“You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there. You have to be humble as you execute but visionary and gigantic in terms of your aspiration. In the Internet industry, it’s not about grand innovation, it’s about a lot of little innovations: every day, every week, every month, making something a little bit better.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Go work at the post office or Starbucks if you want balance in your life.”
― Jason Calacanis
“These days, headlines are trying to get you to click.”
― Jason Calacanis
“It’s very important as a startup to get early press because, although it may not be a large number of people, having a ‘Fast Company’ story – some of those people that read it are going to be your next employees and hires, your next investors.”
― Jason Calacanis
“If you are delusional, sometimes the reality catches up with your delusion, and then all of a sudden you are a genius.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Google indexes the world’s information.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Imagine being 30 years old, thinking you were a media titan, and now you are labeled a ‘scam artist.’”
― Jason Calacanis
“The web and physical world is plagued with abundance – people need help sorting through all the good and bad stuff out there. The tyranny of choice is causing major psychic pain and frustration for people.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Instant access to anything is the future. So if you need a tutor or a baby sitter or a massage or any service, it’s going to be instantly available, 24 hours a day, through your phone, with one click.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Apps, email, and social are the three things Google does not control.”
― Jason Calacanis
“What I’ve learned in my career is that it takes the same amount of effort to build a $10bn company as it does a $1bn company; you as the entrepreneur are going to put your entire life, your entire effort into it.”
― Jason Calacanis
“If folks focus in on a niche and own it, there is a good chance they could make half a living from blogging.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I think you need to have a very strong angel community that is committed to mentoring up-and-coming entrepreneurs.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Things that look like an ‘overnight success’ typically are not.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I learned from my past.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Near-death experiences give you balance. You become more worldly. Your ideas become bigger.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Airbnb is a much more effective protest than shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I’m suggesting that, until America takes care of its debt, untangles the housing mess and gets unemployment under control, we all commit to working six days a week. Yep, move the standard 35-40 hour work week right up to 48 hours.”
― Jason Calacanis
“As the founder of your company, you must be in love with your brand and inspired by your brand’s mission if you have any hope of getting press for your product.”
― Jason Calacanis
“When I was coming up as an entrepreneur, I had to fight for everything I got, and there was no clear roadmap of how to be successful.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I think entrepreneurship is a beautiful thing.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Blogging is great, and I read blogs all day long. However, my goal is really to have a deep, meaningful discussion with people. For some reason, I’m able to accomplish this best via email.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Journalists have misquoted people for so long – and quoted them out of context that for many people like to have their words on record.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I don’t want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me… Just too much risk.”
― Jason Calacanis
“If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it’s the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online. Much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog.”
― Jason Calacanis
“People like rich applications on their desktop, and there is no reason why you can’t have both a rich desktop and a light, cloud-based application framework. Why is it always either/or for people?”
― Jason Calacanis
“Mahalo’s business model is advertising. Yahoo, Google, Ask, AOL and MSN are all advertising-based. So I don’t see anything wrong with advertising-based search.”
― Jason Calacanis
“For tech, I like the ‘DailySearchCast’, ‘TWiT’ and anything Veronica Belmont does on CNET. I think Perez Hilton is a riot, and the rest of my consumption is by people: Folks like Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, Mark Cuban, Brian Alvey, Jeff Jarvis, Xeni Jardin, etc.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I don’t need YouTube’s money. I have my own money.”
― Jason Calacanis
“As a publisher, you have no direct relationship with advertisers.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The down market favours the small two-, three-, four-person company, not the huge company with 100 people losing half a million dollars a month.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The companies that won’t do well will be the me-too companies: the fifth, sixth, seventh version of Twitter, etc.”
― Jason Calacanis
“That’s one of the things I love about entrepreneurship is that if you see something that you don’t like – and if you think you have a better idea – you can pursue your model.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I only take causes or write about things that I am passionate about, and I do it with a certain flair and a sort of wink and a nod.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I like to get attention for the things I think are important. And I think it is important that entrepreneurs – especially young ones – not be abused.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I am a huge fan of capitalism and a huge fan of entrepreneurship and changing the world with technology and with entrepreneurship. Capitalism is awesome. To me, capitalism is my religion.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Fire people who are not workaholics.”
