The a16z Show - The Art and Science of Podcasting

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

It’s both easier and harder than ever to build a successful podcast. In this episode, we chat with Sriram and Aarthi from the Good Time Show, who ventured into the world of audio peak pandemic and have since interviewed the likes of Elon Musk, Calvin Harris, and Naomi Osaka.We get their perspective on how to succeed in this competitive landscape, differentiation and the sliding scale of entertainment and information, the difference between an audience and a community, podcast analytics and how they’re changing, and even what Sriram has learned from his frontrow experience at Twitter recently.Topics Covered:00:00 - Intro02:20 - Podcast trivia06:07 - Starting a podcast08:45 - Differentiating13:10 - Information vs entertainment18:08 - Getting off the talk track20:40 - Growth and metrics22:31 - Authenticity27:10 - Secret sauce of podcasting28:10 - Advice for new podcasters29:58 - In-person events32:06 - Tech as a force for good34:50 - The next wave of social37:23 - Creator middle class41:16 - Podcast infrastructure42:55 - ChatGPT45:10 - Swapping lives with a celebrity52:26 - Your personal monopoly Resources:Find Sriram on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sriramkFind Aarthi on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarthirFind Aarthi and Sriram on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AarthiAndSriramCheck out the Good Time Show: https://www.aarthiandsriram.com/ Stay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease 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. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. 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.

They're like, I want to be Rogan or I want to be Lex or I want to be Alex Cooper. I want to do the next deal. But you can't do that. You can't be a better Mr. Beast than Mr. Beast, right? You know, steal from them, learn from them, see what's working. But you have to infuse yourself into it. If you listen to this podcast, you're probably an avid podcast listener. Perhaps you've even dappled with the medium yourself.

And in a way, it does feel like we're at this interesting inflection point where it's both easier and harder than ever to podcast. It's easier than ever to create, but it's harder than ever to stay. out. And I feel like this recent tweet from Tim Ferriss really encapsulates things. He says, I'm super grateful I started podcasting before you needed to produce a TV show to cut through all the noise and the algorithms. April of next year will mark an average of 1.4 plus episodes per week for 10 years. So look, there are endless creators that we can and probably will bring in to talk about this subject. But today we're talking to two creators that decided to go full force into the

World of Audio peak pandemic. You might know them at Sririum Monarthe from The Good Time Show. Starting as a hobby, the Good Time Show has grown and since had many guests that you're probably familiar with, people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Calvin Harris, and Iami Asaka. So in this episode, we get to hear from Svira Monarthy about their perspective on the world of audio and video. We cover things like the sliding scale of entertainment, information, the difference between an audience and a community, podcast analytics and how those are changing, and even what Sri Rama has learned from his front row experience at Twitter recently. But first, they say that choosing a co-founder is like choosing a spouse.

But in this case, Sri Lama and Arthy are already married. So I decided to kick things off with a game to see who is pulling their weight in this podcast partnership. Place your beds. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. It 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. For more details, please see A16c.com slash disclosures.

I know both of you are husband and wife, so I want to see a little bit of competition between the two of you. See who's pulling the weight on this podcast. But what we're going to do is I sent you both these buttons. You guys have them in front of you? All right. We got it working. Okay. What we're going to do is a fun little trivia game about podcasting and creators. And I want to see which one of you knows more about this universe. You should have told me this right at the beginning. He knows way more about this world than I do.

We'll see. We'll see. Oh, my goodness. All right. So I'm going to read the question. And then whoever hits their button first gets to answer. If you get it wrong, the other person can answer. All right?

So the first question, the term podcast is a portmanteau, which means it's a combination of two different words. What are those two words? I'll give you one. The first one is iPod. iPod. Okay. And casting. I guess. Broadcast? Yes. Yes. Arth, you got it. Second question. What year was this term coined? I am going to go with... Say it. Say it. You press the button. Say it. Well, he says iPod. It must be post-I-Pypard.

So I'm probably going to say 2004. That's right. My God. We're one-one. Okay. I'm a genius. Okay. All right.

Question three. According to an Edison report, what is the most popular podcast genre? Comedy? Comedy? Yes. That's right. Oh. All right.

Two, one. Okay. So of the people who listen to podcasts, according to Infinite Dial, how many do they listen to per week? How many shows? 30. No. Well, let's see. Okay. Well, I'm going to say if somebody is answered. No, no, just say it. Number. Eight.

That's right. Okay. You guys, this is not cool. I promise I did not send Sri Ram these questions beforehand. All right. How many downloads do you need per episode, according to Buzz Sprout, to be in the top 1% of Potu. and just round that up. 4,500. That's right. Yeah.

It was in the prep doc. I know. So I was testing who prepped. All right. Two more. Who was the highest paid creator in 2022? I'm going to go. Say it.

Mr. Beast? That's right. Okay. So we have one more question. It's Thai. At what age did Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr. Beast, start YouTubeing?

Okay, you did it first. I'm going to say 16. Nope. Let's see who gets it closer. Arthi, what's your guess? 14? That's closer. He started at 13.

I win. All right, Arthy wins the... It doesn't matter. I actually know Jimmy. Nobody cares. Be nice. That was fun. I was kind of skeptical, but since I

That was really fun. You get the pride of knowing more about the podcasting world, even though you thought, I don't know. This segment needs some work. We'll talk about it afterwards. If I'd won, it'd have been better. But anyway, all right. Lose with dignity.

