Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Bull-Bear Case For Clubhouse

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

Last week, the great Ed Zitron (@edzitron) , head of the media relations firm EZPR, put out a post that got a lot of chatter where he laid out a bear case for Clubhouse. So I tweeted out, did anyone want to do a bull case for clubhouse so we could do a bull/bear debate episode? And the great Joseph Flaherty (@josephflaherty) of Founders Collective raised his hand and said he’d be game to do it, so this is what we have today. An episode of two halves. First, Joe makes the bull case, then after the break, Ed gives the bear take. And that’s it? Great conversation. Great points made by both guys. Enjoy. Here is Ed's piece that we refer to throughout: Clubhouse and Audio's Feature Not A Product Problem (And How It Might Possibly Be Meerkat 2) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the TechMeme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. So last week, the great Ed Zittron, head of the media relations firm, EZPR, put out a post that got a lot of chatter where he laid out a bear case for Clubhouse. I tweeted out, did anyone want to do a bull case for a Clubhouse so we could do a Bull Bear debate episode?

And the great Joseph Flaherty of Founders Collective raised his hand and said he'd be game to do that. So this is what we have today. An episode of two halves, two parts. First, Joe makes the bull case for Clubhouse, and then after the break, Ed gives the bear take. And that's it. Great conversation, great points made by both. Please enjoy. Joseph, as I was saying, off mic, if you will, there doesn't really need to be anything to tee this up other than you're, you've agreed to be the bull case for Clubhouse.

So let a rip. Tell me why you believe, and this is not to say that you believe, oh, it's the next Facebook or something, but this is going to be a successful company still around 10 years from now. Yeah, and just full disclosure, we're not investors. The firm I work for a founder collective is not an investor in Clubhouse. We are just active and enthusiastic users of the product. And as you say, I have no idea if this is going to be the next trillion dollar company. but I do have every confidence that it will be around in five years, ten years, and certainly the change that it's brought to the world of social media is here to say. I think the reason I'm most confident in making that assertion is this is arguably the oldest form of social networking. Before we had written words, before we were even really putting images up in the caves

in Lesko, we were sitting around fires as human beings discussing what was going to happen the next day, sharing your history, sharing strategies about how to handle. the world that was all around us. And the idea, I think it's, you know, the more important case to be made, or the real onus is on the people who are bearish on this company, that this case that has persisted for hundreds of thousands of years will not persist 100,000 years hence. I think, if anything, the reason it has fallen out of favors because the lack of technology to support it, not because of any sort of intrinsic limitations. I was going to say, I think other people made this point before, but isn't it odd that it's taken this long?

for audio social networking. In theory, with MP3s and stuff like that, audio was one of the first sort of disruptors in terms of media. But only now, video has been around for a long, long time, and only now are we getting around to audio social media disruption. Yeah, and I think it's a good point. I think this is where you have to have a lot of compounding innovations to make something like this possible.

I think part of what makes Clubhouse different and interesting in ways that podcasts aren't is the real-time. in interactivity. You know, I think Clubhouse is at its most interesting when the rooms are fairly open and you have the ability to actually exchange ideas. I think where it's weakest and, you know, where I think it's getting the most buzz at the moment is we have, you know, thousands of people in a room there to hear a celebrity or some tech bon vivant, you know, talking about their thoughts of the day.

You know, those are wonderful, you know, experiences and they're great. But I think the real strength of where we've found it very exciting is the ability to get people to come on and just sort of chat casually. as you might if you're catching up at a tech event, the random imprompt to ability for people to join a meeting. One of the best experiences I've had on the clubhouse was a three-person room. I saw a friend who was alone in a room.

I started chatting with him. And then somebody who didn't know my friend joined the room because they knew me. And that being a connection between an entrepreneur and a senior executive at a very expensive or a very viable public company. And they hit it off and they made some interesting progress in terms of their introduction. So, you know, it had no ramification. There were no retweets.

There were no shares that made it seem special or important, but there was a really human connection that hopefully will, you know, work to their mutual benefit. So hopefully we'll see more of that and, you know, more things along those lines. You know, I think beyond these sort of soft benefits, a lot of the value here or the potential I see is the inevitability of certain sort of pre-internet forms moving online. So you think about calling talk radio. It's not a sexy industry. It's not one that I think a lot of people would say is the future of media, but it's big. Like there are a hundred million dollars plus brands in sports talk, in personal finance, in advice, even have like psych readings, you know, getting some purchase in this area. And so, you know, all that stuff is

reflective of a human desire. It's an expressed or revealed preference, right? And like it only seems natural that it's going to move online. As fewer and fewer people rely on radio is their meeting of choice and things become digital first, it only stands to reason that there'll be some platform that will enable this, right? Like, people love Mike and Maddow. They love, you know, Susie Ormond and Dave Ramsey. And like, these people and sort of their descendants are going to find ways to do this kind of stuff digital. I've made that point a couple times on the show that what my wife uses it for. And at this point, she's on Clubhouse. She's still on and I kind of have dropped off a bit. But she's an architect, and so she just goes to the architecture rooms, and she just listens to people, you know, shoot the shit about masonry and things like that.

