Nobody is more obsessed with the doings of Silicon Valley than Michael Arrington, whose 2½-year-old website, TechCrunch.com, has become an international clearinghouse for gossip, rumor, and inside information about the internet business.

Arrington, 37, who left a lucrative career as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer to become a cyberspace entrepreneur, runs TechCrunch from his rented house in Atherton, California, presiding over a tiny staff of bloggers and reporters who regularly reveal the secrets of life and death in an industry that produced Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and thousands of other startups that you've never heard of, because they crashed and burned into oblivion and lost billions of dollars for adrenaline-seeking venture capitalists.

"I look at entrepreneurs as, in a sense, modern-day pirates," Arrington told Portfolio.com this week in an exclusive interview.

The outspoken Arrington also gave his views on Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo, Barry Diller's recent troubles, and how he has managed to generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue for himself and his partners by never taking a vacation.

Lloyd Grove: You must keep crazy hours. I see that you're posting stuff all the time in the wee hours, aren't you?
 
Michael Arrington: Yeah, I try to get on normal hours and it just never seems to work.
 
L.G.: Really? Tell me what the rhythm of your day is like.
 
M.A.: Just a lot of news breaks at 9 at night and 11, 12, and so I'm usually up and kind of just try to wind down after that, and it's hard. Then I end up writing a couple more posts and suddenly it's 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock in the morning. But even when I don't have to write, I have some trouble falling asleep. It's not a healthy lifestyle.

L.G.: One of the things that sort of charmed me was that at some point when you were practicing as an attorney, you were so nervous about meeting Steve Jobs that you spilled coffee all over yourself. What was going on there? Are you starstruck?

M.A.: I was a very junior associate, I was a second- or third-year practicing attorney and I was working on a deal when Apple bought Next and brought Steve Jobs back into Apple, and the deal itself was crazy. It's just like one day, the partner said it's happening, let's do it. And usually we have a little prep time, but we didn't. We just started working, and we actually didn't even leave the law firm for six days. We showered there, we went home and grabbed some quick clothes and came back, and I actually got pneumonia because I hadn't slept and people were sick. But they got the deal done. It was nuts, and then a few weeks later when everything was closing, a partner, needed to get everything signed by Steve, who lives in Palo Alto, and I lived there at the time, and he brought me along with all the documents. And I was able to meet him, and shook his hand and all that. I was nervous and didn't say much, but he was very nice. I mean at that point it's just that I was a 26-year-old attorney and he was Steve Jobs! Then the closing happened probably a couple months later, and I remember I was at Apple with another associate, and we just had all the documents laid out and the other attorneys were coming in, and the general counsel of Apple was coming in, and Steve was going to come in and sign a couple of last things. And laying everything out, I had gotten a Styrofoam cup of coffee and I was just so nervous about the deal going right and Steve coming in and the general counsel coming in, my hands started shaking. And it literally just shook the coffee all over my shirt. It was hilarious. It was luckily near a shopping mall. I had a dark suit on so it didn't affect my pants. I drove to the mall, bought a new shirt, lost the tie, put it on and went back to the closing, and I actually got there before anyone else got there.

L.G.: You had lunch with Bill Gates as well, more recently.
 
M.A.: Yeah, in '06, I had lunch with Bill Gates, it was a surprise, that was fun.... There were only five or six of us. I got a chance to hang out with him a little bit beforehand.

L.G.: Now that you're older and wiser and have a reputation of your own in this world, do you approach these folks more as an equal?

