This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "Judging leadership | Jason Calacanis" (uploaded Aug 17, 2017) of a live interview/talk hosted at Draper University. The excerpt features Jason Calacanis as the main speaker with an unnamed moderator/host and audience interaction. Calacanis shares personal anecdotes (bulldogs, marathons, a 6th-degree taekwondo black belt), and discusses leadership, public scrutiny and social media/mob mentality, ethics for founders/leaders, and efforts to increase diversity in startups (e.g., Female Founder University and Launch). Metadata: contenttype=YOUTUBE, createdtime=2017-08-17T18:02:57Z, thumbnail provided.
Chapters
Got it. Oh, these chairs are comfortable. I'm gonna take a little nap.
I know.
Hey everybody, can you hear me in the back? Somebody in the back row, wait, give me a thumbs up. How many people in the room are entrepreneurs? Raise your hand if you're an entrepreneur. Raise your hand if you're an investor. Raise your hand if you're an investor. Okay, we're gonna attack her later, get your money. Good announcement.
Sorry to interrupt. No, that's okay. That makes my job way easier. Well, welcome to Draper University, guys, our hero city. It's an honor to host Jason here. This is something that I've been trying to put together for about 4 years. He never said no. He always said, not yet. And now he's here. So thank you so much for being here. And I'll— so Jason has actually written an amazing book called Angel that we kind of got our hands on early. It's an amazing book to read.
Thank you.
for entrepreneurs because it kind of gives you a very good insight into the mind of an angel. And most of the questions we're going to ask Jason are based off of his experiences and things in the book. But the first thing, because we're at Draper University and we do things a bit differently, is we'll start with a little-known fun fact about you. Go ahead. What is it? I don't know. You have to know that.
Well, I've owned 5 bulldogs. My daughter London is here.
Hey.
She came to see me tonight. So little-known fact about me. That's a great question. People know I grew up in Brooklyn. They know about the bulldogs. They know I have 3 wonderful daughters, London, Katarina, and Johanna. And what they may not know about me, Hmm, what they may not know about me. Gosh, I'm kind of an open book, aren't I? I mean, on Twitter and everything. People know I play poker. Yeah, I think maybe people don't know that I ran 11 marathons and that I'm a 6th-degree black belt in taekwondo.
Oh, wow.
Because I don't talk about those things. Because if you talk about being a 6th-degree black belt in taekwondo, you know what happens?
No. What happens?
People want to start a fight with a 6th degree black belt in taekwondo and see if they can beat them up.
And they don't want to do that now?
Well, you know, when I was younger, you know, when— before you get your black belt in taekwondo, for the, you know, couple of years before that, if you're practicing, you talk about it. And then you get the black belt and you realize this is kind of like something you don't need to broadcast. Because there are a lot of crazy people out there. And literally, I've had people who find out say, let's fight. And I say, that's not exactly the idea of practicing martial arts. It's an art. Nobody's interested in fighting, right?
So, yeah, yeah, okay. So no, there's no wonder that's a rare known fact.
So although I did on Twitter offer to do an MMA fight with a Nazi. He said something just abhorrent, and I told him, anytime, anywhere. And he said, okay. And I said, okay, July 4th, Las Vegas. He backed down. He found out I was a black belt.
Oh, okay.
But I would have taken complete pleasure in beating up a Nazi.
That's good to know.
It was literally a Nazi. Somebody else punched him, actually, it turned out. I can't remember the kid's name, but he's pretty famous on social media for being a Nazi.
Oh.
Twitter's a crazy place, isn't it?
It is. You asked the question, I gave it to you, now ask the question. Oh, like, okay. No, I feel very strongly about that, so I'm like, mm, okay.
We're kind of in a weird moment in society, because then somebody said, like, how dare you promote violence? And I said, toward a Nazi? It's kind of the quintessential enemy. I mean, Indiana Jones, like, took particular delight in killing Nazis.
