The a16z Show - How We Podcast

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

"Hi everyone, welcome to the a16z Podcast..." ... and welcome to our 500th episode, where, for the first time, we reveal behind-the-scenes details and the backstory of how we built this show, and the broader editorial operation. [You can also listen to episode 499, with head of marketing Margit Wennmachers, on building the a16z brand, here.]We've talked a lot about the podcasting industry, and even done podcasts about podcasting, so for this special episode, editor-in-chief and showrunner Sonal Chokshi reveals the how, what, and why in conversation with a16z general partner (and guest-host for this special episode) podcasting fan Connie Chan. We also answer some frequently asked questions that we often get (and recently got via Twitter), such as:how we program podcastswhat's the process, from ideas to publishingdo we edit them and how!do guests prep, do we have a scripttechnical stack...and much more. In fact, much of the conversation goes beyond the a16z Podcast and towards Sonal's broader principles of 'editorial content marketing', which hopefully helps those thinking about their own content operations and podcasts, too. Including where podcasting may be going.Finally, we share some unexpected moments, and lessons learned along the way; our positions on "tics", swear-words, and talking too fast; failed experiments, and new directions. But most importantly, we share some of the people behind the scenes who help make the a16z Podcast what it was, is, and can be... with thanks most of all to *you*, our wonderful fans! Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. And we're here today because we're doing our 500th episode of the A6 and Z podcast. Episode 499 was with Margaret Wenmockers, the head of marketing at Andreessen Horowitz, who built the A6 and Z brand. And for the 500th episode, we're here to answer for the first time. So it's sort of a behind the scenes about how the podcast works. A lot of frequently asked questions. People constantly ask us. And that also I got on Twitter. Our special guest host and interviewer is A6CC general partner Connie Chan. Connie will also ask any questions she's interested in because she's actually very into podcasting and invest in podcasting as well. So that's a context. So let's first start with the history of the A16C podcast. Tell me about how it got started, how you got involved.

It was actually created before I even joined. There was already a culture of writing at Andrews and Horowitz before they even built an editorial operation. I mean, there was a popular P. Marka blog. There's Ben Horowitz's blog and then books. And this all happened right before I joined, and they were already writing blog posts about announcements, and they also had done very few specific op-eds that we talked about in episode 499. So that was a context. And then I believe that story was that Dixon, Chris Dixon, we all call him Dixon, came in one day as like, we should do podcasting.

And Dixon was an early blogger, so my speculation is that I think he thought it was like the evolution of that sort of type of communication. And so the podcast was pushed by Chris Dixon and Kim Milosevic was hiring up the editorial team for and Duceon Horowitz, and she first hired Michael Copeland, who got the podcast off the ground and was the host for the first year. I started producing it behind the scenes, not hosting, about three months in, and then I only started hosting about a year in, but I've been very involved since about three months in, doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. So level set, what year was this? I think it was late 2013, early 2014. Okay. And it was actually that exact same year I'd gone to XOXO and I heard a talk from Marco Arment about the resurgence of podcasting because

it's been around for years as you know. Right. And he talked about how brands and others when they do podcasting, there's a certain intimacy that comes with it. And so it has a very similar feeling to blogging and that there's parallels in the authenticity and intimacy of communication. In fact, the way I think of it is that if you think about our history of oral storytelling and how we can all sit around a fire in the olden days, that used to be an experience of one-on-one.

and now we can do the almost the exact same thing where you have the feeling of a one-on-one intimacy, but it scaled to thousands and thousands, in our case, hundreds of thousands of people. What gave you the inspiration that we needed to double down on podcast? You invested so much of your thinking and your energy into this.

What was it that audio was unlocking for you? It's funny that you say audio, because I actually did not think of it as audio then. But I love that you're saying that because that's how I do think about it now. At the time, quite frankly, I was scratching a personal itch, which was I had come from Wired

where I had the opportunity to edit like hundreds and hundreds of different thinkers, writers, famous thinkers, emerging towns. But all in written form. All in written form. I'd never actually done audio, by the way. I didn't have that experience. And I got here and I kind of was like,

oh my God, I love my team, I love the partners, but I'm going to kill myself with boredom if I only have eight partners where I had come from hundreds. Yeah. And so for me, the podcast was a way to answer your question about doubling down to bring more diverse voices

onto the platform. Right, because before our blog posts were mostly just written by general partners. That's right. And then with podcasts, now you open it up to more internal voices, more external voices. Exactly.

And in fact, the external voices was built on what I did at Wired and building the expert opinion section there. And I had three views on it. So first was, I think it's really interesting that in our modern world of media, we even have intermediaries at all to dilute the voice of an expert.

Okay. So in your case, perfect example. You wrote a beautiful we chat piece that we worked on. I remember it ran these. exact same day that David Pierce at Wired wrote a piece about WeChat, which is also very good and well done, very different pieces. Yours was a first person, first principles, first party expert take that was not based on reporting it, but in using it, observing it, bringing your

own thinking. It was what I describe as an ethnographic kind of piece. That's first person expertise. David's was reported. He talked to people at WeChat. He did interviews. He was coming out as a reporter. Also great. But in my view, why was a venture capital firm focusing on reported When we have a huge network, this is our defining thing, a network of networks, in fact. So why wouldn't we bring in experts on various topics but not have them diluted in their expertise? And so when they come on as guests, we have the first person versus the third person. That was a huge important thing to me. And it's also my bias for builders and makers and non-driven.

So as you bring in external folks, though, I mean, that puts a lot more pressure on how you program it, how you research for it and prep for these podcasts. Talk to me what that's like. Yeah. Other questions people ask on Twitter, one of the most common questions that came up is how do we program the podcasts? Like, how do you even decide who to bring on? So, to give you some more context, I think of a podcast in three phases. There's everything that happens before, during, and after. I would say that the majority of the work is before and after than during the podcast itself.

