Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry.
After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in order to continue her career in new media, first as LA Weekly’s Internet culture reporter, and then as SF Weekly’s web editor. Before she joined TechCrunch, Alexia ran the SFweekly.com website while staying on top of memes, the tech scene, and human behavior in the digital age.
At TechCrunch, Tsotsis covers early stage startups, and has had the opportunity to interview everyone from Groupon’s Andrew Mason to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Most recently Tsotsis made the Forbes “30 Under 30: Rising Stars of Media List.” Her Twitter bio reads, “Breaks news, hearts.”
I own Aol stock, diversified investments via ETFs and Mutual Funds, and shares in Facebook. I’m also in a relationship with a VC at General Catalyst Partners. Whenever there is the potential for real or percieved conflict in what I write about, I promise to bring it up, and link back here.
As the Tumblr/Yahoo deal continues to be negotiated by press, and the world gears up for whatever is being announced Monday morning, Tumblr founder David Karp is probably having a very interesting weekend. It’s likely, in between multiple discussions with his board members and Marissa Mayer, that he’ll take a break, like a walk or something, to gather his thoughts. → Read More
Any programmer or blogger knows that when you work on the Internet, on a computer, it’s easy to gain weight. Tech office pantries are stocked with Red Bull, candy, chips and even things you wouldn’t think were too unhealthy, like protein bars. Protein bars are basically injections of sugar. That’s why they taste like a Snickers.
But what no one talks about is that the “Startup 15″ or 40 is… → Read More
The first rule of being cool is not telling people you want to be cool. Yahoo is not following this rule, with its M&A team in full pray-and-spray acquisition mode post-Marissa Mayer hire, hitting on everything that walks, or at least has traction.
Deals I have heard rumors Yahoo was trying to get into over the past couple of months: Foursquare (at an $800 million asking price). Path (at a… → Read More
As one is wont to do, I was checking the French iOS app store rankings this a.m. just to make sure that my old mainstay app “ameli, l’Assurance Maladie” was still in spot No. 3 when sacrebleu! – Path was the No. 1 free app in France.
Now I’ve never really clicked with Path, rarely checked in with people there (it’s super awkward to name drop digitally) and have too much FOMO to stomach… → Read More
My parents have yet to receive their Christmas gift. Because they are avid skiers, I bought them gift cards to Heavenly Mountain last December, and because of some issue with either the ZIP code or security code on my credit card, my charge keeps getting rejected. I have tried five different cards.
I have called AmEx. I’m about to call Chase since I just got a new card, and sit there and go… → Read More
Startups of a feather flock together. Wefollow, a company that was spun out of Digg, has been acquired by About.me, a company that was spun out of Aol. And get this, there’s more: Lead About.me investor Kevin Rose was also a co-founder of Wefollow, and About.me co-founder Tony Conrad was the lead investor in Kevin Rose’s Milk which sold to Google and eventually staffed up Google Ventures. No… → Read More
Serial entrepreneur Evan Williams spoke onstage at Wired’s Business Conference, about going from Pyra Labs to Blogger to Obvious to Odeo to Obvious to Twitter to Obvious to Medium. Whew! “Turns out I’m bad at parallel entrepreneurialism,” Williams laughed, joking about why he just can’t stop focusing when a particular startup takes off within one of his many umbrella companies. → Read More
If anything on the Internet is like a mall right now, it’s social shopping site Wanelo. Call it the Pinterest for products or the Twitter for products or the whatever for products, the platform is starting to leave “X for X” territory and become its own thing like Madonna or Beyoncé. Search Twitter for Wanelo and you get stuff like this. → Read More
My old boss used to say that a story is something you’d tell someone in a bar or at lunch, so I’m going to tell you guys the tale I’ve been telling people at bars and lunches. Yesterday, Aol Ventures head Mike Brown announced through Dan Primack that he’d be leaving Aol to start his own VC firm, Bowery Capital. → Read More
The rise of the company builders is right. As Leena wrote in her spot-on post, “Operators are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC to instead create a studio-like holding operation.” The latest in a series of accomplished entrepreneurs wanting to lend their expertise to a new generation of companies? Serial entrepreneur Garrett Camp, who has set up the holding company Expa to… → Read More
More than 2,000 people have filled up the historic Manhattan Center with our biggest hackathon and Startup Alley yet, and a set of incisive discussions with tech leaders. Now it’s time for the battlefield finals, and we have our seven finalists picked out.
