A week later, GrabGas offers its own version of the story

The GrabGas team earlier this year. Julian is second from the right. Photo credit: GrabGas.

It’s been a full week since the GrabGas kerfuffle broke out, raising issues of startup accountability, work relationships, and media processes along the way. If you missed that, you can catch up here.

At the time, we contacted GrabGas for the team’s side of the story, but received no reply other than a short Facebook post late that night that didn’t really offer any explanation.

Today, GrabGas came back with another Facebook post, and this one is massive.

GrabGas’ account of the situation pretty much squares with Julian’s: bottom line, the startup and the CTO failed to clear up their professional relationship from day one, and that led to a whole lot of miscommunication.

Unfortunately, the post does not address any of the allegations about the startup giving inflated numbers to media and entering an acceleration program and a pitch competition with false credentials. Instead, it focuses on the spat itself.

See: Why and how we covered the GrabGas controversy

GrabGas confirms that initial talks with Julian about salary and status in the company, although crucial, didn’t take place because it had a bad experience with its previous technical person. It wanted to test the new one before talking specifics to avoid a repeat of the previous situation.

It seems that both the company and Julian allowed a long period of time to pass before they attempted to rectify that. By then, Julian had done most of the work required of him.

The two versions of the story differ here and there, give or take a meeting or two, which Julian points out in a comment under the post, but not in any significant way.

GrabGas doesn’t mention what its next steps are at this point. The startup continues to lack technical infrastructure after this event. “With our CTO gone and much tech work let [sic] to be done from the ground, we nevertheless moved on and continue in the local acceleration program,” the post says.