Amateur Lessons in Communications
Rupert Murdoch used to tell his editors that the best publicity a newspaper could ever receive was to be sued.
Which brings us to Hercules Technology Growth Capital, which received a negative review on TheFunded.com, a review site for entrepreneurs about VC funds.
The review said that the firm was “shady, if not outright dishonest” and to “avoid them like the plague”.
So what did Hercules do? They threatened to sue TheFunded for defamatory comments.
Adeo Ressi, the founder of TheFunded, then forwards it on to VentureBeat, causing a spotlight to shine even brighter on the original review. Ressi refuses to take the remark down and stands by the comment.
He effectively is building his brand in the court of public opinion. Hercules just looks like a clueless firm. But apparently not clueless enough for Hercules’ chief executive Manuel Henriquez who ensures that the saga takes on a third chapter of hilarity when he butchers the english language in a response:
“Unfortunately we do not comment on pending legal action or on anonymous disparaging or slanderous posting which chose to hide behind anonymous attribution. We find such actions to be careless and site (sic) should fact check the facts to confirm if there is any evidence to support such claims or at a minimum provide attribution for comment postings.”
The story, via a post on alarm:clock, is now in the top few results for a Google search on “Hercules capital”.
