YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Calacanis

lines on the record: 189
first: 2021-02-15
most recent: 2021-02-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And that company dies. So now you've got 10 million. Poof, up in smoke, boom, 10 million up in smoke. So this is called the J-curve, where your performance goes down. And then it's only in years four or five and six it starts going up. And what you're seeing right now is the people who started like I did in 2000, you know, just 11, 12 years ago in 2009, I started investing. We all look like geniuses. Why? We're at the end of the cycle. We invested after when the stock market was on the floor after the financial crisis. And it's gone straight up since. So everybody looked, there's a couple little blips in there, but generally speaking, there hasn't been like a major crash, with the exception of the pandemic crash, but that bounced right back. And so, you know, it takes a decade to figure out if you're good at it.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies that don't work out go out of business immediately. So, if it's not going to become a Robin Hood or Uber, those take seven, you know you have one of those great successes somewhere in your 5, 6, 7, 8 as an investor Is the first five years like the first five years you feel like an idiot because you, let's say you make these 10 bets. In year two, two or three of them come back and they don't have product market fit, and they're out of money. And they say, Can we have more money? And you say, No, we have to go get it from somebody else because you have to prove that there's still a market for it. We may keep our prorata. We may put a little bit in to maintain our percentage ownership, but we're not going to give you another big chunk of money.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it depends to get out of the way. Yeah. If you get young venture capitalists who are starting their career, they're very nervous and scared because they're putting all these bets. And then there's a very weird thing that happens. The bad news comes first. So.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Takes extreme product market fit, you have to have a great price for your product that has a great margin. Yeah. And if you're doing something in hardware, it's probably impossible because it's super capital intensive. So it's probably got to be a software business. Hardware businesses take a lot more.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now you start thinking about the game theory there. You're dealing with money that is coming in that only cares about you going 100x. It's a whole different ballgame. Whereas if you build off revenue, you don't have to do that. And if you look at a company like Com.com, we invested at $5 million. The next round they did was $250. They were so capital efficient that they grew from $10,000 a month in revenue to millions of dollars a month in revenue over those four years since we invested, and they didn't raise money in between. It was unbelievable, and I've only seen this happen three or four times”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that means it has to grow 30x and then 60x to double the fund. And you're really supposed to be doing three times cash on cash. So that $300 million funds expectation is in 10 years to return $900 million. Triple the person's money as opposed to the stock market, which doubles your money in the same period. So you're supposed to do 25% annualized returns in order to triple the money and maybe have an outlying chance of four or five times the money, which does happen sometimes when you have an outlier in your portfolio like Uber or Facebook was. And what that means is the venture capitalist behavior and the game they're playing is different than you as the founder. You as the founder, you may really care about this. And it dying really matters to you. And then you got a venture capitalist who's like, we're betting on 30 names. We need two of them to hit it out of the park maybe three. And nothing else is meaningful.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And once you start taking that money, the way venture capital is constructed in the mix of like MIT or Harvard's endowments is going to put some money into safe things and then we're going to have these really binary things over here. And they probably put 5% in venture capital traditionally. It's grown to 20% just as a function of how successful it's been. So the Harvards of the world and MIT is probably won 5% or 10% in venture, but it's grown to 25% because companies like Airbnb and Uber have grown so big and Tesla. But the goal is in these venture funds, we're going to invest in 30 names and one or two of them are going to return three times the capital we've deployed. So it's a $300 million fund and there's 30 names and they each got 10 million. That means one of the 10 million is going to return the fund plus.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rockets get blown up all the time at SpaceX as part of their ambitious plans. And startups, seven out of ten startups we invest in go to zero. Now, if you were to start the business and only build it off customer revenue and use your own money and go nice and slow and grow 10% a year, the chances of you blowing up the rocket are very low because you're riding a bicycle. You can go a little faster, but the bicycle can only go so fast.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very important question because the venture capital community is only going to fund sub 1% of enterprise has started in the United States every year, like maybe 10 basis points of them, like one in a thousand. And the reason is. It's jet fuel. You only want to take that money if you really want to build something big and you want to build it fast. And when you put jet fuel behind a startup, as we've seen with other rockets, things can blow up and people can die. It's not people literally dying, but the business can go up and smoke, right?