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

“To raise more money and also begin the process of building the first download system, the first way of actually securing the intellectual property. This was years before the terms about digital rights management were there. Because I'd had so many outside magazine articles ripped off on the Unix internet and people put their own names on and the like that I kind of had this idea that this kind of professional great creativity might need to be protected. So company very well known called IDO, which does industrial design, came in and they were totally excited about all this stuff, including everything from the idea of securing the IP and the download system and building a device with us. So that process started. And yeah, we went out and spent a lot of time going up and down Sandhill Road, getting to know people.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I literally trusted Tim You know, I was a fast study, as journalists are. And so I was picking the stuff up and taking it in pretty quickly. And Tim's first round was, you know, allowed us to evolve the team, and we took over a doctor's office in Montclair, a single room, not far from where I'm speaking in New Jersey. And we painted it on a Sunday and moved in on a Monday. So now we've moved out of my attic and had a place to gather.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I basically said I don't know if we're going to overcome what a venture capitalist would call the tech risk and the execution risk. But whatever we build, we're going to put in front of consumers. And you'll get to say that. And I said, you don't have to take the 85% of your pay cut I took, but you have to take 60 and you're going to get all these options. And a guy jumped into the Merry Band”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went out to find a new science partner and found my lifelong friend and wonderful person Guy Story who was a senior person at Bell Labs. And Guy decided to, you know, hear the siren song and he joined me early.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think at one point she said it sounds a little sexist now, but she said it's better than a blonde. She'd already been such an amazing partner for someone who was willing to live without a net because I was a freelance and book writer and everything. But I was scared. I mean, I had three kids at a mortgage”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Tim Mutt was a great entrepreneur and is a great, great, great person. He was one of the founding people at electronic arts, the three people who developed electronic arts. And when Tim Mott read the primitive business plan, he called me up and said, I would fund this. This is amazing.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were so dismissive of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was like they just didn't get it. I mean, even people who took the time said, why don't you just package it and try to sell it to Sony for $25,000? It might be something they're interested in. It was such a dismissive reaction to it. And that made me more inspired.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there were multiple things inspiring me at the time. One was I just thought it was interesting that I daydreamed about this more than I was daydreaming about the next paragraph or the next day's writing. The other thing was I kept going to people who I otherwise respected who thought I was crazy and”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't play up the book part of it because the business itself was so infinitesimal and small. What I did was I realized through just basic journalistic research that 93 million Americans drove to work alone every morning. At that point, only department transportation number, which you could extrapolate to hundreds of millions of hours of time. People sit in traffic. I then matched the sociological data that showed that the most frustrating time of people's days and least valuable time is sitting in traffic. And I basically just, we said if we only penetrate nine percent of them at ten dollars a month for a service that enriched their lives, here's how big the business would be. And that's how we were able to get what's now very small amounts of money but was then to us a lot of money to make audible.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So instead of terrestrial radio, you could get it delivered through the internet. Instead of an audiobook on tape or a book or a speech on tape or some kind of inspiring I don't know inspirational thing. You just basically say this business is going to deliver this stuff to you through your phone line, through the internet.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And because, you know, what do we know? Now I know, of course, you know, without a portfolio patents are worthless, but at that point I didn't. So that was the first thing we did. But we actually started to get really excited about this”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The story was that we would occupy this time of people's life, which was, and we said when your eyes are busy but your mind is free, we would create a higher level of purpose that the AMFM radio was for everybody. It wasn't just for you. And you would be able to program your own listening time in the future through digital technology and that we would have a company that would sell a solid state digital device as well as content it would be about books and literature. It would allow you to listen to fresh air and marketplace and all these shows that played at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. And we got a patent together on a downloadable system of for media that would be captured by a solid state device. And I remember it was $14,000 that I put on my credit card.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believe it or not, guy, it was actually a solid state cassette. It was a cassette that you hooked to the phone line. That was the first patent. And that the idea was you'd have the signal come over, you'd capture it in the cassette flash memory, you'd push it into the tape bed in your car, which instantly everybody had at that point. And you'd be able to listen, and we just played with it. But I have to tell you, I wrote the business plan, and it was like 110-page narrative.