feeling, but thats about it.
If anyone sees getting on TechCrunch as the goal of their startup rather than using it as a tool that can help them reach your goal, they have probably already failed - they just don't know it yet.
Regardless of how valuable TechCrunch is to us or any other startup, the fact remains that violence and threats of violence against bloggers is utterly unjustifiable. People act like Michael Arrington owes them something, and that's the fundamental problem underpinning the latest attacks.
In any case, yes, threats and violence are not cool in any way. I was just commenting on the effect that TechCrunch has on the community as a whole, which I don't think is all that huge. Its more a place to read about startup news, and can be solved by simply subscribing to something else in your RSS reader of choice.
In any case, I think fighting for press coverage is stupid. Press coverage is not going to make people use your product, and if enough people use your product you are guaranteed coverage. On the other hand, if you want to break into the public consciousness, traditional marketing will help, but there's no point doing that until you know you have a winner on your hands.
If fundraising is in your future, it's valuable.
If credibility is important, it probably helps a touch, too.
Sure, TC just covers start-ups, but actors just make movies and musicians just make music and people have been spitting on them and giving death threats forever. You just need considerably less fame to attract crazy people online because there are so many more of them.
There's nothing special about our industry, crazy people are everywhere.
It's a simple numbers game, become popular enough and your popularity will cover some number of mentally unstable individuals.
Actresses, singers and presidents have all been shot for no other reason then they were famous.
Public criticism or lack of coverage probably makes things worse for Arrington, but I'm guessing not by much. Crazy people by definition do not behave rationally.
I'm not sure there is a solution to that beyond, make sure you keep as much of your life as you can secret.
The name of the young actress who was killed by her stalker some years ago escapes me, but I think he was able to get her address form the DMV.
Arrington can either quit, or keep paying for security, or find a way to keep his office and his home secret.
(Honestly, it seems the kind of circumstance where I can't really think of anything the police should be able to do to anyone who seems dangerous or "suspicious", because both are very much judgement calls.)
Assault: (Law) an act, criminal or tortious, that threatens physical harm to a person, whether or not actual harm is done
So now what ? Is the situation better or worse ? It better be LOT better, because society is collectively out of quite a bit of money by the time all that is said and done.
I don't think Arrington is necessarily over reacting to the threat, either. Without knowing the details it's impossible to tell, and even if you knew the details you might be uncertain. There is a very wide zone between something that will justify society's all-out response and what makes you feel creepy.
There is probably no way for society to make everyone feel warm and comfy about all their interactions with each other. Think about if we had a general policy of jailing people based on a definition of "threatens physical harm" that was that lose. Think back over every bad relationship you ever had . . . are you absolutely sure that some disasterous former manager or former employee could not have gotten you jailed ? Absolutely sure ?
Not trying to argue. Just don't see why that wouldn't work. the jury should just be like "well, it's a crime, and he did it" instead of saying it's common so we'll ignore it.
I have threatened bloody murder to many a bad library author, and the last thing I need is to get jailed because of that ;)
The reason I've heard that assault charges aren't always filed is that there has to be, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember the exact wording, "sufficient reason " to believe that the accuser can and will carry out his/her thread in order to make it assault.
The situation often cited for this is a 90 lb weakling gets drunk and threatens to beat up someone who fights in MMA for a living. Since the thread isn't credible this technically isn't assault.
On the other hand, if I shove a gun in your face and threaten to kill you then that very much is assault as my threat is very credible.
Some where in between is the line between assault and just being a dick, which isn't a crime.
This is often why many verbal assault cases aren't tried.
The other, unfortunate, reason is that court time is very finite. Prosecutors can only take so many cases to court and prosecutors know that people will often make these types of threats for a short period of time and then just leave that person's life.
If that's the case then the situation often resolves itself and they don't have to take up their valuable court space with this case.
It sucks but that's the way things are:(.
When you set policy for things like police, you get tradeoffs. Protect one person's rights, and you'll block actions the police could have taken to stop another. This isn't intended as political commentary and I don't have any particular thing in mind; think of it as an engineering view of law enforcement. You Can't Have It All. (And Certainly Not For Free.)
