Person attributes
Other attributes
Jason Calacanis is an American investor and entrepreneur. He is best known for his podcast and financial contributions in the technology sector.
Calacanis was born in Brooklyn, New York, and was educated at Fordham University. In 1996, he founded a company called the Silicon Alley Reporter, which published print media, such as magazines, to cover news stories related to the rising internet industry.
Throughout approximately the next fifteen years, Calacanis founded and cofounded several more companies, such as Weblogs, LAUNCH, and Inside.com. For several of the companies, he also acted as chief executive officer. Many of his companies were acquired by larger companies, such as Twitter and TimeWarner.
In 2009, Calacanis became the host of the podcast This Week in Startups, which discusses news in the technology sector.
In addition to founding companies, Calacanis is an angel investor. He made an early investment in Uber of $25,000, and by 2017, that investment was worth approximately $100 million. He has also invested in companies like Vincent.
Calacanis is linked to one of the largest bank failures in the United States because of a series of tweets that he made on Twitter. On March 10, 2023, he used the platform to notify his followers that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was on the brink of collapse, which did indeed happen later that day.
Some view his actions as appropriate whistle-blowing in a situation that was set to devastate many start-ups, as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would only cover $250,000 worth of deposits, and many companies had much more than that held in their accounts with SVB.
However, many professionals and politicians, such as House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry, viewed the tweets made by Calacanis as causing unnecessary panic and mass hysteria. Chairman McHenry released a statement calling the string of events that happened after Calacanis made his tweets as "the first Twitter-fueled bank run," meaning that the large number of bank withdraws in an extremely short amount of time from SVB was caused by rumors that were spread via the social media platform.
