jason-calacanis

How many more rounds of layoffs are planned at Mahalo?

Owen Thomas · 10/24/08 06:00PM

What was Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis doing in the weeks running up to this company's layoffs? Traveling around the world, to destinations like the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, Korea. In his how-to-lay-people-off memo, Calacanis also promised to cut back on his travel budget — which struck me as an admission that his trips to speak at conferences, often on subjects unrelated to his work at his Sequoia-funded Web directory, were being paid for by his investors. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: Ted Dziuba, for "Traffic is the new profit." (Photo by JoopDorresteijn)

Is Microsoft ripping off Jason Calacanis's ailing startup?

Owen Thomas · 10/23/08 02:20PM

Talk about adding insult to injury. As Jason Calacanis was sucking his thumb about the coming startup depression, Microsoft quietly launched a competitor to his intern-edited search engine, which has just gone through the layoffs Calacanis predicted for everyone else. Redmond's experimental entry into the market is called U Rank, an experiment in collaborative editing of search results. The sites aren't that similar in their approach to helping users find websites — but they are eerily similar in their flowery logos and pastel color schemes.

AOL makes Jason Calacanis makes AOL look like geniuses

Alaska Miller · 10/23/08 08:20AM

AOL has released numbers detailing the success of Weblogs Inc., its blog network for a reported $25 million. Since taking the company off of Jason Calacanis's and Brian Alvey's hands in 2005, AOL has seen visitor traffic climb 122 percent a year on average, from 1.4 million visitors to 13 million. Revenue went from $6 million to $30 million off of 13 million visitors. You'd think AOL could afford to pay their bloggers to blog.

America's fun new way to lay off everybody

Paul Boutin · 10/22/08 08:20PM

Jason Calacanis is a master storyteller. Like most writers, he needs an editor. Here's a summary remix of Calacanis's secret insider mail, sent a few hours after Mahalo's layoffs were expertly leaked to everyone but me, thanks pal.

sggrf

Alaska Miller · 10/22/08 06:40PM

Jason Calacanis took time out from his mailing list to blog about firing a baker's dozen of his Mahalo staff. The very same brilliant, hard-working, antifamily people he said he'd never compromise on. Today's featured commenter is sggrf, who wonders out loud on whether Calacanis might turn the episode into conference fodder:

Jason Calacanis lays off 13 at Mahalo

Owen Thomas · 10/22/08 03:20PM

Bulldog aficionado Jason Calacanis recently predicted that a large number of Web 2.0 startups will end up on "life support." Could Mahalo, his so-called "human-powered search engine," be one of them? He has laid off 13 of the humans who power Mahalo, with plans to rehire some of them offshore in the Philippines. It's not clear how many staff members that leaves Mahalo with.Silicon Alley Insider reports that a third of Mahalo's full-time staff was laid off; Calacanis, in a blog post — wait, we thought he stopped blogging — muddles the issue by saying Mahalo has 70 full-time and freelance staff. A former Mahalo insider, however, says the real full-time staff has dropped by roughly half, from 60 this summer to 30 before the layoffs. The Brooklyn-raised CEO is ever the artful dodger.

Jason Calacanis, Valleywag's new Apple analyst

Paul Boutin · 10/16/08 05:00PM

"Valleywag’s Jason Calacanis believes that Apple is working on a networked HDTV," writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet. Adrian, if your editor tries to make you go back and erase what you wrote, because his drinking buddies from Columbia Journalism Review think it's fatal to publish a huge factual fuckup in the first three words of an article, call me. I'll come over and slap J. Jonah Jameson with a printout of exactly how many people have already seen it. Tell him, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup." Has-been journalists love a Watergate reference.On the upside, you've given Owen and me a whole new topic for slow afternoons: People who don't even know they're working for Valleywag. Calacanis was easy. Scoble isn't hard enough. We'll have to figure it out some more. Jason: Holla back! Aw, come on. We hate it when you don't holla back. (Photo by Peter Kaminski)

Two bulldogs for EVERYONE

Paul Boutin · 10/10/08 07:00PM

Yeah, I know: The world is ending. You can flip through Sequoia Capital's 56-slide preso on it. Still, in the middle of what he dubbed the Startup Depression, Mahalo chatterbox-in-chief Jason Calacanis has added more staff-generated content. What Calacanis knows that Sequoia won't tell you: Up or down, a lot has to do with your ability to sell a story. Too bad your boss the wannabe general won't have to sell you on that "painful but necessary adjustments" story in the works. Keep those lame layoff memos coming.