No such thing. All right. So as I mentioned before, we are going to be talking about all things, audio, creators, communities, social. So why don't we just start out because both of you have been podcasting for the last couple years on your Good Time show, which started in 20, What made you start that show? Was it the fact that you wanted to build a network? Was it just for fun? What was going through your mind at the time? Okay, okay, I'll go first. The origin story is actually, you know, we didn't plan for any of this. We never saw of ourselves as creators or podcasters or anything of that sort. So this 2020, December, and we're all working from home. And we miss seeing our friends. We used to go home to India once a year and we didn't do that that year. And, you know, we basically thought, wouldn't it be nice to kind of host like a virtual dinner party kind of thing?

Because we used to host all like these founders at home once a month or so and just have conversations about building companies and startups and stuff. And we just didn't do that in person anymore. So we thought we could maybe host this as a live audio session. We started this on Clubhouse. And that's kind of how the whole show started. We can tell you how much it was purely accidental and sedentipitous. And in some ways, I think maybe these things have to be. I don't think you can set out in something like this because there's so much art and, you know, intuition involved.

Kind of came from this very human core of, we're bored. We like talking to people. You know, it's really hard to talk to people during COVID. And we said, let's have a place where we can have a friendly conversation. Like the first few episodes were not like these, not shows. They were really like, you know, how to go fundraise. how do you do performance reviews if you're a new manager? And we would bring in experts we knew or other founders we knew.

And we just, it was more about giving back to that founder community. And we did a lot of those sessions. And we thought they were really cool and fun. But like, you know, our parents or whoever would listen in and be like, what was that? Like, why are you guys talking on this thing? Yeah. So it is really hard when you do one of these to know what is happening on the other side. You can't really picture the human being who's listening to.

it or watching it and what are they going through. But I would say there was definitely an inflection point where Artie, I remember the first few weeks, she would get all these DMs from India, from here, a lot of women, they would reach out, be like, oh, I can't believe you're there and you have Mark and Driesen and Elon Musk and, you know, because your background is my background and I'm here. And those things just, you know, it really gives us oxygen to do these shows. Yeah. Well, I think one thing that's interesting about podcasting, it really does feel sometimes like

you're searching for a needle in a haystack in terms of what's working. You get all types of feedback. Sometimes it's conflicting. Podcasting is also kind of notorious for really bad analytics or distribution. Oh, yeah. It really is this maze where you're like, I think something's working because people are listening. So where would you see the show is now? Like, what kind of show are you trying to create?

I think we were fortunate because we didn't start out with we want to be creators. I see a lot of people who are like starting podcast now where they're like, this is a theme and this is a show. And I keep trying to tell them, that's fine. but there's a very good chance that it's all going to change over time, and you might not see success right away with this exact vision that you have in mind. You know, if you had told us two years ago, oh, you have to have this like whole setup with lights and everything and this backdrop and video and all of that,

we would have been like, yeah, I don't think so. Like, I just don't think we are that. But now, you know, it's given us a time and buffer to just like learn and grow through this and feel comfortable doing what we do. And so now I think the show, how would you, describe where we are now. You know, we've sort of grown rapidly, and I think many ways to measure it. We often get episodes now, which get millions of views, and that's really amazing. We really invested into video, so we really want to experiment with all different formats, which is a whole

interesting other conversation also. One of the interesting things about podcasts is you have to hold two things constantly at the same time. One is, I think it needs to have some kernel of truth and authenticity to it. And unless you have that, I've seen so many podcasts fail. And they often fail because somebody wants to get out there and be like, I'm going to make a successful podcast. And I don't think that is a motivation that sustains you or the audience. Well, it's also too broad, right? It's kind of like someone saying, I want to create a startup.

It's like, okay, well, what do you want to build? What problem are you trying to solve? What are you excited about? Absolutely, right? And it doesn't go anywhere. So I think it needs some point of truth, which is you have to really care about the topic. You have to care about the topic and talk about it, even if nobody's listening to it.

And I think the audience can sense, you know, the level of authenticity. And in some ways, they have to really start connecting with you as the narrator, the guy, the Sherpa was going to take them through this. And that sort of exists in this fuzzy sphere of human connection and intimacy and relationships. Then there is this other work, which is partnerships, metrics, views, retention, top of funnel, download, right? And it's incredibly quantifiable. And there is a game, there's an algorithm that you all need to play to. What we have tried to do is kind of balance both. Because at the end of the day, you know, we don't do this for a living.

We kind of do this for fun. And unless we enjoy it, this will stop. Yeah. The thing that hasn't really changed is we're kind of curious people. I think even the show when it started, I think we were just sitting around late night and being like, it'd be really nice to like have these folks to just talk to them. Like, you know, we should just like ask them how they do what they do kind of thing.

And that hasn't changed two years in. And that's the part that I'm really excited about where every guest, like, you know, yesterday we did an episode. and the prep leading to the episode, that's the part we love and enjoy the most because it's like discovering this person. Like, you know, you've obviously read about them, heard about them, read their books or whatever they've done.

But then when you have to prep, you really have to like know the individual and put some time and effort into it. We still enjoy that and we're still very curious about who the person is and kind of showing our audience, you know, that side of them, whether they're like builders, thinkers, creators, whoever they are.

That's the most fun for us. Well, you know what I'm taking away, which is something that I've noticed with content for quite some time now, is a lot of people, to your point earlier, they're like, I want to create a blog, I want to create a podcast. And then once they decide to do that, they think about it too much in terms of what they're creating. So as an example, they might say, I want to create an interview style podcast about technology. And that's okay. But I mean, how many podcasts are there with that exact same what? And I think when you really consider why you listen to a specific podcast or read a specific newsletter, it's how they do it. And if I were to articulate what both of you do really, really well is you make it approachable. The podcast feels warm,

right? And even when you think about the way people articulate why they like a podcast or a newsletter, etc, it's that how part. You never go to someone and say, hey, I've got this great podcast. And they ask why. And you say, well, they talk about technology. No, because there's so many podcasts about technology. You say, oh, man, these hosts, they just make it feel so approachable. They have no ego. They're not afraid to ask simple questions. And so I think that's really important as people consider whether they should pursue a podcast because technically it's easier than ever. But that doesn't mean that it's easy to start a podcast. And I mean, from that frame is the sliding scale between what I would call entertainment and information.

