How Colossus built one of the largest investing-focused podcast networks

CEO Matt Reustle explained the vision behind the network.

When Patrick O’Shaughnessy launched his podcast Invest Like the Best in 2016, he had no intention of building it into a media company. He just wanted to use it to interview the world’s best investing minds so that he could deepen his own understanding of the industry. But the show proved to be a huge hit, attracting some of the biggest names in finance. By 2020, he and a few co-founders launched Colossus, an investing-focused podcast network that now produces more than a half dozen shows across various finance niches.

In an interview, Colossus CEO Matt Reustle walked me through the vision behind the network, how it develops and promotes new shows, and why the company hasn’t yet launched video versions of its podcasts.

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Transcript

Hey, Matt. Thanks for joining us. 

Thank you for having me, Simon. It's a pleasure to be here. 

So we're going to talk about a media company that you currently run. But first, I just want to talk about your background leading up to it. So prior to joining the company you're in now, you didn't actually have a background in media at all, right? What were you doing?

That's correct. I came from a very traditional finance background, did not even realize once I came to Colossus that I was truly in media, probably for a year or two. Much to my appreciation, you were writing about a lot of the things that I was caring about and started to realize, you know what, I think I am in the media business. But prior to that, I worked at a large investment bank for almost 10 years, worked in private equity, private credit for a few years, and was not planning to leave that world, but had an interesting opportunity that sprouted out and ultimately jumped at joining the Colossus media business.

Yeah. So you worked in finance, obviously pays well, but very grueling hours. Some people find it not very rewarding. Other people do. Where did you fall on that spectrum?

I think everything that you mentioned there is accurate. I think that I did enjoy what I was doing towards the back half of my finance career; it was very research oriented, learning about different businesses, different business models. So I probably view it in a more favorable light than many people who are put through the investment banking, grueling, painful seven days a week, you know, 20 hours a day. I had some pretty brutal hours, but at least I was enjoying a lot of the work that I was doing.

And what was your relationship to media? Had you ever wanted to be in media or was that just like completely out of left field?

So there's two things. I would say I was always a consumer of media, enjoyed books, movies, podcasts in particular quite a bit. So I was always a big user, media lover across a wide genre. I think that where my actual finance career overlapped a bit with some of the things that I've started to do in media is I was writing a lot of research reports and doing basically behind the scenes work, then compiling that into consolidated summaries. Some of those were 120 page reports. But that gave me a sense of what the institutional investing audience actually cared about. And it gave me some media sense because it is a form of content in some way. So I think that is where I was able to take some of what I was doing in the past and then actually apply it to what I'm doing now.

So from what I understand, Colossus started out as a single podcast. What podcast was that?

That was Invest Like the Best, which launched in 2016. And Patrick O'Shaughnessy was the voice and host behind that podcast. And it was something that I was listening to when I was still in the finance world. Anybody that I talked to that was a listener was also very interesting. So there was this bat signal in some ways for very interesting people to be listening to that podcast. It was very fresh. It was very different, particularly from what I was doing in the finance world. It all felt like the answers were more natural, more authentic. They were better.

It could be a lot of the same guests that you might hear in a banking interview, but completely different style, completely different output. And it wasn't until 2020 that Patrick, the summer of COVID, decided, I'm going to take this successful single property and build something bigger around it, build a media business around it. And that was the catalyst that ultimately created Colossus.

I know you can't speak for Patrick, but what was so great about the podcast? Did he have really good interview subjects? Was he very magnetic? What was it that drew people to it?

Well, I think in terms of interviewer, I'm biased, but I will give Patrick constructive criticism on various things. In terms of interviewing, I think he's up there. I can't think of a better interviewer. If I want to hear the definitive conversation with a person, I want Patrick to be the one interviewing them. And that was always what drew me towards his podcast was you could have the same guest on four different podcasts. If it was going to be on Invest Like the Best, it was always going to be the best conversation. And I think that continues to this day. So that was one.

I think his interviewing style was just always excellent. He's a very, very curious person. I think a lot of people now forget what he was doing 10 years ago, which was reading just loads and loads of books, summarizing them. He was in the institutional investing world, so he had an appreciation for that work.

