I've worked next to Shirley for a couple of months in NextSpace last year. She was a nice girl who was doing some marketing work for Zaarly back then. She actually was one of the first organizers of the successful Zaarly Startup Crawls. To accomplish such a thing, you have to be connected. So there may be some fluff to it, but it's certainly not all air.
I'm actually astonished by how low TechCrunch has sunk by calling her out like that and ruining her future career.
I for one am shocked that someone lied and then someone else had the gall to correct the lies.
Also, as one of the people who were on the Zaarly crawl, she literally emailed our all@ account and then we said, sure that sounds cool, come on by. Hypothesizing that she must have been a good marketing person because she got people interested in something that would be beneficial to them and then hypothesizing that Techcrunch is unfair and ruined her career makes me feel like you're REALLY letting your biases get in the way here.
After reading the BetaBeat article [1], which is much more informative and less biased than the TechCrunch one, I stand corrected. Guess she really lives up to her name. Oh well.
I'm actually astonished by how low TechCrunch has sunk by calling her out like that and ruining her future career.