We love Jason Calacanis here at TechCrunch, which is why we partner with him on our TechCrunch50 startup event. Not only is he a proven entrepreneur (he sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, and is now running Sequoia-funded Mahalo), but he’s one of the best self promoters on the Internet. He famously shut down his blog, but somehow he’s now running it again with thousands more followers, for example. And more recently he grabbed attention by offering to pay Twitter $250,000 over two years for a suggested Twitter account.
Twitter is wisely ignoring the circus as they focus on handling massive growth and whatever their real business model will eventually be. But now one of the Twitter users who actually was given a suggested account and has nearly 200,000 followers is offering to sell his spot to Calacanis. And the money will be used to fight breast cancer.
Brandon Mendelson writes about his offer here:
I have a suggested user spot on Twitter. I am thankful to Ev and the folks there for choosing me to have this spot. But I don’t have an ego, and to me, it is not about how many followers I have. I know that we stand in the worst economy many of us have ever witnessed. People need help, and they need help now. I want to help those people.
I don’t know how we could arrange this, but if you’re serious, and this is not some B.S. marketing ploy, I will ask the folks at Twitter to give you my spot, and we, the Foundation, will take the $250,000 to put it toward the fund.
I say Twitter should take this offer, publicly ask Jason to donate the money to Mendelson’s foundation, and then put him on the suggested user list. And they should also leave Mendelson on the list, of course.
Jason gets his spot, he’s called to the mat on a bluff he probably never thought would be accepted (and he’s upped the offer to $500k for three years), Twitter gets even more press attention. And oh yeah, a sizable chunk of cash gets donated to a worthy cause.