So that was one thing. And then that was what started to draw higher and higher quality guests. And he just had people chirping in his ear, many media executives. You know, it was a former HBO executive who basically reamed him out over a phone call prior to that summer of 2020 and said, you're actually stupid for not building something around this. And it wasn't the first time he heard it, but it was the catalyst, the summer of COVID when people had some extra time on their hands, that drew him to build something on top of it.

And was he getting high caliber guests, like top hedge fund managers and stuff like that?

Yes. Yeah. You could think of hedge fund managers, investment managers, people that are founders of businesses that you weren't hearing anywhere else. And that continues to this day. Over the past year, Josh Kushner, his single podcast interview was with Patrick. Steve Mandel, famous hedge fund manager. Lee Ainslie, famous hedge fund manager. These people go back decades and decades. And a lot of what they want to do is kind of, you know, talk about their legacy, their career, and they want somebody who will treat it properly. And Patrick has kind of been a go-to resource for a lot of that.

And how did you connect with Patrick?

So he put out just kind of a signal to the audience that he was looking to build out a team. Again, it was a weekend in January of 2021 where I was not planning to leave the finance world. I saw this and I thought, you know what? This is an opportunity to maybe do something different. And if there was going to be one thing that I was going to look at doing and change my career, this would be it. And it was very much the people involved. He had already assembled a small team, and this was kind of the next step in that process. And I reached out. We started a conversation. I didn't expect it to go anywhere. I think some of the things that were beneficial to me was my research career. There were certain people in Patrick's orbit, like Bill Gurley, where I had had a lot of conversations with them based on research reports that I wrote. So overlapping circles, the history of work that I did, and then coming to an agreement where you mentioned before, finance pays incredibly well, media historically not. But with small organizations, you can come to bespoke agreements that really structure things properly for both sides where it can be win-win. And we were able to do that.

So it was much to my surprise. If I would have put the probability on something working out when I did that initial outreach, it would have been sub 1%, but here we are.

And was his solo podcast already a thriving business at that point? Was he just bootstrapping from revenue there? Did he raise money? What was that about?

There was no capital raised. At the time, he was still working in an institutional asset management business that eventually he sold. He was the CEO of that business. His father had founded it. And he took that over. They eventually sold that business. But that was his full-time job.

The media was a side project that became very, very successful. Once he decided to build the business around it, that's when he started to do some advertising deals. And it was at that time already cash flowing. So there was an ability to bring people on. And audio is extremely attractive from an economic standpoint where the costs are extremely low. For that type of audience, you do a lot more of the B2B type advertising versus B2C, which is commanding you the higher rates. So that was another thing that was very attractive to me, which was this is not a business that is, you know, in this massive need of funding, is going to consistently need capital to come into the business. It was already cash flowing and there was support for a broader team and a bigger team over time.

And so what was that initial pitch to you? When you were there interviewing with him, was he just like, I have a successful finance focus podcast, we're just going to launch more in specific niches within finance? What was the vision he gave you?

Yeah it's changed over time, but ultimately we have this very special thing happening right here which is the most interesting people are either listening or appearing on the show, and there's a variety of different ways that we can work with these people, but also just kind of bring them into the world. That sounds kind of hand-wavy, but I think it's just been proven out to me over the past three years. You build this ecosystem. People can participate in various ways. It can be incredibly passive, like being a listener, but it can be incredibly active, like being a host or being a guest. It can be being a sponsor. And it kind of exists. It's its own economy in very many ways where many of our largest advertisers are avid listeners of the various podcasts. But his vision at the time was we have more shows that we can roll out. It's hard to believe, but three years ago, but podcasting did not hit this, you know, massive saturation point. So there were a lot of properties and white space opportunities to roll out new shows, concepts that weren't being done. So part of it was that. And then there were opportunities to do products in the back of it.

So at one point, there was some type of app potential, whether it's a new type of podcast listener – we scrapped that idea, something that gets you deeper into the content where you can be learning around, but there's all this flexibility and different things that you could do when you have that audience base that we've always considered. And,

Over time, I think it's very common that you see, whether it's the creators or various other entities where their ad space becomes increasingly valuable to them, when they have good products that they can sell themselves. So that's always been kind of underpinning it all is that potential is there in the future to the extent that a product is developed.

