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.