Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis and Loic Le Meur are both successful serial entrepreneurs. They have incredibly impressive credentials and really know what they are talking about in the world of startups and social media. Both of them had successful startups in the blogging industry and are avid bloggers themselves too. They’re also good friends and share ideas with each other.

We recently had the honor of interviewing Loic on our Video Show and it was extremely insightful for our watchers. (Jason, if you want, we’d be more than thrilled to have you on our show too. Don’t you say yes to almost any small podcast or blog interview request you can to embrace small media outlets? )

I thought it would be interesting and useful comparing these two giants in the social media world and see what do they have to say about how to run startups. Even though they don’t agree with each other on every single thing, you know that if both of them say the same thing about a topic, you better make sure you are paying attention.

Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis: Backgrounds

Jason McCabe Calacanis is the Founder/CEO of Mahalo, a human-powered search engine. Jason Calacanis started his entrepreneurial career as a journalist doing Silicon Alley Reporter (Rising Tide Studios). He then started Weblogs, Inc, where he introduced popular blogs like Autoblog, Engadget, BloggingStocks and more.

Weblogs, Inc was eventually sold to AOL for 30 Million in 2005. He then became the Senior Vice President for AOL and launched the Netscape project. He then confirmed to be an “Entrepreneur in Action” in the prestigious venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

Loic Le Meur is the Founder/CEO of Seesmic, an internet company focused on building online communities (including products like Seesmic Desktop and Seesmic Video), and LeWeb, one of the largest tech conferences in the world. After Loic got his MBA specialized in entrepreneurship from the NO.1 Business School in France HEC, Loic started an interactive agency B2L and the leading webhosting company in France, RapidSite.

In 1999 he sold RapidSite to France Télécom and started the application service provider Tekora. Then he became owner/CEO of weblog hosting platform Ublog, where he later merged with with Six Apart and became Executive Vice President in 2004. He was also the Internet Advisor of 23rd French President Nicolas Sarkozy and is part of the team behind the official World Economic Forum in Davos Weblog.

As you can see, both influencers have incredible credentials, but Jason Calacanis has more of a journalist and content background, while Loic Le Meur has more of a web platform and political background.

Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis: Views on Entrepreneurship

Loic Le Meur and Jason Calacanis love writing about startups and entrepreneurship. Loic talks about how building a startup is like building a pyramid, and that “overnight successes take a long time”. Even though every step along the way there will be people criticizing your business, you need to know who to listen to and who to disregard and just follow where your passion takes you.

Loic Le Meur says that having the freedom of running your company is what makes life great. He says that even though life is scary and stressful, it is never boring. He wakes up in the middle of the night in excitement and works on improving his business.

Loic believes in the entrepreneurial spirit so much that he goes as far as to yell at his friend Robert Scoble (another man that we should bring to Viralogy) for saying that a list of 70 startups all “suck”. Loic believes that all entrepreneurs should be respected for taking risks, investing their time, money, and risking family to pursue the startup path.

Jason Calacanis also believes that there are few things in the world are as exhilarating as starting a new company. He says that running a startup is like a big video game, where you can obtain glorious victory, or lose and put in another quarter.

Entrepreneurship is about creating an impact in something you care about. Jason Calacanis cares about making the internet a better place. He calls the Internet a beautiful city that has been polluted and needs to be cleaned up. That is why for awhile he was very outspoken against Search Engine Optimization and created Mahalo to make the internet a better place for humans, not robots, spiders, and spammers. He also thought Youtube was plain out Hit-and-Run Piracy on the internet.

One thing that both Loic and Jason point out in living the startup life, is that the lifestyle of an entrepreneur is very extreme. Loic says that, “have passion about your business. Do not sleep much and focus only on your business. Do not do anything else, except taking some good two hours lunches from now and then” while Jason talks about how startup stress sometimes lead to “unhealthy lifestyles that included bad diets, smoking, drinking, and not sleeping”.

Since Loic says a success takes 3-5 years to build, and Jason raised enough money to run for five years, make sure that whatever startup you are in, you are passionate about it enough to sustain years of little sleep and high stress. That is the journey away from The Hobbit.

Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis: Views on Fundraising

Raising money from investors and VCs is one of the most essential parts of many high tech startups. Loic Le Meur once compared the Pros and Con of raising money and later concluded that achieving a leadership position in an industry with fast growth is more important than potentially losing control and dealing with tough investors.

Loic then went ahead and raised $6M for Seesmic from various investors. The interesting thing to note, is that Loic viewed finding investors as a good way to involve smart friends to give advice. The Skype Founders’ VC Fund Automico alone would have been enough for Loic to run Seesmic on $5.5 Million. However, Loic decided to raise the last $500,000 from a variety of power investors such as Michael Arrington, Steve Case, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, and more. This way he can get more buy-in and advice from these people. Loic doesn’t just view money as money but a tool to bring more people onto his adventures.

Jason Calacanis obviously believes in raising venture money for being a leader in his space too, but he believes in raising all the money he needs very early on. On the outset, Mahalo already raised enough money to last them for 5 years. This gave them invulnerability towards the recession.

With $21M already raised, Mahalo looked to raise another $20M in later 2007 for various opportunities. This shows that Jason Calacanis would not decrease the runway, even when great opportunities to take a killing shows up, but would rather dilute himself for the new opportunities.

