Arrington himself describes Teare as someone "who formerly cofounded Edgeio with me," leaving out Teare's relationship with TechCrunch. As we understand it, Arrington and Teare swapped 10 percent stakes in their companies. Since Edgeio, an online classifieds startup, went under, we suppose that makes Teare the better dealmaker of the two. He's also more brutally honest. On his LinkedIn profile, Teare says of himself: "I am Mike Arrington's business partner in TechCrunch. I'm the one who advised him not to do it. :-)"

The auction for the assets closed at $280,000, just $30,000 more than the open price, with only two bidders. This despite Teare's optimistic claim that: "a buyer will get a huge bargain at almost any price up to $6m. We had term sheets within the last 2 months and interest at valuations around $10m."

The winning bidder was LookSmart, which has itself been struggling to remain relevant after its early success in Internet advertising and search ten years ago. Arrington, who claims he has tried to avoid discussing his investments on TechCrunch, provides his own positive spin, saying he's "happy to see the assets move to a company with the resources to move the ideas forward." Of course, it's unclear what these so-called ideas are. Can anyone explain, really, what Edgeio did? At that price, LookSmart may well have just been bidding on the servers, office furniture, and links to the domain name from TechCrunch.