
The Real History of TechCrunch - zastrowm
https://uncrunched.com/2018/02/18/the-real-history-of-techcrunch/
======
erikb
This is a very important lesson for Michael Arrington and many people reading
this can learn from it without losing too much emotions or money themselves:

Someone, who claims this to be a cofounder of your business even once, is not
your friend! Don't support their claims, don't pity them. They try to exploit
you.

This kind of person is really good at keeping you emotionally hooked, and
therefore even let you find excuses for their behaviour. Think for yourself:
Would you claim ownership over their pet project like that? Probably not.

So be strict with yourself and let that person go. The earlier the better.
They won't change. Your interpretation is not wrong. It's not your fault. And
most importantly: You have earned and will find true friends that support you.
And with them together you will make lots of money if you have that in you.

~~~
gumby
Is the same true of Musk who was an A round investor in a company already
founded by Eberhard and Tarpenning?

~~~
berberous
While not one of the original co-founders, Musk has devoted enormous amounts
of time, money and energy into Tesla since nearly the beginning, which I think
makes him close enough to a co-founder. If you read Arrington’s post, he even
says the same about Heather —- not technically a co-founder but one in
practice given the amount of work she put in.

The guy he is calling out is alleged to have put zero time or money in — he
just grabbed what he could.

~~~
tptacek
I had no idea until this thread that Elon Musk hadn't been with Tesla from the
beginning. I presume reasonable people can disagree, but, no, I don't think
leading someone's A round, even if you take an operational role at some point
afterwards, makes you a "cofounder".

~~~
EGreg
Agreed.

This is kind of like Warren Buffett taking over Berkshire Hathaway.

But now Musk is definitely _the_ face and head of the company same as Buffett.
That is what counts for most people after everything is said and done.

------
vidarh
I won't say a huge deal about this, as I now work with Keith again, and
haven't spoken to Mike for years, but I'm extremely surprised to see this
version of events, as when I worked on Edgeio (I built the prototype, and
managed the dev team for a while and continued to build the system) while
Edgeio's and Techcrunch's offices were both in the house Mike rented in
Atherton (Edgeio was largely built from the bedroom across from Mike's and the
hall outside his room, while Techcrunch's office was his bedroom...), I got a
very different impression from Mike in person.

E.g. "started hanging out at my house and meetups" is a curious
characterisation when Mike's house was literally the shared offices for both
for quite a while.

Mike at least once described Techcrunch to me as growing out of the work done
to do research for Edgeio, and Archimedes Labs as a partnership between the
two. Though it is possible for both that and Mike's version now to be true, my
impression as someone who was there was always that both companies (Techcrunch
and Edgeio) were shared projects, and Mike did nothing to dissuade that
impression though it was clear Techcrunch was more Mike's baby than Keith's.

Of course I was never privy to whatever discussions the two of them had behind
closed doors.

EDIT: Here [1] is an archive.org link from 2005, that lists Mike and Keith
equally, on a post posted by the web designer who also did a lot of early work
on Edgeio, describing them both as editors and Techcrunch as part of the
"Archimedes Ventures" family. It was hard from that kind of presentation at
the time to not see it as something they co-founded. I don't want to go into
it further, as that'd be speculation on my side too (and of course what Mike
let someone put on the site does not have to reflect what he thought about it
in private) - I looked this up to see if there was anything to change my
recollection:

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20051024052402/http://techcrunch...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051024052402/http://techcrunch.com:80/?page_id=120)

~~~
telltruth
This is exact same pattern that gets repeated everywhere: Winklevoss hires
Zuckerberg to do some sort of campus meetup site. While working on this,
Zuckerberg crystalizes related idea of profiles and messaging among students -
but only shared among friends. Winklevoss does not participate in vision,
engineering or anything else but claim the credit for Facebook anyway. I can
understand that in early days it would be hard for Arrington to blantly expose
Keith as he can do now. Keith had already threatened about litigation and
Arrington had no money or time while managing fast growing company all by
himself.