I mean, Huberman Lab, I think hit number one yesterday. You shared that in a chat we're in. And I feel like that's very information dense. I go into the Huberman Lab podcast and I come out and I'm like, oh my God, I need to reshape my life. I'm doing everything wrong. And then there's other podcasts that, quite frankly, at the end of that podcast episode, I've taken nothing away. But I loved it. Right.

I truly enjoyed being there. How do you think about that sliding scale with your podcast? You can't separate it from your own personality. Yes. Huberman Lab, you know, Andrew is amazing at it because he brings to the table, one, this amazing life experience. You should listen to him and he talks about his skateboarding life and he's been in some dark times and overcoming that. That part of it infused with the fact that he has his huge academic background is genuinely curious and he really wants to get to the truth of things. So one is you're putting yourself into it and you can't really divorce your throat.

So when this show started taking off, I kind of went into this sort of analysis of all the great interviewers the last 20, 30 years. And I tried to kind of map out what they were doing well because you're trying to square a circle. You're trying to square a circle of something which is authentic to you, something which is fun for you, something which is some value to the audience. It can be information, it can be something which is great for a guest if you have an interview kind of content. And something kind of works in terms of the algorithms and numbers. And it seems as an impossible equation. And I was trying to go through history on trying to who is kind of figured out. Everyone has its own style.

Larry King, maybe one of the greatest broadcasters, interviewers of all time. If you read his biography, if you read his style, he's all about, I'm going to go in assuming my office. audience knows nothing about this person. And actually, he's famous for doing no prep, right? But it brought it to this amazing purity, which he was like, what like are you working on? Tell me what you wrote, right? And he could sort of communicate the honest version of like some New Yorker on the street. He'd be like, I don't know who this person is. Tell me what you got. What are you about, right? And there was an honesty to that convention. And obviously Larry King was one of the legends. That's on one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum,

you have somebody like Howard Stern, right? Howard Stern, maybe a polarizing character. But one of things he likes to do is put in amazing research. Howard Stern with John Stewart, one of his first questions is he pulls out the very first joke John Stewart ever said in a public setting. And Stewart is bowled over, right? He's like, how do you ever find that? So the other spectrum is sort of the vibe or the format of the show. So for example, if you're doing a hard journalism show, you're doing 60 minutes, right? I'm going to hold you accountable, right? That's one version of things. There's another version of things I think is closer to where we are, which is you are doing something interesting. And I want to understand, and the audience hopefully understand through me,

how it is that you do what you do. It's a little bit of a dance between the guest and the host, and I want them to feel like they got the best version of me out there. I'm a huge man of John La Cure, right? The famous espionage writer who tragically recently passed away. He hated doing press, he had to talking to journalists. And one time, he was in France, and he met his host for what he thought of some random French show. And he was like, God, I hate it. I don't even speak French. well and you did some research right and this host his name is bernard pivoree he hosted basically let's call the equal of the tonight show in france right i think he still does and lecari was nervous he was like i hate this right i'm going to make a fool of myself i hate the whole endeavor right in the first 50 seconds

he's like this is the most amazing connoisse never had right he says it is not because pevo was good looking charming funny smart even i mean he probably was some version of all these things but the thing was within instantly he could communicate to the guest was you are going to be be okay here with me. And when I saw that, right, and I'm not going to claim we even get close to any of that, but I saw that this is what our goal is. Like every show, right, I want to have the guests be like, I'm going to be okay here. And I think if you get that, everything else really falls into place. You know what? That reminds me of this analogy that I like to use for podcasts specifically, which is it's kind of crazy when you think about it. Let's say our podcasts are typically

maybe an hour long. The listener is with you for an hour every week, maybe more than that. And so it's very different than reading a newsletter for five minutes or stumbling upon a blog post randomly online and spending a couple of minutes where you don't even know who wrote it or the face behind the post. And so it's a very intimate form of content. Like podcasts are your best friends. And so I think you're right that there's more of a friendship that needs to be created, not just with the person you're interviewing, but that parissocial relationship with the listener. And so that's where I think, you know, I framed it as entertainment. but it's this warmth. It's this connection that you need to create.

And I like the framing that you described there. It's like you're making someone feel comfortable. Like they want to be there. And you can't fake it. And sometimes it takes a lot of work. And it's not the same for every person. Anybody at the top of their field, I kind of figure out a system of how to make things work.

And I'm always trying to get that system out of them. I think about it as getting them off their talk track. Arthi, how do you think about that? How have you effectively, as you're going into these interviews with people who are so media trained, and have done so many interviews, likely a lot of those interviews have the same questions being asked. And I've found at least listening to both of your shows, like you do somehow find a way to get them off their talk track. Do you have any thoughts on how you've managed to do that?

I kind of have a different approach than Sheriram does. I look at it as our job here is to, one, make sure that the guest feels like this is a good use of their time. They're here for an hour. They're usually really busy people. our other job is to, you know, we have all these people, and we know our cohorts of audience who are like listening, watching. They often tend to be, you know, not from the same world that we are, but aspirationally they want to be here.

