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Turn the Doom-talk into Constructive Business Model Ideas

Train wreck at Montparnasse Station, at Place ...

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TechCrunch Turns Into F**kedCompany 2.0 – says Dare Obasanjo.

Really? Tell me something I don’t already know.   Have we all forgotten that TechCrunch acquired FuckedCompany.com over a year ago?   OK, that was just an April Fool’ s Joke , but you can really say TC is unprepared for a downturn – after all, they own FuckedCrunch.

OK, on a more serious note: I also said, way back in January 2007 that TechCrunch Did Not Build it; It Can’t Knock it Down Either:

TechCrunch did not build this boom. Yes, a well-timed review helps a startup gain initial traction, but Mike does not make those companies successful: whether they make it or not, they do so on their own. And when they fail, they fail own their own merits, too.  Failures are part of business reality, and reporting on them only makes TechCrunch balanced. Without it Mike would be just a biased cheerleader (something he was accused of in the past).

I still mean what I said there, except that in the downturn there will clearly be more failures, and it won’t always be on a startup’s “own merits”.  Reporting on them is part of reality.

But what I really hope for is that TechCrunch and other influential blogs that are a strong part of the startup ecosystem will take a constructive approach, and instead of becoming doom-reporters they start discussing ways of survival – i.e. how to tweak one’s business model to establish a healthy revenue stream.

I’ll have more on this soon.

Update: I’m often amazed at the image selection Zemanta proposes. The word “train” does not once occur in my post, yet it recommended this image of a train-wreck.

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Comments

  1. I agree, and would like to add that I think the VC have to be more vocal about their plan and (hopefully) trust in their portfolio companies.

    http://whileiwasworking.blogspot.com/2008/10/would-you-stand-by-me.html

  2. Zemanta is awesome. 🙂

  3. I think that however gloomy the Sequoia presentation was, it was full of hard but good advice on how to survive. Trying to light a fire under their startups to take precautionary measures sooner or later saves the whole boat right? It’s better for a few to lose their jobs than for the whole company to go down. I would say I believe that a lot of the initial gloom is already giving way to a realistic view of what it takes to weather this tempest.

  4. There is a legacy of doom and gloom all over these days. AAPL, GOOGLE, and others reported great earnings, yet stocks went down. Why? Because Americans consumers are pre-occupied with nothing but doom and gloom.

  5. I recently met Andraz Tori, the CTO of Zemanta. He’s a great guy and I told him about reading this post and the train wreck picture. He mentioned he had read this post too. Cheers!

  6. I’ll meet him next week @ Defrag 🙂

Trackbacks

  1. […] bottom fell out,  the doomsday-chorus started.  On my personal blog I suggested we should Turn the Doom-talk into Constructive Business Model Ideas, and that’s what I intend to do now.  Here’s the gist of my intro […]

  2. […] related sources.  That said, they had one amazingly intelligent hit: while in my post titled Turn the Doom-talk into Constructive Business Model Ideas I did not once use the words train or train-wreck,  Zemanta correctly inserted a photo of an […]

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