Like, it's, she's using it in the way that talk radio has always functioned where, you know, you leave it on in your office all day long. There's a reason why Howard Stern and, and, like, Rush Limbaugh have always been three and four hour shows. So she uses it as that sort of in the background sort of radio. Absolutely. And I think, you know, just beyond the sort of, you know, technological. inevitability or the persistence of these formats, I think a lot of the content is actually just really interesting. So I was in a room the other night and it was a group of plastic surgeons. I have no idea how this ended up in my hallway must be because I follow some folks in the

medical industry. I don't think I would ever wade into plastic surgeon Twitter if such thing exists. You know, I wouldn't certainly wouldn't join any Facebook groups here. But because of the format, because it's sort of very human centered, it's built around a topic. You know, the ideas in area were presented in a way that were much more accessible than like trying to disentangle some different tweet threads. People introduced themselves to the room. They did you know brief explanations of their credentials and then they were having a discussion. I think it was you know the dangers or the rise in plastic surgery as related to you know trends on Instagram and TikTok right and it was interesting. I learned a lot about

in industry that I had never you know previously considered very deeply that I have no personal vested interest in but the content was fascinating right and it was a great introduction and it will arm me, you know, should I ever see a startup that's pursuing this, with some questions or at least some perspectives that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I think it is actually a really enriching way for sort of affinity communities to get together and talk. I think it's also really interesting in a lot of the political dimensions, right? Like, you know, you mentioned Rush Limbaugh, there are a bunch of people who are on the sort of, you know, either in the political spectrum and they have shows. And, you know, I think one of the challenges is those shows tend to get captured by people with

very orthodox views, right? They end up being either team red or team blue. In a lot of these rooms on Clubhouse, you get people who are like really interestingly heterodox, right, who I think you'd have a hard time categorizing as one camp or the other. And so you have a better understanding, I think, of how people are actually thinking about elections, how people are actually thinking about governments that isn't mediated through the ideological filters of either camp essentially, right? And so I think it does actually let you understand and perceive the sort of thought processes of your fellow citizens in a way that you don't necessarily get in more argumentative formats like Twitter or Facebook.

You made the argument, this is sort of along those lines that we already have priors. We know that affinity communities, be it, you know, Reddit or Discord channels, are huge traffic drivers. And so obviously, as far as we know, there's no logical reason why that can't exist in the audio space as well. Right. I mean, I think, you know, the chat, like, there are a lot of challenges, I think, besetting, you know, Clubhouse and I think Ed will do, you know, a masterful job with his case here. But I think that's the truth of any kind of startup, right? Like, you know, each format is going to have certain kinds of content that are well suited to it, right? And those things take a while to

shake out. You know, oftentimes it takes years for the sort of, you know, prototypical content formats to arise on platforms. I think the fact that, you know, Clubhouse has been able to serve so many different communities from architectures you mentioned to politics to technology to culture, all in a relatively short spam, you know, they've only been open to the sort of wider public for six months or so. And the fact that they're able to sort of attract the ecosystem of clubs, of personalities, of room types. You know, I have been listening to some of these shoot your shop rooms, right? Basically like a reinvention of shows like Love Lion, which were popular radio shows, or the dating game, which were popular like first wave of TV shows, in this new generation.

So I think with enough time, with enough investment of human capital, we're going to see some really interesting and novel content types come out based on the interests of these people and the unique, you know, aesthetic capabilities that the platform provides. Right. Because of the nature of our jobs and the circles we run in, we're more familiar with the clubhouse model of people performatively trying to act smart to further their careers and build their brands and things like that. But there's the possibility that actual new formats and new modes could be created in the space, like the whale cry rooms or what is it, the whale song rooms or things like that. But game shows would be another one. Like, you know, shoot your shot is just a game show in a sense. So there's all sorts of things I can have. Yeah. And I think the other part of it that really makes Clubhouse kind of an interesting thing and why I'm bullish about it is that these, you know, the format that it allows also allows a lot of interesting non-advertising based financial models, right?

So, you know, you mentioned game shows. Like I don't think it's crazy to think that you could have, you know, pay poor, you know, the ability to pay to get up onto stages, right? To get into roots. Like those just seem like very, you know, low-hanging fruits. You have game shows, right? That if you can, you know, you know, stake a dollar. or two to get into some kind of contest, you know, that you can participate in some sort of Jeopardy-style game, right? Like, it seems like the monetization potential of this platform is so incredibly vast. You know, there's all of the traditional audio channels that you can, or audio monetization methods at, you know, live reads, interstitials and things like that that could certainly be pasted onto this. But unlike, you know, the world of podcasting, there are a bunch of interactive and access-based models that you're able to tap into as well. So I think

club has his ability to make a product that has captured the attention of such a diverse group of people that has managed to sustain it to a pretty large degree and has not even yet given people a financial case to be made. It just speaks to the strength that this platform could have. It's really, in early days still, I mean, there's not even an Android app. I was just going to say, I talked about that just today on today's show that, yeah, right, as Snapchat is proving that when you actually get your Android app right, that can be very beneficial to your business scaling. Two trends that you also tweeted about that this sort of falls into that, again, does fit into the narrative of social in recent years is number one, it provides that sort of

impermanence that, you know, what happens in this room doesn't necessarily have to leave the room. I mean, obviously, there are incidents of people reporting things and bad things happening in the room. So there's the negatives to that as well. But this does sort of, to, you know, mention Snapchat that follows that trend of impermanence that doesn't necessarily require things like encryption. And then also, as Snapchat is an obvious sort of generational thing, it fits the idea that there's a generation of people that have been weaned in audio rooms like Discord, like, you know, Telegram, because of gaming, because of this is how you get in a room with a group of 30 people and you commiserate for three hours.

And there's a whole generation that knows that intuitively. Yeah, no, I think that's spot on. I think in terms of the impermanence case, there have been a whole host of startups that have tried to pioneer this model where, you know, how do we enable more erudite or more civil discussions about contentious issues online, right?

