Jason Calacanis: belief

Transcript context

…Any company that has that kind of strong network effects inside an organization deserves a meaningful revenue multiple because their differentiator is literally the company's moat. I tweeted this, but if I have a castle and it has a moat around it that is much wider or deeper than your identical castle, shouldn't you pay more for my castle that is more defendable? Hundred percent. I think Sacks made this point on All-In two weeks ago, which was, if they're paying 50x now and the company is growing, okay, they're paying 20x next year or 25x. Who cares? It seems such a high growth company. And then I was just thinking, somebody's got a theory there. When I sold Weblogs to AOL, people were like, oh my God, these people are idiots. They gave $30 million for Weblogs, Inc. They only got $200,000 in revenue. What they didn't realize was AOL Autos, AOL Tech, AOL Lifestyle, those were sold out at like a $90 RPM, revenue per 1000 pages. The ads were different CPMs. They would put an Engadget or an Autoblog story, a Blogging Baby, or whatever other blog we had on the homepage of AOL, and a half million people would flow through. And then they would put those ads on our sites. They would blow out $50,000 or $100,000 in ads a day on a blog. Those people were like, great, because it was costing AOL to make content like $500 per piece of content, $3000 per piece of content on aol.com/autos, whatever. We were doing it at the time, $5 a blog post. We said, people can write for an hour, so it's $20 an hour and it's $6 minimum wage. It makes sense. The media game has changed so much. You guys were $200,000 annual revenue?…

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