I don’t read TechCrunch (TC).
I used to read TC when I believed that raising funding was an important milestone for success. Having raised money and spent it I’ve learned that glorifying money raising is a massive mistake and TC is the biggest culprit.
It’s a much more complicated and in depth process in Africa and South Africa to raise funding. It’s not a simple one anywhere else, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that in such a young and risk averse tech space like Cape Town there are even more difficulties and complications on top of the regular effort a founder goes through to raise funding.
In truth I needed to use all of my emotional intelligence (EI) just to run my own business and focus on my own issues and stability; worrying about what other companies were raising, selling, achieving, failing and succeeding was killing my capacity to focus. I started to become overly interested in how others operated and other benchmarks and achievements.
What I should always have been concerned with was my own context and what my company needed. It’s good to have context but becoming obsessed and consumed with what TC and other startup blogs and websites report on is problematic.
The truth behind 99% of the startup exits, buyouts, shutdowns and successes is often not what you read, remember that and forget to read TC.
31 Comments
chris
and they’re technically incompetent.
when douglas crockford went to paypal, they churned out their normal thin tosh, but topping it off: thinking java and javascript are the same thing (since been corrected).
here’s the “article”. check out the comments.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/13/paypal-gets-its-own-share-of-the-yahoo-diaspora-hires-java-icon-douglas-crockford/
…and yep, an incorrect article shared over 800 times on twitter. amazing.
03 Dec 2012 01:12 pm
Erik Johnson
Ha. Wow. For a tech magazine/blog, that's inexcusable.
04 Dec 2012 06:12 am
vikram
Damn right!!!
Reading a lot of tech cruch can leave one with a bad case of depression. Most of “News” on tech crunch is noise and garbage any-ways.
I especially hate the interviews. Such waste of time.
03 Dec 2012 01:12 pm
Mike
It is so easy to bash one's regular reads, but it is not an intelligent thing to do. For some reason it is fashionable to hold journalists to *incredibly* high standards, mostly while not actually taking any responsibility for paying for their training or output.
Techcrunch (and others) are doing a great job of surfacing stuff you may otherwise never find out about. Of course for every single story they write there will be people with better knowledge of the situation, though it is just crass when you find yourself in this position to use it to pour derision on the journalist. Their domain expertise lies primarily in the art of writing compelling copy, so when they visit your domain try to be kind and understanding, not overly critical.
Being snide about a tech journalist not having an expert grasp on particular technologies is childish, like calling out grammatical errors when a somebody makes an important point in their second language.
03 Dec 2012 02:12 pm
Carlos Ortiz
The same GIGAOM!
03 Dec 2012 03:12 pm
Shrikanth
Mike,
I'm going to have to say that referring to TC, as a decent blog would be an over-statement of their ability. While you're correct about it being incorrect to nitpick on specifics that you see on a blog by journalists, The worst thing a journalist can do, is Sensationalize. While there are other blogs that do not sensationalize and blow useless news out of proportion. TC never fails to disappoint on that front. They are defn a bunch of incompetent journalists, its best you and others equally uninformed stop reading 'em so we can pull TC off the charts.
03 Dec 2012 06:12 pm
suckit
We dont come to techcrunch for the article but for the comments. Comments are worthwhile to read than the article itself.
03 Dec 2012 01:12 pm
star gazer
My guess is you never read this article as well, but came straight to commenting, pointless, the author here makes a credible case.
03 Dec 2012 03:12 pm
chrisek
This blog entry is straight to the Point. You need to develop yourself then worry about all the rest.
03 Dec 2012 02:12 pm
Shireen Louw
Totally agree, your time is much better spent focusing on your own product/service. They hardly ever have anything useful for me to grow my business on there.
03 Dec 2012 02:12 pm
Gilli
It is funny that literally 10 minutes before seeing this post on hacker news I removed TechCrunch from my feed reader because it never really writes anything substantial. It all seems like promotional stuff.
03 Dec 2012 02:12 pm
Psycho
Well, maybe the first problem is that TC doesn’t write about South Africa. And the second point is that you can read anything you want – you just need to apply your brain in order to get something useful of the information you get TC is a good source of market news and competitor information at least.
03 Dec 2012 03:12 pm
Swav
99% of statistics found on internet (including this one) are made up.
03 Dec 2012 03:12 pm
Andrew David Baron
Lol!
