Jason Calacanis: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. Because if you Google Kauai vacation on Google, you get this. You get that now. I was 5 years or 10 years ahead of them. Moritz had said, "I don't think Jason is right. We have to debate at a conference at one point." Somebody asked about Mahalo and he said, "I don't think humans can scale, we got to do it with robots. " Then, they basically took 90% of our traffic away and the punch line was, they took 90% of their own revenue away because the way we're monetizing was with their tools. I called up everybody that I knew there. I was like what are you guys doing? You just killed my site. I have to lay off a hundred people. We got in this big public spat and they're like, "Yeah. We don't know." I was like we’re partners. Matt Cutts says, "We don't have partners." I was like, "I forged an email from the AdSense Team that said Partner Meeting, Partner Lunch, partner this, and partner that." Yeah, that's a different group. I'm like, "But you're so Google." They literally took everybody who would eventually become competitive with them and they just neutered us. This is why Google will face anti-trust action like they did in Europe, maybe here eventually, I think Yelp's right. What they did to Yelp was equally bad. They basically studied us, copied us, killed us. But I learned a really important lesson there which is don't have a dependency. The problem was they just think they're so quick, I was like we're on a $10 million run away. We're making just a lot of money everyday. The peak in AdSense, this is all honky [...]. They'll never shut us off, we're giving 30¢ of our dollar to them. I was wrong, they had a long game. They just didn't want Mahalo.com and other things to exist so they killed us. I pivoted Inside and it's still going today, 12 years later. It's actually doing really well for email newsletters. What’s all this new again.…

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