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Semi-unrelated to the actual content of this particular post: (I apologize about that, by the way) Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis? H

by Towle_ 17y ago

Semi-unrelated to the actual content of this particular post: (I apologize about that, by the way) Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis? He's often propped up as some sort of guru/authority/etc. of start-ups and the Web in general, and I just don't see it at all. I've never read any words of his and felt like a smarter or more knowledgeable person afterward; I only ever see rather mundane platitudes. Perhaps I just haven't read the right pieces of his? If anyone believes this might the case, please consider responding to this post with a link or two. I'm seriously very baffled by his image (and to be honest, I don't think highly of Mahalo as a concept, for many various reasons I won't detail here unless someone is interested in them).

runevault 17y ago
From what I've seen/read, it seems like his strongest skill is finding the right people and letting them do their job and excel at it. After all without people building the content/handling things, Weblogs inc wouldn't have been such a hot property that sold to AOL for however much money it ended up selling for.
- aaronwall 17y ago
  His strongest skills are hype & public relations. AOL was mainly buying into the trend of blogging / lower cost content production models when they bought Weblogs, Inc. They didn't buy a huge cash generating company. Jason was bragging about having about a million a year in revenues (revenues, not profits) with some absurdly large number of writers (like 30). And part of that cash flow was selling text links that flow PageRank to online casinos...over 100 of them carpet-bombed his network of blogs. http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 And (ironically) back then he was also selling links to scraper sites http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 (maybe that is where the Mahalo idea came from)?
  - jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
    gosh Aaron... you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny. Actually, we didn't know were selling text ads to people selling page rank back in 2005... just like Tim O'Rielly didn't. We both turned those ads off when we found out. so, we actually did the RIGHT THING and you're still trying to paint me as some evil spammer. to this day Joystiq, Hackaday, Engadget, TechCrunch50, This Week in Tech, This Week in Startups, Open Angel Forum, Blippy, Gowalla, GDGT and dozens of other brands/projects I've been involved with/invested in are doing great work. You're making me into this black hat who is trying to cheat... it's not how I operate. I true to make and support great products and improve them consistently. A lot of folks I know like the brands I'm involved with and I'm very proud of those brands. Have I made mistakes over the last 15 years of building brands? of course... but i'm always honest and engage folks who point them out. in fact, i thank them.... like i've done here. your attacking me for what you think are my weakest points just gets my team focused on fixing them--and for that I thank you! Honestly, thank you! if there are things we can do better we want to do them. We're in it for the long-haul. We want to make a great brand and we don't want to do it by cutting corners. I know you were hurt when I said "seo is bullshit" a million years ago, but back then that is what i thought. I didn't know anything about SEO back then and I really don't know much about it now. i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times. what is it going to take to make you happy?
    - aaronwall 17y ago
      "you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny." Well I am still in the same company I was back when you call my industry scum (while you were selling links to shady casinos). As far as I am concerned your opportunistic jumps between companies are all part of the same general trend / strategy. You still have not changed as a person. "i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times." Yes but the difference is you stand on a podium at conferences and yell to the press when you slag it off. When you say it has value you do it on a twitter post or a quick blog post that does not even hit your homepage. You are not quite as loud in this case. I would say to make it right you should probably need to (at a minimum)... - Direct link out to the sites you are scraping content from. FIX THE ISSUE. - Make an in-depth post on your blog highlighting how important SEO is to all web based businesses. Describe how you gamed social media sites and worked media and nepotistic angles to build links for Mahalo. Also describe the bait and switch public relations and attack bait angles you used to build links. Better yet...make this an in-depth case study! - Make sure a copy of that post lands in the inboxes of your media email list and your Jason email list. - Issue a press release announcing the above blog post. If you do all of those then there is a pretty strong chance I will think your apology is sincere. Anything less and I will realize that this is once more another round of posturing.
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  You are correct, my best skill is finding amazing people and supporting the heck out of them. However, I would give myself a modest amount of credit for finding verticals a little earlier than average (silicon alley, blogs, human-powered search, etc), as well as marketing, branding and product design. I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong. I don't claim to be smarter than anyone... I just go to work every day and try to do a little better each day.
  - rinich 17y ago
