Jason Calacanis tells founders to cut TV, parties, and pointless conferences. Focus instead on talking to customers, building skills obsessively, and executing. Sacrifice now or watch someone hungrier take your idea.
Chapters
Probably not a great idea. Right. And if you are watching 20 hours of television a week, the average American watches 4 hours a night. TV is so amazing. I mean, how many people watch The Walking Dead? Raise your hand if you watch The Walking Dead. How many— keep your hand— okay. If you watch The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, or NBA games, raise your hand. Raise your hand. Be honest now. Okay, it's about 2/3 of the audience. Stop watching television. Okay, I don't care how good the Warriors are. I don't care how good Game of Thrones is, and I don't care how good The Walking Dead is. Anybody here, anybody here worth $100 million? Anybody here have a successful company that went public? Raise your hand if your company's gone public yet. I don't want to see anybody in here watching any TV until your company's public. When your company goes public and you take down $100 million, you can start watching TV again. Until then, you have no business watching TV. I'm sorry to be your parents. I'm sorry to break the news to you, but if you want to be successful, enough with The Walking Dead. You watching The Walking Dead? I haven't watched it in 10 years. Don't you lie to me. Okay, in 10 years. That's why you're sitting in this chair. Okay? No more with the TV. All right? You want to go for a run or a hike, yes, I'll allow it, but enough with the TV. It's actually not that hard to give up. Listen, I— It depends, but— We had 2/3 of the folks here with those 3 names raised their hand. I know what the commitment is to watch those things. Now, I'm not saying you have to give up your life, but I will tell you that Zuckerberg did and Elon did and Travis did. So if you wanna have an outsized success, are you putting in outsized effort? And if you're watching a bunch of these amazing TV shows, the fact is you're not putting the effort in. And 2/3 of the people put up their hands, the other 1/3 are lying. Right. They're definitely watching that Game of Thrones. I mean, it's incredible. It's like a— that show is unbelievable. But that's my point. It's a major temptation, and people are inefficient. They waste their time on a lot of silly stuff. The fact is, you gotta be focused on your skills. Think about, you know, if you watched all 5 seasons of Game of Thrones and you spent 60 hours on that, you would know how to be a front-end developer, you would know JavaScript, you would know Photoshop, you would understand how to be a sales executive. Yeah. If you wanna watch something, watch This Week in Startups. At least you're learning, okay? Or watch Tim Ferriss's podcast or something Kevin Rose's, where you're learning about building product. Yeah. Myself, you know, I watch a little bit of TV now, but for the first 20 years of my career when I was coming up, I didn't have time for nonsense. I specifically did not waste my time doing that. I did not go out drinking. I did not go to parties. I focused on my work and my skills. That's why I did okay. You have to be willing to sacrifice, and I find people do not want to sacrifice anymore. They wanna go to Summit at Sea and TEDx and Web Summit and all this nonsense, and they want to spend $5,000 or $10,000 on it. If you're wasting your time on Coachella or Summit at Sea or whatever and your company's not profitable, you're doing it wrong. Yeah, until your company's wildly profitable and you've got 2 years of runway in your bank, enough with the conferences. I mean, if you get a free ticket, or it's— let's say it's a conference where you're gonna meet customers. So if you're in the legal field and there's a law conference, yeah, by all means go to it. But I find people are wasting a lot of time, very inefficient with their time. Now, if you're young and you don't have kids, you can be a little bit inefficient. As you get older, you don't even have the opportunity to be inefficient. But as young people, if you really want to be successful— and I've seen the people who are successful— they are obsessed. They have an unhealthy obsession with their own skills and performance and ability. Mm-hmm. and they're not wasting time on nonsense. So just look at your schedule and look at yourself with a critical eye. Mm-hmm. Like if you're the coach, and say to yourself, if I was coaching myself, what would I tell myself not to do? And what are the things I'm procrastinating on? I can't tell you how many founders who know exactly what they need to work on, and they sit there in their email box playing defense all day, responding to bullshit. Enough with the email. You know what it takes? It takes talking to your customers. Mm-hmm. I have people in my portfolio, I talk to them, they're doing everything but talking to their customers. I'm like, well, what do your customers say? They're like, we're scared of talking to our customers. They may not like our product. I'm like, if that's your sense, you really need to talk to them now and find out exactly how much they hate your product so that you can then say, okay, you hate our product. Is there something that you're very frustrated with in your life as a barista, as an accountant, As a sales executive, as an IT specialist, whatever, because we want to build something for you. The number of people who don't talk to their customers is insane to me. Oh, it is. Cardinal rule of entrepreneurship, talk to your customers.