I really don't understand all the apologizing for law enforcement that refuses to enforce the law in this case. The victim was harmed a lot, and still no one wants to see the crook stopped?
And with all due respect to TC and Mike, it often takes "pull" to get Federal law enforcement involved. They handle all the "big fish". For example, if your start up was hacked, they would be the ones to call, but they won't move on anything less than $50,000 or $500,0000 worth of damages.
Disclaimer: IANAL and IANALEO.
You must be new here...
And somehow I hope our industry is special, that we're less likely to do crazy things in general. We're trained in science and reasoning after all. How many techies do you know that are rabid fans of celebrities?
Ironically, many of the successful assassins either did not, or had nothing like a logical reason.
* Booth's assassination of Lincoln is... complicated but had to do with the Civil War. Call it rational-ish.
* Garfield was assassinated by a nutcase who thought Garfield owed him after the assassin's few hundred printed pamphlets putatively got him elected. Not rational.
* McKinley's assassin had a head full of anarchism. Call it rational if you like, but it certainly wasn't because of anything about McKinley himself.
* Kennedy's assassin's motives are unclear, but it looks like he generally just hated the US and wanted to take down Kennedy and thereby become a "great man".
I'm not arguing with anything you said, just find it interesting that of all the people who, like you say, may have some reason to want to pull this off, it's the crazies who succeed. Call it HN's goal of "interesting things".
As an astronaut, I have the same hope for my industry. Puts on diaper
Do you believe there are any cases where one could justifiably kill in self-defense, or are you a pure pacifist?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Schaeffer
I read about her in Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, which incidentally is a pretty good book about such things. (de Becker is apparently the guy you call if you're a Hollywood star who gets a death threat -- protecting famous people is his company's business. And his published opinion is pretty much the same as yours: All famous people will get threats once they become famous enough, and the most famous people you can name have probably got dozens of stalkers of one sort or another.)
When your company goes public, a decision Steve himself made long ago, you know that from then on, what you disclose to owners of the company you effectively disclose to everyone. He knew what he was getting.
Speculating as to his health doesn't worsen it or harm him in any way. If anything is immoral, it's Steve's purposely hiding it and even, this year, lying about it.
0) speculation that isn't mean
1) insults and mean rumors
2) spitting
3) death threatsInstead he treated AAPL owners largely with contempt (pretty much the way he treats everyone from the sound of it) by not speaking about it, or saying one day that he's well and a week later that he's not, while 10s of billions of dollars are on the line.
I have found Techcrunch articles to be of inconsistent quality at best. My impression from reading Hacker News for the past two years is that TC articles are often poorly written, poorly researched, and sensationalistic. 'Integrity' isn't the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Techcrunch. It is perhaps more candid than say, MSNBC, but that isn't saying much.
If I were Arrington, I'd try to stay focused on improving that image. Venting personal frustrations on the front page of the site doesn't strike me as helping all that much.
It seems that the majority of people who work in IT (or at least, those that contribute to the various sites) are acting like they are still in high school. You've got to be associated with this person or that site to be 'cool' and a 'guru' and if you're not you're nothing. It's getting beyond a joke.
Congratulation, you got a mention on TC or HN, or you've been 'dugg' by lots of people. It doesn't mean your startup or product is actually good or useful you know. If that is all the marketing you are relying on then you've only got a 50% chance of success.
The whole thing even extends to people. I'm not going to name names but there seems to be some sort of god-worshipping to people just because they write a blog. Yes, I enjoy reading them, yes I pick up things from people who have done it before, but it doesn't mean they're some sort of superstar ... and I'm not even going to talk about the "we've just got a new CIO who used to work at Google brigade" (oh, he worked at Google, he must be a hero).
Thanks for reading.
The environment is much more geared towards the hotheaded youth. It's not that you have a few outliers that act immature that get kept in check: everybody is immature, and the outliers are the people who act mature. Beyond that: a lot of the people in this scene are the unpopular sorts. People like that often have a ramped up persecution complex: they feel like everybody's got to be against them. As a result, you get very ramped up fights over really stupid things.