Like the idea being that Twitter and other text-based platforms too quickly devolved into flame wars and it's been the case, you know, probably since the first, you know, muds came online, that things, you know, devolved into these sort of fights. And I think one of the really wonderful things about voice is that it does humanize people, right? Like, it's harder to be a jerk to somebody if they're going to be, you know, engaged in a conversation with you. So it creates a kind of civility that I think text is just sort of formally not predisposed to provide.

So I think there's that. I think there's also the ability to sort of decipher goodwill to be. perceive sarcasm, to understand if somebody is sort of floating an idea because they're trying to think through the idea, not because they're sort of making a bold declaration. There's also just this, you know, no ability to quote, tweet, to play to your audience in a way and really try to embarrass somebody for sport. So I think just conversation, it limits the, I think, the scale. It makes, you know, audio just generally is a harder thing to go viral with. But I think that can be a pro and a con, right? I think that leads into the second point where, you know, Discord has shown that

if you want to play Call of Duty or Grand Cephtado, there's a very good model there where you can just sort of, you know, be talking about the game, but also then segue into talking about whatever else that you're interested in. I think similarly, you mentioned your wife in these architecture rooms, there's no reason that that sort of idea you want to commiserate around a specific topic can't extend into architecture or cooking or any number of other topic areas, right? Basically, you want to be in a room with people or in a space with people who share some, you know, professional and sort of, you know, interest-based priors. But from there, you also have families and rich lives that extend beyond your profession or your sort of topic area that are

worth discussing as well. I think this is something that you used to see quite a bit in old forums, where you'd have a forum about knitting or you'd have a forum about building model ships, and there would be an off-topic channel, right, where you could post about these kinds of things. Twitter has and related social media platforms, I think, have gotten away from that where you really want to be presenting whatever the sort of case that you're trying to make. We're both in sort of the world of tech writing. So, you know, our random thoughts about our hobbies or our families probably just don't matter as much to the people who follow us for, you know, our insights on tech.

But in these kinds of rooms, like you do get to know people on a more human level and you're interested in what's happening in their lives, you know, you can also just glean a lot by how somebody is presenting themselves voice-wise. Do they sound, you know, a bit down? Do they sound excited to talk about something? So you want to see, you know, space for them to get involved and to share their enthusiasm. It just gives a richness that, you know, most text-based forms have not provided in the past, you know, where to the point where, you know, on Twitter, it's common for people saying, you know, I should have used a sarcasm tag because obviously what I said wasn't red, I think you just got a higher bit rate or higher level of fidelity when you actually hear somebody's voice. Let me give you two devil's advocate a bit because you mentioned message boards. And then we'll close with one final bullpoint that you made on Twitter. But since you mentioned message boards, I mean, the biggest case that people have been making is this is just a feature. Evidence by the fact that everybody in the world is copying it. this is the new stories or actually, again, message boards. Like, it's table stakes.

Like, for 30 years, if you have a website, somewhere on there, you throw out message boards, right? So to what degree would you, what's your argument against the fact that, well, Clubhouse might have popularized it, but what's to say that they can win it if there is winning? Yeah, so this idea, like, it's just a new social primitive and that it's going to be a feature. It's going to be tacked on to any of this social network. And that may well be right. Like, no, I think it speaks to the vision of the product team at Clubhouse that both Twitter and Reddit have scrambled to release products that they compete with it. You know, I don't know that like I've seen the same energy around spaces or Reddit's a nascent product. I think the argument there is that, you know, yeah, anybody can do it, but to do it right is really a different thing, right?

Like, you know, I can share photos on Twitter and I do share photos on Twitter. but, you know, Instagram and Pinterest have both built much bigger businesses doing that. And even the idea that, like, they're only one. Instagram and Pinterest are both social networks based around pictures, right? Like, you can see how much space there is for both of those to coexist. They serve very different functions. They have very different kinds of audiences. And they're both, you know, Instagram's not independent anymore.

But if, you know, if separated from Facebook in future antitrust, you know, legislation, like, I wouldn't be surprised that they both end up being multi-billion dollar photo-based social networks, right? And so I don't see a reason why, even if, you know, Twitter makes it easy for you to join a space, they're just not going to be iterating as quickly, I imagine, on discovery tools around audio. They're not going to be iterating as quickly around monetization and the unique pathways that are available to there. I think this is just something we've seen play out on tech over and over again, where it's like, yeah, you know, theoretically, you can, you can paste this in, and Facebook has, you know, done a great job of this, but, you know,

Snap still exists. Instagram, well, they're part of Facebook now, but like, you know, these different products still exist and can carve out useful spaces. Well, and the argument that I would make is, for years, everyone was like, could there be someone that would be the grand unified message board for everything? And I'd argue to a large degree, that's what Reddit has successfully done. So there's no reason why it can't. It's not like they killed all the other message boards in the world, but they're very successful.

The other big devil's advocate is sort of what you, said it's a little bit discovery. It's a little bit not everyone can do it. It's this idea that you you serendipitously stumbled onto that plastic surgery room, right? But like one of the advantages and also one of the horrible things about the feed as a product is you scroll, nothing interesting, scroll, nothing, like the ability to swing and a miss is very quick versus you have to go into the room. And is there something good going on? Maybe there was something good going on 20 minutes ago, but you missed it. And like, you know, it's not, listen, I talk and interview people for a living and it's not easy to get a lot of people to be interesting on audio, right?

So this idea that it has sort of a problem that is inherent in the form itself, which is it's hard to get to the good stuff or find the good stuff. Yeah. And I think you've highlighted, you know, if I was going to point to one existential risk that I think Clubhouse and this format faces generally, is that you really need to produce content, right? I think A16Z and, you know, I don't know if it's actually their product, but, you know, one of the things that A16DZ has done well is started to create programming, right?

