Early Employees: TechCrunch

My friend Hunter Walk asked me a few questions about the early years of TechCrunch (I joined in early 2008, when we were still working out of TC founder Michael Arrington’s house).

Here’s an excerpt, you can find the full interview, with an introduction from Mike right here.

Q: When did you join TechCrunch and how did you originally get connected to the team?

A: I usually tell a sanitized version of this story, but what the hell.
It was March 2008, and I’d just graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in biology, a minor in ‘society and genetics’, and zero sense as to what I wanted to do with my life. My good friend Ed McManus (now cofounder of Yardsale) invited me to a party being thrown by an investor in honor of Scribd’s (the ‘YouTube for documents’) first birthday.

The party was unlike anything college had prepared me for — and the likes of which I haven’t seen since. Caviar and vodka shots. Sculptures made of seafood. A basement that had been overhauled to resemble a vintage gas station. Waiters who walked around with endless glasses of champagne, deftly swooping in as soon as one hit empty. I’d had a few — and sure, I sampled the vodka — but the single stair, running the full length between the living room and a hallway, really should not have been there. It was too easy to forget about. I’d have remembered if there were, say, *two* stairs. But the one slipped my mind.
I tripped. My champagne glass fell, and the explosion — louder than any that had come before it — echoed through the halls. I bolted. Down the hallway, straight out the front door. I don’t even remember running, honestly. I stood there in the driveway, trying to catch my breath and staring at the mob of catering trucks, with a vague sense that I was now a Silicon Valley pariah — which I could handle — and that Eddie was going to kill me, which I felt badly about.

Read the rest of the interview here.

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