On Saturday June 6 we are celebrating the ten year birthday of TechCrunch. 1,500 people will gather from 12-3 p.m. at the Presidio in San Francisco. Like the meetups ten years ago at my house in Atherton, it will be a party, a BBQ and a celebration of startups. I can’t wait to spend the days with new friends and old. Get one of the few remaining tickets here.
2005: I was out of work and out of money. But life was good. I lived on the Strand in Manhattan Beach, CA. I spent my days surfing and my evenings playing Xbox. Laguna, just an adorable chocolate Lab puppy at the time, was always by my side.
So I ruined all that by starting TechCrunch. I was thinking of getting back into tech, and was working with entrepreneur Keith Teare on a few ideas, but was aghast at all the new startups doing fantastic new things. I was way behind and figured the only way to catch up was to start researching.
Big problem, though. There was no single news site that focused on startups only. Wired would cover a few, CNET would cover others. But just finding all the exciting new stuff was a real pain.
Since I was doing all this research, I thought I’d just post it on a blog. And that blog needed a name. And I named it TechCrunch.
June 11, 2005: my surfing days were over. The Xbox went on eBay. Laguna and I wrote our first post, a data dump on Technorati.
Knowing what I know now, I wish I had livened up the prose a little bit.
But I knew pretty quickly that TechCrunch was special. Founders flocked to it to see the new startups each day, and ask me to write about their own. I broke a few big stories early on, and Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and the WSJ took notice.
One of the best things about TechCrunch in the early days were the meetups at my rented house in Atherton in the heart of Silicon Valley. Our first one had a dozen people. Our last one had four hundred and the police came. I also met Heather Harde at one of those last meetups – it took me a year to convince her to leave News Corp. and join us as our CEO, but it was the single best business achievement of my life.
Scott Beale has some more amazing photos of one of the early meetups here.
Before I get even more nostalgic and weepy I’ll stop. But I am really looking forward to this party, and so proud of all the people, past and present, who have made TechCrunch what it is today. I hope to see you at the meetup.
And if you were an early TechCrunch’er, or at some of those early meetups, and can’t get a ticket before they sell out, please message me and I’ll get you in. It would be nice to have everyone there, and I hope to see you.
from jushiung1 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/BsLmLfDd2xU/
via IFTTT
Mensagens
0 comentários:
Enviar um comentário