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The Real History of TechCrunch

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Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#11

Post by ktamura »

biztos wrote: post #9
ktamura wrote: post #7

>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…

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.

I agree on both. Honestly, much of my long hours were due to my inexperience rather than supernatural productivity. If I were to do the same work with what I know now, I'd do it very differently with far fewer hours (probably).

That said, the point OP was making is that in a startup origin story, there's a significant perception gap between those who actually moved the needle and those who claim to have done so. Those who actually drove the bus and those who rode it. Time and again, I've seen the latter people take advantage of the relative reticence of the former.

It's probably more like, "relative to this guy who tried to kill my company early on and later claimed undue credit for its founding, this dedicated early employee surely seemed like she worked 20+ hour days and sacrificed everything for me."

Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#12

Post by [deleted] »

biztos wrote: post #9
ktamura wrote: post #7

>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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#13

Post by 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.

Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#14

Post by 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.

Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#15

Post by JumpCrisscross »

biztos wrote: post #9
ktamura wrote: post #7

>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…

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.

> 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.)

Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#16

Post by gkoberger »

dpwm wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#17

Post by JumpCrisscross »

telltruth wrote: post #13

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…

> You do something interesting in your space time, your manager jumps on it out of nowhere to take credit

This is unfortunate, but not what happened here. Better analogy: you do something interesting; your roommate takes credit to hock junk securities.

Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#18

Post by 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...

Re: The Real History of TechCrunch

#19

Post by verytrivial »

telltruth wrote: post #13

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…

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