M.A.: No, no. I look at entrepreneurs as, in a sense, modern-day pirates. They tend to be bright individuals, although sometimes they're uneducated and they become stars based purely on will and intelligence. But they tend to walk away from high-paying jobs that help them support their family and they're not in a position where there's a lot of risk. And something drives them to walk away from that to start a company, just to see if they can. They're so passionate about the idea, they just have to see if they can do it. But they actually do something that economists would call insane, which is that they attach utility to risk instead of the other way around. So the more risk that's there, the better. And pirates used to do that. I really think entrepreneurs are a little bit crazy and really cool, but they also drive the economy. If you look at the economy, particularly in Silicon Valley, how much of it is driven by startups that were once just an idea of a person or two, you know, it's pretty awesome. And if you look at the Googles and the Yahoos and the Microsofts and the Oracles—I could list 200 other companies—and how many people they employ and how their products are so much more productive, that's pretty awesome too. No, I'm still in awe of the entrepreneur. And it's not just the Bill Gateses and the Steve Jobses. Last night I was at a small dinner party, and I met an entrepreneur who moved here from Philadelphia recently. He's doing a small startup, he hasn't raised money yet, but it seems to be doing well. And I talked to him for, I don't know, 45 minutes to an hour, just wanted to hear everything about his life, why he did it and why he left the consulting firm that he was at, and what he wants to do. To me it's just fascinating.
L.G.: There's been some suggestion in recent weeks that, with the recession looming, allegedly, people in Silicon Valley are getting a little cautious and perhaps even nervous, and people are tightening their belts and hunkering down. Do you get any sense of that?

M.A.: There's definitely a sense that maybe the economy is turning. The key there, though, is to watch venture capital and how it's flowing, and what we're tracking right now is almost $1.3 billion in new V.C. dollars just in February. That's way up from January and up from December, and more than November. So V.C.'s are sort of still spending as far as I can tell, and as long as that keeps going, generally speaking, things stay good.... If we're in a recession...people might be cutting back a little bit on spending. But we're not there yet. Now if it does happen, though, having a recession every few years isn't necessarily bad. It tends to separate the wheat from the chaff, and it gets rid of all the startups that aren't going to make it, and lets those who leave go on to other things and be more productive.

L.G.: It's a pretty savage Darwinian environment out there, isn't it?
 
M.A.: Absolutely, except we live in a world where you're not being eaten by a lion when you fail, you just have to go get another job. It is Darwinian in a sense. This is a whole other subject, but people sometimes say that I'm a kingmaker, if I write about a startup positively, but that's not really true. I have called companies successful, I said this is going to be a winner, and they fail dismally. And the other way around: I say I don't like this startup and they do very well-it happens all the time. So I really just sort of ride a wave and try to say what's going on, but I really have very little impact on whether a startup is successful or not.

L.G.: But what you do have, it seems, is a lot of sources which you work relentlessly, and people seem attracted to TechCrunch because you and the reporters you've hired seem to be on the cutting edge of what is going on behind the scenes in the industry.
 
M.A.: We definitely know sources are important, and I cultivate them, and I do hammer them constantly.
 
L.G.: You have been all over Yahoo-Microsoft, or Fox Interactive-Yahoo, or whatever's going on there. What's the state of play? As we speak, what's going on there, Mike?
 
M.A.: There's a whole lot going on, and it's interesting. This merger, probably more than any one merger in the past, is being waged through the press, because they were such a big part of it in the beginning. Both sides are leaking things to the press, both sides are trying to manipulate the press to their advantage. Sometimes it's hard to tell a real leak from a fake leak, or just one that's being manipulative. But as far as I can tell, Microsoft still wants Yahoo; they want them bad. But they're not willing to just start increasing their offer to get there. They think that they can get there by playing hardball, and from what I can tell, Yahoo and the board will do almost anything, short of being sued or going to jail, to stop that deal.

L.G.: And you were just at Yahoo on Friday, right?
 
M.A.: Yeah, how'd you know that?
 
L.G.: Well, I could say that I have scary inside information, but I have to just admit that you told me you were on your way to Yahoo for a meeting.
 
M.A.: Yeah, I was there. I was just being pre-briefed on a couple products and launches.
 
L.G.: I see. To what extent do you think you're being used in this whole thing, since obviously a lot of people, including in the mainstream media, follow your website to figure out what's going on?
 
