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A video entertainment show about tech startups should be a terrible idea, especially one run by people with little to no broadcast experience. Especially for someone like me who, besides a passing interest in tech and tech news has no affiliation with this line of work whatsoever. But skip forward three months and now I find myself on my commute forcing myself not to shout out at my iPod to chastise a would-be entrepreneur who has just given a two minute pitch full of everything host Jason Calacanis has been saying not to do for the past twelve episodes.
Thanks to Jason’s incredibly charismatic, if at times overbearing, personality and his unique position as one of the industry’s leaders, he has somehow turned me from a sceptic into a rabid follower not only of the show, but of the broader tech community, stealing hours of my productivity in the process. The recent Episode 13 contained at once many of the great aspects that have drawn me to the show, as well as many of the minor flaws and niggles that I believe could hold it back from making the next step forward in quality needed to reach the level of the top programs in the field, namely This Week in Tech and Buzz Out Loud.
Technical Problems
This is easily my biggest issue with the show at the moment. While during the first few episodes initial hiccups were expected and even endearing now they seem more distracting and pull the audience out of the program. This is especially unfortunate as these small kinks could easily be ironed out, and distract from the otherwise extremely high production values.
It seems one of the big overriding issues is with how the show is distributed. The show is marketed as primarily a video podcast. The show has an audio-only feed, but the main This Week In Startups podcast is in video form, effectively making this the default, and brings with it whopping big download file sizes. While TWiT for instance uses video for live broadcast and interaction, Leo understands that the overwhelming majority of people will consume the product through the audio only version and so gears their production towards this format. On the other hand TWIST seems to go the other direction, prioritising the video, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of people must consume the audio only version. I wonder how many people have downloaded the show, not realised there’s an audio-only option, and given up, because although video is great for live broadcasts, far less people are interested in downloading it after the fact, especially in such large chunks, and podcasting remains a primarily audio driven medium.
Also, while audio can be edited, cleaned up and fixed in post, this is much harder with video, especially when you’re going through a tricaster and don’t pull multiple angles. This means that what happens live is what you get on the audio feed, kinks and all, and it shows.
For instance, Episode 13 comes in with the beginning of the opening theme jerkily cut off, and then we miss the first few seconds of Jason’s introduction because the mic is too low.
At least Taylor has been given a microphone, but it was still too low when compared with Jason’s which made it difficult to here him while listening on headphones having adjusted the level to Jason’s voice.
The jingles are one of the shows best elements, lending a nice touch of humour to each segment, however they are often badly executed. It was good to see that ”insights from Taylor” was cut down and it now works much better, as the longer version quickly became annoying, however it often arrived too late during the episode, missing the comic beat, with Jason having to prod his team to play it. Also, some of the other jingles were still too long, and while the ”news” theme was cut down it was done badly, cutting out abruptly and not on the end of a beat, making the edit painfully obvious. In addition the ”deadpool” theme was too loud, especially when listening on headphones.
Worst of all, there was a terrible screeching sound (01.00.27) that made me pull my headphones out of my ears, and it’s pretty inexcusable that that wasn’t cut out.
All in all these are each very small issues, but they add up to have a big effect on the show’s production when you put them together. They could easily be solved by giving the audio an editing pass* (which could also eliminate some of the moments of dead air), as at the moment the only post the team seems to do is bleep out swear words.
Segment: Opening
The episode always opens with a one-shot of Jason, and he talks directly into the camera to the audience discussing the show itself and the sponsors. This approach is really engaging and interesting, and definitely helps the strong community feel that surrounds the program, as if its a conversation between him and the audience, even though I’m listening in a crowded tube train in London. Calacanis has an uncanny ability to get people on his side, and you quickly find yourself feeling almost part of the show itself, so much so that when a new sponsor was announced recently I was pleased, when logically I should have been annoyed because as more sponsors means more ads.
The approach to sponsorship is also very interesting, and during this episode in particular Jason challenges the usual models of advertising and starts experimenting with taking it in new directions. This helps keep the ads interesting and engaging, and they feel very much part of the show itself, so much so that you never zone out and think ”oh they’ve cut to commercial”, it all flows together seamlessly. This has a great effect, at least from personal experience, as I’ve even caught myself looking like a schmuck while cooking dinner and absent-mindedly reciting ”DNAmail, DNAmail, DNAmail, everybody loves DNAmail”.
Its clear that the general topic and theme of the show helps a lot with this, and Jason does a good job of not just reading the sponsor’s ad copy but placing them within a startup context, using the spots to give advice to entrepreneurs while still selling the products. Its possible that the ”thank the sponsors on twitter” schtick will get old and annoying as the show goes on, but for now it remains entertaining and I haven’t felt the need to reach for the fast forward button as I now consistently do with the endless Audible adds on the TWiT network.
