What Went Wrong With The CrunchPad Partnership – with Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!


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I love learning how business deals get done and why they sometimes fall apart. So when I read Michael Arrington's post about the end of the CrunchPad, I got insanely curious about why the partnership behind it fell apart. Arrington said Fusion Garage ran away with his baby, so I posted an open invitation on Mixergy to the company's founder to come and talk about it. Surprisingly, he said yes with no hesitation.

In this interview you'll hear about the deal from Chandrasekar "Chandra" Rathakrishnan's point of view, and you'll see the device that he renamed the JooJoo in action.

Highlights from the interview

- This device is stunning. Chandra used it to show a past Mixergy video on YouTube and it seemed to look better on the CrunchPad JooJoo than my laptop.

- Chandra seems to say that Arrington promised him a buyout deal and couldn't deliver fast enough. Since there was no buyout deal, Chandra says Arrington couldn't claim to own the device.

- Chandra claims that TechCrunch had no part in developing the device. We talked about how it was designed and who at Fusion Garage envisioned, designed and developed it.