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Normally we cover bootstrapped products: people who are self-funding the stuff they build. We do this because I’m naturally drawn to bootstrapped companies.
For this episode I wanted to go into “enemy” territory: I wanted to talk to the VC community. To do that I contacted Jason Calacanis, an angel investor, and the voice of funded startups on his podcast This Week In Startups. This is part 1 where we delved into the human said of Mr. Calacanis – where he came from, and how he got to where he is today.
Show Notes
Normally we cover bootstrapped products: people who are self-funding the stuff they build. We do this because I’m naturally drawn to bootstrapped companies.
For this episode I wanted to go into “enemy” territory: I wanted to talk to the VC community. To do that I contacted Jason Calacanis, an angel investor, and the voice of funded startups on his podcast This Week In Startups. This is part 1 where we delved into the human said of Mr. Calacanis – where he came from, and how he got to where he is today.
We also have 3 new sponsors this month:
- Looking for a new job? Mood Media is hiring a Jr. Product Manager. They are looking for an energetic, entrepreneurial technophile who is ready to drive Mood Media’s Interactive product lines in North America forward into the next decade. This person must be a visionary, strategic thinker with a hands-on approach. For more details, visit: productpeople.tv/moodmedia
- I also just discovered KnowAds. The hardest part about online advertising is figuring out what works. KnowAds reveals your competitor’s campagins showing you exactly what’s working for them. You get to see their most successful ad copy & ad placements. Go to productpeople.tv/ads and sign-up for an account.
- And finally, if you’re trying to set-up an online store, you need to use Shopify. I’ve tried setting up dozens of online stores for clients, and there are always so many headaches: handling payment gateways, multiple currencies, taxes, shipping rates. Shopify solves all of these problems for you. I want you to go to productpeople.tv/shopify and get a 14 day free trial.
Notable quotes
- “My first business was making copies of Star Wars on BetaMax for my friends.”
- “I don’t think being an entrepreneur is the best mode of existence; but I do think it’s important for our kids to see us working hard.”
- “Show me a great entrepreneur, I’ll show you a fucked up relationship with their parents.”
- “There were these things called BBSes. I had a 300 BAUD modem.”
- “In college I was making $3.50/hour managing computer systems.”
- “One of my first jobs was doing LotusNotes scripting.”
- “When I saw Mosaic, the first browser, I was like: Whoa. When they added images, the internet felt like a magazine.”
- “People thought that paying bloggers was sacrilegious.”
- “I thought doing 10 blog posts a day on gadgets was crazy. But we ultimately we ended up doing 40, 50, 60 posts a day.”
- “Weblogs Inc. was a great product.”
- “We sold the first podcast ad ever to Volvo. We commercialized it; we saw there was a business opportunity there.”
- “When people use it, and can’t shut up about it, you know you’ve got a great product.”
- “I like to tinker, I like to build products. I’ve had a lot of opportunities to do other stuff, but I like product.”
Show notes
- http://twitter.com/jason
- http://inside.com
- http://www.weblogsinc.com
- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/10/prweb172213.htm
Creators and Guests
What is Product People?
A podcast focused on great products and the people who make them
Hey, this is Product People. Normally we cover bootstrap products, people who are self funding the stuff they build. And we do this because I'm naturally drawn to bootstrap companies. But for this episode, I wanted to try something different. I wanted to talk to the VC community.
Speaker 1:To do that, I contacted Jason Kallikanis, an angel investor and the voice of funded startups on his podcast This Week in Startups. This is part one where we delved into the human side of mister Kalakanis, where he came from, and how he got to where he is today. Now the reason I'm able to do this show and offer it to you for free is that we have great companies that sponsor us. Sprintly has been there from the beginning. Perfect for software teams of three or more people, Sprintly is the easiest way for managers and developers to track the software process.
Speaker 1:You and your team can try sprint.ly for free. Go to www.sprint.ly. We also have three new sponsors this month. Are you looking for a new job? Mood Media is hiring a junior product manager.
Speaker 1:They're looking for an energetic entrepreneurial technophile who's ready to drive Mood Media's interactive product lines in North America forward into the next decade. This person must be a visionary strategic thinker with a hands on approach. For more details, visit productpeople.tv/moodmedia. Get yourself a new product management job. I also just discovered no ads.