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So throughout 1994, I spent time trying to find anyone I could find to talk about a future that involved these little devices that were filled with the soundscape of culture, basically the sound track of culture. I remember talking in various ways, or the sound of civilization. I remember all these things coming out saying, can't you see it? And people thought I was out of my mind. I mean, I couldn't find anybody who knew what I was talking about except for Ed. And we just decided to write it up into a business plan.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's where people have a lot of time. I remember thinking if you took these audiobooks, you could actually liberate time for people. And we got kind of more excited about it. And I got more and more interested in what it would mean to do this because nobody else was doing it.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he had this thought, he said, you know, you know, you could get voice through the phone line. It could be compressed. And we went back and forth and I said, Ed, you know, if you could take audiobooks and send them through the phone line, the cost of the packaging and all those tapes wouldn't be there. You could lower the cost. I remember saying we liberate the signal, meaning, how do we get the audio into my belly pack? So I can go around with it. Or how are we going to get it into cars”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had this book contract, I began to connect with people who were teaching me what I didn't know about technology. And one of the people who was my key contacts was my college roommate from NYU, Edlau, one of my close friends to this day, who was a computer friggin genius. And we were talking about signal compression, basically about analog to digital signal compression. And I was asking all these questions about how text fit through the internet, which was, wait for it, the phone lines. There was no broadband at all. And these discussions were happening in'93,'94.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so I think this is the early 1990s. And during this time, I guess you're also researching another book, which I think it was a book about the burgeoning tech industry. So at what point were you like, wait, I might have a business idea here? How did that happen?”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Painful it was at a Sony Walkman in a belly pack knocking around, and I just remember the utter irritation of trying to change the tapes when you're aerobically taxed and how because you rented them in these big brown boxes that they would often not work at all, which was really irritating when you're a couple miles from home. But I remember listening to John Reed's ten days that shook the world I would take on these long, you know, kind of books and jog along and listen. At that point, I was the only person I knew who did that.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm a hockey player who runs or did run a lot so as to keep in shape. But I definitely like to run. In my regimen when I was living in New York as a writer was to take off in Riverside Park and write.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This tale of America, but it was a tale of hubris, it was a tale of the final founders sowing the seeds of the destruction of the company. I have a whole chapter I remember in there about the building of the Sears Tower. They made this genius conception of every customer thought Sears was the friendly guy down the street, the member of the Koanas Club. And that Sears was this localized reality. And once they built that tower and said that they're one of the most powerful companies in the world, all the bad stuff started happening because it was just thought to be such an unfortunate statement of their purpose. But that company's story is very much about the end of what ended up happening in the 70s, 80s, is Americans realized that other countries actually sometimes were even more productive.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think he wanted to be part of history. I think he, like so many of these Sears guys who they came and transferred their battlefield loyalties from World War II to this Heartland Corporation, they lived these lives where they would move fourteen, sixteen times. I mean, that was part of a corporate life in those days. But boy, oh boy, it was a pretty epic task to then turn it into this.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changing itself so as to continue to be the most beloved and trusted company of the century, it's a matter of historical record. And he just decided that he'd let me in. And this was really rare, because as you well know, corporations tend to be Pentagon-like in their control over the truth. And so I proceeded to show up as a bearded, still looking quite young guy And people who worked at Sears decided I was okay because I had sold Ed Telling on something they never thought anybody would sell or not. So I was a salesman in their eyes. And I just tried, you know, I spent He hears on this. Wow. And did I get an MBA in real time?”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I kind of thought how weird would it be to take this hippie counterculture storytelling and write about a big old American company, what happened to it. And I wrote another letter. I wrote a letter to the CEO and chairman of Sears, a guy named Ed Telling, who was famous for never having given an interview completely introverted. The beat reporters couldn't get anything out of Ed telling. And basically I said that if he can deal with the great American corporation of the 20th century,”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which we'll get to in a moment. But at that time, you were still a journalist for Rolling Stone. You got this great job. You're getting paid and a salary. I know that you wrote your first book, which was the story of Sears, the department store. History of Sears, and then kind of like the rise and fall of it. And the book came out in like 87. Why did you want to write a book about Sears?”