Q: "How would you describe your management style, because you have a pretty unique management style?"
Jason Calacanis: "Yeah, I would say I like people to be able to keep up with me. Uuuhm. And I don't get tired - I have only experienced being tired a couple of times in my life, it's typically from running the marathon and so I need people who are indefatigable, people who have pretty high stamina. I need people who are intense. I need people who can perform at a high level on a pretty regular basis. And I need people who are able to engage in debate. And so I need pretty strong people. I decided I am not going to work for people who are weak and who are maybe looking for balance in their lives. I do view doing a startup company like an Olympic sport. You have to qualify for it. If you don't qualify for it, then you can't be on the team. And if all of a sudden you get slower, and can't keep up, then you have to leave the team, and be replaced by somebody who can. And if you have a team of people who are all Olympic caliber, and who all are running very fast, it doesn't feel like everybody is running fast, it's just how we run, we are fast runners, or hard runners. And you just have to hire the right people. So I think I'm intolerant of average people. I am infuriated by people who make excuses. And so depending on who comes to work for me, and if you interview 100 people who have worked for me, if the person was ambitious and hard-working, they would tell you that it's the best experience of their lives, and that they learned more working for me, got more opportunity, tripled their salary. I have had people literally come in, work for me, 30 or 40 thousand dollars out of school, and then two or three years later would be making 100 thousand dollars. That's my value proposition. If you come work for me, you are going to work very hard, not harder than I do, maybe equal, but no harder than I expect of myself. But you will learn everything, and I will teach you everything I know. Calacanis MBA in 3 or 4 years. And if you do, then I will get you a job anywhere you want to work. If you have done 3 or 4 years for me, I will invest in your company if you come up with a good idea. I will come on your board, if you come up with a good idea. I will introduce you to anybody I know, give you recommendation and support you in any way I can. Take the other half of people, who maybe I've fought with, or fired. or they quit, they tended to be people who were lame, not hard-working, looking for balance, not intense, not winners, not looking to succeed, and they would say "Well, I'm just a normal person". I would say: "Correct, you are a normal person. I am an abnormal person. You normal person came to work for an abnormal person. I have abnormal expectations, that are high. You have normal expectations." It's nothing wrong with that, but that person should have gone to work at the post office, or Starbucks, or IBM, or whatever place where average people can exist without having some insane maniac like me say: "Why didn't you figure this out? Why didn't you work harder? Why did you make all these mistakes?" At a big company, no one would ever confront them. They would just hide under their desk, and maybe 9 months later somebody would say: "What do you do here? Oh cool." And for people who just want to duck down and disappear, there are plenty of jobs out there. I don't want those. I want samurai. People who come in and fight, and cut arms off and crash through stuff. If there is a barrier and a problem, I want people who can just hack their way through it, and not stop until they are dead or they have killed whatever is in front of them. And that is a different philosophy than maybe most people have about business."