The Crunchies are the Kid’s Choice Awards of the startup scene.
So the latest Crunchies just ended yesterday, and as usual everyone is pissed. How the hell did THEY win?
You can probably say that for every winner(except Dropbox), but the biggest I’ve seen, are in regards to “Best social app: Zynga’s Farmville” and “Best CEO: Marc Pincus of Zynga”….I mean here we have a company that Techcrunch spent over a month blasting for scamming millions out of their users…and then they picked them as one of the top 6 choices(users don’t pick these, they just vote for the picks). The other complaints were to Bing and Facebook winning best new startup or product(if you read the original 2007 TC post, it just talked about startups, not products with millions in the development costs). And I’m sorry, but if you are the #1 company in your space, you are no longer a startup.
And yes everyone will blame Techcrunch, but the biggest reason why this happens every year, is because the people voting, are usually not the ones who follow the startup scene. So in the end it’s just a big popularity contest. The biggest name wins. I mean how else do you explain that Zynga CEO beat out Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh for CEO of the year? One built a company on “scamming” his users into signing them up for rebills, and hoping not to get banned by Facebook, and the other built his company on top notch customer service, which he then sold to Amazon for a large chunk of money. Which do we really want to encourage? What does it say about the startup community, if we actively reward this sort of behavior?
Why don’t we nominate Stephen Colbert for best CEO while we are at it? Chances are he’ll probably win it too.
And this will continue to happen every year, because the Crunchies are user voted(just like Kid’s Choice Awards). So the most popular name always wins(9/10 at least).
Don’t get me wrong, Crunchies are a good idea, but I think the startup scene has grown enough for us to have an Oscars type event too. Something, where winners are picked by the people who live and breathe startups, not a 14 year old who followed a link from a game about farming. Maybe then, we won’t have “startup” winners, who have more users than 99% of countries in the world.
There are two ways I can see we can do this.
- American Idol model - select 10-20 tech bloggers and have them pick all the winners. They should know the tech scene, and hopefully public scrutiny will stop them from picking the biggest companies, just so that they can improve their contacts with insiders at those companies.
- Oscars model - where you’ll have ~1000-2000 startup CEOs making their picks. Once again, these are the people who know the tech scene, and can see how ridiculous it is, labeling Facebook a startup.
So we’ll have two events. The Crunchies with their Kid Choice Awards voting model, and the Starties with the alternative model. Let the best award show win.
Few people I can think of who can pull this off:
- Paul Graham…knows tons of startup people, has a lot of respect in the community…great way to grow the YC brand/recognition.
- Andrew Warner…knows tons of founders and CEOs, also ton of respect in the community, great way to grow Mixergy brand.
- Ron Conway…knows tons of startup people, ton of respect, great way to grow the brand
Pretty much anyone who knows a ton of entrepreneurs, and has a lot of respect in the community can most likely put something like this together.
