傑森·卡拉卡尼斯

Early life

Calacanis was born in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York, to parents of Greek and Irish origin, and has two brothers.[5]

He graduated from Xaverian High School in 1988. He then attended Fordham University, where he received a B.A. in psychology.[6]

Career

Calacanis started his career in the 1990s as a reporter covering the internet industry in New York.[3]

Calacanis was founder and CEO of Rising Tide Studios, a media company that published print and online publications. During the dot-com boom, Calacanis was active in New York's Silicon Alley community, and in 1996 began producing the Silicon Alley Reporter.[1] Originally a 16-page photocopied newsletter,[2] it eventually expanded into a 300-page magazine, with a sister publication called the Digital Coast Reporter for the West Coast. Calacanis' socializing earned him a nickname as the "yearbook editor" of the Silicon Alley community.[7] The company also organized conferences in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco focused on the Internet, web, and New Media.

Calacanis co-founded the blog network Weblogs, Inc.[3] with Brian Alvey on September 24, 2003, and the startup was supported by an angel investment from Mark Cuban.[8]

Two years after inception, the Weblogs, Inc. blogs business was generating $1,000 a day just from AdSense.[9] Time Warner's America Online agreed to buy Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for $25–30 million.[3][10][11]

Calacanis speaking at the 2005 Gnomedex

On November 16, 2006, TechCrunch reported that Calacanis had resigned from his position as CEO of Weblogs, Inc. and general manager of Netscape.[12] Calacanis later confirmed this on his blog and the Gillmor Gang podcast.[13]

Calacanis joined Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm,[3] as an EIA (entrepreneur in action) in December, 2006,[14] a position which he held until May, 2007.[15] Through this program, Calacanis invested $25K in Travis Kalanick's company, Uber.[2] The deal is now worth about $100 million.[3]

In 2007, Calacanis started an internet trend he called "fatblogging" after being fed up with being overweight.[16] Fatblogging is when a person loses weight by exercising and then posting their weight afterwards onto their blog for encouragement and support from commenters and other fatbloggers.[16]

He launched the web directory Mahalo ("thank you" in Hawaiian),[10] which raised $20 million in venture capital from investors[17] including Sequoia Capital, News Corp, CBS, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk. The company hit a peak of 15 million unique visitors a month and achieved profitability in 2011, but suffered a sharp decline in traffic that year from the Google Panda search algorithm update and shut down in 2014.[18]

Calacanis founded ThisWeekIn.com,[17] which shut down in 2012 but is live again and available as a weekly podcast.[19]

This Week in Startups (also called TWiSt) is a show hosted by Calacanis and co-hosted by Molly Wood.[20]

He also founded a startup Inside.com which focuses on delivering thematic newsletters.[21] The company raised $2.6 million.[22]

In June 2019, Calacanis partnered with the NSW Government to create the Sydney Launch Festival for startups to give their pitches to global audiences.[23]

Podcasting

Personal life

Calacanis married Jade Li sometime between 2006 and 2009.[45][46] Calacanis' name was found in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book on page 9.[47] On 5 August 2020, he addressed this discovery by stating that he met Epstein at a Ted Talk, when Epstein wanted to invest in Calacanis' magazine. Calacanis also added that he has "played ping pong with Ghislaine Maxwell once".[48]

Politics

Calacanis was an early supporter and funder for the effort behind the successful recall election of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin.[49][50]