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

“The ability to get people to join you on that journey. Is so critical. So, you have to be charismatic, and it doesn't mean like you're an extrovert. There are introverts who are super charismatic, and there are soft-spoken people. They don't have to be like super vivacious or rambunctious people. They could be just quiet assassins, but you need to be able to get people to come on the journey with you. You have to be that storyteller, and you have to have that passion, and then you have to transfer that enthusiasm to investors, the press, to customers, to all the stakeholders. And if you're enthusiastic about it and you're engaged, then it's easier for people to come on that journey. And that's why people really start to think about, well, what is the purpose of what I'm doing?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, and there's definitely something with immigrant parents that is a bit of a stereotype out here, but I've heard from many investors like that's like their, oh, were your parents immigrants? And did they beat into you that you have to succeed and you feel the need to succeed because they suffered to get you to this country? Like there is an archetype there that I hear when I started investing, I heard from a lot of people is like, yeah, you want to find those immigrant founders who are coming out of Stanford because they had to fight to get there. their parents had to fight, right? So it's like two huge fights and there's so much at stake as opposed to somebody who's fifth generation and like had everything handed to them and they were legacy and got into schools for free. But I think in general.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, relationship with their parents find me a radio entrepreneur. I will show me the trauma. Their dad was like, you're not good enough.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe Some of them do actually in their darkest moments, I can tell you that they turn off their Twitter accounts and they've had to sit down with a number of entrepreneurs and say, turn off Twitter. This is not healthy for you. This is not a healthy pursuit because don't read the comments. If you do, it's like a full contact sport. You should just take it as like professional wrestling or something. But stay focused on building companies. Know advancing the human species through science and technology. I mean”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certain religion, fine, but you know, China's approach is we need to win capitalism so bad, we need to win on the global stage so bad, we can't have any of this religious stuff going on here. That is a distraction from winning and beating America. And then in America, the people who are going to make us win are the entrepreneurs. And the scientists and the technology and our education system and finance, and we're vilifying those things. It's pretty dark”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Authoritarians win. And at any time, Xi Jinping can pull Jack Ma into a room and say, it's time for you to be re-educated, or they can put three or four million people, Uyghurs, into prison camps and say, you know what? This religious thing, that's counter to what is productive for us. Therefore, we're going to shave your heads and we're going to have you literally pick cotton in the fields. They have Uyghurs with no sense of any kind of arc of history in the fields picking cotton as slaves in what can only be described by every humanitarian organization as a concentration camp and every Jewish person I know takes great offense when somebody uses the Holocaust as a metaphor except in the case of the Uyghurs right now and every Jewish person I've talked to has said to me that is a Holocaust that is millions of people going to genocide because of their religious beliefs and I'm an atheist but if people want to believe us”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One you're going to see that's flat, and I think we peaked with 53 or 54% of people on the planet Earth being in a democracy, and now it's going below 50. And it's because some of the democratic Western countries don't have the population growth of some of the communist and socialist countries and authoritarian countries. And we have to make sure that we win capitalism. We must win economically. That is the battlefield. The battlefield of science, technology, and money and economy, finance, that's the battlefield. China wins.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in terms of the number of people living in poverty is plummeting. A life spans have been rising. Science is booming. The economy is booming. All these things are incredible. The one thing that's kind of stagnant right now is the number of people living in democracy versus under authoritarian rule. It's flat. So when you look at all Steve Pinker's charts and he's really excited.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bezos now is saying, you know what? I'm 57, I'm the richest guy on the planet, depending on the week. And I would like to do some other challenges. But I don't want to grind it out at Amazon for another 25 years. I want to do other things. And so he passed the baton. And that's the healthy thing to do in that regard. I do think there is a time period in which you can run that hot and then at a certain point you have to then change. Just like an athlete might go to be a coach, right? Or a commentator. And so, you know, being an entrepreneur is brutal. It's, you know, seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Anybody who says anything differently is kidding themselves. You're going to have to sacrifice. And this competition in America has to fight. If America does not win capitalism and China does, it is literally the end of the human species. It's over for humanity. Right now, everything has been going really...”