Jason Calacanis

Founder & CEO, LAUNCH · 1 appearance on the record.

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Jason Calacanis is an early-stage technology investor who backed companies such as Uber, Robinhood, Calm, and Wealthfront, managing investments through his firm LAUNCH and angel syndicate. He authored the book Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups and hosts This Week in Startups while moderating the All-In podcast.

18statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 3.78/5average certainty → 2.44/5average debate potential → 11said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 2 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 1 assertion · 6 opinions · 2 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Jason argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up

Calacanis: Crypto market downturn will trigger hundreds of lawsuits

“And I think this stress test is gonna result in countless And I mean countless lawsuits. Hundreds of lawsuits.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 11:42 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Jason Calacanis on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

What they said18 What others said11 Episodes1

Everything Jason Calacanis said on the Startup Ideas Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Calacanis: VCs paid high legal fees specifically to dump tokens

“You set up these structures, you paid all this legal money because you knew you were going to dump. You knew you were going to clear these positions and you knew it was going to be lucrative. That's why you went through the expense instead of just raising mone…”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 10:33 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Opinion

Calacanis: 99% of crypto projects are built by grifters or incompetents

“I do think 99% of the ICOs in crypto projects have never materialized into anything reasonable. And I think a significant portion of them have been built by either grifters, incompetent people, or some combination of both.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 7:34 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Calacanis: Bitcoin will eventually be replaced by superior technology

“Bitcoin is a great technology. It's been proven pretty robustly over a decade, but it will be replaced by a better technology. All technologies replaced eventually by a better technology”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 28:36 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Opinion

Calacanis: Digital journalism is flawed and BuzzFeed could hit zero

“Journalism is a terrible business. There's no path to viral growth here. Every time you grow in order to grow their top line, they're going to have expense. So if you want to get more page views, you're going to have to hire more expensive entitled writers as …”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 50:48 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Prediction Held up

Calacanis: Crypto market downturn will trigger hundreds of lawsuits

“And I think this stress test is gonna result in countless And I mean countless lawsuits. Hundreds of lawsuits.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 11:42 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2027

Calacanis: Disney's streaming bundle will reach one billion subscribers

“I think that between Disney, Hulu, ESPN plus, they're going to get to a billion subscribers.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 38:49 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Opinion

Calacanis: Blockchain is a terrible database and will always be slow

“The blockchain as a database sucks. You know, everybody knows that it's slow and it's never gonna get super fast. At least not when compared to You know you know, modern day technology that doesn't have to, you know, be immutable and distributed. So it's alway…”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 17:57 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Opinion

Calacanis: Consumers will prefer centralized brands over decentralized crypto versions

“I don't think most consumers would pick the decentralized crypto version over the centralized trusted brand. People are underestimating centralized trusted brands.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 23:31 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Opinion

Calacanis: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is a product genius

“And I think Evan Spiegel is a product genius. Like he truly is. If you think about the things Zuckerberg copied from him, ephemeral messaging, lenses, stories, I mean, and glasses.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 46:37 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Disclosure

Calacanis: All-In hosts agreed to an equal 25% equity split

“And then we just decided, fuck it. We'll just make it a podcast every week. No more events. None of this bullshit. And we'll just own a 25% each.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 58:20 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Insight

Calacanis: Angel investors should only back revenue-generating companies for first 20 deals

“Like I literally tell people only invest in companies that have products in market and have revenue for your first 20 investments as an angel.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 27:36 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Insight

Calacanis: Founder charisma can be faked, great products cannot

“You can become really inspired by a founder and they're, they've been trained on how to be charismatic. Now they've kind of unpacked what charisma is. And how to sort of fake it. So it's quite theatrical at times. But you can't fake a great product. You can't …”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 44:08 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Disclosure

Calacanis bought Bitcoin at $2–$3 and $100–$200

“I bought Bitcoin at like two or three dollars, and then again at a 102 hundred dollars.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 3:31 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Disclosure

Calacanis: Henry Blodget offered me 5% of Insider and I passed

“Yeah, which used to be Silicon Alley Insider, and you offered me five percent of it because I had Silicon Alley Reporter magazine, and I said, nah, you know, just keep it.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 35:41 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Disclosure

Calacanis bought 5,000 Stitch Fix shares after Bill Gurley's purchase

“I saw Bill Gurley buy a million shares. I know Bill Gurley. He's really smart. He's been with the company forever. Bill Gurley's buying a million shares. Sure. I'll buy my, I bought 5000 shares.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 38:36 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Disclosure

Calacanis: LAUNCH averages 70 meetings and two investments per week

“I have 11, I think 10 or 11 people on the investment team at launch. Now we do about 70 meetings a week, probably 50, 60 of them are introductory meetings. And we invest in two companies a week on average. And one of them tends to be a follow on one tends to b…”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 41:53 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Disclosure

Calacanis commits $1M to $2M to learn public equity trading

“The way I'm looking at the million or two million dollars I'm gonna put into J trading is that's to get me the edge. That's my MBA.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 53:13 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Calacanis: All-In Summit made a couple hundred thousand in profit

“It sells out. It makes a couple million bucks, you know, a couple 100,000 dollars in profit. It could have made millions in profit, but we gave half the tickets to the fans at a loss.”

Jason Calacanis Jul 28, 2022 ▶ 57:13 How To Pick Startup Winners With Jason Calacanis

The other half of the tape: Jason Calacanis's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 8 episodes on the Startup Ideas Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Greg Isenberg 4 Michael Karnjanaprakorn 2 Kat Cole 1 Howard Lindzon 1 Cody Schneider 1 Chris Josephs 1

Statements about Jason Calacanis, by other people (1)

Assertion Contradicted

Jason Calacanis invested in three Swell AI competitors that will all fail

“Jason Calacanis has invested in like three companies that are like exact competitors of us. And we're just laughing because I was like how many tap bats can you get with this? It's not going to work.”

Cody Schneider May 10, 2024 ▶ 26:00 A few $30k+/month startup ideas from the most manic/genius founder you've never heard of