M.A.: Last night, for instance, I reported on a slightly different thing. I reported that News Corp. might be unhappy with their $900 million advertising deal with Google.  And they might be negotiating with Microsoft. Now I know that they are talking to Microsoft. I don't know if that's been in-person meetings or just a couple of phone calls saying, "We should talk." I don't know how deep they've gone, but I know it's happened, and I know that the leak originated at Fox, and it makes a lot of sense for them to just make sure that Google knows that they're wanting to go to another partner. Now, today, they're officially saying that's untrue and categorically denying it. So, clearly, they wanted the story to run because they wanted to make sure that Google knows that there are alternatives out there, but they certainly don't want to go beyond that. It happens all the time.

L.G.: How would you describe the philosophy of what you're doing here?
 
M.A.: What I like to do is post information far earlier than most journalists would post it. I think most journalists would maybe get a tip on something and then start digging, talking to all their contacts. Most of the tips I get are the kinds of tips that just aren't going to be confirmed by anyone. I might get somebody to say it's inaccurate, but when I start calling my other sources, they're just either going to not know, or if they're on the record for the company, they're just not going to talk to me. With things like the Google-Fox-Microsoft ad deal, on the record, that is not going to be confirmed one way or the other. I assume that real journalists would either not post anything or maybe they'd wait and try to find another source. I like to post the information early, and say, "Look, this is what I have and this is who I have it from." It's a single-sourced rumor, this is what they're saying, the source has been reliable in the past, and sort of leave it at that-and then let other blogs use their own contacts and see how things play out. And I think an interesting conversation occurs then —where it's not just me, it's a number of blogs playing any particular story and trying to find the truth. And sometimes the truth can be found much quicker that way than through the traditional journalistic means.

L.G.: How big is your staff now?

M.A.: We have eight or nine full-time. Erick Schonfeld I hired from Business 2.0. He's my co-editor at TechCrunch, he's out of New York-he's great. We have different styles but he's taught me a lot, and I showed him a few things about blogging and he's working out awesomely. And then most of the rest of the staff are on our international sites and on Crunch Gear, our gadget blog.

L.G.: And you have Heather Harde, your C.E.O. who came from News Corp. Is she in L.A.?
 
M.A.: No, she moved up here. So five of us work out of my house, including Heather, and two of those five are part-time guys that are developers.
 
L.G.: I see. And is your house still in the kind of pathetic-bachelor status that I've seen described in articles, with a shag carpet in need of shampooing and things like that?

M.A.: No, I ripped the carpet up and replaced it over the summer. But it's still just me who lives here and then my company comes in everyday.

L.G.: But you're still in the rented house, and you haven't splurged to get yourself into digs that would be impressive to outsiders coming in and seeking to be impressed.

M.A.: No, I haven't. It's funny because sometimes you walk into startups, and the best startups could be in the worst offices, because in Silicon Valley it's so hard to get good offices. So for people here, you don't really look at what you're walking into, you listen to the ideas. I mean, the house I'm living in here, it's in Atherton; it's in a rich area, on an acre of land. It's an old house, but it fits what we need perfectly. It's four bedrooms. We changed a few of them into offices, and I'm able to work from home and hang out with my dog. It's great.

L.G.: What's your dog's name?

M.A.: Laguna, like Laguna Beach. She's a chocolate lab. She weighs 100 pounds. She's a really cool dog. She's actually had some medical problems lately. Last week, she had an M.R.I. and some other stuff done, but it looks like she's going to be okay.

L.G.: Oh gosh, well I'm glad. I'm sorry to hear that you've been going through that. But tell me what you think is going to happen with a couple of things: Will Microsoft be successful in its bid to acquire Yahoo?
 
M.A.: I put it at about 70 percent likely that the deal will happen-maybe a little higher.
 
L.G.: You think they're going to have to come up in their bid?
 
M.A.: I think that they could come up. If the stock market falls, if Microsoft's stock falls any further, I think that there's a chance they could even drop the bid. I think ultimately they'll win.
 