    I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong. I'm not your biggest fan, but can everybody piling on here read this and take it to heart? The best thing about the Internet is that you can say anything whenever you want and learn as you go. Just because Jason's more famous than you are doesn't mean he expects his words to be taken as canon, so if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks it's probably less slimy than it is genuine people-not-being-perfectly-consistent-always. I notice people are piling on the downvotes right now, which is a shitty way to handle a debate. Even if you disagree with people, vote based on whether they're contributing to the conversation. When the guy who made Mahalo comes in, he's contributing something rare and unique and if you pound it into the dirt you're making us all look like immature jerks.
    - samd 17y ago
      Sounds like there's some bad blood between Jason and Aaron. Maybe I don't know enough about SEO to get the sting of Aaron's arguments, but on the surface Jason has been cordial and Aaron has been vicious. That's not helping your credibility Aaron.
      - terrellm 17y ago
        That's one of the problem - most people don't know enough about SEO to know what exactly is going on. They place blind trust in those who are featured in the mainstream media. While Jason goes out in public and says one thing, based the examples in Aaron's blog post he does just the opposite in practice. Sites like Mahalo that auto generate content and scrape content are increasingly becoming a problem online as they clutter the search results and hurt the publishers they scrape and steal from. Google is doing worse than turning a blind eye to this as they actually are encouraging these very large "content providers" to create content for filling ad space (see the Wired article on Demand Media). With SEO being an industry that has a negative perception by many, those involved in the industry feel the need to defend their profession.
rinich 17y ago
Congratulations! You've hit upon the tragic core of this industry: Namely, that it's full of semimature people who are only well-known because they're well-known. This is such a new field of study that even the biggest figures are usually only halfgood at what they do. That's cruel. Let me rephrase: This isn't a new field. It's a series of new fields, all developing in tandem. Web design, web coding, web marketing, are all necessarily only a couple of decades old. The tools we're using are younger than that. Two years ago we were still debating how to align a webpage vertically. We've only begun to have real web typography in the same period of time. And programming is similarly new, and we still don't have good web marketing. But those of us who're invested in the web don't like to think about that, so we convince ourselves that we're as advanced and sophisticated as anything else. To do that, we lower the bar. Celebrities in any field tend to balance skill and marketability. Rarely is somebody both ultrafamous and cutting-edge. So in a world where nobody is really that famous and nobody is really that talented, our famous icons are doubly pathetic. Even our best icons, like Zeldman and Fried, are bright but not really operating on a new plane. (I think there are some exceptions, like Dean Allen, but Dean isn't the size of Calcanis.) That's why the brightest talents in our sphere come from other mediums. I think the best designers I know are all twee and twenty and annoying as fuck. For all their immaturity, that's the first generation that could grow up immersed in all the aspects of the business. But admitting their superiority is admitting just how fucking clueless we all are, and that wouldn't be as fun for the communty. Calcanis is a particular jerk, though. I never got why we like him here. Mahalo's been a joke from launch day. (Sorry if there were spelling errors. I wrote this on an iPod.)
davidw 17y ago
> Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis? One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it appears. That said, I get a bad vibe too: why is everything he is associated with seemingly "Jason's this" or "Jason's that". Generally, a startup is known first and foremost as the company, not as "Alexis Ohanian's Reddit" or "Sergey Brin's Google", but you always find that guy's name in the same phrase as Mahalo. I can't quite place my finger on why this bugs me, but perhaps it's something to do with building something up as a free standing entity versus lending your famous name to something.
- Towle_ 17y ago
  >One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it appears. You know, despite being a total noob here, I still thought I had that one checked off on my list of things to watch for...until of course Jason himself showed up on the board (assuming it's really him, of course). I really did not see that coming. But what can I do now other than apologize and hope he wasn't offended? Sorry, Jason. :) No real defamation intended, just wanted to open a discussion on the validity of the opinions you propagate.
  - davidw 17y ago
    I think it's still quite possible to say negative things to/about people, but it really helps to imagine saying them directly to the person in question.
    - Towle_ 17y ago
      Right, of course. I didn't mean to imply that I thought it a mistake to be critical, just regretted and apologized for the manner in which I criticized. Thanks again, David.
  - jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
snowbird122 17y ago
I can't speak about Mahalo, but I have to say that I've become a big Jason Calacanis fan because of the podcast: http://thisweekinstartups.com/ http://thisweekinstartups.com/ He can be annoying at times, but I love the way he tells it like it is. Every episode, entrepreneurs call in and he helps us by dishing out no BS advice. Good advice. The kind you need to hear when you are too close to the problem to understand what to do. He doesn't patronize (well maybe just a little), but instead, he seems genuinely interested in helping other entrepreneurs. Yes, his self promotion can get tiring, but hey, the guy is a marketing genius that we can all learn from. Check out the podcast.

