joining me today is a guest who needs no
introduction but we shall grant him one
nonetheless erick schonfeld you’ve been
a writer for fortune business 2 point 0
you won countless awards which I can’t
remember without the help of the
teleprompter I can count you can count
that will prolly get into that
accountants will get to them you are
currently the co-editor at TechCrunch
welcome to the show well thanks for
having me let’s just dive into it um two
years and a month ago you joined
TechCrunch so I’m curious about how that
actually played out what was the
discussion you had with Michael
Arrington and why you chose to move over
from traditional media to TechCrunch
sure so for people in your audience they
don’t know what techCrunch’s it’s the
biggest technology blog out there and it
was started by michael arrington in his
house back in 2005 at that time i was
editor-at-large at a time inc magazine
there’s now the funk that’s called
business two point oh and i was also i
ended up being sort of the main blog or
their through that we met you know we
started linking to each other we started
we all you know I was always reading his
blog i started to invite him to
conferences and round table that i was
organizing at the time we knew each
other that way through that connection
and in the summer of two thousand seven
he reached out to me to see if I’d be
interested to come join him so I’d
already been a Time Inc for about 14
years and I’d done the whole magazine
thing I had a pretty good run there I
thought but I was already starting being
pulled over to the blog side of the
world and I saw that as my main job
because I already saw that I was getting
a lot more interesting leads for realz
four other stories that I was getting a
lot more recognition that I was really
sort of you know more part of the
conversation right so it was very
appealing to me to kind of leave that
aside and start from a clean slate at a
media company that didn’t have that
baggage and
you know I decided I wanted to try to
build a new media company and I could
either try to do it on my own or I could
you know I could join Michael who would
already at that point you know tech rent
is already well established and since
then you know we’ve we’ve grown it quite
nicely so now we have six six writers on
just the TechCrunch brand itself so the
company as a whole we have about 20
employees and that includes people in
development in different blogs as a
whole network of blog there’s there’s
TechCrunch the main blog there’s crunch
gear which is a gear blog there’s mobile
crunch there’s TechCrunch Europe which
is a regional blog in Europe there’s
crunchbase which is our our database of
companies which from nowhere now has
thousands of companies and we have all
this information about fundings and
acting MMA acquisitions it’s all free
it’s all open data that anyone can
download and we have api’s people are
building other websites based on this
data so there’s a lot of different side
projects as well know about know about
now what’s been the biggest surprise
since you’ve been at TechCrunch the
whole way of running you know reporting
and writing about a story really changes
the way that we do things now is you
know you have a new piece of information
or new piece of news every post this
kind of pushes the story forward and
there’s this whole interactive element
where you’ll post something you maybe
have partial information you could
affirm it or you feel good enough about
it to put it online and you characterize
it as such and then that then brings the
real the real information to you that
makes the company respond or that brings
the person who really knows the story
out of the Woodworks and then that is
this iterative process that you sort of
put everything out there for display
you
introduction but we shall grant him one
nonetheless erick schonfeld you’ve been
a writer for fortune business 2 point 0
you won countless awards which I can’t
remember without the help of the
teleprompter I can count you can count
that will prolly get into that
accountants will get to them you are
currently the co-editor at TechCrunch
welcome to the show well thanks for
having me let’s just dive into it um two
years and a month ago you joined
TechCrunch so I’m curious about how that
actually played out what was the
discussion you had with Michael
Arrington and why you chose to move over
from traditional media to TechCrunch
sure so for people in your audience they
don’t know what techCrunch’s it’s the
biggest technology blog out there and it
was started by michael arrington in his
house back in 2005 at that time i was
editor-at-large at a time inc magazine
there’s now the funk that’s called
business two point oh and i was also i
ended up being sort of the main blog or
their through that we met you know we
started linking to each other we started
we all you know I was always reading his
blog i started to invite him to
conferences and round table that i was
organizing at the time we knew each
other that way through that connection
and in the summer of two thousand seven
he reached out to me to see if I’d be
interested to come join him so I’d
already been a Time Inc for about 14
years and I’d done the whole magazine
thing I had a pretty good run there I
thought but I was already starting being
pulled over to the blog side of the
world and I saw that as my main job
because I already saw that I was getting
a lot more interesting leads for realz
four other stories that I was getting a
lot more recognition that I was really
sort of you know more part of the
conversation right so it was very
appealing to me to kind of leave that
aside and start from a clean slate at a
media company that didn’t have that
baggage and
you know I decided I wanted to try to
build a new media company and I could
either try to do it on my own or I could
you know I could join Michael who would
already at that point you know tech rent
is already well established and since
then you know we’ve we’ve grown it quite
nicely so now we have six six writers on
just the TechCrunch brand itself so the
company as a whole we have about 20
employees and that includes people in
development in different blogs as a
whole network of blog there’s there’s
TechCrunch the main blog there’s crunch
gear which is a gear blog there’s mobile
crunch there’s TechCrunch Europe which
is a regional blog in Europe there’s
crunchbase which is our our database of
companies which from nowhere now has
thousands of companies and we have all
this information about fundings and
acting MMA acquisitions it’s all free
it’s all open data that anyone can
download and we have api’s people are
building other websites based on this
data so there’s a lot of different side
projects as well know about know about
now what’s been the biggest surprise
since you’ve been at TechCrunch the
whole way of running you know reporting
and writing about a story really changes
the way that we do things now is you
know you have a new piece of information
or new piece of news every post this
kind of pushes the story forward and
there’s this whole interactive element
where you’ll post something you maybe
have partial information you could
affirm it or you feel good enough about
it to put it online and you characterize
it as such and then that then brings the
real the real information to you that
makes the company respond or that brings
the person who really knows the story
out of the Woodworks and then that is
this iterative process that you sort of
put everything out there for display
you
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