Like I think of our job as to be in service of them and to make sure that we are able to bridge the gap between what would they want and what is interesting to them and getting the guests to feel like they can convey that in that time frame that they have. It sounds really clinical when I put it that way, but really like an hour every week of somebody spending the time to listen is a huge investment on their part. And we want to make sure that it is actually valuable to them. I know what this person is working on or what they're doing or what the day to day looks like or the book that they wrote or anything of that sort. But I think it is still worth it to ask the question so that the person who's listening on the other end,

gets the value out of it because I can't assume that they know. And so some of the questions might just be like, what advice do you have for founders kind of thing? And it sounds so basic. But sometimes that's kind of where you get interesting answers. And that kind of breaks them out of that mold of the PR spiel, which is they're here to go launch their book and they can talk about the book. But then I'm like, no, wait, but you did that. Why did you start that company? Why did you do this thing? And they're like, oh, wait, you're actually interested in me as a person who did that. Okay, let me talk to you about that. I also think about the curse of knowledge, right? You mentioned that sometimes it's the simplest questions that people get really excited about. And I'm sure all of us and people listening have put out content before trying to sound really smart or say, you know, this is like so thoughtful. I spent, you know, two months on this and then it flops. And sometimes it's the simplest things that people just really latch on to. They're really human things. Yeah.

What's also important to consider is that a podcast is effectively a product, right? And so you are getting, even though it is limited with podcasting, some signal back. So what are you learning? What are you paying attention to? And what has worked in terms of actually growing your show? One comment I'd make is you absolutely have to think of it as a product. Who's your market? Who are your customers?

What are you building for them? How are you finding them? How are they finding you? How are you getting them through the door? Are they staying? There's just the basic questions of any product, you know, especially in the consumer world, really go for podcast also and often a famous name can help with that which is you get in Elon Musk you know A. Raman who's huge in India a lot of people who have do idea who you are will find you but that is

a one-time value but how do you retain them and what we have found is retaining them is because they start to hopefully trust us and they listen to more of our conversations and the other thing I think from the product world we realize is fast iteration like we've changed multiple things we try out things all the time about everything from thumbnails to how we we handle social, you know, how we... The trailer, the first few seconds of like a retention hook. It's easy to get like super caught up in the metric side of things. But the things I look for, I think what Shuram said, which is you get these acquisitive

episodes which are like big guess, but I really look for retention, which is like, you know, and this is the cliched, we came for this guest, but I'm staying for you both kind of thing. And we get comments like this all the time. That's kind of when we know we're doing our jobs because people are watching a lot of the episode content. Oftentimes we see the average number of minutes user watches like anywhere between

12 to 15 minutes of our episode, which is like 25% of the episode. We also look for like retention overall. Like if you're a user, new user who subscribed, are you coming back and listening to new shows that we are putting together every week kind of thing. So I look for that. And you probably know this because you're doing this too.

You have a very strong intuitive feel for when something is working because it's, you know, your email. Catches fire everywhere. Yeah, your email lights up. People that you know. Yeah, yeah. People that you know, right? And you also know the opposite when something totally didn't work and just dead silence. Yeah.

And the hard part sometimes is when that mismatch your expectation or your calibration, when you think something's going to work and totally bombs. I was going to say, the other direction is brutal. We've had that too. We've had a lot of those. And oftentimes it's because we didn't quite understand how to get the best out of this guest. Something about the way we had like tried to make this conversation. conversation and these points and the communication style work didn't resonate with the listeners.

Yeah. I think there's another version of which happens, which I think sometimes, and I'm more guilty of this in Arthur's often, we go into an episode already wanting a certain kind of episode. You have this guest, you're like, and sometimes it's from a very good place. You're a fan, you know their work, you want to sort of fan boy out over a thing, or you're thinking this person expert in X, Y, and Z. Let's ask them X, Y, and Z because you're very good at it and it's going to work with your audience. in particular way, it's going to work with your theme. And when you do that, sometimes it works, but sometimes it has a certain level of artifice and artificial constraint

to what is really a free-flowing human conversation. Yeah. And I think the audience can feel it. The guests can feel it. And it's hard to describe. To be honest, I don't have an answer to that. Like, sometimes you have to, because somebody's launching a new book or a new movie, you have to ask about it.

That's great, right? It's kind of part of the deal because they want to promote it. It's amazing. Sometimes if you're a fan, you want to ask them about that particular thing. And I've tried to get better at it. I've tried to give more space and just follow the conversation.

It's a tricky. But I do think that's another factor. I think oftentimes that Shredaam would be like, this person's an expert in this. I mean, you should really like go. He'll be very serious about the prep and everything. And then they just want to like show up on it and goof off. You know, and Sharia would be like,

but I really want to do it. And I'm like, let them be. They're just having fun. They just goofing off. And to your point, the listener can tell. I mean, Shurram and I were talking about this before we started recording. And I had the same thing. I'm new to this role. And the first couple podcasts I did, I way over prepared. And I did exactly what you're saying where I was like,

there's an arc. People want to hear about X from this person. I'm going to make sure I get it out of them. I'm going to make sure I ask this really amazing, well-crafted question. And then to your point, sometimes that works. And sometimes it just feels really fabricated. And going back to the analogy of podcasts, kind of being like people's best friends, imagine showing up to, you know, a friend's house and there's some other friends there. And someone is like, we have to talk about this today. We have to, you know, we have to follow this conversation arc. And I think, you know, sometimes if people want to talk about that, it's in the news and

everyone's excited about it, great. But when it doesn't feel organic, like, think about how strange that is in real life. It's the same on podcasts. It totally is. And I'll say, right, sometimes, you know, I'm guilty of this. Sometimes I'll do something where I think the underlying psychology is like, I'm going to show you how smart I am about this topic. Totally.

You agreed so quickly. He loves to do that. He'd be like, so when you did this and then you followed up with this, in your mind, was this what you were thinking and feeling? Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I would say the place where it comes from is sometimes when you're a fan, you meet somebody and you want to show them that you've done the work. Right.

