Who is Jason Calacanis?

OpenAI's strategy is to be a platform company, not to compete with customers on the application layer.

“I don't think we should go build every product category. I don't think we should like go try to compete with all of our customers. I don't think we should try to like subsume the entire economy. I think we should offer this platform and try to have 100 million new businesses and 8 billion people use it in all kinds of new ways.”

Zuckerberg's support for open AI models is strategically motivated by Meta being behind in AI, consistent with the pattern that companies open-source when behind and close when ahead.

“When you're behind, you go open. When you're ahead, you go closed.”

In venture capital, growth rate is the only metric that matters; profitability and cash flow do not matter.

“The only thing that matters in our industry for venture kind of capital is growth rate. Like we nothing else matters. It's not profitability. It's not cash flow positive.”

Investors now prioritize evaluating founder persistence over customer acquisition ability, because AI has made early customer acquisition accessible to anyone.

“I'm trying to figure out if people are going to quit. Will they stick with this? because anybody can get a couple of customers now.”

Jason Calacanis on the cost-efficiency of his viral tweet experiment.

“It cost me $11. It has now 1.1 million views this tweet.”

A single tweet about a product built in public cost $11 and generated 1.1 million views, per Jason Calacanis's own experiment.

“It cost me $11. It has now 1.1 million views this tweet.”

Jason Calacanis explaining how Launch VC restructured first founder calls around its top-ranked associates.

“We stack ranked everybody. Now, first calls are only done by the three highest scored people. I told everybody, 'Oh, can I do first calls?' Nope. These three people do the first calls because they are the great three-point shooters on the team.”

As AI dramatically lowers the cost of building software, the binding constraint for ambitious multi-product startups shifts from engineering headcount to founder energy and creative focus.

“That is now becoming the finite resources is the founding team or the founders or the Their enthusiasm and energy, creative cycles to push something forward as opposed to the blocker being, 'Can I get three more developers?'”

Jason Calacanis defines 'AI first' as consulting AI before every task and automating any repeated task, making it an operational standard rather than a mindset slogan.

“Any task you're doing, you have to ask AI first, how could I do this task better? And then any task that you do over and over again, you have to work with AI to let AI do that task or at least attempt to.”

Jason Calacanis found roughly 3 out of his first 400 portfolio companies were engaged in unethical, immoral, or potentially illegal behavior (a ~0.75% rate).

“What I found of the first 400 companies I invested in, we had three that were doing things that were in that area of unethical, immoral, maybe illegal.”

Jason Calacanis sets a hard AI-adoption ultimatum for his team by end of 2026.

“By the end of the year AI first or this isn't the place.”

Jason Calacanis on the real resource constraint for multi-product founders in the AI era.

“That is now becoming the finite resources is the founding team or the founders or the Their enthusiasm and energy, creative cycles to push something forward as opposed to the blocker being, 'Can I get three more developers?'”

Jason Calacanis on his new minimum threshold for any investment.

“I'm not interested if it can't be a billion dollar position anymore.”

Fans are bypassing traditional Hollywood production by feeding comic book and novel source material directly into AI animation tools, producing video content without studios.

“A lot of these Star Wars Tales of the Untold that we're showing here, they came from the comic books and from the novels. So, people are going to the comic books and the novels and just saying, 'Here's the source material.' And I guess they put that source material in and they say just animate these still.”