Okay. So let's talk about programming it, and then I want to dive into each of those sections. Okay, so in programming it, I think of every episode as an op-ed or a feature story. And so just like an op-ed or a feature story, you think to yourself, what is the argument or topic or angle and what is the take? What's the differentiated, fresh view? And then who are the people to have that? So do you take that same like editing framework as a written author and then think, okay, I need to have one main argument and a conclusion at the end? So obviously conversation is so much more organic than that.

Okay. You actually don't really decide the argument up front. I would actually even argue writing is organic. Sometimes you kind of know what you want to talk about, but you just kind of go with it and figure it out as you write it out. It's not like we walk into a room and say, hey, I'm going to come on the podcast and I'm going to argue X. That never happens. But what we do do is figure out, okay, so let me think of a good concrete example. Let's say we want to do a topic on emojis, which is one of my all-time favorite podcasts.

And there's lots of different ways to take it. Well, okay, I think it's really interesting that emojis are pervading our culture and that yet at the same time, people have to propose through proposals specific emoji to get into the set. So what if we did a conversation with someone who proposed the dumpling emoji? So Jenny Aitley did this. And then Fred Benenson, who actually translated Moby Dick into all emoji using Mechanical Turk. And so you have two people at very different kind of perspectives on it. But here's the thing they have in common. Very different takes.

Both, however, are first principles, non-derivative experts who are going at it at a first-person way. Secondly, through this lens, we can then bring in all the concrete and abstract, tangential ideas of governance, open versus clothes, proprietary systems, how to design, Apple versus Android, Twitter, Facebook. Fascinating. And use that as a concrete way to have a really thoughtful conversation. It's funny because you think the podcast is about emoji, but it's actually about how innovation comes about when you're trying to have a system across all. So how do you even decide I want an episode on emojis? Oh, well, that's just what editors do. And this is actually probably the broader context for the editorial operation, which is you always ask yourself, what are the topics we want to cover and how?

And you may not know the exact how, but you have an idea of how. And one of the things that I always tell people, if we were to take this up even a notch, the editorial operation is about innovation. And Margett talked about this in our past episode 499. And I've had a rule of thumbs. People ask me this on Twitter, so I'm going to answer this question, which is whenever I think about any kind of brand or lens for content, I want it to go through two words. And the funny inspiration for this, by the way, is from Domino Magazine. They once did a feature about how you can find your signature style. And there's like a stylist who would come in and say,

Connie, you are urban warrior. This is your two-word word to describe your style. Here at Andrews & Horowitz, it's innovation brand. When I was at Wired, it was informed optimism that came from Chris Anderson. And when I was at Xerox Park, it was entrepreneurial scientists. And my point is that you use that as a lens with which to decide what to run, what not to run and how to treat it and even how to edit it. And that serves as a filter for what makes a cut and what doesn't. We are about telling the stories of the future, building it,

explaining it, and really how tech changes our world. So that's the lens. So on the programming piece, how do you actually choose which guests to bring on? Right. So this is, again, going back to the same philosophy I had for the expert section. I am looking for the expert, not a expert. And again, going back to this idea of an individual op-ed or a feature story for every podcast, you ask yourself if you're doing a future story, who are the third-party experts you would bring in. So similarly, we look for either the expert or the next best expert or someone who has very specific expertise. We don't really love consultants and derivative experts and people who just talk about the thing versus do the thing.

And then I look for a complementary expert. And this is sort of the person who can add texture. We don't want two people constantly agreeing. We also don't want them completely disagreeing. Sometimes people talked about in the early days, we should do podcasts where you have procon and like debates. Exactly. I love debates and oxytes. for Stel debates in particular. But what I find what I call the panel problem where a podcast becomes a conference panel,

I don't know if you've seen this at every conference you go to. Inevitably, the smartest people, four people, so smart on a single panel, it'll be the dullest, dumbest conversation. And why is that? It regresses to the mean. And to me, it's a pure statistical thing.

It's like in statistics, if you sample from the extremes of a data set, you essentially regress to the mean. It is literally the exact same thing happening when you do that with experts. So having a pro and a con, it's actually a case.

of negating the conversation. You want to have a thoughtful, nuanced conversation. So I like to avoid what I call one-note narratives. I don't want an expert who has just a single observation. They're going to hit it like 10 different ways. So after you choose them, do you kind of give them a guidance on what you're going to ask about? Tell me about the prep on the actual figuring out what questions you want to run. Do you let people do a dry run as it's scripted?

What do you do? So the process is that I tell them, this is actually baked into all our emails and how they get on, that they are not supposed to prep. Now, people hate that because they want to prep. Yeah, I'm sure everyone wants to know what you're going to ask them. Right. And in fact, I kind of realized early on, like, oh, Sonal, just because you like that, doesn't mean everyone else likes it. What's the downside of prepping?

That's a great question. So one of the things I learned when I was at Park, and I worked with a really good event producer for this event that that we were hosting O'Reilly Media's Make. It was the first inaugural hardware make workshop. And one of the event producers on that said, I never put two people in a green room before an event because inevitably, everything they say, on stage will refer back to what they were talking about right before coming on stage. And you've probably seen this at many events. And the audience doesn't have that exact same sharpness that they feel when they hear that idea. For me, when I record, I start the recorder before the person even walks in the room and I stop it only when they leave because the

best stuff comes when it's a little bit unfiltered. So when we prep to answer your question, what I tell people is I don't want you to actually tell me what you're going to say because actually then the second time if you say it, it's going to be 10 times worse. It's much better raw and real the first time. Okay, so of course the speakers get freaked out, though, because they're like, what if I sound like an idiot? Right. Which means that you have to do a lot of editing. Oh, we can come back to editing. I mean, it's not by accident that you make a lot of us sound a lot more eloquent than we do in real life. It's not an accident because you guys are also experts. Let's just be very clear that one of the reasons this works is that A6 and C does

have experts. And one of the number one rules of thumb I use for all editorial written podcast or otherwise is the concept of what I coined a number of years ago called writer topic fit, jokingly WTF. And the idea being that the writer has to have the topic and fit for the expertise. This is not credentialist. It could be earned expertise. It could be data. It could be whatever.