You know all these things. And I do like a one minute thing of like, well, you obviously did this, this and this and I'm going to hit you with this. And then this year you did that and you wrote this. and they'd be like, uh-huh, uh-huh, they'll be like, where does he go? Yeah. Well, here's interesting. Finally, there'll be, he'll be like, I'm laughing because I didn't say.

Yeah. But here's, okay, here I'll give you a very surprising thing, which I didn't realize, right? It surprised me for sure, right? I was talking to a really famous person about interviews, and they said, you know what, when a fan interviews me, right? One, it's amazing because this person's a fan of your work,

your craft, movie, book, whatever. It's great. You feel good about it, but you also feel real pressure, right? Because if that person asks you, right, Let's say you interviewing Michael John. You're like, tell me about crossing over Biden and Russell and winning the game.

And you're like, God, I've told the story like 100 times before. This person has heard that story. I am now on the spot to deliver something because this point is such a fact. Now they have to perform for you. But they want to because they are like this person. I mean so much to them.

I need to give them something, right? And they feel pressure too. And pressure is never a good spot for a conversation. Friram comes from this place of like the generosity of spirit where he just, he wants to make this. work and you can see the yearning.

All right, all right, let me give you the real secret sauce of podcasting or our podcast. Okay. Okay. Yes. Arti kicks me under the table here, right? When she thinks I'm going on too long for a story, right? She's like, that's just me. You know, I will leave as an exercise to listen to be, if you can spot the moments

in every episode. Now I have to know how many kicks there have been in this podcast so far. One, I was going to say, I think my secret weapon, which is many podcast. host's Secret Weapon is your editor. I think a lot of people who are listeners forget that. They're like, oh my gosh, you were so concise. You have such great questions. I'm like, you didn't hear the ones I cut out. But I want to at least end this segment about podcasting with a question, which I think, you know, to the point of delivering value to listeners, even though it is very much an art, are there any tricks, any growth hacks, anything that was like an 80-20, whether it was something as simple as like choosing the right thumbnails,

whether it was choosing to do video instead of just audio. Are there any things that maybe a new podcaster should really keep in mind as like, okay, just make sure you check these boxes. So there is an expression which sounds very mean, which is use all parts of the buffalo. And so basically what it sounds very mean to buffalo, so I'm sorry. But that is the expression. I can't change it. But we do this.

We have, say, an hour and a half of a video file and a bunch of audio files, right? Like that's the thing we have. Now what I think you need to do is to take that and then repurpose. that in every single way for every single platform. And somebody like Gary Vaynerchuk does this do really well, where he puts a lot of effort to take every bit of content and make it the most native version possible for each platform. That means on YouTube, you have to really into video. On audio, you want to have amazing sound engineering, you want to have lead and intros,

you want to cut it up into short versions for a reels or a TikTok, and then you want to extract the text out of it and the learnings and put it on Twitter or on substack. one of the ways to think about it is your podcast actually really hard because if you look at the native podcast platforms, say just Apple, there is no discovery mechanism. There is no algorithm, right? So it's really word of mouth. But a lot of other platforms have discovery mechanisms like, you know, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, obviously. The more you are native to what that platform wants, the easier. Also, we just keep changing a lot of stuff. We just got on IG, YouTube, we're trying shorts. So, like, we just keep playing around with different formats and trying to keep it native to those.

those platforms. Yeah. Yeah, just have to keep at it. Yeah. What's important there is we talked about a podcast being kind of like a product. If you're founding a company, you're not just like, hey, we're going to create this product. We're going to put it on one distribution channel and we're just going to keep it the same forever. You test a bunch of different things out. You test marketing channels. You test copy. You iterate the product. Another thing I want to hear from you about is this difference between what you might call an audience and a community. Something that I think is interesting that you've ventured into recently is these in-person events and really translating what you're doing digitally into something physically. Audience is kind of unidirectional. A bunch of people

listening to your podcast. But a community, there's connections within the communities of listeners to other listeners. And so how are you thinking about that? I think that's the long-term goal. We want to have these cohorts of people, when they engage with us, it's not just value from our show and our content, but from each other being in that same cohort, right? Like, that's, I think, the ideal in-state for us. The meetup that we did, we've done one so far, and we're hoping to do a couple more this year. That was in Chennai. It's a city that we come from in India, and it's really special, right, to go back home. And we got a lot of help there. We have people on the ground who basically offered us venue and offered to, like, you know, do the whole

RSVP and figure out who's coming. And that evening, when we had people coming in, that's, I think, kind of when it hit both of us where we were like, this is really cool. We have a couple hundred people here who showed up for no reason other than to just come see us in person and hang out with us. And to us, we were like, wait a second. Like, we've kind of gone from just being these podcast hosts or like goofy getting guests to like show up to being like these people.

And a lot of them there, I think like 70% of them are like founders. And it was great because they all got value from just talking to each other. One of the most interesting pieces I ever read on this topic is Kevin. Kelly's legendary 1,000 true fans. Basically the idea is that if you're creating anything of any product, you want to find your first thousand, really true fans, right, who will consume anything that you do and they trust you. If you do that, you're really off to the races. I think the community really comes from that, which is, are these people connecting to each other, are they finding value out of just what we do? And look, we are not doing this as a job.

We only really want to do this if people are going to be like, this helped me build a company, this helped me get ahead in my career and now folks who think of doing a meetup even without us, you do need some sort of that kind of goal or mission to fuel you. Well, what's your mission in that case? Because you both said,

you just kind of stumbled into this for fun. It's been going well. You like it. But to my knowledge, you're not running ads on it. I don't think you have plans to sell to something like Spotify. And so what is the end state of this?

