The AOL TechCrunch saga that began with the news of founder and editor Michael Arrington’s new venture fund and concluded with his ouster and the noisy public resignation of writer Paul Carr has come full circle: Arrington has launched a new blog, “Uncrunched,” and Arrington’s “CrunchFund” is backing a new company from Carr.
Arrington was officially pushed out of AOL on September 12 by chief-of-content Arianna Huffington over perceived conflict-of-interest issues (he wanted to stay on as TechCrunch editor while launching the joint venture fund with AOL to invest in the same tech companies the blog would cover.)
On Friday, Arrington launched his new blog “Uncrunched,” on WordPress, with a conspicuous header featuring the “Unpaid Blogger” T-shirt he wore as an overt jab at Huffington, whose Huffington Post media empire thrives on the work of unpaid contributors. (AOL bought TechCrunch in September 2010 for an estimated $20 to $40 million, and The Huffington Post in February for an estimated $315 million.)
But it wasn’t until Sunday that he posted his first, detailed entry, in which he posed and attempted to answer the question “What Exactly Am I Doing Here at Uncrunched?” As Arrington explained:
“I’m going to do the same thing I’ve been doing since 2005. I’m going to write about startups, and the people who build them, and the people who fund them, and the people who use them. I’m going to break stories and I’m going to write my opinion, and I’m going to write whatever the hell else I feel like in between. If people want to read what I write, yay. If they don’t, I can live with that too.
And in a potshot at critics of his perceived conflicts-of-interest, he added: “This time, though, my eyes are open. I know exactly what I’m walking into, and I know how to play this game.”
Arrington also spelled out his out his vision and says that three values will guide his coverage of tech startups: “Transparency, Truth and Bias.” He said that while he will always disclose financial conflicts-of-interest, “I’ll also disclose other conflicts of interest, like friendships, when I can.”
Speaking of which, former TechCrunch writer and Arrington defender Paul Carr, who resigned from the blog with a bridge-burning post savaging the blog’s new editor, on Friday confirmed on his personal blog that he was launching a new, as-yet-unnamed startup and had secured financial backing from Arrington’s CrunchFund, which is itself funded by the former employer Carr routinely mocked, AOL. Carr said that he would return to another former employer (prior to AOL), The Guardian, where he would write a weekly “startup diary” on his new company.
Carr wrote in his post:
Having Michael’s backing through CrunchFund is awesome for two reasons. First, I love working with him and am really happy to have the opportunity to do so again so soon after the whole TechCrunch/AOL debacle. And second, half of the money in the CrunchFund comes from AOL. I mean — ha!…
On Monday on his blog, Carr elaborated on his mindset and the dealings that lead to his launching the new startup, defending his final TechCrunch post in which he wrote: “Do I have another job already lined up? The answer is no.” As Carr explains in his latest post:
Some bloggers have suggested that I always planned to start a company and that my departure was somehow stage-managed. Here’s the truth: when I wrote my resignation letter on TechCrunch, I really had no job to go to. Nor did I have any idea where I was going next, or whether anyone would ever employ me again after such a dramatic resignation. I hadn’t spoken to a single person about the start-up idea that had been kicking around my subconscious for a while. My first conversation with Tony Hsieh about investing didn’t come until 24 hours later. My first investment discussion with Michael followed the next day. Everything that happened next — Tony’s and CrunchFund’s investments and my return to writing for the Guardian — happened in the seven days between my resignation and the announcement of my start-up plans. Nothing was stage-managed. As I said in my resignation letter, sometimes you have to throw yourself off a cliff and see if anyone catches you.
In an email to TPM Idea Lab, Carr added that he wasn’t concerned about his new startup receiving increased scrutiny due to its chaotic origins.
“The more scrutiny the better,” Carr wrote, “just encourages us to create something worthy of all the attention. I’m confident we’re doing exactly that.” He also said that he had not heard from AOL his since resignation or regarding his company’s CrunchFund backing, adding “but that’s reassuringly normal.”