Speaker 1:The hardest part about online advertising is figuring out what works. No ads reveals your competitors' campaigns, showing you exactly what's working for them. You get to see their most successful ad copy and ad placements. Go to productpeople.tvads and sign up for an account. And finally, if you're trying to set up an online store, you need to use Shopify.
Speaker 1:I've tried setting up dozens of online stores for clients and there are always so many headaches. Handling payment gateways, multiple currencies, taxes, shipping rates. Shopify solves all of these problems for you. Want you to go to productpeople.tvshopify and get a fourteen day free trial. Now let's get to the show.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Justin, and this is Product People, the podcast focused on great products and the people who make them. And today on the show, I have a man who wears many hats. He's a podcaster, an entrepreneur, and an investor. And he just announced a new venture capital fund. Jason Kallikanis, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. My pleasure. I didn't announce a fund. Somebody found the SEC documents. Actually, the fund, we discussed the fund live on stage with David Sachs at the launch festival.
Speaker 3:Guess people didn't realize they did it then or didn't cover it back then. I guess when an SEC documents gets filed, it becomes real to people.
Speaker 2:Well, that's interesting. Why do you think it didn't kind of blow up originally? Does the Why?
Speaker 3:Because I didn't make a big deal of it. I don't send out press releases. I don't really try to get press. Just email my email list when I'm doing something or I tweet it. And I think also the tech press pretty petty, to be honest, like, you know, they don't like to cover some of the tech press, might not want to cover what I do, because they consider me competitive.
Speaker 3:You know, like, when VentureBeat and TechCrunch and PandaDaily, all three of them, like, maybe not PandaDaily, but you do see a little bit, or you have seen in the past, like, not covering each other stuff. I think, actually, PandaDaily has been really great about coming to a launch festive from day one, and covering it fairly, which I credit to Sarah Lacey's, you know, editorialship.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's before we get into all that, I'm wondering if you could rewind first because a lot of people know you as an investor. A lot of people know you as kind of a media personality as well and active in the startup scene. But can you give us a little background on on yourself?
Speaker 2:Where did you grow up and how did you get into startups?
Speaker 3:I grew up in Brooklyn, an area of Brooklyn called Bay Ridge, which is in the South Area, Southwest Part of Brooklyn, right by the Arizona Narrows Bridge. Okay. And my first business was working for my dad in his bar. So, that was my first job,
Speaker 2:No way. Yeah,
Speaker 3:that was my work in his bar as a busboy, polishing silver, all that kind of stuff. Think I probably started at the age of five or six years old, polishing silver and dropping off bank deposits at the age of seven or eight. So, no joke.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:Well, was easy for my dad to hand me like 3,000 or $4,000 and stay in the van and just say, into the bank, give it to the teller. Here's the, he had all the slips filled out. Later on, I filled out the slips. But, I would go to the teller and just hand, you know, 3 or $4,000 to them and say, need a thousand dollars in singles. I need $500 in quarters.
Speaker 3:Then, the rest, can just deposit. You know, it's doing financial transactions. First business was copying, had a copy of The Empire Strikes Back that somebody had made a Betamax copy of and lost to my dad in a poker game. And so, I was making copies of that and selling it for 30 or $40 a pop back before Star Wars was even on, was even available. So, I was an entrepreneur young kid.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Was called Jason's Hot Tapes. I was 14 at McKinley Junior High School. And I had one business card I typed up and laminated. Because I didn't understand how business cards work.
Speaker 3:I typed up and laminated one card that said Jason's Hot Tapes. And I used like different colors, because my typewriter that I'd gotten for my birthday, pre, it's like 12 years old. Yeah. Different colors. So, I had like J in red, A in green, S in black.
Speaker 3:Know, and I would hand it people and say, hey, I'm with Jason's Hot Tapes. They look at my card and say, I have that back? And they say, oh, you want
Speaker 2:it back?
Speaker 3:I said, yeah, that's the only one got. I take the card back from a pretty funny scene in a movie actually.
Speaker 2:You saved money on business cards.
