Flippant Calacanis strikes a typical pose.
Search Central Mahalo's headquarters in Santa Monica, California, is currently home to 40 "guides" who build search results by hand.
Related StoriesTo hasten the pace, Calacanis has actually baked crowd sourcing into his business model. His Mahalo Greenhouse initiative pays $10 for anyone who builds an acceptable page of results for Mahalo, which goes up $1 for each milestone--like 5 completed, 10 completed, all the way up to 50 completed; the longer you stay the more you make. He sees this as an opportunity to tap an almost infinite labor pool of smart, dedicated people excited about sharing what they know. (If they want to stick to the purity of wikis, he has offered to donate their pay to Wikipedia or Mozilla.) In the first two weeks, Mahalo received 800 applications from would-be Greenhouse contributors, and Calacanis has already begun incorporating their work, which is vetted by full-time guides.
To erode Google's advantage further, Calacanis has formed a team to monitor RSS feeds and breaking news stories. Google recently began folding Google News stories into its searches, but the vast majority of these results lag the news noticeably. Mahalo's news team can create a partial page (a "stub" in wiki-speak) in minutes and add to it as a story unfolds. That might not satisfy serious news junkies, but most people start looking for a story 10 hours later or the next day.
At the rate it's going, Mahalo will capture some 25,000 terms by the end of 2008--far more than the top 30%. And Calacanis is in no hurry to monetize his idea. He doesn't plan to sell advertising for at least a year or two, giving him plenty of time to establish a viable brand. Mahalo, after all, is act three of his business life, when the protagonist either achieves his dream--or dies trying. "Anything less than being the next Yahoo, Google, or eBay," he says, "is a failure as far as I'm concerned."
You can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps.
At 5 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, Calacanis emails a few friends to meet for dinner at Chaya Brasserie in Beverly Hills. By 8:30, he has gathered half a billion dollars of net worth at his table: Shawn Gold, a senior vice president at MySpace; Coffin, who sold LowerMyBills.com to Experian for $350 million; and Musk.
Calacanis, who dreams of achieving this sort of liquidity, orders without asking what anyone wants: nouvelle sushi--dragon and bonzai rolls--and platters of meat. But it's Musk who is the star of the table. Everyone wants to know if they can jump the waiting list for a Tesla electric car. A few spots are reserved for celebrity buyers like George Clooney, but only for people who can promote Tesla. No one, not even Musk, gets a discount. Coffin, who had test-driven an Aston Martin that conked out a mile from the dealership, isn't fazed by the $97,000 list price. Nor is Calacanis, who tools around L.A. in a "velocity yellow" Corvette. That was the car in Brooklyn when he was growing up. It took him less than a week to get his first speeding ticket, which, in true Calacanis fashion, he talked his way out of.
Crackberry addicts all, everyone spends dinner surreptitiously scrolling through email. Calacanis checks his machine at stoplights, top down and AC blasting. Coffin confesses he takes it to bed with him, where he can work at 3 a.m. while his wife sleeps next to him.
Then, acknowledging the presence of a journalist in their midst, Coffin shouts, "This is on the record!" Everyone quiets down. Drawing out each syllable, he declares, "Jason Calacanis is a complete pain in the ass!"
Everyone laughs, Calacanis loudest of all.
Feedback: penenberg@fastcompany.com
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