An incident took place with Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington. Find the complete details below.
Michael Arrington,while walking out of DLD conference,came across an ‘asshole entrepreneur‘ who spat on his face and ran away into the crowd in a split of a second.
What’s latest on TechCrunch is something really embarrassing for the whole startup community. Very recently,Michael Arrington,while walking out of DLD conference,came across an ‘asshole entrepreneur’ who spat on his face and ran away into the crowd in a split of a second.
Arrington,on the other side,was quite astounded(rather shocked) with this mishap and has really spoke his heart out in his recent post.There,he has described the entire incident and a few other life threatening incidents that happened to him in the past.
At the end,he has shown his intentions of segregating himself from the tech world for a while,for self-introspecting of what he has been doing for years and is that what he should be doing.It’s not just him but his family and his employees who have all been threatened several times for a variety of reasons and after this shameful incident,he’s looking very serious about his decision to further pursue independent technology journalism or not.
We think,he MUST continue blogging about startups and tech industry in the future….Here’s why !
Such things aren’t new to him. Arrington, himself has committed it as well. It’s something that’s a bit intolerable to any human but also a thing can’t really avoid.Running away from this growing problem with TechCrunch’s growing popularity will only make the influential blogging community more ‘coward’ than ‘outspoken’.
TechCrunch is at a position which every other tech blog aspires to achieve and simply quitting tech journalism after achieving such a level of influence and popularity would only discourage any blogger to put his/her efforts to make his/her blog,reach the pinnacle of independent tech journalism.
The startup community would also miss an esteemed tech blog,whose one post had enough influence to bring a number of VCs,calling featured startup folks.
Michael must understand that many entrepreneurs are so damn greedy about their brainchild(startup) that their ignorance(for any reason) causes them go for offensive acts.
And if this is the case of an entrepreneur(or an asshole) spatting over an influential personality on the web,there’s also a case where a CEO(Steve Ballmer) of the biggest software company (Microsoft) in the world was thrown eggs on his face by some asshole and there’s one more popular case where the ex-president of United States(George Bush) was thrown a pair of shoes on his face by another asshole in Iraq.And the CEO and the ex-president stayed stiff !
There’s no doubt that TechCrunch remains quite unbiased in their product/service reviews but also says it on the face(rather broadcasts to tens of millions of its followers),whether the profiled startup is going to rock or get deadpooled.
It might possibly be a case when a VC simply loses confidence over the startup he funded after reading a disappointing review of that startup on TC.And its not that TC has also always been right in its judgement or prediction.They can’t always be.So,if they have been responsible for good as well as bad consequences for numerous startups then the returns/response is obvious to be mixed,both good as well as bad.
As far as ‘misbehaviour‘ is concerned,he can avoid(except some exceptional ones) going to events personally and send other folks to most of personal meets for getting on-spot coverage.
In the end,i would definitely agree with Michael when he says…
“But like I said, I draw the line at being spat on. It’s one step away from something far more violent”