Speaker 3:Well, didn't understand how business card works, it was kind of a joke. I saw people had business cards at some point when I was 10, 11 or 12 and I thought you had one and you showed it to people, they looked at and they gave it back to you. Don't understand. You got a whole bunch of them printed. Nobody ever told me that part.
Speaker 2:Now, you were 14 at that time, where did the motivation come from? Did you want to be an entrepreneur? Did you want to make money? What was the motivation behind that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I probably wanted to make money and I also like the idea of building a business and doing transactions. Eventually, I like to making products. I also like being the boss. I like to be in charge, think, because saw my dad running his bar and telling people what to do. And he was being bossy.
Speaker 3:He's a bossy guy. I just like the idea of being the captain. You know, I thought that was a pretty cool position on the ship. So, I guess we emulate what we see. So I wanted to be in charge.
Speaker 3:I wanted to run the ship. I wanted to try to make an experience that people loved. And watching my dad build his bars, people loved coming to my dad's bars and restaurants. And so, I got to see him craft that product and people fall in love with it. People would always say to me, you know, I don't if you got picked up after school, another parent would say, Oh, was at your dad's bar last night.
Speaker 3:It's an awesome place. Your dad makes the rice steak frites, or you're at the cappuccino at your dad's bar. Was amazing, you know. So for me, was like, Oh, there's something special about like, these other dads are lawyers and bankers and schlubs. Probably made much more money than my dad, and had much more stable careers, and they got home and decent hours spent time with their families, as opposed to being out five in the morning.
Speaker 3:Drinking like my dad did. Not that I'm bitter about it, but that's what he did. Yeah. And, I just thought it was cooler. My dad was much cooler because he was creating that product, right?
Speaker 3:It's a product podcast. So, he made that product, he crafted it, he thought about people's experience, and he was a user experience architect.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now, you're a father, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have a three and a year old daughter. I have
Speaker 2:a three and a half year old and I'm a dad too. I think about this all the time, about what can we do as dads to inspire our kids to want to do that stuff, to make their own businesses and make their own products.
Speaker 3:I don't know that you have to worry about it too much. I think that there's probably things earlier in life that are more important, like spending time with them, like being present, having activities, having joy. You know, letting them follow what is interesting to them. So there's this whole, I've researched, and my wife and I have researched a bunch of the educational theories and techniques, like Montessori, Reggio, etcetera. And the Reggio Amelia program is kind of interesting because you just sort of follow the child's muse.
Speaker 3:Like, if they're interested in crickets, then we can go get crickets. We can, you know, do things with crickets and get like, follow this cricket obsession. We, and we did that with our daughter. And now, when she gets into something, she's really into it. So, we watched Brave, and then we got a bow and arrow.
Speaker 3:We got another bow and arrow, and we got the arrows, and the target. We've been talking about bows and arrows, and, you know, just following their muse, I think, and maybe not projecting onto them. I don't know that being an entrepreneur is the best mode of existence. I mean, we're biased to it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I don't know that that's what I wish for my daughter. I wish she does what makes her happy, and she has joy in her life. So, But I think that if they do see you working hard, that is important. Because I don't want my daughter to think like, Oh, well, you just sort of like, I don't know, you just, you're affluent and you got it. How and Yeah.
Speaker 3:Have three cars. Why? Like, I want them to under I want her to understand about future children to understand like, Hey, Daddy works hard. Mhmm. And and here's what It is why he's at the I want him to see me get up early and come back late and understand that I have to sacrifice to build companies and do this.
Speaker 3:And I still have time for them, of course. But, you know, don't want people to be lazy. Yeah. I don't want my kids to be lazy. I want them to have some drive and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:So I think if they see drive in their parents, they'll just naturally have drive. I hope.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, does a lot of your drive come from watching your dad hustle in his bar?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. I think my mom, too. My mom worked three or four jobs to get us through school. I mean, she was really the hero in the family. I mean, she worked really hard when my dad's business has collapsed, actually.
Speaker 3:This is a very like, it's a very textured relationship there between me and my parents. Especially me and my dad. Mean, show me a great entrepreneur. I'll show you a fucked up relationship with your father. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Or mom, for that matter. I've heard from people like, know, came home to their mom and their mom was like, Oh, that's not really that impressive. Now they're like overachieving entrepreneurs. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And their mom was never quite impressed enough. My mom was always impressed with everything.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. So, as a kid, how did you get into computers? What was the eventual connection there?
