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Jason McCabe Calcanis
Chairman: The Weblogs, Inc.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is currently chairman of Weblogs, Inc. Network. Previously, he created, with Barry Wine, a virtual chat environment called Restaurant City, where users could sit in a sushi bar — or dive bar — and chat. America Online bought the property in 1995.
Calacanis went on to consult for a venture capital firm in New York City, which would later be known as Flatiron Partners. He created a 16-page newsletter called Silicon Alley Reporter that quickly grew into a must-read. In four years Calacanis and his team built the company to $12 million dollars in yearly revenue. When the Internet industry consolidated in 2000 and 2001 Calacanis changed the name of the magazine to Venture Reporter and shifted from an advertising model to a database subscription model. That move saved the company while other Internet publications crashed and burned.
In April 2003, Calacanis sold Venture Reporter to Wicks Business Information, the owners of VentureOne and VentureSource—the most respected venture capital databases in the world. In March of 2004 Wicks sold VentureReporter and VentureSource to the Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal. Calacanis is currently a consultant to the Dow Jones corporation.
Calacanis is a highly regarded expert on issues related to media, finance, technology, the Internet and public policy. Calacanis regularly appears in the press and has been featured in and appeared on media outlets including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Charlie Rose Show, 60 Minutes, CNN, CNBC, CNNfn, Bloomberg, Fox News, ABC News, and Nightline.