
TechCrunch Pump n Dump - jamesgagan
http://brianshall.com/blog/techcrunch-pump-n-dump
======
pavs
TC has always been a big scam under the guise of journalism. And the mailbox
example is not even a very good one. I still remember, when I used to frequent
TC, they had glowing reviews for startups they were directly involved with.
Most of the time they didn't even bother to mention the conflict of interest.

Not to mention Arrington and his monthly quota of manufactured drama.

Worst part, TC always did and still does (though not as much), quite
frequently cover most of the frontpage of HN with regurgitated 1 paragraph
"news" that has been already discussed to death on other frontpage submission.

How the hell and why the fuck, I have no idea...

~~~
larrys
"TC has always been a big scam under the guise of journalism."

Why is that a scam? It's only a scam to the people freshly hatched that a)
don't know it's a scam or b) can't figure out because they don't read it or
other things enough to discover it's a "scam" (not my word just repeating).

Sometimes the reason that "scams" get people upset is the same reason a guy
will get mad when another guy gets the girl because of bullshit. And the guy
who lost out either has scruples (and feels cheated) or wouldn't ever think
that anyone would fall for the particular bullshit that landed the girl.

------
ayanb
I have two observations -

1)Our society is structured in pyramids across multiple dimensions. On top of
the these pyramids are powerful cliques. The pyramids that are predominantly
influenced by the business world have even stronger cliques at the top. People
at the top try to optimize for their success, and its only human. So ya, this
who pump and dump is not surprising, happens everywhere.

2) Mailbox is a super-sexy acquisition for Dropbox. Because of my work, I am
in this unique position to look deeply at around 70 online backup and cloud
vendors, their features, their social signal, their pricing etc, their usage
scenarios, their usage feedback and I think, given the uber-competitiveness of
the space, most of these vendors will either a) move upstream and try to
increase the real estate of their clients (Box trying to get into document
editing suite is a prime example) or b) have a differentiated offering like
egnyte. With this context, I think, the mailbox acquisition is an absolute
bomb. I am doing further research on this topic and will hopefully publish it
soon.

So yes, the hype-cycle was at work, but its normal and dropbox founders and
executive team were pretty much certain they needed to this.

~~~
samstave
Spot on!

I think the acquisition of mailbox is brilliant! Dropbox, while fantastic is a
one dimensional service which in its current form doesn't have much room to
innovate around simply storing and synching my data.

With the addition of mailbox, they can start down the path of having the
storage layer augmented by services directly on top of it.

------
joonix
Hold on. MG Siegler and Arrington were investors in Mailbox? This kind of
conflict is really unacceptable. Bloggers need to get real about ethics if
they want to be taken seriously as journalists.

~~~
untog
Welcome to the world of web journalism. Outfits like PandoDaily are funded by
organisations that back the very startups PandoDaily writes about. Conflict?
Psh!

~~~
jrockway
Next you'll tell me that a startup incubator has their own news + commenting
site. (Though I personally don't see the conflict.)

~~~
untog
There is an outside possibility that pg has rigged HN to give more upvotes to
YC-funded companies. It just seems a little unlikely.

~~~
mehrzad
You can't know until he open sources it!

~~~
Karunamon
It is, minus the bits used for spam and vote abuse detection.

<http://arclanguage.org>

<http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar>

------
Eduardo3rd
When is this cycle going to end?

It seems like every time a high profile acquisition takes place there’s a
vocal group of people blogging about how the company in question isn’t really
“world-disrupting shit Silicon Valley does”.

Have you seen Silicon Valley recently? This is exactly what it does. There’s
still a group of companies out there who are taking big chances and trying
amazing things, but by and large the ecosystem is full of stuff like Mailbox.
Well-made, highly polished software that caters to a specific problem that
people with money complain about. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that
business model, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that this is some huge
affront to the innovation engine that is Silicon Valley.

~~~
niggler
It won't end, because even those who claim to dislike the practice still wish
to be part of it.