Speaker 3:In the late 70s, probably '78, 7980, I, when I was eight, nine, 10 years old, I was at my cousin, Ed and Bill McCabe's house, and they had went to a camp. And, was a computer camping offer, they had TRRS eighty's there. And, we would like, you know, we would go get what was called punch card, like, and you would just go to a computer that would look something like this one. And, that was a TSR 80, right there, on my screen. Although, I guess you can't see it, but if we send you the video, you will.
Speaker 3:Anyway, type in TSR 80. It's just a computer with two floppy drives, and there were other ones like it. And we would just go and we write code. So, take one of these cards, and you would say, you know, basic 10, you know, print this, 20 do this, 30 do this, and, you know, whatever. And you type it all in, and then you say, Run program.
Speaker 3:But there was no way to save it, really, because we didn't have floppies. Although, this model has floppies. We didn't really have floppy disks available to us. We just write a program, and then that was computer camp. Just grab something and type it.
Speaker 3:So, thought that was fascinating. So, begged my And I saw people getting Commodore 60 four's, and I had an Atari. So, was just like in the seventies. It's like computers were starting, you know, this is when Steve Jobs was making them, right, in Wozniak. And so, I was right in that sort of zone.
Speaker 3:And eventually, I think the I owned a lot of video game consoles. And then, got the IBM PC Junior. That to me, when that came out, boy was that like the greatest computer ever. And I begged my dad for it and, yeah, it was incredible to have a computer. The release date March 1984.
Speaker 3:I got it right as we were going to high school.
Speaker 2:When did you make the connection that you could use this technology to build stuff? Build and launch stuff and that people would pay or you could make money from it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, there was something called BBSs, and there was a, there was BBS software in the eighties. Where a bulletin board system was, was I turn my computer on, you dial into it, you do something, and then you leave. So, what you could do is leave a message on a message board, or you could download a file or upload a file. Those are the basic things you do.
Speaker 3:Or you could read documents. And so, were bulletin board systems, BBS's. And, I was, what we call a SysAdmin or a junior size SysOp. And, it was called PC Board and, yeah, it was great. We would set up these things.
Speaker 3:Dial in. So, like, Cola Country was one here, you can see. And we would, we would steal computer software. I mean, that's what we did. So, back in the eighties, I had a Ventel, modem Ventel, 300 mod modem.
Speaker 3:And I wonder if I could find it online, but I had this Ventel 300 mod modem that was this big fat monstrosity. It didn't have the couplers like these ones do. It was standalone, but it was pretty cool, the Ventel modem I had. Could connect the 300 baud, which for anybody listening, if you had a dial up in the ninety's or February, it was a 56,000 so imagine 300. Literally text would come in like this.
Speaker 2:I started at 2,400. Can't imagine 300. So what was it about the BBS scene that gave you kind of a picture of building products using computers? Was there something on there that made you feel like, there's something here?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, because we did a lot of things that were really fascinating to me, like, would trade, because we had to pay for phone service back then, and it wasn't flat rate. We would trade Sprint phone codes. So, back then, the way Sprint worked is, you would set up what was called phone freaking. So, you'd set up your phone to dial the Sprint 800 number, and then you randomly try five six digit codes. So, there's only five or six digits then, and eventually, Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you did a thousand of them, or 2,000 of them, you might get one or two that were actual codes. And then, we use those to dial across the country to California, BBS is from New York, or vice versa, or international. We download software. So, it's very fascinating to log into something in Australia, or London, or in California, download Chessmaster, which somebody had broken. I remember downloading Chessmaster, somebody hacked Chessmaster, and we downloaded it in New York.
Speaker 3:And then we became the guys who had Chessmaster in New York, that was cracked, that you didn't need a serial number. So we became these heroes, because everybody, you know, like, when I say everybody, a 100 people downloaded it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then this like, mafiosa guys we knew were like, Hey, you got software that's cracked. Can you give them, like, some guys from Eighteenth Avenue? So we started making copies of that for them, and they would give us like $5 a copy, then they go sell for 10. It was like, really crazy stuff I was into. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I wasn't quite like the guys in Manhattan, who were going really crazy, like, but we, like, we break into the board of Ed Computer System, like, how do we break into it? There was no password Security. Just piled in, you know. Yeah. End up, you're in there.