by Towle_ 17y ago

runevault 17y ago

From what I've seen/read, it seems like his strongest skill is finding the right people and letting them do their job and excel at it. After all without people building the content/handling things, Weblogs inc wouldn't have been such a hot property that sold to AOL for however much money it ended up selling for.

aaronwall 17y ago
His strongest skills are hype & public relations. AOL was mainly buying into the trend of blogging / lower cost content production models when they bought Weblogs, Inc. They didn't buy a huge cash generating company. Jason was bragging about having about a million a year in revenues (revenues, not profits) with some absurdly large number of writers (like 30). And part of that cash flow was selling text links that flow PageRank to online casinos...over 100 of them carpet-bombed his network of blogs. http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 And (ironically) back then he was also selling links to scraper sites http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 (maybe that is where the Mahalo idea came from)?
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  gosh Aaron... you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny. Actually, we didn't know were selling text ads to people selling page rank back in 2005... just like Tim O'Rielly didn't. We both turned those ads off when we found out. so, we actually did the RIGHT THING and you're still trying to paint me as some evil spammer. to this day Joystiq, Hackaday, Engadget, TechCrunch50, This Week in Tech, This Week in Startups, Open Angel Forum, Blippy, Gowalla, GDGT and dozens of other brands/projects I've been involved with/invested in are doing great work. You're making me into this black hat who is trying to cheat... it's not how I operate. I true to make and support great products and improve them consistently. A lot of folks I know like the brands I'm involved with and I'm very proud of those brands. Have I made mistakes over the last 15 years of building brands? of course... but i'm always honest and engage folks who point them out. in fact, i thank them.... like i've done here. your attacking me for what you think are my weakest points just gets my team focused on fixing them--and for that I thank you! Honestly, thank you! if there are things we can do better we want to do them. We're in it for the long-haul. We want to make a great brand and we don't want to do it by cutting corners. I know you were hurt when I said "seo is bullshit" a million years ago, but back then that is what i thought. I didn't know anything about SEO back then and I really don't know much about it now. i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times. what is it going to take to make you happy?
  - aaronwall 17y ago
    "you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny." Well I am still in the same company I was back when you call my industry scum (while you were selling links to shady casinos). As far as I am concerned your opportunistic jumps between companies are all part of the same general trend / strategy. You still have not changed as a person. "i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times." Yes but the difference is you stand on a podium at conferences and yell to the press when you slag it off. When you say it has value you do it on a twitter post or a quick blog post that does not even hit your homepage. You are not quite as loud in this case. I would say to make it right you should probably need to (at a minimum)... - Direct link out to the sites you are scraping content from. FIX THE ISSUE. - Make an in-depth post on your blog highlighting how important SEO is to all web based businesses. Describe how you gamed social media sites and worked media and nepotistic angles to build links for Mahalo. Also describe the bait and switch public relations and attack bait angles you used to build links. Better yet...make this an in-depth case study! - Make sure a copy of that post lands in the inboxes of your media email list and your Jason email list. - Issue a press release announcing the above blog post. If you do all of those then there is a pretty strong chance I will think your apology is sincere. Anything less and I will realize that this is once more another round of posturing.
jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
You are correct, my best skill is finding amazing people and supporting the heck out of them. However, I would give myself a modest amount of credit for finding verticals a little earlier than average (silicon alley, blogs, human-powered search, etc), as well as marketing, branding and product design. I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong. I don't claim to be smarter than anyone... I just go to work every day and try to do a little better each day.
- rinich 17y ago
  I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong. I'm not your biggest fan, but can everybody piling on here read this and take it to heart? The best thing about the Internet is that you can say anything whenever you want and learn as you go. Just because Jason's more famous than you are doesn't mean he expects his words to be taken as canon, so if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks it's probably less slimy than it is genuine people-not-being-perfectly-consistent-always. I notice people are piling on the downvotes right now, which is a shitty way to handle a debate. Even if you disagree with people, vote based on whether they're contributing to the conversation. When the guy who made Mahalo comes in, he's contributing something rare and unique and if you pound it into the dirt you're making us all look like immature jerks.
  - samd 17y ago
    Sounds like there's some bad blood between Jason and Aaron. Maybe I don't know enough about SEO to get the sting of Aaron's arguments, but on the surface Jason has been cordial and Aaron has been vicious. That's not helping your credibility Aaron.
    - terrellm 17y ago
      That's one of the problem - most people don't know enough about SEO to know what exactly is going on. They place blind trust in those who are featured in the mainstream media. While Jason goes out in public and says one thing, based the examples in Aaron's blog post he does just the opposite in practice. Sites like Mahalo that auto generate content and scrape content are increasingly becoming a problem online as they clutter the search results and hurt the publishers they scrape and steal from. Google is doing worse than turning a blind eye to this as they actually are encouraging these very large "content providers" to create content for filling ad space (see the Wired article on Demand Media). With SEO being an industry that has a negative perception by many, those involved in the industry feel the need to defend their profession.