I get this a lot whenever I take the time to read Gawker - I followed the big Jakob Lodwick fight when it happened. Every side was awful. Gawker took potshots at Lodwick to get hits, people online started threatening him because he was a public figure, Lodwick worked up, and in the end he denounced the masses for being "common", Gawker still takes every chance it can get to diss the guy, and people like Ted Dziuba go out of their way to denounce him as pathetic and meaningless. It's a shame, because Lodwick does incredible work and Dziuba doesn't, and so the one takes it out on the other.
(Then, of course, there's Connected Ventures, which makes a few good-but-overrated things and whose staff tries to act perpetually like they're frat kids. They're fun, but it doesn't help this attitude of people that it's okay to be over-the-top and conceited and loud about it.)
It's an attitude that I despise, and it hurts the community at large.
My experience being a part of Y Combinator is that everyone is precisely the opposite, though my experience is limited them the people I've met directly a indirectly because of Y Combinator.
That said, this is the exception. I can't think of many more online groups that are this adult.
TechCrunch (and Arrington to a lesser extent these days) get hundreds of tips or requests for coverage from companies and when TC passes them over, these people who are relying on press to get their name out there, can sometimes get angry. And when TC does cover a company in the same market, or sector, but not their company, it can be interpreted as an insult.
Arrington is the face of TechCrunch. As much as Erick and the others write for the site, Arrington is still seen as the embodiment of it.
I don't care for him, as he does come off as unlikable, and he is also prone to sensationalism for the sake of traffic I feel sometimes, but I hate to read this post. No one deserves that sort of treatment.
(I'm not speaking here about my coworkers, or my employer, or my employer's content-sharing agreement with TC.)
However, death threats and randomly spitting in someone's face are unambigiously crossing those social boundaries by a wide margin.
I'm not remotely surprised that he's pissed off other crazy people enough for them to get retaliatory.
For various reasons [2], human beings tend to think about social groups in us-and-them terms. We're naturally suspicious of Them (whoever they are), while we tend to give Us (our own group) the benefit of the doubt.
Arrington's problem is that he wants to provide information to Us. That means he's One Of Us, because he's helping Us and because we don't listen to Them. A lot of the information he's providing is about a particular group of Them we'd like to join: successful Silicon Valley people. This is a valuable service, and on a rational level we know he has to work hard at it. Even so, when he describes TechCrunch as a startup, associates himself with other successful startups, and even takes credit for some of their success, our emotion-driven social circuitry hears: I am an insider describing to you outsiders what it's like to be inside.
If Mr. Arrington knew about this dynamic, I'm sure he'd spend less time talking about being "battered for three days straight with product pitches from entrepreneurs desperate for press."
[1] In case it's not clear, I'm ambivalent about him. It should go without saying that spitting in the man's face is too much, and threatening his family and business is beyond the pale.
[2] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/a-tale-of-two-tradeoff...
I respect the guy (Arrington) professionally, I've never met him so I can't comment on him personally but this type of shit is totally not cool.
I know you occasionally read this site Mike, so please come back when you've taken time off, even if its to take a more backseat role in what you do.
Something definitely needs to change.
Given how much money it makes, I doubt it will happen.
People begin to treat folks like Arrington as an object and not a person but by the nature of the job they do they are inevitably in closer contact with those that would treat them that way - than (say) a Hollywood film star.
I suspect that we will see more such incidents affecting key technology writers and pundits - fame is dangerous in so may ways.
But (you know there's a "but" coming). But actually, no, it's unexcusable, no matter what.
To you the spitter: no matter your issues, you made the wrong choice and deserver zero respect.
If this had happened 2 years ago during the rapid growth in Web 2.0 investment, I think Mike would have soldiered on.
Instead, he has a nasty experience while his business and kingdom are shrinking. Deep down, I suspect he wanted out already.
In his situation I would.
Sure, he may simply ignore a lot of it - but eventually if you're getting attacked from all sides, there will be a point that you break.
This was his.
As Shakespeare once wrote "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"
I think the problem is that people are blurring the lines between the professional Arrington and the personal Arrington.
Let me highlight it using a hypothetical but extreme case.
You start up a new web app. For every 100 user signups, I get to kick you in the groin (literally, not metaphorically) - How would that make you feel?