~~~
alien_at_work
That's a pretty pro-Zuck view you have there. I think the courts are in a
better position to decide and they found for the Winklevoss twins. Yes, they
didn't get a lot of money but they got what they asked for.

~~~
rst
Source? According to everything I've read, the money they got was from a
settlement, not a court ruling in their favor. When they sued for more after
the settlement, they got slapped down by the courts. e.g.,

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-facebooks-mark-
zuckerberg-w...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-
won-against-winklevoss-twins/)

------
ktamura
>As a final note, I want to add that if anyone was a “cofounder” of TechCrunch
it was Heather Harde. She joined in 2006 but she was in the trenches with the
team until the very end, working 20 hour days, sacrificing her personal life
and giving everything she had to make the company what it was. Heather never
sells herself like Keith does, but she should. Unlike Keith, she helped build
that company, and gave way more value than she ever took.

As someone who's also been an early employee, I totally see why Heather does
NOT claim to be a co-founder. When you work your ass off alongside the
founders, you learn two things:

1\. Building a company is incredibly hard.

2\. Nobody takes it harder than the founders.

Yes, I have worked hard. In the last six years, I always worked parts of my
weekend if not my vacations (which were few and far in between early on). I
pulled off all nighters as well as a last minute trip straight from work to
close a customer. I fell asleep on my laptop answering support questions.
There were many nights of dry tears and waking up in cold sweat from
nightmares that were all too real.

But what I went through is a fraction of what the _real_ founders went
through. And I saw their ups and downs up close.

Startups are hard. Incredibly hard, especially for those who has to lead the
ship from Day One. Early, dedicated employees see this first hand, thinking to
themselves, "Man, I thought I had a good/bad day, but they are probably having
it better/worse". That's why we never claim to be the "founders".

~~~
biztos
I don't disagree with you, but I call BS on the OP:

1\. 20-hour days are not actually worked, not even by slave labor.

2\. Sacrificing your personal life for your employer is pathological, not
heroic.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Sacrificing your personal life for your employer is pathological, not
> heroic_

This isn't an article about heroism. Keith Teare claims he co-founded
TechCrunch. Arrington says "no" and then details why.

One part of the "why" is about value-adding output. Arrington "could never get
[Teare] to write anything, or help pay any bills." Co-founders add value;
Keith didn't do that.

The second part of the "why" is about input. Output requires input. But it's
fair to highlight both, in part to block claims of unappreciated work. In
highlighting Heather's "20 hour days" and "sacrificing [of] her personal
life," Arrington draws into contrast the difference between someone he
considers a co-founder and someone he doesn't.

> _20-hour days are not actually worked_

Founded a company. Worked twenty-hour days. Deceptively easy to do if you're
chasing a short-term deliverable across multiple time zones. (Short-term
because this tactic is obviously unsustainable.)

~~~
kurthr
The first 80 hours of a work week seem the hardest... the next 60 fly by in a
daze of mania. It's hard to remember how to sleep and not think about work all
the time, but your productivity is constantly falling. It works best for
projects you can literally do in your sleep and anything requiring decision
making, detail, or creativity should be done in the first day. If mistakes
aren't very obvious when assembling the final blocks at the end, you'll miss
them. Camaraderie is important too!

------
birken
It seems the one fact that nobody is disputing is that the guy in question
owned 10% of Techcrunch. Generally people who own 10% of a company had
significant involvement in it. Not always, there are always edge cases, but
that is a good general rule.

Maybe this is one of those edge cases. But claiming somebody who owns 10% of
the company had literally nothing to do with the company is an extraordinary
claim that I'd say requires extraordinary evidence. This blog post to me
doesn't seem like extraordinary evidence.

But really the conclusion of this saga is pretty irrelevant. If somebody is
investing in any type of business because an advisor to that business may or
may not have co-founded a tech blog 12 years ago... well they have bigger
problems.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
Let's say he really deserves the 10%. That doesn't make him a "cofounder".
That only makes him a shareholder. If owning some shares in a company made you
a cofounder, by that logic any angel investor or VC is a cofounder of ever
single company they funded.

And even if the law says you're technically a "cofounder", it's pathetic to
call yourself that for a decade and use that false reputation for your
personal gains if you didn't really do anything for the company.

~~~
birken
FWIW I never said anything about the guy deserving the title of co-founder or
not. Arrington is claiming the guy had literally nothing to do with
Techcrunch, which is directly at odds with the one piece of information we
know: the guy owned 10% of Techcrunch.

As for the co-founder title, my point is if you are investing in some business
because an advisor is either a real co-founder or a fake co-founder of
Techcrunch, you are making a stupid investment. And that goes for this guy or
Arrington himself.

And yes, it is pathetic if somebody is claiming a bunch of credit for
something they didn't do. But it is also pathetic to give 10% of your business
to somebody who did nothing (assuming the blog post is accurate). As a neutral
observer I'm inclined to believe Arrington, but at the same time I don't think
he made a very strong case and presented basically no impartial evidence.
Frankly I think this blog post makes them both look bad.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
> And yes, it is pathetic if somebody is claiming a bunch of credit for
> something they didn't do. But it is also pathetic to give 10% of your
> business to somebody who did nothing (assuming the blog post is accurate)

This happens very frequently and that's why there are systems like vesting.