And was the idea always to own your IP versus a network that was just recruiting star podcasters and selling ads and stuff like that?

100%. Yes. And we have done some flexible structures around that where we do not have full ,ownership of the IP. It's more rev share oriented. But really, the focus has been from the ground up, building up our shows or seeding somebody but owning the IP or at least having some co-rights over the IP. Not to just be this spray and pray, massive production with 300 plus shows. The analogy I always give is much more in the style of HBO, where it's kind of curated, highly selected content. You hope that you can eventually have the brand power where if your stamp, your logo is on a show, people are more likely to listen to it because they know what it's associated with. And I would put HBO into that category. You have some other studios that you could also say are similar to. But that was much more the goal than just becoming a factory of massive, massive, massive amounts of shows.

Yeah. And I've just heard anecdotally that's like herding cats when you're just trying to wrangle a bunch of small shows with like 500 or 1500 downloads per episode or something like that. And just getting quality control and consistency and even trying to sell at that level is kind of hard versus just owning all your IP and just having a singular focus.

Yeah. i would say even the the bundling idea, which makes so much sense in practice and we've had some success with it, but if you would have asked me early on, okay if you have eight shows that really revolve around business and investing you should be able to package those shows and basically have some of those smaller shows benefit from being a part of the platform. And if I would have told you that's going to work on 50% of my calls, I would have said that's probably right. People are going to be interested in this. But it's much closer to 20% where people get very focused on one specific show. So I can only imagine with some of those bigger platforms what they go through. And I think it ultimately just comes down to rate. They're selling impressions. It's show agnostic. at a much different model.

But yes, I certainly talk to a lot of the people that operate in that space with larger platforms. I think there's some benefits to it, but it's not our particular style.

And what was your role when you first joined the company?

Running content. So it was head of content, building out new shows, helping with quality control on existing shows, improving the quality of guests, improving the quality of the hosts, and just thinking about new things we can be doing. Again, it started with one. We eventually expanded. Now we basically have five shows that run weekly, several shows that are more seasonal or special interest with that runoff cycle. But at the time, it was just basically building from the ground up, adding additional shows, titles, and trying to think about the different niches that we wanted to get into.

And that was 2021 when you joined? 

That's correct. Yeah. Summer of it was March of 2021 and really kicked off, got going in the summer of 2021. Yeah.

And so what was your expansion strategy? Obviously it sounds like it was kind of a bootstrapped company. It’s not like suddenly you could throw 50 million dollars at a bunch of new shows. You had to be pretty strategic in that. What kind of niches did you move into? How did you recruit hosts? Were they people who had already existing audiences? What was the strategy there?

So in the early days, it was very title-specific. So one of the first shows that we expanded into was Business Breakdowns, which still runs today. And our approach there was to have more of a sports center-like hosting approach where you didn't show up for the host. You actually showed up for the content itself, where we're going to dive into a single business. It's going to be a different guest each week, an investor that really knows the name, and it could be a rotating list of hosts. There was a process where we basically did trial runs with 20 different hosts. We selected a few, Jesse, Zach. I eventually started hosting some of these shows, and we've had some guest hosts come in from time to time. I think we've seen that the SportsCenter style with audio isn't actually a great approach. It's worked well with that show, which is very large. But the tie and the parasocial relationship that you can build with the host is probably the most valuable thing for any podcast to have. So we've shifted that over time a bit. 

But that was the first show. Patrick's conversations were wide ranging. They were about a person. This was going to be very niche, very micro about a business. So it was kind of taking the opposite side of the approach and just taking a different angle on it. We eventually expanded into some other shows. We did Web3 Breakdowns, which was supposed to be a little bit more institutionally friendly, blockchain oriented, which I think we got ourselves caught where we weren't crypto enough. But the fact that we were crypto meant we weren't institutional enough. But Eric Golden built that show out really successfully. And we still run it today with that being a small percentage of the overall content. That was another thing that we did.

And then we've done a few various special series. Will Thorndyke wrote this cult classic book, The Outsiders, which is – pretty much any investor I know has read the book. And he decided that rather than write a new book, I'm going to try this basically in podcast format. You can call it audiobook format. And he started a show called 50X with us. And he was very interested in working with us. And that's really how we've recruited our hosts since then. It's been an interest in working with the platform, an interest in our audience, and us having interest in them. The biggest of which has been David Senra, who it'll be two years, I believe, this summer that we've worked with him on the Founders Podcast, which has grown massively prior to us working together and then especially since us working together.

