Thanks Sam - it’s “Orange France Telecom” - France Telecom is the parent company but the project I’m working on is a consumer orientated one and as such will be branded “Orange” (if it even ends up having a corporate badge at all…)

I actually wrote to Micheal about this and he says he’s not going into VC with Heather. I’m really intrigued as to what he’s up to but also now wondering whether Heather wanted ‘out’ of FIM just as much as she wanted ‘in’ to TechCrunch…?

Blogs, vlogs and even conferences don’t seem like the kinds of products Heather would be immediately interested in. The plot thickens…

I agree with Nik, who probably knows more than most about Mike’s future plans, a media company play is more likely. It wil be interesting to see if that includes properties in Europe.

The success of PodTech.net with both Scoble and Calcanis plus the success of RocketBoom may show one direction for TechCrunch along with the TechCrunch 20 anouncement

I am not sure how his growth correlates to my own growth though, our companies aren’t tied together in anyway.

Anyway my original comment was just to say that the VC speculation re: TC does’t have too much of a foundation and other parts of the story are more interesting - though there is nothing wrong with speculation

“A VC direction is perhaps the only way to take TechCrunch to the next level in terms of size of the business and it’s returns.”

Techcrunch continues to grow strongly, and has more obvious and better opportunities than the VC fund route. Also VC is a very long-term strategy, the image of rich VC’s not doing a lot of work and making a lot of money is fiction, and it takes decades to establish a successful fund. Whichever way you look at it having a small startup raise a fund like what you outline doesn’t make sense

I think more commentary needs to look past Heathers role in M&A and more into her experience from working with big media and how that will compliment Mike and TC - this is an interesting story

I agree with Calacanis when he says that TC has the opportunity to be the next CNet/Wired etc. and to lead “new new” media

Hey, sorry about the lack of credit. It was 1am when I wrote this but that’s still no excuse. Fix now

The ethical issues are enormous and as a media commentator myself it would just be such a large conflict of interest anyone else wouldn’t consider it. I’m surprised O’Reilly didn’t get nearly as much flack for AlphaTech Ventures as they did.

But TechCrunch has always been the blog that defies the rules. People know it’s biased, it’s evaluations are very hype orientated, it rarely goes back to investigates success/failure of companies it profiles, etc etc.

In most other genres people would discount a news source like this, but we still continue keeping TC in our RSS readers. Hey, you can’t knock it if it’s successful I guess.

If Mike and Heather are then investing in the companies they are writing about it could all be a step too far - but then if they make significant returns on the VC side, they could even eventually let TC whither (I don’t think you could sell it off - it wouldn’t be the same) to concentrate on the far more lucrative side of the business.

“That said, although Mike undoubtably has a skill for writing constantly about startups, I don’t think this shows he has a skill at picking them.”

Well it’s as much about presentation and it is about substance, unfortunately, sometimes. I guess I should have written he **appears** to be able to have a knack for writing about startups.

He also has enough friends and connections to advise him and keep him on the straight and narrow.