Calacanis attempts to liveblog entire world

Paul Boutin · 10/10/08 11:00AM

"We're liveblogging the world," funtrepreneur Jason Calacanis tweeted about Mahalo's new human-powered news feed on the search site's front door. Jason, help me out here: A couple weeks ago you bragged about forecasting the Startup Depression of 2008. Now you've added a powered-by-humans news feed to your product that looks like CNN crossed with Fark. How did you justify this to your investors in the face of a startup depression? Because from my experience, all English-language content looks the same to a VC. I'm not sure if I should ask when your funders will finally pull the plug on your two-bulldogs lifestyle, or if I'm just playing on the wrong team.

Calley Nye wants you to be her angel

Jackson West · 10/02/08 05:00AM

Young Southlander Calley Nye has done the flack thing as a social media marketer, has done the hack thing in a brief stint at TechCrunch is now doing the cofounder thing with Dashbuzz, which promises to make it easier for you to promote yourself or your products online. In other words, she's had an "entrepreneurial spirit" revelation. She and fellow wantrepreneur Scott Sullivan are offering favors in return for donating toward their goal of $25,000 to get to prototype. And by "favor" they don't mean "equity." Which, frankly, shows a promisingly cagey business sense. Which lends credence to my theory that if you spend enough time anywhere near Jason Calacanis — even just the same county — you'll grow shrewder through a mysterious form of osmosis. Her emailed plea for your support after the jump.

Buy food and guns — but not the crisis hype

Owen Thomas · 10/01/08 04:20PM

Jeremy Philips, News Corp.'s Internet-savvy executive wunderkind, has been going around telling anyone who will listen, "Buy food and guns." Some people can't tell if Philips (shown here, right), is kidding; those who take him seriously interpret it as a wry shorthand for hunkering down and bracing for a long economic downturn. It's naive to think that the meltdown of the investment-banking sector won't have an effect on Silicon Valley. But not in the way most people think.Wall Street is currently in a bubble of panic. The Valley is currently in a bubble of denial. Neither zone approaches reality. Members of the National Bureau of Economic Research — the only official arbiter of such matters — can't even agree if we're in a recession yet. "It's really hard to say if we're in a recession, because different indicators point in different directions," said Jeffrey Frankel, a Harvard professor and a member of the NBER's recession-calling commitee. That technical measure of recession ignores the reality on the ground: Home prices continue to slump, gas prices are pinching consumers' pocketbook, and advertisers are aggressively cutting back budgets, even online. Layoffs are grabbing headlines. But does this really affect the Web startups which so enchant the blogosphere's imagination? Schadenfreude demands that these tiny companies shutter their doors — or if they don't have the decency to close up shop, they should act suitably chastened by the cold economic winds blowing. There's a lot of contradictory advice being handed out: Rely on angel investors! Don't rely on angel investors! My advice: Don't rely on journalists and bloggers for advice on how to run your business. One might think Valleywag, which eagerly chronicles the mishaps of misconceived startups, would cheer on the notion of a lot of startups starving to death because of an economic downturn. Far from it! Better that they choke on their own vomit — that excess and lack of self-discipline kill them, rather than factors outside their control. Serious entrepreneurs should be tightly controlling their spending. But that is as true now as it was a year ago, and a decade ago. Retaining pricey PR firms, throwing lavish parties, hiring executives from Fortune 500 companies at mid-six-figure salaries — that can wait until the company turns a profit. If your startup is dependent on a bubbly economic cycle, then it's not being run like a startup. By all means, those who were never meant to be entrepreneurs in the first place, who lack any real ideas of their own, or any interest in making money rather than spending someone else's, should take this occasion to make a graceful exit from the scene. Six months ago, closing your startup would have seemed cowardly if not insane; now, everyone will nod at your wisdom. That brings me to the opportunists — the likes of Marc Andreessen, who has been preaching the notion of a coming "nuclear winter" for some time, and Jason Calacanis, who recently wrote about a looming "startup depression." Were I more impressed with their current startups, I'd nod alongside. But Andreessen's Ning is an unimpressive social-network builder; Mahalo, a gussied-up replica of Yahoo's 1994-era Web directory. Frustratingly for some observers, they have raised enough money that neither company will run out of funds for at least a year. (No one sincerely believes Calacanis when he says he has enough money to run the company for four years, do they?) If their flimsy business models remain unchallenged, their survival is all the more likely. So when Andreessen and Calacanis talk doom and gloom, what I'm really hearing is: "Please don't raise money for a better idea than mine — I can't take the competition." What history tells us, actually, is that the best companies are started in times like this. The last wave of truly innovative Web 2.0 companies — Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, Facebook — started at a time when no one particularly believed in their potential. Many people would benefit from a climate of fear: Venture capitalists, who might get larger pieces of startups; employers, who might hire talent more cheaply; and corporate dealmakers, like Jeremy Philips of News Corp., who might acquire companies less expensively. But the biggest reason to ignore Philips' fearmongering, in particular? He's not taking his own advice. Rumor has it that, instead of food and guns, he is acquiring a piece of Manhattan real estate. And from what we hear, it is rather too glossy a place to serve as a warehouse for rations and ammo. (Photo by Gawker Media)

Correct out-of-touch New York style rag's Internet gossip!

