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Hey acquired listeners, we are here with you today for two reasons. First, to remind everyone about our worldwide virtual meetup. So this Thursday, February 21st, we will all be getting together on the internet to celebrate acquired passing the million download milestone, which at this point was like a couple months ago, but you know, it takes us a while to plan things. It'll be at 5.30pm Pacific time, which is 8.30pm Eastern time in the United States. We'll be doing it on Zoom. So we're pushing the boundaries of the medium here and figuring out what it looks like when we all pile into Zoom. And we are structuring it as a Q&A with folks. So the Zoom link is available in the show notes. And if you want to send us a question or upvote somebody else's question, which is very fancy, you can ask it in the Slack, thanks to a very cool Slack bot that David has set up. Yeah, called Slido. And we're going to have a, there's a channel live in the Slack right now called Meetups. So head over there to ask questions. Indeed. All right, David. So the second reason for this episode over to you. Yes, the second reason is in true acquired experimental fashion here. We keep getting a whole bunch of requests in Slack and elsewhere for our take on things like the Qualtrics acquisition last year for the topic of today. Spotify's acquisition of Gimlet and Anchor. But the problem is we can't do like a full acquired treatment for all these companies all at once, but we keep wanting to kill David to spend that much time at the library. Indeed, indeed, the San Francisco public library is, you know, I'm already public enemy number one year. So we're going to experiment today with doing more of a quick take on some really relevant acquisitions to us and the podcasting space talking about Spotify's purchase of Gimlet, media and anchor. So how are we going to do this? There is sadly going to be no history and facts here. We'll just discuss briefly. But we do have a bunch of thoughts we want to share and put out there and get your guys feedback. So. Yeah. And we should also say this does not preclude ever doing a future episode. This just sort of gives us an outlet to be able to share share quick thoughts. And then, you know, as you guys know, we like to wait five plus years after acquisitions happen so that we can kind of have history as a as our guidepost to decide if something was, you know, really something we can grade if it was a good acquisition not. So know that this doesn't preclude us from doing it in the future, but it is a little extra outlet for us. So David, let's should we should we hit the facts of the acquisition first? Yeah. The facts are last week, the podcasting world changed, Spotify not only acquired Gimlet Media for now, I think we as of today know the numbers. They paid about 230 million dollars for Gimlet, I believe, maybe slightly less and also acquired anchor for just over a hundred million dollars and then pledged that they were going to spend several hundred million more this year in 2019 in podcast acquisitions. Boom. In one day, podcasting went from an uninvestable category that has not achieved venture scale to suddenly having, you know, a guaranteed five hundred million dollar worth of exits this year. Things can sure change on a dime or as David has said in multiple episodes on a knife point. On a knife point, yes. The podcasting world turned on a knife point. Yeah, I think there's lots of people have of course had their takes on this many of which I agree on. Ben Thompson wrote a great piece in the weekly his weekly piece exponent, Ben and James also covered it well. It's funny. I've been doing a whole kind of mapping out of the podcasting space as lots of other people have. What's interesting to me is I think the focus is so much on content here. I think the analogy really is Netflix. What I mean by that is like on the one hand, Spotify just paid, we're taking, I'm talking about the gimlet piece of this, Spotify just paid over two hundred million dollars for a podcast media content company that makes just over twenty podcasts and the whole advertising monetization of the whole podcasting space last year was like three hundred million. I think around around there. So what is that make any sense is the question. This is where I think the Netflix analogy is it comes in Spotify's business model is very different from anybody else in the podcasting space. Their business model is they get consumers to pay them ten dollars a month. Obviously that's primarily for music, but also podcasts. The money that Spotify can spend on content if it drives more people to pay them ten dollars a month and a large portion of their user base listens to that content, whether it's gimlet or other content they'll acquire in the future and we can talk about anchor here. That is on a marginal per subscriber basis very low and much lower than basically anybody else could pay in the space. Yep. It's a great point. And it's also worth pointing out as many other smart people have on the internet all a week, this could prove to be a dramatically better business model for Spotify than they have with music where because there are so few providers of music out there, they basically have have Spotify negotiated into a position where they they must give the labels a revenue share on every song played. Now a Spotify creates these podcasts or licenses them. They can pay you know for a certain amount upfront for the creation or license and and participate in all the upside. So suddenly you know this business looks like it has all the characteristics that you normally get out of a technology business and that is sort of why these technology businesses grow to be so valuable is because by you know having the characteristics of having high fixed costs but then getting to spread that out over just an enormous amount of people where distribution costs are free. Obviously people have talked about all this during the week but but what I haven't seen the point that's that's been missed to me is is the next step of that which is okay this is a fixed cost for content but when you have fixed costs for any input into a business the the breadth of your customer base that you're advertising those fixed costs over matters a lot is your competitive advantage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that is that is what is really unique here for Spotify. And so we should clarify too that we're talking about that Spotify bought Gimlet not for the content that they have today but their ability to create exclusive content in the future and the fact that sort of Gimlet is now this 100 plus person organization that is close to best in class at producing content that will be you know fixed costs for Spotify and when they start producing you know more exclusive shows out of Gimlet it'll be enormously differentiating for Spotify over Apple Music where they need strong differentiation. I would be very surprised if they take any of the existing Gimlet content and make it exclusive to Spotify. I think they've already announced they're not going to. But yeah it is all about the future content and that brings us to the other piece of the two acquisitions here which is anchor. This one is super interesting I did not see this coming at all. How about you Ben? No I would not have forecast who bought them but when it became clear that anchor anchor sort of had that very excellently braggadocious announcement that they made recently that over 40% of new podcasts are created using their platform. That data about what podcasts are starting today that are getting traction that that was absolutely an acquisition target for somebody. That number while certainly impressive I had thinking about I'm pulling up a picture of a market map of the podcasting space that we drew out on the whiteboard here. I had viewed the recording and production segments of the market as not good places to invest or build a business because I didn't think there was any money in it. There's not directly exactly right so that's what's interesting about this acquisition. So here's how we viewed the space. There's content itself so you've got the Gimletz, the Ringer, you know, MPR on down to acquired media LLC. Then you've got recording which anchor was really the only player in outside of you know, do your own, roll it yourself like we do here at acquired and like many podcasts do. Then you've got production and editing hosting. Hosting is a really interesting piece we'll come back to. Distribution, promotion, then on the consumer side discovery both organic and paid and then consumption, the listener apps that you all are listening to the show and right now where the big dollars are in this space are certainly in content also potentially in paid discovery on the consumption side and potentially also in hosting all that we'll get back to that. I didn't think there was any money to be had in recording so I thought it was not that interesting but it's when it's bundled. Has a strategic lever for creating more supply. So if it was a recording app that that's all it did and then it handed it off to someone else to sort of host and be able to have insights on how that content is performing, then it's useless. But when bundled with sort of the entire creation and hosting and just and or I guess not distribution but but hosting process, well then it's super valuable and it's interesting to think about these businesses where if you can do something that doesn't capture a lot of value but you can do it the best in the world then it earns you the right to be able to get customers to use it and own another piece of the value chain that is differentiated and super valuable. I think listeners are probably way ahead of us but to put a fine point on it, the supposition that we're making here is that Spotify bought anchor not for any of the technology itself because like not that it's necessarily specifically hard or or highly highly differentiated tech but what the tech had managed to accomplish and that was making it easy for anyone to podcast and getting a large number of new podcasts to start on the platform which gives them a tremendous look at the data of what podcasts will be successful as they start to do more and more licensing and show creation themselves. Right, exactly, exactly. So you know anchor by itself now of course anchor was also a player which is where they started before they pivoted into creating so they were getting. It was almost like an audio social network. Yeah, well we were the anchor podcast of the day way back in the day. That's right. Shout out to our good friends and anchor and congratulations to them. This is very different as part of Spotify than it was by itself. And probably much more valuable. Like it's interesting actually thinking about that that like we try to cover one plus one equals three things on the show. It strikes me that Spotify can extract a lot more value with anchor as a part of them then anchor ever could have created on their own. You would never use anchor and acquired because we care so much about highest quality audio possible and controlling every aspect of production. That's totally fine. Which you actually you actually can use them for just hosting. Like we could record on our you know fanciel mics here and you know upload the audio content to them and allow them to do a lot of the cool stuff that they're doing with you know dynamic ad insertion and there's a lot of other technology in there that could have been