Miller fan?

Eric
http://breakoutperformance.blogspot.com

I’m non-plussed. Any Gillmor Gang listeners will be shocked as well I’m sure. Wasn’t Jason just trying to get Dan Farber to jump on one of the past shows? Strange indeed.

is he already tired of running a billion dollar company?

AOL is still around? Damn, next thing you know a plesiosaur will turn up off the coast of Florida.

Ah, wouldn’t this affect Jason’s payout for weblogsinc?? I would imagine he’s supposed to be tied to AOL for a little while longer as part of the acquisition deal…. or is that period over?

did Calacanis pull a Vincent Ferrari and say “Cancel. The. Account.” ?

“AOL is still around? Damn, next thing you know a plesiosaur will turn up off the coast of Florida.”

You mean Katherine Harris?

yes , Richard, there is the always the claw back (employment) period after an M&A. Jason just capitlized on that clause. The period is this case Could have been 1 yr !!

Jason Calacanis is a rock star in my book; here is a good interview from Venture Voice, it worth listening to if you are entrepreneur.

http://www.venturevoice.com/20......html#more

Thanks for the breaking news as always. Amazing how fast news flies nowadays. Calacanis makes a move and all the blog networks ought ot be watching.

great news really. i can’t wait to see where he ends up, or rather what he ends up starting next.

Calcannis got away with murder with this acquisition from the beginning and if you read his blog, he often ridiculed his acquiring company. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

The fact that these guys were doing 1mm in revenue and then got bought for 20mm, is crazy to me. I mean, come on - 20x revenue!?!??!?! I cannot believe AOL bought these guys - what did they gain really? He is a good hype machine but from silicon alley reporter to his weblogs, i have never been very impressed with the substance of his products. To me, he always comes off as petulant and self-serving. I wouldn’t be surprised if AOL let him go because he did not know how to play nice with the other kids in the sandbox.

Space, the final frontier.

“He also spoke to me off the record but that’s, well, off the record.”

Getting a little full of ourselves, aren’t we Mike?

Without Jason, what’s next for netscape?

netscape is still around?

Arsalan;

I believe it’s called full disclosure.

As for the 20x revenue - there’s nothing new there. They aren’t just buying the revenue, they are buying the name, the users, future potential, and entrance into “Web 2.0″.

My thoughts about Jason were negative at one point, but things have been cleared up. He tried his best at AOL/Netscape, so you can’t bash the guy.

to those of you quipping about AOL and netscape is still around pretending to show wit: only shows your ignorance.

Arsalan you’re an idiot…. if it’s off the record then Jason’s trusting Mike not to talk about it, which he’s obviously abiding by. There’s no ego-pumping, Jason said things to Mike he didn’t want published on TC and there’s nothing wrong with that.

From what I’ve read about the new head of AOL, he’s not a worthy replacement. Jon Miller was agile and fast-thinking, and the new CEO comes from a “big business” background that Google will now just rollover in stride. The goal is for a big company to act more like a little one, not the other way around, but obviously the board at AOL never got that memo.

While I’m not a fan of Calacanis and I welcome AOL’s demise, anyone who says AOL paid too much for WIN is flat wrong. WIN is making $10-15 million a year now. The question is does AOL even care about spending $25 million or making $15 million a year? I doubt it.

Now we will see Dan Farber and Jason C joining TechCrunch to grow the network

Yes, what is going to happen to Netscape now?

Robert Dewey: you are out of your mind!

What in weblogs has:
1) a name? are there any brands there?
2) the users - show me critical mass via comscore or even alexa…the big 3 need scale to make material impact on revenue…come on! They have made nearly 0 incremental impact on revenue and have no prospects to in the next 1-2 years.
3) entrance into “Web 2.0″ - what does this even mean? you have got to stop eating your own dog food and chasing your long tail!

TR: Forget what he said. It doesn’t matter. WIN is making 8 figures. End of story. AOL bought it to make themselves look cutting edge. Plain as that. Now it pays for itself but it’s not gonna do anything to save the company.

It took TW COO Jeff Bewkes to convice Jon Miller to let go of AOL subscriptions and trust a pure ad model. Don’t be surprised to see TW’s stock finally start to move upward. Jason is just a casualty of Miller more than likely.

Interesting Nick. I actually think AOL has turned a corner…ad sales are rocking and they are #2 to google, beating out Yahoo now. Subscription revenue aside, the have a ton of momentum on the ad sales front with no signs of that stopping.

concerning the “off the record” discussion, is it likely that Calacanis would say “nah, I’m staying with AOL” off the record to Mike and he then would make a post like this? My guess would be no. How much off the record is off the record….

TR;

I’m speaking in general terms.

Most people seem to think that an acquisition is simply about purchasing another company solely for its revenue stream. Since AOL purchased Weblogs when they weren’t at “critical mass” as you say, means it wasn’t being purchased for it’s revenue. Instead, look at my other points; future potential / entrance into “Web 2.0″.

I should have used an “and/or” instead of “and”.

BTW… I try to be as far out of my mind as possible. That’s where “thinking outside the box (or skull)” takes place.

Jason is an entrepreneur. It’s great to know that he’ll be starting his next project. His creative energy is still intact… He knows the models that work but he MAY decide to put his energy into building something a bit different… somethig that keeps score using some new metrics. It will be interesting to see what he does next.

I always felt his time at AOL would be limited to the timeframes of the acquisition contract. He’s just NOT a corporate politician… he’s way too
candid about his business dealings.

