Michael Arrington
Michael Arrington
J. Michael Arringtonis the American founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth13 March 1970
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I'm a creature of startups. For example, I don't want government interference in the startup ecosystem.
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.
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'm nearly certain that Google accessed my Gmail account after I broke a major story about Google.
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.
I don't claim to be a journalist. I hold myself to higher standards of transparency and disclosure.
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.