I think if people want to attack his professional life - great, compete hard with TC, refuse to do business with him, boycott his blog - whatever... but when you start blurring (or crossing) the lines between a personal and professional attack is when situations like these arise.
But when the ratio between groin kicks and sign ups started going in the wrong direction, I'd want out.
Hey, it was your metaphor, not mine... :)
The only equivalent I can think of would be the reporters at papers who cover the shady-side of the business world. David Baines (Vancouver Sun) was the target of a lot of threats and innuendo during his coverage of stock-scams in Vancouver, to the point at which he just stopped working in that space for a while.
Sounds like Arrington has come to that place. Let's hope he comes back from it.
It does.
Unfortunately, in your business, just like ours, you have to account for outliers. When we miss them, computers mess up. When you do, ever worse things can happen. Sorry to hear about it.
Have a nice month off, Michael. Looking forward to having you back in March for the 99% of us who really do care about your (and your family's) well being.
And I hope people take this literally. IE, grab the jerk and call the police. Don't just let him walk away.
But I'm also slightly conflicted - why did I laugh when the Arabic reporter threw his shoe at Bush a few months ago? In retrospect, that event should have been just as inexcusable. What if Georgey wrote up a similar blog post about his experience? How would I have felt then?
Spitting is a long way past that point. Not cool.
"Before TechCrunch I assumed most people were essentially good, and assumed that an individual was trustworthy until proven otherwise. Today, its exactly the opposite."
I think any history buff would disagree with this assumption. People tend to be "essentially good" when there are plenty of resources and nothing to fight about. Numerous societies collapsed and some even resorted to cannibalism when resources became scarce.
Also I don't really get people who hate Arrington or love Angelina Jolie or want to kick Brad Pitt's ass. They don't know these people personally, they only can see an artificially engineered media-projection of them. Arrington didn't cover our startup, but hey - we haven't done anything for him either so I never felt bad about it. However, I had a chance to chat with the guy once and even though he looked tired and overwhelmed with attention, he still managed to give me a few very useful suggestions, far better than an average "wow that's nice" doublespeak you'd hear from people who aren't interested but just trying to be polite.
A little spit never killed anyone, and I would say any controversial figure is going to encounter that every once in a while. But the death threat stuff goes way over the line. The police needs to find that guy and put him in jail immediately.
Maybe Arrington should not work from his home to save money. He can't secure it. It's unsafe.
Maybe it's ok if Arrington has to hire security for his workplace. Every newspaper in the country does this because they publish things that would get people shot, maimed, kidnapped or worse. Arrington's stuff runs in the Washington Post and is very influential in a major industry sector. Why is he surprised that people would come after him? He's got money and can make or break people's careers.
Is the spitting lame? Sure. But welcome to the big leagues dude. If you want to call yourself a news organization and play hardball, there's a price that comes with it.
Perhaps this is more about bloggers coming up against the problems that face traditional news organizations rather than a new problem in the industry.
Getting listed on very popular blogs as someone rightly commented have manifested themselves as a milestone, a psychological hurdle. Not just these but the arrogance of people in this circle is definitely making the startups disgruntled. A little amount of humility and humbleness (Mike if you are hearing) will make them so much more big and fond of.
Sure its nice to save the few grand and work from home...but is that really worth putting your family at risk?
Hell, the least Arrington should have done is get a P.O. Box and used that as his address for techcrunch whois.
Maybe there wouldn't have been so much animus if Arrington hadn't done things like single out the lead dev for his favorite web service and run story after story about his purported incompetance.
Nobody should spit on Arrington --- at least, nonconsensually --- but it's not like this is Bill Moyers we're talking about here.
I would also recommend he go to Front Sight and get the training to protect himself and his family (from the death threats, not the spitter).
Most people are trustworthy until there's a large amount of money on the line, as in startups. Then you really never know who is. You think "oh, we've been friends/coworkers/brothers for years, he'd never screw me". Then 6 or 7 figures become and you find out what people are really made of.
Like alcohol can sometimes do temporarily, extreme money will magnify your personality and who you really are.
Only Michael can really know what the score was on the day, but I wouldn't be surprised if random Americans get petty attacks quite often while they're in Europe. What with all the chavs and all nowadays..
