TC is not just WordPress blog. There is a lot of leg work that happens to contact VCs, journalists, founders, conduct interviews, verify details etc. I bet 80% of the work that happens at TC is not-engineering. The fact that Arrington carried this entirely on his shoulder while Keith just stayed on sidelines is enough for him not getting credited for TC. However Keith claims on his LinkedIn profile that he advised Arlington and helped him to be successful even initially he did not believed in TC.
When techcrunch started it was just a WordPress blog. It quickly grew to much more than that, sure.
> However Keith claims on his LinkedIn profile that he advised Arlington and helped him to be successful even initially he did not believed in TC.
I've personally been present when Keith gave Mike advice about Techcrunch on more than one occasion (and I was only over about 1 week every 6 or so, so it'd be odd if I caught their only discussions), so while whether or not he did enough to justify calling himself co-founder is something I don't want to wade into as I simply don't know (and is trying to keep my personal opinions out of this when I don't have first hand knowledge), I for one was an eye witness to Keith advising Mike more than once (whether or not Mike took on that advice, or whether or not it was good advice, I don't want to try to assess).
Most ethical people would never call themselves a "founder" if all they did was give advice and never did any real work. That's why we have a term called "advisor".
We're not even in legal territory here. It's about ethics. Can you see yourself calling yourself a "Techcrunch Co-founder" if you were in his shoes? If I were him, no matter how much advice I gave him I would NEVER call myself a founder if I didn't do any work AND the entire world knows that I never wrote a single post for a business whose only purpose was to blog.
Do you have firsthand knowledge of this? Because I met and worked directly with both people involved regularly during this period, and I still dont know the full details of what went down. So the way I see it, either you were directly involved but aren't disclosing your connection and hence makes it impossible to judge your biases, or you were not and you're judging the situation based on a very incomplete picture.
