TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington on Why He Sold Out to AOL

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington offered his take on AOL's agreement to acquire TechCrunch in a very logical place: on TechCrunch. Arrington wrote that the combination of AOL and TechCrunch first came up during a "quick private chat" with AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong after Arrington interviewed Armstrong at TechCrunch Disrupt: New York in May, but serious conversations were initiated in July. Highlights from Arrington's post: The truth is, I was tired. But I wasn't tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software. And when we did find those engineers, as we so often did, how to keep them happy. Unlike most startups in Silicon Valley, the center of attention at TechCrunch is squarely on the writers. It's certainly not an engineering driven company. AOL of course fixes that problem perfectly. They run the largest blogging network in the world and, if we sold to them, we'd never have to worry about tech issues again. We could focus our engineering resources on higher-end things, and I, for one, could spend more of my day writing and a lot less time dealing with other stuff. The more we spoke with AOL, the more we saw a perfect fit. They already own many of the top technology blogs. They already have a huge sales team in place (although our own sales team kicks ass and is staying on). And they have an internal events group that we will be able to leverage. From a product and business standpoint, it's a perfect fit. But what put things over the top, and what ultimately led us to discontinue discussions with other suitors, was the AOL management team. I'm not going to gush here because, well, I'm clearly conflicted. But (TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde) and I believe in this team enough to bet our company on them. AOL has a very big vision for the future. They may succeed or they may fail, but at least they are all running in the same direction. No one at AOL complains that they don't know what the company is trying to do. So at that point, we were basically sold. But AOL was very aggressive about one last important issue that really sealed the deal -- editorial. Tim told me that he doesn't want whatever makes TechCrunch special to go away. He also said it was important that we feel free to criticize AOL when we think they deserve it. And the agreement we signed with AOL fully reflects this. In particular, we used the Twitter document scandal as a test. If the same thing happens with AOL in the future, we should feel comfortable posting those documents. And in that unlikely event, we will. The last thing we want to happen is to end up with same cuddly relationship that The Wall Street Journal has with its sister company, MySpace, for example. In the end, we'll probably have to create internal checks to ensure that we aren't more critical of AOL than we otherwise would be just to prove our editorial independence. And there is one thing that we probably won't be able to avoid. You probably won't see a lot of glowing blog posts about AOL in general. People will quite rightly suspect we're just doing it to please our corporate parent. So we'll probably leave the high fives to our competitors. So we begin another journey. I fully intend to stay with AOL for a very, very long time. And the entire team has big incentives to stay on board for at least three years.

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TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington on Why He Sold Out to AOL

David Cohen

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David Cohen