So on Tuesday through Thursday nights, Mark Andreessen works with, you know, Catherine Boyle from General Catalyst, Eric Torrenberg and Antonio Garcia-Martinez. And they do a show where they're interviewing people, right? So I know every Tuesday through Thursday night there's going to be a couple hours of interesting conversation. You know, Mark and Ben do a regular show.

You know, there are a bunch of people who have started to create rooms that happen on regular cadences. So I think this is something that Clubhouse is going to have to really figure out how to productize. And I think this is where the financial side of things will really come into play in a big way. It's like you need to get people an incentive to produce content for this kind of platform. Right. Like I think you can imagine it, you know, YouTube prior to the creator program was a great place to find, you know, clips of old TV shows or interesting bits of media didn't have a home elsewhere. But it wasn't until they really turned on revenue sharing that people invested in building brands. there, invested in discovering kinds of content that would work on that platform.

And now it's the most popular destination for people under 30 in terms of their media diet. So I think there's a lot of skill. I think like you said, it really, talking seems effortless. And for most of us, you know, you can, the baseline to participate is very low. The baseline to do something that is actually worth listening to is quite high. I think people like you have, you know, spent huge parts of their career building and refining those skills. And I think people who have done that need to have ways that be rewarded. I think if you look at talk radio, going back to that,

they've also professionalized sort of the back end operation there, which I think is something Clubhouse is going to have to do in terms of figuring out, how do you screen calls or screen people to come up on stage so that you know they can get to their point quickly, that they have something cogent to add to the conversation, and then giving tools to people so that they can get them off stage quickly, right? But I think that's as much hard as it is technology. If you listen to good talk radio shows, people like yourself,

figure out how to elicit the best kinds of interaction from people. They know where and how to apply pressure to get the conversation back on track of the gears off. And so it's really just a matter, I think, of rewarding creators so that they can do this and be rewarded for the great skill they bring to bear. You mentioned the regularly scheduled programming, and I've been saying that to people for months that I feel like that that is what it's going to evolve into, that, you know, there will be shows. It's Tuesday night.

It's time for this sort of show that, you know, I've obliquely pitched. A16Z on a, you need a nightly news show every night at 630, like the old nightly news. I could do that for you. But speaking of that, your final point is that you think that A16Z is smart. They clearly are super motivated in this space. And so no doubt they're not unaware of all of the obvious problems that we've been bringing up. Yeah, just generally in life, like when I see people who have had tremendous success over long

periods of time and I disagree or I don't understand something that they're doing. Like I tend to reflect back and say, what am I missing? Right? Like Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are, you know, legends in the field for a reason. The firm that they built and the people they've attracted to it have a track record that is unparalleled in this industry, right? And so maybe they're wrong. Like they don't bat a thousand, right?

They're notable misses in their portfolio. But by and large, they get things right. And I can't think of too many examples where they've just led round after round. they've moved this quickly where things haven't actually panned out super coil for them. So just given the benefit of the doubt, you know, give the benefit of the doubt to the person who sits upon a throne made of the skulls of their enemies, right? Like, it's really just the smart thing to do, you know, when a person has had great success over long periods.

Speaking of, I don't know if you can see it, but look, in the background there is the Mark Andreessen Time magazine thing where he's sitting on that throne with his shoes off from the Netscape IPO. So speaking of sitting on Thrones with the skulls of your enemies. Joseph, I thank you so much. Is there anything you want to tell us about where we should follow you? Anything you want to tell people about? Yeah. So I just want to say, I put in a plug for my employer, Founder Collective. We're a seed stage venture capital firm with offices in Boston, New York. We've invested in companies like Uber, Airtable, Cruise Automation. And if you're working on something disruptive along the lines of the next clubhouse, in a wide variety of fields,

love to chat to you. You can find us at Foundercollective.com or at F Collective on Twitter. And Joseph is an excellent Twitter follow as well. So look him up. I'll have the link to his account in the show notes. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. And we will see, we will see what Ed has to say, although it won't be a direct rebuttal because he won't hear what you have said, but we'll see what Ed has to say in retort. As I said, after the jump here, now we'll let Startup Communications guru Ed Zittron make the bear case. You're a bear case and then that's it. I don't even know what the bull case could be for this.

I have literally no idea what possible other than just lying to yourself. I have no idea what possible. Can I make us officially recording and keep that? Okay. Then we are officially recording, sir. So, okay, let me, I'm going to say that. this. I don't have an opinion on this. So I'm going to let you go and just give me your whole case. And then I will try to give you some devil's advocate at the end here. But you had a great piece that got picked up over the weekend that I'll link to in the show notes.

And you ran down your, shall we say, dubiosity. Is that a word? Your concerns about Clubhouse. And so just start. And number one, what we were just saying offline, I think you even wrote it out that basically Clubhouse is like a live podcast that sucks. Yes. So I think the thing that people don't understand is that talking is hard. The reason that people go on Twitter and say random stuff and they do threads and such is because you can sit and consider and actually execute a series of thoughts. And even then it sounds bad. Trust me, I know. So with Clubhouse, you are basically as a listen.

you have to be engaged from the beginning, otherwise the conversation sucks. As a recorder, you basically have to be able to get an audience together all at once at one time, and then said audience needs to be engaged, and you need to be entertaining on a totally different continuum than you would in a podcast. In a podcast, you can kind of meander because someone is listening to go, oh, I missed a bit. I'll go back to the beginning, I'll go here. With a live conversation, it's very hard to do. And being very frank here, there's no insult to anyone, most people cannot do podcasts well or interviews well. And Clubhouse is fairly predicated on you being an interesting talker or already having an insane audience.

