Are You There, TechCrunch? It’s Me, Jon

If you’re reading this, then you either have very little to do right now, or you care about the inner workings and staffing decisions here at TechCrunch. (I’m sure there could be other reasons, but let’s stick with those two).

I’m hoping it’s the latter – that you care about this site and the goings-on around it. In fact, I’m sure you do. The community of authors, commenters, contributors and readers that is the beating heart of TechCrunch is a passionate, committed, and engaged bunch… and I’m happy to join you.

My name, if you didn’t read the byline, is Jon Shieber. I spent the last several years writing about venture capital, private equity, energy and technology from New York and Shanghai for Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal. And now I’ll be doing it for y’all.

Here at TechCrunch, and over at CrunchBase, I’ve been tasked with helping everyone find the signals on where venture capital investment – and technology development – are heading through the noise of daily funding announcements, new product launches, new product updates, add-on acquisitions, new hires, etc. etc. etc.

There’s a massive amount of useful data that we have on CrunchBase and we’re going to try and use it to provide more context for you around the day’s news. Hopefully you, the TechCrunch community, will lend a helping hand (I’m lazy and y’all are way smarter than I am).

Anyway, it’s nice to be here. I hope I get to stick around for a while.

Feel free to reach out and follow me on Twitter at @jshieber , or shoot me an email shieber@techcrunch.com or shieber@crunchbase.com. I’m looking forward to hearing… and learning… from all of you.