4 ms·

There's smart, shrewd, duplicitous, deceptive, and finally downright dishonest. I don't know the man personally, but it's my opinion that Mr. Calacanis's busin

There's smart, shrewd, duplicitous, deceptive, and finally downright dishonest. I don't know the man personally, but it's my opinion that Mr. Calacanis's business practices moved into that final category some time ago. It's actually really sad. I wonder what's driven him to this level. Greed? Ego? 3rd party investor pressure? Simply not wanting to ever have his name associated with a repeat failure? Especially amongst the entrepreneur crowd which he espouses to represent, truthful "honest" failure itself is looked upon less harshly than shady "gamed success". Though in retrospect totally full of late 90s Internet hype, I remember being inspired by his Charlie Rose interview back in the "Silcon Alley" days of NYC: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#43m http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#... What happened to THAT Jason?

tomjen2 17y ago
He properly just saw what happened on wall street. Why make money by working hard to produce value, when you can make more money by going the easy way?
numair 17y ago
He moved to LA.
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  LA is really nice..... like New York City with better weather and a beach. :-)
joez 17y ago
I can't speak to the morality of Mahalo and Jason's hand in it but I think since there are attacks on his person that I should bring to light some of the positives he's done for the startup community. Techcrunch50 This Week In Startups (including encounter with Keiretsu Forum)
- bonsaitree 17y ago
  Unfortunately, as is the case with Mahalo, when one is both the CEO and "public face" of a corporation's brand, it is difficult partition the two relms outside of clearly personal matters (e.g. health, friends, family, etc.). A classic case being Martha Stewart. In some instances, with morality and 'key executive personnel' insurance clauses in compensation agreements, they are, in fact, inextricably contractually coupled. As the saying goes, "it comes with the territory" and I'm sure is adequately reflected in his ownership of the company and current compensation. Also, FWIW, I don't believe this was his original plan (e.g. Mahalo Daily's original format hosted by Veronica Belmont). Nevertheless, that's been the situation for years and Jason, and his board, have apparently seen no good reason to change it.
  - NZ_Matt 17y ago
    I believe that Jason's original plan was to have a true search engine with quality human written pages that people would want to use as their homepage instead of google. However this plan was not successful and Jason has realised the opportunity to drive huge amounts of traffic to Maholo from Google. This means that ranking in google for hundreds of thousands of keywords comes first and the quality of content on the pages comes second. It's obvious by the number of ads on the pages that they don't care about the user experience. They know that if people don't find what they were searching for they will click on an ad when leaving.
    - jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
      Not exactly.... take a look at the how to articles, walkthroughs, buzz news on the homepage and Q&A community. We're doing some amazing content and Aaron is focusing on short pages that are not ranked in any search engine and, that frankly, we don't let folks build any more (we started with an open system like wikipedia where anyone could build and build they did... now we have a system like MTurk where you have to complete the page before we publish it). the page we get traffic for ten to have a LOT of content... also, if we see a page gets more than 25-50 page views we put a writer on it to build it out. so, basically nothing that ranks is a short content page (stub in wikipedia terms). however, the truth is google doesn't rank short pages except for VERY long tail ones.... and even that is rare. google ranks you for long, deep content that is updated. Aaron is making a big deal out a problem that doesn't exist because he is mad at me for saying seo is bullshit back in 2006. :-)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
volida 17y ago
I am surprised you fall in the trap of this guy who attacks Calacanis to change or shape a bad image of him. I don't know anyone of them, and it's obvious this is a personal attack. Who is this guy who will tell someone else how to run their company?
- bonsaitree 17y ago
  With regards to personal attacks, see my reply below. No management directives were given in the original article, nor my comment. For all we know, this "business model" is being forced upon Mahalo given the present economic climate. Although I think it unlikely, Jason himself may not feel he has any other option and is being forced by the other investors in the company down this revenue path. I urge you to read the original article and the previously posted comments on this thread for the full context of Mahlo's behavior and Mr. Calacanis' response. It's the double-speak and clearly disingenuous ignorance of his response which is the crux of the matter.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - volida 17y ago
    Your points only emphasize that this is a personal contrariness, that puts others/us in the middle for no reason, using Calacanis any kind of company tactics from the author's point of view, as an edge to make a public issue. old-fashion publicity trick
    - bonsaitree 17y ago
      I fail to see how there's a "middle" here at all. We're both participants in a public online discussion regarding the behavior of the CEO of a company which, at least for me, I can say I have no legal vested interest or direct financial dealings. Fundamentally, this is between Mr. Calacanis, the management of Mahalo, and Google. We're both mere spectators. By replying personally, Mr. Calacanis chose to make this a personal public issue--in both the original article & this forum. That's entirely within his purview. I'm sure he's experienced enough to know the potential ramifications of those actions.

