YouSaid · the spoken record

Connie Chan

lines on the record: 78
first: 2019-11-27
most recent: 2019-11-27
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

“Do you guys do these as sort of informal hallway style conversations? And the answer is that's how they actually started. But what I found is that if you're really trying to grow the show, it was only when we started editing it that it significantly, you look at the charts, it was like upward curve with the edits. And that goes back to the fact that if you're not a cult of personality, people don't, I mean, doesn't it bug you to hear people just chit chat when you're not, you kind of like get to the point. So we do do hall-waste all conversations, but mostly they're just kind of these organic conversations that are working towards some point of view.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intro who it is, the topic, the range, and there's various ways of doing it. We experimented for a while with having snippets. We did all kinds of experiments throughout the years. But what I find is that the intro is a tool to let you start the conversation in Medias Res, which is the term from literature for starting it in the middle of the story. And why that's so important is if you don't have a cult of personality show like a Joe Rogan and an Elon Musk, if you have someone new who's really smart but no one's heard of, if they start out with their personal story, that's probably going to be boring because they're not bought into this person. They don't know who it is. However, if you start with their advice and the thing that you find resourceful and useful as a listener, then the listener is going to be like, oh, that's interesting and remain hooked. And then by the middle or the end, you can then weave in their story. So the editing is about re-flowing and re-architecting that arc for that type of journey of a listener through the entire episode. And, you know, back on this note of scripting versus non-scripting, one of the folks on Twitter asked.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here. This is how I learned editing just by doing it. So to me, the first three to five minutes are incredibly important because that's the highest drop-off point. So we use the intro as a technique, which is why we actually record our intros after the fact, not before.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's a thing that I coined, but it's not like we measure it formally, but it's what we listen for. And to answer your question about starting it off, it matters more in the first five to ten minutes because it's just like editing an article. So I call myself a chartbeat editor because when I was at Wired, I was obsessed with the leaderboard and I, of course, like love seeing where I was on that, especially because I had a flailing section that I wanted to take to the top. And so I was very motivated by that. But then what I noticed in chart beat besides a leaderboard is you saw where listeners, or sorry, where readers dropped off. And that was super valuable to me because then I started seeing patterns of, oh, well, if people drop off here, I need to work harder to really get the nut graph up here before the third paragraph. And the more I work to make sure that every sentence is calculated to keep the listener, the reader engaged, the better the piece. And then by the middle and the end, when they're committed, you have a lot more room to be loosey-goosey and fun. So in the podcast, it's the exact same thing, the chart beat model that I brought.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not so much abusing the listener's time, it's that ear is a new mindshare, you're competing for that share. So the show has to be differentiated. And if you want people to listen to your show and it doesn't have a cult of personality, then you have to make sure it's resourceful and they have a high insights per minute. So their time and their payoff is permitted.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a Joe Rogan. That's a perfect example. The audience is following Joe Rogan. They almost don't care who his guest is. Of course they care if it's Elon Musk or someone else. But because of that combo, they're willing to listen for three hours to the two of them on air smoking pot. In our case, you don't.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a lot of the people on Twitter asked about how you edit the podcast from the whole story arc to rest. So the edits are to optimize for what I call insights per minute. There's three things to that. One, it's that if you have a non-cultive personality show, and I've talked about this before, how there's a taxonomy of types of shows, and cult of personality shows, which are very host and personality driven.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really want to host because I just felt like no, no, I'm a behind the scenes person. What are you talking about? I'm an editor. I can't be a host. So it's funny because everyone hates the sound of their own voice. And I notice all my ticks. And the first one would be like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, got it, got it, got it, mm-hmm, like, like, like, or yeah, you're right, various versions of this. And so what I would do is I would hear my ticks and then systematically decide conscientiously not to say them. Guess what happened? Well, they went away. And another one popped up in its place. It was like a game of whack-a-mole. It didn't matter how many chicks I got rid of. A new one just jumped right up in its place. And so my theory about this is, and maybe it's grounded in science, I don't know. I've never looked it up, is that there's something.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just Hippo. He does. By the way, mighty joke about him when you get a written transcript is for every written page of a transcript, you can estimate about two minutes. And in his case, it's like one minute density is so high. But the rest of the firm talks pretty fast too. And so PSA for everyone, do not listen to our podcast at 1.5 or 2x speed. You should only listen to it at regular speed. But back to your question. So it's not ums and ahs. I mean, we do do some ticks. So my rule about ticks is we don't want to remove all those ticks, actually. We do, however, remove ticks that are a little too repetitive to the point of being disruptive to the listener. So, and I, by the way, have this tick-through, you're going to love this.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my god. No. And in fact, I want to just deconstruct a myth here because we got a lot of flack for people saying, you guys removed the breadths and you guys do this. And it's actually ironic. We never do that. What we do do, in fact, is add brets because our people talk too fast and don't pause. And so sometimes we have to manually slow them down.