I've listened to This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte for quite a long time now, and part of the draw of his show is that he attracts pretty engaging and interesting guests to come onto his show. One of those guests that has made multiple appearances has been Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo.com. Mahalo.com is not his first startup though, and he has started a weekly podcast of his own called This Week in Startups (or TWiST). I happened to notice that Jason was about to start the live broadcast of Episode #13 and decided to give it a listen since I have been working hard on my own startup project in my free time.

There were a few things that really stood out to me from the show. The first was that Jason is a pretty engaging speaker, very frank with a good amount of energy. One important distinction between Jason and other people who might label themselves as "frank", he does have the emotional intelligence that makes him come off as well-informed and not just a wise guy. That is a tough skill to develop, and I look forward to hearing him more than just the occasional TWiT appearance now that TWiST has been added to my podcast list.

The strongest segment of the show for me was Jason's version of the Dragon's Den (BBC) or Shark Tank (ABC). In the segment, he took calls from two different entrepreneurs to hear about their startups and give them thoughts and feedback. Like the Dragon's Den and Shark Tank though, he is looking to invest in a few companies as well and these discussions could end up with more capital for these entrepreneurs as well. (And btw, I would watch Jason's dream team Shark Tank in a second - Mark Cuban, Marc Andreesen, Jason, and others.)

The first caller was Shaan from a company with a website called Emotify.com. Shaan's idea behind Emotify is to create a sort of StumbleUpon or Digg where people can tag content on how it makes them feel - happy, sad, angry, inspired, etc. Jason brought up a site called BuzzFeed that has a similar feature. Shaan described how Motify would pull together content from multiple sites, not just content on its own, a sort of content aggregator and curator. Matt Mickiewicz of SitePoint.com, 99designs.com, and Flippa.com pointed out that making it possible for other content owners to insert a piece of JavaScript that would enable the emotional tagging of the content to then feed into Emotify would be really compelling. Of course in the end, the question came around to how the site would make money. As yet, Shaan did not have a better answer than via advertising.

The second caller for Jason's Shark Tank was John from Vivolve.com. John's business had a very good plan to create a LinkedIn-style site for teens. Jason and Matt criticized John's pitch but also praised his idea. The criticicsm they gave and the help that came with it to help John better pitch his company was great. As they pointed out, if John can get teens to the site and get them to use it, it will be a success and offer many different possible business models. The fact that Jason's Shark Tank was more about helping the two entrepreneurs polish up their business ideas was great.

The one weak point of the show in my mind was the news segment. While I felt that the delivery was good, I am not sure how Microsoft's ad blunder of removing a black man from an ad in Poland warrants mention on a show about startups. The news segment would be stronger if there was more startup-related news like the Deadpool portion. In the Deadpool portion, they talk about startups that have shut down with the point of the section being to learn something from that company's failure. Like most new podcasts though, there's usually some things they learn along the way, so I look forward to seeing how the news segment improves over time.

Finally, one of my favorite parts of the show was the amount of information scattered between the lines in the form of useful websites for entrepreneurs. Here is the list of useful sites that I gleaned from the show.

• 99designs.com - Crowdsource a logo or other collateral for $100 or more. One of guest Matt's companies. Really sharp.
• tweetmeme.com - Add a button to your web content via JavaScript to let visitors retweet content.
• kickstarter.com - Want to raise some capital for a creative project or invention? This site organizes crowdsourced funding.

Overall, I give the show a 7/10. I have tried to find good entrepreneurship podcasts in the past, and I think TWiST does for me what so many others have missed. I actually hope to submit bySwarm.com as a company to discuss on Jason's Shark Tank.