Several times a year, the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, persuades a “Distinguished Innovator” to give an on-campus lecture. Speakers are a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley and in recent years have included such titans of tech as the C.E.O. of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, then a V.P. at Google, who had been the company’s first female engineer, and Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the V.C. leviathan Andreessen Horowitz, where he manages a multi-billion-dollar portfolio that has included Facebook, Skype, and Twitter. In September 2010 the Distinguished Innovator was someone Time magazine had named one of the world’s 100 most influential people, along with President Obama, Rupert Murdoch, and the Dalai Lama: Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, the Web site of record for all of Silicon Valley’s deals, developments, and dubious ethics. The format of Arrington’s lecture was an interview conducted by Vivek Wadhwa, a scholar who focuses his research on the dearth of women in tech.

Arrington has the doughy physique of an N.F.L. lineman past his prime and the untucked style of a frat-house social chairman. Onstage that day, he sat with his shoulders slumped, legs outstretched, bags under his eyes. Then 40, he was dressed in khakis and a blue button-down oxford. Wadhwa began by asking him to share a bit of his biography. Anyone else would have recognized the question as a chance to charm the crowd.

Arrington said he had attended Berkeley his freshman year but transferred to Claremont McKenna College because he “didn’t love having classes of 900 people” at Berkeley. The audience grumbled, but let the dig pass. Then Arrington said he got his law degree from Stanford University, adding, “Clearly the best school in California,” and the crowd let loose a barrage of rhetorical tomatoes. Wadhwa, a round, bearded Indian-American with a gentle way about him, turned to the audience, grinned, and, in a tone of for-those-of-you-who-don’t-know, said, “Mike has a habit of doing that—pissing off half of the world in one fell swoop.”

Crunch. That’s what Arrington is known for. From a rented house in Silicon Valley, he built a media-tech-venture-capital Empire of Crunch. First, the TechCrunch blog. Then its spin-offs, like CrunchBase—a database for investors and entrepreneurs—and the globally influential TechCrunch conferences, including its most famous, Disrupt. The very month Arrington was on that Berkeley stage, AOL was in the midst of paying him some $30 million to acquire TechCrunch.

Crunch has not only been Arrington’s brand, it has been his M.O. Mess with Arrington and you get crunched. He’s provoked personalities ranging from Hollywood star and venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher to former Yahoo C.E.O. Carol Bartz into telling him—to his face, mind you—to “fuck off.” Even Arrington’s colleagues who respect him say he is inclined to volatile mood swings. He’ll scream, he’ll shout. Sarah Lacy, one of Arrington’s former employees, says, “The worst place to be is between Michael Arrington and something he wants.” In Arrington’s honor, someone went as far as to create a Web site: ismikearringtonadick.com.

“Let’s talk about women,” Wadhwa said. The topic was inevitable. The Wall Street Journal had published a column bemoaning the lack of women in tech in which TechCrunch was mentioned because its conferences featured too few women. Arrington had responded with a column of his own, titled, “Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men.” He elaborated to Wadhwa, saying, “Women in my world are respected as much as men.” He pointed out that the C.E.O. of TechCrunch was a woman, as were almost half of his employees.

Arrington then called on a woman in the audience. He identified her as his girlfriend, Jenn. He asked her to please stand. Arrington explained that Jenn had just started a company, Rtist, a Web-based broker of original art. He said Jenn had hired a team and launched the Web site, and it was doing well. Looking in her direction, he asked, “Have you ever felt like, Wow, I feel like I’d be doing better if I was a man?”