AOL hiring a TV guy is interesting as well… but hopefully, Jason will (after the dust settles) tell some of the inside stories from this power shift.

Is this a loss or a gain for AOL?

AOL? Netscape?

Mike - did Jason tell you it was okay to say “on record” that he told you about it “off record?” If not, that’s a major breach of trust and established practice among journalists and bloggers. If your policy is different, it should be disclosed up front.

Damn. I hope this doesn’t mean I won’t be receiving my $1,000 check this month.

Why is the news, really? I mean, does this really surprise us?

I remember Jason once told in the Gillmore gang that he would never give up. Even if he resigned from AOL, he will continue what he was pursuing somewhere else.

I recently escaped the AOL asylum. Jason is a self-promoting user, quick to dish blame and scorn, quicker to dodge responsibility (e.g., for Netscape’s decline since his much-ballyhooed relaunch), but quickest of all to lick the boots of his superiors — and anyone doubting this clearly hasn’t read today’s “Jon Miller is a dreamy samurai” post at calacanis.com.

(Jon Miller is many things — not all of them bad — but a samurai? Maybe to the entrepreneurs he’s made richer, but certainly not to the thousands of AOLers who needed leadership, and got… Miller.)

As to him leaving now… Could be that his earn-out included a “change-of-CEO” exit equivalent, or that the company — sick, as all AOL’s line employees are, of his LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! antics — concluded it didn’t need him (which it doesn’t — or not nearly as much as it needs Weblogs’ ad revenue).

I DON’T BUY IT.

I know some of us are thinking the same thing here and that he was probably fired after they replaced the AOL CEO.

If he was truly fired, what did he have to do to opt for resigning rather then being fired.

MORE IMPORTANT, I wonder if this will end up being the hottest digg topic ever …

Wicked - I won’t say you’re wrong, but his ‘look at me, look at me’ attitude got people in the tech community to actually look at AOL and Netscape which is more than anyone else at AOL was doing.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm:

Well, if he is going to quit or the best time for AOL to fire someone, I guess it would be prior to the event of TECHCRUNCH Nueva Yorka …

Weird coincidence.

DUDE, what is up with the name of one of the sponsors for techcrunch NY, buddylube.com

I was all expecting some type of lubricration product or character avatar creation.

The song alone is enough reason to visit the website.

VISIT THE WEBSITE …………. SERIOUSLY VISIT ………. BUDDYLUBE.com …………….. IT IS TO DIE FOR …….

j.d.a. — whatever attention Jason drew to AOL says more about AOL’s piss-poor corporate communications capabilities than it does about Jason’s success.

And I’d argue that line employees like Carnell and Lawver and many others did and do a h*ll of a lot more for AOL’s visibility and credibility in the tech community than Jason ever did.

(TechCrunch, Valleywag, GigaOM etc. readers “tech community”)

… sorry — that should have read:

(TechCrunch, Valleywag, GigaOM etc. readers [not equal to] “tech community”)

I echo Wicked Smahtie’s comments that Jason is a self-promoter. Look at how his ostensible “tribute” to Jon Miller turned the attention right back on Jason himself with his self-serving ending “Note: I’ve gotten a bunch of press folks contacting me about my future at AOL now that Ted Leonsis and Jon Miller are no longer with the company.”

And as for John Doe’s idea that “some of us are thinking the same thing here and that he was probably fired after they replaced the AOL CEO.” Sorry. The ink isn’t dry on Falco’s contract to take over a multi-billion dollar company. He has much, much bigger issues to deal with than Jason, Weblogs and Netscape.

I heard Nick Denton is replacing Calacanis at AOL and that Calacanis is starting a new blog empire and has hired Nick Douglas to lead the vanguard with a bay-area insider site called ValleyCrunch. Fox Interactive had no comment. ;)

Mike Rundle, you’re an idiot:
“From what I’ve read about the new head of AOL, he’s not a worthy replacement. Jon Miller was agile and fast-thinking, and the new CEO comes from a “big business” background that Google will now just rollover in stride. The goal is for a big company to act more like a little one, not the other way around, but obviously the board at AOL never got that memo.”

As I wrote on another blog: Jon Miller oversaw the decline of the aol membership from ~25M to between 15M-18M, depending on how they’re counting members these days. His leadership was… ahem… no existent. Fast-thinking? It took four years for him to have the balls, err, “leadership” to switch to a free service. That’s fast-thinking?

Jon Miller announced a massive re-org last August that still is not complete. What? He woke up one morning with an epiphany that a re-org was necessary, then has taken 4 months to do this? That’s fast-thinking?

The reasoning for this re-org is that AOL needs to transition to a “product-led company.” It’s been, ahem, led by what under his tenure? It took four years for this epiphany? That’s fast-thinking?

Anything good that came out of AOL under his tenure was done despite him, not because of him. I challenge anyone to provide facts otherwise.

Rich

Who cares if he leaves or not. If he can stick his hand in a bucket of water and pull it out and it leaves a hole in the water then he will be missed. I am sure that is not the case with him

What will he do once he’s left?

I’ve got something he can do……

>>
David Mackey
November 16th, 2006 at 7:18 pm

What will he do once he’s left?

It is a pity. I thought Jason would change AOL into a nimble web 2.0 workhorse.

Let me be the first to share that Jason has joined PayPerPost to lead PPP’s PayPerDiggipedia division.