--:-- Host: 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 Serial." 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 dabbled 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 stand out.
--:-- 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 as Sriram and Arthi 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 Naomi Osaka.
--:-- So in this episode, we get to hear from Sriram and Arthi 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 Sriram 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, Sriram and Arthi 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 bets.
--:-- As a reminder, 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 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 gonna 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.
--:-- Arthi: You should have told me this right at the beginning. He knows way more about this world than I do.
--:-- Host: Okay, oh my goodness. All right, so I'm gonna 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. 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.
--:-- Arthi: And casting, I guess. Broadcast.
--:-- Host: Yes. Yes. Arthi got it. Second question. What year was this term coined?
--:-- Sriram: I am going to go with... [presses button] Say it. Well, it says iPod. It must be post iPod. So I'm probably going to say 2004.
--:-- Host: That's right. Sriram gets a point. We're 1-1.
--:-- Sriram: I'm a genius.
--:-- Host: Okay. All right. Question three. According to an Edison report, what is the most popular podcast genre?
--:-- Host: Comedy. Yes. That's right. All right, 2-1. Okay, so of the people who listen to podcasts, according to Infinite Dial, how many do they listen to per week? How many shows?
--:-- Host: No. Wait, let's see. Well, I'm going to say if somebody is answering... No, no, just say it. Number.
--:-- Host: That's right. Okay, you guys, this is not cool. I promise I did not send Sriram these questions beforehand. All right. How many downloads do you need per episode, according to Buzzsprout, to be in the top 1% of podcasts? And just round that up.
--:-- Host: 4,500. That's right.
--:-- Sriram: It was in the prep doc.
--:-- Host: I know. So I was testing who prepped. All right. Two more. Who was the highest paid creator in 2022?
--:-- Sriram: I'm going to go... [presses button] Mr. Beast.
--:-- Host: That's right. Okay. So we have one more question. It's Ty. At what age did Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. Mr. Beast, start YouTubing? Okay, you did it first. I think Sriram was first.
--:-- Sriram: I'm going to say 16.
--:-- Host: Nope. Let's see who gets it closer. Arthi, what's your guess?
--:-- Host: That's closer. He started at 13.
--:-- Arthi: Okay, I win. I win.
--:-- Host: All right, Arthi wins the...
--:-- Arthi: It doesn't matter. I actually know Jimmy. It's okay. Nobody cares.
--:-- Sriram: Nobody cares. Be nice.
--:-- Arthi: That was fun. I was kind of skeptical, but since I won, that was really fun.
--:-- Host: You get the pride of knowing more about the podcasting world, even though you thought...
--:-- Arthi: I don't know. This segment needs some work. We'll talk about it afterwards. If I'd won, it would have been better.
--:-- Sriram: But anyway, all right. Lose with dignity.
--:-- Arthi: Well, no such thing.
--:-- Host: 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 of years on your Good Time Show, which started in 2020. 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?
--:-- Sriram: Okay, okay. I'll go first. The origin story is actually, we didn't plan for any of this. We never saw ourselves as creators or podcasters or anything of that sort. So this is 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 we basically thought, wouldn't it be nice to host like a virtual dinner party kind of thing? Because we used to host all 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.
--:-- I can't tell you how much it was purely accidental and serendipitous. 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 intuition involved. It came from this very human core of "we're bored." We like talking to people. 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. The first few episodes were not like these shows. They were really like, 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, our parents or whoever would listen in and be like, "What was that? Why are you guys talking on this thing?"
--:-- 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 they're going through. But I would say there was definitely an inflection point where Arthi, I remember the first few weeks she would get all these DMs from India, from here. A lot of women would reach out and be like, "I can't believe you're there and you have Mark and Reason and Elon Musk. And because your background is my background and I'm here." And those things, it really gives us oxygen to do these shows.
--:-- Host: 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. It really is this maze where you're like, "I think something's working because people aren't listening." So where would you say the show is now? What kind of show are you trying to create?
--:-- Arthi: 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 starting podcasts 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. If you had told us two years ago, "Oh, you have to have this 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. I just don't think we are that." But now, it's given us the time and buffer to just learn and grow through this and feel comfortable doing what we do.