So you can't say it's "pathetic" to give away 10% to someone who didn't do any
work. It's more of a system failure, or you suffering due to lack of
experience or manipulation.

To give a specific example, there are tons of near-scam-artists who go around
telling naive founders just out of college that they will introduce them to
some investor, and in exchange they will get like 10% of the equity. Trust me
this happens very frequently and not because the founders who fall for it are
idiots, but because they're just inexperienced at that point in life. In this
case, it should suck to be in that founder's shoes, but it's really harsh to
call her/him pathetic because you have no idea what happened behind the
scenes. But what clearly is pathetic is the older guy who know exactly what
he's doing who is using his experience to scam the younger founder into
believing that it's OK to give 10% of the company he hasn't even incorporated
yet, all just for a single intro.

I'm not saying this is what happened in this case, but I'm just pointing out a
founder giving away 10% (or even more) happens all the time, especially if
you're not surrounded by the right people. This doesn't make them idiots, it's
just that they were in an unfortunate situation. But someone who knows exactly
what he's doing and is claiming to be what he isn't IS pathetic.

~~~
birken
I feel pity for the older and more experienced founder who (allegedly) took
advantage of the younger and naive one. But I also feel pity for the younger
founder who was exploited and didn't know any better.

Maybe it is more pitiful than pathetic for the older and wiser businessman to
(allegedly) take advantage of a younger and more naive person. But it is most
certainly pathetic for somebody to give up 10% of their company for nothing,
whether it is by being tricked or by being bullied or whatever.

That isn't a judgement on how common or uncommon this situation is, nor how
intelligent either party is, nor on their value as a person. And perhaps we
interpret the meaning of the word differently, but to me it means simply
evoking pity.

The irony that this post itself might be interpreted as pathetic is not lost
on me, but I think it is far more pedantic than pathetic so at least I have
that going for me.

------
cocktailpeanuts
Regardless of what the legal structure was, it's pretty pathetic to keep
calling yourself a "cofounder" when everyone knows you didn't do jack shit for
the company.

Kind of amusing because that's what that guy seems to be doing on a Twitter
thread
[https://twitter.com/kteare/status/965488545187147776](https://twitter.com/kteare/status/965488545187147776)

~~~
ckastner
He's calling himself a "co-founding shareholder" though, which appears to be
undisputed. (Not that weasel-wording is much better than outright lying.)

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
That's because he's replying directly to Arrington. Would be hilarious if he
kept insisting he's a "cofounder" on the same thread.

But just do a google search and you'll see that the guy has been really
capitalizing on the "TechCrunch Cofounder" brand for almost a decade now.

------
dpwm
It does muddy the waters somewhat and allow for a claim that he is "credited
as being part of" that he was listed as an editor on the about page. [0]

In fairness to the author, he does point this out.

If this individual really did do as is claimed and really did nothing other
than try to stop TechCrunch's existence, it may seem to some a strange thing
to continue to associate with such an individual.

To have provided a link to the website of archimedes ventures [1] on the about
page [0] where the author is listed alongside this individual as one of two
"general partners" seems like a slightly surprising omission when covering the
"real history."

It seems that had archimedes ventures been more successful than TechCrunch has
been, the author could have been able to have claimed to be a greater part of
that than this article would suggest.

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20051024041505/http://www.techcr...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051024041505/http://www.techcrunch.com:80/?p=2)

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20051026074846/http://www.archim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051026074846/http://www.archimedesventures.com:16080/?page_id=2)

~~~
gkoberger
Meh. Put yourself in Arrington's 2005 shoes. When you're starting, nobody
cares about you. He agreed to put someone on his crappy un-famous little blog
to keep him happy... At the time, getting anyone to care was the hard part,
not worrying about if a decade from now they'd use your reputation to scam
people.

I think Arrington did a great job of showing both sides of the story. Keith
clearly was vaguely involved, and Arrington admitted he didn't care until it
started being used to scam people. I think that's a fair line to put your foot
down and write a blog post.

------
gumby
I don't know anything about what might have actually happened or who said what
back when, but FWIW when I first met Keith a few years ago (I only see him
socially, not professionally) we talked about what each of us had done in the
past and about TC all he said was words to the effect of "..and I was involved
a bit when Techcrunch got going. Then I ...". The only reason this even stuck
in my mind at all is my GF had earlier described him as having founded TC, so
I noted what he said to correct my my understanding.

Maybe other times he played his involvement up more, and maybe other times
Arrington played it up more (as have been noted in these comments) but
literally the only time Keith ever mentioned TC in my presence is completely
consistent with what Arrington says in this blog entry "is what really
happened".

------
huangc10
Doing a quick search on the About TechCrunch page and TechCrunch wikipedia
page for "Keith Teare" will yield no results.

Another reason to do your due diligence when investing in ICOs.

