Jason Calacanis: commitment

Transcript context

…Did you actually have the idea or did you just send the email? I did have the idea. My idea was—Wikipedia was the thing at that point in time—I went to Wikimania which was their conference up in Boston. I studied the Wiki Soft, I started playing with it and I made a little proof of concept where Google was dealing with web spam at the time and the order of the links weren't very good. My wife's Korean and I had heard about Daum, daum.net, and comprehensive search in Korean. In Korea, Daum owned the blogging company and the picture hosting company. When you do a search, they would show pictures, they'll show links, pictures, and blog posts on one page. I made this comprehensive search and I said, "It's going to be called 20.com., the Top 20 links for any keyword." I went into the meeting and I put three pieces of paper on the table—I don't think I ever told the story—and I said, "iPod. Look at these 10 blue links, these are the search results. One's Yahoo, one's 20.com, and one is Google. Which one do you like best?" Moritz and Roelof pointed to one and I said, "Turn it over." It said 20.com. I said, "Turn the other two over." I did it again and I said, "Kauai vacation," and they picked mine again. They said, "Why is yours the best?" I said I had a human look at the Google result and made a Wikipedia page. Mark said, "That's a great idea. What are you looking to do?" I was like I want $3 million for 25% of the company. He said, "Okay. Work with Roelof, " and he walked out. He was on the board of Google and he's like, "I can't do this but Roelof can, he's not competitive with Google." That was the start of it. Then, my friend, Elon, put some money in. He was working at a rocket company, he just called me and he's like, "I think you're smart, I'll put some money in." Uber put some money in, CBS put some money in, just a bunch of people, whatever. I was on the top of my game, got the company at $10 million in Google AdSense revenue and then, Matt Cutts felt we were getting too big and eHow is getting too big. There was also Cosmics, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.