Keith Rabois, former Square COO, prolific angel investor and new partner at venture firm Khosla Ventures, has been bashing another hot tech company, Foursquare, on Twitter this weekend.
This prompted Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley to take to Twitter, defend his company, and bash Rabois back.
And now many of the Valley's biggest names have jumped in to defend Crowley and Foursquare and blast Rabois.
It all started when former Googler Hunter Walk, product manager for YouTube, innocently tweeted about a TechCrunch story: "Wow, who knew 40,000 developers used the Foursquare API"
Rabois tweeted this reply "@hunterwalk same number of real users."
Walk replied:
@p2chairman eh, VC has softened @rabois. Prev he would have predicted an actual date of failure ;-)
— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) March 16, 2013
Developer Sriram Krishnan jumped in defending Foursquare and its API:
@rabois @hunterwalk Their API is one of the best sources of location data around. Used it all my apps.
— Sriram Krishnan (@sriramk) March 16, 2013
Crowley hit back: "Keep hating... and while you're doing so Foursquare will keep becoming the location layer for the Internet."
And Rabois responded to that with another slam, indicating that Foursquare needs to be acquired to save itself and referencing Bebo, acquired by AOL in 2008 for $850 million, and sold off in 2010 for a fraction. In the Valley, invoking the name "Bebo" often refers to when the founders sell a company they know is troubled.
@dens @sriramk @hunterwalk great use of jargon.Maybe Hail Mary Bebo-style acquisition will bail you out.
— Keith Rabois (@rabois) March 16, 2013
And then it devolved into a bigger Twitter brawl, with all sorts of people weighing in and quite a bit of four-letter words and name calling. Entertaining reading. Here's the link.
Buddy Media's Michael Lazerow also took up the fight, publishing a column today on LinkedIn, asking "When Is It OK To Bash A Founder?" and coming up with a strange answer: only when you are trolling the 'net making outrageous comments trying to stay relevant. He compared Rabois to Donald Trump, and not in a good way.
Correction: An earlier version of this story confused Square, a payments company where Keith Rabois used to be COO, with Foursquare, an app you use to check-in. Also, it described Sriram Krishnan as a former Google/YouTube developer, which he is not. We've updated the post, and apologize for the errors.
SEE ALSO: The 25 Most Creative People In Tech
Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »
