Gimlet Media: Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber

really quick before we start the show. I want to remind you about an upcoming live recording of the podcast. It's happening in Denver on November 13th at the Paramount Theatre. I'll be interviewing Kurt Richardson. He's the creator of the Otterbox phone case. And if you haven't been one of our live shows before, they are super fun. There are a chance to see me and to meet other builders and fans of the show. It's all brought to you by American Express and we'd love to see you there. So to get tickets, go to nprpresents.org and I hope to see you in Denver. I had a dream. I was at some party and Ted Coppall was there. He was like Alex. How long are you going to stay at this job? Do you want to start some on your own? And I remember telling him like no Ted, I'm pretty happy. He's like are you really? So then I woke up and I told my wife about that dream and I think that kicked it off. I had just had to bite the bullet and quit. From npr it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they go. I'm Guy Ross and on the show today, I have two public radio producers turn podcasts into profit and a media company called Gimlett that sold for more than $200 million. So some of you may know that for most of my early career, I was a newsperson. I covered a bunch of wars, I was posted overseas, I was a host on npr's evening news show. But then in 2012, I left. I left to essentially relaunch a podcast. It was called The Ted Radio Hour and I still host it. And back then that decision, believe it or not, was like going into the wilderness of journalism. Several of my colleagues were like you're going to do a what to podcast. And to be honest, I was a little embarrassed myself. I was leaving the prestigious world of news for the exile of podcasts. But of course, what eventually happened was precisely the opposite of exile. Podcasts exploded. Today, podcasts are a half a billion dollar industry. And what was once considered an afterthought even at a place like npr is now one of its most important sources of revenue. Now back in 2014, what are my colleagues was watching this explosion really closely. His name is Alex Bloomberg. Alex is someone I've admired for a long, long time. He was a producer on this American life and then he went on to co-create one of my favorite shows, Planet Money. And Alex started to dream of an idea to build a production company like HBO, except for audio for podcasts. But even then, the thought of making money off podcasts was still a fairly new proposition. Besides, like a lot of mature and stable organizations, npr can be slow to innovate. And Alex realized he couldn't launch this idea inside the company. So he left. Which was a huge gamble. Lots of people in public radio thought he was nuts. He also knew nothing about how to run a business. Now, as many of you may know, Alex documented this journey on a podcast called Startup. In that show, he describes the emotional ups and downs of starting the business and how he eventually came to meet his co-founder Matt Lieber. They decided to call their company Gimlett and went on to produce a bunch of podcasts including Reply All and Homecoming. And then in 2019, Matt and Alex sold the company they founded to Spotify for around $200 million. Which I think is fair to say, is not a sum of money you often hear connected to public radio folks, unless they are major donors. Anyway, we'll hear from Matt Lieber a bit later in the show, but first to Alex who grew up in Cincinnati. His dad was in advertising and his mom ran a public assistance program in the city. And even though it may not seem obvious given what they did, Alex says both of them were actually really entrepreneurial. Oh yeah, they were entrepreneurial. And we never used that word. Yeah, I didn't learn that word at home. I probably learned that word in college. My mom was a social worker and she ran a public and plays assistance program. But I never heard her talk about it that way. And then my father, he was always in advertising. My dad was always in advertising and he, you know, he was a copywriter and then he worked with a couple of different people, different agencies and then he eventually started his own advertising agency. And then that agency and then another one that became Wolf Bloomberg Crotey. So he was the Bloomberg and the Wolf Bloomberg Crotey. And like it grew pretty big. It grew at a certain point. I think they were like 70, 80 people. Wow. And he never talked about it. As like, this is my business. Sighting. Like we're building this business or anything like that. If anything, he was embarrassed about it. Why? I don't think he valued it at all. Like I think all he wanted to do was be a poet really. Or like an academic or a great thinker of some kind. But he had this successful business that seemed to kind of grow, I guess, just grow on its own or grow organically. I know. I mean, I remember asking him about this at one point because it was like later, later, later on the journey when we went mad and I had started Gimlin. We were like growing this company and it was like all I could think about and was consuming every single sort of thought in my mind. And one time later, I asked him about that. I was like, how did you feel about it when you were starting it? I never heard stories from you about it. And I think what he told me was like, he was like, I just never felt like I never felt like those were my people. The people I worked with. Did you sense or notice a change in your family's lifestyle, having gone from your dad working for a company or mom doing social work to him running this pretty successful ad agency? Oh yeah. There was a moment where my dad's company was doing very well. And business was booming and one of their clients was Prachter & Gamble. And all of a sudden we had money. And it was fortunately right around the time that I was going to college. So they weren't able to pay for me and my sister got to college. You went off to college, you went to Oberlin and you studied political science government. Did you have a sense of what you wanted to do when you were college? Did you think I want to get into public service like my mom? I want to do some kind of social work. Was that your plan or did you think I want to get into journalism or did you not really know? I think I had a sense of wanting to do something good in the world. I remember I studied Russian because back when I was in college, Russia was still a behavioral empire. And I had this very political feeling about there. There are people just like you and me Mr. Reagan and I'm going to learn their language and prove it to you. And I think one of the things I was a big consumer of narrative nonfiction from an early age. We had magazines laying around the house. We had The New Yorker and Harper's that was that kind of household and I picked them up early and really loved them and then as I got older, I loved them more. But I never saw myself as doing that. That felt like the people who did that, the people who did journalism, those were the kids who were on the school paper and had major in journalism and had gotten internships when they were in college. And you weren't doing any of that. I wasn't doing that. I tested well and I took AP classes. But I was not a motivated student. I was very comfortable with a high B. So you graduate? I guess you go back to Cincinnati? Well, no, I went to Russia. It's been a year in Russia. Then it's been a summer in Cincinnati and then moved to Chicago. And that's where I sort of picked up my post-collegiate life was in Chicago. And in Chicago, you were actually a teacher, right? I was. Yeah, I taught school at a private school for four years at Tut Science. But it wasn't going to be the thing you were going to do. But it wasn't the thing I was going to do. No, I didn't feel like it was the thing. At a certain point, sort of in my second or 30 years, I was like, I don't think this is really what I want to do. But honestly, I think really what happened was my girlfriend broke up with me in Chicago. In Chicago. We've been dating for many years and we were in love and it just really shook me. And when she was like, what are you going to do? And she was like, I'm going to move to New York and I'm going to go to film school. And I was like, wait, that's not fair. We weren't supposed to be actually pursuing our dreams here. You're going to actually pursue your dream. And then I was like, oh my god, and now you're going to go to film school and then you're going to become a famous director. And then your name is going to be the marquee. And I'm going to be supervising recess. And it shook me. And it shook me into realizing. And I was like, well, wait, why is that wrong? I thought I liked supervising recess. And then I realized like, no, I want to I have something else that's my ambition. But you didn't know what it was. I didn't I knew when it was at that point because she was she was transformative in two ways. The other way that she was transformed is she was from New York. And so she knew people in New York media. And so through a friend of one of her friends, he was like best friends with one of the editors at Harper's magazine. And I was like, wait, there are people at Harper's magazine who who are friends with the people I'm friends with. Like that seems crazy. You know, like they felt so far away. Yeah. You know, like completely beyond my reach. And then here this guy was. And so I'd spent a summer in in Brooklyn, in turning at Harper's magazine for free. This is like 1996. 1994. 1994. - Okay. - '94. - Yeah. - And so I knew that I'd wanted to do that. I'd been really captured by that experience. So I was like, okay, well that's my dream. I should start pursuing it. - So what did you do at that point? - I did a bunch of things. I'd dabbled in grad school for a little bit. I'd like went to a year at grad school in Chicago. But basically after she broke out with me, I was 30 years old. I didn't know what I was gonna do with my life. And I was like looking around for stuff to do and I found out about this American life is what happened. - Is a listener? - I knew about it as a listener. And I knew that it was coming out of Chicago and it was like the incredibly hip new thing. And a guy who had worked at Harper's Magazine who had been this incredibly intimidating editor there who I was really enthralled with, but like scared of this guy, Paul Tuff. He was working with this American life in the early days. And so through him, I got introduced to Ira, I believe. And I was able to get a job as the administrative assistant at this American life. - So you are in your early 30s? - Just been dumped. - Just been dumped. You're an administrative assistant at this American life. - Living the dream. - Yeah, was anyone worried about you? Did anyone feel like, "God, would your parents " sort of like wondering, "How does Alex have any direction?" Or, "I don't know what's going on in his life." - The time around medical school is running out here son. - Yeah, were you worried or not really? - Oh, I was really worried. I was really worried. I was very aware of how I presented. I was like a loser. I was like 30 years old, I'd just been dumped. And I didn't have a career, and I was an administrative assistant. But it felt like I'd spent the entire previous decade just not doing anything, just like waiting because I was afraid. And I thought that would keep me safe. And then the safe thing had just resulted in intense heartbreak. (laughing) And there was no excuse that not to do the scary thing. So it felt, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was like where I should be. And being the administrative assistant at this American life, it was like, "Ira and three producers." And they were trying to get out an hour of like highly produced radio every single week. And they were just like completely up to their necks and work. And so there was lots and lots of stuff for me to do. And was Ira teaching you how to make radio? - Yeah, I mean, he was, I don't think, it wasn't like he was sitting down and like, he was like, "Come here, administrative assistant, I'll teach you how to make radio." But it was just such, that was like the second year of this American life's existence. It had already become something of a thing in the world. It was like, you know, very well known. And it was on a lot of radio stations. And it was on the rise. And Ira was just running. Yeah. And never stopped. He would get there early in the morning and he would leave late at night and everybody would. And including me. And so like, he had no choice but to teach me. How did you get your first story onto the show? - Ira came to me and was like, the 10 year anniversary of Harold Washington's death is coming up. And he was like, I'm wondering if we should do something for it. Here's this book, read it. And see if you think there's a story there. And so he gave me this book called Fire on the Prairie by Gary Rivelin, which was all about Mayor Washington. Mayor Washington was the first black mayor of Chicago. And he'd been this sort of like incredibly charismatic leader who just sort of like just tipped off this entire, you know, this sort of hailstorm of racist backlash inside in Chicago. So we started producing it together. And I just like would identify all these people from the book and then we would go and interview them and I'd sort of try to help them come up with the questions. And I remember that like the show came out on a Friday and on Wednesday, we had nothing written. Nothing produced, nothing cut. - Wow. - And then he just dove in and just wrote an entire hour long documentary in three days. - Wow. - It's crazy. He stayed up all night. I'd never say anything like it. - Yeah, I remember that episode. I think it's called Harold. - It's called Harold. It's a classic, this American life. That was the first thing you produced. - Yes, that's one way of looking at it. (laughing) But it was so exciting. - Yeah. - Being there. - It was so exciting. And it was all that I wanted. And so the thing that motivated me was like, I need to take this is what I want to do. I want to do this. And by hook or crook, I'm gonna learn how to do it. - But I mean, obviously you started to do more and more and more stuff for the show. Yeah, over the next couple of years. - So yeah, over time I started, I became sort of like one of the more experienced seasons producers of this American life. And that meant doing my own shows, doing my own stories. As well as producing other people's stories. And then there was a couple of years of that. Just making stories that just felt really exciting. - Okay, Alex, I wanna just pause for a sec because Matt Lieber is sitting next to you and he's been waiting here patiently. - Yes, sorry, I'm digesting. - I'm digesting everything Alex just said. I've never heard you used to tell all that all those stories together. - Oh yeah. - Can I just, I would just want to do like a split screen here for a sec because while Alex, while you were working at this American life, Matt, you were in college, I guess, around that time. And I remember that you were like a big fan of radio. So do you actually remember listening to this American life at that time? - Yeah, like it was like literally I was in the car turning the dial and then I heard an episode of this American life and I stopped because I was like, this doesn't sound like anything else. Which is funny because now like a significant portion of the most popular podcasts on earth are this sound. But at the time it was really weird, it was unusual. - Yeah, and which I guess we should back up first to say that you grew up in Massachusetts, just outside of Boston and when you went to college to Bowdoin College in Maine, did you also get involved in like college radio? - Well, I had done some radio, when I was in college, I interned at the local public radio station. So I was doing my college radio at Bowdoin, which was WBOR. And then I spent the summer interning at WBOR, which was the NPR station. And when I graduated college, I was kind of trying to figure, I had applied to be an intern at this American life. And I spent like a week on my application. You had to like write an essay, you had to critique a story, you had to pitch a couple of stories. I had all this, I thought like I have all this radio experience. - Sure, yeah. - I sent in the package and I didn't even get rejected. I just got nothing. - Nothing. - Like I just didn't get a response. - 'Cause Alex, 'cause Alex threw it in the garbage. - He was in Chicago. - Alex must have been on the other end. - He was in the other end. - What year was this? - 2001. - Do you remember his application? - Alex? - No. - It was that memorable. - Thank God I was not in charge of the intern applications at that point. - All right, so you don't get the internship. So instead I guess just out of college, you moved to New York to try to get a job in radio. - Yes, that's right. I moved to New York on September 1st, 2001. - Wow. - With the idea that I would get into radio, but not knowing anyone. But I figured if I wanted to be in radio and media, like New York would be the place to go. And I had a friend who had a room open as in his apartment. And then on the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was on my way into a job interview in downtown Manhattan at a staffing firm. It was the kind of place where they would like put you and you would be a receptionist at like an insurance company. - Yeah, a temp agency. - Temp agency exactly. And on my way to the subway, so this was 9/11, on my way to the subway, like the second plane hit the second tower. And the subway shut down. And so I didn't go in to Manhattan that day. And on the way back from, as I was going back to my apartment, I saw this guy in a park in downtown Brooklyn hitting golf balls. He was just hitting a pitching wedge. And there was a whole crowd of people all around the boat looking up at the smoke coming from both the towers. And this guy just kept hitting golf balls. And so I was like, this is real. It was surreal. It was just surreal. - Yeah. - And so I ran home. I got my mini disc recorder and I interviewed the guy. And he was a Trinidadian guy. And I was just like, how can you be, like aren't you upset? Like, why aren't you home with your family? Like, why are you hitting golf balls? And he was just basically like, no man. Like, this is America. And in America, you know, everything's gonna be all right. - Wow. - And you actually turn that into a radio story thing. - Yeah. - It aired on Weekend Edition, which is a PR show and, you know, millions of people listen to it. And that was like my first, that was the first piece I ever got on a radio show. - You would actually go on to spend the next several years working at a couple of different public radio stations in New York and in Boston. - Yeah. - And I guess like around 2010, you make a big change like you decided to go to business school. - Yep. - So what happened, what changed? - Well, I had done all these jobs in radio. And I think I spent like a year, year and a half actually working at MTV radio. My job was to interview celebrities on red carpets and then cut up sound bites and send them to local music. DJs, but most of that decade I spent producing journalism, news, culture, and also music at a number of public radio shows. And I happened to be on three shows in succession that were canceled. And that made me doubt whether there was going to be enough stability and opportunity for me. And I remember at the time, my parents were always a bit bewildered by why I was working in radio. My dad particularly was confused, not by my interest in media, but public radio. Right. And I remember what he would ask me. He's like, "Hey, maybe have you ever thought about television?" He's like, "Because I think you could make a better living in television." What she was correct about. And it was just a really hard time in media, period in New York. So this was 2008. There was lots of layoffs happening, the beginning of the internet as a disintermediation of publishers was happening. So if you were in legacy media, you were looking around realizing that your business model was collapsing. Yeah. And people were beginning to get laid off from like newspapers. And there was this rise of digital. And I remember reading an article in New York magazine about how like media was no longer going to run New York. There were all these new startups and they were like technology and product startups. And that was where the future was. And there were these people who were entrepreneurs who were like crazy optimistic about what the world they could build is. And also I was in journalism so people are generally like journalists are skeptical by nature. And I thought like, "I kind of want to be on the other side of this." And so that was when I decided to leave. So you went to business school with the idea of like, I don't know, going into consulting or starting a business or something like that? No. I went to business school as like a last. It's like a lifeline. Yeah, it was a lifeline. I understand by that point that some of the biggest changes in our world are driven by business and if you understood how markets function and how business operates, that's like a tool set that you could do a lot with. All right, I'm going back to you, Alex. And we'll come back to you in a bit. So Alex, you work on this American life and people really become like a part of like the ensemble. I think anyone who remembers that show in the 2000s remembers your name, hearing your name all the time. And then in 2008, there was a pretty significant kind of moment where you produced an episode of the show called The Giant Pull of Money and you did that with Adam Davidson, who was also a public radio reporter at the time. How did that happen? How did that come about? Yeah. You don't want to worry about somebody at this American life had bought a house and I had asked her like, "Wait, how did you have enough money for the down payment?" And she was like, "Oh, we didn't have a down payment. They just gave us the loan without a down payment." And I was like, "Really?" I was like, "I didn't know that happened." And she was like, "Oh, yeah." And so then that started me like, I was like, "That's crazy." And then there's all this credit card debt out there and everybody knew it had huge credit card bills. And so I was just like, I was just like casually looking at this story of debt in America, what's going on. And then the more I got into it, the more I sort of like started to understand the macroeconomics of it and what it had, what that had to do with the Chinese Central Bank. And I was friends with Adam Davidson this whole time. And Adam Davidson was the correspondent at NPR and he was the business in economics correspondent at NPR. And so we had been kicking around this idea of doing something on like, housing debt. So we reported this whole story of like the global financial system and how it had sort of led to these conditions where people were barring massive amounts of money without anybody checking to see whether they could pay it back or not. And I explained to this thing that was happening all around and explained it in a way that had like characters and people that you could hear and hear those stories and it was funny. And I think Adam and I both knew it. Like we both knew what we were making that like we're onto something here. Like it felt like this very powerful thing. Yeah. That episode, the Jean-Paul Money would go on to win like every award and it was a huge, huge piece of journalism that year. I'm going to cut a lot of attention. And I guess the two of you decided, hey, why don't we start something around money? Why don't we do it? Why don't we create something bigger which led to the creation of planet money? And Adam sort of said to you, I need you to join me to make this happen. And the two of you had to kind of build a company within a, like a mini company within a company, right? I mean, over like an ensemble cast like this American life. Yeah, yeah. We had, we came in and we were like, okay, we're going to do this. We're going to do this like, it was daily in the beginning. It was this daily podcast. And me and Adam were like the ones in charge of it and we'd never been in charge of anything before we had to go to management training, learned a lot about ourselves. And that was sort of the experience where I sort of learned like, okay, I can be a boss. Why you, the two of you were kind of ramping up planet money and as it kind of hit cruising altitude and became a really successful podcast and radio feature on some of the NPR shows. Did you, did you, I mean, you're now in your early 40s. Were you married at that point? Did you have kids? Yes. Early on, right? In the very sort of beginning of planet money. Our first child was born my son and then, and then our daughter was born, you know, less than two years later. So yeah, it was sort of a busy time. We were starting planet money and I was like starting a family at the same time, trying to balance it all. Eventually Adam, he decides to take a leave, to write a book and sort of starts to move on from the show. You are still there. At what point did you start to think maybe, I don't know, maybe I should move on. Well, I think, I think it was a gradual thing. I think a couple of things happened over the course of planet money. One, we did this project called the T-shirt project, which was Adam's idea, which was like, I think he came in one day and was like, I think we should follow a T-shirt around the world as it gets made. Like cotton field to the store. Yeah, exactly. We start with the farmers who make the cotton and then it gets spun into the yarn and it gets woven into fabric and then cotton sewn into T-shirts and then it gets shipped back and will tell the whole story and it happens all over the world in all these different countries. We'll meet the people and we'll actually make a shirt and then we just started thinking about it. It was just like the super exciting idea. So we, you know, I think it took like another year, year and a half before we actually did it. And it was this huge hit. It was like, it became this thing that our listeners went along with. We started talking about it. We would prepare all these stories about it and then we sent all these reporters all around. And you sold a lot of T-shirts, right? And we sold a ton of T-shirts. We sold like 20,000 T-shirts. Wow. We made almost $600,000. Which was not like profit for you guys, right? That was just NPR's money. Yeah, that was just NPR's money. But it was also like, and that's what we used to fund the trips and everything about. Like we knew that that was going to, we were hoping to earn back what we spent on like doing this crazy project, but we made that back and more. Yeah. And we were doing these like live events where like there'd be huge theaters would show up and see us talk and people were like, asked us to sign autographs. Which never had never happened to me before. In my, all my years of radio journalism. And so it just felt like there was something going on here. And it felt like there's money to be made and it felt like there's a big opportunity, you know, to like, if we can tell, if we can start a podcast, the super popular podcast about business and economics, then you can start a podcast about anything. Yeah. And it just felt like we should do that. We should do more. We should do more planet monies. You want to start more shows. I want to start more shows. I want to figure out a way to do it with MPR. Because podcasting started to really gain traction, right? Like, yeah, I started Ted Radio Hour in 2013 and we were one of the kind of the early shows that really got a big audience. I mean, people were starting to talk about podcasting around that time as a viable business. Podcasting, just like the numbers were just growing. And then there was people out there who were making it, who were making a business of it independently. Like Roman Mars, who had launched the podcast 99% invisible, was very inspiring to me. Like he was out there on his own and he had done it. He'd been doing it for like a couple of years prior to me leaving to lunch gimlet and he had like a small staff and he had like advertisers. And I remember asking him early on like questions about like how, you know, where do you get your advertisers? How does it work? And it was just working really well for him, you know? Was there excitement when you talked about this at NPR? Was there excitement where people