In this Marketing Over Coffee:

Jason Calacanis Explains Why Google Wins Everything

Direct Link to File

If you’d rather read, the transcript is available here.

Brought to you by our sponsor:

Everyone knows that content is king. Ensure your content continues to reign with MarketingProfs University’s Content Marketing Crash Course.

Designed for marketers who are looking for more from their content marketing efforts and are seeking to expand their reach, and broadcast content through additional digital channels, MPU’s Content Marketing Crash Course will give you hands-on tactics that will have immediate impact on your content marketing program.

Regularly priced at $595, you’ll save $200 off when you register using coupon code COFFEE. Visit mprofs.com/coffeecontent

Who is Jason Calacanis? Twist 40 at Penn State, Twist 378 w Jerry Colonna

No company has as many smart, ambitious, hard working people, making big bets, crazy acquisitons, has more data, effectively plays the government, has global influence, is as efficient, and has as much Larry Page as Google.

Check out the original post “Google Wins Everything

Google’s Domination and Acquistion of Waze and Nest vs. Apple’s fear of using the big chips

What drove the progression from Mahalo to Launch Ticker to Inside?

What are the key elements to determine if there’s a market for the product?

Reinventing the news – shooting to be bigger than CNN

Who’s a threat to Inside? Facebook Paper? Anybody?

LAUNCH Festival is Feb. 24 – 26

TWIST – This week in Startups

 

Check us out on LinkedIn: John and Chris.

Sign up for this Podcast in iTunes (and don’t be afraid to give us a review)

Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters in the Music Alley from Mevio.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Unknown Speaker 0:08
VCs marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

Unknown Speaker 0:16
Hey, we’ve got a great interview with Jason Calacanis coming up here, and it’s presented in its entirety without interruption thanks to marketingprofs Everyone knows that content is king ensure that your content continues to rain with marketing props University’s content marketing crash course designed for marketers who are looking for more from their content marketing efforts, and are seeking to expand their reach broadcast content through additional digital channels. mp use content marketing Crash Course gives you hands on tactics that will have immediate impact on your content marketing program is regularly priced at 595. But you can get $200 off when you register using coupon code coffee, just visit m profs comm slash coffee content. And we thank them for their support. And here’s the interview. Hello, welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. We’ve had Jason Calacanis with us here today. We’ve talked about him all the time on a cast. I’ve got two links. If you want to check out his history, you can go back and look at This Week in Startups, got an interview that he did at Penn State, where he talks about his past coming up as a entrepreneur and also another link to had an interview with Jerry colonna, that’s had some great stuff as far as startups and coaching. So dig into both those. I’ve got Jason on today, though, the biggest thing that got me you know, push me to give him a call to try and get him on here was back in November before the holiday, he did a post called Google wins everything on his newsletter, we’ll have a link, you can sign up to that if you want to get over there. And I guess so as we get right into this. Jason, you just kind of blew me away with this post. And I don’t understand why it didn’t get more, more action why it didn’t run further. So before we kind of dig into the meat, though, can you set it up for us? I mean, what drove you to write

Unknown Speaker 1:46
this? You know, I’m, I’m in a fortunate position as a writer, that I don’t write for a particular publication I write for myself when something’s on my mind and as a writer, I tend to write about the things That I’m fascinated with and that I feel people are not talking about, right. So, you know, when I used to be a journalist, you know, full time and I was editing a magazine back in the day. So looking at a reporter, you had to file. So sometimes you’d have a weak piece. Sometimes you have a strong piece, well, I only write something if it’s really strong. And then most of the stuff that I write is thrown away and I don’t hit the Publish key. Again, I don’t have like an editor or any time to do it. So this was just one that I was feeling building up over time, which is, you know, Google is the most powerful, aggressive, ambitious, intelligent company out there. And at the poker tables I play at, you know, with the sort of, you know, powerful people as it were. The discussion kept turning to like, wow, Larry page’s going for it. I mean, to say lean in would be like a gross understatement. I mean, to have that many smart people and to spend your war chest of cash in such an aggressive way, moonshots etc. It just is unlike anything we’ve seen in the history of business. And, and perhaps humanity. I don’t know that any other organization has tried to change the world as much as Google is doing now, except for the United States. Maybe. You’re right. And that and that’s not a company. That’s a country, you know, as a concept. what Google is doing could be as important or as ambitious if they hit a couple of these things, as the formation of the United States, which I know sounds super hyperbolic. United States, Stanford stood for so many things when it was founded. But Google obviously is, you know, a big the success of the United States is a big part of the reason why Google is able to do what they do. But man to be going after life extension, artificial intelligence, robots, self driving cars, wearable computing, DNA, media, advertising, search, all of this stuff concurrently. And then that’s the stuff we know about. I mean, what about the stuff we don’t know about? You know, you can be sure for every interesting thing we hear about There are five more that we have not heard about yet. And it certainly is a stark comparison. When you look at Apple, which obviously has more money, hundred $40 billion largest hedge fund in the world by a magnitude it’s like, Huh. And they are debating with Carl Icahn, how much of the money to give back. And meanwhile, Larry Page and Sergei are like, how can we spend this money? More interestingly, oh, NASA is available $3 billion. Let’s buy it, you know. So anyway, long way of saying I wrote the piece because I’m in awe of Google.