But they have to have that. So the people who are freaked out about their executives coming on and not having any idea, we don't send questions in advance. I like the conversation to be very organic. One of the questions people asked on Twitter was, do you prepare their script? And the answer is, no, there is no script. What we do at the beginning of every episode is we, and sometimes these people having met each other.

Sometimes you're meeting Christina Shue for the first time. the first time in that room. And the three of us are doing a conversation about stickers and memes and live streams. So in that case, what we do is we'll spend literally five minutes at the beginning, maybe less, just talking about what we want to talk about. Meaning topics, but not the actual argument. Exactly, because then I get mad and I say, no, no, no, because people inevitably start sharing what they're going to say. And I'm like, wait until we get to that part. So we do that. And then we just go through. And then this is where the editing lets you then reorganize it into an arc that makes sense. And by the way, by arc, I don't mean it has to be linear like point A, B, C, D. In fact,

I want it to be nonlinear, slippery, raw. with an edge, not always clean and clear. At Wired, I had a phrase, which I use for my op-eds, which is three turns of nuance. Like, I like that kind of thing. What I'm doing with the editing of the story arc is, again, just listening for how the listener is going to move through it. Do they hear the organization?

Do they have to work to follow it? Can they just naturally flow along and learn as they go? Okay, so that means you're recording how much footage to get. An hour? And that gets edited down to what? Anywhere from 20 to like 45 minutes. 20 to 45 minutes. Right.

But I want to say something about that. This is why there are, are what I consider two types of editors. There's what I call shaping editors, who are people who love as much raw material to work with as possible and then to kind of carve out the arc their own way. I think of this a bit like a sculptor who's given a slab of marble and figures out the shape.

That's what I like to do. And then there are editors who take what they're given and they do a really good job figuring out how to rearrange it, how to put it together, think about it. That to me is a more straightforward type of editing. As a shaping editor, I look for maximum optionality in my recording in that hour recording period because I want to have enough material

to carve out the thing that I'm working on. Whereas for some of the other editors, they have a bit more of a linear script. So when you're editing, it's not just taking out ums and blank spaces. Oh my God. No. And in fact,

I want to just deconstruct a myth here because we get a lot of flack for people saying, you guys remove the brets and you guys do this. And it's actually ironic. We never do that. What we do, in fact,

is add brets because our people talk too fast and don't pause. And so sometimes we have to manually slow them down. Mark, and Dr. Andrewsson does speak very, quickly. It's not just him, though.

He does. By the way, my joke about him when you get like a written transcript is for every written page, for every page of a transcript, you can estimate about two minutes. And in his case,

it's like one minute, the density is so high. But the rest of the firm talks pretty fast too. And so PSA, for everyone, do not listen to our podcast at 1.5 or 2x speed. You should only listen to it at regular speed. But back to your question.

So it's not umz and Oz. I mean, we do do some ticks. So my rule about ticks is, we don't want to remove all those ticks. Actually, we do, however, remove ticks that are a little too repetitive to the point of being disruptive to the listener. And I, by the way, have this tick through.

You're going to love this. So when I first started doing podcasting, I was only a behind-the-scenes person, so I really was insecure about being a host, quite frankly. Right, you didn't host the whole first year. I didn't really want to host because I just felt like, no, no, I'm a behind-the-scenes person. What are you talking about? I'm an editor. I can't be a host.

So it's funny because everyone hates this time of their own voice. And I noticed all my ticks. And the first one would be like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, got it, got it. got it. Like, like, or yeah, you're right. Various versions of this. And so what I would do is I would hear my ticks and then systematically decide conscientiously not to say them.

Guess what happened? Well, they went away and another one popped up in its place. It was like a game of whack-a-mole. It didn't matter how many ticks I got rid of. A new one just jumped right up at its place. And so my theory about this is, and maybe it's grounded in science, I don't know I never looked it up,

is that there's something psychological with how we use. use these ticks, whether it's an anxiety management or a natural way of thinking or like some kind of dead space words between thought out words, like subconscious words even. Anyway, that is how people talk. So you edit those sounds or specific phrases and words, but the actual content, is it moving things? So a lot of the people on Twitter asked about how do you edit the podcast from, you know, the whole, it's a story arc to rest. So the edits are to optimize for what I call insights per minute. There's three things to that. One, it's that if you have a non-cult of personality show, and I've talked about this before how there's a taxonomy of types of shows,

and cult of personality shows, which are very host and personality-driven. You mean like a Joe Rogan? Like a Joe Rogan. That's a perfect example. The audience is following Joe Rogan. They almost don't care who his guest is. Of course they care if it's Elon Musk or someone else. But because of that combo, they're willing to listen for three hours to the two of them on-air smoking pot. In our case... Basically, you don't want to abuse the user's time. It's not so much abuse in the listeners' time. It's that your share is a new mind share. You're competing for that share. So the show has to be differentiated. And if you want people to listen to your show and it doesn't have a cult of personality, then you have to make sure

it's resourceful and they have a high insights per minute. So their time and their payoff is worth it. Is that an actual metric or is this like a new metric you coined? No, it's a thing that I coined, but it's not like we measure it formally, but it's what we listen for. And to answer your question about starting it off, it matters more in the first thought. five to ten minutes because it's just like editing an article. So I call myself a chartbeat editor because when I was at Wired, I was obsessed with the leaderboard and I, of course, like, love seeing where I was on that, especially because I had a flailing section that I wanted to take to the top.