--:-- So now I think the show... how would you describe where we are now? We've sort of grown rapidly. And I think in many ways to measure it, we often get episodes now which get millions of views. And that's really amazing. We're 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, an 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.
--:-- Host: 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?
--:-- Sriram: Absolutely, right? And it doesn't go anywhere. So I think you need 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 the level of authenticity. And in some ways, they have to really start connecting with you as the narrator, the guide, the Sherpa who's going to take them through this. And that exists in this fuzzy sphere of human connection and intimacy and relationships.
--:-- Then there is this other word, which is partnerships, metrics, views, retention, top of funnel, downloads, right? And it's incredibly quantifiable. And there is a game, there is an algorithm that you all need to play to. What we're trying to do is kind of balance both. Because at the end of the day, we don't do this for a living. We kind of do this for fun. And unless we enjoy it, this will stop.
--:-- Arthi: The thing that hasn't really changed is we're just 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 have these folks to just talk to them. We should just ask them how they do what they do." And that hasn't changed in two years. And that's the part that I'm really excited about. Every guest, like 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. 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 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 that side of them, whether they're builders, thinkers, creators, whoever they are. That is the most fun for us.
--:-- Host: Well, you know what I'm taking away, which is something that I've noticed with content for quite some time now. 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 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, it's 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, 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 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. I truly enjoyed being there. How do you think about that sliding scale with your podcast?
--:-- Sriram: You can't separate it from your own personality. Huberman Lab, Andrew is amazing at it because he brings to the table this amazing life experience. You should listen to him when 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 this 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 yourself.
--:-- So when this show started taking off, I kind of went into this analysis of all the great interviewers the last 20, 30 years. And I tried to 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 like this impossible equation.
--:-- I was trying to go through history on who is going to figure it out. Everyone has their 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 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 the heck are you working on? Tell me what you wrote." And he could sort of communicate the honest version of some New Yorker on the street, be like, "I don't know who this person is. Tell me what you got. What are you about?" And there's an honesty to the conversation. 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. Howard Stern, maybe polarizing character. But one of the things he likes to do is put in amazing research. Howard Stern with Jon Stewart, one of his first questions is he pulls out the very first joke Jon Stewart ever said in a public setting. And Stewart is bowled over. He's like, "How do you ever find it?" 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. "I'm going to hold you accountable." 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 fan of John le Carré, the famous espionage writer who tragically recently passed away. He hated doing press, hated talking to journalists. And one time he was in France and he met this host for what he thought was some random French show. And he was like, "God, I hate it. I don't even speak French well." And he did some research. This host, his name is Bernard Pivot. He hosted basically, let's call it the equal to the Tonight Show in France. I think he still does. And le Carré was nervous. He was like, "I hate this. I'm going to make a fool of myself. I hate the whole endeavor." In the first 50 seconds, he's like, "This is the most amazing content you've ever had." He says, "It is not because Pivot 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 okay here with me.'"
--:-- And when I saw that, and I'm not going to claim we even get close to any of that. But I was like, this is what our goal is. Every show, 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.
--:-- Host: You know what? That reminds me of this analogy that I like to use for podcasts specifically. 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. Podcasts are like 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 parasocial relationship with the listener.
--:-- And so that's where I think, 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 has kind of figured 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, 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?
--:-- Arthi: I kind of have a different approach than Sriram 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, we have all these people and we know our cohorts of audience who are listening, watching. They often tend to be not from the same world that we are, but aspirationally, they want to be here. I think of our job as being 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 timeframe that they have.
--:-- It sounds really clinical when I put it that way. But really, 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 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."
--:-- Host: 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, "This is so thoughtful. I spent two months on this." And then it flops. And sometimes it's the simplest things that people just really latch onto. They're really human things.
--:-- 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?
--:-- Sriram: 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? The basic questions of any product, especially in the consumer world, really go for podcasts also.
--:-- And often a famous name can help with that, which is you get an Elon Musk, A.R. Rahman who's huge in India. A lot of people who have no 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. We've changed multiple things. We try out things all the time about everything from thumbnails to how we handle social, the trailer, the first few seconds of a retention hook.