Unknown Speaker 4:28
Right. And so there’s there’s two things that I wanted to follow up with that. I mean, you’re right on the mark, you talk about America, and you know, the United States, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s. We look to the government to do NASA and to do moonshots, it literally moonshots. And now here we are, you know, 4050 years later, and this has to come out of the private sector because the government can’t get out of its own way. Do you think that’s just the you know, kind of the way this should evolve and this is the way it was supposed to work? Or is this you know, kind of we’ve a certain part of our government has failed and you You know, it’s corporates picking up the slack.

Unknown Speaker 5:02
Yeah, it’s a good question. You know, I’m not an expert on government. But I think, you know, we haven’t seen the polarization of wealth and this type of massive ability for individuals and our companies to acquire such a large percentage of the wealth in the world, even the robber barons Now look, you know, kind of, you know, cute in terms of the scale of them. This is a whole different level of wealth accumulation both on personal basis, people, like, I guess, Larry, or Sergey, or Mark Zuckerberg are worth 2020 $30 billion dollars. Not sure exactly, but it just, you know, a very hard to fathom number, but then professionally, those companies like Apple throwing off 140 billion dollars in cash. So governments do what they need to do. And back then, like going to the moon and go into space for something that seemed like we needed to do. I don’t know if it’s if it was, in fact essential. But there’s all kinds of dysfunction in government and these companies I think are led by super ambitious people. I don’t know Larry and Sergey deeply. I mean, I know them casually once in a while, I’ll see them at an event and talk to them for five or 10 minutes. But I do think that those into there are certain individuals right now who are, for lack of a better word bored with what they’ve accomplished at the, you know, incredibly old ages of 40, or 35, or 45. And they just feel like, well, if I’ve got another 40 years left on the planet, I might as well put them to good use and try to do interesting things. So I do think they’re coming at it from a very good place, which is not about money, you know, since they have more than they could ever spend, or not about really power, but really about innovation and trying to do interesting things. I think it’s comes out in a large part boredom and looking for a new challenge.

Unknown Speaker 6:45
Yeah, that’s really interesting. That’s a great point I hadn’t thought about, you know, you hear a lot negatively about the disparity in wealth. But yeah, the fact that these companies have so much in their war chest, it allows them to take those bigger shots happen. As far as Apple now you’ve kind of been spoken about Tim Cook, and he sort undershooting? I mean, literally, they’re going into China with a cheap phone. I mean, but that is the kind of stuff that well, at least, I would assume pleases the street. You know, that’s the kind of stuff that the street wants to see and is, you know, kind of slow, steady growth. But are there any other reasons why you think they’re not doing more moonshots over there?