And that's just the very basic thing about the medium. Because not everybody is a good moderator or a good interviewer, but then not everybody is a good interview subject or just a conversation partner. partner. And so one of the things is, you know, I'm coming at this from the lens of podcasting, there are something like two million podcasts out there or something, right? But no one's listening to them because no one should, right? It's like all content. If there was one podcast app and you went into it and you're like you got flooded with, you know, these two million options and all of them were crap, like it would make podcasting look like crap. But you don't, you get, you get introduced to podcasting by shows that are actually good. But also you make a very

point, which is podcast discoverability sucks. Finding a good podcast that you will like is difficult. A podcast is a time commitment. A clubhouse room is a time sensitive time commitment that, and I have yet to hear one clubhouse room that is actually entertaining, and every time I join one, it feels like it is some form of genericism about something. It's just meandering. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, what's your favorite brand influencer that did this just, and I'm sure the devil's advocate there is, well, you haven't heard the right ones. That's not my job. That's clubhouses. Clubhouse should be entertaining me. I don't go on here.

I shouldn't have to do the work to make your thing half interesting because most of the content on there sucks. It's also not viral. You can't share it. And the whole exclusivity thing, I think, is just very 2015. It's just no one's impressed. but also just it's a limited time trick. And also the one major one I remember, the one major exclusivity play that actually worked was mailbox.

So I think we're required by Dropbox. That was because that was a better way to do email. When you use that, you're like, wow, this is so much better. You get into Clubhouse and you're like, okay, so now what? Explain what you mean by exclusivity thing. So when they did the initial launch and it was custom fit so that people would go nuts about it in Silicon Valley, what they did was they made it so that only your mate's dog's uncle could invite you

and it was rare to get an invite and people paying hundred bucks for an invite and all this good stuff and that worked at first to build samba's i think it got the silicon valley pathology victims involved i think they were very jazzed but as you open it up it's just like this like weirdly enough most social networks that are good get better when you add more people clubhouse got significantly worse. Okay. I mean, that's a really powerful one to me because, and I, listen, I've said many times, I know how elitist and terrible this sounds, but in June when there were 2,500 people on

there and we all knew each other, it was fucking great, right? But, and this is not to say, well, you open the doors and let the Hoy-Piloy in, and then it sucks, but that is kind of true. From day one, I was like, this is great, but I always realized because it's not at scale yet. Once it scales, how can they be honest. I never had that experience. I never, I got in quite early. I have a two-letter I have a two-letter username.

Like, I was in very early. And guess what? I tried it once. I was like, this is dull. It's the same thing with conferences. It's people like go to conferences. They don't go just to watch and listen. They go to see people and network and such. Clubhouse has none of that. No virality.

No sharing. If you hear something good on Clubhouse, you best remember it really well because you can't record it I'm sure you can, but not from the app. And it's just not fun. It's not. It's a mess and you join. And it also is a feature, not a product.

It's just not, it's barely a social network and it's barely a product. Twitter space has popped up overnight. Sure, it wasn't overnight, but they popped up overnight and they were the same. It was the same as Clubhouse, except I didn't have to go on Clubhouse, a net win for both sides, I'd say. and instead of having to create an audio social network, I had Twitter. Now, I still haven't used it much because voice is not that fun. It requires you to stop what you were doing. You can't read, like you could retweets while watching TV.

You can't do really anything. I guess you could work with people talking in your ear, but then you're only half giving it your attention. And even then, it's just, if you miss something, it's like, oh, okay, well, moving on. that in terms of because obviously then podcasts wouldn't be popular if you couldn't do things other things while listening but you can pause it and you know no that's true i can answer i see what you're saying you can pause it and you can say oh i miss something and there are a certain podcasts where it's fun you these people are just fun to listen to and there's a conversation going on that's not something that happens on clubhouse because it doesn't make sense like it just doesn't it could but it's just not

and that spontaneous conversations usually don't take place between people that are great at radio. And so you've got this situation where if I'm listening to the person playing a game, which I've done many times, that is something where if I need to be engaged with the podcast, I probably can't play a game, which is fine. That's the medium. Sure. But every bit of content I've seen on Clubhouse is like a very bad panel at a not great conference I don't want to be at. So the thing that was the most obvious analogy to me is what's fun about going to a conference? Oh my God, I'm six feet away from a famous person that's on stage.

Maybe they're saying something interesting. I'm traveled to a city. It's sort of fun and exotic. And then the primary part of it is the value of it is the connections that you make in the hallways and things like that. But Clubhouse is only that I'm in a room with a famous person. and but otherwise the talks at conferences, I can't remember a conference that like blew my mind and like changed my life or something like that. So once you lose, and I think that's what Clubhouse is losing right now is like, you know, when I was in the room with Oprah the one time, or maybe Oprah's been on a couple times, like that was fun. But like if Oprah popped up there now, I've done it a couple times.

I talked to MC Hammer on there. Like once you've done that, like you don't get the return. ability factor of just the fame doesn't translate, I don't think. Also, just talking to MC Hammer, a bad example because he follows like anyone on Twitter, but say if Oprah popped into your mentions and said one thing, because of how Twitter works, you'd be like, oh, wow, that's really cool. And here's a moment that happened. Talking to Oprah for five seconds and being like, what do you think of Gumbus, Stottley?

Like, whatever question you asked Oprah, she'll answer and then you move on. It will be the same as going to a conference and getting to pick up the mic. ask them, oh, this is more of a comment than a question, like that kind of thing. It isn't, it's not like Twitter, because Twitter has that proximity to the person where you feel like you're talking to them, even if it's some abstraction, there is still that continuum of having had that conversation. You get a good laugh at that. Talking to being frank here, talking to like Oprah or MC Hammer on a clubhouse thing is

much like, oh, yeah, I met him at a party once, I guess. And someone going like, oh, that's, that's cool. So let me use the Twitter thing for another reason, which is, like, I like that idea. Like if, you know, when I first, before I met him, like, you know, the first time Noah Smith was, like, responding to tweets of mine. I was like, because, oh, my God, this is so great. I, I, I, I got in his brain. I said something smart, this incredible smart guy. And, and, like, but Twitter is that.

But then, so I can follow Noah to see his smart things. I can follow Noah to try to have a conversation with him. But Noah, if I followed Noah on Twitter, he breaks news for me. Yeah. You know, like, if the converse would be like, so if Noah tweeted this morning, his latest newsletter, which I read this morning, it was great. I learned that by going to Twitter versus how would the inverse on Clubhouse where maybe tonight Noah goes on and says, I want to talk about the substack that I wrote this morning

and maybe go into in depth. But that would be better as a podcast because then I don't have to be up at 9 p.m. when he actually does the club. Yeah, I don't want to have to tell my wife to take the baby so I can hear whoever it is doing whatever. I just live conversations are not that fun. Podcasts are great because you can save them and choose them whenever. But even then, the quality of a podcast is difficult.

Like it's the genuine, making a quality, well edited, well distributed podcast takes effort. And also it takes... momentum. You need to do it like 40 times before you really have a good flow and good chemistry. And now you have to do that live every time. Every single time. And you need to grow an audience. And on top of that, it's just not social. It's just not a good social media. You can share a podcast. You can go, this is really funny. I would start here. This episode's funny for this. But this is like, I heard a good conversation on Clubhouse. You should follow them so that if they speak again at a time that is convenient to you.

And serendipitously, they say something amazing. And it's interesting. And whatever time they choose, they're feeling good. They're feeling interested. Nothing happens in their life that's distracting them or making them upset. Great. You could maybe serendipitously possibly have an interesting thing you might hear. That's Clubhouse. That is $4 billion.

This is what I said to Joseph about that, too. It's like, you know, again, with Twitter, I can, you know, do the slot machine, scroll, scroll, scroll, and get something good for my two minutes of jumping in, you know, because I sampled 40 different things to get those two nuggets of gold. But you could stumble into the greatest clubhouse room of all time, except for the fact that you missed the nugget of gold 10 minutes ago and you would never know it, you know. Or you'd hear like three quarters of the nugget and you're like, wait, that was great. What's that? And they've moved on. Right, right. And the actual delivery mechanism for this content sucks.

It also is not fun hearing five people talk. You notice that most podcasts don't work like that. And why Joe Rogan, I think, I'm not a big fan of his personality wise, but as far as production goes, he has three, four, five. I think he's done five guests. I'm not a regular listener. but notice how good his setup is and how carefully done it is and also how many of these he's done. Also, another great thing about Clubhouse, it's stuck in your phone. So you can't link your beautiful microphone.

The whole thing that I've heard the Twitch comparison, oh, well, Twitch grew and people weren't used that medium. The thing about Twitch is that people can make a quality set up, but also you can watch and do two things. You can listen to them and like a good podcast, you're basically living a conversation with them and also watching them play a game, which is something people enjoy to do. I don't think that anyone needed more talk radio, and I certainly didn't. Also, talk radio is not doing great.

I think like the rate, if the argument is that Clubhouse will take over digital radio, just that is a $1 billion revenue business. And that's the entire idea. Not legacy radio, but digital radio, yes. Specifically digital. Legacy Radio, even if it is a $20 billion industry, you're telling me that Clubhouse is going to take is worth like $4 billion. What is the killer app here? Because I do not see it.

I don't see anything on Clubhouse that couldn't be done better somewhere else. And I've yet to have the wow moment. With Twitter, I had a few very early on where it was like when it was early, there was the proximity to people. But even now, there is still the proximity to people. I've made friends with, like, fairly famous people off of it just for fun. It's great. And you talk with them regularly, it's not like friendship, friendship. But there's something excited about that.

And also, my friends are on there, but also I have work people who I can talk to on there. There is true functionality that I can't do or see anywhere else. I don't know what it is with Clubhouse. It definitely isn't a business. That's one thing it isn't. that's the biggest one that we've kind of danced around a bit. But this idea that it's a feature, the analogy I use with Joseph was, you know, everybody has had message boards since the web became popular.

Message boards are table steak for any website you put up eventually. If you got enough of a community, put up message boards or whatever. Yes, essentially what is Reddit and a couple other places, they became the message board to rule all message boards. So you can do that. It is possible. Yes. But at the same time.

How is Clubhouse a message board, though? But what I'm saying is if audio rooms become a feature like message boards that anyone can do, then what is the moat? Because you even say in the piece, and I've said before, too, like it makes more sense for LinkedIn to do it. Yes. It makes more sense for, I don't know, for some sort of ESPN to do it and then have live rooms around games and things like that. Yeah. But also, take a second, because LinkedIn, it makes sense because Clubhouse is.

basically LinkedIn voice. It's terrible. It's truly awful. But there's so much MLM career bollocks. If you're on Clubhouse listening for career advice, you've got some advice that starts with stopping that. That's my best thing. But in all seriousness, LinkedIn makes sense. Verticalized audio makes sense, but it's also something that they could build out. Like if Twitter doing it and Facebook doing it has proven that you can't build out yourself. Or you could use Discord, which everyone uses. Or you can use any of the innumerable ways doing it. And also, my God, is there any greater nightmare than an AM talk radio style show?