Speaker 3:And so, we we figured out, I remember my best hack, or my best manipulation was I called up the computer room. I just kept calling public libraries and saying, can I have the computer room? Can have the computer room? Can I have the computer guy? And I have two guys, Hey, it's Jason from the stack down in Lower Manhattan.
Speaker 3:Can I get the number for the stack to dial up? Because we were setting up a new modem. And the guy gave me the number. Yeah. I was like, Oh my God, I got the number for the stack at the New York Public Library.
Speaker 3:So we could go in and we could Just like when you were there, you could dial in and do searches for books. Yeah. When I was 18 years old and went to college, I had the number. And so people were like, Wait, don't have to go What are you doing? And I was like, Yeah, I'm just connecting over the internet to that, you know, and dialing up into it or whatever we were doing.
Speaker 3:I'm like, Hey, look, I have access to the stack at New the York Public Library. Can tell what books are there. So people will like, Oh, can you help me do that? Then even in college, was like, making $3.50 an hour, you know, doing which was the minimum wage at the time, you know, managing computers there. Then, we'd manage computers and we'd pirate.
Speaker 3:We're We're perfect. Get $10 for pirating, we're perfect for somebody. And it was like a really like, you know, I don't advise people to be into crime, but we did a lot of capers. Would call them capers, because people really didn't get hurt by them. We're into capers.
Speaker 3:And, you know, I just love the idea that you could connect other people. And that was the rush of it. Was like, all of sudden, I'm chatting with somebody. So, when BBS became really sophisticated, they have three, four, five, six, seven, eight modems. Some of them could have even more, 20 modems.
Speaker 3:They have two or three of them connected by a serial port. But the thing was, then we'd have a chat room of five or 10 people. And then five or 10 people are chatting about breaking into stuff, and people And then I started seeing people trading credit card numbers, and that's when I was like I started to get actually paranoid because we were using phone codes at Severian High School the public things. And then I started seeing people looking at us at the phone booth, and I thought we were being followed by Sprint agents. So like, I was letting guys call girlfriends on the phone, they give me a dollar, they give me a french fries or a soda, and I would Yeah.
Speaker 3:Know, dial the coding, hand them the phone for their girlfriend to make a phone call across country, and go away. But I started to think I was being followed, I like, this is getting crazy. And then, people started doing this really great caper. I should say crime, but this is a straight up crime, where they would order computer parts with stolen credit cards by the mail to, like, a house that was abandoned, or that was They knew the person wasn't home. So they would order it to this house, and then they would go and put a lemonade pitcher on the stoop, and have gloves with materials to do gardening.
Speaker 3:They know UPS was coming that morning. They pretend they were gardening. UPS would show up with and I remember they did this with the extra hard drives and extra memory for PC juniors and other stuff, Cause then they wanted to trade me that for it. And people would show up, like, the UPS guy would show up, like, hey, here's like $3,000 worth of stuff. And they would sign for it, and then
Speaker 2:And there's
Speaker 3:that. Nobody ever know how they, you know. So anyway, there was crazy stuff going on. But I was there, was breaking, and, you know, I just I learned how to lightly code stuff, like, did Lotus Notes, when I was in college, and, you know, that was one of my first jobs, doing Lotus Notes scripting. Before it was called Lotus Notes, what was it called?
Speaker 3:Anyway, before Lotus bought Lotus Notes, had another name, can't remember right now. But anyway, I liked the empowering nature of technology, the communication ability of it. And then, of course, the Internet went The Internet browser came out when I was in college. When I saw Mosaic, Mark Andreessen's first browser, was like, woah. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And then, Mosaic didn't support images originally. But then, it started supporting images, you could change the background from gray to another color, and you could change the font size. Was like, this is like a magazine. Mhmm. Let alone when they supported file types like, you know, video and audio.
Speaker 3:I mean, video was way down. Real player was video on the Internet for a while. But then, you know, audio files came out. You know, was drunk on I loved it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it seems like there's something about, especially the communication side of technology that you love, because you've been, it seems like from the beginning, involved in media. So you had the Silicon Alley reporter?
