startup hustle

The Crunchies have picked the top 5 “startups” for each category and are ready for you to vote. What I had feared earlier this month has happened, and worse than I had predicted. I feared that the Crunchies would be a bunch of Silicon Valley startups while other new businesses around the country would not get an equal chance because they were outside the Valley.

The selections were worse because many of the companies (or people) are not startups. Companies like Facebook and Linkedin are in the running. Linkedin, are you kidding me. So instead of picking a real startup from the east coast, the selection committee picks non-startups from the Valley, how original. TechCrunch claims that there were thousands of startups nominated. Out of thousands of choices you still nominated a company that was founded over 4 years ago (Linkedin was founded in 2003 per BusinessWeek).

Allen Stern from CenterNetworks has a good post about his selections and why he picked (or did not pick) a specific company. Mr. Stern also touches on the non-startups being included in the running.

On the other side, TechCrunch can do nothing right in the eyes of their readers. The hate filled comments on every entry is getting old. If I was Arrington I would just close the comments for a week and let the complaining readers have no where to vent.