But when you're looking for a host, are you looking for someone who has a large Twitter following or a large newsletter following or anything like that?

No. I mean, in terms of the criteria, it was really their quality of hosting the show. We know that we can make somebody into a big host. We can grow their show. If they have the quality and we are interested in listening to them – we always say we're easily bored. That's the main criteria for us. All those things are added benefits. And I think there is some correlation to somebody being a good host and having a large social presence. But it's not always the case.

And what's your playbook for launching a new show and building an audience from scratch?

So I think, you know, Bob Pittman, kind of a famous media executive for a long time, talks about something that we essentially refer to as the Pittman Plan. But ultimately, you want to be introducing that host to your audience, likely before whatever they're launching is launching, and finding a variety of ways to do that.

So you could be hosting them on other shows, getting them exposure through that. Many times these hosts are practitioners. So they're coming with a background that is not just media. They were an investor for a long period of time. Now they're shifting into this business, or something else where their personal story is going to be very interesting. That gives them exposure to the audience. And then once we start to release the episodes, we also cross promote on other shows. So it's just making sure that they're getting the maximum exposure to all of our different networks. And basically, each of those is a hub.

So you reach all of those nodes, and then you hope to collect some back in. And then just getting continuously familiar with them as a personality. And this is something that we've worked on. In terms of very tactical stuff with a podcast, there's a few things which are commonly referenced, which I think are certainly true. When you're releasing the feed, you want to have several episodes lined up. The aggregate download number, gross number of downloads, is going to benefit you with all of the charts. So we've honed in on this, and recently with Art of Investing, we released it and the first week I think it was number two in the investing rankings for Apple and Spotify. So we've homed in on how the algorithm plays into this as well, but it's really that multi-pronged effort of getting them exposure on other podcasts, getting them exposure via our newsletter and then making sure that you're playing all the right algorithmic trends into your favor.

And so it's almost like you're creating a cinematic universe where they're appearing on each other's podcasts. Does that continue after the launch of the new podcast where they regularly go on each other's shows on an ongoing basis?

Less aggressively. We do not play into that nearly as much as some of the other networks do. And I think it's very interesting to watch networks like The Ringer where... They used to be very guest-driven. Now it is very Ringer universe-driven.

Even with the outside guests that come on, you hear them much more frequently than you did in the past. And I think that's the power of social relationships again. We are not as intent on that following a launch. We try to let the properties kind of breathe and build on their own accord. And because we tend not to have shows which are more social in nature, they tend to be more dense. I think a lot of people would find them overly informational, more on the nerdy spectrum – you think about candy and vegetables more on the more on the vegetable spectrum. Some of the easy listening is more on the candy spectrum. So I think if we were to change that a little bit, then you could see us doing more of that. But for the time being, no.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned The Ringer. I definitely think they do that. And another Spotify-owned company, Gimlet Media, it's now been decimated and carved out. But when it was at its height prior to Spotify, they had their own kind of mini cinematic universe where they were all kind of appearing on each other's show. And I remember that really endearing me to the company. And I was listening to multiple shows at once. So I would recognize when one host would go on to another show and stuff like that.

Yeah, and I love it to this day with The Ringer where I will hear certain combinations. We think about doing that in a variety of different ways. Sometimes that could be more special to introduce via events. So that's something that's always on our minds. But yes, I think there's definitely a reason why some of these businesses have done it and leaned more into it over time.

And do you just cut promos for all the shows and just have a part of your production process to  insert those promos into every episode? You're constantly cross pollinating audiences and stuff like that?

Yeah, I would say we do that. And then we will do feed drops if we have particularly special episodes from a different podcast that we think would be good on some of the bigger feeds. So there's a variety of different things we do. We're probably not as formulaic as we should be, to be honest. We try to keep it somewhat organic where you can get those special, more notable feed drops in addition to the reads, and then just working it into conversation, which happens very naturally. But you will frequently hear references to somebody mentioned on our episode of Invest Like the Best this week, XYZ.

Do you create video podcasts? 

We do not. We are the last podcasters in the world that don’t do video, which is... uh, partially there's a variety of different reasons for that. One, I mentioned the cost, which again, it is not something that's too difficult to do. As you have this set up right now, we record on Riverside. It would be very simple to record the videos. We have done some clips that we posted on social media. We didn't really see a tie to whether it was increasing the audience size. It certainly increased engagement on Twitter. But it was, again, more of a spray and pray approach. We couldn't put our finger on what was going to work versus what wasn't. And it just seemed like a repetition thing that took up quite a bit of time. And we ultimately decided if we're going to do video, we're going to think about doing it in a very specific way. And when we have the time and the investment that we want to put into it to do it. But all of that is not to say that video is not a successful way to build a business or anything else. 

Yeah, I think it is a huge opportunity in that you're just capturing different audiences. I think of my own podcast consumption. I'm sure you know My First Million. I very rarely listen to the podcast and most of my consumption of that is just random episodes on YouTube. Same thing with Colin and Samir. I'll start watching one of their interviews, like while I'm eating lunch on YouTube. And then I'll go on my after lunch walk and I'll get on my podcast app and go to that episode and skip ahead to the point that I am. And then I’ll start afterwards.

So there is a big opportunity there. And it's also just in terms of virality and search engine optimization and stuff like that. There's a huge discovery opportunity there, for sure. Especially for something that's like a chat show that you're just recording on Riverside anyway. I don't think it adds that much extra production in order to do it, but yeah, I see where you're coming from.

Yeah, you are not the first to tell us that. And I think eventually we will have some video stuff worked in. It's a tricky one because we don't get many people telling us, oh, you know, why don't you have video? That's how I consume all of my stuff.

But I think it's the audience that we don't reach and who that audience is. And certainly the younger demographic is much more into video. So if we want to age with our audience and continue to collect some of the younger cohort, then I think eventually that's going to need to happen.

And like on the web, are you creating specific verticals for all your shows, like specific social media accounts, newsletters, websites, or is it all kind of all run under the Colossus social media and branding?

So social media, we have branded accounts. Those all are posting about their episodes. We do have a Colossus specific account as well, which kind of gets in the mix. It's actually funny to look at, we did a little study on how other companies do this, like the Ringer and Barstool and some of the others. But at least for social media purposes, yes, we have branded accounts beyond that. Our website is a Colossus specific website. The nicest thing about that is all of the transcripts are uploaded there. We actually go through the process of hand editing the transcripts. And that way you can use the search to find a variety of different topics. It actually works quite well just in terms of the amount of hits that we get there and the amount of people using the search bar. If you want to understand about marketplaces, you can just type marketplace in and you're going to get three or four of the best operators in that space who have talked on one of our shows about it and you have a collection of different thoughts. So that's where the combined effort really plays a role.

And then the newsletter is a single newsletter that goes out once a week. It's basically a consolidation of what we do. Some people find this helpful because when we're shipping five podcast episodes a week, it's hard to keep up with that. That way they can see what we've done.

And in addition to that, we will announce things in our newsletter. And I think it's to our benefit that we're only sending out once a week. So if we do an off cycle one to either announce a new show or to announce an event, we don't get much drop off or people complaining about that. It's a really nice advantage where I've come to appreciate the value of the newsletter, just in terms of driving some of that direct traffic.

Do you think that there's like a Daily Upside or Morning Brew kind of opportunity there for the newsletter where you could make it just a curation space for all the kind of news and topics that were related to your podcast?

Yeah, it just doesn't feel like our DNA to do news. If anything, there's timely and there's timeless. We try to always focus on the timeless category, sometimes to the detriment of being timely. And you could be both. You could be timely and timeless. But we avoid getting into the new stuff.

And there's a lot of other people that do it well. All those businesses you mentioned have honed in on that well. There's investment banks that do a long list of this stuff. So do I think there's an opportunity? I think there's always an opportunity to iterate on that. Do I think we're the right people? As currently constructed, probably not.

What's kind of your way of interacting with your audience? Like, do you have any kind of community? Do you do live events? Like, what's the opportunity there?