Unknown Speaker 7:18
Well, I mean, I think you nailed it, you know, Steve Jobs could care less about what Wall Street thought? Certainly Larry Page doesn’t care. And I don’t think that Zuckerberg cares all that much, either. So I do think Tim Cook is, you know, you know, a well adjusted person who actually is very considered intelligent and effective at what he does, which, by the way, is not what makes a great entrepreneur. You know, what makes a great entrepreneur is somebody who’s unreasonable driven and who doesn’t care what other people think, thinks at any given point in time, like, I can assure you that whatever I’ve written about Google, Larry Page and Sergey have either not written or quickly dismissed, like they don’t care what Jason Calacanis or anybody else has to say. They hear about what they’re doing and how interesting it is. And so, you know, I don’t think it’s necessarily any failure of Tim Cook’s, I think Tim Cook is probably doing a good job of executing on the existing roadmap that Apple has. The problem is the world is changing very rapidly. And since the death of Steve Jobs, you you have an acceleration in technological ambition and competition. And so it’s just not enough to sit there and think, well, if we release the watch, and you know, then we release the TV, we’ll create two more categories, and we’ll have a lot more money. You do need to be acquisitive, you know, not buying nest, you know, letting Google buy for $3 billion when you have a $440 billion in the bank is a huge blunder by Apple in my opinion. Maybe they had some maybe they have like some amazing Apple products coming out. But well, they don’t want to set the precedent that somebody who previously worked at Apple can get paid to come back to Apple I Who knows? Well, they did that with Steve Jobs and they bought him a plane. So it’s a little bit weird. You know, also waves was an incredible Start up that Google bought for a billion dollars that although their front end product for their maps was a little bit cluttered and not the best UX experience, their data was the best in the world. And the community was the best in the world how Apple suffering from map you know, inadequacies that were very public didn’t just buy ways for a billion dollars and say, screw it, let’s just throw one of our hundred 40 chips at that get replenished at the rate of, you know, dozens a year Why don’t we just throw a chip at that they don’t really know how to use their billion dollar chips. And that’s a lesson. I think the next person who runs Apple, which I think Tim Cook’s probably got five years 10 years of this. Whoever comes in after him is going to need to look at Larry Page and look at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and the people with true true ambition and say Hmm, the world is changing these people are doing big things we’re gonna need to perhaps change the strategy a little bit because they don’t have Steve Jobs anymore. You know, it’s one thing when you have you know, Superman on your team, but when Superman is known longer in the building? I think you do have to think about maybe changing strategy a little bit.

Unknown Speaker 10:05
Yeah, just moving on. How about as far as Google’s domination, you’ve talked in the past about how, you know, mahalo was kind of subject to them as a partner and you know, as their whims change. It changes the environment. It can crush small upstarts and things like now, do you see this? How do you see these things? Do you see this just like creating an iron grip? And just making it that much worse? Or what’s the what’s the kind of future look because of this? Does it open our opportunity? Or does it make it worse?

Unknown Speaker 10:31
Yeah. Now you get into the sort of the really challenging issues to think about, which is what’s for the best of society? what’s fair in terms of competition and entrepreneurship and, you know, an open economy. And certainly, Google is a monopoly or has monopolistic positions in a lot of places. They are very powerful and as a company, on a very pragmatic basis. They really don’t communicate well. So having been partners with them for 15 years, I was told by Matt Cutts, you know, is the The case of Google. I mean, he is 1000 times more out there than Larry Page or Sergey, are you just like he is out there speaking for Google all the time? You know, he said, we don’t have partners. You know, it’s not how we do things. And but then I meet with people from Google all the time, like I YouTube, and they’re like, hey, you’re such a great partner, can we give you more money to do other projects, and the advertising team emailed me after panda? And we’re like, Hey, we wanted to talk to you about optimizing your head somehow. And I’m like, Do you guys know that you got rid of 80% of our traffic had to layoff 75 hardworking Americans who lost their jobs in the content business, which is a really tough business to be in, because you just whipsawed us and didn’t give us any warning or any chance to correct anything or any guidance, like, and they’re like, yeah, you know, it’s a that’s a different. That’s a different group of people. And I’m like, Yeah, I know. But you all have Google on your business card. You’re all eating in the same cafeteria like, and this is where Google’s nobody’s in charge, which is kind of a lie and kind of, I think a way to subvert any conversation with them and increase their dominance. is a big mistake because the animosity towards Google, you know, from both ends from the streets and from the partners is growing and growing and growing. And when you don’t talk to your partners and you say things like Matt says, like, we don’t have partners, while other people in the company are calling me like this, even this week, I had an email exchange with Google who was like, oh my god inside so brilliant. Can we work with you to get you more downloads and help you spend money with us in our ad network if we run a test with you and all this stuff? And I’m like, yeah, you know, I’m not really in the mood to work with Google right now because of how you guys have treated us. They want us as a partner, then they don’t want to support us anyway, long way of saying they are becoming the most loved hated company in the world. And you know, Apple’s just all love, right? Because Apple’s pretty upfront. I think with their partners, they’re like, this is how we do things. You make a beautiful product, you use the iOS seven designs, you’re all good and we may or may not feature you, it’s really based on the quality of your product. And if you want to be in the Apple stores, we need you to you know, have good packaging and a great consumer experience like, they can be a tough partner. But I think they’re a fair partner. I think Google is a tough partner, but they’re not a fair partner, if that makes any sense.