And so I was very motivated by that. But then what I noticed in chart beat besides a leaderboard is you saw where listeners, or sorry, where readers dropped off. And that was super valuable to me because then I started seeing patterns of, oh, well, if people drop off here, I need to work harder to really get the nut graph up here before the third paragraph. And the more I work to make sure that every sentence is calculated to keep the listener, the reader engaged, the better the piece. And then by the middle and the end, when they're committed, you have a lot more room to be loosey-goosey and fun. So in the podcast, it's the exact same thing,

the chartbeat model that I brought here. This is how I learned editing just by doing it. So to me, the first three to five minutes are incredibly important because that's the highest drop-off point. So we use the intro as a technique. This is why we actually record our intros after the fact, not before. introing who the person is. We intro who it is, the topic, the range, and there's various ways of doing it. We experimented for a while with having snippets.

We did all kinds of experiments throughout the years. But what I find is that the intro is a tool to let you start the conversation in Medias Res, which is the term from literature for starting it in the middle of the story. And why that's so important is if you don't have a cult of personality show like a Joe Rogan and an Elon Musk, if you have someone new who's really smart but no one's heard of, if they start out with their personal story,

that's probably going to be boring because they're not bought into this person. They don't know who it is. However, if you start with their advice and the thing that you find resourceful and useful as a listener, then the listener is going to be like, oh, that's interesting, and remain hooked. And then by the middle or the end, you can then weave in their story. So the editing is about reflowing and re-architecting that arc for that type of journey of a listener through the entire episode. And back on this note of scripting versus not scripting, one of the folks on Twitter asked, do you guys do these as sort of informal hallway still a conversation?

and the answer is that's how they actually started. But what I found is that if you're really trying to grow the show, it was only when we started editing it, that it significantly, you look at the charts, it was like upward curve with the edits. And that goes back to the fact that if you're not a cult of personality, people don't, I mean, doesn't it bug you to hear people just chit chat when you're not, you're kind of like, get to the point?

So we do hallways to all conversations, but mostly there are just kind of these organic conversations that are working towards some point of view. So tactically, how are you doing this? Are you using a document? or scripted out? Great question. One of the questions people had on Twitter

was about the technology stack we use. So a couple of things on this. So I'm embarrassed to say that the way I edit podcast is by starting with the transcript because I'm a word person and do like a rough paper cut. And I actually do this without listening to the podcast. After the paper cut,

the technical audio editor turns it into a first cut. And the reason I do it this way is because I want to see the whole shape of the narrative without being distracted by the sound. The problem with that approach is that when you see on a text is unidimensional and flat, whereas in voice,

it's much more multidimensional. There's multiple factors. Yeah, like I might be super excited in one sentence. Right, and then you suddenly have up talk and down talk and you can't match to that. And you can't put that right next to another sentence where I'm quiet. That's exactly it.

So that's why it's kind of a dangerous method, which is why the tool descript is a really interesting one because they actually democratize a process. So to me, the first round is about seeing the global arc. The second round is about listening to it and really seeing how it truly works and flows. And the third round is really about, of polishing it and making sure it just has this ease of listening.

So when you're editing, can you boil that down to principles that we should take away when we think about editing stuff? Yeah, so I guess the number one thing I would say is the biggest difference between text and audio is that audio is a living, breathing organism. So every change you make introduces a new interaction effect. It's like you're adding a new variable. And so every time you decide, like in this cut I'm going to do this, when you listen to your next cut, it messes something else up,

which is why tools like Descript are so important because they shortened the time between what I call the design and manufacturing phase of designing something like a semiconductor chip. The ability to have that sort of iterative feedback loop is critical, which is why all the new editors are getting trained on Descript. So the living breathing organism,

the different framework required then as well. Yeah. It means it's not unidimensional, which I mentioned that has multiple layers. And I describe that for every podcast, there's like five dimensions, or five levers even that you can use. So one is obviously the content itself,

like the substance of what people are saying. One is the energy, so of the individual speaker, their tone, their excitement, do they sound flat? And that can't be edited, can it? Well, not really. I mean, you can actually do some manipulations, like raise a voice a little to make someone not sound so flat, but you don't want to distort the voice. The third thing is charisma. Sorry, that's a charisma of the speaker. So that's not just their level of energy for how they talk, but they're sort of charismatic way of drawing people to their ideas.

Is that editable? Not really. You can do other things, though, because what I find with charismatic speakers is that they often also talk in platitudes. And so one of the things that I tell our editors is you actually don't want to be efficient with the words. You want to cut the platitude statement and then keep the specific wonky statement. So then they don't come off as like BS. And then the fourth one is chemistry, which is the interaction of the guests all in the room. So what do you do with chemistry when sometimes we're meeting that person for the first time?

I don't think having a pre-meeting helps with that chemistry. So I think a great episode for this maybe as an example would be me and David Ulovich when we did a podcast about what time is it. And he has a fun chemistry. Two of us are just very irreverent. It was when he first joined. It was about six months in. And we did a podcast about his career. And on the editing side, I put his story at the end because I don't know if people know him that well. So we started with his advice for founders.

So that was like one of the arc decisions I made. Because by the way, the fifth variable is arc or narrative flow. And anyway, we had such chemistry because we had this like fight in the middle of the episode about how to pronounce Jif or GIF. Which way did he say? Oh, my God. I say Jif, not GIF, which is what he says. Ugh. I don't even get me started on that.

But like, you guys listen to that episode. If you want to eavesdrop on that. But I kept it because it conveyed a certain chemistry. So to answer your question, you have these five levers, and the job of the editor is to take the material they're given with, whether fully all over the place like my material or more linear arc like others, and then shape it into what it needs to be and edit it. So often that means removing redundancies,

but not to the point of being so efficient that it sounds like mechanical. It means tightening flow, insights per minute. And then this is a beauty now of this five framework. If you have okay chemistry but great content, you can work with that by rearranging the order because then you keep people hooked by the flow. If you have wonderful chemistry and energy but very little substance, you can shorten it.

