frankly speaking

Spin Control

A little bit of drama erupted in the Valley on this quiet Saturday afternoon when ATD journalist Kara Swisher released an email that was written from Chamath Palihapitiya to the founders of AirBnB, in which he basically turned them down in their latest round of financing.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, and I won’t get into the details of the deal, suffice to say there are three takeaways from the whole fiasco:

1) “Manage your heat. Get your Joe Torre on.” This quote goes to Chamath. The latest rumor is the email was leaked to Kara by one of Chamath’s assistants who sent it to her boyfriend, who somehow sent it to Kara. Look, if this is the case, Chamath needs to manage his internal people more closely. If he even considered one of the people he cc’d on that email would leak it, obviously, he shouldn’t have cc’d them on the email. If there is ever a question on whether you can trust someone, you shouldn’t trust them with confidential information. He should step up and take the blame. There was some speculation that he sent the email directly Kara. I doubt this was the case. 

2) The press, in general, deserves to take some heat for this. Sure, their job is to write about stories that they feel will drive pageviews to their websites, but if an internal memo that has the potential of ruining a great start-up comes across their desk, they should show some discretion in how much (if anything) they publish.

3) The AirBnB founders - you’re going to have some explaining to do. The fact that the founders wanted to cash out in this financing round is ultimately their choice. I don’t blame them at all for choosing to do this (in fact, if I were in their position, I’d probably make the same move) however, because this has now become a ‘public event’ you are going to have to go into work on Monday morning and explain to your coworkers why you think it was a good idea for for you to take money off the table now, instead of when there’s an actual exit.

The downside of this is in the end, AirBnB employees are going to be a lot less motivated when they walk into work on Monday. They got hosed by a possible investor, the press and their bosses.