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all top down. Olympic pursuit is. It's all top down. Everybody just, you asked earlier what leadership was, and I never answered the question. I think what leaders do is they set the example. They set the bar. And if you look at someone like Elon, we're personal friends for 20 years. And he is indefatigable. I mean, the guy has a stamina that is just phenomenal. Like he does not get tired. He works relentlessly. He sets that standard for the rest of the team. And I think, you know, Bezos is very sharp and likes to debate stuff and is very, and Jobs was just incredible at design and figuring out how to bridge that gap. So they just leaders set the standard. They set the standard. And you know that your time is over as a leader when you can't set the standard. And that's when you have to pass the baton, right? And Bezos did that.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the Chinese are now outsourcing to Vietnam and other countries. So this is the way of the world. You know, people move up and they get a better lot in life for their families. And just in America, we've gotten soft and there's a generation. How do people die in America now? Suicide, obesity, heart attacks, anxiety. I mean, we're suffering from things that if you told people 100 years ago, the top ways Americans would die would be overeating and suicide, they'd be like, what? You're literally killing yourself or eating yourself to death. That's what's happening in America?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if it's the bottom of the middle class, right? They've taken hundreds of millions of people in China and moved them into the middle class. And we're like, oh my God, these people are suffering. You know, they're up to $4 an hour, three or four dollars an hour in the factories there. And they were just two decades ago at, you know, I don't know, it was probably 50 cents an hour, something crazy like that. And now they've improved the quality of life there so much, just like America did 200 years ago or 100 years ago, they've improved it so much in China that now they're getting outpriced for factories from Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, and people are moving, and people in China are moving the factories out of China into other countries.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That just haven't had to suffer And so we're soft as Americans. We're soft. And then you look at people in China and we're like, oh my God, these poor Chinese people are living in these tiny cramped apartments. Like they were living in essentially lean tos in northern China with no running water or like one spigot of ice cold water for the entire village. They're thrilled to be joining the middle class.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you do not need to do anything more than what's put in front of you. And you just put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole and you go home and you get your little bits and grains of rice and you go heat them up and eat them. That's it. And then there's this other thing, which is the extreme pursuit of changing the world and sacrificing. And we have a generation of people, multi-generations of people, who are soft. They're just soft. I mean, what is the big struggle we've had to deal with in America in our lifetimes? Like 9-11, and we didn't have the Vietnam War and then we had this like weird Iraq wars and Middle East wars that were kind of like a small number of people went and we sent drones. Like, we have not had to sacrifice. Gen Xers, you know, maybe the tail end of boomers experienced the Vietnam War regrettably. But, you know, we've had a couple of generations now, three, I guess.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't even apply work-life ballots. Ridiculous. It's a ridiculous concept. Like, the idea that there's work life balance in a startup is ridiculous. If you're looking for work life balance, do not go to a startup or any kind of ambitious company. There is a series of places you can work in the world.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you're not serious about changing the world, why would you go work for Bezos? Why would you go work for Elon Musk? Don't do it. Don't go work there.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you're a rice picker and that's what you do and you feel safe, just getting a couple grains of rice, put them in a basket, cleaning it, and then whatever, that's valid work. No big deal. I'm not deriding it, I am sort of. But that is one group. And then there's people who are samurai. And you cannot conflate the two. You cannot compare the two. And that's what is happening right now in business. Whenever you see these stories about this person at this company is like a tyrant and they're so horrible and they yelled at somebody. Like if you're in the field and you're taking the beach at Normandy and it's D-Day or you got to take the hill or you got to whack Osama bin Laden and you're the Navy SEALs and like a rudder, a Roder gets knocked off. This is serious. Like, don't do it if you're not serious”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they've never left the company, and they are ride or die forever. And what you're seeing there is there's a mismatch of people going to work in an extreme sport or an extreme endeavor who should not do that. There are people. Who should go out into the rice fields and pick rice And then there's another group of people who are samurai. Who wield a sword and who take on missions that are dangerous.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People were super mean to him. They put him in an ice bath. It was like, no, he wanted to be the greatest swimmer of all time and he knew what the sacrifice entailed. And that what happens in work, in business, is that people conflate like, oh, well, I went to work to make a living to pay my bills versus Michael Phelps' approach to getting gold medals or Michael Jordan or pick the person, Elon or Jeff Bezos. And when you look at the reviews of like a place like Amazon, there was this incredible story in the New York Times where people were, I don't know if you remember it, this is the worst place you could ever work. Amazon. And we talked to 200 people and they all told us they all described for us in the New York Times a culture of cutthroatness and brutality that has never before been seen. And then you see all these people who work for Bezos for 24 years from when they graduated with their MBAs until today.