Twenty years strong: a love letter to TechCrunch

Summary

TechCrunch is turning 20. I’ve been here half that time. I worked previously at numerous major media properties, including Time Inc, Dow Jones, and Reuters; this has been the best job of my life, which is maybe why the time has gone so fast. There’s nothing like the culture here. Contrarian, smart, hilarious, and hard-working. Almost everyone at TC wears multiple hats, as anyone who has worked here will tell you. This isn’t just another media company — it’s a place where people are curious about everything, everyone cares a crazy amount about the brand (and each other), and where challenging conventional wisdom isn’t just encouraged but expected. Over the past decade, I’ve personally had the opportunity to interview some amazing people: Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Lina Khan, Conan O’Brien, Al Gore, Finland’s Sanna Marin, along with people making defense tech, building consumer giants, and selling their software companies for billions of dollars. My colleagues have collectively talked with thousands more whose impact on our lives is felt daily. From these conversations, we’ve learned — then explained to our readers — how technology, policy, and human ambition intersect to shape the world. We’ve done this from our homes, from coffee shops, from offices, but also across the world, to the many places TechCrunch has taken us, from Lisbon, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and Davos to (nearly) the opposite end of the globe: Lagos, Nairobi, Hong Kong, and Hangzhou. Across these cities, we’ve sat down with founders who became superstars and superstars who became prison inmates. We’ve watched boring technologies take over the world and celebrated technologies that devolved into dumpster fires. We’ve seen entire industries born, mature, and sometimes wither. We’ve watched two-person startups become trillion-dollar companies. We’ve covered business innovations. We’ve reported on breakthroughs that changed everything. We’ve also covered “breakthroughs” that amounted to bupkis...