like, yeah, this is great. I don't, there was on some places there was, but it was like, I also knew that it was important to me that it wasn't going to be a nonprofit. And the reason was, if you have a large global news outfit with people all around the world, there might not be a viable business model for you. And you might need to make that work. You might need foundation money and stuff like that. You might need to just like go that, that route. You might not be able to actually just turn a profit. But with plan of money, I was like, no, there's, you can turn a profit on plan of money. That's like, advertisers want to be on that show. The audience is big enough. It can be profitable. And if it can, it should be. It doesn't make sense to force it into a structure that it doesn't need. And also I felt like I was creating a lot of value. Yeah. And I wanted to have ownership of that value. If I was going to take this risk, I wanted to be able to be rewarded for it. So as you were kind of thinking about this idea, did you have a clear idea of what it was going to be? Or did you think like, okay, we're going to have, we're going to spin this out, we're going to create all kinds of value. of new shows are going to be this, this, this, and this, and we'll need a team, this size, or was it more abstract? Definitely more abstract, it was like sort of like, we'll need to make the planet money of cars, and the planet money of the internet, and the planet money of, you know, whatever else, you know? And my plan in the very beginning, before I met Matt, and before I actually had, like actually talked to any investors or anything, was like, I just need somebody to give me a bunch of money, and then I can hire some people, and we can start making stuff. So at that point, I mean, in 2000, this is 2013. This is 2013, 2014, yeah. I mean, was the challenge you were running into at NPR, that they were a non-profit organization, and they just could not figure out how to make this work, or was it more like, yeah, we're just, no one really wanted to make a decision, nobody wanted to kind of pull the trigger, or no one really thought that they were legs to this, or was it like a combination of those things? A lot all the above, I think, I was a risky venture. You know, like, there's not that many places that are set up to like, take that kind of risk. Even though I didn't feel like a risk, even though I felt like, well, I know how to do this, and like, obviously I've done it before or so. But like, no, that's not true. I'd done it inside institutions, whose contribution side was way undervaluing. You know, if you're NPR, that's a lot of risk to take, to just be like, yeah, I'm going to give you this money to try to start something that like, I have no idea if you'll succeed or fail. And there's not that many institutions set up to do that. To do that, yeah. I was frustrated, though. I was frustrated. I was frustrated at the inability to like, I felt like we were sitting on gold. I felt like we, they recognized the editorial gold, but I felt like we were sitting on financial gold with planet money. And people love it. And it's brand new, and it's different, and they're consuming it a different way. And it just feels like, you know, that you're getting these like teeny, tiny ad rates, and like, nobody knows what it is yet. And it just felt like, it felt like we were just this giant, and that nobody knew about us. Yeah. Do you remember the point in your mind where you thought, "I'm going to leave. You've worked for organizations your entire life. You've never run a business. You've never gone out on your own. You've got like a family. You're 47. How did you get to the, to a point where you thought, "I am going to do this, and I will leave my safe, stable, comfortable job if I have to?" Because that's a, that's a pretty big leap. I don't know if this is exactly the moment, but this was a moment. I mean, it's never just one moment, but here is a moment that I remember. I had a dream. I was at some party, and Ted Coppall was there. And Ted Coppall somehow knew who I was. And he came up to me at the party, and he was like, "Alex, how long are you going to stay at this job? How long are you going to do that? Do you want to start something on your own?" And I remember telling him, like, "No, Ted, I'm pretty happy." He's like, "Are you really?" So then I woke up, and I told my wife about that dream. And I think that kicked it off. Yeah. When we come back in just a moment, how Alex learns that it's a lot easier to make a podcast than to make a podcast company. And how he documents almost every humiliating moment of that process on the show startup. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raaz, and you're listening to How I Built This From NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raaz. So it's 2014, and Alex Bloomberg is going to walk away, not from one, but from two plum jobs in public radio. And he's going to do this to start a podcast company. Something that at this point was not an entirely proven concept. So he decides to lay out his case on a podcast, which he calls startup. Here's a clip of it. I love podcasts. It seemed like someone should come up with money to invest in making new shows like these and come up with a theory about how those shows could be profitable. I kept waiting for someone to do that. And then came this thought. A thought that's gotten a lot of people into a lot of trouble. The thought, well, I could do that. And did you think you were going to do this by yourself? Was it the plan at the beginning? Yes. I thought that was what I was going to do. Basically, I was on my own. Millions of people listened to this "Mercam Life" and "Planet Money" and "MPR". And I didn't have any personal brand. And so my big fear was like, I figured I'd be able to like get a podcast together. I just didn't know how anybody was going to know about us. Yeah. So I had to do something that was going to attract attention to what we were doing. And I figured like, okay, a guy recording himself trying to start a company. That'll be good. It was like a marketing ploy. Doing an audio diary of like making this company. Yeah. Are you meeting someone with money? This is my wife, Nazanine. Early one morning, a couple months ago. Stopping me as I was on my way out the door to do something I'd never done before. Meet a guy who works at Adventure Capital Farm and try to get him to give me money. Did you in your mind have a sense of how much time you had before you could no longer just survive of Nazanine's income? No. I didn't. By that point, she was working at MSNBC. So she was making a lot more than you make in public radio. But it wasn't long. Like, we didn't have a ton of savings. And I didn't have a job. Yeah. I had a couple, maybe like, I don't know. Three, four months, five months. That was it. Max. And I mean, you were like in your apartment, you had I think two kids at this point, right? Yeah. And you just started out talking into your microphone? Yeah, I started anything I was doing. I would mic myself doing it. Any meetings I had set up, I would tell the people ahead of time. Like, and you know, I'm starting a podcast and coming in. Like, funny thing. I'm also making a podcast about it. Ha ha ha. I'm gonna come out with a microphone. And for the most part, they were into it. Like, it was like, you know, it got me in the door in a certain way. It was like, it was unusual. Yeah. You know, like if you're a VC, you've seen 70, five gasoline people pitch you a different kind of like food delivery app. Or something, you know. But you probably haven't seen people come with a full headguar and boom, like, recording it. So it was if nothing else was a novelty. All right, so you leave planet money in March of 2014. And would you go like just have meetings with people who had money? Would you just try to set up meeting after meeting? Yeah, I would set up meeting after meeting. I would reach out to everybody that I knew who'd been involved. And you just meet somebody and then they introduce you to somebody else and they introduce you to somebody else. And it's all like, you know, but ultimately became very clear. Like nobody was going to invest. I could only tell half the story. I could only tell the story of like, here's the kind of things that I've made. And here's, and I'm going to just keep doing that. And that wasn't that wasn't a business. That wasn't a business. And your pitch was, I want to make like the HBO of audio. Yeah. I want to make really high quality shows. It's going to be ad supported. Maybe we'll sell stuff. Podcasts are here. Everyone. Yeah. No, I feel like I would I would go out and I would be all pumped up. And I'd be practicing. I'd go over my pitch and I'd go out and do it. And then I'd fly out somewhere. And then I was one of like, I don't know, three, four meetings that day. And I was just one idea out of a million ideas. And other people were pitching ideas that had proprietary software. Or, you know, like, but scientific breakthroughs. And they'd been like a part of a lab at Stanford. And I was pitching a podcasting company. And I hadn't worked in a for-profit company since I was a bagger at a grocery store at school and high school. And I remember calling my wife. I think we actually recorded one of these conversations when I called my wife after one of these things. I think it was actually ended up being in a startup episode. Oh, how are you feeling? I'm feeling, uh, I'm feeling the same way I felt the last time I was out here. I'm saying they're talking