designforweb.co.uk/blog

Yeah, I’m just, I need to be careful before I start y’know, spouting off opinions, but it’s nice because I also have a platform to say what I think, and I like doing that. But the biggest thing, I mean the stars here are the entrepreneurs, the ones who could go out and make a good living but decide to forego that, and ignore the risk to return ratio and do something that they love and they need to be the centre of attention as much as possible.

SD: It seems that from your background that your criteria would y’know, that you would, y’know, because you have a law background, you have a starting up tech [y’know and then?] from a lot of different levels of the industry, it seems that like when you’re analysing something and whatever may be the quick analysis of the moment there’s a lot of different datastreams that are going in.

MA: Yeah, I mean that without really thinking it through I look at a company from just a user perspective, do I love using it? I look at it from a business model perspective, um, working with VCs a lot and being one myself for a short period of time, I, think about return on investment for stockholders so you have to kind of factor all that in and I think my experience helps with that, but it really all just comes down to the fact that when I was a lawyer I represented companies, I represented Netscape when they were pretty young and got to know them and I was always more fascinated with their business model and the deals they were doing than with the legal work itself and so I think it was sort of inevitable that I would get to this point.

SD: Where do you see the future of TechCrunch?

MA: So, I think my readers want to read about things other than start-ups. They want to read about mobile applications, they want to read about gadgets. Of course they have other interests as well, but in the technology space, y’know, maybe video games is a big area for them and so I want to cover those areas but I don’t want to write about them, because those aren’t things that I love and I want to find people who do love them and have them write about them. So I have a mobile blog and a guy that loves mobile stuff. I have CrunchGear, which is a gadget blog. I want to expand into ten or fifteen blogs, covering different things and find people who love that stuff and have them write about it every day.

SD: With TechCruch you run an advertising/subscriber model…

MA: Yup, it’s free content of course, and we take advertisers and we’ve been experimenting with different formats for quite a while and we also have a job board where companies can post jobs that they have and that’s doing quite well also, so we’re going to continue to tweak the model and see what the best way to move forward is. Somebody in the audience asked about advertising and I do get feedback from readers that say that they don’t necessarily love the advertising and that maybe there’s too much of it and things like that so we need to tweak that and make sure we keep people happy.

SD: As long as it’s interesting advertising right?

MA: The funny thing is that I only take advertisers where I approve of their products, so we have turned people down. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do that, so I’ve turned companies down for products that we don’t approve of and so hopefully that helps a little bit.

SD: Do you see yourself expanding into the Chinese or Indian market in where, y’know, tech is going there - I mean, there’s outsourcing that’s happening there, particularly in India, but where their start-up environments will be happening over the next ten years.

MA: Yeah, absolutely. So I have a Japanese blog now, and a French blog, and I think China and India, probably India first because it’s largely English speaking, and that’s probably where I’ll go next. It would certainly be an English blog and focus not on translating TechCrunch because it’ll be in English but focusing on Indian startups, and that’s what I’ve done with TechCrunch UK, it’s focusing on UK start-ups so I think I’ll absolutely be doing that. It’s really just a matter of finding the right person, so it’s not like, “I’m going to launch India in two months”, it’s, “I’m going to launch India when I find the right person to partner with on it.”

SD: Do you have any opinion right now on the Indian start-up market?

MA: There’s a lot going on there. A company I’ve been following is ZoHo, they have a presence there but they also have I believe all of their development back in India. I think they’re attacking the US market, they’re going head on with Microsoft right now and it’s good to see that. When it comes to local Indian start-ups that only are in India, I don’t know of any, because I don’t follow the space, but I’ll tell you there’s some really smart and very educated people there and the fact that the cost of labour there is significantly less than the US means that you can have different kind of experiments than you could have here so I’m looking forward to doing that.

SD: How have you seen the success ratio for companies that have a majority of their programs outsourced over in some place like in India and having it as part of the integrated company, do you find that from what you’re tracking that’s a successful model?

MA: Mixed results. Generally speaking, if you have a long time relationship, you’re hiring there, full-time people for a long term, people are more likely to have a positive experience than hiring teams for short-term projects, is what I’ve seen. But totally mixed results.

SD: Just for our listeners, twenty years ago what did you envision yourself doing at this point in time, and how has your professional trajectory been, and do you have any salient points of advice that you would give?

MA: Twenty years ago I was sixteen years old and I don’t think I had a thought in my head about what I wanted to do for a career. I liked sports and debate at that point, but I’ll say that five years ago I could have never have guessed that I’d be a blogger and loving it, and proud of it, and moving from a very well-known law firm into doing this and being much happier doing this, so I think that the key thing is that we live in a world in the US where most people don’t have to worry about putting food on the table, so it’s not just a matter of going out and providing for your family for most of us, and we’re very lucky because of that, so we can do things that we love as opposed to things that we have to do and since you’re in that position the piece of advice that I gave in my [FOWA] presentation and that I give to people is do something that you really love, and don’t do something because you think you’re going to make more money doing it. If you do something you really, really love you’ll probably end up making more money anyway but you’ll certainly end up being happier.

SD: Are there any final little gems that you’d like to leave with us?

MA: No, although it’ll be fun to hear the presentation I gave on the podcast because when you’re up there speaking of course you don’t have any idea… so I’m looking forward to hearing that, and I appreciate your time. Thanks.

SD: Yours too. Thanks.