Michael Arrington is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, the most popular blog covering startups and technology news. In 2005, Michael Arrington was researching Silicon Valley start-ups and posted his findings online. Since then, TechCrunch draws million of visitors a month and boasts annual revenue of over $10 million.
# Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School
# Michael practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
# In 1999 he left WSGR to join RealNames as VP Business Development and General Counsel.
# In 2000 Arrington co-founded Achex, an internet payments company, which was sold to First Data Corp for US$32 million and is now the back end of Western Union online. “I made enough to buy a Porsche. Not much more,” he says.
# His other entrepreneurial endeavors include co-founding Zip.ca and Pool.com, acting as chief operating officer for Razorgator, and founding Edgeio
# He founded TechCrunch on June 11, 2005
# In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world
# In an interview granted to Inc.com as told to Liz Welch, Michael said:
I usually post several times a week. When I first started TechCrunch, I would post several times a day. I’ve always been manic about it. You know that experiment where the rat hits the lever and the treat comes out? By the third day of writing, I got my first comment from somebody who wasn’t my mom. That’s the treat. Then people started subscribing to my RSS feed. Every day, that number would go up—10, 13, 100. That constant feedback is my reward. I still scan for comments on my posts. I can almost always predict how many comments I’ll get. Most are knee-jerk reactions, but sometimes there will be a few that are worthy of discussion, and I’ll chime in.
# Techcrunch was acquired by AOL for $30 million in September 2010.
# Arrington has invested in Supyo, Seesmic, Dogster, DanceJam and Omnidrive.
