Yo, technology.

What is it all about?

Would like to be the most influential early stage investor in the history of Silicon Valley,

and then I want to be able to take early stage out of that.

Be the most influential investor in the history of Silicon Valley.

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and

inside the minds of the top people in tech. This week, we have a good one. Back by popular

demand is Jason Calcanus, who you may recall was one of the very first guess way back at the

beginning of season one.

Calcanus is many things. He's a Silicon Valley insider. He's an angel investor who has invested

in more than 170 companies, including the likes of Uber and Thumbtack. He's a podcaster,

extraordinary, high-stakes poker player and a man of many and very strong opinions,

especially about Mark Zuckerberg, as you'll soon hear.

Anyhow, the idea was to do this five questions thing with Jason, which we did,

but perhaps because he was a bit loopy from some recent overseas travels,

he was feeling particularly verbose. So the interview

went almost three hours. Three hours now. We went all kinds of different directions and in

the interest of your time and your smartphone battery. We have trimmed it down a bit. But even so,

we are splitting this episode into two pods.

So what you're about to hear is part one, which we recorded in his podcast studio where he does his very popular show this week in startups.

And we got off to a bit of a late start because, true story, Jason's Tesla wasn't charged.

But anyway, on this episode, we get through the first three questions.

...