tomjen2 17y ago

He properly just saw what happened on wall street. Why make money by working hard to produce value, when you can make more money by going the easy way?

numair 17y ago

He moved to LA.

jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
LA is really nice..... like New York City with better weather and a beach. :-)

joez 17y ago

I can't speak to the morality of Mahalo and Jason's hand in it but I think since there are attacks on his person that I should bring to light some of the positives he's done for the startup community. Techcrunch50 This Week In Startups (including encounter with Keiretsu Forum)

bonsaitree 17y ago
Unfortunately, as is the case with Mahalo, when one is both the CEO and "public face" of a corporation's brand, it is difficult partition the two relms outside of clearly personal matters (e.g. health, friends, family, etc.). A classic case being Martha Stewart. In some instances, with morality and 'key executive personnel' insurance clauses in compensation agreements, they are, in fact, inextricably contractually coupled. As the saying goes, "it comes with the territory" and I'm sure is adequately reflected in his ownership of the company and current compensation. Also, FWIW, I don't believe this was his original plan (e.g. Mahalo Daily's original format hosted by Veronica Belmont). Nevertheless, that's been the situation for years and Jason, and his board, have apparently seen no good reason to change it.
- NZ_Matt 17y ago
  I believe that Jason's original plan was to have a true search engine with quality human written pages that people would want to use as their homepage instead of google. However this plan was not successful and Jason has realised the opportunity to drive huge amounts of traffic to Maholo from Google. This means that ranking in google for hundreds of thousands of keywords comes first and the quality of content on the pages comes second. It's obvious by the number of ads on the pages that they don't care about the user experience. They know that if people don't find what they were searching for they will click on an ad when leaving.
  - jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
    Not exactly.... take a look at the how to articles, walkthroughs, buzz news on the homepage and Q&A community. We're doing some amazing content and Aaron is focusing on short pages that are not ranked in any search engine and, that frankly, we don't let folks build any more (we started with an open system like wikipedia where anyone could build and build they did... now we have a system like MTurk where you have to complete the page before we publish it). the page we get traffic for ten to have a LOT of content... also, if we see a page gets more than 25-50 page views we put a writer on it to build it out. so, basically nothing that ranks is a short content page (stub in wikipedia terms). however, the truth is google doesn't rank short pages except for VERY long tail ones.... and even that is rare. google ranks you for long, deep content that is updated. Aaron is making a big deal out a problem that doesn't exist because he is mad at me for saying seo is bullshit back in 2006. :-)

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

volida 17y ago

I am surprised you fall in the trap of this guy who attacks Calacanis to change or shape a bad image of him. I don't know anyone of them, and it's obvious this is a personal attack. Who is this guy who will tell someone else how to run their company?

bonsaitree 17y ago
With regards to personal attacks, see my reply below. No management directives were given in the original article, nor my comment. For all we know, this "business model" is being forced upon Mahalo given the present economic climate. Although I think it unlikely, Jason himself may not feel he has any other option and is being forced by the other investors in the company down this revenue path. I urge you to read the original article and the previously posted comments on this thread for the full context of Mahlo's behavior and Mr. Calacanis' response. It's the double-speak and clearly disingenuous ignorance of his response which is the crux of the matter.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- volida 17y ago
  Your points only emphasize that this is a personal contrariness, that puts others/us in the middle for no reason, using Calacanis any kind of company tactics from the author's point of view, as an edge to make a public issue. old-fashion publicity trick
  - bonsaitree 17y ago
    I fail to see how there's a "middle" here at all. We're both participants in a public online discussion regarding the behavior of the CEO of a company which, at least for me, I can say I have no legal vested interest or direct financial dealings. Fundamentally, this is between Mr. Calacanis, the management of Mahalo, and Google. We're both mere spectators. By replying personally, Mr. Calacanis chose to make this a personal public issue--in both the original article & this forum. That's entirely within his purview. I'm sure he's experienced enough to know the potential ramifications of those actions.