~~~
gojomo
And yet, a search of [site:techcrunch.com "by keith teare"] turns up lots of
guest-writing, where the "editor's note" describes him as a "co-founder" of
TechCrunch, as well as other news stories by other TC staffers regularly
describing Teare with the same boilerplate.

Teare may be intending to over-emphasize his role; Arrington may be resentful
that Teare is touting his involvement this way. But for a long time, the
TechCrunch site itself was happy to describe Teare as a "co-founder".

So whatever the cause of the Arrington-Teare spat, it's not outlandish for
Teare to be making the same claim in 2018 as appeared repeatedly at TechCrunch
itself, since at least 2011 (<[https://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/archimedes-
labs-launches-a...](https://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/archimedes-labs-
launches-as-an-incubator-for-mobile-startups/>)).

------
telltruth
This gets played out in all companies every day: You do something interesting
in your spare time, your manager jumps on it out of nowhere to take credit and
soon enough he is the visionary leader while you get transformed in to dude
doing engineering implementation of his ideas.

Lot of big projects where you will see one of the executives or managers
attached, the real work - including vision - is many times done by that
engineer working away in his/her weekends. I know of at least two Ted talks
(one from Google exec) where the real person having the idea and doing the
work never ever gets even mentioned.

Very recently this is exactly what happened my current job. I hate the guy who
is nakedly and blatantly taking all the credit of my work. There is nothing I
can do because he is favorite in the upper management chain. I don't even get
to present my own work because he has convinced the upper management that I'm
just an engineer and not good at executive-level presentations. Unlike
Arrington, there is nothing I can do except leave the job but when I try that
I get grilled through stupid CS questions. Meanwhile my manager was ironically
featured in TechCrunch for all the work I did.

The credit stealing by managers in tech world is huge huge huge problem.

~~~
verytrivial
You sound come across as competent. If you don't feel justly compensated for
this loss of credit, you need to walk.

~~~
telltruth
I hear this advice all the time from my friends. If I was working on just
another web development project, yes, I could walk away to yet another web
development project. But if I was working on sending space crafts to Mars,
then what other choices do I have in the world? Working on improving search
results by 0.0001% at Google? Or identifying state actors at Facebook?
Ewww....

~~~
modeless
That's not a very convincing argument. There are tons of interesting space
companies, like these 10:
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3026685/the...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3026685/the-
worlds-top-10-most-innovative-companies-in-space)

They don't even mention all the ones I know about, like Planet Labs, or Blue
Origin, or places like JPL.

------
swang
Arrington deleted a whole bunch of tweets today seemingly about his worry that
SEC is going after investors investing in... shady ICOs. anyone know what they
said?

------
ggm
I used to eulogize my role in the early internet because being one of ten
thousand felt good. Now I keep quiet about it because I doubt I did much of
value and none of it persists. The real work was done by people we all know
and me and my fellow nine thousand mainly were early adopters with minor bug
reports to our name. Work is work.

It feels like some people prefer to mythologize their roots but I think
deprecation is safer.

------
majani
Two sides to every story. One thing that sticks out here is why Arrington of
all people would easily cave and give 10% to someone who did "nothing."

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
TechCrunch was a tech blog which didn't require much "operation". The site was
just a wordpress blog and the only work involved was probably blogging and
some wordpress maintenance.

This Keith guy never blogged, and this guy is no programmer.

The best he can claim to be is an "investor", but you really have to be
shameless to call yourself a "cofounder" when you really did nothing, and use
that reputation everywhere you go, especially in this case to promote scam
ICOs.

Whether he deserves the 10% or not doesn't really matter. Maybe he does, maybe
he doesn't. But you're not a "cofounder" if you did no work.

