TechCrunch: from 5K to 500K

My first TechCrunch party was in October 2005 – back than it was called the 3rd TechCrunch BBQ. The first two, which I had missed were (almost) impromptu backyard BBQ’s with a dozen or so entrepreneurs at Mike Arrington’s house. I’m not sure how I discovered these events, but it may have been Ethan’s blog, which led to a wiki with open signup. I started to monitor the wiki for the next one, and a month or so later signed up for the 3rd event.

The first parking spot I found was half a mile away from Mike’s Atherton house. Wow! This was no longer a cozy BBQ, the pace was cramped with about 200 people. Lots of food in the backyard, a keg that the geek squad could not force to produce beer, and lots of startup product demos inside. It was a great event – probably the last one right-sized for the house. The next one grew to about 300 people, the 5th, and the last at Mike’s place, the “Naked Party” was a crowd of 500. Oh, and Atherton police got smart, setting up a sobriety checkpoint just around the corner from TechCrunch HQ…

The Party is not all that grew… after the 3rd BBQ I wrote about what I considered phenomenal growth back then:

Mike Arrington started a blog in June with the mission of “ obsessively profiling and reviewing every newly launched web 2.0 business, product and service”. Since June, the blog has grown to close to 5,500 Feedburner readers, a Technorati rank of 566, and made it to the CNET Top 100 list.

Yes, that five thousand is not a typo, that really was the readership in October 2005. The next stop is at 50k, in May 2006 – 53,651 to be exact, as so famously called by Josh Kopelman. Fast forward to summer of 2007, and TechCrunch has 450K feedburner subscribers – well, at least last I looked at it. Until this morning, when I saw this:

Yes, TechCrunch has reached the half a million mark. Congratulations, Mike! That’s quite a milestone, and a reason to celebrate tonight at the TechCrunch Party hosted by August Capital.

Tags: TechCrunch, TechCrunch Party, blogging, startups, entrepreneurship, Web 2.0, August Capital, techcrunch9, techcrunchaugust2007