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mental midget and my IQ is like lower than I don't want to bring the bell curve up or whatever. But you could figure out like if we all put our DNA into sequenced online and like, oh yeah, you know, Lex has got 10 more IQ points than JCAL. Sam's got 10 more than Lex. And all of a sudden people are like all bed out of shape about it. But what if they did that and they were like, and by the way, you also, all three of you are going to get Parkinson's unless you do X, Y, and Z, unless you eat more blueberries or whatever you figure out.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People, your privacy is an illusion. Like all this information is there. And then People are more than willing to give up privacy in exchange for some value. You know, it's a value trade. And giving, if my Tesla, when I'm driving in the direction of my house just starts the navigation and saves me three clicks and that friction's gone, I'm willing to give Tesla my location and my home address, right? Yes. I'm not willing to give Zuckerberg anything because I don't trust him, but you get the idea. I mean, it would be that way with like DNA and other things at some point. We'll just be like, yeah, just take my DNA. Sure. People can look and see that”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow, these blue people have no connection to These people, that one's glowing red. We know seven or more people in common And those are the seven people. Oh, we should go talk about how we know each other. That sort of happened with Facebook. Remember, or MySpace, where you were like, oh, you know that person, friend of a friend? That's what is going to be AR's like this is why I think if Apple figures out AR or Snapchat and they just have those glasses, you know, forget about VR. It's just nauseating and whatever, but AR, where you put the glasses on, you see the real world, but you augment it.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you just see a glow around a person, and like green means you have some financial relationship, blue means you have some friendship one or yellow means you have friendship one, blue means you know nothing about each other. You have no connections.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Network, yeah. And then, because we would discover that through small talk. But imagine you're like at a party and you look and it just People glow”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so I see, oh, you both know Sam Harris, or you had Elon on the podcast on this date, or you and I were both at Burning Man in 2016.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such an amazing product. I just have one killer feature I want for augmented reality. We wear our glasses, and when I look at you above your head, I see the relationships we have. And the things we've done together.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't released the fourth yet. Okay. So I watched all three because I really thought you're Yugwei and him giving you advice was very interesting dynamic. I thought it was very interesting dynamic. And I find him a fascinating cat. We know everybody in common except we've never met. It's very weird because, you know, you think about the social graph in the real world. This is why I think augmented reality is going to be.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's I think it's going to be the in between. I like it as a you release your podcast. Like you and I are going to release this podcast, right? And then at some point I'll have you on my pod when you launch your startup. And then at some point, somebody's going to be like, You and I will run into, and I ran into you. I saw you were on Clubhouse the other night, and I was busy, but I was almost going to click on you and say, let's start a room together. But you and I will start a room together with Eric Weinstein or somebody or Sam Harris will jump in or Elon, and we'll have a different experience, which would just shoot the shit. And it'll act as like a fabric.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To sit back and just put in a couple of miles and play chess and listen to a clubhouse discussion. That is about relationships or, you know, some fashion or hip-hop or whatever it is that I'm not part of. I just sit there and I listen and you learn. It's like such a delightful day. I always think about these kids who go to college. And I always been so jealous of these Ively kids. They go and they're like, oh, I got to go to class. And I'm like, I would just love to sit there and listen to. Professor Lex talk, you know, like what a privilege to sit there and Let somebody else drive and talk and listen and learn.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And listen in and hear conversations that I wouldn't normally be privy to. And my, everybody's like, oh, come join as a speaker. I want to do a room with you. I get asked every day. Can we do a room? Can we do a room? Ask an angel investor. Talk about startups. And I'm like, my usage of... Clubhouse is going on my Peloton treadmill, putting Clubhouse on. Picking a room and just listening It's so delightful for me as a podcaster where my job is to talk.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would like to see the people who are the most helpful in the world, generous, kind, intelligent, considered, you know, commenting on things that I don't already know about because I want to open my worldview That could be a beautiful thing for society. And actually, Jack was talking about. Potentially on Twitter letting people bring their own algorithms and sort their feeds themselves, this would be a wonderful thing. I think it's one of the reasons Clubhouse has resonated. Is it such a diverse group of people that I've been able to drop in on conversations with people who are nothing like me?