My 7 takeaways from Crunchies 2013

Earlier this week, we co-hosted (with Techcrunch and VentureBeat) The Crunchies, an annual awards ceremony to celebrate startups and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Our team was represented (in addition to yours truly) by my GigaOm colleagues Katie, Chris, Tom, Jo and Eliza.

But as I said while presenting the startup of the year award (to GitHub), there are many thousands of startups that toil in anonymity and they do it not for the fame, but for the deep desire to change the status quo. They do it, because they don’t know any other way. Startups are the atomic unit of innovation. Here is to all those founders and their team members who only know the way of change.

Anyway here are my 7 takeaways from the 2013 Crunchies.

1. Codeacademy sending one of its users instead of the CEO was one classy move. I support this community-not-ceo focus and encourage other startups to take cue.
2. Instagram is awesome and glad to see Kevin Systrom win the founder of the year, but Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk is still bad ass.
3. SnapChat, won, and in character, disappeared. I thought that was well played.
4. My cloud photos were mentioned twice. I feel I have totally made it in the #cloudporn business.
5. Aaron Levie (of Box.net) and Chris Dixon must have the same shoe guy. Oh, wait, that must be Zappos.
6. If you are looking for a drink after the Crunchies, well you need more than Google Maps. You need patience to wait and wait and wait.
7. That Chris Albrecht fella is hella funny. Too bad he doesn’t have a English accent.