J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news.
Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a number of startups, venture funds and investment banks. He also co-authored a book on initial public offerings.
In 1999, he left WSGR to join RealNames as VP of Business Development and General Counsel. In 2000, he cofounded Achex, an online payments company, that was later acquired by First Data Corp for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online.
Arrington worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner-backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including Verisign.
In May 2008, Time Magazine named Michael Arrington as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Two big pieces of news today in the Zynga/Vostu lawsuit (details on lawsuit here and here). In addition to that first lawsuit filed in California, Zynga also quietly sued Vostu on its home turf in Brazil (lawsuit embedded below, but it’s in Portugese).
Zynga dragged Google into that lawsuit, apparently because Orkut, popular in Brazil, is hosting the Vostu games that Zynga says are ripoffs. Google, which is a Zynga shareholder, must be thrilled.
…And a judge in Brazil has sided with Zynga for now and has granted a preliminary injunction against Vostu. Vostu And Orkut must remove four games – MegaCity, Café Mania, Pet Mania and Vostu Poker – within 48 hours, or pay a daily fine of R20,000 (about $13,000). Zynga’s press statement: → Read More
Have you heard about ZocDoc? The company launched at TechCrunch in 2007. Their goal – to let people find and book appointments with doctors, dentists and other health professionals online.
The company has raised $50 million in a new round with DST. The company was valued at $700 million or more in this round, we’ve heard from various sources. ZocDoc won’t comment, though, on valuation.
They started off with just a few dentists and 5,000 appointment slots. It took them two years to get to a million available appointments. They now have 5 million over the next 90 days, up from 3 million in February. They’ve also more than doubled the number of employees in the last six months, to 150. → Read More
Whaleshark Media had already raised $120 million in capital to roll up the online coupon space. Now they’ve raised $10 million more in a round led by Google Ventures, with some participation from previous investors. They’ve also added Homeaway CEO Brian Sharples to the board of directors.
Sharples will be useful. He grew HomeAway into a monster. He raised half a billion dollars from Austin Ventures (which also backs Whalesharl) and others and took HomeAway public. Like HomeAway, Whaleshark is growing via lots of acquisitions. It’s the same model applied to a different market.
Whaleshark is broadly competitive with daily deal sites like Groupon, or at least has a similar business model. Google Venture’s investment isn’t surprising given how focused Google has been on this space over the last year. → Read More
It’s never too late to fix bad press with a straightforward, unconditional apology. That’s what the world got from Airbnb today. It was the first time that the company addressed the robbery/ransacking issue on its blog, and CEO Brian Chesky offered an unconditional apology. From the post: → Read More
Earlier this year SV Angel and Yuri Milner partnered on a new venture fund, called Start Fund, to invest $150,000 in every new Y Combinator startup. All but one company from that class took the money. And LikeALittle, the holdout, had already taken funding from both Milner and SV Angel.
At TechCrunch Disrupt in New York a couple of months ago SV Angel said they were making the same offer to the most recent batch of Y Combinator startups.
The terms are the same – $150,000 in convertible debt with no cap and no discount on conversion. If you don’t speak venture capitalist, here’s what that means – other than gifting someone money, this is the most favorable a startup can raise money. It’s very easy to say yes to this.
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This last week we’ve all watched in horror as the story unfolded about an Airbnb user who had her home ransacked a month ago.
Other than the sideshow of us getting dragged into the story, it seemed to be winding down yesterday. The company appears to be bending over backwards to compensate the victim and avoid another of her blog posts where she writes about how scared she is, still homeless and shaken after the ordeal.
Now another victim has come forward. → Read More
After 3.5 years, I’ve finally re-joined the community of car owners.
Between February 2008 and last week, I was car-less. I borrowed and rented cars, took taxis and Zip cars, and occasionally biked. I also bummed a lot of rides (thank you very much – you know who you are). It had started when the warranty on my fancy German gas guzzler expired; I sold the thing, and never really found the time to shop around for a replacement – Who Has Time For This?
I felt a lot more excited about the prospect of driving an electric sedan, which should be greener, potentially faster, simpler to operate, and cheaper to fuel. Most importantly, I’d never have to kill ten minutes stopping for gas – Who Has Time For This? → Read More
You’ve doubtless heard about the Airbnb fiasco – being dubbed #ransackgate by some – that’s been exploding the last couple of days. If you’re not familiar with the story, we first covered it here, and there’s some terrific source material from the woman who’s home was ransacked and robbed here and here.
Today Y Combinator founder (and Airbnb investor) Paul Graham wrote this: → Read More
Yesterday we wrote about “EJ,” a woman who had her San Francisco apartment burglarized and vandalized by someone who rented her home for a week via Airbnb.
There was some confusion about how Airbnb was and is dealing with the situation. See the updates to that post above, and CEO Brian Chesky’s post here on TechCrunch later yesterday talking about the situation.
The event happened, which is a terrible blow to the company’s reputation. The confusion seems to be around whether or not Airbnb will compensate her for her losses. The company at first said no, then said yes, and clarified that they made the offer last month when it happened, not in response to the PR storm yesterday. → Read More
Until now everything has been just great for Airbnb, a service that lets people rent out their homes and become a sort of mini-hotel. The company launched in 2008 and has grown rapidly. They’ve been cloned by the Germans, which is always a mark of success. And they’re now a part of the billion dollar valuation club. Even the clone raised $90 million.
