Jason Calacanis
Angel investor, internet entrepreneur and podcaster focused on startups and venture capital.
“I calculated I'm getting $2 million in value. How did I calculate it? I looked at three different software projects we're doing internally. One was to build essentially AngelList for the syndicate. It would have taken four or five people two years to build, and we built it in three months with no developers and no designers.”
This Week in Startups · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Asked who is telling a positive story about AI, Calacanis says everyday gains from AI agents will change public sentiment, then gives his company's own numbers: roughly $40,000 spent on AI tools against what he estimates as $2 million in value.
Transcript
…more and more is necessary and so all in all i think like as a country we probably need to change our sentiment around technology because we are going to have to embrace it and we're as a country i don't see us just watching other countries continue to succeed and not go and really embrace it here
…the future right like in the 1950s right looked like the jetsons and and there was this view that we would be landing rockets and we would have rosie who's the household like who we have like movie stars telling this positive story of ai but have you seen anybody actually with that rosy scenario i
in america i think if you look at zuckerberg uh as crazy as it seems he created a program for generation tool belt to train people for free to become plumbers electricians etc so he's got such a bad the corporate reputation at meta is the worst of almost every company right um and they have really good comms people there who are like how do we turn this around and that was i think one of their efforts and uh You know, they started that program. Then they're doing a lot on like landing pages about data centers. So you constantly see them putting up these landing pages around: hey, data centers are great. Look at the tax, look at the short-term jobs, the mid-term jobs, the long-term jobs. We're going to have 4,000 people there building this, you know, data center in Waco, Texas, or whatever, El Paso, you know, and here's all the downstream effects. Plus, we're going to pay for your kids', you know, new soccer field or whatever it happens to be. And then Muse. I think the thing that's going to turn this around, as crazy as it seems, is when the stay-at-home mom or dad, the teacher, your everyday American starts…
has that narrative. I think, and I think this will happen much faster than we expect. I mean, you look at the Muse numbers, right? You have 10 million people in the first quarter downloading it. Two and a half million people are daily active. You can imagine, okay, let's wake up in 24 months and…
a net importer of tokens. Like, I think one of the narratives that we need to start talking about is just like oil, just like diesel, are we a net importer of tokens or are we a net exporter? And I wonder, like, you need that positive science fiction view of the world before you can actually have…
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