It's Not Just TechCrunch

Earlier this morning Nic Haralambous posted an article titled Don’t Read TechCrunch. Within four hours his article had climbed to the #1 spot on the Hacker News home page with 132 points, at which point I found it and, out of curiosity, clicked the link.

The succinct point Nic made in Don’t Read TechCrunch was this: rather than spend time reading articles about fund raising, greater benefit to both him and his company came as a result of him focusing on building a profitable business. In closing Nic advised against reading TechCrunch in particular, citing it as “the biggest culprit” in a space “glorifying money raising.” While I do agree with the conclusion Nic came to in his article, his conclusion only scratches the surface of a much broader problem. The problem does not lie in wrongly glorifying a certain aspect of business, for as Nic admitted in his article, “It’s a much more complicated and in depth process in Africa and South Africa to raise funding”. Rather, the problem resides in the inherently fallacious mentality that simply reading can ever take the place of actually working towards a goal, whether that goal is developing a more profitable business or furthering your abilities as a writer.