"the innovation engine that is Silicon Valley"

Maybe I'm too young, but was there ever a time where Silicon Valley was
innovating in the way we wish SV was innovating? It seems like the landscape
was like this for a very long time

~~~
rdl
Steve Blank talks about a lot of interesting RF/defense stuff from ancient
times, and of course Intel early on, so the 1970s were great. And Apple. And
videogame boom/bust/boom.

I'd consider The Internet, cisco, Sun, Berkeley UNIX, etc. to have been quite
innovative. (early 1980s to early 1990s recession)

Arguably the first part of the tech bubble was amazing -- 1995-1998 or so.

I think 2008-2011 was a low period, but that may just correlate with the
economic downturn. 2005-2008 was interesting due to AJAX and not much else;
that really was the weakest boomlet technically, but I think a lot of it was
just proving we _could_ have a boom again, just like GW1 was proving US
military involvement didn't automatically mean another Vietnam.

I've seen plenty of awesome stuff in 2012+, and it seems to be accelerating.

------
xpose2000
Yes, this is how it works in terms of startups trying to gain traction. I
imagine it's not just techcrunch that works this way. The startup I worked for
got immediate coverage and 60% of the article wasn't even true. Inflating
traffic numbers to the nearest million seems like a common practice.

If you know someone, then there is a 100% chance of getting coverage. For
everyone else its a crapshoot and certainly not in your favor.

Here is my example:

I tried to get coverage for a fantasy sports startup that solves real problems
surrounding player news and getting lineup advice. It even tells you who to
pick up on the waiver wire. Got no coverage. Had no exciting investors. It was
boring to them.

However, once I launched a side project that enhances the readability of
reddit iama's, then I got immediate coverage without even asking for it.

~~~
photorized
Their (especially true for TC) coverage seems to be focused mainly on
investment rounds and exits. It is very unlikely that a random startup would
get coverage, if you have no prior exit history, and you are bootstrapping.

That gives me an idea - who wants to launch an anti-TC, dark horse-type
service with me? Focus on bootstrapped businesses.

------
pg
The people who propose these inane conspiracy theories always forget one
critical component: why the acquirer was such a willing patsy.

~~~
pdeuchler
I believe that by definition a patsy is always quite willing.

The OP might be a little off in this case, but I fail to see how this is
inane. A publication that is run by someone who has a conflict of interest
released a large media blitz that undoubtedly painted Mailbox in a very
positive light, leading to an arguably overpriced acquisition.

I honestly don't know enough to make a judgment, but following the money has
never lead me wrong before.

~~~
tptacek
What you're saying is that you think Dropbox values acquisitions by collecting
media stories and measuring their sentiments. Have you ever been involved in
an acquisition? The ones I've been a party to involved proctological levels of
due diligence. The idea that Techcruch coverage even occurred to anyone
involved after the first or second meeting is comically naive.

~~~
ghshephard
Well, in all fairness (and I do think that the original conspiracy theory is
inane, and reflects someone with an axe to grind rather than a rational
assessment of the situation) - the actual hype cycle would look more like:

o Write up a great story that makes a product sound amazing o Get lots of
people to use it, wait in line o Dropbox values the application based on user
engagement stats.

I don't think there is any evidence that Ryan Lawler (the author of the
TechCrunch Mailbox Stories) was incented or directed in any way to write them.
Indeed, here on HN, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5389748>, he states
that he and Arrington/Siegler don't even have any type of special
relationship. He's not even sure that Arrington even knows who he is.

With all that said - I just checked, and I've finally (after a month?) made it
to the front of the line, so I'm off to chase Inbox Zero!

~~~
tptacek
And who's to say long-term user engagement predictions had anything to do with
the valuation? If you were Drew Houston and had all the resources of Dropbox
to leverage using what appears to be one of the most popular mobile email
applications in the world, what could you come up with? How much would it be
worth to have a credible vehicle with which to compete directly with Google
Mail, for instance?

------
flexie
I don't know the Dropbox guys but I doubt they take investment advice from
Techcrunch. It also doesn't seem likely that Dropbox with its 100 million
users bought Mailbox for their 750,000 users.

Why is it so hard for some people to stomach that maybe Dropbox bought Mailbox
for the tech or the talent?

~~~
antr
Both stands are not mutually exclusive.

I really like Mailbox, it really helps me manage my email better, this was no
trivial technical/design execution.

On the other hand, CrunchFund being an investor, and the fantastic duo being
"contributors" to TC makes the cynic in me believe that the last four articles
were more than "news".