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I want to say something about that. This is why there are what I consider two types of editors. There's what I call shaping editors who are people who love as much raw material to work with as possible and then to kind of carve out the arc their own way. I think of this a bit like a sculptor who's given a slab of marble and figures out the shape. That's what I like to do. And then there are editors who take what they're given and they do a really good job figuring out how to rearrange it, how to put it together, think about it. That to me is more straightforward type of editing. As a shaping editor, I look for maximum optionality in my recording in that hour recording period because I want to have enough material to carve out the thing that I'm working on. Whereas for some of the other editors, they'd say when you're editing, it's not just taking”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, because then I get mad and I say, no, no, no, because people inevitably start sharing what they're going to say. And I'm like, wait till we get to that part. So we do that. And then we just go through. And then this is where the editing lets you then reorganize it into an arc that makes sense. And by the way, by arc, I don't mean it has to be linear like point A, B, C, D, in fact, I want it to be nonlinear, slippery, raw with an edge, not always clean and clear. At Wired, I had a phrase which I use for my op-ads, which is three turns of nuance. Like I like that kind of thing. What I'm doing with the editing of the story arc is, again, just listening for how the listener is going to move through it. Do they hear the organization? Do they have to work to follow it? Can they just naturally flow along and learn as they go?”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not an accident because you guys are also experts. Let's just be very clear that one of the reasons this works because that A6NC does have experts and one of the number one rules of thumb I use for all editorial written podcasts or otherwise is the concept of what I coined a number of years ago called writer topic fit, jokingly WTF. And the idea being that the writer has to have the topic and fit for the expertise. This is not credentialist. It could be earned expertise. It could be data. It could be whatever. But they have to have that. So the people who are freaked out about their executives coming on and not having any idea, we don't send questions in advance. I like the conversation to be very organic. One of the questions people asked on Twitter was, do you prepare as their script? And the answer is, no, there is no script. What we do at the beginning of every episode is we, and sometimes these people, I mean, met each other. Sometimes you're meeting Christina Schu for the first time. And the three of us are doing a conversation about stickers and memes and live streams. So in that case, what we do is we'll spend literally five minutes at the beginning, maybe less.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The downside of prepping? That's a great question. So, one of the things I learned when I was at PARC and I worked with a really good event producer for this event that we were hosting O'Reilly Media's Make, it was a first inaugural hardware workshop and one of the event producers on that said I never put two people in a green room before an event because inevitably everything they say on stage will refer back to what they were talking about right before coming on stage. And you've probably seen this at many events. And the audience doesn't have that exact same sharpness that they feel when they hear that idea. For me, when I record, I start the recorder before the person even walks in the room and I stop it only when they leave because the best stuff comes when it's a little bit unfiltered. So when we prep to answer your question, what I tell people is I don't want you to actually tell me what you're going to say because actually then the second time if you say it, it's going to be 10 times worse.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It regresses to the mean. And to me, it's a pure statistical thing. It's like in statistics, if you sample from the extremes of a data set, you essentially regress to the mean. It is literally the exact same thing happening when you do that with experts. So having a pro and a con, it's actually a case of like negating the conversation. You want to have a thoughtful, nuance conversation. So I like to avoid what I call one note narratives. I don't want an expert who has just a single observation. They're going to do it like two different ways.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, this is again going back to the same philosophy I had for the expert section, I am looking for the expert, not a expert. And again, going back to this idea of an individual op-ed or a feature story for every podcast, you ask yourself if you're doing a feature story, who are the third-party experts you would bring in? So similarly, we look for either the expert or the next best expert or someone who has very specific expertise, we don't really love consultants and derivative experts and people who just talk about the thing versus do the thing. I look for complimentary expert and this is sort of the person who can add texture. We don't want two people constantly agreeing. We also don't want them completely disagreeing. Sometimes people talked about in the early days we should do podcasts where you have pro con and again. Exactly. I love debates and Oxford style debates in particular. But what I find, what I call the panel problem where podcast becomes a conference panel, I don't know if you've seen this at every conference you go to, inevitably the smartest people, four people.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, that's just what editors do. And this is actually probably the broader context for the editorial operation, which is you always ask yourself, what are the topics we want to cover and how? And you may not know the exact how, but you have an idea of how. And one of the things that I always tell people, if we were to take this up even a notch, the editorial operation is about innovation. And Margaret talked about this in our past episode 499. And I've had a rule of thumb. People ask me this on Twitter, so I'm going to answer this question, which is whenever I think about any kind of brand or lens for content, I want it to go through two words. And the funny inspiration for this, by the way, is from Domino magazine. They wanted a feature about how you can find your signature style. And there's like a stylist who would come in and say, Connie, you are urban warrior. This is your two-word word to describe your style. Here at Andrews and Horowitz, it's Innovation Brand. When I was at Wired, it was informed optimism that came from Chris Anderson. And when I was at Xerox Park, it was entrepreneur.