There are lots of things that I will probably never experience in this life. Military combat. Being dictator of a small central American country. Dunking a basketball. Being a famous rock star. Or walking on Mars. But one thing I have been, and will always be, is an entrepreneur.
— Michael Arrington
Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump.
I don't claim to be a journalist. I hold myself to higher standards of transparency and disclosure.
For the most part, I've sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies.
I'm nearly certain that Google accessed my Gmail account after I broke a major story about Google.
We have to start encouraging women to get into math and science early on in life... But to just say TechCrunch is perpetuating the problem because there aren't enough women speakers at our events is just a way to get attention and not solve the problem. So do we want to solve the problem, or do we want to just pick on me?
If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.
Everyone wants the rich to pay more in taxes.
One thing I know from personal experience, judges hate it when parties talk publicly about their cases. There are a lot of things about our criminal legal system that need to be changed, and this is just one of them. Prosecutors know how to play the press. Most defendants don't.
More than once at TechCrunch, we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we'd write a post about the whole thing.
Journalists hold themselves apart, and above, the common person. They have rules designed to ensure their objectivity and impartiality.
America is an unsolvable problem: a nation divided and deeply in hate with itself. If it was a startup, we'd understand how unfixable the situation is; most of us would leave for a fresh start, and the company would fall apart. America is MySpace.
Before the Internet, all most people cared about was Office. And Office was really the only reason anyone wanted Windows machines instead of Macs.
If you really care about Facebook likes, don't just post your stuff to Twitter and then rely on it being republished automatically to Facebook. In my sample size of one, Facebook penalizes you significantly for that and shows that content to far fewer people.
Sometimes I have so many financial conflicts of interest that I can't even keep them straight.
That first company I started made a lot of money for the venture capitalists - nearly $30 million - but next to nothing for the founders. The companies I started after that varied between failures and mediocre successes. But at no point did I ever consider getting a 'real job.' That felt like a black and white world, and I wanted Technicolor.
I live a fairly simple life, and that didn't change much after I sold TechCrunch in 2010. I didn't buy a new house or even a new car. The one thing I did splurge on was a boat. Nothing too fancy or large.
Our government is just way too interested in mucking around in Silicon Valley by creating and enforcing rules based on little or no understanding of the consequences.
The problem isn't that Silicon Valley is keeping women down or not doing enough to encourage female entrepreneurs. The opposite is true. No, the problem is that not enough women want to become entrepreneurs.
I'm worried about privacy - the companies out there gathering data on us, the stuff we do on Twitter, the publicly scrapeable stuff on Facebook. It's amazing how much data there is out there on us. I'm worried that it can be abused and will be abused.
If we want to get beyond this whole I'm-cool-because-I-care-about-women thing, what we really need to do is we have to start encouraging women to get engineering degrees in college.
I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things.
Most of the money I make now comes from investments from CrunchFund. And the vast majority of that is what's called carried interest.
If AOL had ever ordered me to remove a piece of content from the site for any reason, I would have immediately written about it and disclosed the situation to our readers. And if I had ever ordered a writer to remove content, I would have expected that writer to have done the same to me.
If a tech journalist needs financial security before doing what their conscience dictates, I'm not sure they should be calling themselves journalists at all.
Just pick a political story at random and read the comments. There is no logic or reason on either side - only hypocrisy and hate.
I'm a creature of startups. For example, I don't want government interference in the startup ecosystem.
Talking about Apple v. Microsoft without mentioning the Internet and the browser is like talking about WWII without talking about the nuke. Framing the conversation just in terms of open v. closed operating systems, the quality of the hardware or software or who the CEO was, is silly.
The main thing to know about me is that I'm a champion of entrepreneurs and the startups they build. They are my rock stars. If in doubt, I side with them, and that's clear from my writing.
I am a partner at CrunchFund, a venture capital firm with investments in many startups around the world. I am also a limited partner in many other venture funds which have their own startup investments.
The payouts for starting a business are just terrible when you account for risk. A tiny minority of entrepreneurs ever get rich. And the majority of entrepreneurs would probably make far more money, and have more stable personal relationships, if they just worked for someone else.
Friendships and marriage are far more potent than financial conflicts.
I've always believed that government tends to screw up whatever it touches, but Obama in particular seemed different. He understood tech issues that left the other candidates bewildered. Part of it may be his age. But whatever the reason, I had real hope that he could help lead us into a new century of technology leadership and growth.
Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit-driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn't matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.
Some people ask why we don't just wait until we have the whole story before posting. The fact is that we sometimes can't get to the end story without going through this process... When a story is up and posted, it's amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information... And readers love it.
Women in my world are respected as much as men.
Everything's mobile these days. Let's go mo-bile! But really, that's just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy, you know they just don't get it, and you move on.
I love talking about taxes.
Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my job to protect it in any way.
Journalists are supposed to put the people first, even before themselves. Around the world and throughout history, journalists have died to get the truth out.
Leaving America means renouncing your citizenship, moving out of the country and leaving family and friends behind. You can retain your citizenship if you like, but you'll still be away from loved ones and still be paying taxes. You lose all the good stuff about America and have to keep all the bad stuff.
I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early '90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking, if you wanted to do Office stuff, you needed a Windows machine.
I have Twitter auto-post to my Facebook page, and I occasionally post things directly to Facebook as well. I've always noticed that the direct-to-Facebook approach generates far more likes, but I've never actually gone back and run the averages.
I always try to find the truth in a situation. That unvarnished, pure nugget of truth at the core of every issue that I write about.
