Jason Calacanis: belief

Transcript context

…You always hear Bob Dylan not like any better. Yeah. I could play with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, but I'm going to write my own albums. I want to do my own thing. I want to keep it small, authentic, and true to what I want to do. I did have a bunch of venture firms over the years make runs at me, and then maybe want to incorporate my little empire into their empires. It'd be a good feeder, you can plug what I'm doing into something bigger if you were a billion dollar late stage fund. Imagine having the only real viable Y Combinator competitor out there as the top of your funnel, the only real AngelList coexisting with your competitor. These things are not really competitors, they're really coexistors, but we're the number one largest syndicate in the world. AngelList is the largest collection of syndicates. But if you took the top two or three syndicates together, they would be smaller than ours, on AngelList. You look at our program, really only people who compete with Y Combinator heads up. The only reason we've had people pick us over Y Combinator and people pick Y Combinator over us or go to Y Combinator then come to us. We're really the only, I think, accelerator, who can say that. Jason, I want to T this up in this direction. You want to be a solo artist, not join a band. I'm sorry, at this point in time, I'm just playing through what’s in your head. You want to be a solo artist but you also deeply understand returns to scale. As you're thinking through This Week in Startups, The Syndicate, which I really want to understand mechanically how that formed and how that works, how are you thinking about scaling what is working for you in being a soloist?…

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