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.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Shepard Smith0:00
There seems to be a big extrapolation from Lyft's results yesterday to what we should expect from Uber tonight. Do you think that Uber will be as optimistic about the second half of the year as Lyft was and also be able to move up its profitability targets?
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Jason Calacanis0:16
Yeah, I think obviously whoever the leading company is is going to accrue a bit more of the lift, and Uber is a magnitude bigger than Lyft, I mean four or five times. So I think what we're really going to see here is that Uber built a very anti-fragile business in regards to having the Eats business and having the Rides business. When the Rides business went down, that kind of indicates people are staying home, right? And so when they stay home, they use Uber Eats and increasingly Drizzly and Corner Shop, Postmates. People are ordering groceries. And really watching the team take on this challenge of the pandemic year has been really impressive. It reminds me a lot of Disney and how they got focused around Disney Plus as the center of the organization. They looked at what was happening in the pandemic and said, you know what, parks are great, merch is great, movies are great, let's just put everything into Disney Plus and accelerate that. Look what happened to that company. And I think Dara has to get a lot of credit. He got rid of a lot of the noise: self-driving cars, which are a multi-decade vision, sold off the places where they weren't going to be in first, second, or even third place, and did JVs and sold off those businesses like Russia and China, etc. That's well documented. And I think they found a new, really inspiring footing, which is if Amazon is two-day delivery going to one day, Uber's kind of one-hour delivery going to 10-minute delivery. And that is Travis's original vision for Uber. In fact, when I met him when he was building the company, I knew him before that, but when we started talking about the company early on and I was the third or fourth investor, his vision was this is a logistics company. We took atoms in the world, made them bits on the internet. Now we're going to take bits on your phone, an app, and we're going to move atoms in the real world. That was his original pitch. And here we are, decade two. I'm still owning the same shares I've had since I bought them for a penny back in 2008 or 2009. So I remain super bullish. I have a huge position in Uber and I'm going to hold it for the next decade.
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Shepard Smith2:26
What needs to be done though in terms of perhaps acquisitions or build outs to make Uber that delivery company? I mean, it bought Drizzly for what, a billion dollars? Is it going to take those sorts of bolt-on acquisitions or can it just turn into a transportation company using the technology it has, using the drivers that are already working for it?
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Jason Calacanis2:45
Yeah, I mean, it's fairly obvious that there are acquisitions and consolidation that needs to happen in the space in order for it to be profitable. The space can't have 50 players losing money. And we've watched Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash, everybody say, you know what, we're going to have to charge what this product is worth. We're going to have to stop earning money. There's no free VC money. The public markets are not down with lose money forever and grow. So I think we found a happy medium here between what public market investors want, profits, and what private market investors want, growth. And I think Dara has done an exceptional job. Some things will come from acquisitions, but most of it has to be just relentless execution and focus. And that is the inspiring part of what happened here, is that they've become relentlessly focused. And things that maybe were coming in 10 or 20 years, like self-driving, where they'll be in all likelihood a commodity business, you know, 10, 20 years, there'll be five people who have that technology. And VTOLs, very fascinating, very interesting, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, but again, that's probably seven, eight, nine, ten years off as a very niche product.
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Shepard Smith3:56
Shepard Smith here, thanks for watching CNBC on YouTube.