Yeah.
I think it's the one place where you're kind of justified.
You are. There's a few places where you are.
This started out really weird, didn't it? I know.
And this is like, which, and this really brings me to ask a question, though. I'm not the most politically correct person. It's not even on my agenda today. But how do you balance that? How do you be who you want to be in this world today where everything you say as an investor or as an entrepreneur is scrutinized? And you have like something like the future, like Uber, waiting for you to happen where you can get kicked out. So how do you— what do you do?
Well, there are a lot of changes going on in the world that are very positive. And so I feel very good about society. I feel very positive about society. If you look at tolerance for gay marriage, if you look at tolerance for cannabis and some other things, the approval of these things has gone through the roof, and the people disapproving has changed in our lifetime.
Right.
So I feel like society is trending towards a very beautiful place. In fact, violence and the chances of having, having been, being murdered in our country has gone down precipitously. And in fact, the world— abject poverty is going down massively thanks to Bill Gates and a bunch of other people. Infant mortality, all of these things are trending in the right direction, but it feels kind of bad because we have a media that obsesses about all the bad things, and then we also have this social media culture where if somebody makes a mistake or says something, you know, in an imperfect way, people really jump on them and try to ruin their lives, and the mob mentality we have today, I don't think is particularly helpful. I think you gotta give people a little bit of leeway and a little bit of forgiveness if they make a mistake. I certainly do. I had an NPR reporter called me a derogatory word. And she's like, I really thought you were going to be a beep when I read your book and when I heard who you were, but I find you quite charming and engaging. And I said— and then the other NPR reporter in the room goes, oh my God. And the woman goes, I'm sorry, did I just call you that? I am so sorry. And she thought I was going to tweet it. It was a recorded interview. And then we had a break, and then she came back and she says, I just wanna formally apologize, I said something inappropriate. And I said, don't worry, I'm not gonna tweet it or anything. I mean, I'll tell the story here, but I'm not mentioning the name. We have this on a million NPR shows.
Yeah.
And I said, listen, if you said something and it was from the hip, and you speak for 3 or 4 hours a day as a radio personality, and you say something that wasn't optimal, I don't think you should lose your career over it. And it was a career-ending type thing, she said. Like, I think actually, literally, she would have been suspended or fired by NPR. And I said, I don't judge you on that. Let's just delete it from the tape. Let's move on. And we'll all have a beer someday and laugh about it, or have a coffee and laugh about it. It's not the end of the world. You said something that was slightly inappropriate, but let's all move on. That being said, we live in a very specific time where people need to, I think, act with a very high bar as leaders, and there is no room for mistakes.
Right.
And so I encourage people, um, to act at the highest levels of morality and ethics and to not do anything inappropriate ever. And, um, you know, if you're looking for a spouse, uh, or somebody to date, that would be something best reserved for Tinder or other applications or websites, not the place where you're employed.
Correct.
Or the place where you're the founder. So, you know, we live in a different time. Things are changing. I think they're changing for the better. And I overall feel very positive about society, although there are still challenges and there are still examples of injustice in the world. You know, it's really fantastic to see so many more female founders, so many more underrepresented minorities in the industry. And in fact, we're working really hard at Launch, my team, we have 9 people there, to do things like Female Founder University, which will take place in the second week of July. It's free, it's 2 days, we do it over at Wilson Sonsini, and it's basically our incubator in 2 days.
Right.
And we decided we're not, we wanted to increase the number of female founders that were pitching us and coming to our incubator and that we're investing in. So we said, let's just run an event where we do something for free that is super helpful. And so we try to do these super helpful events like the Founder University, and we decided to just do one that was all female. And the last one we did was about a third female, and now we're gonna have 35 women. And it just increases our ability to find great people to invest in, right? And so I think I judge people based on their actions and how they deal with bad situations. Bad situations are going to happen. Unfortunate situations will happen. I think the real judge of leadership is how you respond to them.
