Towards the end of last week and through the weekend, tech news outlets were abuzz over Gurbaksh Chahal – then CEO of RadiumOne – with good reason. Without getting into too much detail – many others have done an excellent job covering the story ¹– Chahal was arrested and charged last August “with hitting and kicking his girlfriend 117 times over a 30-minute period.”² The violence resulted in 45 felony charges. However, “Last week, Chahal got all 45 felony charges dropped, avoided jail time, and pleaded guilty to just two misdemeanors. He’s also committed to enrolling in a domestic-violence program for about a year, and he has three years of probation.”³ On Sunday, RadiumOne announced that they had voted to terminate Chahal.

It seems that the RadiumOne board members were not fast enough. On Saturday, TechCrunch announced that they were dropping RadiumOne as a Disrupt New York Hackathon Sponsor:

TechCrunch will be dropping RadiumOne as a Disrupt New York hackathon sponsor. As Leena Rao writes, we simply couldn’t sleep at night knowing that we were supporting and promoting a company led by someone who does not share our values on the issue of domestic abuse.⁴

For a company that is mulling an IPO, this is the worst case scenario. The public nature of the entire debacle is just about the worst possible thing that could have happened to RadiumOne. This is, perhaps, the best example of how not to handle public outrage. RadiumOne’s lack of action not only resulted in them being dropped as a Disrupt New York hackathon sponsor, but the public outrage will undoubtedly tarnish the company’s reputation for the foreseeable future.