Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

In early 2005, Michael Arrington, a lawyer, and Keith Teare, an entrepreneur, started a fund called Archimedes Ventures. Their idea at the time was to invest in Web 2.0, meaning the nascent world of web apps. Out of the fund, they built two products. One was an online classified ad service called Edge.io that was supposed to mimic Craigslist on every site on the web. The other was a startup tracking service called TechCrunch that aimed to review every Web 2.0 site popping up on the nascent Internet.

At the time, the media industry was being upended by bloggers who moved faster and wrote off-the-cuff stories about nearly everything, essentially beating print magazines to every punch. Along the way, they destroyed the embargo system, built the first influencers, gave rise to hagiographic access journalism, turned true reviews into affiliate marketing plays, savaged advertising revenue, and threw traditional journalism into a death spiral whose crash is currently finalizing itself around the world. But, at the time, they were pretty cool.

Teare and Arrington split their time between TechCrunch and Edge.io with Arrington spending most of his waking hours publishing Web 2.0 stories and asking his VC buddies for scoops. He monetized the site by selling square ads on the side of the page for a few thousand dollars a month, and emblazoned there were early come-ons for the same sites Arrington was reviewing. Eventually, those sponsors paid enough money to expand the site into multiple topics, including MobileCrunch and my site, CrunchGear.

I started CrunchGear for Mike in 2006. At this point, TechCrunch had eclipsed most of the rest of Archimedes Ventures, leaving Teare to tend to investments and Arrington to spend nearly every waking hour on TC. To cater to a global audience, he would stay up until three or four writing scoops about exciting new services like TWTR and Spotify and yelling loudly at Mark Hendrickson, a biology major who was imprisoned in Mike’s Palo Alto home. When I came by for my initial interview, I had to wake Mike up and he took me to CostCo to buy stuff for a party he was holding that night.

If you want to understand what life was like back then, blogger Om Malik suffered a heart attack from overwork (and too many cigars) while Arrington himself told the NYT that his lifestyle was awful:

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

“This is not sustainable,” he said.

TechCrunch was the definitive startup news site. To get on the front page - however briefly - meant 10,000 new signups to your service and countless calls from Valley VCs. That was TC’s power: it could make or break a site. This gave us silly kids an inordinate amount of power (and eventually led me to suffer a fairly debilitating depression) because startup founders needed us to close out their rounds. “Get a TC story,” the VCs would say, and founders would listen. One pair of Dutch entrepreneurs walked into Mike’s house with coffee, entering his bedroom in hopes of convincing him to write about whatever they were flogging. Legend has it that at one point an irate German entrepreneur spit on Mike at an event, leading us all to have a profound distrust of humanity.

The site flourished during the Web 3.0 and Mobile Web days and settled into a routine of startup news speckled with more hard-hitting investigations on privacy and hardware. It spawned the best startup event on the planet, Disrupt, and essentially defined how to pitch for tens of thousands of entrepreneurs. I personally ran pitch-offs around the world in bars and concert halls as a sort of scouting mechanism for TC. When I was doing this, during the early 2010s, TC was already becoming insular and SF-focused.

After the Great Recession, however, global startups and local U.S. startup hubs began producing some interesting things. The San Francisco-focused writers often ignored these startups simply because they didn’t get that innovation could happen anywhere outside of the Mission. I called myself the East Coast Editor and said that my beat was everything outside San Francisco.

This was TC’s first mistake.

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https://keepgoingpod.com/p/tech-crunched-how-the-go-to-site