You know you're in a bubble when… tech journalists join startups – Bye Steve!

You know you’re in a bubble when tech journalists leave publications to join startups. The other sign of course is MBA graduates turning their nose up at a cozy bank job. But the former has just happened to us, in the shape of my awesome colleague Steve O’Hear, who is leaving Techcrunch Europe to become CEO of a new startup called Beepl.

Annoyingly, Steve isn’t saying publicly what Beepl actually does, although the strap line reads a “smarter way to question the world.” They also call themselves an “expertise platform” and “semantic technology company”, it says here…. Whatever. It’s clearly some lame kind of Quora clone and he’ll be back in 6 months asking for his old job back. ;-)

Prior to TechCrunch Europe – which he joined in November 2009! – Steve was at CBS-owned ZDNet and pioneered ‘Social Web’ coverage and also co-founded Last100 with Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb. A veteran technology journalist, for The Guardian newspaper and Macworld, Steve also wrote and directed In Search of the Valley, the critically acclaimed documentary on Silicon Valley that was released in 2006.

O’Hear is much-liked in the business, so if he ever gets tired of making millions, he’ll always be welcome to come and re-join us journobloggers breaking rocks back in the Work House for gruel and geting trashed in comments.

He’ll have more to say on his blog I daresay.

So long Steve, and thanks for all the posts!

If you think you are as good as Steve was/is (not easy), apply here.

UPDATE: He blogs about his move here.