Chris Dixon Wins Crunchies 2012 “Angel Of The Year;” Peter Thiel Is Named “VC Of The Year”

As you may know, TechCrunch, GigaOm and VentureBeat host the Crunchies award ceremony each year to celebrate the most compelling startups, Internet and technology innovations of the year. But we also recognize the angel investors and venture capitalists who write the checks that fund these innovations.

For Angel of the Year, which was presented by Google Ventures Partner Kevin Rose and VentureBeat’s Rebecca Grant, the nominees were Michael Arrington, Chris Dixon, Paul Graham, David Lee and Chris Sacca. Paul Graham took the second spot, and the winner is Chris Dixon!

Dixon, who joined VC firm Andreessen Horowitz at the end of 2012, has made angel investments in more than 50 startups including Hipmunk, Foursquare, Kickstarter, Stripe, Pinterest, Dropbox, Codecademy, Stack Overflow, Bloomreach, Optimizely, Trialpay, OMGPOP, and Skype. He also co-founded an East Coast seed venture fund called Founder Collective and via that fund, made investments in MakerBot, Ifttt, Milo (acquired by eBay), Betaworks, Groupme (acquired by Skype), and Buzzfeed.

For VC of the year, which was presented by Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and VentureBeat’s Dylan Tweney, the nominees were Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz, Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz and Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel. Jim Goetz, whose enterprise investments include Jive, Nimble Storage and Palo Alto Networks, took the second spot. And the winner is Peter Thiel!

Thiel, who launched VC firm Founders Fund, was the first outside investor in Facebook, which went public in 2012. During the year, Founders Fund also led investments in Stripe, Asana and Quora, among others. And Thiel funded Palantir Technologies, a company which he also helped launch.

Congratulations to our winners!