We really believe that technology, entrepreneurship is one of the biggest forces for good in the world. In all the ways that you mean the word good. And we want to find... And it's literally benefited us. Oh yeah, it's literally benefited us. Like, we would not have met with our technology. We met online, you know, 20 years ago.

So this is our way of maybe giving back. It's not as catchy as other companies, mission statements and stuff, but it works for us. You know what? I have to ask you guys, you seem very aligned on a lot of your answer. It's like, what do you guys disagree on? You guys are a married couple. I actually, I don't know if you guys know this. I have a separate podcast from the A16CZ podcast that I do with my husband.

And let me just say we don't agree on everything. Oh, no, all the time, all the time. We do disagree quite a bit. I get kicked you under the table a lot. I mean, I think also part of it is this. I'm very left-brained as a person. I'm also much more introverted. And I look at it as a very, what are they here for?

what do we have to convey kind of thing. I look at it in like it has to be really clean like the narrative in the story. I think Shriram is more of like artist. He's a showman. He brings high energy. He's very extroverted.

People love like you know you can see them even before we hit the record button. They're already yapping away. There's like spent 20 minutes just chatting and I'm like, stop, stop, stop. Save this like material for the show. And they just love being in the room. with him and just chatting with him.

Artie, I think also, like, wasn't holding the show honest, right? Like, she'd be the one which is like, hey, we need to do this for this person, right? Like, this question. She's one often holding me honest and sometimes often a creative, a weird tangent,

and I think we balance it out. But yeah, we do disagree a lot. It doesn't show. Surram, I want to ask you about community as well. You've been creating these WhatsApp chats with a bunch of creators. They're great. Arthur, you mentioned this, like, energy

that Suriram has. I don't know how you're always posting in there, finding all these things from Twitter or elsewhere. How are you thinking about building those communities? I think there's kind of been a shift in the way we think about social media and online conversation. When Twitter first started, around 2008, 2007, you would just come in there and you would post what you had for lunch

and it was perfectly fine. And everyone was just kind of a small set of friends. Nobody's going to dunk you. And then it shows up in the national media the next day. What is social media? What is online community? has changed in many, many exciting ways. We've seen the rise of YouTube and then Instagram and then Snapchat and then TikTok

and then Beedil and Discord and, you know, I can keep going on and on. And I think so there are now these kind of different spaces that people come together and we kind of gotten more aware of like the different modalities of like each of these platforms and ways that I don't think we were 15 years ago. I'd be remiss not to ask you about your experience at Twitter and where you see that evolving or how you see the kind of whole matrix of social because if people aren't aware you you obviously have had some pretty intimate involvement in the recent acquisition by Elon and at least you got to see kind of you got a front row seat into what people are thinking there well I think what's happened is

you know if you go back five six years ago it felt like social media was in a bit of a stasis right you had two three companies which really dominated I work for some of them and you kind of posted in ways where you expected everything was going to be public. But in the last few, I think you've seen an explosion of innovation and things have shifted in a few dimensions. One, it's people, we've moved from a follower graph to now having AI and recommendations drive so much of what we do. YouTube, recommendations drive a lot of it.

TikTok, the follower graph almost really doesn't matter. It's really the for you page that really matters. Twitter is obviously expanding with that. So that's one dimension. The other dimension, I would say, is in kind of the size of the spaces. Mark Zuckerberg was saying that so much of the conversation now Instagram is somebody takes an Instagram post

and then sends it to a group chat and it sparks off a conversation. So you're kind of this public to private space transition happening in ways that it just wasn't happening before. Third, I spent all of my day to job when Artie's not kicking me under the table working on crypto and Web 3. And I think Web3 and crypto is this whole other thing

we can get into deeply. But one of the core ideas behind it is power to the people and decentralization. The idea that, hey, in the intro one central set of people running everything and calling the shots and having all the economics. How do we do it in a way where these things are no protocols

and everyone has collective ownership? There are a bunch of these sort of zeitgeist ships happening. I was briefly helping Elon at Twitter. I was there, you know, on the first like let it sink in day and for kind of a period of time after. It now feels like social is active and alive again. Four years ago, five years ago, there was a time when you're like, well, I have Facebook, I have Instagram, I have Twitter, maybe Snapchat, and that is that, right?

that's going to be all the social media anybody ever needs, and that is not true anymore. Yeah, Arthur, I want to hear your perspective on this idea of the creator economy and specifically the creator middle class. We've seen independent creators be able to kind of lucratively monetize their followers through that. Audio is interesting because if you actually look at the top podcasts, the charts, they're all people who had large distribution who were already successful, who already had reach, who are really dominating. there. And you could say that's partially because of the discoverability or monetization that exist within audio. But do you have any thoughts there on whether we're really going to be able to build this quote unquote creator middle class within audio specifically? You are kind of what you measure, right? And with audio, there's just not a whole lot

that's measurable right now. A lot of it is just like hidden behind like these big black boxes and controlled by like different entities as such. Right at the beginning we played this game, you're looking at like 4,500 downloads an episode to make it to 1%. So where does the chart fall off? Like what is distribution? Like who's getting that? There's no transparency of metrics as such. I think if you have better metrics and better discoverability and just helping creators

be successful with more tools, I think you're going to get there. The other part of it is at the end of the day, if you're making money through brands or sponsorships or any of these, brands need to start seeing value. Right. And I think that feedback loop is not quite there yet, where it's like, well, okay, this person talked about this product, they gave a coupon code, the attribution system behind it. Like a lot of it is still super early days. Yeah. It's going to happen, but I think it's just going to be a while.

Yeah. I kind of sort of disagree with you that all these people of live audiences, because we look at the top charts, right? Yeah. Because if you look at Huberman did not have a large journal hotel, came out of nowhere. That's true. You know, to be on the top of charts. Lex Friedman came out of nowhere, really. to build one of the most popular podcasts around.

