YouSaid · the spoken record

Don Katz

lines on the record: 99
first: 2021-11-01
most recent: 2021-11-01
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

“I think it's something on the order of fifty point five to fifty one percent purposeful good calls and brave moments and times when you just didn't give up. The rest of it is definitely luck. And particularly if you're a leader, you kind of got to do it. But I don't know. I think about it all the time, but I feel I was out there playing ice hockey last night and, you know, not many people in my age get to play ice hockey. Is that luck? I think it's luck, and I think it's also that I just made it my business to try to elongate my hockey career. And I do a lot of stuff to make that real.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of things happen to a lot of people that are lucky. I know you've mentioned meeting your wife, for example, as a lucky. Moment, and I would say the same about mine and have. Or the fact that Jan Wenner said, go to Spain and cover this thing, and you met all these guys who covered the Spanish Civil War. And were like, hey, we'll show you the ropes here. Somebody who gave you a lucky break or this guy, Mott, who thought your idea was great when everyone else thought it was kooky. So there were a lot of lucky moments, but you also grinded and grinded and worked really hard. But when you think about this story that you've told me, and you reflect on it, how much of it do you think has to do with luck and how much do you think has to do with the work you put in?”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a pretty unusual story, and I frankly can't believe that it's this now longer than my writing career. And also, you know, come on, let's face it, most people know that senior people at Amazon get paid in. Amazon's stock. Stock. We did the transaction. The stock was like $50 a share. You might want to check out what it is now. So one way or another, whatever happens from here, It's been an amazing adventure, and not many people I know had two careers where you get to turn ideas into reality. I've been pretty lucky.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And others were one hundred percent speculators who could have cared less about being real investors and Wasn't into it. And on top of that, I knew that if I could hook back in with Jeff and with Amazon, we could have access to several hundred million people with credit cards who were likely to be our customers. We would grow even faster and we'd have that many more millions of people. The freedom to even do the things you're doing in Newark, that was meaningful to me. And it's somewhat rare. A lot of founders don't, they go away as soon as a transaction happens. But in this case, it's an independent subsidiary that works.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what it is. And so I was basically working for people that I stopped feeling like I was honestly waking up in the morning. I was and caring about them. And it was very hard to because a lot of them were freaking computer programs that were whipping our stock around after hours in various complex high velocity models.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time I was the only one who thought it was a right move. So this was me. It was a blast to be a Nasdaq CEO. Even all the trials and tribulations, there were things about it that I love because it was just another adventure into a new world By the time two thousand seven came along, I was really in a moral crossroads because, you know, if you read everything from the law to Milton Friedman, the only purpose of a CEO and a chair and CEO, as I was, is to enrich their shareholders. I mean, that's maximize shareholders.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the first things we did was just said, you can't be a nepotistic intern anymore. You got to be a kid from Newark and you'll be a paid intern in our little world. So then you get like this corporate culture, which includes these incredible cutting-edge technologists and all these English majors turned into business people like me. And then all the best, some of the best actors in the world hanging out. And these kids, and you start to realize that this is an unusually rich company culture. And we started paying our employees $500 after taxes rent a frame. And if they moved downtown Newark to be part of the urban pioneers, I started Newark venture partners, which has become an international level of success drawing companies from all over the world to Newark to an accelerator.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you could just go all the way. Newark was thought to be a scary city. I mean, Newark was everything you heard about Newark was that this was a place that, you know, time had forgotten and that it was. Try to create either models that other companies or other cities could use to just be part of a city's comeback.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to basically say there would be a spoken word category called audible if it had to be, that sat next to all permutations of video and movies and TV, it sat next to books and it sat next to music. And we kind of pride this thing into the light. And that's just a little different than a better way to use your computer.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because then you're not going to be the leader unless you take the big risk at the point that people don't believe. And then the question is how early is it? But look, I am stunned by how quickly some of the companies formed after us did come together. But most companies are based on productivity improvements. It's like Uber gets you from here to here like a taxi, but it just, it's better. Most businesses have some level of productivity improvement, like all software businesses and the like. That wasn't this idea. This was creating a media category. This was basically creating a spoken word category when it didn't exist in the country whose entire literary canon was based on how we talked and told stories.