Michael Arrington

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I grew up in California and Surrey, England. I started college at U.C. Berkeley, and transferred to Claremont McKenna, a tiny college located near Los Angeles, after my freshman year. I majored in economics. I went straight from college to law school at Stanford in 1992, and graduated in 1995.

I spent a few years as a corporate attorney at O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini, working exclusively with technology companies. My clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a bunch of startups, venture funds and investment banks.

The late nineties were heady days in Silicon Valley - at any given time I was working on a number of IPOs, venture financings, and merger transactions. I also co-authored a book on IPOs while I was working at Wilson Sonsini, which is still in print (on its second edition) by Bowne. I worked all the time.

I left law firm life to join a hot startup and run sales and business development. The startup, RealNames, filed to go public but didn’t make it out before the bubble burst. Eventually, RealNames liquidated after raising over $100 million in venture capital. I left that startup as it was going through the IPO process and co-founded a company called Achex. We raised nearly $20 million after the bubble burst and sold the company to First Data Corp about a year later for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online.

I’ve worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including SnapNames and Verisign. In addition to TechCrunch, I am a founder of edgeio and a member of the edgeio board of directors.

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