YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Lieber

lines on the record
27
first
2016-01-15
most recent
2016-01-15
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “The thing I'm always most excited about is the next one, and we just launched the trailer for a show called Sampler. Which is a podcast about podcasts.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Think Gimlet will become a software company. I think the advertising business. And then down the road, the subscription business has the biggest potential together.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I mean, Chris, I think Chris is really smart and has great ideas for the business. And having he and Matt Mazio too, like having lowercase in the company, I think has really pushed us and challenged us to think about how we can grow. And as you hear on startup, Chris is uncompromising and feisty.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Because he, I mean, he is a revolutionary and he's a visionary and he created incredible products that change the world. I don't think people loved working for him. And I think that he also has monomaniacal behaviors that I would not want to adopt because that's not who I am. I guess the thing that I want to do is, and Alex and I really try to do is be authentic to ourselves. And that's why, I mean, I certainly look at a lot of founders and say, look at specific things they did. And we try to adopt them, but there's no one person who I'm like, I don't think either of us are modeling ourselves after. I think the thing we try to model ourselves after is ourselves.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “They're all kind of in the range. I mean, if you look at like downloads per episode mystery shows is the biggest, but reply all and startup are not far behind.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And then three is narrative. Like, is there a story here? Do we have the pacing and suspense and emotional payoffs to really hook people? Because those are the three things that when we see them are the ones, the shows that go biggest with large audiences.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Ah, both I mean one way, so we certainly have, you know, the most recent show we launched is called Surprisingly Awesome And we saw a segment in the market of people who are listening really because they want to learn something. They want to be entertained, but they want to learn something. Like you're going on your commute and if you can spend 25 minutes listening to an episode about interest rates and learn more about how the economy works, that's really valuable. That was their most recent episode. And there are some shows out there that are doing this with very large audiences, and we felt like we could compete there. So we teamed up with Adam McKay and Adam Davidson to make that show. They're basically when we look at whether to do a show, like there are three things that we need to see. And one is that element of learning. Like, are listeners going to hear this and come away with it, with some greater understanding or some greater angle of empathy on the world? Two is, do we have a host who listeners can connect you? Like, are they companionable? Do we want to hang out with them as listeners?”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Really interested in doing it at a much larger scale because if you're doing something good, it's better to do it in a big way than a small way”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Really annoying. And we're totally mobile media companies. Like 80% of our listening happens on mobile devices. And our listeners love our ads. And it's a great medium for brand advertising. So we think consumption of on-demand audio is going to be big as smartphone penetration becomes universal and as we get better data connectivity as connected cars come online. And yeah, I mean, the way we come at this is that Alex and I have been doing radio in one way or another for the last 15 or 20 years. What we see is that the shows that we're making, the stories that we're telling have like real relevance to the audiences that we're reaching and that it creates a greater sense of connectivity in the world, a greater sense of understanding and empathy. And we're doing that currently at like a moderate scale.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yes, I do. I mean, one way to look at the, you could look at the market size very, like the simplest kind of most direct way to look at the market size, well, what's the size of the radio market? You know, radio does, I don't know, 17, 18 billion dollars a year in advertising in the US market alone. So that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is what's the entire digital mobile media advertising market. That's another market that we touch. One of the big themes that's happening right now with like use of personal technology, but also in media, is that consumption is shifting to mobile platforms. People are spending more time on mobile. And mobile is hard to monetize if you're a media company because the sort of advertising models that worked on desktop, like where you have display advertisers just doesn't work as well on mobile because it's a small screen and ads are”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “When we set out to raise the series A, we sort of explicitly told each other that the terms were not the most important thing to us, so we weren't out trying to drive the highest valuation. What was more important to us is that we could have a partner that really understood us and that was aligned on the vision and had experience investing in media because I think investing in media is different than investing in technology companies and the returns have a different timeline and the way the dynamics of media companies are just different than tech companies. So those were the things that were important more than the valuation, I guess, or the other stuff. I mean, it was really important to Alex and I that we both still controlled our own destiny, that we controlled more than 50% of the company, and we wanted to have a small board. And then when we around went very well, and there was a lot of interest in our”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I am not. I mean, I am in the company, but actually we decided that your Gimler guide would not be a co-founder of the company and would not be your direct manager. It would be someone else on another team who doesn't work immediately on your team. Because we also wanted to stitch together all the teams in the company. So one of the things we found is because the Atomic Unit here is the show, shows aren't always as connected to each other as we kind of want. We think there's a lot of value in having a network in the shows working all together and being greater than just A collection of shows being one company or one network. And so this was also a way to connect the shows to each other and the people.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “indefinite. And so, you know, your gimmick guide takes you out to lunch once a month. There your kind of resource, if you have any questions about, I mean, anything from like where's the bathroom to like, hey, how do promotions here work? Or I'm thinking about doing this. Do you think this makes sense? Who should I talk to about that, this sort of thing?”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “They get our culture and they're very empathetic and they have meant like they have it in them to be a mentor. And so it's sort of their job to also like establish and communicate what the culture is here, how we work, what we believe in, what we don't believe in.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, we do it. So we do a few things to, Gimlo does have a culture. I think it's a fairly strong culture, although we haven't been that explicitly about communicating it and what it is. And I think that's something we'll probably start to do. And the ways we, I mean, I think the way culture gets communicated is the behavior of the leadership. And also you can design in certain kind of signs and the language and vocabulary that people use. So we started something recently called Gimlet Guides, which is every new employee who starts at the company now. It's something we started just a few months ago. We didn't have at the beginning, but when we got to like 20 or 25 people, we decided to get formalized about the onboarding process into the company. And so now when you come into the company, you're introduced to someone who's called your Gimler Guide. And Gimlock Guides are people who are selected because they are...”