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. I thought she was great. And life went on from there. And it's been an amazing marriage. And just about nothing I can think of that has been good for me. She hasn't been an amazing part of, including memorably referring to my sudden U-turn from writer to entrepreneur as a non-toxic midlife crisis.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I met my wife Leslie in nineteen eighty two on a river raft trip in Pennsylvania out of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. And we were both with different people and we kind of hit it off. And I went off to China for National Geographic and spent literally months traveling the Silk Road. It was an incredible trip, but it was long. And when I got back, the relationship with my former girlfriend was over. And she said to me, I know who you're going to call. People said Leslie Larson. And she was right.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought if they saw how young I think I looked like I was twelve when I was 23 years old. I was incredibly self-conscious and I did try to be out on assignment when the editors I was working with telephonically were in town for a while and eventually when I revealed myself and I met them, they did exactly what I expected. Come on, you're not Don, are you? They were incredulous that I was putting out this precocious stuff.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I guess you start writing more and more pieces for Rolling Stone and then eventually some other publications. And you sort of travel more like to Northern Ireland. And I think you went to Ethiopia and a bunch of different war zones. But, I mean, you were... So incredibly young when you were getting those bylines. I read a story, and I love this story, that you were so self-conscious about being found out that because you were so young that whenever one of your American editors would come to London, you would actually not be there deliberately, so you wouldn't have to meet them face to face.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I sat down and I wrote this story. And it came out as I'd written it. And on the cover it said dispatch from the Valley of the Fallen with my name on it on Rolling Stone magazine. Now I'm twenty three years old and I was like, I can't believe this. And of course, because I really hadn't been a student journalist, I just wrote, you know, I didn't know that as it was explained to me later, that usually they like to edit these things a lot, but they did. They just put it in.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The attack that actually I think attacks all people who go way out with crazy ideas, whatever they are, which is that, oh my God, I'm a fraud and they're about to find it out. Yeah, right. That is exactly what happened. But it's not the only time of my life that, you know, I've kind of had that feeling. So I had no idea what to do. And I got myself to Madrid. I knew I'd have to get basically credential to cover what was supposed to be a funeral. And so what happened was all of the World War II era journalists who were still around. The wire service guys, they all descended on Madrid for almost like a last hurrah. And they took me on.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of them was that at the point Franco, who was ancient, begins to die, the great dictator of Spain, it would be very interesting to illuminate the liberation movement of the Eta Bosque separatists and the perspective of this last dictator going down and that basically the last of the World War II era dictators and that it would be an interesting story. And I get a telegram saying, go to Spain, and I'm not so sure. Anyone I work with at Audible or my children know what a telegram even looks like. Because that was the fast way to get to me, was to get out of here, go write the story. And it basically said five to seven thousand words and we'll pay you $1,500 in reasonable expenses.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Sitting next to a guy named Robert Greenfield, who introduces himself as a rolling stone writer. And we just get chatting. And I basically... Told him about some of the things that were going on, notably what was going on in Spain at the end of Franco. And I talked to him about what was going on in Northern Ireland because I had a very different perspective on the world because I was based in London and reading the European press. And he said, you know, you should package one of these things and write this guy Jan Wenner who I work with at Rolling Stone a letter with some ideas because you could just write about these are great stories you've got and I went ahead and I sat down and I wrote this letter two or three ideas.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just to make money, Barbara got me little gigs reviewing albums for the British music. Like Melody Maker or NME. Exactly. New Musical Express sounds. And I'll never forget I wrote one about Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons. I got to interview Frankie Valley and the like. And I was just kind of trying to figure it out. I matriculated for a PhD, but I just didn't know.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. But I studied European economics and politics and international history. And I was living with my old friend, Barbara, who was a rock writer. She had gone to be a rock and roll writer in London. And so we just paired up and shared a flat. And so I would come home and there would be Rod Stewart and Keith Richards. And so they did Suushi hung out with.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. In fact, I thought at the time almost everybody thought if he didn't know what you should do, you should go to law school.