~~~
flexie
But do you think that is what made Dropbox buy them or that it substantially
influenced the price?

~~~
antr
In an indirect way, yes. Creating positive noise can attract more
buyers/interest to the table, and that can put pressure on serious buyers like
Dropbox to increase the price/make the offer sweeter.

I really doubt it was only Dropbox knocking on Mailbox's door. Specially given
the rumoured price (I also think there is a large equity component).

------
ChuckMcM
Sigh. Doesn't matter what the facts are, this point of view that there is a
"conspiracy" always emerges. There is a strange counter phenomena on the other
side too sometimes. Sometimes a person at a company and get acquired or go
public who suddenly has a high net worth, can't internalize the fact that they
are suddenly rich and the people perhaps sitting next to them aren't. A bit
flips and they decide its because they are just that smart/good/talented.
(which is, for them, easier than just being lucky). It is a weird thing to
watch, I saw dozens of cases of it at Sun when Sun went public and recognized
it in folks at Google as well.

The brain tries to "explain." Sometimes really implausible scenarios seem to
be the best answer [1]. For this particular scenario (TechCrunch somehow
"selling" Mailbox to Dropbox) some pretty savvy and experienced people would
have to have been "tricked." While the probability is non-zero that that is
the case, it is highly unlikely. And the much more boring answer that the
Mailbox folks had created something of value to the Dropbox folks remains.

I am more curious why Brian is so invested in the lack of standards at
TechCrunch. Why does he care? It's not hard to see they rate somewhere been
the Enquirer and the Daily Post in terms of what they will publish to get page
views.

[1] Alien abduction is one of those areas where people would rather believe
they were abducted by aliens than what ever really happened.

------
aneth4
I have a hard time understanding why Dropbox would pay $100M. Compared to the
Instagram acquisition, this seems like a blunder.

The talent - Maybe worth $10M at the high end, probably same for Instagram

Future profit - Difficult to see how this app would be profitable, but maybe
it could make a few million a year if it swept the app store. Instagram had
similar long term monetization potential to facebook.

Technology - Indexing gmail and keeping metadata on each message. A difficult
task to scale, but not $10M difficult. Instagram was handling significantly
more data, but Facebook certainly didn't need the technology.

Users and momentum - Don't see much value for Dropbox here with 700K users.
Instagram was growing rapidly and had 20M+ users.

Time - Dropbox wants to be in the email and communications space... seems like
the could have developed something in 6 months for a few million. Instagram
would have been difficult for Facebook to catch up with, since head starts
matter in social. Email apps don't have the network lock-in, so there is much
less reason to worry about time.

Competition - There was no threat to dropbox. Instagram appeared to be
dominating a demographic and use case for social, and could easily be seen as
a threat to Facebook.

However, Dropbox did pay that much. We have to assume there was a reason other
than a Techcrunch article.

------
damoncali
I think the OP is giving Tech Crunch a wee bit more credit for king making
than they deserve.

Mailbox is a great case of playing the hype game to perfection. Massive hype,
perfect fit for a larger "startup" playing with house monopoly money - it all
adds up to a huge win.

Just be happy for the guys. They haven't even gotten started yet- let them
give it a go.

------
neya
I am glad someone is actually writing about this. We live in an era where
we've learned to accept the things around us - No matter how good or bad they
are, but we've over the last few decades, started to accept the things that
are going around us, and accept compromise, slowly.

News organizations like Techcrunch, Gizmodo, etc. are some of the most
arrogant, unethical organizations you will ever find on this planet. I say
unethical because of how they work. In the REAL WORLD, journalism works by
having REAL journalists, who travel places, meet new people, explore new
problems, explore un-identified areas of coverage and report them as news.

But, the internet revolutionized journalism so much that it's so screwed up
right now. In the online world, all you need to call yourself a 'journalist'
or a 'media organization' is just a hosted Wordrpess blog with a custom
domain. And that's just it. The worst part is the content - Where journalism
by itself is known for the kind of content it provides, this is totally
eliminated. In many ways, an online journalist has not much work to do, when
say compared to a real life journalist. The information he wants to report on
is RIGHT THERE. Just go to news.google.com, news.ycombinator.com, reddit.com,
find some controversial (most cases) topic to write about, add some opinions
and publish it as a post. BINGO! Just watch the comments pour in and pageviews
explode! And profit!!!