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And use that as a concrete way to have a really thoughtful conversation. It's funny because you think the podcast is about emoji, but it's actually about how innovation comes about when you're trying to have a system across all.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Translated Moby Dick into All Emoji using mechanical turk. And so you have two people at very different kind of perspectives on it. But here's the thing they have in common. Very different takes. Both, however, are first principles, non-derivative experts who are going at it at a first person way. Secondly, through this lens, we can then bring in all the concrete and abstract tangential ideas of governance, open versus closed, proprietary systems, how to design, Apple versus Android, Twitter, Facebook.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So obviously, conversation is so much more organic than that. You actually don't really decide the argument up front. I would actually even argue writing is organic. Sometimes you kind of know what you want to talk about, but you just kind of go with it and figure it out as you write it out. It's not like we walk into a room and say, hey, I'm going to come on the podcast and I'm going to argue X. That never happens. But what we do do is figure out, okay, so let me think of a good concrete example. Let's say we want to do a topic on emojis, which is one of my all-time favorite podcasts. And there's lots of different ways to take it. Well, okay. I think it's really interesting that emojis are pervading our culture and that yet at the same time people have to propose through proposals specific emoji to get into the set. So what if we did a conversation with someone who proposed the dumpling emoji, so Jenny Aitley did this, and then Fred Benninson, who actually”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. So in programming it, I think of every episode as an op-ed or a feature story. And so just like an op-ed or a feature story, you think to yourself, what is the argument or topic or angle? and what is the take, what's the differentiated fresh view? And then who are the people to have that?”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, to give you some more context, I think of a podcast in three phases. There's everything that happens before, during, and after. I would say that the majority of the work is before and after than during the podcast itself.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, why wouldn't we bring in experts on various topics but not have them diluted in their expertise? And so when they come on as guests, we have the first person versus the third person. That was a huge important thing to me. And it's also my bias for builders and makers.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and in fact, the external voices was built on what I did at Wired and building the expert opinion section there. And I had three views on it. So first was, I think it's really interesting that in our modern world of media, we even have intermediaries at all to dilute the voice of an expert. So in your case, perfect example, you wrote a beautiful WeChat piece that we worked on. I remember it ran the exact same day that David Pierce at Wired wrote a piece about WeChat, which is also very good and well done. Very different pieces. Yours was a first person, first principles, first party expert take that was not based on reporting it, but in using it, observing it, bringing your own thinking. It was what I describe as an ethnographic kind of piece. That's first person expertise. David's was reported, he talked to people at WeChat. He did interviews. He was coming out as a reporter. Also great. But in my view, why was a venture capital firm focusing on reported stories when we have a huge network? This is our defining thing, a network of networks, in fact.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unwritten form. I'd never actually done audio, by the way. I didn't have that experience. And I got here, and I kind of was like, oh my God, I love my team. I love the partners, but I'm going to kill myself with boredom if I only have eight partners where I had come from hundreds. And so for me, the podcast was a way to answer your question about doubling down to bring more diverse voices onto the platform.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny that you say audio because I actually did not think of it as audio then, but I love that you're saying that because that's how I do think about it now. At the time, quite frankly, I was scratching a personal itch, which was I had come from Wired where I had the opportunity to edit like hundreds and hundreds of different thinkers, writers, famous thinkers, emerging technologies, all of that.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Late 2013, early 2014. Okay. And it was actually that exact same year I had gone to XOXO and I heard a talk from Marco Arment about the resurgence of podcasting because it's been around for years, as you know. And he talked about how brands and others, when they do podcasting, there's a certain intimacy that comes with it. And so it has a very similar feeling to blogging in that there's parallels in the authenticity and intimacy of communication. In fact, the way I think of it is that if you think about our history of oral storytelling and how we can all sit around a fire in the olden days, that used to be an experience of one-on-one. And now we can do the almost exact same thing where you have the feeling of a one-on-one intimacy, but it scaled to thousands and thousands in our case, hundreds of thousands of people.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was actually created before I even joined. There was already a culture of writing at Andreessen Horowitz before they even built an editorial operation. I mean, there was a popular P. Marca blog. There's Ben Horowitz's blog and then Book. And this all happened right before I joined. And they were also already writing blog posts about announcements. And they also had done very few specific op-eds that we talked about in episode 499. So that was a context. And then I believe this story was that Dixon, Chris Dixon, we all call him Dixon, came in one day and is like, we should do podcasting. And Dixon was an early blogger, so my speculation is that I think he thought it was like the evolution of that sort of type of communication. And so the podcast was pushed by Chris Dixon and Kim Milosevic was hiring up the editorial team for Andrewson Horowitz. And she first hired Michael Copeland, who got the podcast off the ground and was the host for the first year. I started producing it behind the scenes, not hosting about three months in. And then I only started hosting about a year in, but I've been very involved.”
2019-11-27 · a16z Podcast · How We Podcast · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source