useful to us and is useful to friends of the show that we know that are putting their podcast on anchor. So there is sort of other reasons to be on it other than yammering into my cell phone. But that is certainly a large part of the new podcast that were created even though many of them only ever released one or two episodes. But where I was going with it is I don't think we ever would have paid them. Right. Probably not. Yeah. Certainly not for that recording piece. And hosting is basically pure commodity. Yeah. So we use lipstick here commodity we use lips in which is a publicly traded company amazingly so 37 million dollar cat publicly traded company. Yeah. Now what's interesting about the hosting part of the stack is that's the substrate for analytics analytics are so poorly by you know built out in this industry as we all know and lips and others bundle analytics with hosting. So whatever insights we have you know about our audience and downloads and listens we get from from that analytics are also interesting but I think also in and of themselves not valuable. But again how back to part of Spotify as a as a content acquisition engine you know think about how Netflix works right like they have they host of course all the content that they're delivering and then they have strong analytics on top of it that they use to inform their content both acquisition and production decisions. So you start to see how this is really important. So the analytics we should say is not all the fault of the people who make the analytics dashboards the vast majority of them don't have access to client side data so you only get the information that the server sees which is pretty small but there's a lot more that you sort of could do and the virtue of that is extolled in the many many tabs spreadsheet that I have to export data from various sources and agglomerate our own our own analytics and I know that a lot of the larger networks do the same thing and so it's kind of a it's a funny space. It is amazing. I mean it shows you know the opportunity here for tech both tools and software but also platforms and large platforms maturing here like the gymnastics you go through band and that that you know also sophisticated podcast creators go through and publishers is just ridiculous. Okay so now we have this world where Spotify has been growing in listener share the numbers I've seen over the last several months have been somewhere in the sort of seven to eight percent range the folks at gimlet sighted 20 percent which is interesting it must be measured either on a different access or if Spotify sort of has has different information than what I've seen from a lot of the aggregated sources it also could be certainly for us it could be a segment issue like so many of you listeners you know we know listen and overcast listen and pocket cast that's great I love overcast I mean would never listen in just a stock app but I think that very much you know is dependent on us being an attack vertical yeah and that's not our numbers that sort of industry numbers that I've been seeing like lips and release something a few months ago that said seven percent so it's been growing you know they really only started doing podcasts like 18 months ago or 24 months ago something like that and so already getting meaningful share because oh my gosh when you have an app that everyone already clicks on to listen to stuff it turns out if you give them different stuff to listen to that's not so different and that was the bet is that people who listen to music in your Apple also want to listen to podcasts in your app it was a reasonable supposition and is definitely bearing fruit they've been growing and growing in share now Apple has historically been the elephant in the space with 50 60 it used to be like 80% of listens happening in the Apple podcast app Spotify is slowly chipping away these acquisitions you know if they can really produce differentiated content you know that the next serial being produced on Spotify is a very real possibility and one could make the argument well the next it won't be the next serial if it's on Spotify because it will only reach a fraction of the people well you know there's a chicken in the egg thing here and they can kind of keep leveling up and if they get a larger and larger percentage there is a chance that they could create the next serial on their platform and the same way that when Netflix releases bird box if they have a hit that they are able to release the content access marketing and could go drive a bunch of people to sign up for Spotify purely to get access to that exclusive and differentiated content so that is sort of the white whale that that they are chasing here is that differentiated content will accelerate the pace of Spotify having listener share and get closer to be the largest player in the market the podcasting world really did fundamentally change last week with this and it's because of this business model point which is Spotify is the only player that now has a very not only a very different business model from anyone else in the podcasting space but I would argue really the only viable business model like Apple unless they change their their model Apple has no incentive to go invest 200 million in content for podcasts because they're not making any money off of that whereas Spotify is doing the math and running the analytics and saying like okay great if we can produce or acquire this compelling content and we're willing to spend a lot on it and that drives enough subscriptions for us like we'll take that all day. There's a lot a lot happening in the podcast space I'm so far from from being willing to say the only viable business model I think that lots of there's lots of people that have lots of announcements that are oh sorry the only viable business model today but I think that's going to change we're releasing this only days from now and at the pace the space is moving right now when surprise me if I don't think anybody's going to announce anything over the weekend that's true what I think we should chat about next is okay great this is now the Paul Revere you know riding through the shots have been fired the British are coming you know the the Swedes are coming with Spotify what's next for the space. I think the question what's next and what will happen can be broken down into who are the stakeholders and what do they all want and if you look at the alignment of incentives and you sort of form some beliefs around how the sequencing will happen based on what those incentives are you can sort of come out to what possible scenarios for the future are so if you look at the stakeholders there's people who produce audio so everyone from networks to acquired to somebody who is producing audio for the first time and someone who you know it's thinking about starting a podcast which is I don't know how many millennials are there. The question is how many podcasts will each millennial create. That's a great point my model doesn't take that into account. Yeah what's the what's the multiplier on there what's this one point to something like that so there's the audio creators there's the listeners and then there's these businesses that are trying to sort of sit in the middle of these things so there's there's Apple there's Spotify certainly there's these players that have been at it forever with you know Stitcher there's a lot of really great listening apps out there today like Breaker I think we should start with listeners and creators first and then back into platforms so I'll I'll pose this question to you David should podcasters allow their podcast to be distributed on Spotify is that in their best interest. Well we have had a bunch of conversations over the past day about this. I think here's my view I think yes a hundred percent because any incremental audience is great audience and we'll come back in one sec too why that is going to get even more important. The answer is surely yes unless and until Spotify makes a product change to go to an algorithmic feed instead of a subscription model so if Spotify starts looking more like YouTube where they control access they they intermediate access between you and your listeners that's a dangerous place for podcasters like hey what should you listen to right now hey this is what we recommend based on things that you've given a signal to over time exactly and and and there's nothing wrong with that for discovery I mean that's what Breaker does but it's when that becomes the primary listen mode like on YouTube and this is why YouTube creators are so upset at the platform is they say like hey I have my audience people subscribe to me people follow me and then you intermediate that and then I don't reach them anymore if Spotify does that I think then there's a question should you be on it I don't know that they will and they certainly you know aren't going to anytime soon. Right it's I mean Spotify today looks basically like a glorified RSS reader that that you know hey look the feed that you subscribe to got a new thing that you go listen to it the reason I don't think they will is or or it's not a slam dunk that they will is because again think think back to the netflix analogy like they are going to invest a lot in creating tent pole triple a content great they're obviously going to make that discoverable and merchandise that in the app but they're they're not like YouTube right they're not trying to maximize number of listens to show ads alongside their business model is a $10 a month per subscriber like YouTube they want you to watch as much content as possible for as long as possible so they can show you as many ads as possible. Spotify just wants you to pay them 10 bucks a month. Spotify wants you to be the have the highest as Tim Cook says customer sat with your experience. As long as Spotify believes that is getting surfaced the content that you have subscribed to then it will stay that way to the extent that it ever changes and they're like actually a news feed of content that's that is really well tailored for you also we happen to put our first party content in it you know also we happen to for whatever other reasons put other things in it that is the scenario where that's the danger that where you become you know a journalist on Facebook yes yes you make a really good point that I actually have not heard anyone make yet that is their business model so if we walk backwards from like why does Facebook have a news feed or why do they still have a news feed let's not take it from the initial implementation of it but you know why have they doubled down so hard on the feed it's because it happens to be the greatest format in humanity to show ads. Yep and to and to keep your attention. Right Spotify their business model is completely different where you know they're not trying to show you ads also the way that they keep your attention is not visually so there's not like that that sort of feed metaphor the question is is there like you know there were these great apps that happened swell 60 dB that were sort of these like algorithmic short form audio we're just going to play stuff that we think you like the question is will Spotify's $10 a month customer is be more delighted with a primary experience around here's some stuff you like then they will with here's the latest episode of a thing that you have directly created a relationship with and subscribe to perhaps and that's why I say perhaps but but I don't think they have a nearly as much of a like if Google