1) J. Michael Arrington was born in Orange California, United States on 13 March 1970. He has been named as one of the most powerful internet personalities mainly because of his creation of TechCrunch, which covers the detailed happenings of the Silicon Valley.

2) Arrington had a very diverse childhood as far as his academics is concerned; after growing up in Huntington Beach in California and later in Surrey, England, he enrolled in the prestigious University of California Berkeley.

3) Later on Arrington graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 1992 with majors in economics; but that wasn’t the end of education for Arrington, because he went on to study law at Stanford Law School from where he finally graduated from in 1995.

4) Following this legal streak, he worked in two separate law firms; O’Melveny & Myers, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati where he continued practicing securities and corporate law.

5) While practicing law, Arrington catered to a number of clients including Netscape, Apple, Pixar, Idealab in addition to many start-up investment banks and companies.

6) Arrington is known for involving himself in a number of other endeavors as well including being co-founder of Zip.ca as well as Pool.com (both in Canada), being the founder of Edgeio and Chief Operating Officer of Razogator which was backed by Kleiner.

7) One of his prominent and recent ventures includes being part of the Board of Directors of Foldera that is known for designing a service organizational software tool. He also worked in an operational role at a startup in London backed by Carlyle and was the consultant of companies including Verisign

8) Once Arrington was done with practicing law, he joined the company Real Names in 1999, which unfortunately went bankrupt and closed down after raising an investment of $100M. There he worked as the General Counsel as well as Vice President of Business Development. He was also one of the co-founders of an online payments company called Archex, which became the back end of online Western Union after being sold to First Data Corp for US$32M.

9) Michael Arrington’s real story of fame started when he founded TechCrunch in 2005, which is a web publication, dedicated to offering all sorts of technology news and detailed analysis from the Silicon Valley. Recognized now as the official blog for the Valley, it covers all products, websites and startup companies in addition to the major headlines. The first publication of TechCrunch came out on 11th June 2005 and according to FeedBurner, on 10th April, 2012, it was enjoying 1,628,000 RSS feed subscribers.

10) In September 2011, a lot of mystery was attracted by TechCrunch when it was reported that Arrington was no longer working at TechCrunch and had in fact, been employed by AOL Ventures. The mystery further deepened when merely days later, it was revealed that Arrington was no longer at AOL Ventures and in October 2012, it was reported that he had gone back to being a TechCrunch blogger.

11) Influential magazines like Forbes and Wired have often called Arrington as one of the most powerful internet people. Wired went as far as to mention his obsession with Web 2.0 and included him in a flowchart of ‘internet blowhards’. In 2008, the TIME Magazine selected Arrington among the 100 Most Influential People of The World primarily because of the power he held over the information flowing out of the Silicon Valley.

12) In 2011, Michael Arrington was known for collaborating up with Patrick Gallaghar and M. G. Siegler to found CrunchFund, which is a venture capital firm.

13) Many corporate and internet critics have pointed out the various conflicts of interest that Arrington hold because of his involvement in a variety of investment funds and ventures. According to Arrington himself, he is a partner at CrunchFund and is a limited partner in other funds, all of which are constantly investing in startups. That means that at any one point in time, Arrington has a good chance of being a direct or an indirect investor in these startups and owning the public stocks of companies like Facebook, AOL and other top venture funds.

14) Most of these criticisms were addressed by Arrington himself who revealed that he deals with all these various financial conflicts of interested by indulging in transparency and truth and to hiding from clear biases.

15) Michael Arrington also started the Chrunchpad project in July 2008 that was supposed to work as a tablet computer serving the needs of users that are conflicted between desktop computers and laptops.

16) Sometime later in this project, Arrington got involved in a number of disagreements with developers of Crunchpad. Because of this, the developers left Arrington and released the product themselves however; it did not receive much attention and went bankrupt soon after. If Arrington had managed to release the product successfully, he would have enjoyed a head start in the market possibly overshadowing the iPad itself, which was released in 2010.

17) Michael Arrington is also known for supporting students who drop out of college. At the UC-Berkeley Distinguished Innovator Lecture Series in 2010, Arrington expressed his belief that one of the best experienced for a bright student was to get into Harvard and drop out after a year something that would convey the world that you are good enough for Harvard.

18) Arrington was also part of a bribery scandal at TechCrunch in 2010 when an intern requested some compensation for a blog post after which Arrington fired him. Critics commented on the inappropriate handling by Arrington especially when some sources claimed that the intern was actually a part-time employee.

19) In 2010, it was reported that AOL acquired TechCrunch for $30M with Michael Arrington taking a backseat role.

20) Michael Arrington also runs TechCrunch Disrupt, which is a business conference imparting advice to investors and entrepreneurs.