L.G.: Over what time period?
 
M.A.: Over the course of weeks or months. Things can be accelerated if Microsoft decided to increase the bid, for instance. The problem is, Yahoo doesn't have a viable third-party alternative. If one were to pop up —
 
L.G.: News Corp doesn't fit that category?

M.A.: From what I hear, no.

L.G.: Even though you reported on your website that they had sent five people or four people out there [to negotiate].

M.A.: Yeah, my understanding is, they're having a lot of trouble getting to a deal that pencils out the evaluations that everyone needs and that the stockholders would accept. So, as far as I know, no bid has been finalized yet.
 
L.G.: Assuming this happens, what are the implications of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo? What do you see as the benefits and the possible pitfalls of that?
 
M.A.: Well, the first thing is, it gives them a ton of page views, and page views are important when it comes to advertising networks-because they're going to want to serve as many ads as possible. So the more page views you have, the more advertising you would have. The more advertising, they'll be forced to go onto their platform, so they'll provide some competitive strain on Google right away. Yahoo properties, in general, tend to be better than the Microsoft Web properties, as well, so for the most part, Microsoft could sort of end their efforts on the Web space-just merge those teams into the Yahoo teams. But it's still unclear that they would be competitive over the long haul with Google and the search-advertising side, based on just the number of customers that Google has and the technology that Google has. It might be that Google continues to take market share, even from the combined entity. Or it might be that somehow they're able to fight and take a bit themselves. Most markets break down into an 80-20 rule, though, and Google seems to be turning up to that 80 percent of the market share. And Microsoft takes care of the 20 percent with Yahoo. That's still a big market, but it's not Google.

L.G.: And what's the future of Google, in your view? Their stock has certainly plunged over the last few months.
 
M.A.: I think the January quarter where they talked about MySpace not being very revenue-friendly is interesting. A couple of days ago they launched a new feature called automatic matching, and what this is, it's a way to take more money away from the advertisers. So if an advertiser has a budget, and the budget isn't fulfilled with ads, with the keywords that they want, Google will try to spend that money on different keywords that they think are still okay. And it shows that they're trying to find innovative ways to grab more and more money from the advertisers. To me-and this is just me speculating-it suggests that the organics for natural growth are slowing in a way that they don't like, and now they're sort of trying to scramble to find cool ways to continue turning the knob. And that's not a good sign. When you're at that point, sometimes it suggests that growth might be stalling. So we'll see what happens-if there is a recession and it does hit the online advertising space, Google could be hit very hard.
L.G.: I see. What do you predict for Facebook—which some people have suggested could be something like the next Google in terms of sheer power and size, or could end up like Friendster and sort of fade toward oblivion. What do you think?

M.A.: Well, Facebook is interesting because it has a lot of page views. It's one of the biggest factors on the internet in terms of page views, top five or six, but what they don't have is a lot of search, and search page views are the most monetizable page views on the internet. So monetizing Facebook in a Google-like way is going to be very, very hard. Now, in '98, '99, no one thought searches were all that monetizable either, and then when they paired what had been a go-to with Yahoo, people thought, "Oh, wow, you can make a lot of money on search marketing," and Google perfected that market. Maybe somebody will find a way to do that with social networking as well, and if anyone will do it, it's probably Facebook because they're so innovative—but until they do, having a lot of page views doesn't mean they're ever going to have a lot of revenue. So that's their challenge—to find new revenue streams that are substantial.
 
L.G.: So do you think Mark Zuckerberg is up to this? I've seen reports that he's thinking of or is being urged to bring in somebody to be C.E.O. to let him be more creative and not actually manage the company on a day to day basis.
 
M.A.: Well a C.O.O. could manage the company on a day to day basis. I think he makes a good C.E.O. He's still very young. I think he's growing up a lot faster than he normally would, but he seems to be handling it well.

L.G.: How old are you, by the way?
 
