That is right folks, one of the most famous ads that ever...was has now officially been retired. Kudos to Jon Hodgman and Justin Long for a wonderful and great ride. In addition, kudos are well deserved by the folks at One More Thing podcast for this wonderful mashup video. Enjoy!
If all of you have been underneath a rock for the past month (or you might not listen to podcasts...but why?), Jason Calacanis runs a great one centered around being an entrepreneur. This Week in Startups has been rocking the entrepreneur world now for nearly 9 months and the current episode is just as phenomenal as the rest. This week's guest is Shawn Gold, who is now having fun with his wife and running a web invitation startup named "Cocodot."
The show starts off a little ruff due to the technical squad being Calacanis' B team so if you are experiencing oddity in the audio, hang tight, it gets better as the episode progresses on. At the beginning of many episodes, Calacanis tends to enlighten the crowd and extend the episode however, this episode is seriously different, within 15 minutes they have already jumped into the "Ask Jason" segment. One item, everyone needs to know about the podcast is that it will often last for around 2 full hours, (sometimes more) so make sure to carve a good chunk of time out for the entire episode. Not to worry, it is definitely worth your time if you aspire to play in this space.
The first Ask Jason question is quality mainly because it highlights the concerns that all of us have when coming out of school: should we jump into our own startup, or work under one and accumulate some know-how? The second question is the one that all of you budding entrepreneurs want to listen to, rewind, and re-listen to. It focuses on selling add space to extremely niche, content based web sites. Shawn played a large part of accomplishing this with Calacanis' Weblogs inc. startup, and is a tremendous wealth of knowledge in this area. Apparently, all of this encapsulates into Shawn and Clacanis talking about adult entertainment "aka...PORN" industry and how it has been decimated by the free model.
The next segment of the show highlights the model based on the extremely unpopular show Shark Tank. Calacanis gives callers 60 seconds to pitch their startup in exchange for a metric ton of feedback. In this episode, Calacanis reams on the the caller right away for having a "girl's name" (Nickey) which is absolutely hilarious. The idea of this specific pitch is internet translation, called "Transisimo." Usually the callers in this section tend to be serious quality; however, I thought this specific shark tank was a bit of a bore. Perhaps I thought this because I could care less about translation but if you do, stay tuned, I am positive there are some quality nuggets in there. After this section, Calacanis jumped right into talking about Cocodot and Shawn.
The section where Jason and the guest shoot back and forth about their startups is by far one of the most packed with knowledge. Shawn by far, holds up to this idea and shares a lot of his know-how when dealing with startup drama throughout his years in the space. At the moment, Shawn runs a boutique "e-greeting" site (about damn time) with his wife (aww...no idea how he pulls this off but serious hat tip). This section is THE reason to watch this episode so I am going to cut the review of it short in order to save everyone from spoilers.
The final and, quite frankly, the best section of the show is "The News." This section is run with another one of Calacanis' cohorts named Lon Harris who by far, should have a seat next to Tom Brokaw. Lon is an absolutely amazing news "anchor" and brings some quality news articles to the program every week. This week they all talk about Yelp and Google, Iranian's hacking Twitter, Groupon's crazy evaluation, and Facebook's "whack" change in security. Overall this is definitely in the top 10 of the best TWIST episodes (I have been watching since the very beginning) and a worthwhile listen. Big ups to Bing, Powervps, Webspy, Ustream, and DNAMail
-Thanks for the great opportunity Jason...btw, I could use the mac mini for a colo podcast server *wink,* *wink.* Thanks, for a pimp ass show man.
Loic jumps out onto the streets of San Fransisco and shares some of his valuable insight about the future of Twitter. Loic has been doing the whole Web 2.0 thing with his startup Seesmic, which has become a powerful AIR based twitter client. It is definitely a worthwhile 18 minutes if you are just dipping your toes into twitter or the uber elite.
