I think "black and white" is a problem here... I see no reason why Arrington can't be right while McClure can honestly believe that there was nothing wrong with the meeting.
Conspiracy theories grow on the basis of black and white, good vs. evil, etc. Outside of programming, aren't we all used to varying shades of gray?
If Arrington is right McClure is wrong, regardless of what he believes. Just because you believe it's legal and moral doesn't make it so. (More so on the former than the latter.)
wolfrom said Arrington right and McClure honestly believe.
Believe is very different to wrong. If Arrington is right, McClure is wrong in his belief. He can still honestly believe it though.
One, or all, of Christians, Muslims and Atheists are wrong in their belief, but they can all honestly believe.
I'm not being pedantic here, if you read wolfrom's statement with the correct meanings you'll see how wrong your comment is, even if you honestly believed it.
I agree and I think the best approach here is to assume that you should never "trust" Arrington or any other business person (especially media) but that you should constantly read, listen, compare, and assume that you will have to make an educated guess. Chomsky, a staunch critic of the media, is very good at explaining how trust vs. conspiracy theories is never the choice when looking at the media. The issues is that the media may believe what they say but that they may not see the whole truth. It's for you to make your own best educated judgments. And best judgments are usually made by listening to all possible angles, doubting everything you hear, and staying positive in believing that this process will produce good educated actions in your own life, business, etc. That is if you have time to read it all ;-)
I think you misunderstand Sprout's meaning, and that Sprout precisely understands Wolfrom's. Sprout is actually saying just what you say: honest belief can be independent of truth or legality, but Sprout also emphasizes that from a legal point of view the statements of Arr. and McClure are mutual contradictory. An action can be ethically grey, but not legally gray (i.e., there's no such thing as bending the rules without breaking them).
If you don't have time to read more than Arrington's TC posts, I would strongly advise against making TechCrunch your only source of info. It's good but it is very opinionated, like Arrington is.
Blogger and witness are two entirely different roles.
Witness: I can to the lunch uninvited, people squirmed, a couple of the participants later told me they were uncomfortable with the tenor of the discussions. (From a witness perspective, first-hand facts based on personal knowledge are everything - anything beyond this is hearsay and not to be credited).
Blogger: These are the top angel investors in the Valley; I heard second-hand from a couple of the participants that they are upset about valuations, are looking for ways to cooperate to bring them down, and are also looking for ways to cooperate to freeze out VCs as co-investors and to limit the impact of rogue operations like Y Combinator; I checked with my lawyers (and am myself a lawyer) and I can tell you that this stuff, if true, is blatantly illegal and I speculate that this is why everyone was squirming.
This latter stuff is the blogger, not the witness, drawing inferences, putting glosses on the limited known facts, speculating, etc. with an overriding goal of making a story significant, newsworthy, and even sensational. This is a legitimate role of a blogger, and is a big part of what makes TC and Mr. Arrington himself sometimes insightful, sometimes arrogant, sometimes maddenlingly infuriating, but almost always interesting to a general readership that takes an intense interest in the subjects being covered.
One can "trust" the witness aspects without necessarily giving credence to the blogger glosses that are put on the facts. Mr. Arrington appears to be a straight arrow when recounting facts but watch out for those glosses: they might easily have an agenda behind them as to which the simple facts themselves are secondary (this doesn't mean they can't be true, only that they need to be considered cautiously in light of possible underlying motives).
I disagree, I personally think Arrington made a bit too far of a stretch.
Did a bunch of super angels get together and talk shop? Definitely. Are they talking about how high valuations are right now? Probably. Once you get into the "concrete plans for how to control the world" it gets a lot sketchier.
There's a strong difference between someone saying "company X is raising at a really high valuation, you shouldn't stand for that" and "company X is raising at a really high valuation, don't take it or there will be consequences". Startups talk about investors all of the time, why should the investors be any different?
Whether Arrington was right or wrong, there's probably some truth that angels hate YC. It's based on the whole premise that VC's and angels aren't all their cracked up to be. It would make sense that these "superangel" gatherings would discuss their slipping hold on power and how to get it back.
This looks at the wrong metric. It’s not whether his sources are typically accurate but whether he is generally good at correctly inferring from vague or uncertain evidence. In my experience, analysis is unquestionably the weakest part of TechCrunch. They aren’t bad at getting the facts but when it comes to telling us what those facts mean the wheels come off.
If you’re looking to confirm that the people were all in a room together than I guess the little breakdown works. If you’re looking to to see if it adds up to collusion or some Valley equivalent to The Council there are some other factors to weigh.
Surely it's worth noting that the cases he offers as evidence are cases in which we expect eventual proof. The "AngelGate" as he describes it is illegal and if it were true would necessarily go on behind closed doors. Everyone involved would have a lot to lose from any proof getting out that they were involved or that it was even happening.
In short, the previous cases made falsifiable predictions. Arrington had strong incentive to report accurately on them because if he was making them up he would eventually get caught. AngelGate does not share this property. If it isn't true, thanks especially to the vagueness of the story, what evidence would be likely to turn up? What if were true. What likely evidence then?
It's not a question of whether to believe unverifiable claims. The question is "why pay attention to them at all?" Until one or more angels comes forth and admits the conspiracy (very unlikely, even if true) or Arrington comes forth and admits he made it up, the whole issue is just noise.
last.fm scandal -1 (although I'd award him more than -1 for that :D)
Point is, someone else could probably cherry pick situations that make him look wrong.
Everything Arrington writes should be taken with a large dose of salt; because he is, essentially, a gossip journalist. And even before the internet you did not believe every word a gossip journalist speaketh :)
Often he is right. Sometimes he is spectacularly wrong. Sometimes, and I think in this case, he gets a rough truth and then tarts it up to make a bigger story (either deliberately or subconsciously, I couldn't say)
I think in order for this argument to hold true, you'd have to go back for four months (or longer!) and do the exact same thing that the OP did. That is: pick every single article where Arrington has predicted something based on an anonymous source and award points based on whether it was true or not.
