From Venture Capital Dispatch:
- Gimlet Media founders Alex Blumberg, left, and Matt Lieber.
- Gimlet Media
Public-radio producer Alex Blumberg made a living explaining how
business works, for shows such as This American Life and Planet Money.
He still does, only now he’s doing it from the inside.
Blumberg and co-founder Matt Lieber have raised $1.5 million for their podcasting startup, Gimlet Media.
Betaworks, Knight Enterprise Fund and Lowercase Capital have invested,
as have former Tumblr developer Marco Arment, Groupon Inc. founder
Andrew Mason and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg.
The New York company raised $200,000 of the round through an equity crowdfunding campaign that reached its goal in a matter of hours, Blumberg said.
The startup’s launch is being chronicled, naturally, on a podcast
called StartUp. The initial episodes have covered common concerns facing
many startups, such as coming up with a name, finding partners and
raising funding. StartUp is the first show from Gimlet, which plans to
launch a network of podcasts.
Blumberg sat down with Venture Capital Dispatch to discuss the economics and artistry of successful podcasts.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
New York has gotten a lot of attention for its startup scene. How do you see things, as a newcomer to the scene?
It’s been very friendly and generally just very supportive. I had
this image, working in public media this whole time–it’s hard to
describe just how accurate the term “not for profit” is. It’s very, very
accurate. There is a tendency to see the profit motive as turning
people bloodthirsty and cutthroat, and certainly that happens, but my
experience so far has not been that. They’re just trying to create cool
new things.
For a long time venture capitalists weren’t terribly
interested in investing in media companies or content production
companies. How are investors looking at content and media companies
these days?
I think for everybody it’s where they feel comfortable. There are
some investors who are just more comfortable with content, and have seen
content become successful and have been an investor in Upworthy and
BuzzFeed and understand how those content companies work and have seen
it grow and happen, and they have faith that somebody else can make it
grow and happen as well. There are people who get it and there are
people who feel comfortable with it and people who don’t feel
comfortable with it....MORE
