Jason Calacanis, Launch Festival

Jason Calacanis is the founder and CEO of Inside.com, a real-time mobile news app with the mission of being the world’s best news product.

Calacanis is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor in over 70 startups, including the first round of Uber. He is currently investing $15 million a year in 30 promising startups through the LAUNCH Fund and his AngelList Syndicate, which has 400 members.

After three years of hosting TechCrunch50, he founded LAUNCH Media, which publishes the LAUNCH Ticker and produces a number of events, including the annual LAUNCH Festival, the largest startup conference in the world with over 9,000 attendees last year. The Festival features 50+ startups that launch in front of 5,000+ industry leaders. Previous graduates include Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit and Room 77.

Since 2009, Calacanis has been the host of popular podcast "This Week in Startups,” the largest talk show about technology and startups in the world. Past guests on the show includes Mark Cuban, Twitter founder Evan Williams, Paul Graham of Y Combinator and angel investor Chris Sacca.

Prior to that he was the CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a network of widely read blogs including Engadget, Joystiq and Autoblog. Founded in January 2004, Weblogs, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL in November of 2005. Calacanis maintained editorial supervision over Weblogs, Inc. as a senior vice president of AOL.

Before forming Weblogs, Inc., Calacanis was CEO and founder Silicon Alley Reporter, a must-read monthly that chronicled New York’s Internet and new media industries, that was eventually sold to Dow Jones.

Calacanis is known for his insights into the media and tech industries, and he is often quoted in trade and consumer media outlets. He also keynotes industry conferences worldwide.