to the to the to the sky. And I'm describing something that feels like the biggest thing I've ever done. Like a scale beyond my wildest imaginings. Something that I can't even tell if I could pull off. And it's totally not big enough. Like it seems small to him. But like, even when I was like at the depths of my depression and feeling small and stupid and like what the hell have I done, the fact that I was able to talk about it on tape. I knew it was good tape. So the more I failed, there's the one to be entrepreneur. The more I was succeeding as a as a radio documentary producer. And so there was something weirdly comforting about that. Like at least all this work won't be for nothing. At least I'll have a some document. Yeah, I mean startup really was fascinating. To listen to and these like now iconic moments like I think a lot of startup fans will remember that moment when you're trying to pitch a gimlet to the investor Chris Saka. So I'm making a network of digital podcasts that we will monitor that will that is going to meet. Sorry. So what's it going to take to do it? So it'll take a million and a half dollars I think. And. - They got the I-Ting. - Yeah. - They'll take a million. - I was so neat. And it was like that meeting that really showed me how naive I was. All the questions he asked, I had no idea how to answer. What's the exit? I was like, what does that even mean? He was like, you know, I give you money. You build the company, then how am I gonna get my money back? What's your exit? You're gonna sell two. I had no idea. Didn't anyone occur to me? - Yeah. - When people said, yeah, I'll offer you a little bit of money here or there, how did you even know what percentage to give them? How did you even know how to accept the terms and the terms she did? Were you consulting with a lawyer? Did you just, 'cause those things are complicated. - Nobody was offering me money until. I literally, nobody, I don't think anybody offered money until mad and I teamed up. I think when I was doing it by myself, I didn't even get to that point. - So you come to this conclusion that you need a partner, probably somebody with some experience in business or maybe at least an MBA. When did you meet Matt? - I met Matt over the summer of 2014, I believe. And we were introduced by a mutual friend in public radio. And the story that I heard was that sort of like, there's another guy running all around town with sort of the same story. Talking about how there was a business to be built in audio and he was sort of off in his world doing the same thing that I was doing. And so we finally met. - What met when you met Alex, what were you doing in the summer of 2014? - I had done my MBA and then become a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, which meant that I would go and work inside of large companies and help them develop growth strategies or solve problems or things like that. But then I began to think about digital audio and I was listening to a lot of podcasts at the time. And I thought every time a new medium comes about, new media companies get built. This is true across the last 100 years of history. And I thought someone will build a defining media company around on-demand digital audio and like why not me. And I told a lot of people about this. Not that I was starting a company 'cause Alex was much further advanced than I was. But just like that would be exciting. Like I think someone's gonna do that and I think it would be really fun. And I told my friend Graham, who had been a mentor to me back in my radio career. And he said, "Oh, you should meet this other guy, Alex." - What'd you think about him when he first met? Did you think, this is it? This is like a slam dunk? - I'm in. - Or was it not quite that clear? - I mean, this is the thing about, like I feel like I already knew him because I had listened to his stories. This is the thing about audio. And I'm sure you've experienced this guy, which is when you meet people, they walk up to you like they're your friend, right? And everything he was saying about, like I'm excited about audio and I think it's underestimated and I wanna do a business around that. I just sat there and shook my head and said, "Yes, and I think this is how the business could work." And I think it could be really big. And that sounds exciting. And I basically said, "Let me know how I can help." - Yeah. It's a funny moment 'cause really what I was looking for was a co-founder, but I didn't know my co-founder yet. And so there's like some sort of weird dating thing that has to happen. And as we started to talk more about like what would be helpful, I think you suggested like, why don't we do a business plan? - Right. I think I just started working on it. Basically like nights and weekends and sending you things and what kinds of shows we would create, which was a long lens of what you were doing, but also how they would get distributed who the partners would be. And I was doing that not because I was like trying out to be your co-founder actually. That's the crazy thing. And I was doing a lot of work. - You were doing so much work. - But I was like, the thing for me it was like, it was fun. And I would wake up in the morning just excited to do it. - Yeah, and I would get up in the morning and they're early in the morning and there would be like multi-page business plan that Matt had somehow produced. (laughs) And I was like, oh my god, this is amazing. And making a case that investors could actually get behind. - But did you, Alex, did you pretty much from the beginning when Matt started to kind of help you out and just give you free advice? Did you think, okay, I think this is the guy or were you not quite there yet? - I wasn't quite there yet because I think we didn't know each other at all. - Yeah. - We had met like three times. - Did we only meet three times when we? - No, no, I mean, by the time we signed, we'd met more than three times. By the time we actually signed an agreement, but like I think around the business plan, era. - Right, right, yeah. - We came over and we had an initial meeting sort of at my house where Matt brought over some beers and we drank beers and talked about like what was happening. - Just a couple of start-up bros, I was trying to drink him bros, he's hatching my arms. (laughing) I did a bunch of, I did some reference checking so I started calling around to people who had worked with Alex. - You did? - Yeah, I didn't think so. - Oh yeah, and it always still shocks me that you didn't do that for me. But of course, I could the time you didn't have a clue. - Yeah. - Now you would never hire someone without like buying reference checks, right? So I called a couple people who'd work with him and they're pretty consistent which is he's a brilliant, brilliant editor, like incredibly supportive. And then I had lunch with Adam, David's in your partner. - Oh wow. - Adam is a very direct person and he was also like, yeah, Alex is also like tenacious and you know, doesn't back down and is really stubborn. And actually all that turned out to be true. Like the four words to describe Alex aren't those brilliant storyteller, stubborn control freak. (laughing) And I was like, that's, those are some of the qualities you want to have in starting in the early stage. - And what about you, Alex? I mean, Matt, you didn't know him at all. You just knew that he had some experience that was in public radio and he had a business degree. But like-- - I had concerns about how we didn't know each other and I was worried about that. And we're pretty different people. Trying to think of like what our first major conflict though was. - Oh, I remember very clearly 'cause I, 'cause I think this is before we agreed to partner. This is gonna sound very divulgal, but I was like, we have to have a fight so that we see how each other are going to conduct ourselves in a situation with conflict. And I kind of forced it. - Yeah. - It was like nine p.m. We'd both put our kids to bed and then came over your apartment. And I think it was about, it was our eternal fight which was you were saying, this is, we're just gonna make a bunch of podcasts. Like that's what we're gonna do. And I was saying, first of all, we're gonna make more than a couple of podcasts. We're gonna build a company and an organization and a culture and it's gonna end up being really big. And it's going to be way more work than we're doing now and it's gonna be incredibly hard and I think you're underestimating that. Because for you, you think you're just gonna be able to do the same thing you did at Planet Money but do it a couple more times. And actually the thing we're doing is completely different. - So when you guys finally did decide the partner, I had to come about. - Well, Alex did it as part of a startup. - So the final thing to discuss, which we had put on the agenda for last time, where we see this relationship going. - Yeah, checking in on it. Looking back, I think you only felt comfortable having that conversation because you had the microphone. And then that began a negotiation basically about what the partnership was gonna be. - And I think Alex originally, you offered like 10 to 15% ownership. - No, no. - No. - No. - No. - No. - I think I said in the range of one to 10, I'm key to the success of the company. And I wanna feel that that is reflected in the cap table, I guess. There's a subtext to the, I am key to the success of this company, which is you are not. You meaning me. And Matt was, and you were, so do you believe that I'm somewhat, offended by