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The Colab Brief - 130: TechCrunch - u ok?

Welcome to The Colab Brief

Author

Ash + Lizzy
August 10, 2024

The TC tea is piping hot. đź«–

(There is swearing (not ours!) in today’s newsletter, so if that offends you, please navigate elsewhere)

Read Time: 2 minutes

Let’s all take a little journey, shall we? All the way back to June 28, 2024. The day that longstanding reporter Haje Jan Kamps decided to light his TechCrunch career on fire. 🔥

For background, Haje started with TechCrunch in September of 2021 as a hardware and climate reporter. Shortly thereafter, however, Haje began to head up the Pitch Deck Teardown, which allowed founders to submit their pitch decks as a way to be featured in TechCrunch after raising a round. 

We loved the Teardown. It was a way to get a one-two punch for your funding announcement in the most coveted tech publication—that is, until June 28th. 

It appears that up until that day, Haje had garnered so much respect and trust from the TechCrunch editorial team that his work no longer required editing. 

Talk about autonomy. 

Except that on this day, Haje decided to throw all of that trust and respect out the window and verbally accost, belittle, and degrade TechCrunch’s 7M readers. 

The post has since been redacted, but you know we’d find it, so here is a copy of the original post for your reading enjoyment. 

TL;DR, see below: 

Uhhh, Haje…you good?

Spoiler alert, not good. 

It seemed almost instantly TechCrunch redacted the newsletter and issued an apology for the Haje’s abhorrent behavior. 

But, as you might have guessed, it was not fast enough for the internet to take hold of the entire situation. 

Here’s the kicker - this likely would have gone down quietly, with most TechCrunch readers being none the wiser. 

TechCrunch publishes so much news everyday that any reference to this incident would have been past page 10 of search results in just a couple of days. 

But (there’s always a but) Haje took it upon himself to put on some rose-colored glasses and publish his own skewed perspective on X, below. 

As you could have guessed, the internet lost it. 

Some of the responses are a little too crass for us to post, but some of our favorite PG-rated ones are as follows: 

We love the internet. 

There are a handful of lessons to be learned here. 

First and foremost, no matter how trustworthy someone’s writing is, have a system of checks and balances in place. Nothing ever dies on the internet, so quality control is imperative. 

Next, remember that people have loads of time on their hands to catch you in a lie, and if they can sleuth out receipts for something you did, they will. Never try to pull one over on the internet. You won’t win. 

Really the only reasonable way out of this would have been for Haje to issue an apology on his own socials, deal with the fallout, and then go quiet for a while until the next salacious media scandal took place. 

But instead, he doubled down and invited a world of scrutiny, leaving a shame-trail for all to see. 

Since June 28th, TechCrunch has shut down the Pitch Deck Teardown (womp womp),and no word on whether any unknowing startup founders have proceeded to work with Haje. 

If we get an update, you know you will too.

Until next week,

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