― Jason Calacanis
“When it comes to individual bloggers, they have many choices now that include blogging for a network or going solo.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Today you can start a blog, build an audience, and give the advertising slots to AdBrite or Google AdSense.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The idea is that angel investors are supposed to be wealthy people supporting people who need funds, typically who are not wealthy, and don’t have the ability to do it themselves.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Obviously, New York and Boston and Los Angeles have pretty vibrant entrepreneurial scenes.”
― Jason Calacanis
“AOL has a great collection of brands, and the question is, ‘Can they innovate and scale their business?’ And those are very challenging things to do. But I think they are well positioned to grow.”
― Jason Calacanis
“My first company produced ‘Silicon Alley Reporter’ magazine, where I held the dual titles of CEO and Editor.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I’ve gotten more press than any entrepreneur could dream of – certainly more than I deserve – and I’ve never had a public relations firm working for me.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I’ve become addicted to playing poker because you’re constantly faced with confusion, and winning is trying to make sense out of nonsense.”
― Jason Calacanis
“You can’t be ever embarrassed about hustling.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I really think the Uberfication of everything is a trend that I didn’t expect to be coming this fast. I mean, every single thing you want to do in your life, people are building services to take all the pain out.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Just start thinking about all the different services in your life. Like getting your dry cleaning picked up and dropped off. Nobody has done the Uber of that yet. But that will be Uberfied. You will arrange your dry cleaning via your phone.”
― Jason Calacanis
“In my next life, I would like to be Charlie Rose or Howard Stern or maybe something in between.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I have hundreds if not tens of thousands of fans… The people who have negative things to say are typically loser-type people who are probably in some cases mentally ill.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Risk-taking is my thing… I think of my company as my chip stack.”
― Jason Calacanis
“CNN was crazy to think they could fill 24 hours with news – let alone around the world in 10 to 20 languages. Reuters or AP with a thousand people around the world covering news? Crazy.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Search folks don’t understand editorial. I’m not afraid of editorial costs, just like machine-search folks are not afraid of computer servers.”
― Jason Calacanis
“After Sept. 11, New York wasn’t the same, and that’s part of the reason why I left.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Creative destruction is gonna be the greatest thing that can happen to Manhattan.”
― Jason Calacanis
“You have to get in the limelight based on what you do, how creative you are, and not how much money you make.”
― Jason Calacanis
“When it comes to education, there is no one site you can point to that you can say, ‘They speak to the world, and that is the site where you go to learn.’”
― Jason Calacanis
“To get people to switch from Google, you have to offer something twice as better. But the truth is, the world doesn’t actually need better-quality search. I think we’ve got good enough search.”
― Jason Calacanis
“My mission is to grow business in Silicon Alley.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The balance of power shifts on the Internet to the individual. This is a two-way medium.”
― Jason Calacanis
“For three or four decades, we’ve been sitting here in front of this TV consuming a one-way medium that we had no control over.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The Internet is about giving the consumer exactly what they want, whether there’s an audience of one or 1,000 or 10,000, and then figuring out how to make money on it later.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case.”
― Jason Calacanis
“While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Commercial real estate is really a black box: its super opaque, and it’s hard to get the information.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The blogosphere is real, and it can be really harsh on fakes… so, if you’re a phoney, you’re going to get your bell rung.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Until you use the iPad for a couple of weeks, you can’t appreciate it. But it quickly becomes your primary consumption device.”
― Jason Calacanis
“If the founder comes to work every day, and it’s a struggle, that permeates the whole organization.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Everyone’s drunk on the term ‘blog.’”
― Jason Calacanis
“Do I think there’s going to be a business in blogging? Yes.”
― Jason Calacanis
“If I said I was going to make a newsletter that made $2-$3 million a year, no one would question me. If I say, ‘It’s a blog,’ everyone questions me.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Back in the ’90s, folks were not sure if they could trust the Web, and frankly, a lot of the services back then didn’t provide massive value.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Selling out isn’t selling out anymore. It’s getting the brass ring.”
