Original post by MIKE BUTCHER via TC
It’s been a fascinating road since I joined TechCrunch in September 2007 to build outTechCrunch’s European arm. Five years on to the week, I’m today sitting at the still-freshCampus London venue where hundreds of startup people pass through every week.
We’ve come a long way. Five years ago you would have found me sitting in some East London coffee shop which had barely just installed Wifi. Five years ago the tech startup scene in Europe was — at least for a journalist — a little like a chicken scratching around in the dirt looking for a rare grass seed. Today, there are startup hubs, co-working spaces, accelerators, and a growing number of VCs (old and new) in Europe. Yes, the eco-system is still growing, it’s still fractured by language and geography (although low-budget airlines are helping solve that). And these days I can hit a European conference and run into great people I already know as well as a veritable tsunami of new faces, every time. And not just European: I’m including our cousins in the Middle East and Africa in this as well. It’s been fun. Maybe we should have a birthday party or something?
But in any case, it’s time to re-introduce ourselves to you. And by that I mean the team we’ve built out in London, and which will be roaming internationally from here. We plan to be very mobile. We cover big U.S. stories with a fresh eye, even as our colleagues there hit the sack. And at the same time we’re building out TC’s international coverage from a time-zone better suited to this side of the planet. As we say at TechCrunch: “Sharks never sleep and neither does TC.”
So without any further ado, in alphabetical order, I give you the team:
MIKE BUTCHER
Mike Butcher is the EMEA Editor for TechCrunch and writes about US and international startups generally. He loves to be the first to write about cutting edge startups in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and interviews people for TechCrunch TV. A former grunge/thrash rock drummer, Mike became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman.
