Jason Calacanis: prediction

Transcript context

…How'd you get to know Mark? I had known Mark because I had written Broadcast.com, it's a billion dollars worth of hot air in Silicon Alley Reporter. I said your revenue is like $10 million. Do you know what the revenue is next? He was like, "No. You're a publicly traded company, of course, I know." I said, "Why don't you wait?" Then, the revenue went from $10 million to like $60 million, like quarter of a quarter. I was like, "Okay, it's not a billion dollars and hot air." I did a mia culpa kind of situation. We became good friends, Mark and I, for a long time. He put $300,000 in. We started Blog Maverick for him. Brian Alvey came up with all the good names, the best collaborator I ever had in my life, and Peter. Peter said listen, I feel really bad about the stuff with Nick Denton. I said you shouldn't feel bad, this guy promised you equity and he gave you nothing. You've given him this incredible brand that's going to become worth millions of dollars, you should feel zero guilty. He robbed you of your vision and we're going to take it back. He said yeah, maybe you're right. I was like yeah. I've been in fights. If somebody sucker punches you, you have to teach him a lesson so they don't do it again. Because if you don't teach them a lesson, what I learned is they will come back. It has to be such a beat down, it has to be so painful that the person says, I should have never sucker punched that guy. That's how powerful the beat down has to be. It can't just be retribution of one for one. If they punch you, you have to annihilate them. This is what I learned about violence when I was growing up and I've since disavowed this but this is literally what I saw on the streets of Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s. I said when are you going to tell Nick? He said he's been working so hard for like a year and half or whatever, he's just burnt out. He's been working seven days a week on this. He said he's going to take his first vacation. I said rally? He said yeah, he's going down to Brazil or whatever. All these famous people are going. I said when is he going? He's going Sunday. I was like oh, what time is he leaving? He said I don't know what time he's leaving. I looked up online, flights to Brazil, whatever, I couldn't figure it out. I said listen, I want you to write a blog post about this. We're launching the site at 2:00 P.M on Sunday." We literally launched the site the first day of his vacation. He landed with his people going Gizmodo has no blogger. We have all these advertisers and there's a competitor. Oh, my God.…

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