Do you know what is unethical about this setup?

These so called 'journalists' are basically thieves. They 'steal' from an open
community like reddit or hackernews, add their own flavors and spin it off
into a new article. I want you to browse through the whole list of articles on
Gizmodo and Techcrunch and compare it with the sh*t these organizations write
and tell me this is not true. You will easily notice that majority of the
content is ripped off from the open communities.

These so called organizations and the idiots calling themselves journalists
are a shame to the true essence of Journalism. Because what they are supposed
to write about is the news and not what they think of it. I am sick of reading
anti-Google posts and pro-Apple (or vice-versa) articles on these shitty so
called 'news' sites. I want to read true, unbiased, uncolored content. I want
to read the news and not what a random author thinks of the news. And I know
someday someone will realize this and create a true 'Wikipedia' for news. And
that will be the greatest 'FUCK YOU' sent to these unethical organizations in
the history of man kind, ever.

------
minimaxir
(Disclosure: I independently comment a lot on TechCrunch articles.)

While I definitely agree that the acquisition of $100 million is absurd, I
don't think it can be solely attributed to TechCrunch's coverage, given that
other sites like GigaOm and The Verge also gave large amounts of coverage.

The relationship between the writers/CrunchFund is overstated:
<https://twitter.com/ryanlawler/status/313297205186408451> _EDIT: article
updated with Tweet_

Also, large amounts of TC press does not mean success: (see
<http://techcrunch.com/tag/airtime/> )

------
10char
Guys, this is an under-informed and reactionary post, which grossly simplifies
the situation in a way that is insulting to Dropbox, TechCrunch/AOL,
CrunchFund, and the Mailbox/Orchestra team. It's also kind of upsetting that
this post is at the top of HN and getting a kind of froth-at-the-mouth
reaction that it is.

It's well-known and indeed massively controversial[1] that there's a
CrunchFund/TechCrunch conflict. Arrington _left TechCrunch_ because of his
desire to return to investing about a year ago[2], after the short stint at
doing both journalism and investing in parallel. According to CrunchBase, this
was coincidentally the same month that CrunchFund invested in Orchestra[3].
Both he and MG returned in October 2012[4], but both have hardly written any
TC pieces since then. Why? Probably because they're quite busy with their day
jobs running CrunchFund.

Additionally, on many posts with CrunchFund conflicts, they have been called
out at the end of each article (see
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/andreessen-horowitz-adds-
je...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/andreessen-horowitz-adds-jeff-jordan-
as-partner-leads-5m-likealittle-series-a/)). They probably have been a bit lax
about that as of late since the CrunchFund guys aren't really involved in TC
(compared with the often torrential output of most other staff writers).

TechCrunch coverage did probably get Mailbox some users, and CrunchFund as a
VC probably did add some value to their company, but the effects and
importance of TechCrunch itself are _wildly overstated_. Probably more
important is that the Mailbox/Orchestra team is _top notch_ at making
incredible mobile products (Orchestra won one of Apple's Top App award in 2011
[http://blog.orchestra.com/orchestra-is-productivity-app-
of-2...](http://blog.orchestra.com/orchestra-is-productivity-app-of-2011-in-
the)), had _hundreds of thousands_ of active users within a very short amount
of time (with only a tiny insignificant fraction of those coming from TC), and
Dropbox can probably provide a better home for a lot of the Really Hard
problems with email at that kind of scale.

Like I get why OP seems alarmed, but it's pretty naive to think that
TechCrunch matters in any important way to the success or financial outcome of
a company. Just read about the "TechCrunch pop"[5]; their users rarely not
stay with or give lasting value to a product. If you want to belittle the
_astounding_ accomplishments of the Mailbox team, at least don't pick
something like TechCrunch to do it over.

[1]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/technology/michael-
arringt...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/technology/michael-arrington-
techcrunch-blogger-to-invest-in-start-ups.html?_r=0)

[2]: [http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/michael-arrington-
leav...](http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/michael-arrington-leaves-
techcrunch-134791)

[3]: <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/orchestra>

[4]: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/getting-the-band-back-
toget...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/23/getting-the-band-back-together/)

[5]: [http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/11/19/the-depressing-day-
aft...](http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/11/19/the-depressing-day-after-you-
get-techcrunched/)