So you have the energy but reduce the length because the payoff is so low. So basically what I'm saying is you can use one of these five levers and manipulate them to get more or less, dial it down or up or down to get what you need. And of course there's only so much you can do. But what's really cool is Descript has a company called Lyrebird, and they are doing synthetic audio.

And what's up with timing? Like, is there a sweet spot for how long a podcast should be? Yep, this is so funny because what I found when I asked people, like, what's your ideal length for a podcast? Guess what? The answer was exactly proportional to their commute or workout time. So if their commute was 15 minutes, that's what they thought was their perfect length. If it was 45, that was great.

Is there like a time that you aim for? No, we don't aim for a time. It seems like the sweet spot is somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes. My philosophy about time and length, and this is so strong, both for written and spoken content, is I think discussions about length are so arbitrary. Religious debate, it should be as long as it needs to be. So if it's gratuitously long, cut it. If it needs to be longer because we're going in depth and it's so interesting,

why would we cut that arbitrarily? But this is the caveat to that. The payoff and the insight per minute has to be proportional to the length. So if the person is listening for a long time, there's not enough payoff. That's a complete waste of their time. They're never going to trust you. you destroy that trust, you lose them as a fan. So that's the first thing.

The second thing to your question about the ideal length, I do believe that short-form podcasting is a really important form. That's one of the trends in the space. And I had a moment, kind of an insight was I had this realization that, gosh, all these other people are doing news shows like the New York Times Daily and Vox Today Explained. And again, it's a reported model, third-party experts, which is great. But why aren't we doing a first person where people who know this industry are commenting on it directly and do that way.

So I was like, I want to do a news show and news podcasting is actually a growing trend. And then why don't we combine it with short form? So then I thought, let's do it for 16 minutes because Andrews and Horowitz, A16 and Z, 16, why not? So hence 16 minutes. Now, I think this one must be much harder to edit, though. Well, first of all, I've not gotten it to 16 minutes.

Sometimes it's like 17, sometimes it's 19. I try to only have it below 20s. A couple of times I've abused it. So for the first episode, I tried doing it where everyone just did one full take a few times. And then what I have found was, this is actually true for you in particular. You said different things on each take. And I was like, oh my God, what she said there was so good.

And what she said, the other take was also really good. So I use the editing to then seem together the best parts of what you said. And if you again think about insights per minute and the fact that you have only this many minutes, how do you add value for the listener? You want the highest insight per minute, hence the editing. So yes, it's now a more highly edited show. And I'm kicking myself for it because it takes a lot of time. It's a lot of work.

and it's freaking aiming to be a weekly new show. So I'm pretty burnt out. Okay, so how do you think about frequency of programming? Does it have to come out at the same time every week? It's funnily, that's another area where people have a lot of theories. And when I first joined someone from the outside said to me, it should be exactly every Friday at 3 p.m. There's all kinds of theories around this, and that's all wonderful.

Here's the three things I learned. The best content will always win. Time of day, all the other stuff aside. As you know, I am a master of timing things. This is how I made my section successful and writing the specific timing for zeitgeist and virality. But for podcasts, there is no such thing. So someone asked on Twitter about the tools for creators

and distributors of podcasts, for people seeking to start their own podcasts, because not everyone is a big brand like this, is actually Substack, which people think of as a newsletter-only tool. It's really about connecting writers and people with their audiences. So if people are seeking a place to both host and distribute, what better place than within the email ecosystem because you really own your audience when you own that.

Here's the thing. People may talk about a podcast on social. Like you'll see a ton of people talking about a certain episode, but the reality that they're actually listening to it is very little. And so I think that the evolution of social podcasting, which I know you are interested in as well, it's still too early. So technically podcasts have what I call, quote, slow burn virality. They don't just go viral overnight. It takes about a week, like the first wave of listens is in that first week,

and then you kind of see it grow from there. Kind of like how I watch TV now. Oh, my God. That's such a good point. Well, you and I did a podcast on a podcast about podcasting with Nick Claw. People should listen to that episode if they want to hear our thoughts on the trends because we did talk about binge watching and other things. Back on the timing thing, I do believe editorially, especially for written content.

And this thing that I dubbed the McCluskey curve after Mark McCluskey, my former colleague got wired. He's now at Sports Illustrated, I believe. But anyway, he always talks about how you add value. And I say it's when you're offering something new or differentiated or leading early in the cycle or you do it in the end of a news and discussion cycle where it's after it's very noisy and you have a very fresh or differentiated take and kind of being in the middle of all the noise is like the worst position to be in in terms of value and for the timing of it. So that's like

literally my philosophy. One thing I didn't mention in the cycle because someone asked about the cycle from ideas to publishing that a big focus for us is around more promotion and you know that's sort of the whole cycle of things. And so one of the experiments I had wanted us to do was to start doing audiograms and people promote podcasts through video, you know, the whole definition of what is a podcast is blurring Tom Webster of Edison Research. We're sharing how for many young people, especially those that are streaming, whether on video or audio and Spotify, they don't know the difference between whether it's on video or not.

And so when people say subscribe in your favorite app, it could be YouTube. What about sound effects, music? Yeah. So on the sound effects and music, we tried. So Hannah did a great episode for Halloween a few years ago where she had sound effects for the person who was talking about the why behind the weird. I would like us to have music on our show. As long as it doesn't come off as corporate overproduced slick

because that's not our aesthetic at all. However, I do think we need that, and it adds more dimensionality. I mean, it just sets the tone in the beginning. So for Ben's new show, it's Ben Horowitz and Shaka Sen Gore. They co-hosts a show called Hustle and Tech, which is guides to technology for hustlers, but what it really means is really helping people use technology to help themselves, which is an amazing concept.