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, we have a new show development team whose sole job is to create new shows. We have a kind of methodology that we've developed around that that includes essentially prototyping. And so we will make an epic. We'll have an idea for a show and we'll make an episode of it. We make enough of an episode to know like, hey, is this going to work? Like how does this feel? Does it have the right elements? And we've certainly made episodes of show concepts that we felt like either what they weren't working or it was going to take so much luck for it to work repeatedly. Or it was working well enough, but it wasn't, it didn't feel exciting enough and we didn't pursue them further. So yeah, we've had that.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “A business hadn't been done before in this medium. Reply all repeatedly does things on their show. It shows about the internet where they break format and come up with whole new formats for an episode. And it's when you do that that the audience really notices and you see growth. And so we want it to be well capitalized to be able to take that kind of risk.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, and to feel like we could place bigger bets and do more. So risk can take a lot of forms and like obviously investing involves risk and VC involves extreme amounts of risk. In our business, there's also creative risk. There's like trying to create and execute shows or creative ideas that haven't been done before and that involves risks. And sometimes they fail, actually. Sometimes they fail before they even ever even get out into the world. But the most successful media properties are ones that are trying to do something that hasn't been done before. You know, mystery show, which is one of our shows, is a format that had not ever been done before in this medium. Solving mysteries with a kind of personal point of view, but using real journalism to solve actual mysteries out in the world and doing it in a way that feels like a film that had never been done before. That's one of our most successful shows. Startup, a reality show about startup.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And that is actually a very exciting proposition because it means you don't dilute yourself and your shareholders. And it means you maintain control of your own destiny. And if you can self-fund through profits, that's a fantastic thing. And so that was kind of our dilemma. Ultimately, we decided we had really ambitious plans for the new next set of shows that we want to do. And we need to build out the company, like the first year of the gimlet was really about building up these shows. And now I think is the time to build up a company, meaning like you have, you know, a real sales team and a whole operations to support the kind of creative work that the shows do. The atomic unit at Gimlet is always the show, but we have a company and a set of shared services that can support shows to take all of the things off their plate that isn't having ideas, going out and executing them.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Day one. And actually, the business was going so well that we thought we could have a way to self fund our growth. We thought there might be a possibility if we continue to make these hits and churn them out at a pace, a certain pace that we could To fund our growth, like the way normal businesses do.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “We've had a pretty good first year. We had launched three or four shows, and all of them were doing well. Like they have grown to scaled audiences and they were doing interesting creative work. And unlike, I think most sort of Silicon Valley startups that have started in the last year or two, we had revenue from the very beginning because we were selling advertisements on our show. In fact, we had conversations with some VCs who we would begin to talk about revenue and they're like, we don't want to hear it. Like we're not actually interested in that. We want to see just a really steep user growth curve. And we know that if you get a large audience, you can worry about the revenue later. But for us, actually, it was important to do it from the beginning, both because we wanted to prove out the business model, but also because we didn't want to, like we actually felt like the advertising business model, the ads were part of the product and that it made sense to have them there.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yes, in his curiosity and just his boundless optimism for being able to make something better and pushing to make these stories or these shows like better tomorrow than they are today. And one of his main kind of theses is like all first drafts suck. And it's the second, third, fourth, and fifth where you can make them better. And he is a person who makes you believe that you can do better”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I was nervous, but you know, when I met Alex pretty immediately, I recognized that he is a very special person and he, like I asked myself, is there a real market here? And is it big enough to spend the rest of my life doing work in? And do I have a partner who I really believe in? And I think I could work with for a very long time and go through hard times with and build something with. And the answer to both of those things was yes. I mean, Alex is one of the best people in the world at what he does. He's one of the greatest editors and he is a creative visionary. And I don't think you get that many opportunities in your life too. Partner with someone like that. What do you think?”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, I had, I did start radio shows. I had launched a show. The idea was to do almost like the daily show for public radio, so it was a nightly news and entertainment show. It had live music, comedy, and serious interviews. And what we found is to distribute it to a really large audience, there were actually a lot of gatekeepers that we had to go through. So we basically had to market by market. We had to convince program directors at local radio stations all over the country to pick up the show, to distribute it. And that meant that we actually weren't really working for the listener. We were working for this intermediary. And we found it hard to do something that was actually ambitious and that carried creative risk in that scenario. And so I sort of did do radio shows, but it felt to me like the really exciting thing was happening in podcasting. Like there was just there was more creative, ambitious work happening.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Hopped over to the business side. So I went back and I did an MBA and then spent a few years as a management consultant working mainly on digital businesses and media companies. And then I met Alex Bloomberg, who's my co-founder. And that was about a year and a half ago.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “And I ran my college radio station, and then I was a producer for a number of years. And at some point, I decided that, one, all of media was changing so much. And I sort of saw in the mid to late 2000s that what was happening to what the web was doing to newspapers and what iTunes was doing to music, like the same thing I felt was going to happen to radio, which is that audiences were going to continue to listen to news and storytelling and talk shows, but they probably weren't going to do it exclusively over AMFM broadcast towers. They would do it digitally through their smartphones. And I thought that's a big change that's going to come and I would like to be like participate in that transformation. And I also felt like the impact I could have would be greater if I understood business and if I”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, well, Gimlet is where a media company and we make narrative audio. And so another way to say that is we're a podcast network. And my own background actually, I did two really different things. I was a radio producer and a journalist mostly with NPR and public radio stations here in the States. For almost 10 years, like I was a radio kid. I grew up in love with the radio. I would listen to it all day and I would go to sleep to it. But kind of lifelong dream was to be a radio producer, if you can believe that.”

    2016-01-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 030: Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber on The Future of Podcasting and Life @ Gimlet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source