Melissa Gira Grant · 10/01/08 03:20PM

It's complicated. God, is it ever. The same October Details story that follows around New York's "Internet playboys" and their bicoastal hangers-on runs with this chart of who dated, funded, or hated in this overdocumented side of the Web scene. So sweet to know we're not the only ones keeping a scorecard, but one of its subjects, Caroline McCarthy, claims there's inaccuracies! Let's do Details and the kids recently fanning their fameballs from the coverage a favor and fix it up then. Ready? Let loose in the comments with your errata.

Henry Blodget's family feud

Owen Thomas · 09/29/08 06:20PM

Why did disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget post a long email by Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis to Silicon Alley Insider, and then take it down? There's the obvious reason: Calacanis hadn't given permission for it to be republished. But Silicon Alley Insider has reprinted Calacanis's emails before. We think it more has to do with the fight that broke out in the comments between Calacanis and Howard Lindzon, a Phoenix, Ariz. hedge-fund manager who owns a piece of Blodget's blog. Could it be that Calacanis's copyright gave Blodget a convenient excuse to unpublish the piece — an item that was generating ill will between one of his investors and a startup CEO whom Blodget thought it expedient to suck up to?If so, the peacemaking attempt failed. Lindzon has made no secret of his dislike for Calacanis, on his blog and on Twitter after Twitter after Twitter. In a post discussing the bailout, Lindzon gratuitously dissed Calacanis as someone who "started a bad business (Mahalo.ugh) at the top and now is scared and panicking to his e-mail list." Calacanis extended an olive branch:

Jason Calacanis missive unpublished by Silicon Alley Insider

Jackson West · 09/29/08 05:00AM

It's Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis's world, we just have the misfortune of living in it. The former Silicon Alley Reporter publisher decided to quit blogging, instead opting to send out his verbose fonts of wisdom as emails. Take his latest 2,948-word missive, "(The) Startup Depression" — claiming that anywhere from half to four in five startups will fail thanks to the current economic crisis (or at least, will blame their failure on the economy). Apparently Calacanis asked that the post be taken down. Because of a principled stand for intellectual property? Because SAI's publisher was getting the pageviews and Mahalo wasn't? Or because Calacanis can't take the heat in a public forum? The fight that broke out in the comments between Wallstrip creator Howard Lindzon, Blodget and serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer suggests the latter.

Loïc Le Meur, Segway instructor

Jackson West · 09/11/08 02:26AM

Please tell me someone has pictures of Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur giving small-time technology investor Michael Arrington Segway riding lessons outside 330 Ritch for the TechCrunch50 conference's closing party. For now, I'll have to settle for Siqi Chen, left, and Alex Le, right, the guys behind Facebook widget Friends For Sale, at the Plista party at Fluid. Where's the afterparty? It's not at the W or the Four Seasons. Maybe Mahalo chief Jason Calacanis is drinking responsibly tonight and has turned in early, but I'm pretty sure Arrington is up drinking scotch somewhere.

Cal Henderson sighting at 330 Ritch

Jackson West · 09/11/08 12:18AM

Stubblicious Flickr developer Cal Henderson and his "fake wife," Pownce community liaison Ariel Waldman, were sharing a precious booth with their entourage at yet another overpacked Seesmic party. Here, Waldman tries to chat with Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale over the din. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis and Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, probably fed up with the crowds, have ditched 330 Ritch for the Plista party at Fluid.

Jason Calacanis has no idea how much vodka he drank last night

Jackson West · 09/10/08 09:00PM

The closing party for TechCrunch50 kicks off tonight, and our spy will be bringing us live updates as the evening unfolds. Hungover organizer Jason Calacanis, who got so sauced he couldn't remember what city he was in last night and showed up late this morning, was offered a bottle of Finnish vodka from a wantrepreneur, soliciting a bit of a reprimand from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington — who also demanded that Calacanis delete his drunken postings to Twitter (Calacanis complied).

How to make a baloney sandwich

Paul Boutin · 09/10/08 06:00PM

Just when I thought Mahalo Towhead-in-Chief Jason Calacanis had cornered the market on baby-fine locks, he calls in reinforcements. (Bonus points if you can identify the Valleywag celebrity to the right.) Write your own caption for this post and we'll use the best one as its new title. Yesterday's winner is categorically for "You just put your lips together and blow."