Anyway, shame on whoever did it. Showing the disturbing old European spirit yet again.
I think that this indicates an incredibly cut-throat feeling in the startup world.
The state of the economy in general can't be helping.
How could this be different?
Death threats and spitting are way over the top!!! It's a shameful behaviour that needs to be outcast. TechCrunch help lots of businesses and in the process killed some. That's life, suck it mate!!!
No, don't. Just kidding. Be careful out there.
Spitting on someone is wrong and cowardice. However, I would not lose sleep over it.
"Never ask for place-names in Wales, Baldric. You'll be washing the spit out of your hair for weeks". (Blackadder)
In my group, Arrington symbolises everything we hate about the "Web 2.0" greed culture. He's relentlessly promoted himself as the gatekeeper to this bullshit world of easy VC money, now crashing down around him. Good riddance.
If it hadn't been something as revolting as spitting, and instead say a nice cream pie to the face, I'd be delighted.
How is that?
1. because he obviously has 2. I consider this to be generally accepted as truthful 3. if you don't agree then we are probably not going to agree on anything, ever
and leave it at that. This is probably breaching some law of argument ("Fallacy of Call to Common Sense" or something?) but hey, who has the time.
A lot of people dislike the guy (I dont care for his attitude myslef but I respect his influence) and probably waould say "he deserves a punch" without meaning it literally :)
I was taking your comment as a cue too :D
(alsio known as hitting the wrong reply button)
I don't understand what you mean, anyway. You don't like his business, you don't like his writing, but you have all sorts of cares for him? Er .. why? What would he have to do to make you finally relinquish your sympathy?
In my book, a man is but the sum of his actions. I can't stand Arrington's actions, therefore I can't stand him, ergo I have no sympathy for the hatred his actions have engendered amongst sum.
And one more thing - the man who spat in his face may be contemptible, but it doesn't doesn't fit my model of how "cowards" behave either. The coward would be writing spiteful comments anonymously on blogs. Walking up to someone and spitting in their face takes balls, IMO. Not exactly my preferred means of communication but it certainly got the point across.
Yes, spitting on someone is illegal.
Fun game: stand on a busy street corner and spit on everyone who walks by. If you're arrested before you're crippled, you win.
Anyway I stand corrected.
There are no physical consequences to being spat on by a healthy person (if they are sick and do so knowingly to infect you, that is completely different). It is an insult, a grotesque one, but an insult none the less, and should be treated as such by law.
That is not necessarily true. Commission of verbal assault can land a person in jail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words_doctrine#United_...
The fighting words doctrine, in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as granted in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In its 9-0 decision, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine and held that "insulting or 'fighting words,' those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" are among the "well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech [which] the prevention and punishment of...have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem."
the test for battery is that you harmfully or offensively touched someone or something on them
i think spitting would fall under both for most juries..
As noted it is illegal in most countries.
"I don't understand what you mean, anyway. [...] What would he have to do to make you finally relinquish your sympathy?"
Something a great deal worse than writing articles that do not much interest me. I find it incomprehensible that someone could find a matter of mere taste to be sufficient justification for a crime.
"And one more thing - the man who spat in his face may be contemptible, but it doesn't doesn't fit my model of how "cowards" behave either."
Your definition of bravery is not one I have any respect for then.
I don't remember defining bravery anywhere? I simply said that in my opinion, most "cowards" don't consummate their cowardice by walking up to big guys (Arrington is a big guy) and spitting on them.
Anyone motivated enough to take an "extreme" action against someone else (eg spitting on them) could be argued that they are not necessarily in a right frame of mind and more or less going to do it regardless of circumstances.
Exhibit A - the guy who threw shoes at then President Bush.. there were secret service all over that place.
Without knowing who did it, or for what reason, I'd be fairly confident in betting that at no point did Michael's size come into the equation.
Maybe we should re-evaluate that.
Many, if not most of the TC articles posted here do seem to be sensationalist in nature, so it's easy to believe Arrington's just after ad-money (as some people say).
From a business standpoint, it would be silly for pg to ban a site that helps promote YC startups, not to mention TC is nowhere near as wonky/gossipy as valleywag.
