Benioff interview
Arrington and Benioff talk about Salesforce’s $100 million venture fund, wearables, Benioff’s commitment to improving education in San Francisco, why his name is on the city’s new children’s hospital, his approach to politics, and Apple’s product launches.
The company has invested well more than $100 million in startups…we do seed funding, Series A, B, C, D, we invest in this thing called the cloud, we do a lot of investments in mobile, social, connected devices, we have a great group…and their returns are pretty incredible.
He says the company is very interested in founders that build on its platforms, and will take them to its customers and bring them to its shows.
Uber interview
Arrington and Kalanick talk onstage at Disrupt San Francisco about Uber’s scrappy reputation, global growth, and Plouffe’s role as campaign manager. Arrington:
A guy like you shouldn’t even have a car.
Kalanick:
I haven’t driven in a while.
Whisper, Sequoia interview
Arrington talks with Whisper co-founder Heyward and Botha from Sequoia Capital about Whisper’s business model and impact, whether celebrity gossip counts as whistleblowing, and whether CrunchBase should be spun off from AOL. Heyward:
Whisper is all about creating a place of authenticity and a place of openness
Silicon Valley interview
Arrington talks onstage at Disrupt NY with the show’s creators, Judge and Berg, and cast members Middleditch and Miller about parody, real Silicon Valley cameos, and research for the show. Miller:
I think I saw Peter Dinklage, but it was just Tom walking around on his knees
Fred Wilson interview
Arrington interviews Union Square Ventures’s Wilson at Disrupt NY about Google’s potential for evil, uses for blockchain protocols, and the New York startup landscape. Wilson says that in 2020, the top three internet companies will be:
Google, Facebook, and one that we’ve never heard of
Arrington:
Why’s Apple gone?
Wilson
They’re too rooted to hardware…and they don’t have anything in the cloud to speak of
Hacker News may be worth $500 million
Altman says in an interview with Arrington that Hacker News could be worth $500 million if sold, but he says that it is worth more to Y Combinator than to anyone who would potentially want to buy it. He adds:
Intermediate valuations are completely made up and silly.
Zuckerberg interview
Arrington interviews Zuckerberg at TechCrunch 40:
If you take all the people in the world and all their friends, that’s the social graph…What we try to do at Facebook is model that
Arrington:
You’re trying to mirror the real world?
Zuckerberg:
Exactly.
Interview about NSA
Arrington and Conway discuss the NSA at Disrupt 2013. Arrington talks about issues like seizing encrypted data and hacking phones:
We see what is happening with the NSA, the NSA is strong-arming these companies that are part of our ecosystem…why have you sat by for six months and not done a thing to stop this?
Conway:
I absolutely agree that we have to balance national security, there was this thing called 9/11, the government’s responsibility is to protect… You have to balance that with responsibility… Obviously the events of the last 60 days with the NSAs says that there has to be a balance between national security and transparency.
He says there is a healthy debate and he is focusing on other issues – civic engagement, gun control, and immigration reform:
I’m probably not going to be the tech leader who heads that…right now immigration reform to me is probably more important
Benioff interview
Arrington and Salesforce CEO Benioff talk about the influence of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Salesforce’s financials, and how the cloud and social segments are supporting the enterprise software industry. Benioff:
Salesforce.com just had an incredible quarter with 30% growth, in not just the top line but in great numbers on cash flow. To see a company that is going to do more than $4 billion in revenue this year and is still growing at 30% is something in our industry that hasn’t been seen in a long time
Kutcher, Oseary interview
Kutcher and OSeary talk about A-Grade, and confirm that the fund has raised money at a $100 million valuation. Kutcher:
Yeah, that’s true.
On the amount raised:
Enough.
Kutcher says they are bundling existing investments and formalizing them in the fund, and are heavily focused on social products like Airbnb and services-based companies like Zaarly.
Kutcher tells Arrington: ‘Fuck off’
Arrington and Kutcher exchange banter onstage at Disrupt NY. Arrington:
I’ve never gotten to interview you without getting told to f-ck off
Kutcher:
You always say something that deserves a good ‘Fuck off’ early on
Arrington:
My favorite movie that you’ve been in … Dude Where’s My Car was funny
Kutcher:
Fuck off
Disrupt 2013 interview
Arrington interviews Conway, Lee, and Pokorny about where the innovations are in tech.
