StartUp - #14 Where We Are

Synopsis: StartUp ends its first season as Alex Blumberg checks in with his wife and then Chris Sacca, his business mentor. He wrestles with how much of himself he’s willing to devote to creating a “huge scale media company”. Then we get a preview of “season 2” with new host, Lisa Chow.

Upshot: As with the all of the episodes of StartUp, Alex offers us a truthful and sometimes painfully earnest assessment of his business venture. It’s frankly a muddled and mealy mouthed ending to a muddled and mealy mouthed season. But the preview of the upcoming season sounds surprisingly good.

Full review after the jump:

All good things must come to an end, but then all mediocre things have to end too. Thus it is with season one of StartUp. Perhaps I’m being overly harsh, but I’ve found myself consistently frustrated by the story of Planet Money co-creator Alex Blumberg’s journey from entrepreneurial impulse to full fledged media company.

Part of that has to do with the incestuous relationship the podcast itself has had in the success of his company. StartUp, like Serial, got a huge boost in viewership from the beginning by being highlighted in a segment of This American Life. Unlike Serial, you won’t find an enormous subreddit devoted to dissecting each episode. The comparison might be unfair. While both podcasts are serialized true stories featuring narrators plagued by self-doubt, Alex Blumberg is reporting on himself. The huge profile his podcast started out with and its subsequent large audience aided tremendously in the success he’s since had. The podcast is like an obscene ouroboros, the mythical snake eating its own tail even referenced in one of the commercial breaks. It’s navel gazing, while impressively fearless and honest, has often proved down right tedious over the past few months.

Part of that might have to do with the fact that even despite the fact that I’ve listened now to fourteen episodes devoted to the creation of Gimlet media, I still am frankly very confused about what the hell the company is planning on doing. Right now, Gimlet produces two podcasts, StartUp and Reply All (which I’ll be covering on Wednesday) but has obvious designs to produce more media content, presumably in the form of podcasts. But they’re also a technology company, experimenting with app creation, a hypothetical demo of which can be seen here:

Part of my confusion is that I don’t really buy the premise that Alex seems to have about his company. He sees the podcast universe as an open frontier, a place ripe for new listeners, and the future of radio media. I’ll agree with him on that last count, but there are plenty of media companies currently creating fantastic podcasts on a very regular basis. Just this past month Earwolf, already a supplier of many comedy podcasts, including its flagship show Comedy  Bang Bang (which I already reviewed earlier today) introduced a sister “channel” which premiered with a total of twelve new shows. There’s also the Nerdist empire (responsible for The Thrilling Adventure Hour and the Todd Glass show), How Stuff Works (responsible for Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class, etc.), Radiotopia (undoubtedly the single greatest collective of podcast creators outside public radio), and Maximum Fun (Judge John Hodgeman, Jordan ,Jesse Go!, etc.). My point is that where Alex Blumberg sees a vacuum waiting to be filled with content, I see a glut of companies producing too many shows that even I, a person who’s decided to write a blog devoted to the subject, can’t make the time to listen to many of the shows I’d like to.

In the episode Alex has a conversation with his mentor and angel investor Chris Sacca who basically tells Alex that he expects him to think of himself as the next Rupert Murdoch (hopefully a more benevolent version of the Australian tycoon). He speaks of Gimlet media in the same breath as Uber and twitter, two technology companies that have literally changed the face of their respective industries. For me, I look at Gimlet and think not only is it doing something that’s already being done by other companies, but you aren’t killing in the quality department either.

Reply All was frankly better when it was named TL;DR, a sub-podcast of On The Media produced by WNYC. This is all the more painful to report after listening to the insane amount of work both co-hosts have been putting into each weekly podcast as revealed in StartUp episode #12 Burnout. But it’s true. I still enjoy it and I will continue listening. And as far as the future of StartUp is concerned the picture is looking even rosier.

The second half of the episode is devoted to coyly teasing out the content of “Season Two” of StartUp, led this time by journalist Lisa Chow. I have to admit, when I heard at the beginning that this would be the last episode devoted to the growing company of Gimlet, I doubted I’d be much interested in hearing stories about other startups, but the brief little teaser surrounding this latest episode fills me with more than hope: it makes me optimistically curious.

The next season will detail the story of Emma and Lauren, co-founders of a new dating site (or app? I’ve forgotten). Not only do the two “protagonists” seem rich and endearing, but the authoritative voice of Chow makes for a nice change from the constant hemming and hawing of Blumberg’s own self obsession. There’s a wonderful moment when Emma records her own thoughts late at night after a long day of work at the company she founded. She reminisces about her sister who died six years previously in her late thirties. She recalls how her sister, an unmarried midwife, when faced with her prognosis, went to the beach and collected shells, attributing to each goals she would undertake once she beat her disease: “this shell is for the kids I’m going to have when I get better and this shell is for the wedding I’m going to have…” She goes on to reflect about the way we use our time and what it says about both our priorities and in the end what really matters.

Alex, too, is faced with this dilemma, as he has been throughout the run of StartUp. The question is not "does he have what it takes to form and maintain a successful company?", but "to what lengths is he willing to sacrifice for that dream?". As frustrated as I sometimes am by this podcast, you have to admire a man who begins an episode with a frank conversation with his wife and refuses to edit out the pause she gives him when he asks her “Do you think our marriage will survive?”