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had this business plan, right, which was audio delivered to people through the internet onto devices. But when you think about that, do you almost wish that you would have, and there's no way to know, right, that business is, most businesses just evolve. Like there really is no master plan. Like Jeff Bezos kind of had a plan, but it unfolded in ways that he probably couldn't really have anticipated, although maybe he did. But when you look back, do you often sort of kick yourself and say, God, I should have known from the beginning this was going to be audiobooks and never have wasted my time on the devices, on making the devices and just focused on the audiobooks.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we just started to have, you know, which now we have this massive kind of brand moment and brand equity. And like, I mean, people started discovering this thing called Audible. And we started to build up our teams. We started to expand internationally and kind of where, yeah, I admit it. I thought we'd be year three, which is why those survival years. But I got to tell you that the warrior spirit of those formative years, that is one of the reasons I still think we're so successful because the people who work at the company do try to see themselves as these kinds of people who want to invent and stay ahead as opposed to manage.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, obviously, broadband access that download that system, the trust of everything about from the e-commerce system to using their credit”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there must have been some hairy moments. But the truth of the matter is I said I never really measured my ideas on money. I just can't. I always thought, you know, the number of customers, the retention rate, the kinds of amazing content we could make, including tons of original thinking, I don't know, that stuff turned me on more. And I still probably approach things that way.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I would go at one point, I remember I would put my wallet on the desks of CEOs in the publishing industry. I said, I need more content. So at that point, it wasn't coming. And we broke in to getting the rights ourselves and making a whole lot of audiobooks. We also figured out how to make an audiobook for about a tenth of the cost that just using technology. So we just started making a lot of audiobooks and it got better and better. And there was something called Project Hollywood in 2011 and 2012 where we just said, let's just go find out what the greatest actors will do. And when I heard Kate Winslet do Teresa Recon, one of the darkest Zola novels of all the Zola novels. And people heard what she could do. thinking we could take this whole thing to a new level And make this about acting as much as it's about writing”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that the utility of the service, the idea of positioning this as a way to use your time, now it was also true that only about 15% of the books coming out were in audio. So our crusade was always to get more audiobooks made or to try to get the rights ourselves from the agent and the author to get them made because we literally would run out of mysteries.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was just because it took off. 2007 we still had 20,000 audiobooks now we have many many hundreds of thousands obviously we had 20,000 audiobooks in 2007 and 45,000 other kinds of content, including Robbins programs, Ricky Gervais's programs, the amazing Susie Bright Erotica series, which was powerful.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's absolutely right. And we were happy to get out of it and basically declare that, you know, hardware was a means to an end. There would be other transmission methodologies. We know we had partnerships with everybody, including the companies that were making CD burners at the time and the like. So I always wanted to be means to an end.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did say that it was audible ready, and that was that term that we'd kind of coined at the time and that it started to mean something, at least in the world of people buying MP3 players. So we were able to garner our cost structure to be for the stakeholders who were going to get this. You know, so we were able to target market to the people buying these newfangled players. And we were basically compatible with all of them. And once we started giving away minisstead of our own player, it started to get better.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, and that was it. And so it would load up. And there were these sweet little devices. They were very cool. The only thing we didn't get to do was put our marketing collateral in the boxes.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“fifteen million dollars marketing their audio player And I said, Can you imagine if we had fifteen million dollars to market at Audible? And this one thing led to another and the second generation iPod came out. It worked commercially with Audible.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he was very, very focused on this. And he went on actually to Talk in ways that we began to have fairly rich conversations because we shared this historic view of the interplay of technology and invention and culture, this whole idea that from chisels in caves to parchment, you have these amazing creative unleashing. He understood, I was surprised for what I thought would be a pure tech guy, the golden age of radio and how what that meant and how the music business exploded with creativity when it shifted from sheet music. I mean, so we talked about this kind of stuff and he told me that he would weep copiously when he listened to Edmund White read Charlotte's web. So he just basically decided to tell me that he had this plan around this iPod and that I went home and I remember telling my wife that Steve said he's going to spend”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did. He said more than that. He said Tell me about this round tripping how you bookmark the content. I said he said I want to hear more about this. And then he asked all sorts of questions about the tech in very enthusiastically, which was kind of ironic because, you know, Steve was kind of known for a, you know, not invented here view on tech”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was actually nine hundred ninety five for two audiobooks when we started. Yeah, a month. And it gained traction. And frankly, the phone call I got around this period from Cupertino, California, from Steve Jobs was a ray of hope that was really meaningful.