This has come as a mild shocker to me. Jason Calacanis has confirmed that he is leaving AOL. His association with AOL started just over a year ago when AOL procured Calacanis’ blog network Weblogs, Inc. Following that, Calacanis was the top man at Netscape when it relaunched as a Digg clone earlier this year.
What makes it look a bit weird to me is that very recently AOL bought over another Calacanis company - Blogsmith, the publishing platform for the Weblogs, Inc. network. It looked to me that the ties between AOL and Calacanis were growing only stronger.
The fact that triggered the decision from Calacanis may well be regarding the replacement of the AOL CEO Jonathan Miller with Randy Falco, the ex GE COO. Calacanis regarded Miller very highly and wrote about him being one of the very few mentors he had in life. In fact, Calacanis wrote;
[Miller] made me feel like part of the team which was something I frankly didn’t think would happen when we sold AOL our business.
So, after Miller’s replacement, Calacanis was no longer in the ‘comfort zone’.
So what does the future hold for Calacanis? Will he be able to achieve something as spectacular as Weblogs, Inc. again? If you asked me honestly, I would rate Netscape’s new avatar under Calacanis as a very poor attempt (though I know it can be easily disputed). It would be very interesting to see the redoubtable Jason Calacanis’ next move.
We wish him all the best.
News: Forbes.com
