Daylife Peeks From Behind the Curtains
Michael Arrington
17 comments »
New York-based Daylife finally showed a hint of itself today via one sentence in a long post by Jeff Jarvis, who’s working with the company.
He says “Daylife will gather, analyze, organize, and create a new, distributed platform for the world’s news.”
I don’t know anything more about the company than what Jeff says, which is unusual for one reason: I’m an investor. I participated in an angel round of financing over a year ago (before TechCrunch) and the company has kept me completely in the dark as to when they’ll launch, feature set, etc. This is understandable given the conflict of interest that has arisen with TechCrunch since then. The screen mockups and demo I saw when I invested were impressive, although I’m sure they have very little to do with what is being launched over a year later. To be blunt - I have no idea how Daylife will compare to, say, Newsvine and Digg, two news companies I fawn over regularly.
I eagerly await a glimpse of what they will launch, and will have someone else write about it on TechCrunch (as I did with Edgeio, a startup I co-founded).
Dave Winer, another investor, also noticed Jeff’s post today and wrote briefly about it.
I don’t see how keeping you uninformed is understandable. You are, as you say an investor. You have every right to want to know what’s happening to your money - indeed you should be actively interested in Daylife.
The one thing we know for sure about Daylife is that they are looking to hire a VP of Engineering, a Front End Engineer, two Core Engineers, a Web Application Engineer and a Q/A Release Engineer, because those job openings are the only things on their website. Which begs an obvious question - do they have any technical staff at all right now?
Completely agree with Chris and was just about to write the same thing.
You are a financial investor - you deserve to know what is going on. Not only that but you are an angel investor and thus they should keep you in the loop on new developments as they take place.
I don’t think it would be conflicting if they told you anything. Afterall you do choose what is published on this blog and if it is in the company’s and thus your best interests (as an investor) to keep quiet about something then that is completely understandable.
So I see no reason for them to not keep you in the loop.
I think Arrington is right to ask nothing about Daylife.
If they told him what they were doing, and they were direct competitors with, say Digg, this has got to affect how Arrington writes about Digg. As Calacanis is saying, voted news isn’t a winner takes all thing : the top 3-5 all benefit as the rising tide raises all boats.
Of course it makes sense for Mike to rave about Digg if he’s invested in another play in the same sector.
But right now, TechCrunch must be worth more to him than small investments in internet startups. By not asking too much about Daylife he’s investing in TechCrunch’s integrity.
Hey can you invest in me? I’m working on something HUGE. Don’t worry about what it is. I’ll ping ya in a year. Thx.
Just sayin’.
Eric Rice - that is basically how it looks from how Michael has written it.
Yeah Mike, I dont quite get how they could leave one of their investors in the dark.
It doesn’t matter how much you know, you are invested and that makes you biased. The fact is all journalism is biased though, so as long as you disclose the source of bias (not necessarily the details of what you know) then it should be ok with readers.
It’s just widely believed to be poor form to invest blindly in anything.