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other words, an effort that requires massive sacrifice. We would not look at somebody who wins a gold medal like Michael Phelps and say, oh my God, he had to get up at 4 a.m. every day and he had to swim and he had to do an ice bath. Oh my God, that poor guy he suffered he was tortured”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. If you want to do great things, there will be some suffering. And there'll be some pain and it's not easy if you want to change the world. And then some people have this expectation that it's going to be easy. And what you'll typically find for any great leader who's trying to do something super ambitious. Like if you want to be like, if you're a rich guy and you start like a restaurant and you don't care about making money and people have made restaurants before, like you could be high fives and everybody can love you or whatever. If you want to change the world, you want to do something hard driving, there's going to be sacrifice involved. And so the problem is people are looking at something that is an Olympic caliber sport or a Navy seals-like effort.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there is my incentive to grow faster, and then there's what's right for society and for the individuals. You got to think it through. Think it through.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sad part about it was there were a group of young men who were gay and who were in college and there was a gay choir in their college and the person who was coordinating their Facebook group added them. So Zuckerberg, it wasn't enough for Zuckerberg to make it so anybody could add anybody to any group because it will grow faster, let alone you have to confirm you want to be added to the group. What it also did was post it on their walls to increase engagement. And what they inadvertently did was they outed a bunch of 18-19 year olds in college to their families. They joined the gay man's choir at some college. And this is the kind of way, this is where Silicon Valley needs to check itself and to do better is you have to really think.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facebook last year, and then Zuckerberg's response was well, if your friends put you in that NAML group, you should get new friends. And it was like, you got put in there too.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they added Zuckerberg, Mike Arrington, myself, and like 20 other famous people in Silicon Valley. And I was like, and then somebody takes a screenshot of it, and they're like, you're in Ambla? And I'm like, no”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of scary, but that is the next evolution. And what happens when you go that fast is you get unintended consequences. And so this is why Facebook has had more fines than any company in the history of Silicon Valley, just giant fines for doing stuff like this. And one of them was, I don't know if you remember when they created groups or if you have a group for your podcast. But, you know, you can just add people to a group without their permission. And there was this famous case when they first came out with it. Somebody created a Nambla fake group, National Man Love Boy Association or whatever, like pedophilia association.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, one click was the start of it. And then you look at Clubhouse as an example. You open Clubhouse and you see rooms, you click on it, you're listening. So in one click, you're listening. And then in one click, if you raise your hand, you get invited and you say yes, you're speaking. So it's two clicks to speak, one click to listen I mean, the only way they could make that app work even faster is if you opened it up and your microphone was turned on, which is...”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was the best at it. I mean, at Uber, they were like, we're going to take out tipping. We're going to take out the need for you to take out your credit card and do payment. It's just going to be in your wallet. You got picked up. You leave. That's it. And I was like, we should have tipping. And they're like, it adds a step and we're trying to have no steps. You put your address in, you click the button, and you do nothing else. And so we've been obsessed here in Silicon Valley is how many clicks can we take out of the process?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know he, I think, was so upsessed with engagement and winning, and he's kind of like one of those friends you have who's just really good at playing a video game, but maybe doesn't see the bigger picture. And they really don't like them. So I think there is something that he does that does not breed loyalty, but he's very successful in his focus, which is growth is all that matters. He's a marauder. And taking friction at a products and processes is the playbook of Silicon Valley for the last decade or two. So whatever the friction is poetry.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, listen, the motivation of 18 19 year old men is pretty clear. He was just trying, he had no game. He had no game, and he needed to know who was single, so he could at least have a shot at getting creepy.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely I mean, the guy started it because he was unable to ask girls if they were single and on a date. I mean, that was his explicit.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'll probably copy it. I mean, Zuckerberg has no moral compass or ethics or anything. I mean, he's a marauder. I mean, he basically copied Snapchat seven times. Like he did poke and he just kept trying and trying and trying. And it's part of the reason why the WhatsApp founders and the Instagram founders left is they found Zuckerberg so distasteful in terms of his ability to copy.