--:-- Arthi: It's easy to get super caught up in the metric side of things. But the things I look for, I think what Sriram said, which is you get these acquisitive episodes which are like big guests, but I really look for retention. This is the cliched "we came for this guest but we're staying for you both" kind of thing. And we get comments like this all the time. That's 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 a user watches is anywhere between 12 to 15 minutes of our episode, which is like 25% of the episode. We also look for retention overall. If you're a new user who subscribed, are you coming back and listening to new shows that we're putting together every week? 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 your email lights up.
--:-- Host: Yeah, your email lights up. People that you know.
--:-- Arthi: Yeah, people that you know. And you also know the opposite when something totally didn't work and just dead silence.
--:-- Host: Yeah. And the hard part sometimes is when that mismatches your expectation or your calibration, when you think something's going to work and it totally bombs.
--:-- Sriram: 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 tried to make this conversation and these points and the communication style work didn't resonate with the listeners.
--:-- Host: Yeah, I think there's another version of this which happens, which I think sometimes, and I'm more guilty of this than Arthi is 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 fanboy out over the thing, or you're thinking this person is an 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 a particular way. It's going to work with your team. 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. 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. Sometimes you have to because somebody's launching a new book or a new movie. You have to ask about it. That's great, it's 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 try to get better at it. I try to give more space and just follow the conversation. It's tricky.
--:-- Arthi: But I do think that's another factor. Oftentimes Sriram would be like, "This person's an expert in this. We should really go..." He'll be very serious about the prep and everything. And then they just want to show up and goof off. And Sriram would be like, "But I really want to do it." I'm like, "Let them be. They're just having fun. They're just goofing off." And to your point, the listener can tell.
--:-- Host: I mean, Sriram 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 overprepared. 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 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 follow this conversation arc." And I think 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, think about how strange that is in real life. It's the same on podcasts.
--:-- Sriram: It totally is. And I'll say, sometimes I'm guilty of this. Sometimes I'll do something where I think the underlying psychology is, "I'm going to show you how smart I am about this topic."
--:-- Host: Oh, totally. You agree so quickly.
--:-- Arthi: He loves to do that. He'll 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?"
--:-- Sriram: Hold on, hold on, hold on. I would say the place where it comes from is sometimes when you're a fan and you meet somebody, you want to show them that you've done the work. You know all these things. And I do like a one-minute thing of, "Well, you obviously did this, this, and this. And then in this year you did that and you wrote this." And they'd be like, "Uh-huh, uh-huh." They'd be like, "Where does he go with this?"
--:-- Arthi: And finally, he'll be like... I'm laughing because I didn't say that.
--:-- Sriram: Here's a very surprising thing which I didn't realize. It surprised me for sure. I was talking to a really famous person about interviews and they said, "You know what? When a fan interviews me, one, it's amazing because this person is a fan of your work, your craft, movie, book, whatever. It's great. You feel good about it. But you also feel real pressure, because if that person asks you..."
--:-- Sriram: ...Like, let's say you're interviewing Michael Jordan. You're like, "Tell me about crossing over Bryon Russell and winning the game." And he's like, "God, I've told this story a hundred times before." This person has heard that story. I am now on the spot to deliver something because this person's such a fan. They have to perform for you. But they want to because they're like, "This person says I mean so much to them. I need to give them something." And they feel pressure too. And pressure is never a good spot for a conversation.
--:-- Host: Sriram comes from this place of generosity of spirit where he just wants to make this work and you can see the yearning. All right, let me give you the real secret sauce of podcasting, or at least our podcast. You ready?
--:-- Host: Arthi kicks me under the table here when she thinks I'm going on too long for a story.
--:-- Arthi: That's just me.
--:-- Host: And I leave it as an exercise to the listener to spot the moments in every episode.
--:-- Sriram: Now I have to know how many kicks there have been in this podcast so far.
--:-- Arthi: I was going to say, I think my secret weapon, which is many podcast hosts' 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."
--:-- Host: I want to end this segment about podcasting with a question. 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 an 80-20? Whether it was something as simple as choosing the right thumbnails, or choosing to do video instead of just audio. Are there any things that a new podcaster should really keep in mind, like, "Okay, just make sure you check these boxes"?