Unknown Speaker 13:08
Yeah, no, that definitely lines it up how you had a nice segue to talking about, did the content model for lunch tickers that what is actually driving inside? Or how did that all evolve?

Unknown Speaker 13:19
Well, yeah, it evolved actually from Google will get if inside turns out to be a unicorn, Google will wind up having inadvertently gotten me there because what happened was I was doing mahalo. And we were the hundred fourth largest site in the United States. 1617 million uniques $10 million dollar run rate on just Google AdSense alone, our partner at the time, and you know, the How to content was getting better and better. Now, there were times when it was low quality, and there are times when it was medium quality. But generally speaking, we were trending really well. We were spending more per piece than anybody else in the content space, and we were just getting better and better and better at it and making videos and had 50,000 videos on YouTube and 20 million views a month. 30 million views a month. 2 million subscribers so well that was humming along so well, then we get hit with the Panda update. And I’m emailing everybody I know over there and they won’t talk to me and they won’t give me a straight story. Matt Cutts lied to my face, basically, which is why, you know, you sort of hear this little bit of resentment towards Matt personally, because he just looked me in the face and lied to me so that you don’t have a penalty against you. But we had 80% of our traffic gone. So and he’s like, there’s nothing you can you know, this, you don’t need to do anything. And I’m like, what, how is he need to do something. So anyway? Well, that anks basically led me to this really dark place where I was like, Well, what am I going to do here? I’ve got millions of dollars in the bank. I’ve spent millions of dollars in the bank, I’m laying people off, very dark moment of my career, second only to the.com bust and 911, which were sort of back to back events. And so I’m sitting there in the start period going God, what do I do? And I talked to my board, and I did a lot of soul searching. And I was like, Well, I think there’s three things that the future is going to be about, I think the future, there’s education, there’s video, and there’s news like these are three areas that really need disruption and really need new products. And so I started testing that we did a deal with YouTube, they gave us over a million bucks. Create nine shows, three of which became breakout hits, which was, you know, the goal of the program. But even though there were breakout hits, they didn’t, it was great traffic, but bad return on investment because the money with Google taking 45% of it made it just impossible. So that was like sort of a, I would give that a B, B minus as a sort of business proposition. Then we did educational apps. And we tested a lot of interesting apps, and iBooks. And they really got great response from the users who got them. But again, they cost, you know, 100 200 300,000 to make an app, and then you want to make 50 or 100, unless you have like a head. So very hard business. Yeah, businesses really grind it out. And then I looked at the news business, and I tested the minimal viable product of the launch ticker, which was just somebody read all the tech news and write it as simply and cleanly as possible for me in a Google Doc. So it literally costed whatever, $125 a day to hire a writer and you know, nothing for a Google doc and boy, was it compelling and I could tell right from the first day I read it like this is saving me a lot of time. And I love it. And so that quickly grew to five 6000 email subscribers. You know, smart people were looking at it saying this is the future and I was like oh interesting, smart people are getting it and I had gotten the inside.com domain name which is another story. And I said boy, this is it. If I do inside comm slash Bitcoin inside comm slash coffee inside calm says Sochi Olympics inside.com slash Woody Allen whatever it is on the topics that are in the news, or slash comic books, things that people are passionate about, and we can figure out a way to deliver to them mobily it’s gonna be a huge win. And so we came up this concept of updates and Pandora for news and we started building it and, you know, the reaction has been amazing. And, you know, without getting into too many the numbers which I’m not gonna reveal, people are people who use the product are really into it. And so, you know, I basically did like three tests. One of them really appealed to me as an entrepreneur, there was a founder, market fit, founder product fit, and that also happened to have a product and Market Fit, right? So you really need those two things. When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to love the product you’re building. And the market has to love your product, right. And so if you get those two, those two things in a nice little triangle, those three things in a nice little triangle where the founder loves the product, the market loves the product, the founder loves the market, you know, and you get that little circle going or triangle going, you’re in a good place. And I feel like insides just destined to be the number one news site in the world, you know, mobile app in the world, I think it will be ultimately as important or more important than CNN, you know, that’s a really bold, crazy statement. But it’s obvious to me Somebody has to reinvent the news. And cnn is just so saddled with the past New York Times associated with the past, that we can start fresh and you know, that’s a huge opportunity. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s still not a one or two or 3% chance we do that. But boy, I like those odds. 1% chance of making something as important as the CNN or New York Times. I’ll take those odds any day.

