Jason Calacanis: commitment

Transcript context

…It turns out you were not the last person to have that. No, no, no. I might have been the first, but not the last. I said I have to destroy Nick Denton. How am I going to do this? I said I know, talent. Nothing worse than losing talent. Elizabeth Spiers, she's writing for Gawker, I'm going to make a run at her. I had heard that he was paying the writers $1500 and the MacBook Air had just come out. I contacted Elizabeth and I said let's have coffee. She agreed to have coffee or something. There's like a photo of it, actually, of me talking to her at the park that somebody took in the early days. She's looking at me like I am the Antichrist. I was like you are a unique talent. Nick Denton will never give you equity, I will give you equity. You will become a millionaire. I'll give you a MacBook Air and I'll give you two grand a month, which is a 33% more raise. She's like, no, I'm going to go work for New York magazine. I was like that's the worst career move you could ever make, Elizabeth. Magazines are going to die, blogs are going to take over. There's no way magazines can ever keep up with blogs. Whatever they print is going to be old news, and you're already proving it. You're number one at blogging, and you're going to become number 500 at a magazine. She says it was always my dream. The blog story, this is going to be a big theme that we'll come back to later with what you're doing now. Before the brand was New York magazine, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and everybody you wrote for, it was just a faceless name. In the blogging paradigm now, the blogs don't matter. It's the writers that matter.…

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