M.A.: I'm 37. He strikes me, in the time I've spent with him, as, I don't want to use the word brash, but adventurous. Willing to try new things without, you know, the harm of having failed before to stop him, or make him hesitate. But he also seems to take the advice of people around him. So he seems like he's got what it takes to be one of the legends of Silicon Valley. He just has to execute. So personally, I don't think him stepping aside makes any sense. Now, hiring strong people around him, like Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] did [at Google], makes a lot of sense. And he may theoretically hand over the C.E.O. title, but I could also see him keeping that title and just hiring-
 

L.G.: In other words, if he had somebody like Eric Schmidt, that would make sense.
 
M.A.: Yeah, but it's not like they're doing poorly now. The service continues to grow and revenue is sort of doing okay.
 
L.G.: Do you think that Jeff Bewkes over at Time Warner is making the right moves with AOL?
 
M.A.: I'm not sure what moves he is making. You know, we've heard advertising dotcom spinoff and I.P.O., we've heard rumors about them trying again to sell AOL to Yahoo, or if there's a Yahoo-MySpace deal, to somehow get sucked into that as well. They seem to want to be rid of AOL. Most of AOL revenues, a little more than half actually today, are still subscription revenues based on dial-up services and broadband. That's not a business that Time Warner probably wants to be in, not because they don't like it—I mean, they have cable revenue that way-but just because it seems like it's going to go away with time. And they're sort of stuck with this big property that has a lot of page views in advertising revenue. They seem to be trying to get rid of it, so I don't know what the final sort of word will be on AOL. It could be sold off to any one of the other big players.

L.G.: I see Barry Diller has said he might like to buy it, but of course price is key there.
 
M.A.: Yeah, Diller's a wounded animal right now. Google could certainly buy AOL, Yahoo could buy AOL normally, Microsoft could, and so could News Corp. Even Viacom or something like that. Comcast, they could theoretically be in that space, they've been making a lot of acquisitions lately. So there's a whole bunch of people that could buy them—I don't know what's going to happen with them.
 
L.G.: Please elaborate on your description of Barry Diller as a wounded animal. He's obviously been in this pissing match with John Malone.
 
M.A.: Yeah, and I think that caused the deal, which was supposedly on the table and ready to be signed and it was in the $150 million to $200 million range, to be killed. And from what I can tell, either the desire not to fight with Malone over it or if Malone didn't like it or something like that, it sort of killed the deal. You know, he's splitting all the companies up, some of the key execs like Jim Lanzone, who ran Ask.com, have left. I just think that right now, IAC isn't considered with-it, and a lot of their properties are really old and sort of stale. I just don't look to them to be the cutting edge. They also tend to do weird deals. When they acquire companies, they tend to be cheap, and they try to acquire a controlling stake in a company, but not buy them outright. They basically buy the rest based on bonuses and targets and things like that, and it's just not a good way to sell your company unless you don't have any other options. So it turns out that a lot of the companies they buy didn't have other options, and so they don't necessarily go after the best properties. I think Diller's strategy has worked in the past and can continue to work in a down market where there are very few buyers and properties are cheap. But in a market like this, they just aren't really a player.
 
L.G.: Tell me about how you got to this place in your life? You were an attorney, and initially started at O'Melveny & Myers and were doing very boring work having to do with aircraft leasing, and then you moved to the Silicon Valley powerhouse firm Wilson Sonsini. What excited you about Silicon Valley?
 
M.A.: The team I was on was representing Netscape, so Netscape was high-flying right then, had 90 percent or 95 percent market share in the browser market, they were acquiring companies left and right. I worked on all those acquisitions. I also worked for IdeaLab, an incubator, starting a lot of companies left and right. I was working a lot of I.P.O.'s, representing the companies and investment banks, so a lot of growth was happening. The internet was new and young and awesome, and WebVan was around, you could get your groceries delivered, you could buy books online, you could do all these great things and I just loved being a part of it. So I loved not only the work, meeting new clients and seeing their new ideas and taking them from nothing to a multibillion-dollar I.P.O. in a year or two was great, but it was so great, I wanted to be a part of it. So in '99, I decided to join one of my clients, and was there for a few years. I left, mostly with stock investments...started my own company. We raised a bunch of venture capital, we sold the company for $30 million dollars, and then after that, I just took time off.
L.G.: In other words, you sold it before the bubble burst?
 
