On The Next Venture
I've been thinking about how I was going to write this post for a while now. Of course, I didn't anticipate that I would be writing at 2 AM local time in London, where I'm currently visiting to speak at FOWA in a couple of days (that talk also just potentially got more interesting).
Context & Ripple Effects
MG Siegler's parislemon teaser lands alongside confirmations from TechCrunch itself and pickup from Betabeat and UNCRUNCHED: he is joining Michael Arrington's new CrunchFund as a venture capitalist while staying on at TechCrunch as its Apple columnist. The announcement comes days before he speaks at FOWA in London, which he notes just got more interesting.
The move extends an arc the corpus has been tracing for years — the porous line between people who cover startups and people who fund them, from Caterina Fake's BizDev 2.0 era of deal-by-deal relationships to Fred Wilson arguing investors should invest in the mess rather than wait for polish. What changes here is that one person now sits on both sides of the table at the same publication.
First-order effects
- TechCrunch's Apple coverage now runs through a writer who is simultaneously a CrunchFund investor, so every Siegler post about an Apple-ecosystem startup carries a disclosed financial stake in the space he covers.
- Erick Schonfeld inherits the exact question Betabeat put in its headline: whether TechCrunch keeps its editorial swagger after Arrington's departure, with its best-known Apple voice now splitting his time with a fund.
Second-order effects
- Startups seeking TechCrunch coverage are now also pitching a CrunchFund portfolio candidate — the same byline can be a source of exposure and a source of capital, which pressures rival publications to decide whether to match the journalist-investor model or police it.
- CrunchFund gets a de facto media amplifier: a fund whose most visible hire writes for the industry's loudest blog, tightening the loop between deal flow and narrative.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tech media consolidates around dual-hat figures who both write and invest, and disclosure norms rather than structural separation become the standard that governs how startup news gets made.
- Funds built around media personalities shift early-stage competition from check size toward attention — whoever controls distribution of the story also shapes which companies get funded.
The trend: Tech journalism and early-stage venture capital are converging into dual-hat roles, with CrunchFund-style funds built around writers who bring their own audience.