Creative snap decisions – behind the scenes at TechCrunch

There’s another truth hiding inside Robin Wauters little part of the TechCrunch story:

…[I] finally tease Arrington – who I got to know, ironically, because of the whole Blognation drama – in a Skype chat that he’s getting slow and that there will be a day where he’ll be forced to hire me. One day, not too long after, that’s exactly what he does. He says something like “dude, stop breaking stories on [The Next Web] and come blog for us instead, ok?”.

The next day, I received a username and password for WordPress, our CMS, and I remember asking for an editorial guideline of some sort. His response was something to the effect of “dude, just blog”. So I did, hehe.

Erick [Schonfeld] ended up really teaching me the ropes, but it was Mike who gave me a shot…

So we have a rather visionary leader doing the high level stuff, with a second in command taking care of the details. That is a very traditional CEO/COO relationship. Or at least was. TechCrunch is  more than one man, in the same way that Apple is more than one man, but as Stan Lee always likes to remember us, one man can make a very big difference. It’s going to be very interesting to see who Schonfeld chooses as his 2ic.