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consider bringing your own alcohol and bring your own algorithm. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you thought about it, if we came and said, I want, when I look at my Twitter feed,”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The coolest thing in the world is today Going to the Grammys, going to whatever Coachella Burning Man, like you're like, oh, but I'm home. I'm in my house And I'm not at Burning Man”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what's got to be undone. And the only way for that to be undone is these things can't be billions of people where the most outrageous thing that happened in the world today, in the last five minutes, is now in front of you. And that's why people have anxiety, they don't sleep, and they doomscroll all night is because the human mind was not meant to process this much suffering, pain, anger. And that's why we have all this mental health issues. Also, you know, young girls or even adults watching other people post their private jets and their vacations and, you know, YOLO adventures on their Instagram to the point at which young people are now faking being on private jets to put on their Instagram and creating like this crazy FOMO around their Instagrams. We wonder why people are unhappy. Like if you think everybody's on a private jet going to some Michelin Star restaurant or whatever.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to get to the top of the list, and then, of course, with Trump, he realized it, and he's like, okay, yeah, I'm just going to make fun of a celebrity and I get more retweets. Okay, I'm going to make fun of Rosie O'Donnell for being overweight or something. And he just starts attacking people. People like, oh my God, what did he say? And he copied that from Howard Stern because he was in New York and he used to be on Harry Stern. Howard Stern took over all the dialogue in the 80s and 90s because he was outrageous. And then Trump did that. And then social media incorporated that into the operating system. It became the actual device of social media was the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. We've got something incredible for you. Everybody salivates like Pavlog's dog, you know. Oh my God, I can be outraged”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then it got dark. And then people started to realize if I want to show up on the top of my friend's feeds, if I say something controversial or I'm outraged, I get to the top. And then that's when outrage culture came in. And then that's when cancel culture came in. Everybody started to realize, if I try to cancel that person for being a racist or a sexist or a horrible human being or whatever they did that's wrong, I get to the top of the feed. And we all collectively started playing a very weird video game, which is how outraged can we all be?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retweets. Let's show those first, and then we'll kind of mix in the most recent stuff. And so when you're on Twitter and then when Facebook did that, Facebook became so addicting because Facebook was on, what has got the most engagement put that first so every time you opened up Facebook, you got the dopamine hit. And then what happens when you see the Bar Mitzvah photo or the enraging story about some injustice in the world, you retweet it, you write a comment. You share it on your wall. And thus this addiction to the outrageous, the outlandish, the inspiring occurred. And it used to be like inspiring stuff, puppies or some heartwarming story.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked earlier about The magic of Silicon Valley and then maybe going too far with the Facebook groups example where you take out all that friction. What happened was we used to have something called RCron, reverse chronological order. That's how you consumed a feed. So any kind of social feed like Twitter was in reverse chronological order. The newest thing was up top and you would just work your way backwards. And so it gave this like really fresh feeling. And then a guy named Dave Morin and the team over at Facebook realized, you know, there are some things that got a lot of attention two hours ago. And the stuff since then has not been as important. But if you missed that, there was a really good tweet where there was a really good update. Like somebody had a baby. That's kind of, can we get the baby one at the top? And it was like, well, how would we do that? How would we know that that's the important one? It's like, well, let's put a like button on it. And let's see how many comments there are. So if it gets a lot of likes or comments or”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's going to be May, June. I'm a little bit earlier than you. I've been tracking it. It's like 1.5 million shots at arms a day. I think this vaccine's been undersold. I mean, it's a miracle. Not one person who is in the trials died, who took it, and only one went to the hospital and they weren't even put on a ventilator. And the hospitalizations are plummeting, and we're at 10% now in the United States. At the pace we're going at 1.5 a day, I think when the Johnson Johnson one comes out next month, it'll be $3 million a day, maybe, two and a half. And we already have 100 million people who've likely had it. So I've been doing the math. I think we're like 60 days away, February, March, yeah, sometime in April, I think anybody's going to be able to get a shot. And the number of deaths is going to go below 200 a day.