How To Make Millions interview
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
This Week In Startups interview
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.
Launch Festival interview
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.
Launch Festival interview
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
NextShark interview
Calacanis talks about building Weblogs Inc., how a blog network isn’t as easily scaleable now as it was before, and the problems he sees with YouTube. He says for artists, YouTube is possibly the best way to spread their work except for Pinterest which may be better for fashion designers, and Twitter may be better for comedians, but starting a standalone business on YouTube is problematic:
[..] there are certain things that make it really untenable to production companies and make it really impossible for it to be anything more than the third of the mix; anything more than a marketing tool with a little bit of revenue.
Shiny Media interview
Jason Calacanis talks about Mahalo.com, his online rivals including Nick Denton of Gawker Media, and a new announcement about the human powered search engine:
