In early November 2007 Mike Arrington and his TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde approached me about participating in a new awards competition they’d come up with, “the Crunchies.” The idea (as far as I could tell) was to replicate the Webby Awards, which had been running since 1996. The Crunchies would focus specifically on Web 2.0 companies. TechCrunch would produce the show, with Read/WriteWeb, GigaOm, and VentureBeat as cohosts.