― Jason Calacanis
“There’s nobody who has as big of a real-time logistics network than Uber.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The first phase of social media was listening to the conversation. The second phase was joining the conversation. The third phase will be hosting the conversation on your site.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The key to building a sustainable content company is to control costs.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The wisdom of the crowds has peaked. Web 3.0 is taking what we’ve built in Web 2.0 – the wisdom of the crowds – and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I’m not an investor in Meerkat, sadly, or, Periscope – I missed both of those – however, I do have a lot of inside information.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Even if you’re a relatively small player in search, that can still mean a company that’s worth several billion dollars.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The future of television is not on television but online. A majority of us are turning to our computers and mobile devices for news and entertainment, Millennials especially.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I think it hurts blogs when they have to turn off their comments.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I am not trying to model my career to be a one-hit wonder.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I find podcasting an enticing space.”
― Jason Calacanis
“It turns out a human being in two, three or four hours can build a search result that’s much better than Google, Yahoo or Ask.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Very, very few podcasts have made it to scale, and to me, that says this business will never be big.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The only way to make podcasting a real big business would be if you could somehow get the top seven podcasters to team up and make a mega-network.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Jon Miller would be amazing for Yahoo because he is extremely good at building display advertising businesses and buying young startups.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The tech and tech media world are meritocracies. To fall back to race as the reason why people don’t break out in our wonderful oasis of openness is to do a massive injustice to what we’ve fought so hard to create.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Food is the new health care.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I ain’t gonna work on YouTube’s farm no more.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I syndicate my Twitter activity to Facebook, but I get very little traffic from it.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I find very few folks are watching their Facebook feed, some are watching their Twitter feed, and all of them are watching their email box. So, while social networks are nice, email is still the killer application.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The only time I felt a little too exposed was for a week then I started life-streaming for a couple of hours a day on Qik and Ustream. It became very much like the film ‘We Live in Public.’”
― Jason Calacanis
“Social media, like blogs, are truth-seeking technologies. In fact, the Internet itself is the greatest truth-generating device ever created.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Fire fast: Fire people who do not fit into the culture of your company and who are negative.”
― Jason Calacanis
“For a first-time entrepreneur, there’s nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there’s such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The stuff coming out of Silicon Valley is dorky. Like, it’s not very sexy.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The problem most people make with their media presence is they’re trying to craft a media presence as opposed to just consistently publishing who they are.”
― Jason Calacanis
“No one has looked at news from new atomic units of content, like a tweet on Twitter.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The problem today isn’t low-quality journalism, it’s too much noise. If one out of five ‘Business Insider’ stories is original, the other four would be culled.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I’m trying to correct what is wrong in journalism today: wasting users’ time.”
― Jason Calacanis
“YouTube has made a lot of changes to support time on site – a statistic they care about. But subscriber support is lacking.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Let’s make it so the more you invest in YouTube, the better deal YouTube gets for you.”
― Jason Calacanis
“As content creators, we’re benefitting YouTube every day. YouTube couldn’t do what they do without us, so do not underestimate your power.”
― Jason Calacanis
“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.”
― Jason Calacanis
“All we have to do is find something we love doing each day, surround ourselves with like-minded people, and put all of our effort into that one thing at all times.”
― Jason Calacanis
“People can easily make millions of dollars without much work in America.”
― Jason Calacanis
“This concept that starting a company is so hard and that you’ll never make it is conspiracy concocted by the rich and powerful to keep you from trying – and you’ve fallen for it.”
― Jason Calacanis
“America might be a dying empire, but it’s not going to die in our lifetime – and it doesn’t have to die at all.”
― Jason Calacanis
“I think Google’s a brilliant company, filled with brilliant people who have done brilliant things.”
― Jason Calacanis
“In the technology industry, a 48 hour work week would be, for most, a vacation.”
― Jason Calacanis
“If you’ve got a good job, you should bust your butt to make your company as successful and profitable as possible.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Car technology needs to advance, and the best place for that to happen in is Silicon Valley.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Of course the first version of an all-electric sports car is going to be expensive.”
― Jason Calacanis
“The reason I bought the Tesla was to help fund the Model S – and because I like things that are fast, sexy and high-tech.”
― Jason Calacanis
“Supporting American technology companies is one of the most patriotic things you can do – the technology industry is the reason our country has such a high-standard of living and why we can afford to spread the democracy virus around the globe.”
― Jason Calacanis
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