Although I always find this opening meta segment of the show interesting, with Jason talking about anything from where the show is going to what’s going on at Mahalo I thought that in this particular episode it did start to drag towards the end, with the topic of conversation not turning to startups, or for that matter the guest not being introduced, until the 19 minute mark. In my opinion this really needs to be closer to around 10-15 minutes max. As such sometimes this meta-perspective goes over the top, as I found it did with the discussion of WE LIVE IN PUBLIC, a film Jason appeared in. While talk of the sponsors and Mahalo seems relevant, this just seemed like self promotion, especially for those of us who don’t live in the US and will most likely never get the chance to see it.
The playing of the trailer was one of the few times when I stopped fully paying attention to the show on my commute and my eyes started wondering around the carriage, as I checked out the attractive older woman opposite until the spot was over (As an aside, she weirdly had chewing gum stuck to her sock). Also, after seeing some of the video version, Jason wearing the same WE LIVE IN PUBLIC t-shirt for two weeks running is pretty cheesy, and the black shirt on black background gives a very, very strange look.
Segment: Guest introduction + Ask Jason
The guest this week was Matt Mickiewicz, founder of www.sitepoint.com and www.99designs.com, and while he seemed like he has an interesting career he was one of the poorest guests on the show so far, made worst by the fact that he came directly after perhaps the two best so far, Peter Pham in episode 11 and Brad and John from Ustream in Episode 12. Matt talked very little, mainly sticking to very short answers or interjections and not driving the conversation forward. It’s possible that he struggled to bounce off Jason’s very loud personality, and perhaps Calacanis was partly to blame for not giving him more space. For example just as Matt was introducing himself Jason cut him off to exclaim ”isn’t it amazing that I know the population of every country just like that!”. This isn’t too much of a criticism though, and I’m sure he will perfect his interviewing technique as he continues the show.
The Ask Jason segment is always a strong portion of the show, providing interesting topics and allowing Jason + Guests to share their extensive knowledge and experience. The first caller was Stuart, who unfortunately did not do well either. He admitted he was nervous and came off very poorly, he didn’t even seem to know what type of product he was looking to develop. Jason covered it well here and took over the conversation (as was necessary in this case), taking what seemed to be a bad idea, a ”podcast specific device” (to me this seems to have a very small market share and would be immediately destroyed as soon as Apple adds this feature) and gave some great advice - to add simple recording and outputting features and to use Kickstarter (a great site i hadn’t heard of), which will allow him to test interest for the idea and not develop it until there were guaranteed profit margins.
Jason also nicely mixed discussion of the individual situation with more broader examples and good business practices, a real strong point of the segment in general, explaining how in order to make a dent in consumer electronics your product has to ”zig where everybody zags” which was a nice way of putting it.
It seems so far that he seems to do a good job of guiding the callers who have what appear to be bad idea in a different direction, although I and I’m sure most of the audience are always hoping that he will at some point brake down and chastise them for how bad their ideas and pitching skills are.
The second caller sparked a good conversation about managing clients and how to approach new clientele. Here Jason’s (and often the guest’s, although not in this case) experience really shines through, and the discussion of freemium models and how to use them creatively to attract clients seemed to be great advice and showed how strong Calacanis can be when within his area of expertise.
Segment: Shark Tank
This was a brand new segment tried for the first time on this episode, and it showed a lot of potential. The opening story of Jason and Tylrr’s experience with the original Shark Tank show was particularly funny. The idea of the segment is very strong, but the format still needs to be ironed out. I found the pitches themselves to be very boring, and my eyes began glazing over to the newspaper of the man sitting next to me (Oh, Lindsay Lohan may be cutting herself, interesting!).
The best thing to do would be to either cut the pitch time down to 90 seconds, or to at least make sure to cut them off when their time is up. The first guy was told he had ten second left but kept rambling on for a further thirty seconds before finally drawing to a close.
The pitch itself, categorising web content based on emotion, was interesting and led to perhaps the best moment of the episode where Jason showed his skills by asking ”if you had an inspiration page, do you think anybody would really care about that?” to which the caller, falling into the trap that all the listeners could see replied ”errr… it’s too early to say”, as Jason pounced ”that’s the moment right there, you’re not passionate enough to defend your own idea”. The format really has the potential for Jason to cut loose on poor ideas or poor execution, which the audience has been waiting for since the beginning of the show, and he showed some of this with the next caller ”first off, your presentation is terrible”. Not only is this very entertaining, it’s a great way to learn from seeing their mistakes.
Jason seemed to be reluctant to flat out say no to the proposals, while the whole allure of the Dragon’s Den format is in the taking down of bad ideas. I’m pretty certain he will not be investing in either idea, but instead of turning them down he appeared to pawn them off with an ”ok we’ll take this offline”. He did end the segment with a nice line though: ”abc - always be cheap”, very good advice indeed.
In conclusion I can see the segment becoming one of the most interesting on the show, however it will definitely need to be tightened up and cut shorter - it’s still very early days though so this is all understandable.