had bought Gimli or Facebook had bought Gimli yeah I'd be super worried as a five-caster about putting my content on those platforms. Spotify yeah we'll see we'll see like what if Netflix opened up the door for anybody creating video why hasn't Netflix done this if you're on YouTube and you also want to upload your content to spot to Netflix here's a way to like that's what happened to us in Spotify we we got the opportunity to just say cool yeah we can put it there to and reach their audience why hasn't Netflix decided that any freely available content on other platforms should also be available on ours. I wonder if with video it's bandwidth and hosting issue like no that actually that costs a lot of money remember that's why perhaps misguidedly that's why I gave YouTube a C right that's prior our worst grading ever yeah we're definitely gonna have to redo that one. The question is like it does Netflix believe that that will increase subscriber acquisition or retention probably not if it's content I can get elsewhere probably not and so Spotify looked at it as it's super cheap so why not or Spotify probably looked at it as well we want to have exclusive differentiated content and the way to train people to listen to spoken audio content here at all at all is to index the publicly available stuff that's probably more of what it is I'm sure they didn't emerge from the womb with their strategy fully formed around podcasting they I'm sure they were experimenting too yeah but okay so why as a podcaster do I really you know in the world of 2019 why do I really care about getting more listeners what's changed there well we are living proof so a lot of folks know this but LPs definitely know this the LP show is going really well if you look at sort of podcasting as a funnel our bottom of funnel is folks that are are directly paying to access bonus content and go deeper on the show so you can pay five dollars a month and go beyond the standard episode format that David and I do and listen to us talk about stuff like product market fit and interview awesome people like Doug Rand who talked to us about the supply chain of clean energy funding in the US like all these cool topics that like David you and I are curious about but you know don't really have an opportunity to do on the show and so like oh my gosh there's a business model now to be able to directly monetize some percent of your audience in a super aligned way with with their interests and by having more listeners you now have this this business model available to you either on top of sponsorship or in addition to sponsorship where the larger your whatever that percentage is that that a show is able to to convert to you know something like a limited partner program the more the top of funnel matters too as listeners of the show probably know been and I started thinking about this last summer and you know the outcome of that of course is the limited partner program but also the company Kimberlite which we've been building Ben's been building inside of PSL that is powering the limited partner program and is soon going to be available to any podcast to use yeah super pumped super super pumped and so now you know this is the other I think major that is happening in parallel to the world changing announcement of Spotify last week is that as a podcaster now no matter what size you are whether you know you're an acquired and you have tens of thousands of listeners or you're a you know small podcast that has hundreds of listeners or even you're a Joe Rogan that has millions of listeners you can implement a business model that is aligned with creating great content aligned with connecting with and supporting you know your fans in your community and as we've seen on acquired you know again we started the limited partner program for two reasons one we wanted to do it to we wanted to experiment and see you know the market opportunity here um but it's going to be at least it's on track it's growing way faster than our advertising revenue did and and we'll become our primary business model over time and that's not to say we don't love our sponsors we actually think we have this like a crazy also aligned uh sponsorship model on the show but like it is so cool to both be able to produce this second stream of content that we've been wanting to do for a while and it feels like it's just it's it's it's a really good sort of value alignment uh with the audience you know not to be on our our soapbox about like Kimberlite specifically I think obviously if you're interested you should definitely go to Kimberlite.fm and check it out and we we'd of course love feedback or if you want to use anything like that but this the notion generally that you know we're moving to an era where you know independent creators can can have this relationship with um with audience and have sort of sustainable business models where content could be directly funded by folks that it is most resonant with it's just a cool cool era to be in. Yeah well that's what's um part also why we wanted to uh do this is our first um you know sort of mini episode and get our thoughts out there is uh you know for so many years and especially all of last year in 2018 everybody was talking about what's up with podcasting like is this just a bad space like all this attention but somehow no monetization. Yeah it's all this attention in uh billions of listener hours and yet only 300 million in you know monetization for the whole space what's going on here well now all of a sudden there are two extremely viable business models in the space at at totally different ends of the spectrum and I think they're going to coexist completely which is tentpole big content you know Spotify paving the way there um but also bottoms up direct monetization for podcasts of any scale and interestingly yeah with the same business model of this this direct pay for content albeit you know different you know one is uh um paid to get access at all and the other is sort of paid to either go deeper or but but who's to say people won't use Kimberly to do all sorts of interesting things with structuring how uh how you pay for content someone could use Kimberly like we are to do uh an extra show you could do it for a whole show you could do it for every other episode of a show but we won't be doing those things in acquired but uh who anybody could use it how they want don't make promises David we don't know that's right don't worry listeners the main show will always be free and uh always um well I was gonna say hopeful always as great as oh I didn't even did that not not in like a threatening way and like a like have you and I ever actually like stuck to something it's like oh this show's just about acquisitions that actually went well wait it's about all acquisitions oh my gosh at IPS wait also we tell the story of definitive companies right yeah we uh like we are in this very moment we always reserve the right to add more to acquired but don't worry the core acquired show uh we'll always um we'll always be what it is and we'll always be open and free to everyone in deed okay so we cover the creator side I don't think we need to spend as much time on the rest the ecosystem but I do want to make sure we round it out so it wasn't like why did they go on that big long tangent then end so the audience side I think it's a win for listeners who want to particularly listeners who aren't enormous podcast fans and aren't gonna have a dedicated app for it um but have one or two that they want to listen to or potentially uh be exposed to podcasting when they otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to it so it can kind of be a gateway to sort of more dedicated podcast playing experiences at least short term it is a really good thing for um podcasting to to be available in Spotify longer term I think there's sort of an open question of uh and this gets into sort of like the philosophical dueling that happens on the internet but is it better to have this sort of all open ecosystem is it better for a company to have a lot of control and be able to like really deeply optimize the experience but at the benefit of their own business you know I think there's lots of uh uh discussion and cross talk that could happen there but I think listeners want to listen to content that they like in the most frictionless way possible and so every step that we have toward that seems like a good thing for for listeners and they're now being to at least two and perhaps more but I think probably two core viable business models in the space to support it is only going to be great for listeners podcasting content available to listeners has grown exponentially over the last few years and just think about now it's insane looking at graphs it's insane right but how much of that content has been of the quality of gimlet uh of the quality of you know uh I won't say acquired but uh uh people you know there's a lot out there but now there's now that their business models to support people investing in content that's only going to mean more quality content uh it's just like we've had the renaissance in television over the last few years with Netflix and Amazon video I'm very curious to see so Edison research does a survey every year to see sort of like uh are more people you know what's the current state of podcasting and they ask things like how many people listen weekly how many people listen monthly there's some staggering stats around how mainstream podcasting is now that almost 80 million people listen monthly almost 50 million people listen weekly when people listen to podcast they spend an average of like six and a half hours a week listening to podcasts so that's that that applies to weekly listeners the growth rate of podcast among Americans is modest it's like 15% per year but the number of new podcast created is like exponentially growing something like I don't know it's like 10 to 15 thousand podcasts created a month which you know I'm sure most of have one or two episodes but um and are not saying there's 10 or 15 thousand reply all's created every month but um you know there's one but it's interesting to look at the growth of the space across all those different vectors of number of shows is huge audience space is relatively large growth of audience space is relatively modest but I think this year I bet we'll have a jump um by it really entering the public consciousness and also I think Spotify will probably deserve a lot of the credit for a bigger than than normal year in podcast listenership in the US podcast listenership has grown all completely organically again because there haven't been viable business models there has been no ability or incentive for anyone to spend on advertising and marketing for podcasts that has changed now you're going to start seeing certainly Spotify but podcasts being marketed to you on television on billboards on you know where do you see movies marketed to you especially if you're driving through LA yeah exactly it's the way that we've been thinking about this in the world of Kimberly is like people can't be trusted to spend money or you can't expect people to spend money when they don't have trust that that money is well spent it's definitely a flywheel of enabling confidence that there's an ROI on your spend will dramatically increase the the amount of money flowing through an ecosystem and that just wasn't the case before but now you know again even down to the smallest podcast every incremental listener that comes to your show if you're