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Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis77 posts

Jason Calacanis is an American blogger, publisher, and web entrepreneur, born in Brooklyn in 1970. He created the Silicon Alley Reporter industry newsletter and magazine. He set up the Digital Coast Reporter, a sister publication, and organized conferences in LA, New York, and San Francisco. He later created Weblogs, Inc., which was sold to AOL. He was managing editor of Netscape at AOL, and later joined the venture firm Sequoia Capital. He created Mahalo.com, a search engine, and the Open Angel Forum aimed at connecting startups and angel investors. He hosts the podcast This Week In Startups.

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2014

How To Make Millions interview

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Calacanis tells HowStuffWorks about how Weblogs grew and developed:

We had all these passionate people blogging about these specific topics that advertisers could then advertise against, so you had this perfect marriage of bloggers who were passionate, an audience who was passionate about reading the bloggers, unfiltered, and advertisers, who could join that whole love-fest

17 Oct, 2014

TWiST – Tinder etiquette

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Calacanis, Sarver, and Hoover talk on This Week In Startups about etiquette on the dating app. Calacanis:

Are you on the Tinder with all those other kids?

Hoover:

I had my first Tinder date, like, a month ago

Calacanis:

You really went on a Tinder date. What’s that like?

Hoover:

It was normal. She was fine.

Jason Calacanis learns Tinder etiquette from Ryan Hoover and Ryan Sarver

11 Oct, 2014

Starts LAUNCH incubator

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Calacanis announces that he will be hosting a startup incubator that starts Dec 1. and ends at the LAUNCH Festival on March 2. The program will consist of six startups initially. Two slots have already been filled, by Weblogs, Inc. co-founder Brian Alvey and former LAUNCH CEO Jason Demant, leaving four spaces open:

The Incubator” is going to follow the basic Y Combinator model of 12 weeks and 12 dinners with speakers, but with a few twists.

11 Sep, 2014

Starts Launch Ticker

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Calacanis starts the news service with $50,000 as he says he is tired of reading padded quotes and clickbait headlines. Initially he hires a college student to pull the most interesting stories from tech media and put them into a spreadsheet each day. To assistant:

Why the f-ck did you put something not important in my presidential daily brief? ‘Expedia Hires a New VP of Nothing’ — I don’t need to know this. Go find me something important.

Once the formula was perfected, he then started sharing the Google Doc with people in the tech industry, then created the app. Subscription costs $100 a year. He says TechCrunch is a joke since it lost Arrington and other senior people:

TechCrunch is the publication of record, but they’re so bad and uninformed. It’s insult after insult. When I play poker with other VC’s, we all laugh at TechCrunch.

Business Insider has one good story for every 10 stories, while other tech media are dominated by aggressive PR tactics. Launch Ticker isn’t profitable yet but he is already working on a Pro service that costs 10 times as much, and a generalized consumer-facing service, Inside. Calacanis on his media vs others:

You’re talking to LeBron James about guys playing in the rec league. These guys are amateurs, I’m the f-cking real deal.

15 Jul, 2014

TWiST retail at LAUNCH Beacon

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Calacanis sits down with Ryan Craver of Lord & Taylor to talk about how consumers shop:

Are you brick or are you click?

Craver predicts how technology will enhance our purchasing power and rock the in-store experience.

Launch Beacon Retail 2014 - Ryan M Craver & Jason Calacanis (ryanmcraver.com)

3 Jul, 2014

This Week In Startups interview

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Hoover and Calacanis talk about new products on Product Hunt like the Uber Wedding app and Soundcloud for iOS, how he got the idea for the site, and how viewers can interact with the people who create the products.

There’s some very interesting conversations that come out of Product Hunt.

He says that for an app called InstaNerd, site users contributed ideas and the founder incorporated them to improve the product.

Product Hunt founder on his cool new site & what's hot in tech

Says Cutts killed Mahalo

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Calacanis posts on the site about how he says Cutts killed Mahalo.com with the Panda formula:

[Cutts] just smiled and told me “you don’t have a penalty” with a shit-eating grin…. they targeted us for destruction and i had to layoff 80 americans working from home full-time. Salt of the earth people…. people making $500-700 a week… while the people at Google are spending $200 a week on gourmet food.

I’ve still got that Google kicking our ass fire in my belly. I want to come back from them jumping me in the parking lot and have my revenge.