Right. PG banning it would be different from people just not posting any TC stories though. No need for PG to incur Arrington's wrath.
From what I've seen, TC contains so much gossip and mildly nauseating posts that we'd be better off without it.
I think you need to stop and reconsider whether this is the appropriate attitude to take toward someone who really does nothing more than write articles and speak at conferences.
I'd also argue that a culture of tolerance, civility and diversity of views does far more to foster the open exchange of ideas than the silencing of those with whom we disagree.
I do agree somewhat with some of the criticisms that you and others have put forth about Techcrunch as a publication, in particular that it was prone to hype. But otherwise I think he performed a valuable service to our industry, and I think his willingness to speak his mind is both rare and laudable.
It saddens me that the animosity and intolerance that have shadowed Techcrunch have boiled over to something as despicable as this.
I might be in the minority on this, but I was unhappy with the whole discussion from the past about banning/censoring Valleywag and Techcrunch. Though the arguments against Valleywag had slightly more merit, the whole thing smacked of intolerance toward people and ideas we disagree with, which see its logical culmination in acts like this spitting incident.
Makes me think John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" should be required reading here.
Because of course it couldn't possibly be that people object to the way in which he spouts those disagreeable opinions. Or the ex-cathedra pontificating on technical matters he has no understanding of whatsoever. Or the use of his extremely loud megaphone to bully individuals.
The bulk of the antipathy towards Arrington, I believe, has very little to do with what he says and almost everything to do with how he says it. When TC was new, none of the most obnoxious behaviour was yet apparent. As time's gone on it's been on a continual slide into egomania and vindictiveness.
[And, fwiw, no: I have never been covered, or asked to be covered, or had a project which was relevant to be covered, by Techcrunch.]
[edit: In case anybody's unclear, nothing here should be misinterpreted as support or defence of gobbing in his face.]
Pieing is the act of throwing a pie at an authority figure, as a means of protesting against a perceived flaw (arrogance, hubris) in the target's character.
and also:
Godard was very pleased at being pied.
The point is that despite just writing articles and speaking at conferences, the content of his messages have far more meat than his enactment of them.
It is also true that not all speech is equally tolerable, in both the moral and legal sense. The Supreme Court ruled long ago, for example, that yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is not an instance of protected speech.
In the interest of full-disclosure, I did down-mod the comment that you just deleted.
i expect you've never tried to raise vc?
From the way you describe your beef with him, it sounds as if you're making up a personality for him-- that you're projecting onto him your bitterness about "Web 2.0 greed culture." You're wrong about that too, incidentally.
There are a lot of faster, easier ways to make money if you're greedy. Before the crash, I'd say go into finance and become an i-banker.
Web 2.0 start ups -- especially one seeking seed money and boot strapping -- are seeking more responsibility than they are wealth. It still has that "selling t-shirts on the internet" feeling: a) Everyone is doing it. b)It feels like a good idea. c) Its not really known if people can make money from doing it.
I don't know Arrington, but to me he always sounded like a humble, down-to-earth guy, very passionate about his job.
but Kathy Sierra, some misogynists went a little bit crazy. we can't tolerate this kind of thing, no matter how much this particular target deserved it, because it creates a dangerous atmosphere. so although I think anybody who is upset that this happened is a fucking idiot, and anybody who was surprised is probably too stupid to spell their own name, we need a way to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and part of it involves tuning out idiots like Arrington instead of letting them amass all this ridiculous inappropriate influence in the tech world.
You sound like a delightful person to be around.
The gist of your entire tirade is that Michael Arrington doesn't deserve the influence he has because he often gets technical details wrong, ergo he deserves people spitting in his face.
Are you kidding me? It's his blog, he can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. If he doesn't want to cover your company because he judges that you're an asshole, how does that give you the right to assault him?