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, if Facebook hadn't bought Instagram, it would be a company in decline right now. People would be shorting the stock, right? Facebook peaked and then was sort of heading down and Instagram saved them and WhatsApp saved them. So that's another kind of weird moment in history that they were able to accumulate that much power and consolidate that much power. Instagram should have never sold to them. That should have gone public. They had just raised money from Sequoia and they had raised $50 million at a $500 million valuation and they didn't need to sell. And that was a big mistake to sell. They should have kept going and they should have took on Facebook. And if Instagram was a standalone company right now, I'd be worth $500 million. Yeah”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be 10 versions of Clubhouse. We looked at social networking. We thought Friends was it. Like, Friendster was so good, nobody'd be able to compete with that or was growing so quickly. And then MySpace was a juggernaut, and they hit $100 million in revenue and 100 million users. And it was like, well, that's game over. And then Facebook and LinkedIn and Snapchat and Friend Feed and countless others, you know. So there's usually 20 people who will win in a category. And 80% of the category will be owned by the top two or three players. But.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't work out, but take your hard drive on your computer at home. You give a terabyte of your 10 terabyte drive over to the cloud. And then everybody else does their terabyte. And then all of a sudden you've got this virtual cloud and anybody can store stuff on it and it's all encrypted and then nobody can stop it. And that could be tweets. It could be videos. And so this idea that YouTube will be able to tell people to kick people off because they're skeptics of, I don't know, the pandemic or the vaccine or they've make things that are more censorship resistant. I think that'll be the reaction to all of this.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we went to the infrastructure layer. And they'll even go after Cloudflare, which is a CDN provider. They're just a plumbing. It's like sort of like the telephone. So we're basically holding everybody responsible on the whole chain of events here. And what that's going to do is I'm not a huge believer in crypto, but distributed computing where nobody and decentralized and distributed computing platforms and open standards. Podcasting is an open standard. The web is an open standard. FTP was an open standard. But Twitter and Facebook are closed. And what's going to happen is we will see a group of individuals create peer-to-peer networks for social media where nobody can control it. And the same for cloud computing, where there's a crypto project where everybody will, and I invested in a company that tried to do this and got sold.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you're not. I think you're paranoid for a reason. Paranoid for a very good reason, which is as big as these companies can become, they are beholden to the mob. And if the mob says, hey, this person needs to be canceled, they're going to get canceled because you can't lose your entire audience. You could lose your whole customer base and you can lose all your employees. I think what's interesting about your fear about Parlor and AWS taking off is we went from being like a social network, which is, you know, the software layer.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like there was an insurrection, by the way, we also almost had a revolution at the Capitol where a bunch of crazy people who have guns and body armor and then a bunch of them who are just YOLOing in cosplay.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, seven movies have been sold. Two weeks. Think about how fast things are moving legs This thing happens, Like, people had the idea to short the stock six months ago. They start doing their research. They build an army. They execute the trade. The system goes down. Robin Hood raises $3.5 billion in four days. Elon is interviewing them on Clubhouse on Sunday after the Wednesday had happened. And now here we are. It's 10 days later. Doesn't it feel like it's been 10 months It's been 10 days, Lex.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We thought the market was like the 60 million homes with broadband. And originally it was like maybe 10 or 20. Then it became 60 million. Then it was like, okay, well, how many hours are you at your desktop computer? Well, like probably at our computers for five hours a day, 10 hours a day at work, three hours a day on our own. And then I was like, yeah, nobody's on their desktop computer. Everybody's on their mobile phone. Oh, and by the way, they have it with them. So the people with mobile phones are now using this high-speed device with an app store, with their credit card in it. In the early days of the internet, people were scared to put their credit card on the internet. That was considered a really dumb thing to do. If you put your credit card on the internet, you're going to lose all your money. They're going to hack you or whatever. And now it's just amazing to me how quickly when a company hits, how quickly it can get to a million subscribers or 10 million or a billion users, right?”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An Airbnb for a party and they learn. So I think there's a learning curve with these companies, and they do get to scale at a level that is unprecedented. It used to take decades for a company to become an international phenomenon. Now it happens in two, three, four years. I mean, look at Clubhouse. This thing went from being You know, a private beta six months ago to being the number one app in Germany and in Japan and here, like just like that, boom. And it's because there's an ecosystem that has never existed, the app store. Then there's Payments online. And then everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket. When we, the thing people got wrong about entrepreneurship technology and business over the last couple decades was just how big the market was and then how quickly you could achieve relevancy in these markets.