--:-- Sriram: There is this expression, which sounds very mean, which is "use all parts of the buffalo." We do this: we have an hour and a half of a video file and a bunch of audio files. What I think you need to do is take that and repurpose it in every single way for every single platform. Gary Vaynerchuk does this really well. He puts a lot of effort to take every bit of content and make it the most native version possible for each platform. On YouTube, you have to lean into video. On audio, you want to have amazing sound engineering, lead-in intros. Cut it up into short versions for Reels or TikTok. Extract the text out of it and put it on Twitter or Substack.
--:-- Sriram: One of the ways to think about it is your podcast is really hard because if you look at the native podcast platform, say Apple, there is no discovery mechanism, no algorithm. It's really word of mouth. But a lot of other platforms have discovery mechanisms: Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. The more you are native to what that platform wants, the easier it gets. We just keep changing a lot of stuff. We just got on IG, YouTube, we're trying shorts. We keep playing around with different formats and trying to keep it native to those platforms.
--:-- Arthi: You just have to keep at it.
--:-- Host: 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 going to create this product, put it on one distribution channel, and 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 an audience and a community. Something that I think is interesting that you've ventured into recently is in-person events, translating what you're doing digitally into something physical. Audience is kind of unidirectional. A bunch of people listening to your podcast. But a community has connections within the listeners to other listeners. How are you thinking about that?
--:-- Arthi: I think that's the long-term goal. We want to have these cohorts of people where 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. That's the ideal end 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 to go back home. We got a lot of help there. People on the ground offered us a venue and offered to do the whole RSVP and figure out who's coming. That evening when we had people coming in, that's when it hit both of us. 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. We went from being these podcast hosts who are goofy getting guests to show up, to being these people. A lot of them, I think like 70%, are founders. It was great because they all got value from just talking to each other.
--:-- Sriram: One of the most interesting pieces I ever read on this topic is Kevin Kelly's legendary "1,000 True Fans." The idea is that if you're creating any product, you want to find your first thousand true fans who will consume anything that you do and they trust you. If you do that, you're really off to the races. The community really comes from that. Are these people connecting to each other? Are they finding value out of just what we do? 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" or "This helped me get ahead in my career." There are folks who think of doing a meetup even without us. You need some sort of goal or mission to fuel you.
--:-- Host: Well, what's your mission in that case? Because you both said you just 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. What is the end state of this?
--:-- Sriram: 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...
--:-- Arthi: It's literally benefited us.
--:-- Sriram: Oh yeah, it's literally benefited us. We would not have met without technology. We met online 20 years ago. This is our way of maybe giving back. It's not as catchy as other companies' mission statements, but it works for us.
--:-- Host: I have to ask you guys, you seem very aligned on a lot of your answers. What do you guys disagree on? You're a married couple. I actually have a separate podcast from the a16z podcast that I do with my husband. Let me just say, we don't agree on everything.
--:-- Sriram: Oh no, all the time, all the time. We do disagree quite a bit. I get kicked under the table a lot.
--:-- Arthi: I think part of it is this: I'm very left-brained as a person. I'm also much more introverted. I look at it as, "What are they here for? What do we have to convey?" It has to be really clean, the narrative and the story. I think Sriram is more of an artist. He's a showman. He brings high energy. He's very extroverted. People love him. You can see them even before we hit the record button, they're already yapping away. They spend 20 minutes just chatting and I'm like, "Stop, stop, stop. Save this material for the show." They just love being in the room with him and chatting with him.
--:-- Sriram: Arthi keeps the show honest. She'd be the one who's like, "Hey, we need to do this for this person. Ask this question." She's often holding me honest and reining in a creative tangent, a weird tangent. I think we balance it out. But yeah, we do disagree a lot. It doesn't show.
--:-- Host: Sriram, I want to ask you about community as well. You've been creating these WhatsApp chats with a bunch of creators. They're great. Arthi, you mentioned this energy that Sriram 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?