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, Clubhouse is a beneficiary of the pandemic for sure. When do you think the pandemic will be under, let's say, 200 a day and we'll have 200 million people on the other side of this? Because that's kind of what it takes, right? You got to get to 150, 200 million people on the other side in America?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are not taking shower snow, Lex. We're in a pandemic and people just roll out of bed. And the hair thing, nobody's getting hair cut. Nobody's hair is good. Nobody's getting haircuts.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they had this like addictive nature to it, and that's why Clubhouse was able to garner so much investment. Is the number of hours people were using it every month was just unbelievably off the charts.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A fancy word for how much they use it. In Snapchat, when that was going around and they were trying to raise money, they had a fraction of the number of users. But the top maybe third were opening the app every hour. Nobody had ever seen that before. People were using Facebook a couple times a day, the top users, but nobody had ever seen. People using it every day for a hundred days in a row, every hour. And I was like, what's going on here? It's like, oh, the ephemeral messaging and then the streaks. They had created these streaks between people where, you know, every day and then people would be like on vacation. Like, I just have to open my streak and keep my streak with Lex that we chatted every day going.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could have great teams that build a bad product, doesn't happen too often. Or you could have customers who don't like the product. But generally speaking, a great team will build a great product or a good product and iterate and then eventually delight customers. And so most people say the team is the most important, but there's a lot of smart people out there. And let's assume that you can raise money for your idea or you have money or you can just convince people to do it for free. If you make a great product and it connects with users, that's the magic. You look at Clubhouse, it's actually a really well-designed product. And that product is connecting with customers. And if you were to talk to the customers or look at the product, you would see a well-constructed product and a delighted customer. And you can tell the delighted customer by just the amount of time they use it. That's called engagement.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the construction, the actual product is amazing. Then there's customers. And that every business has ultimately a customer. And that customer, if they are in fact delighted by that product, that's the magic. Because You need a team to build the product, and then you need customers to use the product. And really, those three vectors are undeniable.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that's how they won their championships. They meditated. And I was like, hmm, if you see LA's doing, and Sam says it's cool, well, fuck it. I'll put money into that. And that's the second biggest investment in my career after Uber. And in all likelihood become the biggest. I mean, it's between Uber, Robin Hood, and Calm. And long story short, when I'm teaching people to Angel Invest, there's really two things that you cannot fake. One is a product that is built really well. So if you look at Calm, Robinhood, Uber, Tesla, Amazon, these products are transcendent. They're well constructed. There's craftsmanship to them. They're great products.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six years ago, so probably seven, yeah, maybe 2015, 2014. And nobody else would invest in comm. But Sam Harris was the reason I did because I asked Sam. Tell me about meditation, and he's explaining it to me. And I said, What about this? Like, you have to have a mantra? How does it work exactly? I know positive. Well, you know, you should just go to UCLA and talk to Diana Winston and like, there's this whole project there. UCLA does meditation? It's like, yeah, there's a mindful institute. They're like teaching people to Hesh meditation. And they're doing PTSD and I'm doing brain scans. And I was like, oh. And then I talked to the UCLA people and they're like, it's real. We taught Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryan and Chaquille O'Neill did.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very similar to the advice I give to investors because now I teach angel investing because there's so many people want to invest. And so I wrote a book on that, Angel, and then I do a course called Angel University that I teach six times a year. And then I have a syndicate called the Syndicate.com where I invest in companies. There's 6,500 people who are members of that, it's the largest syndicate in the world. In fact, the first deal we ever did was calm.com, the meditation app. We put $378,000 into it when it was a $5 million product, a $5 million company. So we bought six or seven percent of the company. It's now worth $2 billion. So you can do the math on that. We still own 5%.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing in the world because anything I need, you know, if you forgot a microphone or a cable goes bad or a camera goes bad, you get it here, you know, within a day or less.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It started at $50, and I think they even had like $40, $50, $60 was like the testing in the early days. And now it's, I think, $149. Wow. $13 a month if you pay for the year, I think it goes down to $10 a month, $120. And you're like, wow, and it's like, Yeah, you're paying $13 a month for the privilege of shopping. At Amazon, but you would say it's the greatest.