this justifiably, I would say. - I can't imagine doing this for the numbers that you're talking about. I just can't imagine doing it. Because if it's 90, 10, I'm like, this is now it's a job. And in a job, I'm not gonna like, and then you're the boss. I'm just not interested in that. And I don't think that will make the company succeed. So you guys, play out this negotiation in the podcast. Eventually, Matt, you come back, you say, let's split it, then you say, okay, about 53, 47, Alex goes back, you talked to your wife, your wife is saying, now it's too high. Finally, you agree on a 60, 40 split. This is all out there. - Yep. - For everyone to hear. - This is public, all public. And that was great, though everybody was happy with that. - I was. Were you? Yeah, I was excited to just get started building the company. And I felt that it was being able to get through that negotiation and get to an agreement was, it solidified our relationship. - And Alex, that entire time you were going back and forth with Matt, how confident were you about this idea that this company was even gonna work. You know what? I think on some level, I knew it would work. I'm not a big risk taker, not a serial entrepreneur. It just felt so clear to me. But of course I didn't know it was going to work, right? So of course you actually have anxieties and eventually I admitted myself to possibility that like, oh this could not work out, but it was by that point we were like four years into it and it was definitely going to work out. Like it was already growing and it was like it's funny and you know I looked when we eventually sold the company to Spotify. People were posting a Slack channel, all these very very first pictures of the very very first office in the very very first months of that first office. And at the time I'd been so proud of that office and I couldn't believe that like, look we have an office and we got people to give us money and it's all working. And then I looked back and I for the first time I saw it through the eyes of a non-tru believer. I saw it from the outside and I was like, oh my god you quit your good job to do this, to like show up in this dusty office with no infrastructure and like you guys made your own studio and like what were you possibly thinking and all these people came along with you? Like what it felt like looking from in hindsight, I somehow accessed all the all the doubts. And of course I'm on a sort of podcast. You describe all about that first office in Brooklyn and the people you hired and working with Matt and you also talk about how early on you changed the name of the company to Gimlet because I guess one of your potential investors thought your first name was just dumb. Like American public. What was it again? The American podcasting corporation. The American genius name because it was like a callback to the original big media companies that were started in the original era of like of radio. Americans broadcasting company. Yeah, so did you like the name Gimlet at the beginning? No I didn't. And it wasn't just investors who hated the name American broadcasting corporation. It was also Matt. Right. You hated the name too. I hated the name and I was I insisted on a new name and then there's a there's a consulting company whose job it is to create names for new companies and new products and they ran a thorough process that landed us on Gimlet. And I think what you didn't like and I think part of the reason you didn't like it was maybe you didn't like the name. I think more of the reason was you didn't like the idea that there was some experts that we were going to consult in such a corporate fashion who would give us our name. Yeah, I felt like I was to felt for me. It felt in authentic. Yeah. I don't know. This was this is interesting. Like I think Matt and I went up the other big fight we always had was just around your gut like and how how you make decisions and I'd spent like 12 to 15 years making decisions with my gut. Like that was the way you do it when you're making a story for this American life. And I was taking that with me into starting a company. And so like the fact that a branding company had come up with their name it just felt like it just felt wrong. But of course it wasn't wrong. So as you guys roll through 2014 your first big I guess acquisition or partnership was reply all which was a show that was in a slightly different it was a different version of that show but it existed. How did you guys convince those guys PJ and Alex to bring their show to Gimli? They were hungry to do something. It was a side project. They had day jobs. We had to convince them that it was okay to leave their good jobs and join a shaky startup. But it was exciting. I think a lot of people were feeling the way that I had felt which was that like there was more happening here than public radio has the infrastructure to accommodate right now. And start up put us on the map reply up it is on the map. People knew about us. People were coming to us and just being like oh my god I hurt. I just was in startup. Can you still invest? Yeah and I guess people were actually investing. You initially managed to raise about a million and a half dollars. But I mean even with a million and a half dollars that that wasn't really going to be enough right? Like could you could you scale up with that? Could you actually like start hiring a lot more people? Well when we raised the first million and a half dollars of financing our plan was that that would take us through to profitability and then we would fund our growth through profits. Right. We always build the company so that we could either be profitable or get to profitability based on the amount of cash we had in the bank and we were always over optimistic in our projections. You thought that that seed round was going to be the only round of money that you had to raise. Every round we thought was going to be the last round. Was it just the reality of the of the business was that you actually could not raise the amount of money you needed to raise? It just the money wasn't coming in instantly from advertisers or whatever. No it was it was a combination of we decided to grow faster than we originally had so we decided to launch more shows which required hiring more people than we originally had planned to in the original plan and the reason we decided to go faster was we saw that like podcasting as a trend and as like a cultural moment was really crystallizing and we didn't we wanted to make sure we stayed at the forefront of it so we wanted to launch more and so that's why we ended up raising more to grow faster. And also it's just like we had like in the beginning like we had so many hits you know like startup was a hit and reply I was a hit and mystery show and crime town and what's Matt's not saying is like he built an entire infrastructure had Gimlet he built a sales team and he built a sales marketing team and we built and built a finance operation and and a people ops operation and all those things were working in concert and he hired really good people to like lead those and build those and we were monetizing. I mean the business so you say the business is working well but I have to imagine it's a media company and I can't imagine that you were making more money than you were spending you had to spend more money to grow this business and did that worry you or did you guys both say we're just we're not gonna make we're just not gonna make a whole lot of money in the first couple years. We actually did make more money than we brought in like in our second year of operations we generated profits on an accrual basis. Because the way the podcast work is you launch a podcast and when you launch it has an audience of zero but you have to pay the people to make the podcast and they're gonna work for you for a few months before you're able to launch and then once the podcast launches you have an audience of you know tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of people if you're lucky and and then over the course of a year the audience grows and there's a size of an audience where you multiply by the size of audience times the number of episodes you produce times you know how well you're able to monetize through advertising and then it becomes a profitable entity so you each podcast is like a little business inside the big company and you have to invest in them before they become profitable and we always understood that. Were you just being inundated with pitches? I've got this idea. I want to do this show and I'm assuming you were and how did you filter out? Like how did you deal with that when you're coming? That was hard. That was one of the things that was really hard it was like sort of like everybody out of the pitch and like okay we've set it up to make more podcasts and then it's like okay which ones are we gonna launch? How are we gonna launch them? Who's gonna do them? And then everybody in the world is like I want to do this podcast, I want to do that podcast and what do we do? How do you how do you do this over and over and over again with a bunch of different people in a bunch of different topic areas and how do you not make it the same thing over and over again? Like how do you not make it actually the planet money of blah blah blah like how do we actually make them feel new and different and that that was hard. That was like the part that was the thing to figure out. I remember we had a conversation Alex I think it was probably like 2016. I think at that point you said you know I'm almost at