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you are going to operate, we basically vilify and demonize. And I think that is part of it. Like when the person at, I remember Airbnb, we always thought, what if somebody trashes your apartment? And then sure enough, a bunch of methads rented this poor woman's apartment. She left all of her stuff in it. And then a bunch of methads had a drug party, destroyed her apartment, ripped up all her photos, and went crazy. And we knew that day would happen, but nobody remembers it now. But it was the number one story on every news channel because, wow, that's an exciting story. And I just thought to myself, I wonder if there are any parties in hotel rooms where the hotel room is being trashed and people are doing drugs and crazy things. It's like, yes, that's basically every hotel in Los Angeles right now is being destroyed by some rock band that's throwing a TV out the window. Like we expected in, you know, a hotel. We just didn't expect it in somebody's house with Airbnb. And then Airbnb created rules around you can't rent.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or leaving the driver's seat against all the rules of autopilot and somehow Tesla's responsible for that. It's like, we have people who stand on top of their motorcycles and drive down the road on a motorcycle. And we don't blame Yamahaf or Harley Davidson for some idiot standing on the seat of their motorcycle on a highway going 60 miles an hour. We just say that person's an idiot. But when new technology comes out, we blame the technology, not the person operating it.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And nervous or nervous. Yeah, it could just be the person is nervous, you know. So it's really hard to be building one of these companies and you're at scale and oh my lord the entire thing's coming apart and you're the most hated person for that day. You know how the rage cycle works and the media. Is just so crazy when they get their hooks into something. I saw it happen with Uber, we saw it happen with Facebook, and even Tesla, you know, there were times when people did stupid things with autopilot and it's like. Okay, somebody's watching a movie and sleeping in their car.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might be the point in time, like in terms of escape velocity. There might be non-disclosures in place that we're not aware of where they're not allowed to talk about certain relationships.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing's going to collapse, right? So I think there was this kind of like black swan event, and they probably didn't communicate it all that well”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, communication is always the number one issue with these startups, right? And if you have to get ahead of any problem and you have to put all the bad news out immediately. And in the case of Robin Hood, it seems, based on what has been in the papers and what Robin Hood said publicly, is that they had this kind of liquidity crisis, right? They were being because of these exchanges telling them, you have to put up this amount of money in collateral and them being pinned at number one in the app store. There were so many people trying to buy five shares of this stock, five shares of this meme stock, that it kind of broke their system. And then the people who clear the trades for them, they said, you got to put up a billion dollars, two billion dollars, three billion dollars. Well, you can't do that overnight. And I think that they were in uncomfortable situation of like going on TV and saying, we have a liquidity crisis. That could be like a run on the bank. Everybody then logs in at the same time to Robinhood and tries to sell every share they own because they're afraid that the whole”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mass producing them, we should have sent them in every postal, anybody with a post office box with a mailing address, should have had 10 of them put in their mailing address just for free from the government. And then everybody would be testing and we would have contained it. We don't have test and tracy here in the United States. All the countries that are on the other side of COVID did it by having testing, tracing, and closing their borders and masks. That's the combination that works.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crony capitalism in all likelihood is what stopped it here in America. I mean, I had friends who had imported them from other countries. The testing kits, and you've probably been to parties where people had these kind of testing kits from other countries, and we're sitting here and they're just approving them now. Really? In February, month 11 of the pandemic in America, we're going to have testing online. Really? I mean, even if these tests were 80%, you know, effective and they're 95% effective.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not cancel each other over this very suggestion. When I make this suggestion that our challenge trials reasonable or not, if I were to do that on Twitter, they'd be like, oh, Calicanis wants to give poor people corona virus in order to save rich people. It's like, yeah, no, I didn't say that. But you and I could have a reasonable discussion about our challenge trial is something we should consider in a Acute situation where millions of people are going to lose their lives.”
2021-02-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #161 – Jason Calacanis: Startups, Angel Investing, Capitalism, and Friendship · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source