But there's 100 people? Yeah, this is Bobby and the Ford. It's a trade Donovan McNabb. Like, that is what that will be. And I'm actually shocked, as you're right, that sports would actually fit this really well. Right. But I haven't seen much sports on that. But to your larger point, there, if this was a thing that was like,

really excited for people, people really wanted this, people would have done it on Ventrillo. They'd have been doing it on Discord. They'd have been doing it on Twitch. They, like, there are numerous ways in which this could have happened before. And when you remove the Silicon Valley from this, there's nothing. Because the people getting excited about Clubhouse are Silicon Valley people who talk to Silicon Valley people who talk about Silicon Valley things. You've had a few celebrities pop in and they go, ooh, celebrities are here, but it's the A16 Z fart parade. They are on the march. They have got their celebrity.

They've got their influences in. That's an unsustainable model. And also, this is a feature on a product. I mean, it's the most obvious one. It's a bad social network. There's no virality. There's no network effects beyond the fact that when you go live, people could hear you, like, go and see.

But I should add Twitter had that with Perris. scope. And I have, I'm on Twitter, roughly 23 out of 24 hours a day. I have never clicked someone going live. Same with Instagram. No interest. And that was with video, which is way more interesting. With just audio, I get there, so, uh, yeah. Yeah, so air tags, uh, it could be interesting. Like, that is just to do a really high quality show. And assuming that Clubhouse becomes almost entirely high quality audio. And at this point, you were describing Sirius XM, because that's what that is. It's still not that interesting and it's still not a business. How are they going to monetize this? You're going to add pre-roll, mid-roll to a thing that is inherently spontaneous.

You're going to have pop-ups. You do pro-subscriptions. Like, what's that going to be? The argument is, you know, this is by drinking the Kool-Aid of the creator economy and we're going to allow creators to monetize and things like that. But let me, let me, let me, give you a couple quick devils advocates because you mentioned one of these in your piece, which is Twitch, because I'm old enough to remember when people are like, what is this Twitch? Who would watch people play video games? How will you monetize that? Absolutely. Which has been a great success story. That would be a sort of devil's advocate. But you actually

address one of the reasons or several of the reasons why you think Twitch has succeeded and Clubhouse might not. Yeah, I think that Twitch, I was one of those people. I was like, why would I ever do this? And then I actually used it because I'm that much of a commotion. I'm just like, I don't like the idea and I'm not going to try it. I've set my opinion based on nothing. But in all seriousness, when I finally tried Twitch and I watched a group of friends mine, the Go Off Kings, when they were starting slow, and it was magical.

It was great. I got to watch people who had otherwise known on the podcast do gaming and be as funny as they were on the podcast, but it was more chilled out. On top of that, Twitch is interactive. It's interesting. You have a lot of different mediums that this do things on. Funny audio things, funny video things. You have three, four, five video feeds in there.

It is a full production thing. And sometimes when so big difference there as well is when the quality is shitty on Twitch, it can be charming. Because you're like, oh, this is kind of funny. I quite like this. When the quality is bad on audio, it's uncomfortable. On top of that, I've tried Clubhouse and it is, I've tried it before it existed. It was called Bad Talk Radio.

Drive on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at 3 a.m. You will find Clubhouse Room style things on AM radio where people are just very angry at whatever Carson Wentz. They're still mad about the Carson Wentz straight. I don't know. Like they pick a random sports thing. But I think that the medium is just not that fun. It's just not that good. It's not great.

I think there is a lot of Emperor's new clothes going on with it. I think that everyone is desperate. And I understand this instinct. We're all trying to be trailblazers here. We're all trying to see the future. I think everyone wanted this to be a big thing. To the point that no one, like a lot of people responded to my piece and were like, I've been afraid to say this.

It's like, why? Who cares? Even if you're wrong and I've been dead wrong many times this week, let alone my life. It's fine, but also just if you try it and don't like it, who cares? Don't just, you don't have to crap on it and a huge news that other people read. That's my job. But I think that people were desperate for this to work. But it isn't. It's not, it's not a company. It's not a product. It's not barely a social network. It is really not an enjoyable experience.

If you go on Clubhouse right now, you get the doom question. The doom question for any product is simple. What do I do now? If you have to, if that question is not like, bam, I've got an answer for that. Twitter had that at first. Twitter now less so, they took. They guide you through it. Sure.

Clubhouse, though, I can't think of an endearing thing for Clubhouse. You could start mass producing really high quality shows and you'd still have the time problem. And you'd basically be serious XM. And I don't think we're going to be able to install Clubhouse in every new Ford. Final devil's advocate is simply that, you know, Paul and Rohan are smart. Folks at A16Z are smart. They obviously can see all these things. They're raising money.

I think what Joseph said was when I see people raise that amount of money, I'm going to give them the benefit of that a doubt that they see an angle that I can't see yet, that they're moving so fast that they're executing on an angle that they, see that once it becomes blazingly obvious to everyone, the play here is that they'll already be so far ahead. So just the simple devil's advocate of they would have already thought through all of these holes that we're poking in it, and they have an answer to someone. So my peer who is on the bull's side, you're telling me his argument was the emperor's clothes are actually beautiful. You just can't see them? Because that is the argument there. Because so give them the benefit of

the Dow, like they did with Theranos. I'm not saying this is Theranos level. I'm just saying that every VC, Andrewsson included, has made Bum plays. Clubhouse is unique because my, my conspiracy theory is that this is an acquisition play. They're just building up so they can sell it and then make it thing. It's boardlining. I don't think it was incubated in Andreessen, but they took a lot of, they put a lot through it early. But I have sat and you know what, I'm not a successful VC. maybe there's something I don't know. But I've sat and really thought about what could they do with this that would make me excited to open the app?

