Ah, the weekend — when we get to lounge around in our pajamas with a cup of coffee, reading the thrilling back-and-forth, he-said/she-said tales of Web 2.0. This week’s installment brings us back to the gang at Blognation UK, the TechCrunch-style blog that Sam Sethi set up after he was given his walking papers from TechCrunch UK. If you recall, the last episode saw Blognation writer Oliver Starr (ex of MobileCrunch) post a 3,000-word screed about Sethi and how he was (allegedly) a lying scumbag. In case you’re interested, Sam has a sort of mea culpa here.
Now, Mike Arrington has posted a document that purports to be a “term sheet” from a venture fund called Secora, which Sethi claims is investing almost $500,000 for a quarter of Blognation. But there are some odd things going on with this term sheet — the dates appear to be wrong, and it looks as though it might have been prepared long before Blognation came apart at the seams. Not to mention that it’s difficult to believe anyone in their right mind would invest given the lawsuits that are flying.
In addition, a commenter on TechCrunch posts this illuminating excerpt from Secora’s annual report:
“The Board has subsequently carried out due diligence on a privately owned media and entertainment business… during the due diligence process it was determined that the financial results of the target business were significantly below expectations upon which the price had been based.
Several attempts were made to renegotiate the deal on terms that were acceptable to the Board and that could be recommended to shareholders, but without success. As a result it was concluded that the transaction would not be in the interests of Secora shareholders and should be aborted.”
Even if that doesn’t refer to Blognation (which is hard to believe) the rest of the report suggests that Secora itself is having financial difficulties, and therefore the odds of it deciding to put $500,000 into a struggling blog are not great. But that’s not the weirdest part: the weirdest part is that Sam Sethi appears to have posted a comment on TechCrunch using someone else’s name, which Debi Jones (another ex Blognation writer) then responded to.
This one is entering the Soap 2.0 hall of fame for sure. In any case, all this should make for a fun Le Web conference, since Sethi apparently was hoping to have a united front of Blognation bloggers show up and fly the flag. Doesn’t sound like that’s going to be happening any time soon.