Basically, for that show, I did add music, and it was interesting because I didn't want, like, stock music. And so I asked Chris Lyons, you know, who runs our cultural leadership fund, but I didn't even know he'd put his own sample in there. He sent me like six tracks, including all these stock things that had a more hip-hop sound to it. And it turns out the one we all liked happened to be his personal ones. That's so cool. I was so excited. But it sets a tone for the show. And I do want that. The reason we haven't been able to do it though is because licensing for songs is very complex. It's not just copyright. It's like layers and layers of

record distribution labels. So music is like one of the things that you're experimenting with. It almost sounds like you're treating this like a startup or like a product. Totally. I had a moment of emotional where I got a little teary-eyed because I was solo for a long time. First it was me and Michael. Then I was solo for a long time. Then I hired Hannah and then it was me and her. And then about almost a year ago

I hired Amelia to be our managing editor. And she's growing the team so that we can scale this. And I had proposed that we hire an editor for every vertical so we can really just go deep and kind of channelize our insights there and truly self-select the audience. So anyway, To that point, I kind of got emotional when I saw that all these desks that had been

empty around me had people sitting in them. I got kind of like, oh my God, is this how a startup CEO feels? If this is it, I'm in. Count me in. Because I've never done that. Okay. What are some new experiments you're thinking about? So in general, in podcasting, I'm fascinated by audio fiction.

That's like a really interesting and important trend. However, I cannot, for the life of me, think about what our version of audio fiction would be. So maybe I'll just maybe do something personally. So who knows, at some point I can experiment with that. I'm still waiting for your book, by the way. I know, so am I. Okay, so experiments in our podcast.

Okay, so there's a blending of, as you talk about, you wrote about this in your knowable post, that you get this found time with audio. One of the things that I'm interested in is that if the blinds and definitions of podcasting is blurring, and you really talk about this more than anyone, Connie, so I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here. but the idea that audiobooks and podcasts and educational content all kind of blurs together,

for that same reason, why wouldn't people listen to blog posts in podcast form or email newsletters in podcast form? So I asked some of the other partners to read out loud, their blog posts on air. I'll probably read a couple and I do want to experiment more with us doing more content in the audio forum in that way. There's already tools like Autumn out there and media outlets, but just more like a voiced way and not so manual, there's like a new set of tools coming about in that work. What are some experiments that didn't work early days? Oh, that's a good question. So very early on, Michael Copeland recorded a conversation with like four kids from a youth and tech conference.

And he told me about the footage and how complicated it was. And I was like, why don't you make it into like a narrative where you narrate it? And he did a beautiful job of turning it into sort of an audio narrative stories. I'd like to do that. And it's not that it didn't work. It's just that we haven't invested in it because we were so building one style. So I'd like to do more of that. experiments that didn't work. So back to the question you asked me about the ideal length.

So I thought, well, what if I experimented with interstitials where we could segment an episode? Interstitials? Like music in the middle? So not music. Kind of like a intermission almost, like a pause point that the listener would know, hey, if you want to take a break, this is a good spot. My thesis at the time was that people on campus, some kids on campus at Stanford told me they were listening to it while walking a class. And they don't want to listen to a long episode because a commitment was so big. So I was like, well, what if it's a long episode? But I, I segment it for them, like the way you have chapter turns, that didn't really work because

then I realized very fast from other people like, uh, duh, I don't need that. My app holds my spot. So it doesn't really matter. So it's kind of orchestrated and contrived. So that didn't really work, although that might come back because as with all experiments, sometimes it's a matter of timing. You probably do a hundred little experiments that you just don't even think about. Sometimes yes, but the reality is that I actually think you should have more focus and I have a very specific focus on the strategy for the existing Z podcast and what I believe and where it's going. So I have a very particular vision for that. And when you have a vision for, of course, the big podcast, but also each particular episode, are you editing until it hits that vision?

Oh, for an individual episode. Yeah, like, how do you even know when to stop editing? Oh, my God. This is the hardest question, believe it or not, because right now we're onboarding some new editors. Yeah, and how do you teach other people, too? Well, this is what I'm struggling with. And frankly, I read Ben's book recently, and it's beautiful, by the way. And how do I think about doing this culturally and thinking about it?

it. This is the exact challenge because, well, I learn podcasts by myself, like everyone can do it. And I'm realizing that the way we do things is quite, things that I take for granted as implicit or they're very tacit things or mindsets that are really unique and foreign. So to answer that question, the answer you can't use when you're scaling is, well, I'll know it when I know it. Like, you know, the line from Justice Potter Stewart about porn, he said, I'll know it when I see it. I mean, that's how I think about investing sometimes. Really? So this goes back to that whole, like, instinct. So this goes back to that whole, like, instinct. But the reality is that instinct is trained by experience.

But what I find is taste is very difficult to train. And you can't just say to someone, well, you'll know it when you hear it. That's not a good enough answer. So it's frankly not helpful. It's not helpful. And it's hard. I don't have a full answer yet. But I will say that you can figure out the bar by having some principles for what you're doing.

So what are your editorial principles? There are things like I mentioned non-derivative experts, true to the maker, the culture of adding a very fresh and differentiated take. We don't want to say what everyone else is saying. The art of timing. Does this meet the bar? Is this really adding value to the conversation? Is it signal versus noise? Is it more of the same?

Is it spinning forward? I use that phrase all the time. Spin it forward, spin it forward, spin it forward. How do we do it at the same time? How do we make it concrete? Because our audience is not just people like big Fortune 500 companies thinking about the future of tech or startups. I mean, I hear people talk about the podcast who don't work in tech.

