Twenty years strong: a love letter to TechCrunch

TechCrunch is turning 20. I’ve somehow been here half that time. I worked previously at numerous major media properties, including Time Inc, Dow Jones, and Reuters, but 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, TechCrunch has had the opportunity to sit down with incredible personalities across every corner of the tech and policy world, from CEOs like Sam Altman and Evan Spiegel to antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan, from venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Serena Williams to unlikely guests like Conan O’Brien and Al Gore, and leaders like Finland’s Sanna Marin. We’ve interviewed founders making defense tech, building consumer giants, and selling their software companies for billions of dollars. Collectively, our team has talked with thousands of people whose impact on our lives is felt daily. From these conversations, we’ve learned — then explained to our readers — how tech, 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 introduced you to two-person startups that became trillion-dollar companies and told you about business innovations that flipped industries upside down — from subscription models to the gig economy to, more recently, AI roll-ups. We’ve reported on breakthroughs that changed everything. We’ve also covered “breakthroughs” that amounted to bupkis.

We continue to show up every single day. In recent weeks, TC has sat down with the prime minister of Greece and with the mayor of San Francisco. We’ve also covered big stories involving the most prominent VCs, startup founders, and big tech outfits in the industry. I’d stack our transportation, startup, cybersecurity, and AI coverage against anyone’s.

These are tough times in media; it’s among the growing number of industries in flux. But to everyone who’s gleefully written about the supposed demise of TC, plot twist — we’re still here! Twenty years in, we continue breaking the stories that matter, holding power accountable, finding the next big thing before it’s obvious to everyone else. We’re doing it for a growing audience, too.

Michael Arrington, thank you for creating this brand that became so much more than any of us could have imagined. Thanks to every parent company that’s supported us and helped us keep doing what we love, including, today, Regent. TC’s ownership has changed over the years, but our mission to find the signal in the noise and tell stories that matter remains the same.

Here’s to the perspective that twenty years gives you, and to twenty more years of asking hard questions, helping readers see around corners, and working with people who make even the roughest days worth it.

To everyone who’s been part of this story — writers, editors, sources, readers, attendees, speakers, critics, and cheerleaders — thank you for making TechCrunch what it is, a place for people who want to understand what’s coming next, who firmly believe that tech can make the world better — and who trust us to call out when it doesn’t. Cheers.

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