About Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis, co-host of the All-In podcast and founder of LAUNCH, has been active on his podcast and at events discussing investment strategy, the technology industry, and political dynamics. In October 2024, he outlined his investing philosophy, emphasizing backing a team's vision over hype and dollar-cost averaging into companies one believes in. He described Elon Musk as having a gift for pursuing multiple visions concurrently and argued that criticism of valuation hand-wringing stems from an inability to tolerate ambiguity across multiple business lines. In mid-2026, Calacanis moderated the All-In Liquidity Summit in Napa Valley, describing it as an event for the "top 0.1%" of the podcast's audience, with 550 capital allocators representing $7 trillion in capital present. He stated that the event was part of a broader community-building effort and that his philosophy for events is that attendees return if they make a great contact, have a great experience, or learn something.
Calacanis has also commented on the current tech boom, which he attributed to AI, noting that companies like xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic are going public. He described seeing "a Cambrian explosion in startups" and said he personally invests in roughly 100 new companies per year through his fund LAUNCH and a program called Founder University. In a May 2026 appearance on the Bulwark Podcast, Calacanis discussed why some in Silicon Valley have been reluctant to criticize President Trump, arguing that access to the administration to shape policy is preferable to not having one's phone calls returned. He also described former President Trump's handling of Iran as "an unmitigated disaster" and said he believed it would "kill his presidency." Additionally, Calacanis has been publicly critical of Mark Zuckerberg, stating that the Meta CEO has "damaged the reputation of the industry" by repeatedly prioritizing self-interest over what Calacanis described as the right thing for humanity, including in matters of privacy and content moderation.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Jason Calacanis's recent appearances.
Browse all interviews →
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
J
Jason Calacanis0:00
Somebody should make an iPad with toughening and battery, waterproofing everything, and then on the other side is an Android pad. You put it in a fire truck and they share a common... you put like two or three Wi-Fi networks in it and you just open the thing up. It's like a briefcase but it's got four Wi-Fi networks that are all powered up, it's got like a 10-hour battery. And then when, God forbid, another 9/11 happens, you actually would have some way for people to communicate. How do you think this new generation of devices and software would have impacted something like, say, 9/11? Have you guys done an analysis of that? Have you been asked to do something like that?
U
Unknown0:40
It's a great idea. I mean, that would be a wonderful white paper for our website or something. I do think that there... it's not at all hard to find. There's two kinds of stories of pain or trouble that we run into all the time. So one is situations where coordination was the failure point, where the person who is on the phone or dispatching just rate-limited the whole thing. So situations where there's hundreds of people available but only eight of them are assigned because there's a bottleneck.
J
Jason Calacanis1:08
That's right. They're not self-organizing.
U
Unknown1:10
Super common. We hear that story almost every day. And another story that we hear a lot is about cross-organization visibility, or even visibility between different units in the same organization. So there's this crazy story from Katrina where Walmart was trying to deliver water to the Superdome and FEMA and the police were blocking all deliveries. And why? It's just all these situations where organizations didn't have visibility into another, and you know, it ends up with people dying. It's crazy.
J
Jason Calacanis1:40
I mean, Haiti actually was probably a good example of where you could really have done some great work because people didn't even know where... I mean, I guess people's phones are out, but were the cell phone towers still working?
U
Unknown1:50
The cell phone towers were mostly working, yes. SMS was going through.
J
Jason Calacanis1:54
Well, in these emergency type situations, is there a technology standard? Because I know nothing about it, but what is the best platform to have in case of an emergency? Like if I was one of those nuts who carries around a satellite phone or something like that, is that the best thing if you're one of those crazy survivalist people? Or is it a CB radio? What's the most resistant technology for emergency situations?
U
Unknown2:16
Sure. So I think the two candidates are SMS and digital radio. Digital radio is what a lot of these dispatch systems, the police dispatch systems, have moved over to. And the FCC has given a... so it's more powerful than cell towers. It's a separate infrastructure. It's maintained by a lot of the emergency management folks.
J
Jason Calacanis2:38
Digital radio? So you mean the same digital radio where the FM stations now have two stations? And so it's a different bandwidth, but it's specifically for the pager and kind of... that bandwidth? And is it two-way or is it...?
U
Unknown2:54
It is two-way. A lot of it is just used for the kinds of stuff that pagers used to run on. And a lot of this stuff is just like... the reason that it's reliable is because it doesn't have to compete with consumer traffic. It's just because there's a separate bandwidth for it.
J
Jason Calacanis3:10
Yeah, I mean that is the problem with the 4G networks, just too many people surfing the web, too many people downloading movies or YouTube videos. And the same thing that happens at concerts and stuff like that. I was at the Grammys and nobody could check their email or send a message because there's too many people trying. The FCC seems to be buying back spectrum and has a bunch of proposals for that. What's going on with that? Are you familiar with it?
U
Unknown3:32
I don't keep up on it.
N
Narrator3:36
You've been watching This Week in Startups. To watch the full episode, click here. To check out some other shows from this weekend, click here.