And the answer is, I cannot think of a single thing, even if you put all my favorite podcasters on there all day long. I still would have trouble with it. I still wouldn't want it because I don't consume content live. I would argue that live content needs to be so endearing and so good that it needs to transcend just audio. Just audio is not that, like Queens and Stone Age, my favorite band. If they were doing a live gig on Clubhouse, I might make the time,

but there are also a bazillion other platforms that do that. There are so many others. I cannot think of what, I think that this is being pumped up for a clear, quick acquisition. The fact that the user base is dropping so precipitously, I don't know, I don't think we mentioned this, but I, As of April 19th, there was a 68% month-over-month drop. That is what we call in the business not good. That's not good.

That ain't what we want here, folks. That also suggests that users are churning and that they aren't telling their friends, you've got to try this. Sure, every single successful thingy, every single successful product out there has grown with a small community of people who absolutely love it and radiated outwards. Look at Discord. Look at Dropbox. Look at Twitch. Look at all these things. They've grown out of these communities that have gone, and other people are going, oh, I can see myself in this. I can see the use case. The problem with Clubhouse is it started big. It started saying that this was the

future and look all these famous people are on it. And look, you want to get a piece of the pie, the famous pie? You want to eat the famous pie? You want to be famous? We want to be in with the famous and the popular people. The problem with that is, it's very difficult to work backwards. It's very difficult to go. I'm sure, Twitter had, at first, Twitter had some of that, but really Twitter was, we're all dicking around, we're having fun on it. Like, that was early Twitter, and it's grown into much larger dicking around and then some societal problems. Clubhouse at this point, and I should add Monday, April 26th, Censor Tower data says that it's 475 in free apps. Great job. But,

But in all seriousness, why would people download this? What are people missing? When you go live on TikTok, you do a TikTok video. I saw the world's worst comparison. I look, oh, well, clubhouse isn't good. You don't think Clubhouse is good? Well, why isn't TikTok good? Because TikTok takes like 10, 20 seconds to do some crap.

You can put in more, but you can consume TikTok and put stuff into TikTok fairly quickly. With Clubhouse, it's like, okay, I've just got to sit here. I got talk now, do I join? I join and it's like being at a party and walking over to another conversation, which is, by the way, one of the most awkward things in the world. Why would you recreate that in my phone? I feel bad enough as it is already. But seriously, why would you, like, what is the impetus down? What are you missing out on? What magic is sitting in clubhouse? And let's think huge here. The thing that they're building that we were. wouldn't know. Okay, so it's still audio, so it's extremely limited. It, my, in every Ford,

if they were thinking of like a serious XM level partnership, that might cost the money they're raising. If they really wanted to go hog wild and take this out of iOS and just put it on in cars and such, maybe that's a growth avenue. But even then, wow, you've created serious XM, a business that has to spend so much on marketing because no one really listens to it. Also, I realize I'm going on here a bit, but most radio is consumed while in the car. People listen to radio because they can't listen to something else. It's just there are so many reasons why I am even trying to be a true evangelist and like, oh, what could think of the magic here?

And it's, I can't think of it. There's no magic for me to grasp on to. There's nothing exciting about this. And the fact that their rankings are just dying on their ass suggests that they're going to either re- have to completely redo the product or just sell, which I think was the whole goal. Well, they missed their opportunity recently with Twitter for $4 billion. But I would not be surprised if that conversation was less serious than it was, and that was spread deliberately.

But that's just me being paranoid. Well, yes, other people have had that thought as well. Ed, Ed, don't apologize for going on and on. That's what I brought you on to do. And you did it eloquently as usual. There's two or three pool quotes that I could have done. Please tell us something good you want us to know about. Tell us where to find you, follow you, anything like that. You can find me on Twitter at Ed Zittron, Ed Z-E-Z-I-T-R-N and my media relations firm, EZPR.com.com. No hyphens or any of that. But yeah, you can also find me on Substack, E-Sach.com. Another early actually, can I finish with a point about substack and cloudhouse? Absolutely. I have had this comparison brought to me by people who go, well, andriesen's in both. Substack is a great example of a network effect that works.

If you have five people you're monetizing, you can monetize 500 in much the same way. Substack as a platform is very easy to get into because it's Wizzywig. Distribution is really easy. If you want people to sign up for it, give them your link. Substack does the thing it's meant to do, which is provide writing easily to people and help people monetize their audience and distribute to their audience incredibly well. And it's been like that since day one. It has always been that easy. They didn't have to fumble with the idea of how they'd make money.

The whole Substack Pro program, that's a different conversation. But if anything, substack is the antithesis of Clubhouse. Your voice is unique. It is inherently viral. anyone can use it and get something out of it, for the most part, who can write? It is not something that is sensitive to your time. It is not something where you have to do a bunch of stuff to make it remotely doable. And it works.

Like the core product is something that there really isn't, there were, there was MailChimp and stuff like that, but they simplified it and honed it to this point. It works really well. I don't know how you'd hone Clubhouse, because if you hone Clubhouse anymore, it's just going to be a radio show or a a phone call. Well, yeah, that's what I've said before, that I think they'll end up trying to do some form of regularly scheduled programming, but then, like you said, that that's just... That is literally radio. An industry with massive revenue concerns. Ed, thank you so much. My pleasure.