Kyle
Mike Arrington was back, looking right at home on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. As most of you know he was here last year for Disrupt NYC but after that things between he and AOL got a little shaky.
Last year Arrington appeared onstage with a TechCrunch Green t-shirt that read “unpaid blogger”. This year there was no special shirt, just Arrington in his best form. After being introduced by John Biggs as a guy who used to be Biggs’ boss he sat down to chat with Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson.
Arrington pointed out that every time he talked face to face with Wilson they were always in New York. Arrington went on to ask Wilson if he was extremely wealthy and if Wilson had rode into Disrupt on a helicopter. Wilson was quick to point out he walked a couple blocks and then grabbed a cab. He also pointed out that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg often takes the train.
As far as Wilson and his investments are concerned, Arrington immediately started in on him about Duck Duck Go a new search engine. In regards to Duck Duck Go, Arrington looked at Wilson and simply said “Why, I don’t understand”.
Wilson responded by saying that Duck Duck Go has 40-50% of the traffic of AOL search which is still a top 5 search engine in the world. Wilson is also enthusiastic about Duck Duck go because it was created by just one person. Concerns about privacy will also drive the popularity of Duck Duck Go because it’s a 100% private search engine.
When Arrington asked Wilson if Google should be worried about Duck Duck Go, Wilson said no pointing out that Duck Duck Go is fundamentally different. Where Google uses algorithms and key words, Duck Duck Go “leverages 100s of services that are domain experts, hit their API’s and assemble on the fly”.
Arrington admitted that he was not enthusiastic about Kickstarter at first but has since become one of biggest fans of the crowd sourced funding site. Union Square was the only venture capital firm to invest in Kickstarter. When Arrington asked Wilson why they invested, Wilson described Kickstarter as a “futures market for product”.
Arrington and Wilson rounded out their conversation talking about Wilson’s investments in Twitter and Zynga. Arrington of course said Wilson needs to get to San Francisco more.
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