Like Meatloaf Through A Straw: Crunchgate Drags On

The whole Daniel Brusilovsky/ TechCrunch Crunchgate free laptops for coverage saga continues to drag on like a poorly written soap opera with a post from the founder of startup Divvyshot.

Sam Odio confesses in a blog post that he was the startup founder at the center of the storm, and that Daniel asked him repeatedly for a Macbook Air. You can read the whole thing here.

I’ll give Odio credit for confessing and admitting to have done wrong (and it’s credit due,) but likewise he makes a number of claims that are bizarre to say the least.

Odio claims that he didn’t say no to Brusilovsky, and indeed strung the kid along for a week until finally deciding high school fashion to dob him in to Michael Arrington for the request. Although the time line isn’t 100% clear, that would appear to be strung out for the week after he had the post published to TechCrunch. Odio claims now that this was wrong, and hindsight is after all 20/20. But likewise the whole “I wished Daniel would stop asking” claim is a bit bizarre: indeed, he kept telling Daniel “we can do this, but not right now.” Sounds an awful lot to a casual observer that he was mostly worried about keeping the coverage, until eventually Daniel’s pestering got too much…or perhaps in the mean time he grew a conscious.

But what truly lets the confession down is Odio’s bizarre decision to attack Jason Calacanis and Loren Feldman to complete the tale.

On one hand Odio claims that he wanted to be “as private about the matter as possible….[and for TechCrunch] keep my identity confidential.” And yet he wrote to Jason Calacanis disclosing his involvement.

Sorry, that’s bollocks.

I don’t begrudge Odio’s preference for privacy. But if you’re serious about your identity not being known, you don’t start telling third parties about your involvement. This is doubly so when it comes to Jason Calacanis, who is well known for publishing emails he’s received on his personal blog. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (and I mean it as no disrespect to Jason,) but seriously: you don’t get to remain anonymous and discuss it with third parties at the same time.

The attack on Loren Feldman borders on complete stupidity. The odds on someone finding out Odio’s involvement in Crunchgate was always on the table, and if it hadn’t been Loren it could have easily been someone else. This is the tech community after all: secrets leak. Shooting the messenger when you yourself disclosed your identity to a unrelated third party to the story: well, someone needs to buy a book on personal responsibility ASAP.

I don’t know Sam Odio, and I’m sure he’s normally a perfectly good bloke, but you don’t get to confess your sins and then blame others in the same breadth without being called out on it.