Erick Schonfeld
Erick Schonfeld is the co-founder of TouchCast, the executive producer of DEMO, and a technology journalist. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City.
Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog.
He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving media property. After founder Michael Arrington left in 2011, Schonfeld became Editor in Chief.
Prior to TechCrunch, he was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, where he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, The Next Net. He also launched an online video series with CNN/Money and hosted regular panels and conferences of industry luminaries.
Schonfeld started his career at Fortune magazine in 1993. In 1999, he won the prize for best information technology submission at London’s Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, Schonfeld was recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30.
He appears regularly on CNBC, CNN, and NY1, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.
Schonfeld graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993.
CrunchBase profile →Latest from Erick Schonfeld
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SocialFlow Opens The Floodgates
Brands love marketing across social media, but it is a little like TV advertising in that it is hard to measure how effective it is. Sure, you can count retweets, likes, and Klout scores, but how does that translate into real engagement with a brand or actual spending? SocialFlow is trying to answer these questions, and in the process is growing like crazy. “I don’t know who put… Read More
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Pedestrian Map App, Lumatic, Raises $800K From Joi Ito And 500 Startups
All the major map apps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapquest have walking directions as a standard feature, but the folks at Lumatic don’t think they are good enough. It is creating mobile maps designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transit. Originally a TechStars company called Omniar, serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery, Mashery) joined as CEO… Read More
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How Facebook Really Stacks Up Against Pre-IPO Google
Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was… Read More
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Sh#t VCs Say: “Have You Ever Tried Kiteboarding?”
Following in the tradition of “Shit Silicon Valley Says” and other Shit ______ Says memes, August Capital’s David Hornick has made “Shit VCs Say.” There are some gems in here, including: Read More
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Yammer Time: In 2011 “Pretty Much Everything Tripled”
Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: “Pretty much everything tripled.” Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. Also, all told, 200,000 companies are using Yammer… Read More
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You Know What’s Cool? $1 Billion In Profits
We learned a lot of things about Facebook today from its IPO filing. But there is one detail that sticks out for its improbable exactness: The $1.000 billion in profits Facebook reported for 2011. The number wasn’t $998 million. It wasn’t $1.003 billion. It was $1.000 billion right on the dot. Read More
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Facebook’s Profits: $1 Billion, On $3.7 Billion In Revenues
Facebook just filed its IPO registration (SEC doc here) and its financials are off the charts. Facebook’s IPO document provides the first peek at its financials. The company did $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, and $1 billion in profits. That’s right. Net income was $1 billion. Profits grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010. And revenues grew 88 percent. Read More
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The Birth Of An American Giant—Basic Clothing Sold On The Web
Nothing is made in this country anymore. In terms of actual manufacturing, America is increasingly at a disadvantage. The logic of the global economy moves jobs overseas. Get used to it, we are told. Well, Bayard Winthrop thinks the conventional wisdom is wrong. He wants to bring manufacturing back to America, in the apparel industry, no less! His clothing startup, American Giant (gotta love… Read More
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Ben Horowitz: “It Took About 3 Weeks” To Raise Our $1.5 Billion Fund
Andreessen Horowitz is definitely killing it these days. The unconventional VC firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz is less than three years old, but just raised its third fund. The amount raised: $1.5 billion. That puts Andreessen Horowitz in the rarified realm of only a handful of VC firms with funds of that size. And how long did it take to raise all that money? “It took… Read More
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Jason Kilar: Hulu’s 2011 Revenues Of $420 Million Was Actually Above The “Board Plan”
Last year, Hulu brought in $420 million in revenues, with was 60 percent above the year before. The news, however, was seen as a miss because Hulu earlier in the year suggested that it would make $500 million. Today at the D: Dive Into Media conference, CEO Jason Kilar defended his record, revealing that “our board plan was $408 million.” So Hulu came in above the internal goal it… Read More