~~~
tatsuke95
> _" in a way that is insulting to Dropbox, TechCrunch/AOL, CrunchFund, and
> the Mailbox/Orchestra team"_

Arrington is a jerk and MG is a talentless shill. They're both "right place,
right time" guys who strut around with undeserved influence. I care little
about insulting Techcrunch/AOL or Crunchfund.

When banks do things like this, we call for heads. When it's SV personalities,
we're apologists.

> _"Arrington left TechCrunch because of his desire to return to investing
> about a year ago"_

You say left, I say forced out, because there was an _obvious conflict of
interest_.

> _" Probably more important is that the Mailbox/Orchestra team is top notch
> at making incredible mobile products"_

That's nice. I suppose we'll agree to disagree that a company that built an
app that sits on gmail is worth $100MM.

~~~
pg
It embarrasses me to see comments like this getting upvoted on HN. There is no
information in it, just inflammatory language. When this sort of comment
prevails on HN, we'll have sunk to the ground state of forums.

~~~
tptacek
Why aren't you quietly penalizing people who upvote them? They're damaging the
site.

Here is a better question: why aren't you quietly penalizing people who submit
the stories that generate these comments?

~~~
samiur1204
Well. while I absolutely find these comments to be unhelpful, it's definitely
not a good idea to censor comments or explicitly ban them. I'd like to think
that we can filter out these comments by the community downvoting them rather
than PG doing it himself. It should be a democratic process.

~~~
tptacek
HN is not a democracy, and it's not an open forum (whatever that means). It
never was. If censoriousness drives users away... well, maybe that is itself a
solution to a problem.

Features that make HN disproportionately less attractive to the kinds of users
who vote up comments like the one upthread sound like a good idea.

~~~
chacham15
While what you say is true, how many posts have you seen along the lines of
"why was foo hellbanned" or "why was this post killed?" I think people would
be upset if the response was because I think that they are detracting from the
site.

~~~
tptacek
I don't like the way hellbanning works here, but that doesn't mean I'm going
to pretend that crap like the TC/Mailbox Conspiracy comes from a minority we
should protect, nor do I think hellban administration is a problem that needs
to be fixed first.

------
uptown
For $100 million, Dropbox just got a glimpse at every current and future
Mailbox user's inbox.

That's actionable data that's otherwise difficult to get without starting your
own webmail service. This comes at a time when Dropbox seeks to expand the
services and integration-points to provide other services - this might pay-off
in the long run as more than just a tool to complement email.

------
nawitus
Well, that could've been written better. There's clearly a conflict of
interest, but on the other hand Mailbox seems like a useful application. Even
great products benefit from hype.

~~~
buro9
I looked at Mailbox about a month ago and couldn't work out what it did that
Gmail for Android didn't already do.

Then I looked again a few days ago after the hype about the sale, and I still
can't work out what it does that I don't already have available with Gmail for
Android.

About the only email addition I'm currently excited about and finding useful
is Streak.

~~~
pron
Yeah, it seems like Mailbox is pretty much a clone of GMail for Android, only
for the iPhone.

------
klochner
1) We're not in a position to value the acquisition.

2) TechCrunch is more of a PR outlet than news source. It has an occasional
news story, but the vast majority are PR pieces.

Surely Mailbox met the minimum bar for some glowing PR pieces in TC, so this
controversy is misplaced.

------
jroseattle
This post basically says that the guys at Dropbox are idiots and can't
disambiguate between PR-driven noise and a real business. News flash: the guys
at Dropbox aren't idiots.

The notion that Techcrunch is fueling demand AND reaping rewards on the other
side is false. Oh, they may try to prime the pump from time to time, but at
most it simply gives visibility to a few startups. In the end, users will
drive and dictate the value.

Give the Dropbox guys some credit. And, more to the point, _don't_ give credit
to some guys with nothing more than write access to a blog.

------
zht
case in point: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/with-20-of-reservations-
fil...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/with-20-of-reservations-filled-
mailbox-goes-down-so-you-can-enjoy-your-valentines-day/)

I'm not sure if I've ever read such fawning about a service going down.

------
itsprofitbaron
I believe that this blog post is absurd, disrespectful and insults the entire
Dropbox and Orchestra/Mailbox teams as well as, those at Aol/Techcrunch and
Crunchfund. Dropbox did not buy Mailbox based on a couple of Techcrunch posts,
and they obviously will have done their due diligence before purchasing the
company.

