YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Mason

lines on the record: 89
first: 2017-12-13
most recent: 2017-12-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And then we're taking that to the next step, which is not just. Yeah, but actually editing and producing content. And so we spun it out of detour and we raised $5 million from Andreessen Horowitz. And the vision of this is to make audio and eventually video as As easy as to edit as it is with prints. Print has this killer feature where you can write something and then you can rewrite it, you can edit.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now all that stuff is becoming commoditized where there's a zillion different APIs that you can use to get that stuff really fast and really cheap. And that's really foundational. And then the other thing that we do is this technology called text audio alignment where we can analyze the phonetic content of the audio and compare it to the text and then basically layer the text on top of the audio, know the starting and ending point of every word and that stuff that we've built we found the way we realized it was viable is we found a guy that was getting his PhD in this stuff at Berkeley and we got him to come work for us. So all this stuff is just starting to happen. Like in the last year there have been a slew of different companies that are doing automated transcription disrupting the human power transcription market which ends up being like a $10 billion market.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we're leveraging the progress that big companies have made by using machine learning and artificial intelligence in speech to text recognition, where you now have 95% accuracy with decent sounding audio.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Similar. So you were trying to create any example that you can come up with of something that was really cool but maybe not really popular. And then out of it something like awesome and super popular that made a ton of money.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a little bit like ODO became Twitter or Slack was out of the gaming company. I can't remember the name of the gaming company that Stuart started. I can't remember. It's tiny something. Tiny. Yeah, similar. So you were trying to create”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it would change the audio exactly. And so we built that inside of Detour as a way to make tours. And then we would bring people into the office who were working in audio or even in video, and they would just lose their minds. I mean, half of them would be like, yeah, we've wanted this to exist for 20 years. Why has it taken this long to build it? people would just see the shortest little demo of it and get it right away. And so it was one of those things, I mean, and this was happening as long as a couple years ago where it became clear that that might be the actual thing.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we thought, well, what if we could use that to create a kind of audio editor that looks like a word processor and acted like a word processor, where instead of editing these waveform timelines, you could just edit text.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our ultimate vision was to make detour a platform where anyone would be able to produce these things. And as we were using these tools that existed to create audio content, talk-driven audio content, it became clear that it was just never going to happen with the tools that existed. The learning curve is super high. And then even once you understand it, it's tedious and slow because you're looking at these waveforms, just timelines of waveforms. And even if you understand that stuff, you have to kind of turn off your editorial brain and engage your engineering brain. And it's really difficult to work with. So we were aware of the explosion progress that was happening around speech to text automated transcription, where now you have models that are transcribing audio and comprehending audio at rates higher than humans can.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My new company, much like one could think of it as a pivot, much like Coupon was a pivot. It's been incubated inside of Detour for the last couple of years. So Detour were basically making these things, podcasts, that are scripted, and we recorded hundreds of hours of voiceover sessions”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that was more of the diversion than anything else as reporters were ever so fond of pointing out during the tough times I was a music major. And I worked at a recording studio for a couple years out of school. So getting into audio and content was something I was always interested in. And I don't know. But also I just, you know, I'm not looking to I'm looking to do things that I think are interesting and products that I want to exist and they don't all fit into one category. The goal, I'm not driven by starting another $20 billion company”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't have anything to announce about what's happening to it right now, other than it's not going anywhere, and hopefully I'll have something happy to say about it in the next couple of months.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was good neighborhood. Yeah, I mean, it is good. For people who have done it, and people who have done it really love it The challenge is when you pitch someone like, hey, let's go take an audio tour this weekend. The pre-existing ideas people have about that, like, oh, an audio tour. You mean like that kind of lame thing I do when I when I... I mean, a museum. It happens to be there, and I'll give it a try. So it's just been hard to build a mobile app that has such a high onboarding requirement where you have to go out into the city and block off two hours before you can even have any idea of what the experience is like. But I think it's really hard as a standalone travel startup. It's not going anywhere. I'm not working there anymore.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then detour was like actually an idea that I had before Groupon. It was, and what it is is it's an app for taking audio tours of cities. And it's something I always wanted when I traveled. I always wanted a really exceptional Way to explore cities with people that know them best on your own terms.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I mean, I wouldn't have chosen to be fired if I could go back to that moment now and have not been fired. I would have not been fired, even though I'm really glad to not be working at Groupon anymore. I still feel a responsibility to the...”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, okay. And anyway, it was like so clearly fired, and the letter was all like. No awareness of that whatsoever. And it's worked for him. And it works for people all the time. So, I mean, I feel good about it. I wouldn't do it differently, but I also wouldn't recommend it's probably not worth it. You also seem somewhere.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, but so if you don't do that, like I remember reading about Joshua Topolsky's resignation letter and he had been fired and wait, he used to work here. He was from here that he was fired. So maybe I should find another example.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But here's the reason it makes sense. Because now every time anybody writes about me, or at least when detour came out, it was always like ousted Groupon CEO starts a new company. And so it basically gives reporters permission to bring that up over and over again. We keep talking about it. Right. And also it's weird because I meet people at parties. I go to a lot of parties and I meet, I don't really go to a lot of parties, but like when I meet people, they're like, oh, yeah, I loved your, like, that's what they remember me for is the letter, which I, so Alstud is a...”