Speaker 3:Yeah. That was my first magazine, really. I had done one before that called Cyber Surfer for five issues and that was about CD ROMs. But yeah, I did the Silicon Alley reporter and yeah, it was a trade publication. A lot of great people came out of it.
Speaker 3:Sheny Jourdan and Clay Shirky were, on it. And so was, Raphael Ali. People don't remember. So, a lot of great contributors back in the day. I'm going to add Rafael Leach on the Wikipedia page right now.
Speaker 3:But yeah, it was great.
Speaker 2:And even the way you just described Mosaic, you said you looked at it and you said this is like a magazine. Were you automatically thinking publishing? Was that something you've always been passionate about? Media, publishing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I always loved publishing and I always loved media. I always liked video. I like pictures. I like magazine.
Speaker 3:I really like magazines. I mean, I thought magazines were the big That was the big thing in New York during the 90s. Was zines and magazines. So there was a magazine called Spy Magazine, which was like upstart. Esquire was this other upstart magazine.
Speaker 3:Paper Magazine was one. And there were zines. So the zine movement in New York in the '90s was just crazy. There were all these zines. You go to Tower Records, and there would be zines.
Speaker 3:Just, you know, people would write what they thought. 2,600, actually, was a Zine. And Zines, you know, would look like, you know, this. Like, just these little, like, photocopied, you know, nonsense. And it was really great.
Speaker 3:Because you, it was like this radical idea. It was like, sort of like blogs became a radical idea. You could just print these self booklets, and your words would be read by people. Mhmm. And what zines you read, and you know.
Speaker 3:Then, zines actually became more like blogs and websites and websites begot blogs.
Speaker 2:And maybe let's kind of round this part of our talk off with talking about WebLogs Inc.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so the idea behind Weblogs Inc. Was a network of blogs. Is that the idea?
Speaker 3:Yeah, was a network of blogs. We thought we could have a 100 blogs, which at the time was pretty crazy since Nick Nettin just had one or two at the time. I think he had just launched No, he's had two. He had just launched Gizmodo from Gawker. And we thought, know, blogging would become commercial.
Speaker 3:That bloggers would be paid. And people who have bloggers being paid was sacrilegious, actually. And it would ruin it. Of course, it made it sustainable. And it did ruin it.
Speaker 3:It did both. It made it sustainable, and it ruined
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, I was, you know, it was one of the great successes of my career. And not that my career's over. I think inside.com would be a bigger success. Much bigger success. But, we we paid bloggers.
Speaker 3:We paid them $2 a blog post, And, know, dollars $2.50 for a 125 blogs post for the original deal. And Sean, what's his name? Anyway, we had all kinds of famous bloggers do that. And, we became the largest blog publisher in the world. And, yeah.
Speaker 3:We would we launched one on satellite radio. We launched one on flash. We just started launching things on crazy topics. Anybody who wanted to blog for us, we would. We started putting out press releases.
Speaker 3:There's my press release from 02/2004. World's largest blog publisher. Just thought if we said world's largest blog publisher, that would be a good idea. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And in what ways was that a product? Do you feel like that was a product?
Speaker 3:Oh, certainly Engadget and Autoblog and Joystick, yeah, these were products, and they were also publishing systems. They were best practices. It was all of those things. But yeah, we productized it, yeah, definitely making a great logo, paying bloggers, publishing consistently. Mean, I remember Peter Rojas telling me, Jason, you know what the secret to blogging is?
Speaker 3:And I said, What? He said, Showing up. I said, What do you mean by that? He goes, Well, most people blog for three days, then they stop for three months. And they blog for three weeks, and they take two weeks off.
Speaker 3:What we've got to do is blog 10 blog posts a day, every day, all year. And I was like, 10 blog posts a day about gadgets? That's like, are you crazy? Because I don't know if they're good at math, but that's 3,650 stories a year. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Are there 3,650 stories a year? Ultimately, we wound up doing forty, fifty, 60 posts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He was right.
Speaker 3:And people were like, Oh my God. You know, and I remember going to CES, and running into John Markoff, and For five days. And we came two days before it started, and we're staying two days after, because Peter Rojas and Ryan Block didn't want people on flights the day after CES or the day after that, because they thought there'd be so much left to do. So I think, probably, if you look at Engadget during the CES period, we might have done a 100 posts one day, and it made people crazy. But you know what?
Speaker 3:People, the core audience, a 100,000 people were loading the site all day long. So we just blew the doors off of it. And you know, those brands are legendary. Some of them got shut down, like TVSwan, Cinematical, which I'd love to get back from Tim Armstrong, if he was willing to sell them back to me. Anyway, I don't even want them.
Speaker 3:I got inside.com. I'm rather on all this. You got a great domain like inside. What am I doing trying to go backwards? Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, yeah. And it was a great product, you know. I can't take too much credit for it. I mean, I did start the company. I I brought my co founder on, Brian Alvey.
Speaker 3:He built the Blogsmith platform. Peter Rojas really taught me everything about branding blogs and what the Gestalta blogs were. And, Ryan Block, obviously, was his workhorse. So, you know, I really managed the team really well. Sean Gold sold the ads.
Speaker 3:So I get a lot of I get a disproportionate amount of credit for it. There really were like five people, six people who were absolutely key to getting it where it is. But it was an eighteen month journey that ended with a great result and,
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk about the advertising, like the revenue model behind that. How did that work?
Speaker 3:Sold ads, but it was kinda crazy. We sold the first podcast ad ever, which was to Volvo for Autoblog. And Sean Gold, who works with now inside, he sold that. And they were like, what's a podcast? So there's people talking, and we put the video, put the audio file up, and then people download and listen to it on their iPods.
Speaker 3:And they're like, how does it get on their iPods? I'm like, use a pod catcher. What's a pod catcher? Oh, it's a thing called Lemon. Basically, it's an RSS feed.
Speaker 3:What's RSS? Oh, RSS is a standard, and then you can put an attachment into it. Well, it's an attachment. Oh, an attachment is a file. Okay.
Speaker 3:Let's come for it. We really, you know, giving Dave Warner and Adam Curry a lot of credit, but we were the ones who actually commercialized it. We actually saw it as a business opportunity, which, you know what, I don't know if I should get much credit for that, but it was pretty easy for me to see there was a business there, Raffat Ali, who did paid content, and Shani Jardin, who did Boing Boing, both used to work for me. Then they went to do those products and they did a really good job on those products. Realized, if the smart people who used to work for me are doing really cool projects that are cooler than the projects I was previously doing with them, Maybe there's something there.
Speaker 3:So I think awareness as a product person is critical. Like, what is great product? You know, great product is product that people use, you know, and people love. That's the ultimate litmus test. Know, you made a great product.
Speaker 3:We'll use it. Uber is a great product. I'm an angel investor in it. Because people use it, and they can't shut up about it. Know, Net Promoter Score.
Speaker 3:When people, I mean, I think the launch ticker became one of those sort of surprise products for me. I created the launch ticker last summer. It was a Google doc. I just told a researcher, summarize what happened in the news today. And I've been just slowly tinkering away with that product, and 5,000 people signed up for $1,500 a month in reoccurring donations, which, you know, I think that equals, like, whatever, $18,000 a year.
Speaker 3:That's $4 a person on average. But, obviously, it's only a small number of people doing it. So, that's been a tremendous success for me. And advertisers love it. And readers love it.
Speaker 3:So, I like to tinker. I like to build product. I had a lot of opportunities to become a venture capitalist, lot of opportunities to become editor in chief, lot of our companies to be CEO of other companies. I like to build product. Always going be building product.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I'll probably be 80 years old and be like, Yeah, so I got this new thing coming out. It's going to be called more.com. Know, I'm gonna get you more, you know. I probably suck.
Speaker 3:I'll probably be seen now. But at least I'll be launching something. Like the act of launch which is why I created the Launch Festival, originally TechCrunch fifty. Because I just love the act of coming on stage and saying, here's my new shit. Like, do you like it, world?
Speaker 3:What do you think? We spent some time building this for you. What do you think? I just love that moment. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Maybe just Either having it myself or watching other people have it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And just thinking about advertising for a second, because some people would say, well, how can that be a product? But it seems like there's actually a lot of innovation you could do with advertising right now. If the
Speaker 3:advertising We did the first yeah. We did the first name of ads.