That's to me as a bar of success right there. So actually, I describe it as the podcast. podcast as influencing the influencers. And so to me, when media outlets reporters say like, oh, I listen to that episode, I love that because they may not write it up, but it informs their thinking. One of my big principles is that we need to either provide a framework for how to think about something, if not an answer, or tease apart hype versus reality and think about how big tech trends like VR, AR, whatever the topic is that may play out concretely.

Then it informs the influencers. Give me a concrete example. What's the proudest moment of that? So one of my most favorite moments and stories about the podcast is that a senator, a U.S. senator, was listening to the episode. And this is a testament to the network. And they come across our content, and the whole thing kind of reinforces like a flywheel. And he heard the episode.

It was about health data. And he literally had his staffer reach out to us. And the staffer quoted his line to us, like what he said. And he's like, I can't believe this idea is not already being done already. I want to propose it in the upcoming session as legislation. can you please put me in touch with that founder? So you're affecting policy. I literally call it policy by podcast.

Now, I don't actually think that came about, but that is one of my all-time favorite stories. Wow, that's awesome. And by the way, in the early days, in terms of thinking about the audience, there was an incredibly strong brand that Mark and Ben and Marget built as a base and a foundation for sure.

And the network is a thing that continually reinforces it. But initially, I had to beg my contacts, people I edited people in the book publishing industry to get them on the podcast because, A, they didn't really know A6 and Z. B, it was a fledgling, nascent podcast. It hadn't had like an established presence. And so I convinced one or two of the key

publicists and book publishers because I ran their excerpts in my section. I then got the, once I got one big name author in, then the rest started following. And then I started getting pitched. Because you must get pitched books all the time. Not only pitched books, we get at least five to 10 emails a week that are just pitching us. Then of course, people, book authors going on podcast became a thing because it actually moves book sales. By the way, one author told me that he came on our show and we moved a thousand books in like a few days because it's a very self-selected audience that's you know listening and very motivated and there's no better way but we try to break the script for book podcasts and one of my rules is again going back to editorial principles of differentiation is if you

have someone like Yuval Harari who's been doing the circuit and he's like on every major podcast show and he's a really well-read author and the person who put him on is my friend rimjim day she's one of the people who took a very early bet on us he has to talk about something different with you well it's that he has to talk about his book but we have to do it in a different way So I want to go back to a topic you mentioned early on, which is how in that first year you didn't like hearing your own voice. That's why you don't want to get on the podcast. But now I have been with you in public where people run up to you

and say they recognize your voice. So how does that feel being a voice celebrity? I've seen people want to take photos with you, but what does that feel like? It goes back to feeling that sort of vulnerability of being a person who wants to be behind the scenes. I don't know if you know this, but my first two years, I didn't even put my name on the byline of the podcast. I know. In fact, people found me proactively, which is crazy to me. Because I thought the goal of the host, because this is what editors do.

Editors do tremendous work. The shaping editors do tremendous work to shape a piece. They practically co-write them. But I did not include myself on the byline because I thought it was my job to be invisible as the host and the moderator. And I always view myself as a shepherd for the audience. That is my job. Although it's funny because over the years then people started finding me. I eventually added my name on the byline.

It's incredible when people come up to you because frankly, when you're sitting in a room and this is what I love about podcasting is that that's intimacy. People think they know you. I love that. They feel like they know me because I'm in their ear, but there's a huge asymmetry there. But anyway, it's amazing and powerful and moving to see your work in action. And I'm so grateful to our fans and to Andrewson Horowitz for letting the podcast got off the ground. You know, Dixon and Kim and Michael started it. But after a while, I don't think really people paid attention to it. Like, I think Mark told me about a year and a half in that he was... I think it surprised us all. I think it did. People didn't really

think it'd be so big. But like I said, we had to earn those listeners because it's not like you have brand and they come. It's that you have the guest and then they listen and it gets better. And this is where the editing comes in. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I have seen you edit and work magic. Like even our WeChat piece that we did years ago, like you made that into a completely different thing. I've seen you edit ever since. And it's really funny because once you're in the zone, like one time I was watching you on Google Docs Edit and I really felt like I was watching a painter paint. I just saw these like sentences moving around and it was like watching a paintbrush.

That's so beautiful. I love that you're saying. Don't make me cry on the podcast. Like were there a podcast that surprised you, things that made you cry? The podcast that made me cry, there's actually been two or three. So one was with Layla Jinnah of Samas Source.

They were empowering people around the world with micro work. They found a way for a woman who previously had no spending money to be able to, for the first time in her life, by makeup. And that sounds so frivolous. But that made me, it completely, I started crying. I edited it out, but that was one of the episodes that made me cry. Another one that made me cry recently was Ben and Shaka when they interviewed Deshaun and Cherie about Maven. And there was a moment that just brought me to tears. And you should listen to that episode, but that was also another one of the episodes that made me cry. So I want to talk about your policy on cursing on the

podcast. Do you do it? Do you bleep it out? It's funny because I felt a lot of tension about it. I remember I once asked Ben and Margaret about it because I was like, you guys think it's bad that I cuss? Should I stop? And Ben was like, entrepreneurship is hard. It's a struggle.

It's meant to be hard. And then I started getting folks on Twitter, some being very helpful and some being judgmental. You know, we don't think you should cuss. You have such a beautiful voice and you sound so nice. Is it necessary? That would probably drive you to swear even more. It did.

And frankly, the reason I wanted to keep it is because I believe when women, we're asked to conform to so many things. No up talk, no this. know that. They're showing me different things. And I'm just like, you know what? I want to be me raw and real. But here's why I did finally decide very recently to stop cussing on those shows.

And no, I don't bleep it out. But funnily enough, on the podcast you and I did with Nick Quab, a podcast about podcasting, someone on Twitter totally teased me. They're like, I think it's hilarious that you bleeped out the name of a company to protect their confidentiality, but you didn't bleep out your F-bomb. So now I edit it out. So I stopped because there are kids in the car. And in the beginning, I was like, oh, look.