Being a successful startup means being the last one standing. If you spend too much money to become the market leader but run out and die, Jason says that’s like winning the race to get to the moon but not having enough resources to go back to earth.

Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis: Views on Product Launch

Launching a product is one of the most essential parts of running a start up. All entrepreneurs need to deal with this stage before dealing with some of the other issues with marketing and customers.

When it comes to launching a product, both Loic Le Meur and Jason Calacanis focus on executing and launching as fast as possible. According to Loic’s interview with Calacanis, Calacanis had no business plan nor projections put together. Loic also shares his philosophy of executing fast, sharing with everyone, improving the product through being social and listening, address the mistakes, and improving.

Loic Le Meur is against market research and business plans. He thinks that the users will tell you what they want after you create the product, as long as you can modify things with lightning execution. Jason Calacanis also uses Loic’s company as a great example of why startups should just start and find the killer bullet along the way. Or else you will never start.

One difference between Loic Le Meur and Jason Calacanis is the promotional part of a new product launch. Loic believes that a company does not need to do much marketing, and it is more meaningful to build a better product first instead. Loic likes to just gather a small group of people and test out and improve the product with the community he builds up. Jason Calacanis, on the other hand, has an entire process to promote a product launch, clearly being more of a buzz creator than solid community advancer.

Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis: Views on Marketing & PR

Marketing and PR are an integral part of building a successful startup. After all, it doesn’t matter if you have the best product if no one will ever learn about it and use it. Loic comes from the school that believes marketing is not useful compared to building a better product. He believes that instead of trying to get uninterested people to pay attention to a product, it is better to work with people who are interested and have them share to those who care about the product.

Loic Le Meur also believes in the same philosophy for Public Relations. In a post that refutes Brian Solis’ PR Secrets for Startups, he says, “who cares about stories, you can get traction and users if you have a good product”and a startup founder should not pick a PR person and should just be the spokesperson of her company.

However, Loic also believes that writing a weekly or monthly newsletter for email marketing is something that can be very effective. He also suggests keeping in touch with the community with events (including virtual events such as questions, challenges) often.

Very different to Loic, Jason Calacanis likes to create a lot of marketing and PR buzz. His slogan is very simple, “Be Amazing, Be Everywhere, Be Real“. Jason also believes that you should be your own company’s PR Spokesperson, but he wants you to be everywhere and be remarkable. His goal is to get every person on the planet to know Mahalo through him and build a positive mindshare through that.

Interestingly, Jason Calacanis also likes to create false information to generate buzz confusion through Valleywag. He used fake email addresses to send fake rumors to Valleywag so everyone would constantly try to pay attention to what Mahalo is really up to during stealth mode. This is very different to Loic’s philosophy of sharing all your ideas with everyone very early on and learning from it. One focuses on product improvement, and one focuses on market buzz.

Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis: Views on Hiring/Firing

Often times the best management strategy is the right hiring (and sometimes firing) strategy. Loic, like everyone else, tells you that you should hire people that are better than you. This is easier said than done, but if are going to have someone else do the work, you might as well have them smarter than you, right? Loic says that a company should “hire slowly and fire fast”, especially in a startup that is yet to be profitable (like, everyone), because you need to make sure you have enough runway, especially in a recession because it’ll be tough getting your next round of financing or exit.

Jason Calacanis follows that advice well by making sure he has five years of runway to build up the Mahalo empire. He also has some insights about a team of 25 employees get more things done than a team of 40 employees(to this day, I still don’t get what a team of 120 engineers do).

Calacanis also offers some very specific advice for startups when times get tough. He suggests that a business should first convert the non-core staff to part-time, including PR, marketing, and admin. Then a startup should negotiate the salaries of the high-paid officers in the company and adapt it to the market rates that are now lower. A good way to do that is to ask yourself, “Would I hire this person for this amount today?”

Of course, during good times, Jason Calacanis is very focused on making sure employees love their jobs and are having the most amazing time on a great journey. He believes that treating people super well negates bribes, which is what government officials of many countries fail to do.

One of the only mistakes more severe than hiring the wrong people is to keep them on board for too long. Even though these are sensitive topics, Loic and Calacanis make sure that startups recognize that for their ultimate survival.

Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis: Views on Monetization

If an internet company does not make money, it is just a website instead of a businesses. Even though Jason Calacanis raised enough money to keep Mahalo powered for long, his mind is still very much on monetizing. He emphasizes the importance of sales by saying, “If you can’t sell your product, it’s not a product- it’s a hobby.”

Calacanis values monetization so much that he has written multiple posts on how absurd it is that Wikipedia does not put ads on their site and start making millions.

Loic Le Meur also gives some practical tips on monetizing a website. In a step-by-step explanation, Loic says that:

Once your product is ready enough, start selling something, find real customers. This does not mean it should become entirely paying, the community would not like that, rather ship a “pro” more feature packed product, or start adding some non intrusive advertising but in recession times, do not count too much on advertising revenues.

Right now neither Seesmic nor Mahalo is profitable. Mahalo raised more money so they will need to have to work harder to become profitable, while Seesmic is doing something exciting with their new projects down the pipeline. With Calacanis and Loic leading the two companies, they both have promising hands with lots of chips on the table to beat the house.

Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis: Who is the better Entrepreneur?

Loic Le Meur or Jason Calacanis, who is the better Startup CEO? Who will lead their companies to victory with more glory? Leave your thoughts in the comments section and we’ll let their fans battle it out!