After parting company with ousted TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, AOL finds itself in the awkward position of helping him fund the competition.
Sarah Lacy, the former senior editor at TechCrunch who found the door after a corporate dust-up that sidelined her former mentor and boss, just launched a rival site called PandoDaily.
To add insult to injury, her start-up received money from Arrington’s CrunchFund, a venture-capital fund partly backed by AOL.
PandoDaily, a reference to the natural phenomenon of the Pando tree as a metaphor for the Silicon Valley ecosystem, received about $2.5 million in seed money from a number of investors and funds, including Arrington’s.
It’s a juicy irony that’s clearly not lost on Lacy, judging from her full laugh when it was raised during an interview with The Post yesterday.
Lacy said she only wished the best for TechCrunch, a site she still remembers fondly.
“I still have a lot of friends who work at TechCrunch and still have a lot of affection for that property,” she said.
Still, there’s no doubt she is looking to beat TechCrunch as the go-to site for news on Silicon Valley start-ups.
“We’re sort of running our race to be the start-up blog of record,” Lacy said. “For a long time, TechCrunch had that position, so yeah, I’m trying to displace them.”
TechCrunch has suffered a mass exodus, including top bloggers MG Siegler, Paul Carr and of course Lacy, after Arrington was ousted by AOL’s editorial chief, Arianna Huffington.
Arrington was forced out after he took on an active investing role as the head of CrunchFund, which raised potential journalistic conflicts of interest by both backing and reporting on start-ups.
Arrington’s CrunchFund has since hired Siegler, funded a venture by Carr and is advising, on top of investing, with Lacy’s site.