the point where I'm making as much money and income as I made it NPR. I think it was around 2016 and I thought man that is just such a risk. This guy is in his late 40s he's got two kids and like he's just getting to that point after two years of a slog and wow you know and and I don't know if you guys ever experienced this but being on the outside and you know me sort of being connected to the public radio world and the radio world I had a lot of conversations with people who were so skeptical who said you know that thing is just not going to work. It's it can't work because they're not going to be as profitable as they say and their investors are you know they're not going to make a return and blah blah blah. Did you guys ever hear any of that Naysang or were you sort of shielded from that? We heard it secondhand. Yeah nobody never would say it to our face. No one said to your face. Nobody's nobody face to it us. But I think that the we had both come out of this amazing institution of public media and what we learned there informs our success and a lot of the people who were early employees in both the company came out of that same system. But I think in some places we're viewed as a threat and and I think some people's natural reaction to a threat is just is too naysayet as a form of self comfort I guess. And then there was some who were like It's gonna change everything. You're gonna bring in money, and you're gonna ruin it. I think there's a lot of fear that we were opening a Pandora's box. - Did you ignore that criticism or did it sometimes as you did it like, "Bakey, feel bad?" - It fueled me. (laughing) - Matt is fueled. What part of it fueled you? - When we first started the company, when we were out pitching to raise money, we pitched the company to probably three of the biggest public radio stations. And none of them invested. And one of the pitches was the most insulting, condescending response we ever got from any investor ever. And that actually did fuel me. 'Cause I was like, "We are going to show you." - Do you remember what they said? They said, "You don't understand how risky this is. "You haven't evaluated the risks. "The quality of your presentation deck is beneath you." - Wow. - And the price that you've put on the company is expensive bordering on outrageous. - bordering on insulting. And I was so mad. And I remember, and you were just kinda like, "Yeah, you were just disappointed." You're like, "Yeah, that's what happens." But for me, that made me just want to prove everyone wrong. - Right. - But me, Mom, I mean, you were growing. And I mean, over time, you, I think you wound up raising like, I think like $27 million by 2017. And around that time, you had like, around 100 employees, right? - Yeah, over 100. - Over 100. As you started to hire more and more people, especially people coming from public radio, that's a challenging group of people to oversee. Okay, that's not, we're not talking about like, software engineers or computer programmers. - We're super easy. - Well, not comparatively easier, right? Where they cover sales teams, or they're coming in and like, this is a group of highly intelligent, highly creative people with a million different ideas and not easy to manage. So I have to imagine that you guys ran into some challenges. - Yeah, different challenges. - Yeah. - Yes, yes we did. One of the things that I started to realize very late this year was that the hard thing about any media business is that there is a thing at the center of any project that you're launching, of any show you're trying to launch. And that thing is a mystery. And the mystery is, will people listen to this or not? And there is no way to quantify why people listen to things. There's no way to predict whether people will listen to things. It's unknowable. And dealing with that mystery, that's what every creative person is doing. And yeah, that presents a real hard management challenge. On the one hand, you have to manage the anxiety that comes with knowing that. So people who have somehow have figured out that mystery and are like doing successful shows, they know on some level that they don't know why they're working, why what they're doing is working. And so you have to manage their anxiety about that. And then for the people who are launching something that isn't working, you can't tell them why, because you need them to have figured out the essential mystery and they haven't figured it out. And so you have to just be like, you haven't figured out, I'm sorry. And it took us forever to, it took me forever to understand that. - 'Cause you had to, I mean, you're a business with a, with a PNL and you gotta be profitable. And which means that some shows that don't work have to be killed. And some of those shows are done by people that you know that are friends. Which means that you are going to lose friends. - Yeah. And I hired almost all my friends at the beginning because all my friends were in the business. - Did you have sleepless nights? Did you have, I mean, we heard your anxiety when you were starting this company in the podcast. Did you have even more anxiety after you started to gain traction and you started to see some success? Or did your anxiety mostly go away? - Oh, the opposite. The more successful we got, I think the more anxious it became. It became harder and harder to sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night until they really had never really done before. And I think it was about like just the more successful we got the more the bigger the stakes are, higher the stakes are, the more people that are depending on you. And you just have to contend with like, you can't make everybody happy. And I love making people happy. It's like one of my, the most essential character flaws. - How about you Matt? Did you have more anxiety as you started to actually see success with the company? - Yeah, I think I did. And oftentimes like the moments of on the outside where it looked most successful inside it felt like the biggest mess. And inside it felt like it was gonna fall apart. And that's really hard to live through it. And then learning that actually that is the common experience of starting a company helps a little bit. As our coach says, because we go to a leadership coach says like just because you feel like (beep) doesn't mean you are. - So we had an episode about Yelp. And Yelp was offered like half a billion dollars by Google a couple years after its launch. And Jeremy Stoppeman said no, we're gonna keep going. And Yelp today has valued it over a billion dollars and et cetera, et cetera. And of course, you guys were approached or you began conversations with Spotify to acquire Gimlett. They made an offer reportedly more than $230 million, a really big offer. I would have taken the money personally, but I'm just wondering, did was there any part of you that thought, let's not take this, let's just keep going and build this into a billion dollar company. - There was a small part, maybe. - Not a big part. - Nope. - Not really. I don't know why. - Yeah, Alex is making that up. But no, we're, nope, nope. - No, because we were, the company was going very well at the time. Actually, we were, we had the most momentum we'd ever had as a company. This was in the fall of 2018. Our audiences were growing faster than they had in years. We had come out of the summer and all of a sudden, like there was more and more interest from advertisers in spending money on our podcasts. And we had a hit television show that we had produced for Amazon called Homecoming, starring Julia Roberts. And so if you are around New York City at the time, like you couldn't turn around without seeing a 50-foot billboard with Julia Roberts' face on it, starring in Homecoming, which was based on our podcast. But there were a couple of things that we just weren't. There were two, like basically industry level challenges that we were confronting along with every other podcast company. And one was audiences were still having a really hard time discovering new podcasts. Like if you asked people how they find out new podcasts, they would typically say, like word of mouth, like a friend told me, or I found out about it from another podcast, but discovery is really hard. And then we weren't getting data that we could share back with our editorial teams about how the shows were performing, who was listening to them, and that kind of inhibited the monetization as well. And so we thought that for podcasting to become, like as an industry to become, to realize its full potential, those two things had to be addressed and we couldn't do those alone. And Spotify, which is the world's largest music streaming platform, could do that together with us. - Yeah. - It wasn't even so much the money, it was more like the, we felt like we could achieve so much more by joining forces than we could independently. - And a company like Spotify, that's their business, they have this huge built-in audience that's already listening to audio. And it felt like that's a great synergy is the word I'm thinking. I can't think of a, I'm gonna say synergy. - You would have been totally riddigated of the plan of money if you said synergy. You would have been shamed in public radio if you used that word. - I'm probably not the first person that said that word in this podcast, am I? - So it makes total sense, right? 