Speaker 2:And even with I was looking at the launch ticker today and I thought, because I see you have this little you want your ad here. I thought, Man, that would be amazing if I could just click on that and put my ad there right away. Like if I could have it
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's down not a bad idea. Sure, why not?
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's move on. Let's talk about funding. First of all, let's talk a little bit about this fund you just launched.
Speaker 3:What is this think there's some rules about not talking too much about it. But anyway, a couple of friends of mine put some money into a fund to invest in the winners of the launch festival, which if you invested in the winners of the last six years of TechCrunch fifty and launch festival, you would have had an incredible return. And I started investing in those companies towards the end. It's, you know, it's something that, Stuart Alsop did with demo. He eventually became a venture capitalist and was doing demos.
Speaker 3:So it's a thing. I give credit to Stuart Alsopp for that. Yeah. And I enjoy it. You know, I've invested in about 30 companies.
Speaker 3:I was affiliated with Sequoia Capital for a long time with their SCOT program, still am. And, I'm an LP in one other venture fund. So, I just like investing, and it's just a way for me and my friends to, since I'm already sorting through all these companies, to select 50 companies to go on stage at launch, and helping them, and building a bond with them, like, why not take it to the next logical conclusion, which is, give them office space and or invest in them. So, have a launch co working space here in Los Angeles, and I have the launch fund. It's a full service kind of thing.
Speaker 3:And I have This Week in Startups, my podcast, where I can talk to them. So, sometimes, I'll have people on the show, then they wind up launching at the event. Sometimes, I'll have people at the event, they wind up being at the show. Sometimes, I'll have somebody come to the event, and then tell me they're gonna create something for the next year, come back the next year and say, I told you I was gonna make something, and then I invest in it, and then launch at the event. All this kind of great stuff happens.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Just like to be in the mix.
Speaker 2:What's the advantage of doing it through a full venture capital fund as opposed to angel investing? Is it just you multiply what you can do?
Speaker 3:I think if you can If you're already doing the work to select the companies for the launch festival, it becomes super efficient. And if you've already got the marketing machine to get the word out about the things you've invested in, that's also I have two I have two basic unfair advantages in the space. You kinda look for unfair advantages. One, the event is very stable and reoccurring, and people love it. And there's a lot of great sponsors involved, a lot of great alumni.
Speaker 3:So I already have this footprint that occurs every year, and in fact, now it's happening like four times a year, because we have niche events like Launch Education and Kids, Launch Mobile, Launch Hackathon. So you already have that, and you have the Launch Ticker. So I can just plug people. That's my unfair advantage. I'm already getting this amazing, amazing deal flow.
Speaker 3:The other advantage is, on the other side, when we do choose to invest in something, we know because the audience has gone crazy for it and it won, the grand jury selected it. That would be like you're running Sundance and if the grand jury gives something a prize, then your movie studio head as well and you get to release the film. Yeah. Which is what Sundance did with the Sundance Channel, right? They sort of had some unfair advantage with the Sundance Channel.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I think it's And, you know, the unfair advantage for me is, I just do it because I love startups and I love entrepreneurs and hanging out with them. And I'll get a return, you know, and I'm sure it'll be good. You know, it could be great, it could be okay, who knows? We'll see. But, for me, it's something that's pleasurable.
Speaker 3:And so I just do stuff that I love. I love doing This Week in Startups. I love doing podcasts in the same way I can see you get great joy out of having a conversation. People are like, Why do you do This Week in Startups twice a week if $3.50 was in there? Because I love it.
Speaker 3:You think I'm sitting here because I'm trying to make money? No, it's not a lot of money to be made in podcasting. I mean, I wanted to make money, I'd be a hedge fund manager, I'd be CEO of some top 10 internet company. No. I do what I love.
Speaker 3:I love interviewing other entrepreneurs. I love interviewing investors. I love startups in general. It gives me a rush. I'm a gambler.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I love gambling.
Speaker 1:Jason was a great guest. You'll definitely wanna come back next week for part two. You can follow Jason Kallikanis on Twitter at Jason. You can follow me, Justin, on Twitter at m I Justin. And you can follow the show on Twitter as well at product people TV.
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