How Felix Pissed of Boris
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (organizer of The Next Web conference) has gotten into a bit of a rumble with Plazes CEO Felix Petersen. Late Thursday afternoon Felix notified Boris that he couldn’t attend The Next Web conference because of a major bug with the new Plazes and an illness of his daughter. Can you imagine how amazed Boris was when he noticed that Plazes (Felix’s own product) placed him in Kopenhagen at the Reboot conference.
TechCrunch has taken up the story, providing some more details with the title “Plazes CEO Busted By His Own Product”. I have to agree with Boris for now because cancelling to go to Reboot is regretful, but lying about it is just a shame. Let’s see if Felix will respond with his side of the story.
alper http://www.alper.nl
June 4th, 2007Felix already responded to the TechCrunch story and I frankly think the whole Boris leak and TechCrunch coverage is uncalled for.
The new Plazer is indeed less than ideal to work with and the initial version had a lot of errors in it which made it completely unusable. So that part of the story was at least true. I don’t know why he couldn’t fix those issues more efficiently remote working from Copenhagen than rushing back to Berlin.
As for his daughter, I will not (and should not) speculate about that.
But Cris, you were as close to the fire as I was. How did the Next Web crew and the audience react to both Felix and Michael Arrington’s absences?
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
June 4th, 2007True, in retrospect I must agree that Boris had better first ask Felix why he “lied”.
As for the audience: I don’t think many of them noticed. Although I must say that there weren’t too many true inspirational stories as I think they might have wanted.
Conor O’Neill http://www.loudervoice.com
June 4th, 2007I don’t think anyone noticed Felix’s absence but many noted both Mike’s absence and the lack of any comment from the organisers.
He is still listed as a speaker! As was Jason until he blogged that he wasn’t going. That hovers right on the edge of misleading advertising.
Having said that, I don’t think the event suffered at all from those absences and was superb from start to finish!
Anonymous
June 4th, 2007Isn’t it ironic that one missing speaking blogs about another missing speaker? (For those who don’t know, Arrington also canceled, and he runs techcrunch!)
Conor, I don’t think Mike was scheduled on the agenda on the entry badge. Felix was. Arrington’s image was still there.
I liked the conference. I haven’t been to many, so I can’t really comment on how it compares to other stuff. I liked most of the speakers.
I think it’s better for a speaker to cancel than to try and make a hurried and unprepared presentation. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that Jeff Clavier (The french VC, also commented on demos from the balcony with Marc Canter)’s presentation just wasn’t that great. That’s more a comment on the quality of the other presenters than on Jeff’s skills on the podium, but perhaps a more inspiring speech by a lesser known figure would have been better in retrospect.
Now imagine that Arrington and Petersen both did manage to hurry something through, and that it wasn’t much to write home about. That would have been much more detrimental compared to them just not being there.
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
June 5th, 2007Felix replied to Boris with an explanation and Boris realized he was kind of an ass. In the end I think Felix just doesn’t care about Boris as Boris cares about himself.
All and all a very interesting and funy development.