'Cause Spotify's a giant, right? And full disclosure, as you know, I did a podcast with Spotify. They paid a lot of money for Gimla, 'cause it's the last valuation before the sale was like 55 million. And now you've found yourselves very quickly. I mean, I know it's a long slog, but five years with a lot of money. And now you're presumably committed to working with Spotify for a few more years. - Yeah. - What do you think? I mean, you're gonna, I don't know, you're gonna buy a, 10 Teslas and a mansion and a house in the Hamptons. What are you gonna do with your life and your wealth? - I, yes. - No. - They're good. - It is life changing for us both. - Yeah. - And someone asked me recently, "Oh, how are you?" And I said, "Well, I'm really rich and it turns out money doesn't make you happy." (laughing) But it does make you safe. - Yeah. And so I feel an incredible amount of safety, knowing that I'm gonna be able to put my kids through college, and I don't have to worry about that. And, you know, we've never owned a home, and now my wife and I are gonna buy a home. It is a life-changing thing. - Yeah, I think right after it happened, I kept thinking like, this feels like a big deal. I don't understand why I still feel like the exact same way. Like, it feels like an event that should just sort of give you a whole new outlook or something, and it didn't. It takes away this huge hum of anxiety. There was always in the back of my mind about like money and the future, and that hum is gone. And that's nice, but it sort of takes away nothing else, you know? And which is surprising. I would have thought, I would have thought it would feel different, duh. We, my wife's parents came from another country to this country, and we're as refugees, and worked all night, cleaning offices to pay for her to live in America. And so I think when this happened, it was just like, it was winning the lottery for them, and then we were able to pay off their mortgage, and renovate their house, and have them come and visit our kids more often. And it's been just an incredible blessing. - Do you feel like what happened to you, the outcome, and the story of Gimlet happened because you're super smart and talented and worked really hard or because you got lucky? - I think it's mostly luck, but not in the obvious way. Like I think for me, it was the luck of being born into the family I was born into at the time that I was. So I had the luck of being in a family where my parents sent me paid for my college, and then we're in a position of financially support me so I could do unpaid internships, producing radio, because that was my passion. And then they also sent me to business school. And that is like an extreme level of privilege. And then the other forms of luck are having my Alex when I did, and having really good timing on the idea of starting a podcast, an audio podcast company in 2014. I definitely don't think I'm smarter and more talented than your average entrepreneur. - Yeah, it's funny. I think both things are true though. Like I think there's probably a lot of people who could have tried to start this company and it wouldn't have been successful. So I think there's something, we brought something to it. (laughing) I'm proud of that. I am proud of that. But I think that's the part that's easy to tell and most easy to overemphasize as you're looking back and especially as you're looking back. And I think it's important to remember that that's like a tiny part of it. - Yeah. And both of you guys have the potential to be on the other side of the table from where you guys were, right? The investors. You both can be investors now for other startups. And the other side to it is, you both can give away a lot of money too. So do you, to either of those or both of those things appeal to you? - I don't know about investing. Like maybe, I don't know. Like I'm still trying to figure out like what this all means. - Right. - It seems only sporting that I would do that since so many people trusted us and it worked out for us and for them. So it feels like I should sort of pay it forward in that way. - Yeah, Matt. - Yes, I will do both. - Yeah, I've made a couple of angel investments and-- - You have. - Oh yeah, I've been told that. - Wow, no. - Oh yeah. - Interesting. - And it's fun. - Do you even cut Alex into that? Wow. - Didn't even tip me in. - It's key. - Do you want to be? - Do you want to be? - We should talk about it. - That's Matt Lieber and Alex Bloomberg. Co-founders of Gimlett. And by the way, the eighth and final season of startup launched a few months after our conversation. And in it, you can hear many more details about the past few years at the company, including some very serious money problems they got into last year and how they got out of them. Also some great fly on the wall moments from the Spotify acquisition. And a kind of surreal scene where Alex and Nazanine are having it another sleepless night. And for whatever reason, they find themselves hunched over a screen scrolling, I kid you not through pictures of the royal family. And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're gonna hear from you about the things you're building. But (beep) Oscar winner Regina Keane has been acting for more than three decades. But she says it's just in the last few years that she's really coming to her own. - Being a mother had a lot to do with getting me to that space. - Regina Keane on her Hollywood long game. Next time on, it's been a minute from NPR. - Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And this story starts back in the late 1990s when Casey Carigan was working at a rehabilitation hospital in Boston. - I was seeing a lot of patients with NPR threat us. - Especially women in their 50s and 60s. - And what we found is that high heels affected pretty much in the whole body. - She found that high heels don't just affect knees but hips, feet, lower back, pretty much everything. - Now Casey's specialty is physical medicine. So she started to do some research. And she soon realized that high heels are not the only enemy. Women's shoes in general have all sorts of problems. - Two narrow of a toe box. Two narrow of a four foot, a lack of true spring in the soul. - And some of Casey's younger patients would say, "Yeah, I know these shoes are bad for me "but I want my feet to look great and fashionable." - But gosh, do we really wanna be walking around and choose that are doing this? I mean, let's walk around and choose that are going to be the easiest on our joints. - So at this point, around 2009, Casey decides to quit her very safe, very good paying job at the University of Virginia Medical School. And she sets out to design a kinder shoe for women. - When I left, I thought, ah, you know, this shouldn't be too hard. Just need to make a sole that's flat and springy and that accommodated the natural anatomy of a woman's foot. How hard could that be? - Actually, pretty hard. For starters, no shoe factory in the world seem set up to make the kind of shoe Casey had in mind, which was wide in the toe, totally flat on the bottom with a super springy sole. - Nothing in the design is like meant to just be pretty or everything's functionally based. - So using computer assisted design software, Casey taught herself how to make those first shoes. But remember, she couldn't find a manufacturer to make them. So she and her husband took their savings. They bought an old warehouse and they filled it with all kinds of equipment. - I bought this big filament winder to make these carbon fiber springs. I bought a water jet saw. Then there's ancillary things like you need to, like a, ah, she, what do you call it? By the way, this is all happening when Casey is already in her late 40s. - Oh, chillers, that's it. So you need a water chiller. - She'd been a medical doctor, then a tenured professor. And suddenly she's making shoes. - I never thought, yeah, I'd never be a cobbler, right? - In about 2011, Casey's first shoe was ready to sell. It was kind of a heavy, chunky leather sneaker. - You know, these were like orthopedic looking shoes. I gotta be honest, not really attractive because they had real thick soles. But a few years later, Casey found a better material for the soles, rubber pellets. The same stuff they make those super bouncy balls out of. And at roughly the same time, 3D printing was becoming cheaper. - And I thought, hmm, wait a minute. If we 3D print it, I can basically create the sole that I could only imagine ever making, you know, with traditional manufacturing. - So now Casey could make thinner and more flexible soles for all kinds of new designs, like a tennis shoe and a ballet flat and even a platform sandal with a fluorescent blue bottom. - And it's comfortable, that's the thing, is when you step on our soles. It's springy, I mean women, they'll smile because they've never experienced it before. - Casey calls the shoes, oh, which is an anagram for the word shoe. Both Sheetter Husband run the company out of Charlottesville in Virginia. Last year, just selling from their website, they made about three-quarters of a million dollars. If you wanna find out more about O Shoes or here previous episodes, head to our podcast page, how I built this, dot NPR, dot org. And of course, if you wanna tell us your story, go to build.NPR.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected] and if you wanna send a tweet, it's @howIbuiltthis or @gyraz. Our show is produced this week by James Della Hussi with music composed by Rumpteen Arableui. Thanks also to Candace Lim, Julia Carney, San Asmesh Kumpur, Niva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Sequoia Carillo. I'm Gyraz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. (upbeat music) (gentle music)