It's called "Tall Poppy Syndrome"
Focus on startups as you say, and stop mudslinging with a hidden agenda.
treat others as you'd like to be treated - and that applies both to Arrington and to the spitter.
anyway, for what it's worth, because I'm thinking out loud, the thing w/both Arrington and Sierra is it's live by the sword, die by the sword. especially with Arrington. you can't set up a system where your income depends on fame and then be surprised by the fact that people project things onto you. that's what fame is. it's not the only thing fame is, but it's a huge part of what fame is. there's a whole lot of people who don't need to know who Arrington is, but know who he is anyway. Arrington created that deliberately, because building your fame builds your ad revenue.
interesting thing about neurology, if you hear about a celebrity often enough, you actually end up with a neuron dedicated to that specific individual. so he literally invaded our brains because it would make him money. that's fine; wasting our time for his selfish purposes isn't a problem in his book. but when it bites him in the ass, it's not fine?
I'm not saying this is how fame should work, but it's how fame does work, and if he's not realistic about that, that's nobody's problem but his. you can't help yourself to all the upsides of fame and then literally go running home to Mommy (as he himself says he did) when the downsides enter the picture. that's just not going to work.
For Arrington to be surprised that this happened, though, jesus. That's ridiculous. Go to my blog and google "Arrington." Got at least five links to him spitting in people's faces online. Probably many more than five. And that's not even going anywhere near the politics, power-playing, manipulation, or his claim that promoting his own companies means "journalism is evolving." He's a horrible human being.
I'm against the idea of randomly attacking bloggers, but if you had to pick a blogger to randomly attack, you couldn't find somebody who deserved it more. And if this incident shuts down TechCrunch, we should find the spitter and give him a medal for helping the tech community scrape that thing off our shoes.
There's a perfect example of this THIS WEEK! Arrington has been ripping into Cha Cha for years, and they just got a massive funding round.
Who says they're not!
When's the last time TC linked to another blog in a post. Hat tips etc.?
I've never used it before, so I decided to give both it, Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Ask.com the same search phrase in response to this comment and see what the results are.
What is the speed of light? - I felt a simple enough question.
Google took just 0.11 seconds to give me an exact answer.
Yahoo took 0.28 seconds
Live Search has no timer, but it was much less than 1 second, I assume around the same speed as Yahoo
Ask.com no timer, but same perceived speed as both Yahoo and Live Search
EDIT - it's now 4:25pm, still no SMS on my mobile phone from ChaCha.. I think its fair to say that comparing 10 minutes to 0.11 seconds is a pretty clear indicator why human search isn't a good idea.
Even if you take out the signup stage, human reaction time can't even compete with 0.11 seconds and that doesn't begin to factor in things like time it takes to read the question.
EDIT #2 - 5:06pm, still no SMS...
It's so weird for people to base VC investments purely on "the team" -- I've always figured (as I gradully ramp my startup to my full time job) -- its great to have a great team -- and you know what else helps? having a fucking awesome idea.
VCs need to work with the team, need to have faith in the team, and need to have a sense that the ideas will come. The current idea is a good start, and an indication, but in the grander scheme of things, it's the team that reall counts. They're the ones that will make things work.
A good team with an awesome idea is not investable.
An awesome team with a good idea, is.
David Hornik (August Capital; Ventureblog) basically says this also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwY0ac5XI_0
And, the truth is, A teams usually don't have B or C ideas, because they recognize, "Gee. We're looking at this thing. It's an interesting market. We have an idea. A particular approach." And, maybe it's an A-minus idea. Maybe you say, "Well, I'm not sure how that's going to evolve, but it'll probably evolve in an interesting way with this team," then I'm happy to invest and see how it goes, because, historically what's happened is they've figured out that there was some other twist, or there was a better market, or there was a better way to get to a group of people.
And so I would always start with the people, first.
Maybe I'm biased because I have no previous ventures and VC mildly interests me :)
Why didn't you try a non-simple question? Google is basically an almanac. When I have an almanac question, I don't hire a professional researcher. I consult an almanac.
Its now 1:30am, I'm just about to head to bed and still have been unable to sign up for chacha (even though I've attempted to do so again with a different email address/username since I last updated my comment) I feel that I can quite comfortably say that I wont use them for my searching requirements anytime soon.
Also, if this guy is a felon how does he have a gun and Arrington knows this is a fact? When you buy a gun they do a FBI check to make sure you don't have such a conviction.
Your startup will succeed regardless of its inclusion in TC. Worry about the product not some silly blog.