The Jason Calacanis Special (cont.)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

All right, LPs, thank you for continuing on here with us. So Jason, the question in my mind, as we sort of did the research and mapped out, of course everything you've done, but everything you're currently doing is like, draw me the Disney flywheel. There's Launch Festival, there's the Launch Accelerator, there's your personal angel investing outside of the Launch Accelerator.

There's the three podcasts you do, but sort of anchored by...

David Rosenthal (0:23)

Twist.

Ben Gilbert (0:24)

Twist, yeah. What piece did I miss there and how do they all feed?

Jason Calacanis (0:28)

So here's a secret grand plan. Forget about the flywheel, just think about a funnel.

It's a little bit easier. At the top of the funnel is advice and entertainment, which is the podcasts and my social media. And then if you enjoy that, and that's enjoyed by over 10 million people a year, and you get the bug, you might want to come see us in person at an event, or you might want to join our Slack channel, which is a new thing. You might want to sign up for an email list, and you can come to one of those big events. And now we've gone from 10 million people down to an experience that would be 10,000 people or less.

Then there's a more intimate experience, which is Founder University, which is a two-day 60-person event where we have a bunch of speakers come in, and I give feedback to people who are just getting ready to come to our accelerator. So we've defined our Goldilocks zone as, you don't have a competitive Series A process running right now.

David Rosenthal (1:28)

Series A?

Jason Calacanis (1:29)

Yeah. That's too hot. You don't need us. Why would you go to an accelerator? You got a Series A, you got multiple term sheets. Who cares?

I get it. Too cold? You have an idea. You have a business plan. You have a prototype. You have a product, but you have no paying customers. You have a consumer product with nobody using it.

But you know how to build it, and you've incorporated, and you have something that you could show me and pitch me.

David Rosenthal (1:53)

That's your sweet spot for the university.

Jason Calacanis (1:57)

Right for university.

So too cold for an investment.

Now what's just right? Just right, you've got a product in market with customers we can talk to. It could be free, it could be paid. In the case of Fitbod, they had a couple of hundred, maybe 200 people who paid for the app, and they were paying $100 a year. So you can just do the math, like I think they were doing $2,000 a month or something or $1,500 a month. That's enough. We could actually diligence somebody using the app. We could meet the two or three co-founders working on it and say, you know what, reasonable bet. We've seen $2,000 turn to $20. We've seen $20 turn to $200. We saw $200 turn to $20 million, and in the case of calm.com, we've sort of turned into nine figures a year. They've been pretty public about their run rate. So we've seen this movie before, and so that's just right for us. So Founder University is a way for us to have 60 people come, and out of those 60, you should two or three make it into the accelerator.

And then there's the accelerator itself, which is a seven-person experience. So now we've gone from a 10 million to a 100,000, 10,000. My book would be another one of those, like, you know, hundreds of thousands, 10 to 100,000.

David Rosenthal (3:07)

You've got a parallel track for people to join the syndicate that aren't founders but want to invest.

Jason Calacanis (3:10)

Correct. So there's 4,000 people in there, and we have Angel University, and I just did two virtually. Actually I did a tour, I did an Angel University on the East Coast where I toured it six times, and we charged $500 a ticket, we had 250 people come. You know, we were able to basically cover our expense on that, and I had to go on the road for 10 days. I just did a virtual one on Monday, and 250 people came virtually and gave $100 or $200 each to charity to come. So we equaled that, and then the week before we did 150, so 400 people, which theoretically, if all of them join the syndicate, I think half of them will, will grow the syndicate by 5%. Great. Mission accomplished. Right?

So that's why I created founder.university, angel.university, is to just really educate people and they get to know us. Again, remember I said the more good we put out in the world, the more comes back to us?