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have hundreds of millions of people doing Amazon Prime for 10 bucks a month. I think globally it's probably cheaper. But that was the driver of that business was all of those people because they would, you're an Amazon Prime subscriber. Do you know how much you pay?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wonder if we actually made the batteries ourselves what that would look like, or I wonder if we could get to two-day shipping, you know, or wonder if we do same day shipping. Like, you need to have somebody who's willing to say, you know what, fuck it. Let's set a crazy audacious goal. Two day shipping of any product anywhere in the United States. And once you throw the gauntlet down like that, now everybody knows they're rowing in the right direction. two-day shipping, Amazon Prime. That's what people didn't realize about Amazon. The business wasn't the shipping of those products. It was getting you to sign up for Amazon Prime”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really think through what is the best possible solution here? What are some alternative solutions and get from everybody? Like how do we solve this problem? And what people do sometimes, they get in a rut. They just come to work and they just go through their email. They do whatever they did the day before. And they don't think, why are we doing this? And is there a better way to do it? Now, you can get so obsessive about that that you can over engineer stuff and you can never actually ship a product. So there have to be some pragmatism and some goals and some dates associated with that. It is a very cool thing to really think like.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure things out. I mean, he's a problem solver. I mean, and that's another thing I think the great entrepreneurs can look at a problem with very fresh eyes, like almost consistently. Bezos described that as day one thinking. Right? Like, just pretend this is day one every day. And then other people use the term first principles. But it basically means like when you see a problem, pause for a second.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anybody who knows Elon knows he has great questions. I mean, I used to have dinner in LA, and my book agent, also with Sam Harris's agent, and Sam and I met through John Brockman, and we became friends because we lived near each other and I was friends with Elon. And then I used to invite them to both dinner in Brentwood because one lived in Bel Air, one lived in Santa Monica, and I lived in Brentwood. And we would go to this place Papone, this Italian restaurant. And every Tuesday, for years, we would just the three of us every other Tuesday or so, we'd have dinner. And I'd sit there and say, Sam wanted to know about AI. And Elon's talking about artificial intelligence because he's on the board of DeepMind. And Elon wanted to know about atheism and meditation and all this other stuff that Sam was an expert on. I got to sit there and just listen to these two guys talk.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's just incredibly hard working and he's very talented as well. I don't think people understand that. He actually is a really brilliant engineer. At the end of the day, he actually knows what he's doing. And he asked the right questions. I mean, people were kind of aghast that he was asking Vlad such good questions. And they're like, oh my God, Elon's the best journalist on the planet. And it was like.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No choice. Having been a witness to it, you know, just as friends for that long, I have never seen an entrepreneur suffer more than him. And he's been public about that. Like, you do not want to be me. He has suffered for those companies. He has suffered to get them where they are. It has not been easy.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to get to month nine or ten of this, and you're going to run out of money or like your CTO is going to quit, then your CFO is going to quit, and you're going to lose your biggest customer. And you're just going to say, this is not worth it. And if, you know, using Bezos or Elon as examples, they just needed to see this the world change in very specific ways. And Steve Jobs, you know, they needed to see a change. It doesn't matter if they made money or they were losing or winning. They just went to work every day and they had to change it”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's like, a church should have one purpose, one single thing they do. And like his church, which was like one of these mega churches in San Diego, just wanted to do education for this specific country. And that's all they did. And they just benchmarked them. I think it's very important to have a purpose and a mission, not everything. But a specific purpose of some kind of joy that you want to put into the world. You want to solve some kind of big, hard problem. And then everybody knows why you're coming to work every day. And then from the founder, when you dread going to work that day and you don't feel like solving that problem anymore, that's the tell. And a lot of times I meet young founders. I'm like, why are you doing this? And they're like, well, I was looking for an idea. And this is the one I came up with because I think I'll make a lot of money. And it's like, you're going to quit.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it sounds corny. And when I first heard that, I was like, it's kind of corny, but then I read this book by, I've got his name Rick Something. He wrote The Purpose Driven Church. And he had spoken out of TED or something and everybody went crazy about it.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source