Valleywag
Well, this would be an investor meeting worth attending for the theatrical value. Michael Arrington, Techcrunch's publisher, is an investor in Daylife, a much-anticipated, and much-delayed online news site founded by Upendra Shardanand. That's a recipe, not so much for conflict of interest, but for conflict: Daylife's shareholder register is a bizarrely complete listing of the influential tech news publisher's current enemies.
Shardanand, chief techie at Firefly in the 1990s, brought the New York Times in as his main investor. Arrington, having accused a Times startup reviewer of corruption, recently broadened his charge, calling the paper ethically challenged.
One of the most prominent individual investors, apart from Arrington, is Dave Winer, the evangelist of blogging and web syndication. In an extraordinary lapse of self-control, Arrington, quoting a comment about Winer's fragile emotional and physical health, calls the 51-year-old the great-great-grandfather of blogging, a description so snide it made even us wince.
And consulting editor on Daylife is Jeff Jarvis, the magazine editor turned internet guru, who was recently accused by Arrington of fabricating stories about him to suck up to the New York Times.
Disclosure: I'm friends with both Upendra Shardanand and Jeff Jarvis. We used to sublet some space in the same office as Daylife; Jeff Jarvis was on the board of my last company, Moreover Technologies; and I introduced him to Pyra, the makers of Blogger, in which his then-employer, Conde Nast, invested.