Segment: Interview with the Guest
This segment can either be the strongest or weakest part of the show, depending entirely on the quality of the guest. For instance the Lockhart Steele and Don Dodge episodes both had fanastic interviews. Here however, as mentioned earlier the guest was relatively poor, although for the first time in the episode he did give some interesting insights. Matt had an impressive story, a 15 year old with a big site earning tens of thousands of dollars, skipping college etc. However his way of telling it wasn’t compelling at all, and he would stop every few sentences and needed prodding from Jason to continue talking. The highlight of segment was the discussion of his experience of the dotcom bust, which was sadly moved over all to quickly, I thought Jason could have delved deeper into a discussion into what it was like for companies at that time.
The segment quickly deteriorated in sections of dead air and Jason simply reading copy from Matt’s webpage, with <att often simply answering ”I agree with you” or ”exactly”. Sadly the conversation never caught on as it had with previous guests. Jason wisely brought an end to it quickly, deciding not to drag it out when it clearly wasn’t going anywhere, uncomfortably joking ”well, he’s a man of few words…”
Segment: The News
I enjoy how with the news and the entry of another personality the tone of the show often shifts, become more of a relaxed free for all discussion with Tyler also participating more. It’s nice to switch the tone to more of a panel feel when heading into the last third of the program. Andrew Warner stood in and read the news in the place of Lon Harris who was on holiday, and he was generally interesting and charismatic, adding new life and energy as the other started to understandably tire after the 1h30 mark.
However, the mix of news, as is the case with Lon at the helm, was predictable - with two Apple stories and a Twitter story dominating the headlines. It would be better if the news was more startup related, as although the discussion of Apple and Twitter is fine, it’s done to death on every other tech show out there over and over again every week, and the charm of TWIST is the startup angle, not generic discussion on what Apple should do next, why they’re successful etc.
However, again Jason’s position gave for some particularly interesting insights as he discussed people trying to get onto the celebrity Twitter list and gave details on the upcoming professional accounts. It’s this kind of inside track that comes from being at the top of the business that keeps the quality of the show so high and so worth spending time on, as Jason gives a unique position and perspective that you can’t find anywhere else. Again, his story of the shaking baby association trying to get him to force Steve Jobs to appear at one of their conferences was one of the funniest moment in the show.
Segment: Homework
There was no homework this week so as to give people time to finish the audible book. It will be interesting to see how this segment works out with a new format, as audio books obviously require a much larger time investment than a film as previously. The idea of having giving an entrepreneurial focus to the homework assignments will certainly make the audible ads more interesting than the often bland/tired/overlong spots on the TWiT network.
Jason’s offer to give a discount to new audible sign ups is interesting and another example of keeping the ads unique and fresh by doing something different with the formula. Unfortunately the Audible discounts and deals (as with other with audible-sponsored podcasts) appear to only be available to US listeners, which probably should have been mentioned on the show.
Also, I’ve now heard Jason explain what’s in the Mahalo pack so many times I can now recite it from memory, as he says himself, ”it’s starting to sound like a PBS drive”.
Segment: Deadpool
This is always a nice and fun segment to end off the show, although unfortunately the dog aspect doesn’t work as well with the audio-only vision. It’s light hearted fun and a fitting end as the show winds down.
The last five minutes of the show did seem to fall off and descend into general chatter about dogs, domain names and the godforsaken new Apple tablet. It was all entertaining but seems to drag a bit long, the show could probably do with being cut off a little than it generally is, so as to leave listeners wanted more.
And finally… It’s fun!
My favourite aspect of the show is in fact not any segment in particular, although they’re all enjoyable in different ways, but the small off the cuff moments of banter and stories from the tech industry. These help the show move along and not drag despite its epic length, and are what keep less specifically startup minded people like myself coming back for more. The best instances of this are probably my two favourite show moments: When Jason invited his team into the studio and asked ”what’s my bosses’ worst characteristic” and in this episode where he somehow gets sidetracked into giving relationship advice and romance tips to the busy entrepreneurial man. Both of these had me bursting out laughing in public, and it’s these moments as well as the personal stories from the business that make the show as enjoyable as it is.
The parodies of tech industry pundits are also hilarious, from Jason’s ”Hi! I’m Robert Scoble!” impression to ”Mike Arrington just wants to be able to boot into Firefox while watching his favourite show, you know… Desperate Housewives”, and he even managed to slip in his now traditional dig at Jimmy ”Fails” Whales, which is always good for a chuckle.
Final Thoughts
Although not a stand out episode when compared to the two that came before, especially with regards the in studio guest, Episode 13 was another entertaining and engaging TWIST, which ironed out some of the previous technical problems and showed a good progression both in terms of format and content, with new segments and ideas being tested and refined. The true success of the show stands in its ability to attract audiences such as myself that reach beyond its subject matter, and with continued refinements and tweaking it really can rival the best in the podcasting medium. I’d rate this episode 7/10, very impressive when you consider the technical difficulties.
Oh, and Jason’s military hair cut is awesome.
Linton Davies
With thanks to: DNAmail, Webspy, Audible, and Ustream (as is my giri)
*As an aside, Jason I’m a student film editor with audio experience, I would do a weekly audio edit on the show before it comes out for 30 bucks a time. I hope that doesn’t sound like I’m shaking you down; its just an offer, take it or leave it.
