Quotes from Michael Arrington

Our government is just way too interested in mucking around in Silicon Valley by creating and enforcing rules based on little or no understanding of the consequences.

Sometimes I have so many financial conflicts of interest that I can't even keep them straight.

If we want to get beyond this whole I'm-cool-because-I-care-about-women thing, what we really need to do is we have to start encouraging women to get engineering degrees in college.

I love talking about taxes.

Leaving America means renouncing your citizenship, moving out of the country and leaving family and friends behind. You can retain your citizenship if you like, but you'll still be away from loved ones and still be paying taxes. You lose all the good stuff about America and have to keep all the bad stuff.

If a tech journalist needs financial security before doing what their conscience dictates, I'm not sure they should be calling themselves journalists at all.

Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump.

Everything's mobile these days. Let's go mo-bile! But really, that's just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy, you know they just don't get it, and you move on.

One thing I know from personal experience, judges hate it when parties talk publicly about their cases. There are a lot of things about our criminal legal system that need to be changed, and this is just one of them. Prosecutors know how to play the press. Most defendants don't.

Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my job to protect it in any way.

Before the Internet, all most people cared about was Office. And Office was really the only reason anyone wanted Windows machines instead of Macs.

I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early '90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking, if you wanted to do Office stuff, you needed a Windows machine.

I live a fairly simple life, and that didn't change much after I sold TechCrunch in 2010. I didn't buy a new house or even a new car. The one thing I did splurge on was a boat. Nothing too fancy or large.

Just pick a political story at random and read the comments. There is no logic or reason on either side - only hypocrisy and hate.

Some people ask why we don't just wait until we have the whole story before posting. The fact is that we sometimes can't get to the end story without going through this process... When a story is up and posted, it's amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information... And readers love it.

Journalists are supposed to put the people first, even before themselves. Around the world and throughout history, journalists have died to get the truth out.

The payouts for starting a business are just terrible when you account for risk. A tiny minority of entrepreneurs ever get rich. And the majority of entrepreneurs would probably make far more money, and have more stable personal relationships, if they just worked for someone else.

I'm worried about privacy - the companies out there gathering data on us, the stuff we do on Twitter, the publicly scrapeable stuff on Facebook. It's amazing how much data there is out there on us. I'm worried that it can be abused and will be abused.

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

Write good content about stuff that you love. Readers will find you.

For the most part, I've sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies.

Talking about Apple v. Microsoft without mentioning the Internet and the browser is like talking about WWII without talking about the nuke. Framing the conversation just in terms of open v. closed operating systems, the quality of the hardware or software or who the CEO was, is silly.

I don't claim to be a journalist. I hold myself to higher standards of transparency and disclosure.

I always try to find the truth in a situation. That unvarnished, pure nugget of truth at the core of every issue that I write about.