Jason Calacanis: Revenge is a new editorial project to rival TechCrunch
Jason Calacanis is angry. You can tell he's angry partly because he talks even faster than normal, but also because he's (still) spitting feathers about TechCrunch founder (and now AOL, employee) Mike Arrington.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Calacanis–Arrington feud has a long tail: Valleywag covered 'the Calacanis effect' back at Netscape in November 2006, and by August 2007 Scripting News was already arguing that Calacanis didn't bring anyone a win-win, with blognation signing off on the era that December. The two have circled each other in Silicon Valley media for years.
What changed this week is structural rather than personal: Arrington is now an AOL employee, meaning TechCrunch sits inside a corporation, and Calacanis is answering with a deliberately named editorial project, Revenge, built explicitly to rival it. A grudge is being converted into a publishing venture.
First-order effects
- TechCrunch immediately gains a competitor whose founding premise is antagonism toward its own founder, turning every exclusive and scoop into a head-to-head contest between the two outlets.
- AOL's bet on buying TechCrunch is tested on arrival: its newly acquired franchise must defend its position while its founder's most persistent critic attacks from outside the corporate umbrella.
Second-order effects
- Startups and PR sources gain a second bidding target for exclusives, forcing them to play TechCrunch and Revenge against each other for launch coverage.
- Other independent tech blogs face pressure to pick sides or sharpen their own identities, since a two-outlet rivalry raises the cost of being an undifferentiated middle player.
Third-order effects
- If personality-driven outlets keep winning attention, corporate acquirers of founder-led blogs inherit a durable key-person problem: the departed or absorbed founder's rivals can weaponize the transition into a challenger brand.
- The episode points toward tech media organizing around named individuals and their feuds rather than mastheads, with acquisition events doubling as launch events for competitors.
The trend: Founder-led tech media is splitting into corporate-owned incumbents and personal-brand challengers, with acquisitions of blog franchises spawning rival titles almost immediately.