--:-- Sriram: I think there's been a shift in the way we think about social media and online conversation. When Twitter first started around 2008 or 2007, you would just come in there and post what you had for lunch and it was perfectly fine. Everyone was just a small set of friends. Nobody was going to dunk on you and have it show up in the national media the next day. What social media and online community is has changed in many exciting ways. We've seen the rise of YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, BeReal, Discord. I can keep going on and on. There are now different spaces that people come together in, and we've gotten more aware of the different modalities of each platform in ways that I don't think we were 15 years ago.
--:-- Host: I'd be remiss not to ask you about your experience at Twitter and where you see that evolving, or how you see the whole matrix of social. If people aren't aware, you've had some pretty intimate involvement in the recent acquisition by Elon. You got a front row seat into what people are thinking there.
--:-- Sriram: If you go back five, six years ago, it felt like social media was in a bit of a stasis. You had two or three companies which really dominated. I worked for some of them. You posted in ways where you expected everything was going to be public. But in the last few years, there's been an explosion of innovation. Things have shifted in a few dimensions. One, we've moved from a follower graph to having AI and recommendations drive so much of what we do. YouTube recommendations drive a lot of it. TikTok, the follower graph almost doesn't matter. It's really the For You page. Twitter is obviously expanding with it. That's one dimension.
--:-- Sriram: The other dimension is the size of the spaces. Mark Zuckerberg was saying that so much of the conversation on Instagram is somebody takes a post and sends it to a group chat, and it sparks off a conversation. There's a public-to-private space transition happening that just wasn't happening before. Third, I spend all of my day at the job, when Arthi's not kicking me under the table, working on crypto and Web3. One of the core ideas behind it is power to the people and decentralization. How do we do it in a way where these things are protocols and everyone has collective ownership? There are a bunch of these zeitgeist shifts happening. I was briefly helping Elon at Twitter. I was there on the first day and for a period of time after. It now feels like social is active and alive again. Four or five years ago, there was a time when you were like, "I have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, maybe Snapchat, and that's it. That's going to be all the social media anybody ever needs." That is not true anymore.
--:-- Host: Arthi, I want to hear your perspective on the creator economy and specifically the creator middle class. We've seen independent creators be able to lucratively monetize their followings. Audio is interesting because if you look at the top podcast charts, they're all people who had large distribution, who were already successful, who already had reach. You could say that's partially because of the discoverability or monetization that exists within audio. Do you have any thoughts on whether we're really going to be able to build this creator middle class within audio specifically?
--:-- Arthi: You are what you measure. With audio, there's just not a whole lot that's measurable right now. A lot of it is hidden behind these big black boxes and controlled by different entities. Right at the beginning, we played this game. You're looking at 4,500 downloads an episode to make it to 1%. Where does the chart fall off? What is distribution? Who's getting that? There's no transparency of metrics. I think if you have better metrics, better discoverability, and more tools to help creators be successful, you're going to get there. The other part is, at the end of the day, if you're making money through brands or sponsorships, brands need to start seeing value. That feedback loop is not quite there yet. "This person talked about this product, they gave a coupon code, and the attribution system behind it..." A lot of it is still super early days. It's going to happen, but it's going to be a while.
--:-- Sriram: I kind of disagree that all these people had audiences. Look at the top charts. Huberman did not have a large audience. He came out of nowhere to be on the top of charts. Lex Friedman came out of nowhere to build one of the most popular podcasts around. There are obviously celebrities, like Emma Chamberlain has one of the popular podcasts. But there are a lot of folks who really burst out of...
--:-- Arthi: No, I think you're right that these people didn't have followings, but they didn't burst onto the scene. I think the thing we're missing is it took a really long time for a lot of these folks to keep chipping away at it. It just looks to us like overnight successes because it suddenly got into the zeitgeist and everybody's like, "Huberman, Lex," and you just hear that in your echo chamber. But they've been doing this for years. That goes back to the point that it just takes a while. All the breakout stars don't break out overnight. It takes five, six, seven years to get there.
--:-- Host: Which maybe somebody listening to us who wants to start their own podcast... This is amazing stuff. 90% of podcasts don't last to episode 20, and then the remaining 90% don't last to episode 40.