Well, don't listen. But now, and we've talked about ear shares and your mind share, people need to listen to podcasts with kids in the car. And by the way, the other trend I think is super interesting about podcasting is these new wave of shows just for kids. It's one of my favorite things. I feel like in podcasts, you're taking something that's previously just information and education, and you're forced to make it entertaining. Ah, you're right. Well, I think the job of the moderator for me is to be a shepherd for the audience, and that means including stitching together statements, helping the listeners follow along with the arc, summarizing and explaining.

But to the entertainment part, I agree with you. I do believe the future of podcasting is merging with entertainment, and that is going to be interesting to see. Tell me a little bit about what software, what technology do you use? Like the hardware, not just the software. Yeah, yeah. So we use a Zoom recorder, and we use sure mics, and we use standard.

At one point, we use halmikes for our clamp. Do you use a mixer? Oh, no. So in the early days of the podcast, people would keep complaining on Twitter. Like, I listen to your podcast. It doesn't sound good. I thought musicians always use mixers. Well, one of the negative legacies of podcasting tools is that a lot of them were grounded in the music world versus made natively for podcasting, which is why I like Descript and other tools came about.

Basically, we got rid of the mixer and then our sound improved drastically because we can manipulate more because you record separate tracks. How'd you know to get rid of the mixer? So this is my biggest most invisible partner in crime who I want to give a shout out to is our sound engineer, Seven Morris. I brought him in and I was like, please fix our sound. People keep complaining. I cannot take no for an answer. You need to tell me what's wrong and I want it fixed. I'm just like, there surely is a solution.

It was a funniest thing. Because what he did was he basically removed the mixer. He's like, you guys don't need this. That's what people use for live events. You're editing. You want individual tracks. You should be plugging directly into the recorder, not having a mixer in between. So that's what we did.

Our equipment's not that expensive. I give a lot of startups advice on how to do this stuff. And the list of equipment is all under $1,000. We have sound panels and acoustic stuff, but not really. We use really standard equipment. I think the primary thing in the tech stack is that we're now on Simplecast, which is our hosting platform. I think of them as like the stripe of podcasting

because they have an API model. And we're getting a lot of features in that and particularly going to be more important as we expand to more and more shows. The other thing is that as everyone knows, analytics for podcasts have been very, very broken and very difficult because the industry has not standardized. And what's great is that Simplecast

has been going through the process of IAB certification. For me, the wish list has always been completion. Like where do people drop off? I want chartpeat like analytics for things. I want to know about audience overlap. between shows. I want to know where people are more engaged. Are there parts where they're repeating and trying to listen again? Like there's so many million things I want to know. What's also great is Amelia hired, and I actually credit to Andrew on this because he had suggested

as part of the hiring plan. He suggested we hire a growth and audience development person in addition to the editors. And I'm really glad he did because Amelia hired a wonderful growth and audience development person for us. Jared and he is very much thinking about how to bring the promotion side. You know, as we're growing, and thinking about, okay, we have our main show, now we have the 16 minutes thing, we have hustling tech, like, what does the future of our podcast library look like? I think, the Margaret has a great phrase. She describes our podcast and the editorial as a platform, which I think is exactly right.

For the podcast, I think of us as expanding into more of a network. Network meaning like multiple shows. Multiple shows. I want to try different types of shows. But you also don't want to abandon your audiences. So I don't want to arbitrarily start a show. and then if we only have like a few episodes, not, you know, keep that feed, which is why some of these shows are starting off as series,

and then we can break it out into its own show in its own feed. Capsule collections in the beginning and then they break out. For some, we start from the get-go. So 16 minutes, that I knew from the beginning would be its own show. But what we did was we let it run on the main feed for the first 10 episodes. Someone on Twitter actually asked that. I thought it's the cutest question. They said, why is 16 minutes not on the main feed anymore?

This is the reason why. And then we ripped off the Band-Aid and told people it's no longer on this feed. So now people only subscribe there. And you see like a big spike when you gave those callouts. And that's because I need to build a new show there. And let me just tell you how painful that is because after building a show at this 500th episode and now starting at like 15. Yeah. It's a very different game and it's like exercising new muscles all over again.

But I love it because I miss that zero to one day. It's like a second child. I guess maybe it's very similar because you're going back to scratch again in some ways. And that's how you build that type of a network. Also, we will be verticalizing some of the channel so that people can subscribe to feeds. And so we're going to have a separate channel initially for like A6 and Z bio. And that's great because an audience can self-select. And if people want to talk about journal articles without people who don't want to hear about crypto policy, you don't have to mix those.

And this is great because this is to me the future of media. I'm a big believer in Kevin Kelly's 1,000 true fans and then going from there. Initially when I started thinking of mapping out the territory podcast, I literally thought about it as mapping like sales territory. and so I want to conquer the open source community. I want to conquer no JS. Let me bring someone on from there. And I literally mapped it out geographically and community-wise to kind of grow and aggregate that.

This is how to take over the world. Software is it in the world, but so is audio. I am so honored to be able to interview you today. Happy 500th episode. Thank you. And thank you to everyone for listening. And I also thank you to our incredible, amazing team here. I want to thank especially our audio engineers,

Seven Morris and Tommy Herron and the first editor I hired Hannah Tidnam, who's now been here for three years, and now Amelia and the rest of our team who've joined DOS, Lauren, and Zoren, who are starting to podcast. And thank you to Margaret, especially. Thank you to Kim, who reached out and hired me. And also it was funny, she actually told me she had never thought I would be into podcasting, and I was like, me neither.

But I'm so grateful to the firm, frankly, it's a miracle that they would be so supportive of us doing this. and I'm so thankful for that. So thank you everyone and thank you, Sonal, for the A16C podcast.