Unknown Speaker 17:59
Yeah, no. That’s definitely where you want to be how about the the players like you know, everybody that kind of dominated the web for the past three or four years that you know this Huffington Post’s the slate all these people that have kind of fallen prey to victim of the click you know, they’d rather put something scandalous up there to drive the traffic then actually report the news is that again at the core because obviously quality content is always what you’re all about, is that do you fear those other guys or do you fear an upstart over them?

Unknown Speaker 18:27
Yeah, I wouldn’t be.

Unknown Speaker 18:30
I wouldn’t be too worried about you know, the big players because again, they have a legacy business, The New York Times has whatever thousand journalists and they need to feed and the paper and the history and they have to pay homage to that history and keep it going. And you know, you can appreciate all of that right and, but then you have the business insiders and the buzz feeds in the upward these who I would put in, having to post I put all of those products in the category generally have a mixed bag. They have high and low moments. So I call them high and low and is their strategy which is to say, you will have a brilliant story on BuzzFeed, or Business Insider, you know, Nicholas Carlson comes to mind with the Marissa profile, or Alison with the Travis Kalanick profile from Uber, or BuzzFeed has some great stuff once in a while, but then they surround it with a bunch of these sort of pop culture, you know, slideshows, gimmicky headlines, You’ll never believe the three things that Marissa Mayer did to be successful in kindergarten or whatever it is, and they’re just like, we know that people love kindergarten, we know they love Marissa, and they know we, they love secrets, so let’s just do that all day long every day. Yeah, so that kind of stuff feels ephemeral and vapid and all those kind of things so but it works right upworthy is just work so I look at that those kind of techniques to me. Those gimmicky techniques feel just like SEO, you know, let you listen. I I fell prey to that strategy as well which is it can build big rush of traffic, but it’s sort of like hitting a crack pipe during a marathon, right? Like, it’s gonna get you through the next mile, but it’s gonna kill you in the couple of miles after that, like upworthy will be penalized, it will be blocked by Facebook, or there’ll be charged by Facebook and they’re gonna, this is gonna be a huge upworthy crash. BuzzFeed and Business Insider who knows, you know, maybe they’ll be able to push into the legitimate stuff and, you know, maybe strike a balance, but, you know, you live by the gun, you die by the gun, and I think they’re really a little bit too much on that crack pipe of Facebook and it’s not gonna work. It’s not gonna end well. Once Facebook decides, hmm, you’re making money off of us. We’re gonna, they’ll say we’ll cut you off and you pay us now, which is what they did to Zynga, right or any other game company and they did it to people building Facebook pages, right? People were building Facebook pages. They said Oh, build up all your friends and family and get them all to like your profile page. You know, for your podcast, and then all of a sudden you wake up one day after you’ve invested hours and thousands dollars in time or whatever it is, or even 10s of thousand dollars in money and, like, yeah, you want to reach those 10,000 people will follow you pay, you can reach 300 of them, but to get the other 70 you know, 700 of your 8000 people you got to pay us right? I think those things are part of the reason we’re what we’re doing at InSite is speaking to a small number of people in a very big way. Because they’re tired of the cotton candy. You know, cotton candy is a delicious thing, but it’s very hard to eat a whole serving of cotton candy when you get to the end, you’re disgusted. And you certainly nobody ever orders a second helping of cotton candy, right? The first bite Oh my god. The lish is English. Yeah, right. Right. It’s picking up coffee right? How

Unknown Speaker 21:38
about So Facebook pages their paper this new thing that they’ve got coming out I have you guys obviously you guys are watching that. Do you see them as a threat? Is it any good? Hmm.

