Starts Launch Ticker

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.