rinich 17y ago

Congratulations! You've hit upon the tragic core of this industry: Namely, that it's full of semimature people who are only well-known because they're well-known. This is such a new field of study that even the biggest figures are usually only halfgood at what they do. That's cruel. Let me rephrase: This isn't a new field. It's a series of new fields, all developing in tandem. Web design, web coding, web marketing, are all necessarily only a couple of decades old. The tools we're using are younger than that. Two years ago we were still debating how to align a webpage vertically. We've only begun to have real web typography in the same period of time. And programming is similarly new, and we still don't have good web marketing. But those of us who're invested in the web don't like to think about that, so we convince ourselves that we're as advanced and sophisticated as anything else. To do that, we lower the bar. Celebrities in any field tend to balance skill and marketability. Rarely is somebody both ultrafamous and cutting-edge. So in a world where nobody is really that famous and nobody is really that talented, our famous icons are doubly pathetic. Even our best icons, like Zeldman and Fried, are bright but not really operating on a new plane. (I think there are some exceptions, like Dean Allen, but Dean isn't the size of Calcanis.) That's why the brightest talents in our sphere come from other mediums. I think the best designers I know are all twee and twenty and annoying as fuck. For all their immaturity, that's the first generation that could grow up immersed in all the aspects of the business. But admitting their superiority is admitting just how fucking clueless we all are, and that wouldn't be as fun for the communty. Calcanis is a particular jerk, though. I never got why we like him here. Mahalo's been a joke from launch day. (Sorry if there were spelling errors. I wrote this on an iPod.)

davidw 17y ago

> Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis? One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it appears. That said, I get a bad vibe too: why is everything he is associated with seemingly "Jason's this" or "Jason's that". Generally, a startup is known first and foremost as the company, not as "Alexis Ohanian's Reddit" or "Sergey Brin's Google", but you always find that guy's name in the same phrase as Mahalo. I can't quite place my finger on why this bugs me, but perhaps it's something to do with building something up as a free standing entity versus lending your famous name to something.

Towle_ 17y ago
>One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it appears. You know, despite being a total noob here, I still thought I had that one checked off on my list of things to watch for...until of course Jason himself showed up on the board (assuming it's really him, of course). I really did not see that coming. But what can I do now other than apologize and hope he wasn't offended? Sorry, Jason. :) No real defamation intended, just wanted to open a discussion on the validity of the opinions you propagate.
- davidw 17y ago
  I think it's still quite possible to say negative things to/about people, but it really helps to imagine saying them directly to the person in question.
  - Towle_ 17y ago
    Right, of course. I didn't mean to imply that I thought it a mistake to be critical, just regretted and apologized for the manner in which I criticized. Thanks again, David.
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago

snowbird122 17y ago

I can't speak about Mahalo, but I have to say that I've become a big Jason Calacanis fan because of the podcast: http://thisweekinstartups.com/ http://thisweekinstartups.com/ He can be annoying at times, but I love the way he tells it like it is. Every episode, entrepreneurs call in and he helps us by dishing out no BS advice. Good advice. The kind you need to hear when you are too close to the problem to understand what to do. He doesn't patronize (well maybe just a little), but instead, he seems genuinely interested in helping other entrepreneurs. Yes, his self promotion can get tiring, but hey, the guy is a marketing genius that we can all learn from. Check out the podcast.