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CardSpring Raises $10 Million To Connect Payments To The Web
We measure every last click when it comes to the Web, but there remains a gulf between online and the real world. Yet the online world increasingly drives behavior offline, especially when it comes to purchasing habits. How many times have you researched something online or on your mobile phone before buying it? Yet when you go to a store to buy it, everything you did online might as well… Read More
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TrialPay Raises $40 Million From Visa, Greylock, T.Rowe Price
Offers are a booming form of advertising in which consumers are presented with offers to try or buy products. It is particularly popular in social games where players receive virtual currency in return for looking at the offers. One of the leaders in this form of ecommerce advertising is TrialPay, which just raised $40 million from Greylock Partners, Visa, T. Rowe Price, DAG Ventures, DFJ… Read More
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Twitter’s Dick Costolo: “We’re Growing Faster Than We Have Ever Grown Before”
Does Twitter need Google or does Google need Twitter? It’s a question complicated by recent events, such as the two companies not coming to an agreement to extend their previous partnership through which Google showed Tweets in search results. That deal wasn’t renewed,and then Google decided to promote its own Google+ results in search, which didn’t go over well with Twitter… Read More
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Pre-IPO Filing, Facebook Trading Privately At $84 Billion Valuation
As everyone waits for Facebook to file for its IPO this week, one of the big questions is what will its valuation be. Will it hit the magic $100 billion? Well, we are not going to find out this week because IPOs don’t get priced unti right before the offering, which isn’t expected until April or May. And a lot can happen between now and then. (What will be filed is the preliminary… Read More
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LivingSocial CEO: Lumping Us With Groupon Is Like Lumping eBay With Amazon
The local commerce industry as represented by daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial is still barely learning to walk, even though Groupon has 10,000 employees and LivingSocial has 5,000. While the two companies look nearly identical today, don’t be surprised if they diverge. LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy reminded me in a conversation last week that “a lot of… Read More
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For Those Who Can’t Let Go Of The Past: The Techmeme Re-Underliner
Remember the old Techmeme of a week ago, before the new design took effect? Sure, the new design is easy on the eyes. But is it better? Personally, I’m already used to the new look, other than the sponsored posts stuck in your face in the new middle column (push those to the right, please, where ads belong). But some people just can’t let go of the past—people like Eric… Read More
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Apple’s Off-The-Charts iPhone And iPad Sales
Sometimes you have to see things to truly appreciate their magnitude. Apple’s latest quarter was so massive that MG had to write two posts about it: $46 billion in revenues, 37 million iPhones sold, 15 million iPads. The chart above, which comes from Francesco Schwarz, using data from Apple and Asymco (see a fully interactive version here), shows how unusual this quarter was for Apple. Read More
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LivingSocial Now At 5,000 Employees, Half The Size Of Groupon
A few days ago, at the DLD conference, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason revealed that his three-year-old daily deal company now has 10,000 employees, with about 70 percent overseas. What about LivingSocial, the No. 2 daily deal company? Tim O’Shaughnessy told me yesterday the company is now at 5,000 employees worldwide, with “just under half” in the U.S. Read More
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What Apple Should Do With Its $100 Billion In Cash: Buy Hollywood
“Kill Hollywood,” is the latest battle cry from Silicon Valley. If you are Paul Graham, that’s not a bad way to motivate young would-be founders to create new startups. But what if you are Apple, trading spots with Exxon on any given day for the most valuable company in the world, with nearly $100 billion of cash in the bank, looking for the next industry to overturn to… Read More
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Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC Raises $55 Million For Fund III
The micro-VCs are growing up. Case in point: Jeff Clavier, who started out as an angel investor backing Web 2.0 companies and then transitioned his portfolio into a more formal venture firm, SoftTech VC. Clavier just finished raising a total of $55 million for SoftTech’s third fund. SoftTech’s main focus is on three areas: mobile, next-generation e-commerce, and cloud-based services. Read More
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