Lee:
I would actually say in the last 12-18 months ideas are bigger, bolder, more ambitious…
Those include things like drone companies, and scientific research.
Conway:
We just in the last six months have [identified] two new target sectors to invest…education and the internet of things
He says the company is looking at ‘hardware devices communicating constantly with the web’, and says SV Angel is ‘defining’ the new sector of health informatics.
Lee:
The basic idea is if you think about the explosion of genomic medical information, all the medical data that is now being digitized…I think there’s now a chance to turn biology itself into a [tech sector]
Pokorny:
I’m still bullish on consumer innovation
Fred Wilson interview
Arrington and Wilson talk about Kevin Durant, Jim Cramer, and how and how not to pitch a startup. Arrington:
If other venture capitalists are sheep, what animal are you?
Wilson:
I may be a sheep too…We like to think we get out in front of trends but a lot of people in the venture business don’t, they sit back and wait for what becomes obvious and they jump on it.
He adds:
When people laugh at the company and say that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, that’s a good sign…people who are sheep in the business aren’t going to make a lot of money.
Tim Armstrong interview
Arrington interviews AOL CEO Armstrong at Disrupt SF:
You have tripled the stock price of AOL when everyone, me included, was calling this company dead a year ago. How did you do it?
Armstrong:
We basically had a three-pronged approach, one was operationally, you’ve seen us do a lot better, improve and beat expectations the last four quarters in a row, the second thing is really focus on products…the traditional AOL businesses as well as the new businesses [like Disrupt], the third thing was on the financial engineering side, we did a patent transaction, we bought back a significant amount of companies, we did a huge buyback last summer.
He says the company is focusing on consumers, advertisers, publishers, and subscribers, and making sure investors get a high return.
Zuckerberg interview
Arrington talks with Zuckerberg at Disrupt 2012 in his first interview after the Facebook IPO announcement. They discuss the stock price, ads, Facebook phone, and the mobile version vs the website. Arrington:
The stock has lost roughly half its value…if you could’ve done anything differently with hindsight?
Zuckerberg:
The performance of the stock has obviously been disappointing…We’re going to execute this mission where we’re going to make the world more open and connected
Kelman interview
Arrington is interviewed by the Redfin CEO for Starter Day. He talks about how TechCrunch got started:
I had no money, and somebody wanted to start a company with me…I started doing all this really formal research and I realized, I’m doing all this research, why not just post it on the internet?
Disrupt NY interview
Arrington interviews Conway and Lee at the event. Conway says he is an executive investor in SV Angel and Lee is managing the fund.
But I have a huge vested interest…I get to come in and help entrepreneurs, I get to do what I enjoy
Lee responds to Arrington’s question over rumors the fund is looking to raise $400 million, saying it is looking at investment, but declines to give details:
We are exploring all options
Tech Crunch interview
Conway talks with Arrington at the Tech Crunch office to talk about trends in the tech industry.
There’s two big trends that we see that are going to become billion dollar industries, one of them is real-time data which would be Twitter and what we call the real-time ecosystem, which is really any company that employs crowd-sourcing or collective wisdom to create this new corpus of real-time data on the web, which is the most valuable data on the web.
He says Foursquare and Quora are also examples of real-time data, and clarifies SV Angel isn’t invested in Quora. Growth in Facebook and Twitter alone is enough to confirm a second trend:
The other mega-trend is that the web is becoming more social…the phenomenon is that consumers are willing to share more about themselves…this phenomenon is growing to create huge commerce opportunities on the web
Conrad interview
Arrington talks with About.me co-founder and CEO Conrad about the product. Arrington:
It’s a simple product on the front…but something about it is compelling
Conrad:
Because it is very simple
He explains that part of the product’s success was because it avoided evolving, as MySpace did by becoming a music sharing site and Facebook did by becoming a photo-sharing platform.
Startups Uncensored interview
Arrington chats with DocStoc founder Nazar about TechCrunch, his personal life, and mistakes he’s made.
When I worked for other people I always knew I wanted to start my own company.