--:-- Arthi: That is so true. 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 have to look into yourself. Don't look to the numbers because numbers will be zero for quite a bit of time. Make it to 40 and then you can talk about whether you want to quit or not.
--:-- Sriram: 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 tell people, and this was earlier about product-market fit and how we think about a startup, is I sometimes see podcasters record an entire season before launching it. That is bad. You're getting no feedback. I was talking to this person and they had recorded 15 episodes back to back. They're going to put it out for three or four months. Maybe this will really work. But the problem is when something isn't working, they're not getting the feedback. They can only react on it like next year. That's really hard because you need to react week to week. Your OODA loop—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. By episode 40, you'd be so dramatically better than you were in episode one.
--:-- Host: Both of you have been founders or have grown companies to significant size. As we've talked about, the infrastructure is not great. We don't get as much signal as we'd like. The tooling is pretty nascent compared 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?
--:-- Sriram: There are a few parts to look at this. One is the prep, getting the guest booked on our show, hosting the conversation, recording it, the tools for recording it. Initially, it used to be super manual. The tools were not that great. Guest booking was like Calendly chaos of going back and forth between the three of us. A lot of that has gotten more streamlined. Post-recording, we used to struggle with transcripts. What do we do now? Break this into clips so 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. Reels can be a little bit longer. Lots of other tools are coming in and playing a really good role there. Then post-release, looking at metrics. We use Anchor, Simplecast. We look at podcast download numbers. YouTube has been really good. I really like the Studio metrics page. A lot of these tools are coming in and getting really good, practically month to month you're seeing step function changes in what value they're offering. I do think we are in a really interesting time now.
--:-- Arthi: We tried to prep for a couple of episodes by feeding it to ChatGPT.
--:-- Arthi: That was kind of fun. We fed it a bunch of stuff like, "This is an author, these are the books..."
--:-- Sriram: Hold on, hold on. Here's what happened. We forgot to prep for an episode and we didn't have time. Arthi at the last minute was like, "I don't know what to ask." She fed it into ChatGPT and we got a bunch of stuff that was pretty good. I actually sent the questions to Sriram and he was like, "Yeah, these are pretty good." And I was like, "I did not come up with them. ChatGPT did."
--:-- Host: It's so funny. I have to confess. For the trivia at the very beginning, around half of those questions, I just asked ChatGPT, "What are some interesting, fun facts about podcasting?" I came up with a few on my own, but yeah, ChatGPT was my little assistant as well.
--:-- Sriram: I think in the future, there's going to be like, when you buy a product from the supermarket, you have content that says, "This was purely human generated. There's only 10% AI participation in this podcast."
--:-- Host: I heard Mark actually talk about this on a recent interview with Vijay. He talked about Mad Men, one of the most popular TV shows of all time. The writers talked about how they would sit in a room and come up with a bunch of different plot lines. They would come up with them partially because they were like, "Let's get all the obvious stuff out of the way. Let's write what everyone expects." Mad Men has now become known for the fact that you don't know what's going to happen. It takes a left turn. Even as I was preparing for this interview, I was like, "Let's use ChatGPT." Some of it's okay. Some of it's good. But even the good stuff, I'm like, "Let me come up with better questions than what it's outputting here." These are the obvious things that everyone expects to ask that I can almost guarantee a previous interview has asked. I also think it's a tool to push us. It's a good generic baseline. It's important to see what that baseline looks like so that you can actually do the work. It's a median version of humanity. If you put in 15 minutes and Googled and had to write up something about this person, what would you get? It kind of gives you some words.
--:-- Arthi: True, true, true.
--:-- Host: The truth has come out for both of us. We're already using AI to help with our interviews. All right, I want to close things out with a question. Both of you have had the very cool opportunity to talk to some of the most impressive people in the world. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Calvin Harris. Across industries and skill sets. Something that came to mind as I was thinking about what question to ask you is something I've heard Naval talk about. Being jealous of a celebrity isn't very productive. If you really think about every aspect of their lives—who their loved ones are, how they spend their day, how wealthy they are—it's very rare that you would want to trade every aspect of your life for that person's life. You're just comparing one sliver. 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—their stature, their warmth, their personality, the happiness they bring to life—this person has really captured me and I really respect the way they've led their lives?"
