The Voodoo Curse of Julia Allison's Dog on Tech Companies
Theory: the closer internet persona(e) (non grata) Julia Allison gets to your internet startup, the more it's bound to falter. The breaking moment comes when her dog shits on your carpet.
Just as in relationships, when a significant other's dog empties itself on your carpet, you've broken a threshold, a deed that will never be undone. And we imagine Julia Allison's cupcake-eating dog, Lilly, has shit on a lot of carpets.
This probably happened to Vimeo founder and retreated-fameball Jakob Lodwick shortly before he was ousted from the company.
We've all heard about the troubles of Facebook lately (Spam! Departures!, Gadfly speculation on the non-monetizable nature of the company!) since her and Randi Zuckerberg became besties and started smoking in the bathroom and whatnot.
This probably didn't happen to social-network-as-video-game OMGPOP founder Charles Forman, because we haven't heard anything about that company other than people pouring money into it sometime both before and after the couple broke up (Forman more or less claimed tinnitus, not dogshitting, as the breaking point).
But Tumblr founder David Karp, while never in a relationship with Allison, has, at the least, always been cozy with her. From deep inside the Tumblr headquarters, proof that this thing has reached a breaking point:
Yeah: that's Allison, cleaning up Lilly's satanic curse from the floor of the Tumblr offices. Allison has referred to Lilly as a business partner; we don't doubt the dog's cunning skill in strategic shittery as a mark of both territory and omen. Open memo to David Karp and the rest of Tumblr: fumigate the place. Smudge it with sage. Rain dance the hell out of it. And Dennis Crowley of iPhone social networking app Foursquare: put that thing down NOW.