Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970[1] in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York) is an American Internet entrepreneur and former blogger. His first company was part of the dot-com era in New York, and his second venture capitalized on the growth of blogs before being sold to AOL.
Rising Tide Studios
A native of Brooklyn, with Greek and Irish origins, Calacanis attended Xaverian High School and Fordham University. During the dot-com boom, he was active in New York's Silicon Alley community and in 1996 began producing a publication known as the Silicon Alley Reporter. Originally a 16-page photocopied newsletter, as its popularity grew it expanded into a 300-page magazine, with a sister publication called the Digital Coast Reporter for the West Coast. Calacanis's tireless socializing earned him a nickname as the "yearbook editor" of the Silicon Alley community.[2]
His company, Rising Tide Studios, also hosted conferences. It had a staff of about 70 people, including conference organizer Xeni Jardin, who would later become a journalist and blogger at Boing Boing. Other bloggers involved in the company include Clay Shirky and Tristan Louis.
With the end of the Dot-com bubble, the company had to lay off much of its staff.[3] The Silicon Alley Reporter was renamed the Venture Reporter in September 2001 and refocused on venture capital deals. Calacanis subsequently sold the business to a publishing company, Wicks Business Information, and it ultimately ended up in the hands of Dow Jones & Company.[citation needed]
Weblogs, Inc.
After selling Rising Tide, Calacanis co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey. They built the company as a network of blogs supported by advertising, also taking an angel investment from Mark Cuban. They recruited freelance bloggers to provide content and grew to about 50 sites within a year. One of the more popular sites, Engadget, was created by Peter Rojas (previously a co-founder of Gizmodo), whom they offered an equity stake in the company in order to leave competitor Gawker Media.
Calacanis is known for being outspoken and moderately transparent about Weblogs, Inc., going so far as to give updates on the company's Google AdSense earnings. Time Warner's America Online agreed to buy Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for an amount reported to be about $25 million, but confirmed to be $30 million at FOWA London in October 2008.
Netscape.com
Six months into his tenure with AOL, Calacanis was offered a chance to be the General Manager of the new Netscape website. Lead developer Alex Rudloff used the model pioneered by Digg, Del.icio.us, and Furl and added an editorial layer to the system. The project has launched and occupies the front page of Netscape. Calacanis started by hiring a team of eight "anchors" to follow up to users top stories. He then hired some of the top users of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and Flickr to go to Netscape as Netscape Navigators,[4] which prompted a public debate with Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.
On November 16, 2006, Techcrunch reported that Calacanis had resigned from his position as CEO of Weblogs, Inc. and General Manager of Netscape. Calacanis later confirmed this with a post at his blog.[5]
Sequoia Capital
On December 5, 2006, Techcrunch reported that Calacanis was going to announce his new position at Sequoia Capital as an EIA (entrepreneur in action).[6] Calacanis later confirmed on his blog.[7]
Mahalo.com
Calacanis founded Mahalo.com, a "human-powered search engine",[8] which launched in alpha test in May 2007. During a speech about the site at the Gnomedex conference in August 2007, Calacanis got into a public confrontation with Dave Winer that led to Winer's resignation from the panel of experts for the TechCrunch20 conference organized by Calacanis. Winer interrupted Calacanis' speech during the event, calling it "conference spam" and igniting a war of words on their blogs. "I'm not interested in having someone berate me like this," Calacanis wrote on his blog.[9]
In October of 2009 Mahalo reached 12 million unique visitors and became the 155th largest site in the United States according to Quantcast [10].
This Week in Startups
In 2009 Calacanis started an internet show (podcast) entitled "This Week in Startups" in which he interviews notable CEOs and venture capitalists. Guest have included Gary Vaynerchuk and David Sacks of Geni.com and Yammer.
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