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that was the challenge. So, what if you just got an audiobook a month and a player and you get a year's subscription? And that really helped. That helped a lot, particularly since at that point we had these audible ready devices that other people, you know, bought, but we started giving away a little blue MP3 player called the Otis. We got rid of the Audible Mobile Player and let that become the artifact it needed to be.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book publishing is people who love books, meaning that they're willing to get paid less or they have the wherewithal to not get paid a lot. And they go into a world and usually they stand for the status quo and they usually resist technological change in particular and others. It's a longer story, but it's been like this forever. So it was difficult, but eventually we did start to break through and be able to carry these audiobooks at a different cost. And then the other thing that we did figured out was the subscription model.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we not only got all those deals done, we had Texas instrument chips that were already audible ready. So when the dust started to clear a little bit and life started to get a little bit better, we come out with all these MP3 players, which people were buying at the time, with our bits inside the device and our marketing collateral inside the box. So it kind of got hard to compete with us at that particular time because we were of all these different companies that wanted to be doing the same kind of thing in a pretty good position.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We decided to not be technology agnostic, and during this period when nobody was looking, we decided to take our pretty good science and call this the audible ready platform, which would be the de facto way that spoken word was transmitted and played back in a new generation of MP3 players that were coming out.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, which, you know, if you look at some of the suits against stuff, there was some pretty good evidence it was true.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what happened during this period of time as we did hunker down, and when you went public, you had to basically be trained to say one thing to all the fund investors, which was we are technology agnostic. And what that was code for was that we will not build, or you say the word platform, because the word was in the nineties, and life has changed a lot, is that if anyone said they were building a platform, Microsoft would make it their business to destroy your company”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was incredibly anxious, but I just kind of had an attitude about it because we weren't out of capital yet. And we had investors who had not given up hope. And it felt like there was just always another reason to keep fighting.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a couple of them, and here's the term in the day was like, you know, yeah, I would never have sold. I mean, I thought it was told it was immoral for a founder to sell a share of stock. And I took that fairly seriously. But some of our VCs, right after we went public, Began to, as the term was, puke out their shares in very public filings. And they were right. I mean, they made a lot of money off Audible. And because what happened next was not pretty. But, you know, I should say for context, I've heard that there were 1,500 public Internet companies at the beginning of 2000 and 140 at the beginning of 2003. So there were combinations there. There were, you know, some takeovers that went on. But it was that kind of... Of decimation and the stock price, which was once twenty nine dollars or something, it went down to four cents.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but in that year a few months later, Andy, at thirty nine years old, was a University of Maryland basketball star, was playing basketball on a Saturday with people like Ralph Sampson, who was a great NBA star from the past and others in a New Jersey game, and he died of a brain aneurysm. And this was... One of those moments where I realized I was the only person of the 38 of us who'd ever experienced sudden loss. And trauma, and I brought in actually a great friend who was a grief counselor, and we kind of worked this through together. But it ended up, I think, stealing those of us who were left to a survivor mentality that probably served us well.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, most of them said, What are you talking about? You only have. 3,800 customers. Robin Williams had come in and bought like 500,000 shares of common stock before we went public. He was part of the road show. Because he was a real techie guy. And so it was a blast, actually. And the whole thing of selling of going to Europe and selling, it was a real experience”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was the boom, the dot-com boom. Yeah, and it was very much a bubble, but it was a bubble that I did not want to miss. Because if nothing else, my London School of Economic Training is like when capital costs almost nothing, you probably should take it. So I just, we pushed forward.