I don’t know where we are in the podcast cycle. Is it completely saturated or are there room for more entrants? I spend a lot of time with headphones on and I welcome the supply, the more the merrier. While it’s impossible to listen to everything, there’s nothing wrong with dropping something when a better product comes along to replace it.
Here’s how podcasts fit into my daily life. I recently got into the NYT’s The Daily. It’s twenty minutes and it’s a great way to consume real news, right from the mouths of the people in the trenches. I use the app Overcast, and I’m either at 1.8 or 2x. So I can knock out that 20 minute podcast, which is closer to 10-14 minutes depending on how fast I listen, while I walk my dog in the morning.
My commute is 90 minutes a day, or 450 minutes a week. I mostly read on the train, but the walk to and from the train is another 15-20 minutes a day, or 90-100 minutes a week. And when I’m cooking or showering or brushing my teeth, I’ll listen to a podcast. This sounds exhausting. It’s not. I love this medium.
I take notes while I listen on my phone. Here is an example of what that looked like today, from a conversation on Capital Allocators with Ted Seides and Chris Douvos, who runs a fund that invests in other venture capital funds. It was excellent.
- Lottery league slogan with Ivy League veneer.
- When venture’s working really well, time is really cheap and capital’s really expensive. What happens in bubbles is that time becomes really scarce and expensive. People don’t have any time and as a result their capital becomes cheap. And when you have that kind of relationship, watch out.
- Opportunity equals value minus perception.
- Everybody wants to be Stanford. If I could short Stanford I would. It’s a fantastic place but talk about perception. All those entrepreneurs coming out of there have very full perceptions of themselves. There are other campuses that I’ve gone to that are producing comparable talent and comparable ideas with much more humility.
- Some of the venture funds that we’ve seen grow quite large end up doing much better for their partners than their investors.
- There’s not much of a charm premium left anymore (in Venture).
- If your whole micro cap public market is gone, where are you gonna go for emerging growth companies?
- The average venture partnership lasts twice as long as the average American marriage.
- We’re at that moment where we’re overhyped in some areas but under hyped in the long-term.
I totally understand the thinking that the world doesn’t need another podcast. But I’m happy that the ones I’ll listen to in the future won’t be stifled by this attitude.
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