--:-- Sriram: It's a very good question. This is going to sound cliché, but in some ways, there's no real one person you want to be. In crypto, we talk about proof of work and proof of stake. When you talk to somebody, they have done the work. Somebody listening might say, "Why can't I be transplanted into Elon Musk and have billions of dollars and all these companies?" But Elon Musk is not Elon Musk set up as a sum of his experiences and all the journey. That's what makes him uniquely him. I don't think there's one person I would really want to transplant into because I would never be that person. I would be me living that person's life. It might be fun for a day or two, but I would probably get bored because I haven't seen the journey. What I've tried to do is steal things from certain people. For example, Mark is just an encyclopedia of everything. Off the cuff, he'll quote some 50-year-old book and which page number, and you're like, "How do you have this in your head?" That is amazing. We had Andrew Hejlsberg, a legendary programming language designer. He's worked on one problem for 40 years and just honed that craft where he's the best in the world at it. There's something so romantic and pure about that notion of working on one thing and being undisputably the very best in the world at it. Every one of these people, I'm trying to steal something from them. I'm like, "Could I steal some version of what that person has and apply it to my own life and my own job?"
--:-- Arthi: As I'm recording the episode, I 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. We are having the time of our lives just bantering across, me kicking him under the table. Usually we record these late at night. Our kids are asleep. We have an iPad here that shows both of them, the baby cameras. These folks are all really great. They're very impressive, but they don't have the life that we do. I would rather do this than anything else.
--:-- Sriram: I think that's great advice for everyone trying to be creative. They're like, "I want to be Rogan, or I want to be Lex, or I want to be Alex Cooper, or I want to be the next Serial." But you can't do that. Not because you're not talented or capable, but you're not them. They are doing the thing which works for them. Mr. Beast talks about this all the time. You can't be a better Mr. Beast than Mr. Beast because it is so native to him. You need to find the thing which works for you and then be the very best at it. Steal from them, learn from them, see what's working. But you have to infuse yourself into it.
--:-- Host: 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. Beast has worked on coming up with YouTube video titles for years. Joe prompts him, gives him a word. I think he says "dog" or something. The title that Mr. Beast comes up with in that moment, I was shocked. It was so good, given that his brain had processed it for a millisecond. To your point, everyone is where all these AIs have been trained on a data set, which is our lives. You can't just copy and paste that to someone else's life. Mr. Beast is a savant about online video. You watch his interview with Lex Friedman. In the middle, he's like, "Lex, while we're talking, all I'm seeing is your metrics in video." When we had him on our Clubhouse show, 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 it interesting? Is it boring?" It's been trained like a neural net over millions of videos that he's watched. You cannot compete with him on that. But you'll be the best at something else. Mr. Beast is not an Indian couple 20 years in with a bunch of jobs. This is going to sound like some self-help book, but you have to be the best you possible.
--:-- Host: Someone's going to clip that. But I couldn't agree more. For listeners, one tip to surface that is: if you've ever been in a situation where someone has asked you, "How did you notice that?" that is something your brain is more trained around than other people. For me, I've been a marketer for a while. I'll be driving down the street and I'll be like, "Do you see that sign on the back of that truck? That's genius marketing." Or I'll be at a movie and I'll see some copy and I'm always pointing it out subconsciously. People will be like, "How did you notice that tiny little thing?" I guarantee everyone listening has aspects of that in their own life where people are just like, "Where'd that come from?" You're already paying attention to that because to everyone else, they've drowned it out. If you're a designer, you notice the aesthetic within a restaurant differently than someone else. That's a wonderful place to end off. Thank you so much, both of you, Sriram and Arthi. This was so fun.
--:-- Arthi: It was so fun. We'll have to do this again sometime.
--:-- Sriram: There was almost no kicking. What's our kick count at the very end?
--:-- Sriram: Just one. The audience can email us or tweet at us at where that was. We leave it as an exercise to the listeners.
--:-- Host: That's awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much.
--:-- Sriram: Awesome. Thanks, Tiff.
--:-- Host: 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. Bye.