Unknown Speaker 21:46
I think it’ll be as successful as you know, their effort to take on Korra or Africa take on Snapchat. Or Groupon. You know, if you if you look at a company when they when they start to knock off other people innovations and or Google with Google Video versus YouTube, whenever you just do that straight up knockoff, the public is kind of savvy to that and they don’t embrace it. I think maybe not the entire public, but the ones who matter that those early adopters, so when the early adopters are poke, they were like, Oh, you ripped off Snapchat, I’m not interested, you know. And, you know, the YouTube community when they saw when it was an independent company, Google do Google Video, they were like, yeah, that’s, that’s Google. We’re not interested. So you gotta be careful with that strategy. So I think it’s a very beautiful Amash to Flipboard. But I mean, if anybody looks at it, it’s pretty clear. They just literally stole flip boards innovations, like from from the section functionality to flipping through stories. I mean, it’s just a knockoff. And so I generally don’t a good one, though, you know, like if it was on Canal Street or in the Fendi store, you wouldn’t know. So I think that Facebook is awesome at knocking stuff off. They did it with Snapchat and poke, poke was You know, probably, you know, even a better product in some way, but you can only rip people off, you know, and get so far it 95 times out of 100 it just results in nothing. And so I think that’s what we’ll see here. But I think it’s a maybe a 5% chance it’ll work. They’re not gonna put the effort and the care into it, that Flipboard has, and they’re certainly not going to be able to retain top employees and top talent to produce rip offs. You know, that’s the other thing is can you imagine you’re like, you’re at Facebook and Zuckerberg comes down and says, like, make me a snack. We can’t buy Snapchat so make me a pixel by pixel copy of it or we can’t buy Flipboard it’s too expensive or whatever, they won’t sell it to us. So make me a knockoff. And you know, he he actually famously, according to Snapchat folks emailed them poke after they wouldn’t sell. You know, who knows what the details are there but two sides every story I’m sure Mark has his own but that’s a little bit of taunting, you know, and I think that kind of child is taunting is probably unconscious. Probably not a great long term strategy for success so I’m that’s the last thing I I worry about is like Facebook’s you know efforts to copy stuff I always look for, you know some other entrepreneur who really understands and is thinking from zero about what the experience should be.

Unknown Speaker 24:16
Yeah, I can see that. Well, the early adopters pass up on it and it just doesn’t, you know, you don’t get that same kind of starting hit. How about LAUNCH Festival you’ve got coming up February 24 to 26th in San Francisco. You guys ready to roll with that? Another? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 24:29
it just did the rehearsals. So this is the seventh year I’ll be doing a festival the first three years I did with my old friend Mike Arrington as TechCrunch, 40 and 50. And then for the last three years, I’ve done it on my own as LAUNCH Festival. So this will be the seventh year I’ve done a startup conference like this and the companies are amazing, you know, just they’re all coming into their first rehearsal and I give them scores. I typically the score is in the first rehearsals or four or five sixes sevens. You know what In a while, and eight and then this time was all seven and eights, you know, it’s eight and a half. So in the first rehearsal to have people doing such a good job is extraordinary. So and you know, I do that event at a breakeven a loss every year, but I try to make it bigger and better every year. And this year, we’ve got well over 7000 people already RSVP. Last year, we had 6000. And we’re still 20 days out. So I would guess we will hit eight, nine, maybe even 10,000 people making it the largest startup conference in the world by far, certainly the largest the United States. And I do it for the joy of entrepreneurship. And I have a little angel investing fund. I’ve invested in 50 companies over the next three years, I’ll invest in 50 more. So I’ll have 100 investments and my thesis is that people will come to the event and the judges and people who participate are my deal flow. So you know of those companies. I see in rehearsal, I can. I could see the entrepreneur and how they take the feedback during rehearsal and how they respond to it and if I see them, really improving product and really doing a great job in the four weeks of rehearsal, which is sort of like a mini, you know, probably 30% of what a Y Combinator or TechStars is, you know, it’s we don’t get any equity, but it sort of feels like that to them. You know, if they do a really good job, then I’ll probably Angel invest in them, which I’ve done in the past years.

Unknown Speaker 26:17
That’s great. Jason Calacanis, from This Week in Startups and everywhere else seems like you’re everywhere these days. Thanks for stopping to talk to us. Anything else you want to hit on the way out the door?

Unknown Speaker 26:27
No, I just you know, podcasting is a great thing. And I always love talking to podcasters. And you can follow me at Jason. And you can follow inside at inside and you can follow lunch at lunch. Pretty easy, huh? All those great names on Twitter.

Unknown Speaker 26:38
That sounds great. Thanks again, and we’ll catch up with you next week. Until then, enjoy the coffee. Cheers.

Unknown Speaker 26:43
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at Christopher penn.com. Read more from john Jay wall at jw 51 fifty.com. The marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at music alley from meh vo or follow the link in our show notes.