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If the paywall is affecting you: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is resigning as editor of the popular technology blog, and will run a $20 million venture
by glymor 15y ago
If the paywall is affecting you:
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is resigning as editor of the popular technology blog, and will run a $20 million venture-capital fund backed by TechCrunch-owner AOL Inc. and several venture-capital firms.
Mr. Arrington "will run the fund and will continue to write for TechCrunch, but will have no editorial oversight," said an AOL spokesman. Erick Schonfeld, who has served as co-editor in New York, will become interim editor while AOL searches for a replacement for Mr. Arrington, the spokesman said. AOL purchased the site last year.
Mr. Arrington's new fund, called CrunchFund, closed Thursday with $20 million, according to people familiar with the matter. AOL leads the limited-partner group, which includes a long roster of venture firms that kicked in $1 million each: Austin Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
Several individuals contributed money, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz; general partners at Benchmark Capital; angel investors Ron Conway and Kevin Rose; and Yuri Milner of Russian firm DST Global.
It isn't immediately clear what is the fate of AOL's venture-capital arm, AOL Ventures, which has made recent seed investments in start-ups such as spam-defense company Impermium and price-tracking service Shopobot.
Mr. Arrington's partner in the fund is Patrick Gallagher, who has been a partner at VantagePoint Capital Partners since 2008.
Mr. Arrington wasn't immediately available for comment. He posted a message on Twitter after news of the fund broke: "slow news day."
Mr. Arrington, a former lawyer who is known to be well connected in Silicon Valley, started TechCrunch in 2005. The site built up a following for its coverage of young tech companies.
Long an angel investor himself, Mr. Arrington announced on TechCrunch in 2009 that he would stop making investments in start-ups due to a perceived conflict as both publisher and investor. It's "a weak point that competitors and disgruntled entrepreneurs use to attack our credibility," he wrote at the time.
But in April this year, after AOL acquired TechCrunch, Mr. Arrington announced he was investing in start-ups again, while also becoming a limited partner in venture funds Benchmark Capital and SoftTechVC.
Mr. Arrington has often said that transparency and full disclosure keep things above-board when his blog writes about companies he has some financial stake in.
- michaelpinto 15y agoThank you! You read my mind...
- cft 15y agoTo avoid paywall, you paste wsj urls into google and click on the result, so that the referrer url is google.com
- neeleshs 15y agoInterestingly, that does not seem to work with SSL version of Google.
- senko 15y agoBrowsers strip Referer if the protocol is HTTP but the referrer's URL was HTTPS, to prevent the information about the resource just being left leak. If WSJ checks Referer and explicitly allows Google to pass, it won't see it if you're coming from HTTPS.
- 0x0 15y agoOnly if the link target is non-HTTPS, I believe. HTTPS-to-HTTPS requests includes referer headers, even across domains.
- thelibrarian 15y agoBrowsers do not send referrer headers is the referrer is an SSL site.
- mike-cardwell 15y agoFirefox users can just install RefControl and then configure it to always send google.com in the referer header when visiting wsj.com from a non wsj.com referer.
- ry0ohki 15y agoShouldn't Google penalize sites like this for cloaking?
- realshady 15y agoWhy would it be in Google's interest to do so? It makes coming in via search a better option, thus adds value to their site.
- Garbage 15y agoIs this paywall for US only? I don't get any paywall for WSJ from India.
- sathyabhat 15y agoI was shown the paywall, even though I've hardly visited any page from WSJ from the computer I'm working on.
- pwaring 15y agoIt's definitely not US only, as I'm in the UK and see the paywall.
- bluedanieru 15y ago>Mr. Arrington has often said that transparency and full disclosure keep things above-board when his blog writes about companies he has some financial stake in. Isn't this sort of thinking half-bullshit? It's certainly more ethical than writing a glowing review of some startup without revealing you have a stake in it (which borders on criminal), but the truly ethical course of action is to not write about it at all. A statement admitting you are biased doesn't negate your bias, and leaving it to your readers to decide if you're sincere or full of shit doesn't make for good writing.
- joelmichael 15y agoThis conflict of interest is precisely why he resigned. I'm not convinced a personal stake necessarily makes for uninteresting writing, though.
- chc 15y agoI'm not convinced that utter fiction makes for uninteresting writing, but it certainly lacks value as journalism.
- EwanToo 15y agoFred Wilson at http://www.avc.com http://www.avc.com writes very interesting stuff about startups he has a stake in, showing it's possible, but it definitely has to be considered whenever you read something by him.
- djb_hackernews 15y agoThats a personal blog. I would hope and expect a VC to write about the companies he has invested in on his personal blog. Cheerleading and all.
- splatcollision 15y agoResigned, but still writing for the site, which is continued bullshit.
- 15y ago