Mike Arrington, the owner of TechCrunch UK has put the blog site on hold after Sam Sethi reported what he felt about Le Web 3.0. According to Mike, the real reason for firing was that Sam has promoted a series of events without first consulting him. Here is Mike’s story…..
Here is an extract of the last post from Sam…
“Following yesterday’s post about Le Web and Loic’s retort. It seems Mike Arrington has disagreed with my post and opinion believing my actions to be vindictive towards Loic. What was said between Mike and I will remain confidential but suffice to say I can no longer remain with TechCrunch UK & Ireland. It is a very sad after all the work that has gone into TechCrunch UK and Ireland. I wish all of the UK and Irish entrepreneurs well. I will be personally blogging back at www.vecosys.com and looking for something new to keep me busy. Bye “
This came as a real shocker to me. Sam has done tremendous amount of work to promote startups in the UK. So what is next? The easiest option is to setup a rival site. Sam is now well known within the circles, so grabbing punters is not a big issue. I have not spoken to Sam, but assume he would be inundated with calls and would be best to leave him for a while before contacting him.
In my own humble way, I proved that an event like NW StartUp 2.0 can be setup with minimum effort attracting sponsors like KPMG and venues like IoD. The spirit of the event was: it was set up informally (OK, most of us wore suits!) + it was fluid/dynamic and did not follow a corporate agenda. One of my other ideas before this happened was to do a regional blog – a regional TCUK type but with no connection to Mike (I do not know him personally) or TCUK. Perhaps its time to talk about this bit more seriously. What do you think Ivan?
Tags: TCUK, TechCrunch, TechCrunch UK, Sam Sethi, Mike Arrington, NW StartUp 2.0