Dropbox bought Mailbox because, it wants to be more than a storage company and
they are looking at diversifying their income streams with the rise of rivals
encroaching their territory as well as, ensuring that people stay with Dropbox
rather than go to other rivals. Acquisitions of Audiogalaxy, Cove, Snapjoy etc
highlight that this is Dropbox’s plans going forward.

More often than not, Techcrunch states a disclosure of a Crunchfund investment
within the posts that they are writing and although, they may have not
followed through with this properly with Mailbox – you can clearly see on the
Company Bio linking to Crunchbase that Crunchfund are/were an investor too[1].

Let’s not forget Mailbox is from Orchestra[2], a company which already had
hundreds of thousands of users and is a company which won Apple’s Productivity
App of 2011[3].

[1] <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/orchestra>

[2] <http://www.orchestra.com>

[3] [http://blog.orchestra.com/orchestra-is-productivity-app-
of-2...](http://blog.orchestra.com/orchestra-is-productivity-app-of-2011-in-
the)

~~~
tatsuke95
> _"Dropbox did not buy Mailbox based on a couple of Techcrunch posts, and
> they obviously will have done their due diligence before purchasing the
> company."_

I like Dropbox. But recent history is filled with terrible acquisitions that
have you wondering what the lawyers and accountants were doing:

Ebay buying Skype.

Microsoft buying Danger.

Microsoft buying aQuantive.

Anyone investing in Color.

AOL buying Time Warner.

Yahoo! buying Geocities.

and these were all huge deals I can think of off the top of my head. The
number of small ones is, I'm sure, substantially larger.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The lawyers and accountants were doing overtime, those are all billable hours.

But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know what
management had in mind for it. If their goal was go "make it go away" then
what looks like "bad" on the outside can be "good" on the inside. If their
goal was to get a team to build something they didn't yet have a team that
could build, it might also be "good" in a way you and I couldn't see.

~~~
tatsuke95
> _"But to make the argument that something is "bad" you really have to know
> what management had in mind for it."_

What they hand in mind is irrelevant to me. All I care about is the outcome.
Saying Microsoft bought aQuantive with the hopes to cure cancer in their mind
doesn't justify a $6BB write down. It would still be bad.

------
rkl
Hi everyone! I'm the writer of all those effusive Mailbox articles which
supposedly drove up the valuation of Mailbox and helped it to be acquired for
the benefit of the folks at CrunchFund. So maybe we should clear a few things
up. The Storify version is here: <http://storify.com/ryanlawler/techcrunch-
pump-n-dump>

But let's make a few things clear: I don't have any special relationship with
Michael Arrington, MG Siegler, or anyone else who works at CrunchFund. I may
see them around socially, in the same way that I see any other investors or
entrepreneurs at events where those types of people hang out. But they don't
pitch me startups they've invested in, and there's certainly no expectation
that I, or anyone else at TechCrunch, be friendly to companies that they've
put money into.

I joined Techcrunch more than six months after Arrington was booted, and well
after the exodus of employees who worked for him started 'pursuing other
interests.' I never worked with him, and besides exchanging pleasantries
backstage at TC Disrupt, I frankly don't think he knows who I am. He certainly
doesn't whisper secrets in my ear, and I couldn't care less about whether or
not his little VC fund is successful.

I first reached out to Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood in August of last year,
because I heard he was working on a cool solution to email overload. (I think
I first heard about Mailbox from one of his tweets.) It wasn't until December
that I'd gotten a chance to test it out. I think I had it for about a week
before I wrote that first article, and I loved it, and still love it. In fact,
I have been using it as my default email client ever since I got it.

At the time I worried that the story would be seen as hyperbolic, but I
believed in the product and thought more people should know about it. I
thought it was an actual useful piece of software that could make people's
lives better, so yes, I wrote glowing reviews of it. But at no point did I do
so because of any influence from Mike, or CrunchFund, or anyone who had an
actual vested interest in seeing Mailbox succeed or profiting from it.