03 Dec 2012 06:12 pm
Herman Schaaf
Speaking as a fellow entrepreneur from Cape Town, I completely agree. I stopped reading TechCrunch a couple of months ago, removed the bookmark and never looked back. Now I just read the occasional article that someone refers me to, if at all.
03 Dec 2012 03:12 pm
Erick
Nice read! I put together a similar post about TechCrunch a while back.
http://www.growdetroit.com/put-that-techcrunch-down/
03 Dec 2012 04:12 pm
Ermolay Romanoff
read nytimes.
Carr is particularly engaging: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/columns/media_equation/index.html
03 Dec 2012 05:12 pm
lol
Congratulations on this HUGE enlightenment of yours! Now go read some Mashable.
03 Dec 2012 05:12 pm
Sebastian Komianos
It also just glorifies the money raising part of the “startup” experience, making more and more people believe that a. that’s the only way to go and b. that’s the only thing you can get from a startup.
But I guess I shouldn’t have commented about this as the conversation will now go towards the “Capitalism vs Communism” debate, even though I never mentioned any of these two, not even directly.
But, yeah, TC is not quality reading anyway..
03 Dec 2012 05:12 pm
Why Nic Haralambous Quit Reading TechCrunch | Inside-Startups.com
[...] ethical problems at TechCrunch and the departure of publication founder Michael Arrington. Read the Full Story. Posted in Entrepreneurs, STARTUP Advice by Rich Brueckner 0 [...]
Read TechCrunch. Daily. | Statspotting!
[...] Read TechCrunch. Daily. December 3, 2012 11:53 am var addthis_product = 'wpp-262'; var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true,"data_track_addressbar":false};if (typeof(addthis_share) == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}[This post is a response to the post Don't read TechCrunch] [...]
No leas TechCrunch : elich.es/blog
[...] Don’t read TechCrunch: What I should always have been concerned with was my own context and what my company needed. It’s good to have context but becoming obsessed and consumed with what TC and other startup blogs and websites report on is problematic. [...]
Andrei Potorac
Where you are mistaking is thinking that one reads techcrunch to know about the money specifically.
I read it to learn about the startups that have raised – and have inspired people to invest in them. Once I find out about these startups, I try to learn as much as I can about them.
I would argue to not read any other tech blog, and instead focus on techcrunch, as they have the best content based on my writings above.
03 Dec 2012 07:12 pm
statspotting
I wrote a response here:
http://statspotting.com/2012/12/read-techcrunch-daily/
03 Dec 2012 09:12 pm
Mike
Your article completely misses the point by assuming tech crunch will help you “know your space”.
Reading TC does not provide nearly enough ROI on the time invested. Period. If you believe the opposite, have fun reading, worrying, and disillusioning yourself while others are building, testing, and selling.
04 Dec 2012 04:12 am
Daniel Chalef
Nic,
Congrats on your recent exit. What we as entrepreneurs forget is that the news we read on Techcrunch, and elsewhere is for the most part an echo of the press put out by companies and their PR firms. It’s always good news, and always contains an element of puffery.
We forget that the founders / execs of these companies face the same people, customer / market, and capital challenges that we face.
It took me a long while to work that out, and not get totally stressed out when a competitor or contemporary got a write up.
Daniel
03 Dec 2012 09:12 pm
Pete
May I ask; what we should be reading?
03 Dec 2012 11:12 pm
Nic
Good question Pete.
It's difficult to pinpoint one source but most people have said something similar - read a lot of different sources, don't take any as the tech gospel and then internalise the information for what you need. Don't read, ingest, regurgitate as fact.
04 Dec 2012 07:12 am
fakerb
I started reading until I got to this sentence: “It’s a much more complicated and in depth process in Africa and South Africa to raise funding.” I do not understand. I though South Africa was part the African continent? That is like saying “in America and New York.” It seems a little odd.
04 Dec 2012 06:12 am
Nic
Hi fakerb - just a quick little comment to point out that New York is a state inside of the same country that California, Utah, Colarado and Floria are all in. The same country. One country.
Africa is a continent filled with many different countries, not states (57 the last time I checked). So in fact, it's like me saying: in America and Canada.
It is very different raising money in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Egypt and South Africa - those are all different countries with different tech ecosystems and different appeals to different investors. Hence my statement of "Africa and South Africa". Hope that helps clear it up.
04 Dec 2012 07:12 am
Java Geek
I stopped reading TC a while back when I see nothing in terms of interesting coming out and it just same stuff over and over again.
09 Dec 2012 03:12 am
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