~~~
telltruth
TC is not just WordPress blog. There is a lot of leg work that happens to
contact VCs, journalists, founders, conduct interviews, verify details etc. I
bet 80% of the work that happens at TC is not-engineering. The fact that
Arrington carried this entirely on his shoulder while Keith just stayed on
sidelines is enough for him not getting credited for TC. However Keith claims
on his LinkedIn profile that he advised Arlington and helped him to be
successful even initially he did not believed in TC.

~~~
vidarh
When techcrunch started it was just a WordPress blog. It quickly grew to much
more than that, sure.

> However Keith claims on his LinkedIn profile that he advised Arlington and
> helped him to be successful even initially he did not believed in TC.

I've personally been present when Keith gave Mike advice about Techcrunch on
more than one occasion (and I was only over about 1 week every 6 or so, so
it'd be odd if I caught their only discussions), so while whether or not he
did _enough_ to justify calling himself co-founder is something I don't want
to wade into as I simply don't know (and is trying to keep my personal
opinions out of this when I don't have first hand knowledge), I for one was an
eye witness to Keith advising Mike more than once (whether or not Mike took on
that advice, or whether or not it was good advice, I don't want to try to
assess).

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
Most ethical people would never call themselves a "founder" if all they did
was give advice and never did any real work. That's why we have a term called
"advisor".

We're not even in legal territory here. It's about ethics. Can you see
yourself calling yourself a "Techcrunch Co-founder" if you were in his shoes?
If I were him, no matter how much advice I gave him I would NEVER call myself
a founder if I didn't do any work AND the entire world knows that I never
wrote a single post for a business whose only purpose was to blog.

~~~
vidarh
Do you have firsthand knowledge of this? Because I met and worked directly
with both people involved regularly during this period, and I still dont know
the full details of what went down. So the way I see it, either you were
directly involved but aren't disclosing your connection and hence makes it
impossible to judge your biases, or you were not and you're judging the
situation based on a very incomplete picture.

------
waqasaday
When starting a new company (esp without any compelling background), no one
cares about their project. So founders often reach out/involve potential
employees/advisors/supporters on the side line, and sometimes those name
appears on incorporation document/contracts/rent agreement etc because
founders were trying to get things off the ground. And they don’t want to
screw up the newly built relationship to get going.

Situation like these do not make someone a real co-founder.

------
gist
> Ultimately Keith knew I could just walk away from it all and TechCrunch
> would lose all its value, so he relented and I agreed to pay Keith 10% of
> any value I received in the company eventually to avoid litigation.

I know and have done business with Mike.

That said the above sounds like Mike may have been using resources [1] of
Edgeio and so essentially to avoid litigation Mike had to give Keith a cut of
the action. So as a stretch Keith could claim that w/o those resources (pay,
reimbursement, guidance and so on) Mike would never have been able to start
Techcrunch. That doesn't make Keith a founder for sure. But then again (taking
Keith's side of this not that I have any reason to do so at all) it doesn't
seem entirely unjust that he got 10% of Techcrunch. He could probably rework
the 'techcrunch' connection creatively to reflect this.

Also nobody gives up 10% of a company in this circumstance (remember Arrington
went to law school) unless they feel the other party has a leg to stand on and
they stand to loose more. Generally of course.

[1] "He asked me to work with him on Edgeio and possibly other companies he
was to start. I agreed and began working with him.".."At the time I was
working with Keith Teare on another project called Edgeio, a company that he
founded"

------
TheCondor
How does this actually matter? Various players either have stock and money
from tc or they don’t.

I’ve seen maybe a half dozen first hand examples of companies here in Colorado
bootstrapping, getting some real funding, going through a big pivot and then
having their history effectively rewritten. CEO and maybe a CTO are named
“founders” and neither was involved in any capacity for the first 12-18
months. After a pivot and some branding, about the only original equipment is
the name of the corporation and some legal paperwork, perhaps a couple
employees. Engineers do this too, surely we’ve all witnessed a little “title
inflation” on LinkedIn, I think it’s almost a disease with dissolved startups,
I just assume someone gave themselves a bump when reading a resume with
details from a completely nonexistent startup.

“Founder” is funnier though, it’s one thing if you got payed, but it’s not
like you’re claiming engineering experience. Seemed like a few years back at
defcon and black hat, folks were getting twisted about “credit,” like Apple
and MS, etc.. were going to give “Solar Ninja” credit for finding a security
flaw they fixed in a service pack.

~~~
zwily
The article explains exactly how it matters. Arrington didn’t care that much
until people started asking him about his connections to various crypto ICOs.

~~~
TheCondor
But he has no connection to them. He can simply say that, he can throw the ico
under the bus and recommend against doing business with them. He can do
whatever. If the investors talk to the wrong founder, that’s not exactly
helping the fundraising process, is it?

Ethics matter, truth is real, I’m not justifying any sort of dishonesty but
the difference between a real Co-founder that signed some articles of
incorporation or something and an early employee that you gave 10% of the
company to is kind of academic. If you have to make spurious claims to get
your ico off the ground some investors will sniff it out, others won’t, that’s
business. People “round up” on their resumes, it’s a known open secret, right?

------
phaed
Another scumbag advisor. Seeing that name is now a confimation the ICO is a
scam.

------
dannyw
Michael Arrington is named as an advisor to Nexo [1]. Is this connection
legitimate?

[1]: [https://nexo.io/](https://nexo.io/)