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I did it for that reason. It was so obvious to everybody that I would have been fired, right? Like even if I hadn't, even if there was like a family emergency or whatever, nobody would believe. So the only thing that I'm doing in my mind at the time by saying by pretending like I wasn't fired is like deluding myself.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll tell you why I did it, and I'll tell you why it's probably a mistake to do that for people that are considering such a thing.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, so then the horse was unrelated, but that's part of a long version of the story. So then Bloomberg is coming up the stairs, and we've got the horse ready to present to him. And then our PR person found out that his daughter had just been injured in a horse riding So there was a episode of Veep, this last minute scramble to hide the horse. So we ended up hiding the horse in the kitchen elevator.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Next to his desk, and we gave him a machine gun that he was wearing. And then he just had the customer service headset on and he was sitting typing at his computer. And the way I thought of it is like, these poor security guards never find anything. This at least will be good for a laugh for them. They'll give me a high five. Anyway, like my COO at the time saw that moments before the security guards came up and shut it down. This is why they hired me. This is why you hired me to stop you from doing these things. I regret that.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. I was like, it would be funny if we just dressed up one of our customer service representatives as a terrorist. No, don't.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, and so he sent his security guards up to look around, and that was new to me. I'd never had that where security guards are going to come and do what I was. Do a sweep, yeah. And I was like”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we thought, let's give him a gift and something to say thank you for coming. And then we were like, it would be funny to give him something that would be like this incredible responsibility. Because how do you react to something like that? So at first we thought we'd give him a dog, but then it just seemed like he might believe that and it would be weird. So we pushed a little bit further and made it a horse.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The train. Who was that from? But it was different than the Shervin horse. Like, I just want to think that was not a cool horse to just, oh, look at me, I'm at a party, I'm a horse. The reason.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was the problem. Yeah. I mean, so that always worked for me as a private when we were a private company. And getting back to what I wasn't prepared for, what I wasn't prepared for was the degree to which you enter the big leagues. And it's an entirely different game once you're a public company. And I just had this incredibly naive attitude. It was like, oh, I'll just be myself and I'll just keep doing what I've been doing. Right.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so I think it was then disappointing for people in Chicago when it didn't prove to earn its place alongside Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft and blah, blah, blah. Right.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think in Chicago there was a, it's like I was just in Finland and Finland had all of their hopes and dreams tied to Nokia and now the country's like in a identity crisis because of its collapse. And I think at least in tech. For a period of time, Groupon was carrying that weight. Yeah, you had that great headquarters.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just never comfortable with the amount of Like the adulation and all of that on the way up. And I responded to that like aggressively by going out of my way.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a hard time taking myself seriously. Because there's something true about tech. Here's the secret. I like people to believe that I'm this super genius who's just like, no, I'm sorry, nothing had anything to do with luck. This is all skill and capability and just razor-sharp instincts. But the fact of the matter is there's an incredible amount of luck, right? There's a lot of people, entrepreneurs out there who are way smarter and more capable than I am that have never had the kind of success of Groupon. I mean, I don't think I'm incompetent, but I do think that luck had a lot to do with it.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The guy that actually was in charge of all of the content came up with that name. His name was Aaron With. And when we were like, we need to come up for a name for this group coupon company. And he was like, how about Groupon? I mean, I make it sound less genius than it was, but yeah, that's where it came from.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, well, it's still a multi-billion dollar business, and people still use it all the time and get a ton of value out of that. We got that out there What did I, what else did I do well? I don't know.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whole, I mean, so the whole thing from the write up and down was surreal and absurd. The absurdity, I mean, there was something absurdity about the kind of heroification That happened on the way up And then also the opposite of that on the way down. But luckily, the ride up prepared me for all of that. And I just look back on it as this crazy experience that I feel really lucky to Been part of.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, I always did. I had a lifelong love of coupons. Since I was a small child. Would you wake up”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it seemed like, man, if I could get a critical mass of people, a tipping point of people together, and we all threatened to cancel our contract, then maybe they would take us seriously. And then the point became just a broader or more abstracted platform for that kind of concept. You get a bunch of people together and they all agreed to do something if some conditions are met, that thing could be doing something. It could be giving money towards something. And then one of the ways people were using it was to buy things as a group, group purchases. And so then we just focused in on that and it became groupon.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. So it started out as this thing called the point. And at the time before that, I was getting a master's degree in University of Chicago in public policy. And I was learning about collective action problems and had this issue with my cell phone contract. And these egregious contracts that they lock you into.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. So talk about your journey, your short journey. People know what happened in Groupon, and we'll talk about where it is right now. You don't have any involvement with them now, do you? Not at all.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, we had just done a deal for the Art Institute of Chicago and sold 5,000 memberships, something like 10% of what they sell in a year. Many of those people went on to renew. And yeah, check it out groupon.com, daily deals on the best stuff to do in your city”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just put on the headphones. All right. Put them on right now. Thank you. Oh, isn't that better? Don't you feel better? Don't you feel closer affiliated with me in Casey here? Wait and see. All right. So Andrew, when last I saw you, you were doing detour. First, let's talk about, let's talk about your history because I want to get into your new company. We have a whole hour to talk. Give the people who don't know you're famous. Oh, you took off the headphones.”
2017-12-13 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT