Business Advice from Mike Arrington: Don’t Screw Us Over
May 17, 2008 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
It’s great having a mentor.
They give you the benefit of their years of experience.
TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington was happy to offer Loic Lemeur and his start-up company Seesmic the following advice, in a posting published to TechCrunch Saturday. (Arrington was furious that a Seesmic plug-in brought down TechCrunch three times when a Steven Speilberg promotion saw traffic on the consumer-generated video site spike.)
TechCrunch, May 17, 2008
“…But never withhold information from your partners and tell them that you have no idea what is causing downtime when you know exactly what the problem is. As exciting as getting Steven Spielberg on your site to talk to your users is, it is not worth being dishonest to partners.
“I understand that Seesmic may have been hesitant to tell us about the promotion because they wanted to keep it quiet. But all they had to do was tell us before the downtime that it was going to occur, and we would have been happy. And Seesmic would still be an active plugin on TechCrunch.
“Some of you may wonder why I’m calling out a company that I’ve invested in so harshly. The reason: I’m calling them out because they deserve it, and the fact that I invested in them means I need to be careful before giving them any kind of break.”
Ouch!
This transparency thing can be painful when you’re the one being transparented on.
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