Mind-blowing Idea: Free Transportation for Life

I've been privileged to be able to own both of Tesla's models (Roadster and Model S sedan) over the past four years. During that time I drove 15k+ miles and never visited a gas station, with the rare exception of my summer retreats to the Catskill Mountains driving convertible Mustangs around the Adirondack Lakes.

During that time I realized that we, the humans on planet earth, were hoodwinked, duped and bamboozled by the political industrial complex that electric vehicles were not feasible.

Last week, the Tesla Model S won two awards: Automobile of the Year from Automobile magazine and Car of the Year from Motor Trend. Well deserved to be sure. The car is flawless, and to call the object a car doesn't actually do it justice.

Now, the Model S is as much a movement as a vehicle. And while the car is groundbreaking inside and out, the greatest innovation is hiding in plain sight.

Click to read more ...

I Wonder If Live Crowdfunding Works? Let's Find Out!

tl;dr: We're making an iPhone app that will let the audience invest in the startups @ LAUNCH live. Like a mashup of a Sotheby's auction and Kickstarter with a splash of AngelList.
 
--------------------
$2M was invested in the startups at the LAUNCH festival last year from the stage by angel investors and venture capitalists. This was the first time anyone had ever done a life funding at a conference and it was a wild success.

If you had invested in our alumni, folks like Powerset, Mint, Yammer and Red Beacon, at the event, you would have made, ummm, a huge return (of course, conversely, if you had invested in many of the other companies, you would have lost your money--that's the nature of startups: most fail).

Recently I thought to myself, "What if the 3,000 folks who came to the conference or the 100k+ who consumed it remotely could have invested in these companies--for equity?" Just like folks do on Kickstarter?

At this year's LAUNCH Festival--the sixth--we’re making an iPhone app that will allow everyone in the audience and at home to invest in the companies while on stage.

Click to read more ...

T2E: Time to Excellence

How long does it take to make an excellent product?

That's the question I've been asking myself as I pivot and prod my own startups, and make a handful of angel investments a year.

In the '80s, it felt like the journey from good products to excellent took decades. In the '90s, it felt like it took 10 years. Today, it feels like it happens overnight.

[ Note: If you're reading this, I'm going to assume you read "the Age of Excellence" and agree that the world doesn't care about average or simply good products any more--and that you want to make something excellent in your lifetime. ]

The time to excellence, which I will refer to as T2E, has halved or more every 10 years since I came of age in the ‘80s.

Let's look at three groups of products: computers in the form of the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad; social networks in the form of Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and Path; and cars in the form of the Tesla Roadster and Tesla Model S.

Click to read more ...

Google's Fiber "Proof of Concept" Is Anything But

How many folks want fiber in their homes?

[ everyone raises their hands ]

Keep your hands up if you've looked into getting fiber.

[ everyone's hands remain up ]

Keep your hands up if you have fiber at home today?

[ 96% of hands go down ]

Everyone in our country wants fiber, but it's my belief that the evil folks at cable companies and telecoms are sabotaging fiber in order to maintain their legacy businesses: be they content in the case of Time Warner or phone calls and text messaging if it's AT&T.

As your internet gets faster you spend more time online. This is one of the core tenets of Google's success. Instead of adding features to Gmail, YouTube and Google search, they historically focused on making things faster (at least first).

Why?

Because speed drives usage.

Click to read more ...

Good to Great to Excellent: A Roadmap

By Jason Calacanis

I've spent the past two decades building products. As a "builder" your career generally starts with idea generation. "Wouldn't the world be better if you could press a button and A happened?" or "Why does A work like B when it should just do C?" are the non-stop tormentors of founders.

For as long as I can remember, I have tried to imagine how everything I looked at could be improved. That's how I approached life, and I made a bunch of products I felt were great.

And while it was never a struggle for me to conceive products, it certainly was a bit of a struggle to launch them early on (getting funding, building a team, finding office space -- blocking-and-tackling type issues). Later on it became easy to launch them (folks wanted to work with me, angel investing got easier after I made some folks a 15x return in 12 months, etc), and the challenge was to make them good.

Now it turns out starting companies and making good or great products is not so hard -- making them excellent is.

I realized that great is the starting line, not the goal.  

"You made something great in a world that wants excellent," I keep reminding myself.

I've gotten more sustained feedback on the "Age of Excellence" piece I wrote on April 25, 2012 than perhaps any other piece of written. Thanks for all the insights.

The question that inevitably comes up after reading the piece: "How do you make something excellent?"

I've been focusing on this question for the past year, and I've got some early thoughts on the journey "Good to Great to Excellent."

Click to read more ...