This was written by me circa 2020 for a Notion page of podcast highlights that I used to maintain. I have sunsetted that page and moved mosts of its content to this section on this site. Thus this piece is a tad dated; still I thought it would be useful to have this here, given how often I reference my thinking on this topic, and felt it would be handy to have something to link to. I will update this in the coming year given how AI is helping speed consumption of podcasts without having to read or listen to them even!
***
Why listen to podcasts at all?
After all, there are so many substacks or blogposts to read. Or so many tweet threads to read or tweet links to check out. Why take out 40-50mins to listen to a podcast when in that time, you can instead breeze through 3-4 posts? (This is increasingly becoming a moot point, as more and more podcasts publish transcripts thanks to AI; and Apple Podcasts enables transcription for most podcasts, and AI enables accelerated consumption of transcripts without even having to read them!)
Well, here is the thing.
In the startup / venture investing world, podcasts play an outsized role in knowledge dissemination, as compared to the written word. This is different from say an industry like hospitality or transportation, where the written word dominates, e.g., essays in their trade rags or reports. So what makes the startup / venture world different when it comes to podcasts?
In the startup / venture world, time is short and it is difficult for many founders and investors to take time out of their schedules and put their thoughts together. It takes 3-6 hours to write a decent piece, more if you are writing one with a lot of analysis. But podcasts allow them to spend an hour and share their best ideas and learnings. Podcasts are in all likelihood the least frictionless way for tacit information or tradecraft to be made more explicit in the tech world, given the opportunity costs of time for a founder or VC.
Also, our startup world doesn’t have the equivalent of a HBR or high quality trade rags, which distill and showcase the best content / frameworks. But it is a fast-moving space. Learning is accelerated here. Startup playbooks are developing and evolving all the time. And given the time pressures of writing, a lot of the knowledge and insights instead get captured in podcasts instead. Very likely, podcasts offer the highest information bang for the time buck as far as the tech + startup world goes.
Hence podcasts matter.