Which is all super great. But now the story of a trusting Airbnb user who’s had her home sacked (it’s the only way to describe it) is starting to spread. Airbnb’s response so far has been tepid at best. It turns out that when something like this happens, Airbnb isn’t financially responsible.
The facts: Last month “EJ” wrote a long blog post about how a renter spent an entire week carefully robbing and trashing her home. Walls were cut through to get to locked valuables, including her grandmother’s jewelry. → Read More
If that headline looks familiar to you, you’re probably remembering our story about Google offering to buy Path for $100+ million from earlier this year. Path turned that deal down.
About the same time, multiple sources have confirmed, Google was also making a run for Color, the mobile social network founded by Bill Nguyen. This was well before Color launched, and Google was looking at the company’s potential as well as the team. Google offered $200 million for the company, according to our sources.
→ Read More
Zynga hit Brazilian gaming startup Vostu with a massive lawsuit last month, alleging that the company was copying Zynga’s games so closely that they even inadvertently included the bugs. Today, Vostu responded with a 368 paragraph document of their own (embedded below). It’s a longer version of Vostu’s press statement immediately after the lawsuit was filed, which boils down to “I Know You Are But What Am I.”
Vostu’s defense also includes numerous illustrations of how Zynga has copied other games repeatedly over the years. One example – Zynga showed how closely Vostu copied Cityville (see top image here). Vostu includes an image in their response showing how similar Cityville looks to three previous games not published by Zynga:
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Game development startup Unity Technologies, founded in Copenhagen and currently headquartered in Silicon Valley, has raised a second round of financing – $12 million from Asian firms WestSummit Capital in China and iGlobe Partners in Singapore. Previous investor Sequoia Capital has also participated in the round, and Raymond Yang from WestSummit has joined the company’s board of directors.
We continue to hear nothing but great things about Unity. Game developers love it – there are some 500,000 registered seats on Unity, and 150,000 of them are active monthly. Hit games like Bigpoint’s Battlestar Galactica and Gazillion’s Marvel Super Hero Squad were built on Unity. And EA inked a wide ranging deal with Unity last year to get Unity tools in front of EA developers. → Read More
Gogobot is a truly special startup. Beautifully designed and very useful are two things that are rarely found together, but Gogobot has both.
We first covered them last year. But they didn’t unveil the product – a place to create and consume reviews and photos from real people about places they’ve traveled to – until November 2010. → Read More
Santa Barbara and New York based FindTheBest has nearly doubled in size since February, so it’s no wonder Kleiner Perkins is putting another bet down on the company. They invested $2 million last December. And now they’ve invested $4 million more.
I’ve been a fan of the company since I first heard about it. It’s a very useful comparison engine for large data sets (see ski resorts or nutritional supplements or colleges, for example). → Read More
There’s a nasty, and very personal, lawsuit in progress between Radar Networks and a jilted investor, Kate Paley (daughter of CBS icon William Paley). The defendants include founder Nova Spivack, the company that eventually acquired Radar Networks (Evri) as well as investors Steve Hall, Ross Levinsohn and Baris Kardogan.
The company, known by most through it’s product Twine, was once doing quite well from an outsider’s perspective, but the reality, according to the lawsuit, is that the company was scrambling for ways to stay in business by 2008. The way that the company raised new money, and the details around its eventual sale to Evri, are a warning to any startup – sometimes it’s better to just shut down a failed company and move on. → Read More
Ad.ly is an advertising platform that pairs advertisers with celebrities. For $1,000 to $200,000, an advertiser can get one of a thousand celebrities to publish a sponsored message, usually on Twitter. The company has raised $5.5 million, has sixteen employees, and has sold 26,000 paid endorsements in the last year and a half.
The company occasionally pops up in the news. They were banned from Facebook, for example, and they were right in the middle of the whole Charlie Sheen is now on Twitter thing.
But for the most part, Ad.ly has been quietly operating out of their Beverly Hills headquarters without a ton of notice in the tech press circles. But suddenly there’s a lot of interest in them. And multiple sources have told us that a handful of companies are looking to buy Ad.ly. → Read More
A couple of weeks ago we wrote about Evernote’s new rumored venture round. It was a big one, said one source, putting them in the billion dollar valuation club.
Today they’ll officially announce that deal – $50 million in new funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures. And while they didn’t quite get that billion dollar valuation people were whispering about, the company is still doing quite nicely, thank you. → Read More
Badgeville founder and CEO Kris Duggan is one of those people that is so ridiculously upbeat and positive all the time that sometimes you just want to strangle him. No one has a right to be that happy.
He was smiling and happy when I met him at the Fortune Brainstorm conference a year ago and he showed me Badgeville for the first time. He was happy on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francsico last September while launching his company and taking the audience choice award.
And now he’s a whole new level of happy because he just closed a second round of financing – $12 million from Norwest Venture Partners and El Dorado Ventures, with participation from previous investors Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
