I watched the show “This Week in Startups” last friday. This show features amature poker player Jason Calacanis. Jason was sponsored by Full Tilt poker in this year’s WSOP. I have been trying to contact Jason to get him on PokerSoup, but neither Jason or his “people” have responded to my requests. Not sure that the guy has any real skills, hopefully we can get him on the show and find out. If you don’t know Jason you can read his bio here.

It was really interesting to note that on Jason’s show he never knows the episode number. Kind of the way that I forget the episode number every week on PokerSoup. I guess great minds forget alike. The audience for this show is entrepreneurial minded people that are interested in evaluating startup ideas and learning some new insights (sometimes from Tyler). Overall the show gets your brain working. Many times when you are working on growing a business and you intently focus on things and create inattentional blindness. A show like this gives you the opportunity to engage in some higher level thinking, step back and get your creative juices flowing.

Episode 13’s guest was Matt Mickiewicz this kid seems like a nice enough guy, but it was a little annoying that Jason would ask him leading questions. He does the same with Tyler. He’ll say something like “the earth is flat, isn’t that right Tyler, don’t you agree” I hate when people do this, this is a manipulation tactic and seems to come natural to him, I am surprised that this did not come out when he asked his employees about his weaknesses.

The guest was Canadian and has this really annoying accent, though he may be deaf, in which case I apologize for criticizing your impediment.

One thing that Jason does well is pimp his sponsors. Audible.com sponsors the TWIST show, I happen to be an audible subscriber and have been so since 2000. Audible rox. Jason whores out his sponsors like nobody’s business. They get some serious value. I would sponsor twist any day if I sold to his target audience. Not only do you get the exposure from the show, but donks like me that post a review of the show get them exposure as well. If you also could just do me a favor and send a tweet to @audible_com with the text “plz sponsor @pokersouptv http://pokersoup.tv”. Let audible know that pokersoup rox. If you listen to the older PokerSoup shows we pimp our sponsor pretty heavily using interstitial. Jason’s audible pimipage was the inspiration for those advertisements.

Jason is a total link-baiting whore and a great example for anyone else out there that does not know anything about marketing. This review is a fantastic example, he also way over tweets with links to mahalo.com. They generate TONS of traffic. I think that they should do an entire show dedicated to marketing link baiting and creating compelling tweets.

“Jesus Christ!!” Ok this is not a curse word, and any viewers that are offended by “Jesus Christ” should try listening to PokerSoup once in a while. Apparently they have a viewer that bitched about foul language. Get over yourself already. Maybe you should listen to “This Week in Church.”

Someone called the show with an idea where they would rate content based on how it makes them feel. IMO this is a stupid idea. People are not going to search for content based on how it makes them feel. Most people are visually or audibly oriented, there are few people that are kinesthetically oriented. Save yourself time and money and do something esle. I figured that Jason would poo poo this idea but he kind of gave the guy a pass. FAIL!

The next caller was great, he had this idea for creating a site for tweens and teens though college where they can list their academic and extra curricular activities. This is a really great idea IMO. Jason and Matt broke this idea down really well, and offered some great advice. One question that I have is that the barriers to entry for such a venture are pretty low, how do they stay ahead of the game as other established sports related sites that are similar to this, realize that there is a market and quickly adapt.

During the show the connection disconnected. How the hell can that happen? It was really annoying and I almost bailed on the show. I am glad a waited it out, but seriously, you have millions of dollars you can’t get a reliable setup?

Overall this show is really insightful. Great show and I recommend it to any entrepreneurial minded person.

-Blaz

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Author: Blazman

Blazman is a podcasting guru. He is the lead host of the PokerSoup podcast and can normally be found grinding out a micro-stakes profit live and online.