Posts Tagged ‘Michael Arrington’

“Who are the Seans?” one might ask. Well, they may not officially be ‘The Seans’ just yet, but if their most recent venture blows up, they may well achieve that single name, ‘Winkelvii’ type status (without the d-bag-y conotations). Individually, you just may have heard of them though. Sean Parker? You know – that guy played by the pop star in one of last year’s biggest movies, Founding President of Facebook; the one that seems to have the Midas Touch with any tech startup? That Sean. Then there’s Shawn Fanning (sorry buddy, the ‘Sean’ spelling is more popular). In creating Napster, he almost single-handedly changed (Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich would write that as ‘destroyed’) the music industry. Yeah, they’ve done stuff.

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Revenge is a dish best served cold, and the relationship between Web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has been downright frosty of late, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise that Calacanis is mounting a direct challenge to Arrington.

Calacanis said he will launch a startup editorial project and event called Launch, taking direct aim at TechCrunch, paidContent reported, keeping its focus on writing and editorial. In fact, Launch will debut as an email publication, Calacanis told paidContent, adding:

When I started with Peter Rojas, blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight. Now it’s even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility.

If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it’s the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online — much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog.

I want high-quality insider information, a celebration of entrepreneurship and taking risk. I want it serious and insightful rather than salacious and link-baity.

Until then I’m listening to the audience and testing what they like. But I’m going for something that doesn’t exist in the market — not a blogger writing the story in two hours. The world really wants deeper stuff right now.

Reaction continues to pour in on AOL’s deal to acquire TechCrunch, including more insight from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who spoke with CNN’s Dan Simon for CNNMoney.com (video below).

And Ben Popper of The New York Observer shared his own theory: AOL bought TechCrunch because Gawker has maintained the momentum it gained from its purchase of an iPhone 4 prototype that had been lost by an Apple engineer, and it has skyrocketed past AOL in terms of traffic.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington offered his take on AOL’s agreement to acquire TechCrunch in a very logical place: on TechCrunch.

Arrington wrote that the combination of AOL and TechCrunch first came up during a “quick private chat” with AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong after Arrington interviewed Armstrong at TechCrunch Disrupt: New York in May, but serious conversations were initiated in July.

Highlights from Arrington’s post:

The truth is, I was tired. But I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software. And when we did find those engineers, as we so often did, how to keep them happy. Unlike most startups in Silicon Valley, the center of attention at TechCrunch is squarely on the writers. It’s certainly not an engineering driven company.

AOL of course fixes that problem perfectly. They run the largest blogging network in the world and, if we sold to them, we’d never have to worry about tech issues again. We could focus our engineering resources on higher-end things, and I, for one, could spend more of my day writing and a lot less time dealing with other stuff.

The more we spoke with AOL, the more we saw a perfect fit. They already own many of the top technology blogs. They already have a huge sales team in place (although our own sales team kicks ass and is staying on). And they have an internal events group that we will be able to leverage.

From a product and business standpoint, it’s a perfect fit.

But what put things over the top, and what ultimately led us to discontinue discussions with other suitors, was the AOL management team. I’m not going to gush here because, well, I’m clearly conflicted. But (TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde) and I believe in this team enough to bet our company on them. AOL has a very big vision for the future. They may succeed or they may fail, but at least they are all running in the same direction. No one at AOL complains that they don’t know what the company is trying to do.

So at that point, we were basically sold. But AOL was very aggressive about one last important issue that really sealed the deal — editorial.

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The rumors have now been officially confirmed by AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong: AOL is the proud new owner of TechCrunch and its network of technology-centric Web sites.

TechCrunch will become part of the AOL Technology Network, but it will retain its editorial independence, according to Armstrong’s press release. The official announcement will be made on stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF conference in San Francisco.

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There has yet to be any kind of official announcement on the rumored acquisition of TechCrunch by AOL, but Web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis certainly made his feelings known about the potential deal, ripping into TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington in a series of Tweets Monday night, Silicon Alley Insider reported.