monetizing via Kimberly or a similar platform you are getting ROI on that spend you know I didn't put two and two together till now but Ben one of your one of your carve outs from perhaps years ago at this point the dissect podcast which is unbelievable I finally started listening yeah that was the blueprint right that's what you're going to see like it was cold Spotify licensed cold created this amazing content it was an independent creator just incredible if you haven't listened to the dissect podcast by the way season two every just you know who could not love diving into a beautiful dark twisted fantasy I have so much more appreciation for Kanye now than before I listened to that for folks who weren't listening a seasonal two ago when that was my my carve out it is every single episode so the season is an album so they the cold kitchen analyzes the Kanye West album my beautiful dark twisted fantasy every episode is a song and it's an hour long and he basically he's both a great storyteller and also a music producer so he dissects all the lyrics and then he dissects the beat and he's he basically builds up the entire instrumental track for you to talk about where every bit of it came from and how it all sort of aligns with the sort of artistry of the vocals and it is completely amazing it's incredible yeah so yeah so Spotify I think it was right after season two at the end of season two Cole was just a guy like us had a day job and did this on nights and weekends and Spotify hired him and now he creates a full time for for Spotify but it's still accessible to everyone in every feed it's a very soft hammer they're brandishing it's like oh it's it's produced by us be you can listen anywhere oh it's windowed a little bit oh you can hear it for the first week here on Spotify but but still everywhere I mean there's definitely oh we're putting up a billboard for the Amy's Schumer show that we paid a rumored million dollars to to have her come to a show with us and of course all the billboards say you should listen to the Amy Schumer podcast on Spotify of course you can listen everywhere else we're not gonna take it off everywhere else but like everyone ends up listening on Spotify because all the billboards say to listen on Spotify like it is it's a pretty well executed plan this is a huge moment for for them and the industry as we've been saying so all right so David you asked the original question then I danced around it of sort of what's next for the ecosystem and we've talked about now what's good for listeners what's good for creators I don't know what do you think I think this is the beginning of the golden age of I would call it the golden age of radio right like people talking about the golden age of television it's not television anymore you know Netflix and and prime video are to television what podcasting is to radio it's been bubbling up slowly over the last gosh 15 years right the podcasting has been a thing to 2006 I believe yeah yeah so 13 years probably kind of just like online video was a thing for a long time before before the golden age really emerged but I think that's I think that's what we're heading into and I do think even though Spotify is doing a you know a great job of really getting more listeners share there's quite a bit of pie growth so like more people listening to podcasts you know I do think there's some steady state where I don't think this will be entirely owned by one player I do think players and other large companies are going to continue to do things particularly now that the Spotify thing has happened it's probably woken a lot of folks up but I do think we'll kind of continue to see a fragmented player experience for a long time and I think in some ways podcasting apps are a lot like to do list apps or weather apps or what are the other sort of like UI playgrounds everybody's kind of finicky around like what's the best productivity software as 10 people get 14 answers and so I think there's definitely an amount here where we'll continue to see fragmentation for a long time Spotify will build an excellent business in in podcasting it will bolster their whole business it may even be bigger than music at some point who knows but yeah other companies will too for sure this is is not a winner take all space on the on the content side this hasn't happened yet but I think it's going to now just like multi homing is super easy in video you know I watch stuff on Netflix and Amazon and YouTube and you know whatever I don't really care where it is I just watch great content um you know an apple and Disney when they launch their streaming service um Disney plus the best best name ever indeed all right do we have anything else have we naval gaze sufficiently here into the world of podcasting I think that's it so listeners we hope to see you here from you at the meetup worldwide virtual meetup next week we would especially love to hear your thoughts and feedback and questions on this topic and this format do you want to see us do more of these short episodes around big announcements would you rather us not clutter your feed let us know and these will be weird they'll be like podcasts that are released that are not numbered that's a quick take that don't have the research we normally do but probably do have this kind of I would I would guess this one's longer than a normal quick take episode they'll probably be this sort of 10 to 20 minute but honestly who knows we would love your feedback if you want to go deeper with us on on tech and vc you should definitely consider becoming a prestigious prestigious acquired limited partner you can click the link in the show notes or get a kimberlight dot fm slash acquired we would love to have you indeed we'll see you on Thursday see you on Thursday