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he basically was. And Ralph was a deep and exacting intellectual, so I had to work really hard and read really hard. Anyways, it was an amazing experience. He would sit with a big stogey and he had this amazing story telling voice with this Oklahoma. I've said that his voice was like a coal car coming out of my mind. And I would just be mesmerized. And he was a big supporter. And, you know, later, even the audible transition, right at the time he died, He was incredibly supportive of what I did.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He taught me how to read in a way that I fully didn't understand, and I knew that I loved more than anything the sound of literature, and I was just, and how it felt to me. But Ralph actually kind of fussed it out in a way that it became something that I was fully able to understand. He also gave me the, I think, the confidence to try to be a professional writer, which I proceeded to do for 20 years.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it really marked my life in so many ways. It was definitely a formative experience. I've heard, and you probably have heard this too, that there's a lot of patterns of fatherlessness in highly entrepreneurial people, whether it's through abandonment or early death, including taking ridiculous risks as a journalist in the early part of my career, where I could have easily gotten killed several times, I think I was working out his heroism and other kinds of things. So, you know, you come to these things a little later in life, but it is interesting to reflect on it.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was financially successful in the way of arising entrepreneur of his time, but very tragically he went out to play tennis at forty seven years old on a Saturday, and I got a call when I was in college saying that he died playing tennis very suddenly and Of a massive heart attack”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“put chord books in guitars and started this whole idea that you too can play the guitar, and it alienated a lot of the musicians, including Barney Kessel and Les Paul and people that he was friends with, because they were infuriated to say that their instrument was any easier to play than a violin. And of course, he said, yeah, but you know it is. And so it ended up that my family was all in Newsweek magazine taking our guitar lessons together because my dad had decided to be part of this you two can play the guitar which was part of the whole mid-60s folk music kind of movement so so I think The status quo, which I think I have come by honestly.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my dad made guitars, he made them for sears, silver tones, but I remember that there were some pretty great bands of the era, one called Spirit that had a fantastic guitarist named Randy California who only would play Ks and the like. But my dad's kind of claim to fame at that time was that he”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he didn't really talk about it. He wasn't one of those guys, but he had different purple hearts every time I broke a leg and hockey or something, I would wake up and find the purple heart on my pillow.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So my father was just incredibly kind of smart, kind, and you know it's a cliche, but he was one of these guys you would want to be your kind of best friend. I looked up to him. I probably wished he was home more because he was frankly like I became, someone who worked a lot and he was also he'd been a war hero. He ran away from home basically seventeen and was behind enemy lines, highly decorated. Where was he?”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It dominates the space with a library of over 600 thousand titles, and the company is now part of the Amazon family which bought Audible for three hundred million dollars in two thousand eight. But getting to that point was painful and full of setbacks, and the story includes a cameo appearance from none other than Steve Jobs. Dotcats was a staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine during its heyday in the late seventies and eighties. He grew up in Chicago in the fifties and sixties and strongly identified with his dad, who owned a small business.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Began to decline. But Don was optimistic, and at the age of forty two he decided to ditch his successful career as a writer and try to start something he knew nothing about. A tech company, a company that would create a digital audio catalog of books and storytelling and spoken word and deliver those stories to users through a device specially designed to play that audio. And as you will hear, in the early days, not many people came to the party. The technology was way ahead of its time, probably too ahead of its time. In fact, Audible, the company Don founded, almost collapsed in the early two thousand when its stock price hovered at around four cents a share. But today, of course, audible holds the biggest audiobook catalog in the world.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back in the mid 1990s, back before you could plug in a pair of earbuds and choose from hundreds of thousands of different books, millions of different podcasts or tens of millions of different songs back before any of that, a former journalist turned writer named Don Katz had a problem. During his daily jog in New York City, he would listen to books on tape, literally on tape as in cassette tapes, and Don wondered why do I have to lug around a cassette player and then flip the cassette aside B in the middle of my run? Surely there must be an easier way, he thought, and in fact at the time there was MP three technology existed except almost no one used it. In the mid nineteen nineties, compact disc sales were on a tear. It would take another seven years before CD.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there were 1,500 public internet companies at the beginning of 2000 and one hundred forty at the beginning of two thousand three. But it was that kind of decimation. And the stock price, which was once $29 or something, it went down to four cents at the end of 2000.”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2021-11-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Audible: Don Katz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT