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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. They built a few products at the time. 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. Teare, for his part, focused on the startup while Arrington focused on the blog.

After years of corporate ownership, culminating in Yahoo’s sale to private equity firm Apollo, TC has become a milquetoast site focused on big raises specially placed by expensive PR people and random tech news that has been neutered into pablum. The once-freewheeling editorial strategy - writers wrote what they wanted at any time and nobody really edited anything - is being replaced by a more formalized system familiar to those who are one job away from become PR people themselves, while any hint of anger against the current crop of boy-kings in SF is dealt with harshly. Haje Kamps(who was, incidentally, running a side business advising startups, something that would have gotten him canned in previous incarnations of TC but was ignored because the wall between VC and editorial has been worn down to a nub) wrote about the lie of Alexandr Wang’s take on DEI vs. meritocracy.

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