Jason Calacanis

Obligatory link to Jason Calcanis's "Why I Emplyed a Felon", from 2009:

http://calacanis.com/2009/03/05/why-i-employed-a-felon/

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Excerpt:

> However, Mark screwed up by not doing a simple Google search on John’s name. If Mark had, he would have easily found out about these crimes, we would never have hired John, and I would not be writing this letter. Why would we even take the risk of hiring a felon hacker? No one would, right?

Months after John’s hiring, our VP of Operations found out about the crimes John had committed. We sat down with John and learned about what he did when he was younger, how he was abused as a child, his anger issues, and how he found some level of peace in being part of the team at Mahalo.

Now I was left with the decision to fire John on the spot and cut my losses and responsibility. This was the easy choice, obviously. If I really wanted to cover my butt, I could turn on one of my best friends, Mark Jeffrey, and fire him for making the only mistake he’s ever made working for me. The other option was to keep John on and deal with the potential firestorm of criticism that we’re now facing.

I chose to put my job and reputation on the line and keep John employed.

At this moment, I’m honestly glad we didn’t know about what John did when we hired him and I’m happy we’ve kept him on board. It’s taught me a lot about society, computer crime and rehabilitation. In John, I see almost every computer programmer from my time “hacking” on BBSes as a…

it seems natural and appropriate to let poorly run businesses fail. unfortunately, our central bank doesn't prioritize based on inflation rates: http://www.house.gov/jec/press/2005/10-18-05.pdf instead they do the following:

instead of managing inflation, they generally do everything possible to prevent periods of deflation (which requires propping up the money supply) which is what happens when you let industry leaders fail. if we let all of the businesses fail instead of bailing them out the fallout would likely be unprecedented.

see jason calcanis's explanation of the belt tightening effect and the resulting death spiral. imagine if every industry was experiencing this. http://calacanis.com/2008/11/06/the-future-of-startups/

people need to realize that this is not an adam smith capitalistic system, this is a system heavily influenced by the government. this leaves room for regulation loopholes and mistakes which create bubbles which ultimately pop. this bubble has been patched for years, its getting too big to pop. popping it would remove our status as world police and likely be a large security threat.

george bush wanted to let these companies fail, but he was told, albeit mostly by market and industry leaders that letting them fail would create a chain reaction of failures and deflation.

the answer is probably to let some companies fail so as to punish poor businesses, but we have to be wary of purging the entire system.

I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility.

Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter.

But that was just the start. Wikipedia killed it in SEO when it was easy to do so, but it also did one other thing that most SEO-driven sites (eg: About) didn't do correctly - it cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads (anyone remember Jason Calacanis' articles on how they are leaving $100m on the table? See [1]). So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.

Wikipedia's dominance continues because it's basically impossible to overcome its lead in inbound links and domain authority. Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.

Well done.

[1] https://calacanis.com/2006/10/28/wikipedia-leaves-100m-on-the-table-or-please-jimbo-reconsider/

Correct. We will let folks buy trade show tables and exhibitor booths through the front door. I have no problem with a funded company that is selling to our audience to buy a table.

I mean, if you're selling a SaaS product that has an average LTV of $5,000 it's probably good idea to spend 2-5x that on a sponsorship for our events (or someone else's) because, well, you'll make it back!

The issue we are talking about here is people "applying" to be in a competition to "get exposure to angels," and then being "accepted" for a fee. That's just lame.

I'm a lucky bastard in that I have the chip stack to take on the risk of a $1m+ budget event, get the support of the top sponsors in the industry and be able to give everyone free tickets and tables.

Remember, Mike and I fought to kill the DEMO conference ($20k to present!) and then he sold to AOL and they decided to maximize profit. I decided to minimize profit -- in fact, my goal is to net out to ZERO each year and give back MORE AND MORE.

Why?

I believe the angel investor who gives away the most value gets into the best deals.

The SCALE conference is going to be free for 2,500 of 3,000 seats. http://calacanis.com/2015/04/29/welcome-to-scale/

Are throw away comments stated on keynote speeches multiple times?

Are throw away comments used as the core marketing and public relations strategies for a new company?

Just because you are hoping that people have short memories does not mean you can change reality.

Lets see what Jason called Youtube
http://calacanis.com/2006/05/11/how-youtube-won-great-seo-stolen-content-or-the-biggest-hit/
"How YouTube Won: Great SEO + Stolen Content (or the biggest hit and run in the history of the Internet)"

And yet when Jason takes your content and wraps it in Mahalo that is somehow legitimate. hmm. double standard, eh?

That is not an area where I taught you anything...it was one you discovered on your own, while analyzing Youtube.

The other thing you mentioned about YouTube was "If YouTube makes $250M from a sale their founders and VCs should give $225M of it back to the content owners like NBC and Loren Michaels who they stole it from!"

And I do hope you hold yourself to your own standards. Though if history is any guide :(

There have, or are going to be, a few actually:

1. Startup U (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_U) Was a show about Draper University and their incubator program.

2. Jason Calacanis is working on a reality series now, just not sure when it is to be released. (http://calacanis.com/2016/02/29/why-im-doing-a-reality-show/)

3. BravoTV had Start-ups Silicon Valley (http://www.bravotv.com/start-ups-silicon-valley)

As the other comment pointed out though there are problems with doing a startup reality show. In order for it to "sell" and be worth the production time, there needs to be a level of drama that is added to the show or "instigated" by the director/producers. The other big problem is that 80% of the show would be just watching people code or sit in meetings. Finally, as a viewer you would want an underdog that prevails or at least one startup that becomes a unicorn. There is no way to predict this from the start for sure.

Jason has stated his desire to keep it authenticate, so we will see.