M.A.: No, the bubble burst in March 2000? We didn't raise the money until July of 2000. It was Achex. So even though the Nasdaq burst, venture capital still flowed for quite a while, because people weren't sure if it was temporary or whatever. So we raised almost $20 million, and started spending it and then it became clear that the venture capital window was shutting for years, and so as we sort of started to run out of money, we realized there's no way to raise any more money. We started talking about acquisitions and then First Data came in and bought it, to use it as the back end for Western Union, which still is the back end infrastructure. And they bought it for $30 million, so we made a little bit of money off the $20 million raised and that was great. And I spent time in L.A. surfing; in London consulting; in Copenhagen with a girl I was dating. Went to Canada and messed around—started a couple companies there with a guy up there—I basically was just screwing around until 2005 when I got serious again.
 
L.G.: What got you to be serious again? I mean, you were just having a good time, you didn't have any money worries, obviously.
 
M.A.: No, I ran out of money in 2005. So I needed to start consulting hard-core at that point. The last year of it I just completely turned off. I did nothing but sit on the beach and surf.
 
L.G.: Really, what was going on there? It sounds sort of like an Apocalypse Now sort of scene.
 
M.A.: [Laughs] My girlfriend, who had a great job, was getting a little tired of it. So my friend Keith Teare, who was the founder of the first company I worked for when I left the law firm, said he wanted to start a new startup called Edgeio, and he wanted me to run it, and I said sure. I wasn't using the internet for anything but email, so I got back on and started looking for all the startups and did all that research. I decided to start TechCrunch just to publish some of the research I was doing, and then TechCrunch grew and took off so fast that actually I never really did much with Edgeio. It kind of went on its own, and I stayed at Tech Crunch and grew it.

L.G.: And you're getting how many unique visitors every month now?

M.A.: TechCrunch alone is 2.7 million, 2.8 million uniques, something like that.
 
L.G.: Wow. Now could this be true that the advertising revenue is up to $200,000 a month?
 
M.A.: We reported that last year and at that point, when Heather came aboard in April, she said I can't talk about revenue anymore. There were too many interviews where I was telling people our exact revenue numbers. And she was like, "There's just no point, just stop." So I stopped. But the last time I said, it was $200,000 a month.
 
L.G.: And are you the sole owner? How does that work? Are you allowed to talk about that?
 
M.A.: Heather was a star exec at Fox, and the head of M&A; she did their MySpace deal and all the deals after that. She did over a billion dollars in transactions for them, she was making a ton of money, so she took a huge salary cut to come here, like 1/10th of what she was making, but she got a big chunk of the company.

L.G.: So you and she are the equity stakeholders?
 
M.A.: Well no, actually. Everyone who works here full time has equity as well. And it's definitely a growing market. We had our first conference last year, TechCrunch 40, and it was very successful, had a thousand people. We're doing it again this year. We have a party every month or two that generally has a thousand people. We're having a party in L.A. next month that'll have 2,000 people in it.
 
L.G.: I guess this is a far cry from barbecues in your backyard.
 
M.A.: Yeah, it is. We're actually teaming up with a blog called Pop Sugar, which is a very large blog that covers women's fashion and celebrity news and just stuff like that. It's generally a group of very attractive, well-adjusted young women and then there's all the geeks that read my blog, and we're getting them all together for a party in L.A. called Geek Gone Chic, and it's going to be a lot of fun. We charge $10 to get in, and we're going to give that away to charity, and then we have sponsors and there'll be bands there playing, and MySpace will have a presence, and it'll be crazy. There's a huge club called Vanguard in Hollywood, and it'll be on April 10.