But first, tomorrow will feature Ashton Kutcher, Joe Lonsdale, a big panel on transportation, an interview with hardware startup leader… → Read More
Ch – ch – ch- changes! The six-year-old media startup Tumblr is going through quite a few right now, namely focusing on profitability versus growth in its product efforts — enabling a promoted post feature in addition to just recently launching mobile ads. The company is looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg-type” COO, amidst a series of executive departures and layoffs. → Read More
We’re happy to have Allen & Company Managing Director Nancy Peretsman and Kleiner Perkins’ Chi-Hua Chien lend their judging expertise to our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition. One of the most powerful women in New York business, Peretsman worked on Google’s IPO and the Aol Time Warner spin-off, among other things. And from the West Coast, rising star Chien has already worked at two… → Read More
We’ve just gotten word that Facebook’s Director of Engineering for Ads, John Hegeman, will be moving to Quora to lead the Quora engineering team. While I haven’t received direct confirmation from either Quora or Hegeman on the hire, Hegeman has apparently confirmed the move on his (private) Facebook Timeline according to a tipster, writing: → Read More
Only three days left to scoop up TechCrunch Disrupt NY tickets! You can get them here. And view our amazing speaker lineup here.
Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley has had a helluva April. The company just closed a $41 million debt round from Silver Lake Partners and Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech and Union Square Ventures, and released a re-vamped iOS app. Yahoo M&A… → Read More
There’s a sign at the back entrance to the TechCrunch San Francisco office that reads, “I’m not delusional, I’m an entrepreneur.” That sign has kept me (relatively) sane for almost three years now, as TechCrunch expanded and contracted and expanded and took me a long with it.
The cartoon on the sign was drawn by artist Hugh MacLeod, who’s been illustrating the TechCrunch summer party poster for… → Read More
Google has finally closed the deal on Wavii, a natural language processing startup, for a price that is more than $30 million, we’re hearing from a legitimate source.
Both Apple and Google were competing for the Seattle-based startup, and Google eventually won. Apple wanted the company, which developed its own aggregation technology and natural summarization algorithms, for its Siri division. → Read More
We’re hearing from multiple sources that design-focused retail site Fab is raising a new round of funding at a $1 billion valuation. The company has previously raised $171 million in funding and we’re hearing it seeks to raise more than $100 million in this round. At Fab’s last round of financing, the company was worth around $600 million.
Twelve million users strong, Fab is continuing to grow… → Read More
Everyone has their moments of insanity. The Internet has made that painfully obvious, as our moments of abstracted, often context-less, craziness are haphazardly posted and then, in some cases, amplified for all to see. Because of this dynamic, we’re also given endless opportunities to deconstruct the way in which someone else has come unhinged. To wit: The first thing we do in a national… → Read More
Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning and documentarian Alex Winter will be at TechCrunch Disrupt NY next week, joining our truly badass lineup to talk about their upcoming Napster documentary DOWNLOADED. <ad>Buy Disrupt tickets here!</ad> → Read More
The TechCrunch SF staff normally goes to your parties, but tonight you can come to ours. And this one has a mission beyond drinking and tech talk — we’ll be donating the proceeds to a nonprofit, like we’ve done in the past, this time to Teach for America. → Read More
Online commerce is splitting into haves and have-nots as software eats up not just the world, but the mall. For every meteoric success story like Warby Parker’s or even Zulily’s, you have the bumpier narratives of Shoedazzle or Gilt, or the quiet defeat of hundreds of subscription commerce startups you’ve never even heard of. → Read More
Thank you readers, you helped us kick Path to the curb in our Teach For America challenge. Muahahahahahaha. Now let’s see if we can get to that number one slot. Fear our TechCrunch power, Jessica Lessin.
To sweeten the deal we’re offering free Disrupt tickets for the first ten people who donate $500 and over to the cause. In case you missed it, we’re having a SF TechCrunch Meetup to benefit… → Read More
Some of us in tech are self-taught geniuses who never needed school — but that’s mostly not the case, and you know it. Great teachers in math, science, reading and other core areas have helped this generation of tech leaders get the skills they needed to succeed, and those teachers are busy training the next generation right now.
Now, help them. Here, we’ll make it easy for you: We’ve put… → Read More
We’re very pleased to announce that Dwight Merriman, the co-founder and former CTO of DoubleClick and now the co-founder of hot New York startup 10gen, will be joining us onstage at Disrupt NY this month. He’s been at the forefront of Internet advertising and engineering for the past two decades and is an icon of New York startups. → Read More
Mailbox launched to much fanfare earlier this year. Heralded as “the best email management app you’ll ever use“, iOS users virtually lined up to try the app. It was a hit. So much so that Dropbox quickly scooped up the team led by CEO and co-founder Gentry Underwood. And now, at the end of April, Underwood will be onstage with us at Disrupt New York. → Read More
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