9 May, 2014

Interview with Gavin Newsom

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Calacanis sits down with the San Francisco Lt. Governor to talk about how startups can help with urban problems, and Newsom’s vision for the city, asking him tough questions:

How San Francisco is developing and growing int o a city of the future

Is it turning into Manhattan?

What will it look like in 10 years?

22 Apr, 2014

State Of The Media speech

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Calacanis delivers his annual address about what he thinks of the state of new and old media:

I’m going to go very fast, and I’m going to talk about every single type of media

Keynote: Jason Calacanis - State of the Media

11 Mar, 2014

Launch Festival interview

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Graham is interviewed by Calacanis at Launch Festival 2014, and talks about his decision to hand over the running of the accelerator to Sam Altman.

Y Combinator’s gonna have to grow. We grow as the number of startups grows and the number of startups has been growing. You saw how it started up – it was in my kitchen. Now it’s got 10 full-time partners…maybe 20 people. 632 startups we funded. It’s turned into this giant thing.  I’m no good at running this giant thing. Sam, however, is going to be good at running a giant thing.

Y Combinator's Paul Graham sits down with Jason at LAUNCH Festival 2014

4 Mar, 2014

Launch Festival interview

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Calcanis and Kalanick have their first interview in four years, talking about Uber’s expansion plans, and a new feature of a push notification to let customers know when surge pricing periods are about to end. Kalanick says Uber now provides more than half the total rides in San Francisco, although he doesn’t give specific numbers. Kalanick talks about being an entrepreneur:

You’re afraid of failure, you do the best you can, but you really need to have the perseverance, the stamina, the hard core, to just make it through

Uber's Travis Kalanick and Jason Calacanis at LAUNCH Festival 2014

5 Feb, 2014

Phat Startup interview

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Calacanis talks about his come-up in the tech media world, diversification, and why you should always focus on your product, as well as loving your haters, why people in San Francisco are lying when they say it’s not about the money, how to market using free platforms, why you should always come out swinging, and how hip hop is all the inspiration he ever needed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78e9aHcL47c

27 Jan, 2014

Inside.com

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jason-calacanis-inside-com-logoCalacanis launches the mobile app, which highlights and summarizes news stories. The app is related to Mahalo.com. He hires Snyder, a former Atlantic editor, to run the service. It allows users to read a summarized version of the news or swipe through to read the full article. The news selection is curated by an editorial team. Snyder:

The idea behind it is that the world is heading to mobile, but there still isn’t a solution in the new space. I feel like the transition, in terms of news and mobile, is sort of where news and the web was in 2002. Everyone knew the web was going to be huge, but there still wasn’t a grammar to the form. [Inside.com aims to] marry what humans are good at and what technology is good at.

6 Jan, 2014

Intruders TV interview

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Calacanis talks about how Peter Rojas pioneered live-blogging at Engadget, and says Mahalo is effectively applying the technique to the rest of the world:

Jason Calacanis on Mahalo Liveblog and a lot more...

22 Dec, 2013

Investment case for AngelList

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Calacanis talks about the investment case for Naval Ravikant’s angel investment fund, and the future of investing in general:

PandoMonthly: Jason Calacanis on AngelList and the future of investing

Dec 2013

Interview with MBA student

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Calacanis accepts an interview request from an MBA student, and talks about why he accepted the request:

Somebody emailed me out of the blue and said, Listen, I’m a fan of the show, I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve got an assignment, can I interview you? And I said of course…Because when I was a nobody coming up in the world, I sent those emails out, I hussled, and I got no responses…but then I got one or two responses…I’ve gotta make time for other people

Jason Calacanis Interviewed by MBA Student David Kawata

26 Nov, 2013

PandoMonthly Fireside Chat

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Calacanis talks with Sarah Lacy about how poker strategy is like entrepreneurship, various pieces of advice for entrepreneurs, and how family relationships like his strained relations with his father can affect people’s careers:

You show me a great entrepreneur and I’ll show you a f-cked-up relationship with one of their parents

A Fireside Chat Jason Calacanis

22 Nov, 2013

Investment strategy

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Sarah Lacy talks with Calacanis about how he managed to succeed as an acquired taste despite being fairly abrasive, and his investment strategy going forward:

PandoMonthly: Jason Calacanis' investment strategy