"EPIC FAIL meeting Arrington. He totes blew me off. Awesome!" — Valleywag's Jackson West, confirming via text message other eyewitness accounts of the TechCrunch editor's personal charm.
We hear Michael Arrington is in advanced talks to acquire VentureBeat, a smaller tech blog which, like Arrington's TechCrunch, is trying to expand from the niche of covering startups. When Arrington issued a rant about the dangers of tech blogs raising venture capital, it was easy to dismiss his talk of a blog rollup as drunken fantasy. Arrington's concern: That his competitors, by raising money one by one, would make it financially impossible to assemble a "dream team" of bloggers. But why on earth would anyone accept a lower valuation just to be part of Arrington's team? Arrington, we're told, has tentatively secured venture backing from Eric Chin of Bay Partners, a longtime business associate. That would give him the capital to buy up at least some of his rivals.
In a 543-word opus describing his travails finding Internet connectivity in Palo Alto after a Comcast outage, imperialist blogger Michael Arrington was distracted by a noisy rooster. "There should be no live chickens in Palo Alto," he complains. While roosters, like the one pictured, are strictly forbidden in Palo Alto outside of areas zoned for agriculture, residents are allowed to keep up to six hens with a regular permit. How to dispose of the noisy cock? The city will happily loan a humane trap for $5 a day.
Our commenters are revolting. Specifically, over our continuing coverage of Jason Calacanis, who is famous on the Internet for owning two adorable bulldogs. But there's something charming about the sheer clumsiness of Calacanis's relentless hucksterism. Take the live broadcast he conducted to beg Chris Shipley, the producer of tech-startup conference Demo, to come work on Calacanis and Michael Arrington's rival TechCrunch50 conference. "Be part of the winning team! We are the street level team ... blue collar. Everybody needs to support the Jason Nation." J-Dawg, with that headset look, shouldn't you be playing CounterStrike? And on what planet are you and Arrington "blue-collar"? I can only imagine what Arrington said to you when you tried to put him on the speaker — no doubt something as subtle and polite as "Demo needs to die." The video:
TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis (did you know that he runs Mahalo?) have announced their second TechCrunch conference: the TechCrunch50, with 10 more companies than last year. The conference will be held over three days — overlapping Demo's fall event. Demo is the startup-launch Arrington and Calacanis are trying to compete against, their distinction being that all finalists are supposedly chosen by "merit," as they define it. The "merit" is so important that TechCrunch head Michael Arrington mentioned it twice in the 248-word announcement. I can't wait.
It takes a brave man to get in the middle of TechCrunch's bloggin' VC Michael Arrington and PaidContent founding editor Rafat Ali as they duke it out over the future of their micromedia empires. Timesman Saul Hansell is nothing but brave. In a Bits blog post, he quotes Rafat Ali's new hired hand Nathan Richardson saying that PaidContent differentiates itself from TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider and our own Valleywag because it "has not gone down the road of following personal foibles." Then, towards the end of the piece, Ali himself suggeests that Arrington is thinking too small by gunning for CNET:
Josh Quittner, the Fortune executive editor who's reportedly plotting his escape from his gilded cage at the magazine, has written a perfunctory profile of TechCrunch blog impresario Michael Arrington. Nothing we haven't read before — including the obligatory paragraph about Arrington's conflicts of interest in writing about startups even as he invests in them. Quittner observes that the practice seems to boost Arrington's reputation in the Valley. One conflict Quittner never mentions: As editor of Business 2.0, where I worked for him, he tried to strike a deal with Arrington to save the magazine by merging it with TechCrunch. The effort failed, landing Quittner at Fortune.
Michael Arrington spends 1,517 words talking about blogs taking venture funding and his grand scheme to form a big, A-List blog network to take on CNET. Most of you are too busy raising money for your blogs to read all that. Here's our 100-word version — and a suggested name for the blog network he wants to launch.
What is Michael Arrington smoking? His self-indulgent fantasy: All the bloggers should band together into a "dream team," owning equity in the joint venture. "Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business," he writes. That existing blog he has in mind is obviously TechCrunch, though he never comes out and says it. What pushed him into this delusion? A rumor that Silicon Alley Insider is raising a $3 million to $5 million round and that PaidContent is also seeking more financing, a charge founder Rafat Ali doesn't exactly deny. Arrington doesn't want his competitors to raise money, because that will screw his ambitions for a big blog rollup.
TechCrunch head Michael Arrington is so attentive to detail. He posted a Twitter last night asking about a Google page's redesign. "hmm, how long has the google advanced search page looked like this? http://tinyurl.com/6rb" Moments before, however, Arrington posted a now-deleted Twitter with the same question but a different URL: http://tinyurl.com/3776ez. This URL links to a Google search page, but with "site:duncanriley.com arrington asshole" filled in as the search term. Duncan Riley is a contributor to TechCrunch. A little dissension in the ranks, Michael?
Head TechCruncher Michael Arrington noted three separate times on Twitter today that TechCrunch had "broken" the AOL buys Bebo news last month. Then he zings BoomTown's Kara Swisher, who'd dismissed the rumors earlier: "hmm didn't someone say Bebo wasn't for sale? http://tinyurl.com/2t5mch" That's great, Michael, but don't break your arm patting yourself on the back. You might need it to write more Twitters. It's also worth noting that Eric Eldon at VentureBeat broke the Bebo story months before Arrington's "exclusive" when he reported that Bebo had hired a bank. See Arrington's entire Twitterpated output below:
Charlie Rose brought the man he called "kingmaker of new technology startups" onto his show last week. The kingmaker told Rose that tech gossip blogs like Valleywag —ok he didn't actually name us, but we knew who he was talking about — are a "trainwreck." Quote: "Silicon Valley, I believe, we're all geeks. We're not ready for this kind of attention where, literally, people are taking pictures of the inside of your house." But then why did we invent the camera phone?
A curiousity in our inbox: Meghan Asha, the Silicon Valley heiress who formerly dated TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, may not actually be Meghan Asha. A tipster says Asha's last name is actually Parikh, and her father is Mihir Parikh, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. One piece of evidence that suggests Asha is actually Parikh: A friend congratulated Asha on running the New York Marathon last fall. But no one by the name of Asha ran in the marathon. Instead, a Meghan Parikh did. Asha's — rather, Parikh's — close friend Julia Allison also changed her name. But one wonders if Parikh was doing more than just following a friend's fashion. Update: More evidence, courtesy of the enigma herself:
Sure, he missed out on TED, but that's not stopping Michael Arrington from popping up at SXSW. We got a glimpse of him when pet-repreneur Ted Rheingold bounded in as a surprise guest during Battledecks II, a sort of PowerPoint karaoke where contestants narrate zany (!) slides on the fly. Now the whole gang can play from home: Suggest your headline for this photo in the comments.
You know, maybe it isn't as easy as it looks being the world's most arrogant startup curator. In this interview, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington told local radio personality Hooman, "it's just tough, you know, when I read negative stuff about myself." And, you know, like, how dare anyone out there make fun of Arrington! After all he's been through? He loves startups. He went through a breakup. All you people care about is readers and making money off of him. He's a human!
Michael, listen to me. Don't do it. It's not worth it. Yes, you weren't invited to the TED conference. Yes, 17-year-old entrepreneur Jessica Mah, a 17-year-old best known for blogging about how she "sucks at running companies," is going to TED next year. But you still have so much to give us still. If not at TechCrunch, then another startup blog.