L.G.: A singles scene. You mentioned your girlfriend. Are you available? What's your deal?
 
M.A.: Oh yeah, that was years ago. No, I'm not dating anyone.
 
L.G.: So you're on the market.
 
M.A.: I guess, yes. It's kind of hard to date when everyone watches your every move, but yeah. Have you heard of Valleywag?
 
L.G.: Yeah, are they dogging your every step?
 
M.A.: They're always mentioning how I'm single.
 
L.G.: I ran into Nick Denton [the owner of Gawker Media, parent company of the Silicon Valley blog Valleywag.com] last night. What do you think of him?
 
M.A.: I think he's a total dick.
 
L.G.: Would you care to elaborate?
 
M.A.: I think he's amoral. I don't think he has any sense of right and wrong, and he'll do anything he can to make money and have a successful blog. So I just don't associate with him.
 
L.G.: I have to say, when he invited me to be his friend on Facebook, I had to think about it a long time. Because here in New York, when I had a gossip column at the New York Daily News, Gawker particularly attempted to make my life less pleasant than it ought to have been.
 
M.A.: Yeah, I know what that's all about. By the way, Valleywag competes with TechCrunch on some stories, and it doesn't matter. If they get a tip or think something's funny, they'll write it about me. And it's not just me, they do it to everyone. But I just try to ignore it.
 
L.G.: Uh huh. Tell me, obviously the big challenge for traditional print journalism organizations like the Washington Post or Time magazine or New York magazine, and even Condé Nast Portfolio, is to figure out how to monetize the internet and make their businesses viable on the internet. Do people in those businesses ever consult you since you seem to have a very successful journalistic operation?
 
M.A.: Not so much. I mean, we're able to monetize because we have a very high-end audience and it's very niche and very specific. We're lucky, but it's not magic. If you can get an audience like ours, it's pretty easy to generate revenue.
 
L.G.: How do you describe your audience to advertisers?
 
M.A.: You know, they're early adopters. They're people that want to try new products. A significant portion of my audience, for instance, would've bought the Kindle when Amazon released it last year, immediately. And they're a lot of entrepreneurs, so a lot of them need service providers, they need designers, they need accountants, and then they need to buy software. So Microsoft, Adobe, and others are always advertising on the site as well. So that's it, and sometimes, you have other things as well, but its a high-end high-income sort of audience. We did a survey a while back, and the average was like $100,000 a year.
 
L.G.: You're only two years old, right?
 
M.A.: This is going to be our third year.
 
L.G.: Have there been moments where you were just feeling the adrenaline rushing through and you had a fabulous scoop?
 
M.A.: Yeah, when I broke the YouTube acquisition in late 2006, and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal cited me for that, that was awesome, that was definitely a high. I think that put us on the map as having credibility when it comes to journalism. We've broken a lot of stories now, especially acquisitions first, like when Microsoft bought Tellme, and a ton of others, and those are always fun. But what I really like is when some of the startups that we covered in the very early days are successful. One called Gooey, AOL just bought them, not for a lot, it was probably less than a $30 million transaction, but the company launched in my living room, at a small party here, one of my first parties. So it was really cool to see that, when it was just a couple guys who were really insecure and they didn't know what was going on.
 
L.G.: So you're obviously not just covering the business, you consider yourself a booster?
 
M.A.: Oh yeah! I love it when the startups do well. I mean, I think it's awesome, it's great. This is my passion. I couldn't write about it all the time if I didn't love it. If you don't love what you're doing, it's going to be really hard to put the time into it.
 
L.G.: Do you ever take a day off? Do you ever go on vacation or are you just obsessively, compulsively, always in the loop?
 
M.A.: I haven't yet. When I travel, I lose a day of writing, but I hope to take a vacation some day.
 
L.G.: You haven't taken a vacation in nearly three years?
 
M.A.: No.