Jason Calacanis Quotations

You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there. You have to be humble as you execute but visionary and gigantic in terms of your aspiration. In the Internet industry, it's not about grand innovation, it's about a lot of little innovations: every day, every week, every month, making something a little bit better.

If you are delusional, sometimes the reality catches up with your delusion, and then all of a sudden you are a genius.

Imagine being 30 years old, thinking you were a media titan, and now you are labeled a 'scam artist.'

That's one of the things I love about entrepreneurship is that if you see something that you don't like - and if you think you have a better idea - you can pursue your model.

I only take causes or write about things that I am passionate about, and I do it with a certain flair and a sort of wink and a nod.

People like rich applications on their desktop, and there is no reason why you can't have both a rich desktop and a light, cloud-based application framework. Why is it always either/or for people?

For three or four decades, we've been sitting here in front of this TV consuming a one-way medium that we had no control over.

Near-death experiences give you balance. You become more worldly. Your ideas become bigger.

I think you need to have a very strong angel community that is committed to mentoring up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

When I was coming up as an entrepreneur, I had to fight for everything I got, and there was no clear roadmap of how to be successful.

If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it's the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online. Much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog.

I am not trying to model my career to be a one-hit wonder.

Things that look like an 'overnight success' typically are not.

Journalists have misquoted people for so long - and quoted them out of context that for many people like to have their words on record.

Blogging is great, and I read blogs all day long. However, my goal is really to have a deep, meaningful discussion with people. For some reason, I'm able to accomplish this best via email.

For tech, I like the 'DailySearchCast', 'TWiT' and anything Veronica Belmont does on CNET. I think Perez Hilton is a riot, and the rest of my consumption is by people: Folks like Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, Mark Cuban, Brian Alvey, Jeff Jarvis, Xeni Jardin, etc.

The companies that won't do well will be the me-too companies: the fifth, sixth, seventh version of Twitter, etc.

I don't want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me... Just too much risk.

As a publisher, you have no direct relationship with advertisers.

I don't need YouTube's money. I have my own money.

I like to get attention for the things I think are important. And I think it is important that entrepreneurs - especially young ones - not be abused.

The down market favours the small two-, three-, four-person company, not the huge company with 100 people losing half a million dollars a month.

I am a huge fan of capitalism and a huge fan of entrepreneurship and changing the world with technology and with entrepreneurship. Capitalism is awesome. To me, capitalism is my religion.

Mahalo's business model is advertising. Yahoo, Google, Ask, AOL and MSN are all advertising-based. So I don't see anything wrong with advertising-based search.

Until you use the iPad for a couple of weeks, you can't appreciate it. But it quickly becomes your primary consumption device.

Unfortunately, it is a documentary and not a drama.

Art is an adventure that never seems to end.

If everybody has a voice, then you end up with something average.

I've developed some deep relationships over the past couple of years blogging and I realize that those relationships manifest themselves in the links I find when I do my x a daily ego search over at Technorati.

The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust... you pay folks to blog about a product and you compromise that. I would almost care about this, but it's so obvious to everyone that this is either a joke or an idiot that there is nothing more to say.

Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens.

Average people push great people out of a company.

Be amazing. Be everywhere. Be real

The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust.

Starting is easy. Finishing is hard.

You should know what makes one photo brilliant and another. Why one illustration is instructive and another is banal. Why one blurb is clever and another is trying too hard. Why one video is brilliantly entertaining and another is cheesy. Bottom line: you should want to do great work with a great team-no matter the cost.

I get a lot of emails from entrepreneurs. The best ones are short, to the point and include some question and/or the product

Longevity is a big part of credibility.

People's reputations are made in the bad times more than the good times.

If you can't sell your product, it's not a product-it's a hobby.

No one remembers how you got there, only that you got there.

Excellence is everything today, and most people aren't excellent. If you're not excellent - like truly excellent at what you do - you're toast.

There is no luck, you work hard and study things intently. If you do that for long and hard enough you're successful.

Fortunes are built during the down market and collected in the up market.

The only way to make podcasting a real big business would be if you could somehow get the top seven podcasters to team up and make a mega-network.

Let's make it so the more you invest in YouTube, the better deal YouTube gets for you.

Search folks don't understand editorial. I'm not afraid of editorial costs, just like machine-search folks are not afraid of computer servers.

Selling out isn't selling out anymore. It's getting the brass ring.

Since the number has been stated as not out of line it sounds like someone is trying to play this down.

My first company produced 'Silicon Alley Reporter' magazine, where I held the dual titles of CEO and Editor.

Of course the first version of an all-electric sports car is going to be expensive.

No one has looked at news from new atomic units of content, like a tweet on Twitter.

Obviously, New York and Boston and Los Angeles have pretty vibrant entrepreneurial scenes.

