Jason Calacanis on the new Inside.com, the state of the media and what's interesting to investors
Jason Calacanis, who sold his company Weblogs to AOL for $30 million in 2005 and was an early investor in Uber and other tech startups, said he doesn't need to work again.
But as a serial entrepreneur who cut his teeth as journalist before launching several publications, he has dedicated himself to creating another media company, Inside, and building it into a profitable business.
"I really want to set journalism on a path that's more sustainable where publications cannot survive on advertising," Calacanis said in a recent interview with Mashable's Biz Please podcast.
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In this week's episode, Calacanis explains why he thinks the media industry has fallen in a trap, once again, and how they can get out of it. He also shares other investment trends in Silicon Valley. For example, Calacanis recently invested in robotic coffee maker, Cafe X, that he says aligns with the current interest in robotics and automation.
Calacanis takes us through his personal experience navigating the search engine optimization revolution (which propelled the reach of new online publications like his own Weblogs) to the era of optimizing for social media and now the present state of relying on third-party platforms like Facebook's Instant Articles, Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages and Snapchat Discover.
The entrepreneur's latest bet does not involve entrenching itself into third-party services, and it's not about making your own mobile app. In fact, that was the original idea of Inside until Calacanis discovered that less than 1 percent of users opened the app daily.
Inside is, instead, a network of email newsletters where the topics will be selected by readers. It launched Monday with eight newsletters serving an audience of more than 100,000. Any subscriber can go to Inside.com to vote on a new topic.
Calacanis said he hopes to grow that base to 250 newsletters with 10,000 to 1 million subscribers each over the next three years.
"It's going to be a very boring business but I hope it can be a very boring profitable business that has incredibly high editorial ethics and an incredible focus on reporting the truth and high quality," Calacanis said.
For more Biz Please, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and find them here on Stitcher.
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