Calacanis and Arrington had a falling out over the dissolving of the TechCrunch 50 conference, and Calacanis didn’t pull any punches. Some of his Tweets, via Silicon Alley Insider:

@Justyn asks if @Arrington & I are still friends. The question is moot, a sociopath like Mike isn’t capable of friendship-except w/ dogs.

How do I really feel about @arringon @thelocalgentry? He stole from my family, treated me like garbage & laughed in my face as he screwed me.

@thelocalgentry you’ve a had a partner you considered a good friend F@#$%k you over, laugh in your face & take food out of your kid’s mouth?

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AOL is nearing a deal to acquire online blogging network TechCrunch, with an announcement possible at the latter’s Disrupt SF conference in San Francisco, which began Monday and runs through Wednesday, GigaOM reports, adding that it could not reach TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and AOL had not returned calls for comment.

GigaOM founder and senior writer Om Malik wrote:

On a more personal note, I think this is great news for Mike and his crew. I remember Mike starting out by writing long reviews of Web startups in 2005. We often talked about the world of technology and discussed where it was all headed. In the years that have passed, he turned his blog into a company and brought in Heather Harde to run his operation. The company has launched series of events, with TechCrunch SF being the latest. I want to congratulate Mike and his crew on their success.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington accused a group of “super angel” investors of collusion and price fixing in a post Tuesday night.

Arrington claims that he walked into a “secret meeting” of around ten investors responsible for nearly all of the early stage startup ventures in Silicon Valley who were pooling their resources to muscle traditional venture capitalists out of early stage deals, keep new angel investors out of the market, and combat the growing influence of startup incubator Y Combinator.

Arrington says he knows all the angel investors personally, and did not name names. Collusion and price fixing are very illegal forms of anti-competitive behavior. Penalties include jail time.

The “Godfather style” meeting (Arrington’s words) took place at Bin 38 in San Francisco and immediately shut down upon Arrington’s arrival. However he says he was able to talk to several participants after the fact, and their agenda allegedly included:

• Complaints about Y Combinator’s growing power, and how to counteract competitiveness in Y Combinator deals
• Complaints about rising deal valuations and they can act as a group to reduce those valuations
• How the group can act together to keep traditional venture capitalists out of deals entirely.
• How the group can act together to keep out new angel investors invading the market and driving up valuations.
• More mundane things, like agreeing as a group not to accept convertible notes in deals (an entrepreneur-friendly type of deal).
• One source has also said that there is a wiki of some sort that the group has that explicitly talks about how the group should act as one to keep deal valuations down.

MySpace co-president Jason Hirschorn is leaving the company and moving back to New York. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch broke the news earlier this afternoon, and News Corp. has since confirmed it.

Hirschorn joined MySpace in April, 2009.

News Corp. digital chief Jon Miller released the following statement:

We fully respect Jason’s decision to leave and his personal desire to return to New York. As many people know, Jason is like family to me, and as expected, he’s done everything we asked of him and more. We’re incredibly grateful for the passion and enthusiasm he brought to the company. And as I know Jason agrees, Mike Jones has done an outstanding job leading MySpace into its next evolution and is the right person to take the reins. There are no plans to bring in additional management.

TechCrunch founder and CEO Michael Arrington shocked his readers today announcing that he is taking “some time off” as he tries to “get a better perspective on what I’m spending my life doing.”

TechCrunch, which began in June 2005, dedicates itself to “obsessively profiling” new Internet products and companies. But it was obsessive followers that led Arrington to step aside for a while. He writes that being spat on while leaving a conference in Munich yesterday was the last straw.

I write about technology startups and news. In any sane world that shouldn’t make me someone who has to deal with death threats and being spat on. It shouldn’t require me to absorb more verbal abuse than a human being can realistically deal with. The problem is that I love what I do when I’m not hiding from some crazy fucker who wants to kill me or being spat on by some unhappy European entrepreneur we didn’t write about.

Arrington says he will be covering Davos this week, but then will be taking “most of February off from writing.” He says he’ll sit on a beach somewhere, without…gasp….his iPhone or laptop “and decide what the best future for me is.”

And he has a message for his peers: “I want them to realize that their words influence others who may be inclined to ‘take matters into their own hands’ under the mistaken impression that threatening to kill someone, or physically attacking them, is somehow righteous.”