I've watched a lot of Jason C. and one thing is true, he is a "_brilliant_" salesman (I swear he is branding that word). But for him to step out and take on the old establishment really means something. He could easily concentrate on Mahalo and and not reach back and motivate the people working on startups.
It's so cliche, but he seems genuinely sincere in fighting for the the next generation of entrepreneurs. I'm behind him 100% on this, and can't wait to see where it goes.
The best pitch is the one you don't see coming. I should have known better than to click on this axe grinding rant, but since I did here's my take:
- The guy grinds axes. Is he right? Is he wrong? It doesn't matter, he's going to be as loud and obnoxious as possible.
- He likes to talk about himself. I really don't need paragraphs about how he grew up in a loud, opinionated environment. (I was able to discern this on my own pretty quickly).
- He's an opportunist. I mean, the bar is really low here: should startups pay for ear time? Of course not. This is even less debatable than the brouhaha last week regarding Revolutionary Angel's competition [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=861767 ].
My impression is the slimy feeling you get when someone goes "out of their way" to help you, only to screw you later. I don't know how or when that might happen in this circumstance, but the whole post feels self-serving. (Maybe its an east coast spidey sense)
It might have something to do with this:
d) We are demanding that angel groups waive all fees starting today
e) We are going to crush any group that doesn’t comply with our demands
f) There is no negotiation
Apparently Calacanis is setting himself up as the VC police? This looks like a power grab for leverage over VC's via defamation. Last time I checked, Calacanis wasn't a newspaper or other journalistic organization beholden to the facts, or with clear separation of interests.
Actually, we're going to hit profitability in a couple of months and we're at 12M uniques/#176 on quantcast (verified):
http://www.quantcast.com/mahalo.com
Mahalo 2.0 which came out in June gave us a major boost because we started giving ~40% of the revenue from topic pages to our page managers. This resulted in a LOT more page being created.
Mahalo 3.0 will be out on December 1st and it will do a better job of explaining what Mahalo is. We got a little drunk on the Korean Web design of www.naver.com and it confused folks. That was my bad... M3 will be MUCH more obvious as to what we're about (search, content and Q&A all on one page).
I think he genuinely interested in helping startups and giving his knowledge away, also in being well known, so that is part of the visionary bit you mention. He sometimes talks about himself in the third person as if he thinks everyone thinks of him as this visionary already.
I doubt he run Mahalo in long term, he will want to get it established and flip it in the next 5 years, if not sooner, and I've heard him mention on the show that he is envious of $100m buyouts for companies and he wants that for Mahalo.
I think he building connections for his next ventures and company. He is aware of a lot early stage companies, he can invest at very favorable rates and then give the company a much better chance of success by introducing it to key VCs that he knows - which could make some very good investments for himself.
actually, our goal is to get into the top 100 sites in the next year and the top 50 two years from now.
If we do that we'll have a really nice business, and to be honest I'm not interested in flipping this one. Like Evan Williams with Twitter, I'm long on this startup after having sold my last one quickly.
No regrets selling Weblogs, Inc. after only 18 months. In fact, it was an amazing deal that set me up to raise $20M to build something on the scale of About.com (top 20 site), eHow (top 30), Yahoo Answers (top 20) or perhaps even Wikipedia (top 10!).
I think we have a good chance to grow as large as About.com or eHow... getting to Wikipedia level, well, that's a little out of my control, but I'm going to try really hard.
In terms of being a VC I've thought about it, but for now I'm just going to do 2-4 small invetments (25-50k) a year. So far I've done two this year: www.challengepost.com and www.gdgt.com. Both of which are really great ideas with big potential. I love the entrepreneurs behind each of these... hopefully I can find a couple of these a year.
Salesman or marketer? A lot of technical folk confuse the two. I think he can close deals, for sure, but really he is a talented marketer.
A lot of really good sales people don't make it obvious they are selling, Jason seems to make it a bit obvious in an un-ashamed way (which make me think he is more interested in getting the word out then pushing things on people).
His enthusiasm is infectious though, its really cool assuming he is sincere (and I am pretty sure he is).
It's so cliche, but he seems genuinely sincere in fighting for the the next generation of entrepreneurs. I'm behind him 100% on this, and can't wait to see where it goes.