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Andy Huffman was a pure tech guy and a really good guy, but he was absolutely a pure product and tech guy. And in that period, what I was doing, and we were talking 99, was convincing my venture capitalists that they weren't the cowboys anymore because what was going on was a bizarre situation in'98'99 where companies like ours were going public. And they were grabbing the A whole lot of money. It was”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, these were like traditional crystals that were in the device. And you couldn't believe how complicated it was to get this thing built.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, I think I know about crystals. He said, Well, done, you can't shit a crystal. He says, they had to grow them. They had to grow the friggin crystals. Wait, these are crystals.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was kind of a bomb, but it didn't we didn't ever stop to think that way. We just kind of went forward thinking like, what are we going to do now? And of course, the tech deliverables were so difficult. I mean, I have to tell you, being in the hardware business to this day, if it is not an easy business as anyone who makes hardware will tell you, but I just remember missing a milestone that was a big milestone for another funding. And I get to this company called Flextronics, which is a very sophisticated contract manufacturing company that was making the player. And I just said. What do you mean it's another three months? He said. We're out of crystals”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put that in your cassette. Remember that? Remember that? Yes, and then they would play out of your speakers. You But it cost us $208 to make that little device, and we tried to sell it for $215. Wow. And that was a lot of money for people to get something that was of that quality. And mostly that they didn't even understand what it was.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Successful? We didn't sell many, but the people who got them, they did use them in their car. They plugged them into a little speaker that sat on their seat. We gave them a cassette converter that we had that would.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but it's basically a software algorithm that deals with the compression factor of the audio and gives you relative sound clarity versus not. And we did push the labs out there to make much better sounding audio even month over month that allowed us to the clarity to go up. But in the end, the user experience was really clunky and primitive to the point that when I meet people who are original customers, I always say we should have been paying you”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's exactly right. That's how it worked. And now it did take a long time to come down. The internet was incredibly choppy over the phone lines before broadband. So we had really sophisticated resume features, which ended up being another things people celebrated for our tech chops later because it would drop off. And that way it was always kind of waiting for you in the morning. And then you were supposed to drive to work and come home and put it back in the dock and get to work smarter than the guy in the next cube, as we used to say. That was it. Now, it should be said it sounded like crap. I mean, the audio quality was not good. It literally sounded like somebody talking to you with a COVID mask in the bottom of a bathtub or something. It was just not good audio. But we kept pushing the science.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's 95% of the time, or something like that on the metrics. And we were, I think we were seven years before the vibrancy of the market. So it's a very unusual story to be alive that long.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we either narrated or other things before we had a lot of books. But the first download, when it finally happened, was in october thirty-first of'97, it was Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, the self-help book. And I remember it was to a customer in Cave Creek, Arizona. And it was done at the then pretty famous technology conference called the Agenda Conference, which is where we unveiled the service and gave everybody from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs and Michael Jell this digital audio player we made. And I'm sure the majority of them were sawed in half back in various labs when people got home to see what's inside them.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. By ninety nine, I'd signed up Robin Williams to do original programming for us. And yes, we wanted the audiobooks too. But it was many, many years. We had much more content that was just different kinds of public content.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought the content would be frankly what it became, a mixture of literally the best possible public expression in words. You know, if the Churchill Club had profound speeches, I wanted to carry that. Gotcha. We turned the San Jose Mercury News into an audio program.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was the content that you envisioned being on this player? Because you had two paths, right? You got two things you got to do at the same time. You've got one team building the actual device that's going to play the stuff, and then presumably another team getting the content. So what did you think the content was going to be?”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was definitely nervous, but I was on point. Look, I definitely felt more concerned about having put three and a half million dollars into play that was other people's money and feeling deeply responsible to them and to others, particularly people who left perfectly good jobs, because a lot of these people left really nice jobs to join this.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so I was president and CEO, and Tim was chairman, and we formed a board. And I believe this idea of seeing the future and seeing these opportunities and doing something that had been done and persuading people to be part of it was the most important thing. But it is also true that managing people is a different art and science. But I did have all those years of watching both entrepreneurs and others lead.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT