As I mentioned previously, I interviewed Michael Arrington of TechCrunch last week as part of my ongoing series of recorded and podcast phone interviews. Michael really impressed me in the interview with his humour, his obvious intelligence and his humility.
This is definitely one of the most stimulating interviews I have recorded yet – despite stiff competition from Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and TJ McIntyre.
These are the questions I asked Michael and the times in the interview they were asked:
- Michael, for anyone who is not familiar with your name can you start off by telling the listeners who is Michael Arrington? What is it that you do? – 0:15
- How long has TechCrunch been running now? – 3:58
- I was interviewing Robert Scoble last week and he said he’d never heard of TechCrunch 6 months ago – now it is the first site he looks at every day – 4:09
- Feedburner reports Techcrunch has 15020 subscribers – to what do you attribute the success of techcrunch – 4:46?
- Since TechCrunch is a success you must be really busy, is it a full-time job? – 7:29
- You don’t have ads on the site – how do you fund it? – 9:32
- You have recently joined John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing – can you explain what that is and how do you see this changing TechCrunch? – 11:46
- How is it different from Google’s AdWords? – 12:54
- What’s the story with the BBQs? how did that tradition get started? – 13:13
- TechCrunch is part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup – What is the web 2.0 workgroup? – 15:50
- What is Web 2.0? Is it just another catchall buzzword like ‘interactive’ designed to grab the attention of vc’s? – 17:14
- What web 2.0 app(s) could you not live without? 19:56
- Ad supported sites seem to be becoming the norm – is everything headed that way? do you think we will one day see an online version of Office/Windows supported by ad revenue? – 21:27
- Are you a Mac or PC user? – 23:27
- What kind of world do you want your kids to grow up in? – 27:27
The full interview is 29 minutes and you can listen to the interview here (6.6mb mp3).
Terrific interview Tom. I haven’t heard any other interview with Mike previously so this was fascinating. Amazing to think that TechCrunch isn’t his full time job.
Jim,
yeah, that was a surprise to me as well – some people obviously fit 48 hours into their day!
Interesting allusion to the fact that the Irish PC vs Mac divide might run along the same faultlines of that other great national rivalry!
You should use google talk for your interviews, the audio quality is really that much better.
Pingback: Web2.0 Ireland » Blog Archive » Michael Arrington interview
Pingback: CrunchNotes » Talk with Tom Raftery
great stuff… PodTech deflowered him first
@Stefan, thanks for the suggestion – unfortunately there isn’t a Mac version of Google Talk and I am Mac based. However, I have experimenting with recording Skype calls and the quality does seem much better.
@John, no fair, you got to everyone first!
Pingback: PodLeaders - Thought Leaders podcast » Blog Archive » Michael Arrington podcast
Pingback: Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Here in Cork!
Pingback: small business marketing » Blog Archive » What It Takes To Become an A-List Blogger and Join ‘The Blogging Elite’
Tom
I am regular reader of Tech crunch and found this post from a comment in an old post. Arrington changed a lot from the day of this post and he is running Techcruch with a passion. It’s always a great experience to read the view of people in a few years ago.
Btw. I really like your blog and just subscribed to the feed. I’ll keep in touch.
@Joe Tech:
Shit man! Same case with me..