There are definitely obviously celebrities, for example, Emma Chamberlain has one of the popular podcasts around. But there are a lot of folks who really burst out of like, you know, came out of... No, I think you're right that these people didn't have followings, but they didn't burst into the scene. I think the thing that we're missing is it took a really long time for a lot of these folks to, like, keep chipping away at it. It just looks to us like overnight successes

because it suddenly got into the zeitgeist and everybody's like, Hoberman, Lex, and you just hear that. been like your eco chamber that you are in. But they've been doing this for years now. So I think that's kind of going back to the point of it just takes a while. Like all of these like the breakout stars don't break out overnight. It just takes like five, six, seven years to get there.

Yeah, which maybe somebody listening to us and they want to start their own podcast. I will say, you know, this is amazing stuff. It's like 90% of podcasts don't last to episode 20. And then the remaining 90% don't last to episode 40. That is so true. So if you're doing a podcast, number one, you have to really enjoy doing it every single week. because if you don't enjoy it, you will not make it to episode 20. You'll definitely not make it to episode 40.

You can't have to look into yourself, right, and don't look to the numbers because numbers will be zero for quite a bit of, quite a bit of time. Make it to 40 and then you can talk about whether you want to quit or not. Well, that is true. Because once you make it to 40, you would have learned so much about the art of podcasting, what is working, what is not. The other thing I actually couldn't tell people, and this was earlier about the product

market fit and how we think about a startup is, I sometimes see podcasts when they do the very first podcast. They record an entire season before launching it, and that is bad. Because I think what happens is you're getting no feedback. Right? I was struggling this person and they had recorded, I think, like 15 episodes, you know, in back to back and they're putting it out. They're going to put off like three, four months.

And this person, maybe this is really work. But the problem is like when something isn't working, they're not getting the feedback. They can only react on it like next year. And that's really hard because you need to react on it week to week. Your Uda loop, you know, your observe, orient, decide act. That loop needs to be super short. Look at what's happening. Change it up the next week.

Change it up the week after. And that iteration cycle by episode 4, you'd be so dramatically better than you were in episode one. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, both of you have been founders or have grown companies to significant size. And as we've talked about a couple times here, the infrastructure is not great.

We don't really get as much signal as we'd like. The tooling is pretty nascent, at least as we compare it to something like text. If you put your founder hat on, are there certain companies or gaps that you think really need to be addressed that could help podcasters like, You and I. There are a few parts to look at this, right? One is the prep, getting the guest booked on our show, you know, actually hosting the conversation, recording it, the tools for recording it, all of that. There, if you look at it, initially, it used to be super manual. The tools were

not that great. Guest booking was like calendly chaos of like going back and forth between the three of us. And so, like, a lot of that has gotten a bit more streamlined. Then post-recording, we used to struggle with like, okay, transcripts, what do we do now? break this into clips so that it's bite-sized and consumable. We want Insta reels. What do we do there? TikTok has to look different, feel different. Shorts is a little bit different.

It has to be under a minute. Now reels can be a little bit longer. So you kind of sort of have to figure this out. There are lots of other tools that are like now coming and playing a really good role there. And then post, right, like looking at metrics and stuff. We use Anchor. We use Simplecast.

We look at like podcast download numbers. YouTube has been really good. like I really like the studio metrics page. There are a lot of these like tools that are now coming in and just getting really good. Practically like month to month, you're seeing like step function changes in what value they're offering. So I do think we are in like a really interesting time now. We tried to prep for a couple of episodes by Polly pushing it to chat GPT.

Oh yeah. And that was kind of fun because we fed it like a bunch of like, this is an author. These are the books every day. Hold on. Here's what happened. We forgot to prep for an episode. We didn't have time.

comes out. And then Arthi at the last minute was like, I don't know what to ask. And then so she fitted into chat GPT. And we got a bunch of somebody like, is actually pretty good. Right? I actually sent the questions to Sharam. And Sharam was like,

yeah, these are pretty good. And I was like, I did not come up with them. Chat GPD did. You know, it's so funny. I have to confess. So for the trivia at the very beginning, around half of those questions, I just asked chat GPD.

What are some interesting fun facts about podcasting? I came up with a few on my own. But yeah, chat GPD was my little assistant as well. I think sometimes in the future it's going to be like that it's going to be just like, you know, when you buy a product on the supermarket, yeah, like, you know,

what content is going to be like, this was purely human generated. There's only 10% of AI participation in this podcast. Yeah. You know, I heard Mark actually talk about this on a recent interview with BJ. He talked about Mad Men,

which is one of the most popular TV shows of, I think, all time. And the writers of the show talked about how they would sit in a room and they would come up with a bunch of different plot lines. And they would come up with them partially because they were like, let's get all the obvious stuff out of the way. Let's just like write what everyone expects. And Madman has now become known for the fact that they actually,

like you don't know what's going to happen. It takes a left turn. That's another way where even as I was preparing for this interview, I was like, yeah, let's use chat GPT. Some of it's okay. Some of it's good. But even the good stuff, like let me come up with better questions than what it's outputing here. Like these are the obvious things that everyone expects to ask that I can almost guarantee that a previous interview has asked. And so, yeah, I also think it's a tool to like push us. It's a good generic baseline, I think. And I think it's important to see what that baseline looks like so that you can actually like do the work. It's like a median version of humanity. It's like if you put 15 minutes and you Google and you had to write up something about this person, you know,