The thing that annoys me about pieces like this are that they vastly overstate
the influence that CrunchFund or any other VC have in our coverage. Yes, they
frequently clue us in to cool applications they're playing with, but there's
no real exchanging of favors that happens. I write about products I like,
usually pass on those that don't interest me, but if there's the case where I
test something out and it doesn't pass muster, I usually say so.

One final note: The most recent article I wrote was about Uber, which is also
a CrunchFund company. That one was not nearly as positive as the stuff I wrote
about Mailbox. [http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/see-uber-this-is-what-
happe...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/see-uber-this-is-what-happens-when-
you-cannibalize-yourself/)

------
kmfrk
Someone with more experience writing browser extensions than I shouldn't have
too hard a time using the CrunchBase database to automatically include a
"CONFLICT OF INTEREST" warning in TechCrunch posts:

<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/orchestra>

------
OldSchool
If you're in the "startup" business, where the real product is the business
itself, this sort of operation is standard practice. It starts with having a
PR company - a truly productive one. Add on some great media contacts made
over the years and you're playing an A game.

To an extent all business runs like this. It actually is much more difficult
to enforce the now, but imagine a world in which only those who can afford
advertising have any public voice at all. As an added bonus, those who buy
advertising are at least at the front of the line to get positive articles
written about them. Those 2% of your customers you inevitably piss off can't
drag your name through the mud because they have no truly public forum for
their opinion. That's pretty close to how things were before the web.

------
glasshead969
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/3961544/mailbox-app-for-
iph...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/3961544/mailbox-app-for-iphone-inbox-
unchained)

[http://www.macworld.com/article/2027388/review-mailbox-
for-i...](http://www.macworld.com/article/2027388/review-mailbox-for-iphone-
belongs-in-your-dock.html)

[http://allthingsd.com/20130221/mailbox-takes-swipe-at-
tradit...](http://allthingsd.com/20130221/mailbox-takes-swipe-at-traditional-
mobile-email-apps/)

It's just not techcruch, mailbox app got rave reviews from other sites too.
This post is insulting to mailbox team giving an impression somehow they are
scamming.

------
waterlesscloud
The number of companies that TC hypes that go nowhere far outnumber those few
that succeed. Those that do succeed seem like they would have done so even if
TC hated them.

I strongly doubt they play much of a role in the success of a company.

------
ruswick
I'm not sure that this can be reduced solely to a conflict of interest
regarding Crunch Fund. Arrington left, and the piece (really more of a rant)
never accounts for that or for any of the other possible motivations: it just
asserts some sort of dubious manipulation of the system.

Frankly, I think the impetus is much more benign: TC wants trafic, and Mailbox
is popular at the moment (primarily due to their brilliant if infuriating
waiting list gimmick). Blogs write what will make them money.

------
tptacek
This blog post was so obviously pointless and toxic that I flagged it, but of
course flagging doesn't work on stories like this, because they collect
upvotes too fast.

------
ghshephard
"Pump and Dump" claim might have some semblance of credibility if mailbox was
a publicly traded stock that Arrington/siegler talked up on techcrunch,
without noting they were investors, and then sold to the unwitting public who
purchased said stock on the basis of a techcrunch article. Given that the sale
to Dropbox was a private transaction, this is all moot.

------
thedrbrian
That was hard work just to read a paragraph of text. Note to website
owners/designers 5-7 words per line doesn't make it easier to read on a
smartphone.

------
blantonl
Granted, this type of journalism is shady, but this certainly doesn't meet the
definition of a "pump and dump" scheme.

~~~
benologist
You should try using this definition:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump>

------
mikekij
I couldn't agree with the OP more.

------
smoyer
And only yesterday there was a post about how you couldn't make any money as a
writer!

------
angrydev
Doesn't a company like Dropbox have the ability to judge for themselves
whether or not a startup boosted by TC is actually worthy of buying? It's
insane to think that they would drop $100M on a company based on TC promotion
alone.

------
michaelwww
Who's being scammed here? I don't get his point.

~~~
camus
dropbox investors.

~~~
michaelwww
Dropbox is a privately held company. I'm not going to second-guess it's
investors or management. Besides, tech journalism has been this way since the
beginning. When I read Zeigler or Mossberg I know I'm getting. I've always
used the contrarian writings of John C. Dvorak as a balance. Does anyone
really think the 750,000 people are going to keep using Mailbox because
Zeigler or Arrington say they should, or even know who these two are?

