Congratulations TechCrunch

Congratulations to TechCrunch, who announced yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt that they have been acquired by AOL.

I've been reading TechCrunch since before I knew I was going to do startups.  It all started because my friend Blake Scholl was doing a startup, and I set up Google Reader to track TechCrunch so I would be sure to see when his company got coverage.  At the time I was working for a Fortune 1000 shipping company as a business analyst, and had nothing to do with startups.  I got addicted to reading the damn thing in the spring of 2007.

TechCrunch is the reason I found out about Twitter, Twitter is the reason I came to understand social media, and there were a few hundred steps more before I landed here in San Francisco to work on Twilio.

If you write in a paper journal, you might have noticed how the daily ritual becomes like a benchmark in your life.  In a way, it gives you deja vu -- but in another way it helps you mark the passing of time.  Reading TechCrunch is like that for me.

I'm happy to for Michael Arrington and the whole team there, and I hope they get some much needed rest and a chance to celebrate this weekend with their friends and family after TechCrunch disrupt wraps up.