what would you get? And it kind of gives you some worse. True, true. Yeah. Well, the truth has come out for both of us. We're already using the AI to help with our interviews. All right, I want to close things out with a question because both of you have had the very cool opportunity to talk to some of the most impressive people in the world. I mean, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Calvin Harris. So we're talking like across industries or skill sets as well. And something that came to mind as I was thinking about what question to ask you about all these wonderful folks that you've spoken to is something that I've heard Naval talk about, which is being jealous of someone, like a celebrity, for example, isn't very productive. Because if you've really

really think about it. You really think about every aspect of their lives, like who their loved ones are, like how they spend their day, how wealthy they are or not. Ultimately, it's very rare, if true at all, that you would want to trade every aspect of your life for that person's life instead of just comparing, you know, one sliver of it. But I thought that frame might be interesting to ask you of all the people you've talked to, who would you actually want to trade lives with? Who were you most like, wow, in every aspect of talking to this person, like their, their staff. their warmth, their personality, the happiness they bring to life. Was there someone that you were like, wow, this person, you know, maybe unexpectedly has really captured me. And I really like respect the way that they've led their lives. Well, it's a very good question. I actually, it's going to sound like cliche, but in some ways, there's no real one person you want to be because in crypto, there's a sense of, you know, we talk about proof of work

and proof of steak. And when you talk to somebody, you know, like they have done the work. right? And that person, like, for example, let's say somebody who's in to this, they'd be like, well, why can't I be, I be transplanted into Elon Musk and, you know, I have billions of dollars and I have all these companies and it'd be fun. But Elon Musk is not the Elon set of a sum of his experiences and all the journey and that's what makes him uniquely him. So I don't think there's one person I would really want to transplant into because I would never be that person, you know, I would be me in living that person. It might be fun for a day or two, but ultimately I would probably get bored because I haven't seen the journey. What I've tried to do, It's like maybe steal things from certain people. For example, Mark, he's just an encyclopedia of everything. Totally. Off the cuff, you'll quote some like 50-year-old book, you know, and which page number. And you're like, how do you have this in your head?

Like, you know, this is crazy. And you just go off on that. That is amazing. We had like Andrews Heelsberg, who is a legendary programming language designer. He's worked in one problem for 40 years and just honed that craft where he's the best in that in the world. and there's something so romantic and pure about that notion of like you work on one thing and you are going to be undisputably the very best in the world at it. And every one of these, I'm trying to steal something from them where I'm like,

huh, like, could I steal some version of what that person has and apply to my own life and my own job? But what do you think? As I'm recording the episode, I kind of look at it and based on your question, I'm like, would I be here or would I be there? I would rather be here. You know, we are having the time of our lives just bantering. across me kicking him under the table. Usually we record these. A lot of these are like late at night. Our kids are asleep. So we like have like an iPad here that's like it shows both of them.

They go to the baby cameras. These folks are all really great. They're very impressive. But they don't have the life that we do. So I would rather do this than anything else. Which I think great advice, piece of advice, but I think everyone time we created. They're like, I want to be Rogan or I want to be Lex or I want to be Alex Cooper. I want to be, I want to do the next serial. but you can't do that. And not because you're not talented or capable, but you're not them. They're doing the thing which works for them.

And Mr. Beast talks about this all the time. Like, you can't be a better Mr. Beast than Mr. Beast, right? Because it is so native to him, right? You need to find the thing which works for you and then be the very best at it. You know, steal from them, learn from them and see what's working. But you have to infuse yourself into it. Yeah. If you listen to his Joe Rogan episode,

there's a part where Joe is talking to him about him dreaming up thumbnails. and this idea where Mr. Bees has worked on coming up with YouTube video titles for years. And he prompts him. He's like, he gives him a word. I think he says like dog or something. And the title that Mr. Bees comes up with in that moment, I was like shocked. It was so good, given that his brain had processed it for like a millisecond. And so to your point, yes, everyone is, where all these AIs have been trained on a data set, which is our lives. And so you can't really just copy and paste that to someone. Like Mr. Bees, he's a savant about online video.

I'll give an example. You watch his interview at Lex Friedman, right? In the middle, he's like, Lex, while we're talking, all I'm seeing is your metrics in video, right? Like, you know, when we had him on our club show, right? You could see him being like, this part is boring to the audience. There's a part of his brain which is always like, is interesting. Is it boring, right?

And it's been trained like in the internet over millions of videos that he's watched. And he's saying about all the time. You cannot compete with him on that, right? But you'll be the best at something else, right? Like, he can't, you know, Distribese is not an Indian couple in over 20 years and you'll have a bunch of jobs. And this is going to sound like, I don't know, some self-help book, but like you have to be the best you possible. Someone's going to clip that. But no, I couldn't agree more. And just for listeners, one tip to maybe surface that is if you've ever been in a situation where someone has asked you, how did you notice that? That is something that your brain is more trained around than other people. So for me, I've been a marketer for a while. And I'll just be like driving down the street and I'll be like, do you see?

that sign on the back of that truck? Like, that's genius marketing. Or like, I'll be at the movie and I'll see some copy. And I'm always pointing this out kind of subconsciously. And then people would be like, how did you notice that tiny little thing somewhere? And I guarantee everyone listening has aspects of that in their own life where people are just like, where that come from? I've already paying attention to that. Because to everyone else, they've, you know, they've drowned it out. But maybe if you're a designer, you notice like the aesthetic within a restaurant differently than someone else. That's a wonderful place to end off. Thank you so much, both of you, I'm and Arthi. This was so fun.

It was so fun. You know, we'll have to do this again sometime. There was no, almost no kicking. So, it was our kick count at the very end? Just one. Just one. Yeah. The audience can email us or tweet at us at where that was.

We leave it as an exercise to the listeners. Yeah, that's awesome. All right, well, thank you so much. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Tess. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend.

We also recently launched on YouTube. at YouTube.com slash A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.