Charles Forman Videos

"Jimmy Wales started his search company a year ago, and he was on the cover of Fast Company saying he's going to kill Google, and then he gave up after 11 or 12 months," says provocative serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, referring to the co-founder of Wikipedia in this episode of The Deal's Behind the Money video show. "That's not being an entrepreneur. That's being a poser." "I think you have to fight the fight for years and not give up; so I don't have a lot of respect for people who give up," Calacanis (pictured) tells The Deal. "I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who fight and fight and fight and then fail." Calacanis is no stranger to failure. As a teenager, he watched federal marshals show up with shotguns and close his family's bar in Brooklyn after his father failed to pay taxes. "I was 16, and I curled up in a ball and just cried," Calacanis told Silicon Alley Insider co-founder Henry Blodget at Startup 2009 on Wednesday, a few minutes before we interviewed Calacanis. When his media company Silicon Alley Reporter crumbled in 2001 along with the New York dot-coms it chronicled, he watched other founders go on yoga retreats, but he kept his nose to the grindstone. His efforts paid off in 2005 when he sold his pioneering blog network Weblogs Inc. to AOL LLC for $25 million. These days, Calacanis lives in Los Angeles and focuses on his search startup Mahalo.com. He demonstrated a new version of it at the NY Tech Meetup showcase for Internet Week New York on Tuesday evening. "I'm bullish on Silicon Alley, more than ever," he told The Deal, pointing to the mix of seasoned Internet entrepreneurs and talented 20-somethings here, including Kevin Ryan, co-founder of AlleyCorp, and John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks, in the first category and David Karp, founder of Tumblr Inc., and Charles Forman, founder of OMGPOP (previously known as Iminlikewithyou) in the second.

Drop.io founder and CEO Sam Lessin talks about how his company's file-sharing service takes advantage of the "real-time Web," also known as the "Now Web," in this episode of The Deal's Behind the Money online video show.

"We're looking for entrepreneurs that are taking on these very ambitious projects and that have passion about what they're doing and are really trying to do something very big," says Spark Capital general partner Bijan Sabet in Part 2 of The Deal's Behind the Money video interview. Spark recently launched a new seed-stage program to nurture entrepreneurs in New York and Boston, where Spark is based. "It's not like we're sitting around at Spark, saying, 'We'd love to find a company that's building a widget for Facebook'. We're looking for something really different." As an example of a startup with a big idea, Sabet points to Spark portfolio company Boxee, which develops media center software and which raised $4 million in December from Spark and its frequent New York co-investor, Union Square Ventures. Sabet, who is 40, points out that entrepreneurs in their 20s and early 30s have a competitive advantage: They have never known a world without the Internet. About Spark portfolio company founders David Karp (Tumblr Inc.), Charles Forman (OMGPOP, previously known as Iminlikewithyou) and Evan Williams (Twitter Inc.), Sabet says, "They grew up on the Internet. They're Net natives. When they think about things, they have an instinct that is unique compared with entrepreneurs who are 10, 15, 20 years older." Incidentally, in the video Sabet mentions having worked at Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) in the past. Sabet jointed the company as part of the team that created WebTV Networks, which Microsoft bought for $425 million in August of 1997. Click here to see Part 1 of our chat with Sabet, in which he talks about co-investing with Union Square and others. Click here to see our video with Tumblr's David Karp, here for our video with OMGPOP's Charles Forman and here for our video with Boxee's Avner Ronen.Watch the video interview below or download it at iTunes.

In this episode of The Deal's Behind the Money video show, Dan Porter talks about what it's like to be the resident grownup at Iminlikewithyou and argues that Forman's irreverent style resonates well with the company's target audience of 15- to 25-year-olds. "He's actually one of the smartest people I've ever met," says Porter of CEO Charles Forman. "And I think his public persona maybe hides the fact that he actually works really hard on the product and really cares about it. But he's funny and irreverent, and there's something about the site I think that captures the zeitgeist of his humor....Aspects of the site that flow out from his personality and his sense of humor are what make kids just see it and really get hooked on it and identify with it." Check out www.TheDeal.com for more on Porter and Forman.

In this episode of Behind The Money, The Deal's Mary Kathleen Flynn speaks with Iminlikewithyou founder Charles Forman about funding and taking his company to the next level.