I am Nikita Upreti and I talk to Indian founders, hackers and investors on iamstarting.com. And I started iamstarting with an intent to  unlock  the mysteries behind building successful startups and help others to startup  by sharing  the stories of doers. I started with audio podcasts and then moved on to doing video podcasts. And while I was quietly building this platform, I met the founder of Pluggd.in (Ashish Sinha)

Jan 5:  After mutual discussion of sharing a common goal, Pluggd.in offered me to work with them as Editor- Pluggd.in TV , to build their video channel. We decided to build that mutually and call it Pluggd.in TV.  From the start I was  in it for the love of things, so I did not  care much  about the the payout , I had a good feeling that working with a smart team would be fun and help out more startups on the way.

In our initial meeting, I was  assured that Pluggd.in  has  a good team and  adequate resources to build Pluggd.in TV  which was kind of an exaggeration as  I was the first employee there (officially).  I was surprised when basic tools to get the job done, were not available and no team was in place(given the fact that they have been active for more than 4 years now).  But we as startups strive to make things happen against the odds  and I took it upon myself to get things rolling.

In my first interview with  Mobisy’s founder we somehow managed with what ever we had, and Ashish was helpful throughout this interview.

Jan 17:  Following week, I decided to get in touch with Vivek Ravishankar (Founder, Interviewstreet), and see if he could share his experience of getting in Ycombinator.  I really struggled with this one and worked hard on the interview from shooting to the final video. The video was originally under my name and so did the description of the video in the Youtube. “Nikita Upreti – Editor – Pluggd.in TV in conversation with Vivek Ravi Shanker, founder interviewstreet. ” . This is not the case now.My name has been replaced with Pluggd.in TV, inspite of me being the content creator.

Jan 25 (First Straw):  Pluggd.in wanted to launch it’s TV channel  with an announment that  “iamstarting is  a part of Pluggd.in” .  I was surprised with the implied intent of this title for the launch post as  as I had joined  them  as their  “Employee” and not a stakeholder.

iamstarting was never up for grabs. And  allowing Pluggd.in to  put “iamstarting is now a part of Pluggd.in” as the title of launch  post would have given many a false impression that iamstarting got acquired by Pluggd.in (which was no way the case , as it was not a merger/acquisition ).

 This situation became deal-breaker for me, and only after  I took  a firm stand, Pluggd.in agreed to let it go. And finally I launched Pluggd.in TV.  I ignored  the incident and took this launch in good spirit and continued to build Pluggd.in channel.

In the spirit of keeping things short, lets just say, there were multiple situations where our value systems disagreed with each other. Finally things were not working out between us.  The basic problem which didn’t make the partnership work was that we at iamstarting always focused on presenting a truer picture of things without getting into the controversies. After all, our audience is mostly hackers who don’t want bullshit wrapped in a velvet cloth, they have straightforward questions and expect straightforward answers.

What was expected of me at Pluggd.in was not working out for me, I did not want to evoke false controversies for the sake of page views and extra comments. There seemed to be a huge difference in the intent of doing these interviews. And So I decided to move on.Moving on was a bitter experience with Pluggd.in, but let us leave that aside for now. A bigger problem is…

Present date ( The Major Problem):

This morning a friend pointed out that Pluggd.in has removed my name from all the work I had done while at Pluggd.in and replaced it with Team Pi. I agree I am no more a part of Pluggd.in but I did the work and helped them built the channel from scratch.

I remember even when Sarah Lacy left TechCrunch, Techcrunch had maintained the basic ethics of giving credits to her(the author)for the work done. And not that once Sarah is not with Techcrunch, they go and remove her name from their videos.

I have worked hard on the content, I have built video channel for Pluggd.in from scratch  and I don’t  think  it is fair for Pluggd.in as a  paltform to remove my attribution from the content .  May be we expect more from a respected platform like Pluggd.in  in being authentic and encouraging.

Now, I am not expecting anything from Pluggd.in but at the same time I would like to quote Godfather .

Michael: [speaking to Carlo] Only don’t tell me you’re innocent. Because it insults my intelligence and makes me very angry.

Below is the screen-shot with original results