I have hundreds if not tens of thousands of fans... The people who have negative things to say are typically loser-type people who are probably in some cases mentally ill.

I find very few folks are watching their Facebook feed, some are watching their Twitter feed, and all of them are watching their email box. So, while social networks are nice, email is still the killer application.

If I said I was going to make a newsletter that made $2-$3 million a year, no one would question me. If I say, 'It's a blog,' everyone questions me.

If the founder comes to work every day, and it's a struggle, that permeates the whole organization.

I ain't gonna work on YouTube's farm no more.

Just start thinking about all the different services in your life. Like getting your dry cleaning picked up and dropped off. Nobody has done the Uber of that yet. But that will be Uberfied. You will arrange your dry cleaning via your phone.

Jon Miller would be amazing for Yahoo because he is extremely good at building display advertising businesses and buying young startups.

I syndicate my Twitter activity to Facebook, but I get very little traffic from it.

I think it hurts blogs when they have to turn off their comments.

Risk-taking is my thing... I think of my company as my chip stack.

My mission is to grow business in Silicon Alley.

I think Google's a brilliant company, filled with brilliant people who have done brilliant things.

I'm suggesting that, until America takes care of its debt, untangles the housing mess and gets unemployment under control, we all commit to working six days a week. Yep, move the standard 35-40 hour work week right up to 48 hours.

When it comes to individual bloggers, they have many choices now that include blogging for a network or going solo.

When it comes to education, there is no one site you can point to that you can say, 'They speak to the world, and that is the site where you go to learn.'

The problem today isn't low-quality journalism, it's too much noise. If one out of five 'Business Insider' stories is original, the other four would be culled.

The problem most people make with their media presence is they're trying to craft a media presence as opposed to just consistently publishing who they are.

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

The only time I felt a little too exposed was for a week then I started life-streaming for a couple of hours a day on Qik and Ustream. It became very much like the film 'We Live in Public.'

Fire fast: Fire people who do not fit into the culture of your company and who are negative.

Today you can start a blog, build an audience, and give the advertising slots to AdBrite or Google AdSense.

The reason I bought the Tesla was to help fund the Model S - and because I like things that are fast, sexy and high-tech.

What I've learned in my career is that it takes the same amount of effort to build a $10bn company as it does a $1bn company; you as the entrepreneur are going to put your entire life, your entire effort into it.

To get people to switch from Google, you have to offer something twice as better. But the truth is, the world doesn't actually need better-quality search. I think we've got good enough search.

You have to get in the limelight based on what you do, how creative you are, and not how much money you make.

Very, very few podcasts have made it to scale, and to me, that says this business will never be big.

Even if you're a relatively small player in search, that can still mean a company that's worth several billion dollars.

As the founder of your company, you must be in love with your brand and inspired by your brand's mission if you have any hope of getting press for your product.

Commercial real estate is really a black box: its super opaque, and it's hard to get the information.

There's nobody who has as big of a real-time logistics network than Uber.

The wisdom of the crowds has peaked. Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0 - the wisdom of the crowds - and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.

These days, headlines are trying to get you to click.

The stuff coming out of Silicon Valley is dorky. Like, it's not very sexy.

The tech and tech media world are meritocracies. To fall back to race as the reason why people don't break out in our wonderful oasis of openness is to do a massive injustice to what we've fought so hard to create.

I've become addicted to playing poker because you're constantly faced with confusion, and winning is trying to make sense out of nonsense.

TechCrunch is the publication of record, but they're so bad and uninformed. It's insult after insult. When I play poker with other VC's, we all laugh at TechCrunch.

People can easily make millions of dollars without much work in America.

After Sept. 11, New York wasn't the same, and that's part of the reason why I left.

CNN was crazy to think they could fill 24 hours with news - let alone around the world in 10 to 20 languages. Reuters or AP with a thousand people around the world covering news? Crazy.

AOL has a great collection of brands, and the question is, 'Can they innovate and scale their business?' And those are very challenging things to do. But I think they are well positioned to grow.

Apps, email, and social are the three things Google does not control.

As content creators, we're benefitting YouTube every day. YouTube couldn't do what they do without us, so do not underestimate your power.

Back in the '90s, folks were not sure if they could trust the Web, and frankly, a lot of the services back then didn't provide massive value.

This is a speculative space and no one has made it work yet. So there is a lot of work to do. Frankly, I'm not sure how many of these we'll do We're going to see how this one goes and grow from there.

The web and physical world is plagued with abundance - people need help sorting through all the good and bad stuff out there. The tyranny of choice is causing major psychic pain and frustration for people.

This concept that starting a company is so hard and that you'll never make it is conspiracy concocted by the rich and powerful to keep you from trying - and you've fallen for it.

America might be a dying empire, but it's not going to die in our lifetime - and it doesn't have to die at all.