Doesn't appear to me that the blogger was cherry picking in any way.
One needs to apply the Arrington filter, which is a little complex.
For example: I immediately thought the Facebook phone story was link bait (and I still do). However, it seems there was more truth in it that I would've credited (based on a subsequent interview with Zuckerberg). Such stories drive page views but they bring Arrington's credibility into question, leading to debates like this ("do we believe him?").
With this story, the fact that the meeting happened I think is undisputed. Rather than more typically quoting an "anonymous source" he staked his personal reputation and used his own eyewitness account. So I don't doubt that part at all.
After that, it gets murky. Arrington's claims of collusion and price-fixing are probably a stretch based on the evidence but it has touched off McClure, Wilson and others. So there is something there. In the very least both sides (entrepreneurs and angels) are sensitive to the issue.
I also don't believe this is a binary problem: one of McClure and Arrington is right and the other is wrong. They can both be right, both be wrong or, more likely, both be somewhat right and somewhat wrong.
For one thing, people can believe they've done nothing wrong when they really have (note: I'm not claiming the super-angels have done anything wrong).
This is somewhat reminiscent of the DoJ investigation into anti-poaching agreements: both that and the angel collusion allegations seem motivated from cooperation but that doesn't mean they did nothing wrong.
TL:DR Arrington's observations are believable. His conclusions are premature.
Let me put it this way: if this story came from the Washington Post, New York Times or Wall Street Journal it would a) be more measured and b) have a higher standard for making what is a serious accusation.
I am the opposite. I believe blogs more than either of those sites - especially with important issues such as the war (they have each royally screwed up at least once with covering something as important as the war) .
Michael Arrington is a writer, not an oracle of truth. Regardless of whether he gets it right, people are still going to go to his site. In fact, the further he spins the story, the more people he gets to visit TechCrunch.
To elaborate further: Mr. Arrington has a history of making character disparaging claims without providing any supporting evidence what so ever.
I personally lost all respect for him as a journalist when he decided to publicly blast Blaine Cook while knowing no facts other than that Mr. Cook had left twitter.
Blain having a slide at a conference saying 'Scaling Rails. Its Easy. Really', before they had all those problems, was, well, sorta asking for it.
And anyway it was 2 years ago, could he have learnt from it? This is, after all, a new medium etc. etc. so a bit of trial and error is expected. As this post points out, the hit rate to date this year is almost perfect.
(edit: I just re-read that post and boy it was a bit harsh, the comments are terrible (from both sides - a lot of grudges are being held over this, I feel).
Doesn't convince me to write-off any trust in TC though, especially not two years later. If I ignored every source that wrote a bad story I would be left with nothing atm).
That's one of a series of posts Mr. Arrington made. They also fit in a general trend of manufacturing a dramatic store with no source and no supporting evidence.
Blaine's slide was perhaps poorly chosen, but it's also entirely correct: scaling the rails portion of twitter is trivial, just as it would be with php, .net, or countless other technologies. The stateless tier isn't interesting. But for whatever reason, the meme was never "mysql can't scale at twitter", but rather "rails can't scale at twitter", even though the app server stack had little to do with it.
Also, those of us who've been through the pain of a rapidly growing startup, even if it wasn't growing as fast as twitter, understand that the real challenges are people, politics and vendors. Rarely is there a deep technological problem that requires a novel solution. Typically the fight is over getting the things you need to implement a well known solution.
In particular I had a few calls with early twitter folks at the time and know first hand that the people involved were not clueless. They were quite humble and helpful in providing frank discussions of vendors and technologies we were considering.
Just because it's a blog doesn't mean it's a new medium or that bloggers shouldn't expect to be challenged on the accuracy of their claims. I don't see any reason that the expectations I'd have of reasoned discourse in person, by phone, video or print don't also apply to the techcrunch blog.
Yes it is hard, but Twitter was down a lot. Was Blaine fired? I met netik at a conference just before he was hired by Twitter - great guy, knows his shit.
I am not saying that they shouldn't be challenged on the accuracy of their claims, I am saying that they are learning as they go. That post was a bit personal, the next one won't be.
Judging by the hit rate outlined in the post above Arrington seems to have learnt a lot about how to handle sources, stories etc. But ignoring him completely based on a few examples from years ago seems wrong.
By your reckoning I seriously would have nothing left to read atm (especially the NYTimes) - I still read it all though because I take everything at face value.
I am not going to exclude myself from an entire slice of online media just because 2,3,4 or 5 or 10 blog posts out of thousands that provide me so much information and value.
It wasn't true. The founders didn't quit because of it, they quit because of the same reason founders always quit when they get bought by big companies.
Presumably by "one of the sysadmins" you mean me, because I ended up (somewhat badly) handling most of the PR for this debacle (I'm the Russ Garrett referenced in both of those TechCrunch posts), but I don't remember deleting any of my posts.
It didn't happen. I would have known if it had happened. I would have had to pass the data, and it didn't happen.
I can't remember the exact references that made me form that opinion but I do remember discussing it in one of the online forums - so thanks for clarifying directly, and sorry, my opinion has changed.
btw did you work out if anybody from CBS or your own company actually placed this story with TC or was it somebody from the outside?
Drinks and casual conversation are not a particularly efficient way acomplish that.
Probably north of 50% of the sales of most enterprise software companies happens over drinks and casual conversation. And probably over 90% of business development deals happen in similar circumstances.
Conspiracy theories grow on the basis of black and white, good vs. evil, etc. Outside of programming, aren't we all used to varying shades of gray?