TechCrunch August 2008: Defining a Culture

Written on July 26th, 2008 by Graham

The year is 2008 and in two blinks of an eye (a lifetime on the internet), TechCrunch has risen to the absolute pinnacle of internet startup culture, which involves a dizzying mix of entrepreneurs with crazy ideas, millionaire (and billionaire) investors looking for the next big thing, programmers, PR agencies (who may or may not be able to get you to the front page of Digg, or the New York Times -whichever is better), and everything in between.

Make no mistake, there is a profound culture percolating here. It is the Internet Startup Culture, and no where can you get a more raw taste of what it is than at the TechCrunch Summer Party.

I will never forget TechCrunch 2008.

It’s the year Jason Calacanis showed up in his Tesla, the first all-electric US-manufactured automobile. This car will go zero to 60 in less than 4 seconds, will go 250 miles on a single charge, and it will single handedly put an end to the biggest crisis facing humanity: global warming. Jason got his in orange.

It’s the year Julia Allison, the closest thing the blogosphere has to a Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, made the cover of Wired and was signing and posing for photos.

It’s the year I had a drink with the founder of MyBlogLog, Eric Marcoullier, and talked with him about his new groundbreaking work on data-portability, a concept that will affect all of our lives in the very near future. I was sure to tell him about how Entrecard was partially inspired by the company he sold to Yahoo for 10 million.

Of course, 2008 was also the year you could find Michael Arrington playing on his iPhone when he should have been doing more important things.

Of course, Gatsby made plenty of time for all us aspiring web moguls.

2008 was also the year my company, Entrecard, partnered up with SezWho, in a revolutionary pact to give people advertising dollars for their blog comments, to improve blogging for everyone. Here’s me with Ted and Jitendra, the two founders of SezWho who were instrumental in making my vision a reality.

And of course, the whole place was effing packed, because when Gatsby throws a party, anyone and everyone shows up, along with every press outfit and media bit in the country.

I’ve now seen more dot-coms scribbled onto nametags than I ever thought I would see in my life. I’ve seen a raw, erupting culture first hand, and have the education and knowledge of history to put it in a proper context. In many ways, internet startup culture is a renaissance, a movement, and it won’t be until people are reading history textbooks in the year 2100 that they realize exactly what was going on in the year 2008. Arrington’s name will go down in history, hand in hand with this cultural movement, like Da Vinci with the Renaissance of the middle ages. That’s not me sucking up. That’s just the way it is.

And I was there to see it.

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