If you were driving down Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco last Monday evening, you might have seen the green carpets rolled out in front of the War Memorial Opera House. You might have thought, “Maybe this is an early St. Patrick’s Day celebration?” Wrong, my friends. It was the ninth annual Crunchies, the Bay Area’s own tech-industry awards show put on by the tech blog TechCrunch.
Join me as I take you through a quick visual recap of the most important events that took place that evening.
I was excited to attend my first Crunchies. I walked in to discover a huge photo booth set up by Toyota. Turns out they bankrolled a majority of the event because, as you may have heard, tech stocks are really down right now. Thank God for the auto industry.
I got to my seat, and one of the first things I realized was that there was no dress code! That’s right, Snapchat ghost, feel free to leave your shirt and tie at home. You’re in good company! Mental note: find a TiVo TV guy costume for next year.
And then the awards began with opera in the Opera House! Cool move, TC. More precisely, “La Donna È Mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto. Verdi was all about BB-8 before it was even cool. Check out Pene Pati’s entire performance.
And then came our host, Chelsea Peretti, from the TV series Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Chelsea is super-funny, and the audience seemed to like her most of the time. But let’s be real: last year’s host, T. J. Miller (star of the HBO show Silicon Valley), set the bar so low that even TechCrunch issued an apology after the event. T. J., we still love you, but only when a comedy writer feeds you the lines. Also, I can’t wait for season 3 of Silicon Valley. Can’t. Wait.
Slack won the first two awards of the night. It was like Titanic at the Oscars. Their award for Fastest Rising Start-up was accepted by four black female engineers. They made the point that diversity and inclusion do a lot for one’s company. Well played, Slack.
It was a big year for diversity and the first year for the Include Diversity Crunchie. Winner Kimberly Bryant (founder of Black Girls Code) did an excellent job of recognizing her peers. Then she went on to predict the future obsolescence of the award she just won, and just before she dropped the mic, she referenced Beyoncé’s new hit song, “Formation,” and emphasized the need to find the next black Bill Gates.
Let’s skip a few awards because I want to point out that Chelsea was supposed to ad-lib a Kanye joke, but she didn’t! I felt duped. Or maybe it happened during one of the seven times the mic failed that night. Seriously, there was no sound engineer in the house?
At a slow point in the night, Chelsea threw an Apple Pencil out to a needy billionaire in the audience. Good feelings all around.
Back to the awards! And the CEO of the Year was … not present. In fact, all the nominees chose not to attend, and Zuck sent a proxy to accept his award. Could we get people to videoconference next year, TechCrunch? Let’s get on that!
And the Best Overall Start-up award went to Uber. At this point, you should already know why CEO Travis Kalanick was not present to accept the award. That’s right, last year’s host, T. J. Miller, called Travis’s girlfriend a bitch*. It was also the first and last time TMZ covered the Crunchies.
*“Did You Just Call Me a Bitch?” featuring T. J. Miller as the antagonist
And finally, just one more notch in the growing list of disappointments for the night: underdog start-up Bob’s Donuts did not win the Crunchie for Biggest Social Impact, but it goddamn should have, San Francisco. See you next year!
Photos courtesy of AkshaySawhneyPhotography.