We are increasingly doing events, that has been new as of this year, where we've launched a couple. Those tend to be small groups and probably at the higher end of the spectrum, just in terms of wealth and who's signing up for those events. They're a little bit more exclusive. But that is happening, and that's one way. On social media, that's another way that you get a lot of interaction. through email. We have a lot of different channels that you can communicate with us. We have never launched the community. I think it's certainly something that would be smart. And again, we're a lean team.

We're very conscious of the capital that we're spending and the time that we're spending because we want it to be a bootstrap business that doesn't require additional capital. And we think we can get there. But that means sacrificing and focusing on certain things. So not doing news related newsletter, not doing a community that you would have to be really in the mix of and moderating, especially in the early days. If we could find the right setup that we all felt like we were excited about, then I think we would do it. But where it lies in the priority list is fairly low.

For the live events, are those live podcast tapings? Are you charging for admission?

It's a ticket and it's usually multiple days. It's more like a... I would say conference, but conference sounds very sterile. But multiple days, single location, room, board, food included. And the idea is really to gather the people from the audience that we get to interact with that are incredibly impressive. And you get so many interesting things that come out of this. So there's an application process. You apply. We want a certain caliber person in attendance. And those are usually two to three day events that you can go to.

So you're renting out a room block in a hotel and their event space and everything like that? Is that in New York or are you bringing them to like different places? 

Yeah. Bringing them to different places. So we have two upcoming. One is in California. It's about an hour drive from San Fran in the Redwoods at this really high end location. We have another in Austin, which is a private site. So once you're on the campus, the event campus, nobody else from outside of the conference is there. All of the rooms are there, all of the food is there, it's on the water. So it's a nice experience. And it's kind of separated from everything else going on. And those are two examples of what we're doing, trying to find locations that, you know, are natural gathering places for a variety of people in our audience.

And what's the demographic for that? Like career wise.

Founder, CEO, portfolio manager, founders of investment companies. So it tends to be people that have had, I would say, a good amount of early success. And they're ambitious and looking to either do bigger things or to branch out on their own and create new opportunities. But that tends to be the demographic.

And is there like educational programming, like sessions and stuff like that? Or is it more just networking and stuff like that?

Yeah, I mean, ultimately the goal is, and this has been my experience – I just returned from Capital Camp, which is something that's held in Missouri – each year I come back with four to five people that I never would have met otherwise that I've now spent multiple days with in a variety of different settings. And there's usually business opportunities that come of it. Now, they don't always come of it. Sometimes, you know, there's people that I met four years ago that were just starting to do different things now. But it is getting the opportunity that's not a Zoom call, that's not an email, to really spend with somebody and knowing that your hit rate is going to be incredibly high in this particular group. So that is mixed with some main stage, a few discussions. But we try to limit that to a lot of small group discussions based on topics of interest.

And we're bringing people in or taking people from the guest list to have those discussions in small groups. And that's where it could be the organic catalyst to have another discussion after you listen to that and you want to talk to the speaker offstage. So there's plenty of opportunities for both.

And are you recording those and distributing them as podcasts or it's just purely live in person?

Purely in person, off the record, Chatham House rules style. That is the goal, tends to draw better crowds, groups, people willing to speak. And it makes it more of a valuable experience for the people that attend as well.

So is your main mode of monetization just selling host red ads on the podcasts and then selling tickets and sponsorships to the events? 

Yeah. And the newsletter gets mixed in there. We could theoretically do other sponsored events, which we've done from time to time. But primary sources of revenue are the podcast sponsorship, the newsletter sponsorship, and then events.

Do you sell all your own ads? Or do you work with an agency?

We primarily sell our own ads. We've actually done a couple deals this year with Smooth Media. Josh and the team over there have been probably the first agency that I've worked with that actually has some appreciation of differentiating the content and not purely commoditizing it. So I've appreciated that. Generally, we have done all of our selling. So I think 98% of our revenue has been directly sold.

You mentioned earlier this idea of an app. What opportunities do you think there are to sell products, whether it's a subscription, like extra podcast episodes, or a data product, or some other kind of tool or something like that?

I think it would have to be a separate tool, something that our backgrounds – most of us come from the investing world – would appreciate. Something that we would have some ability to build that would likely require additional funding, but we would at least have a leg up in terms of understanding the audience, understanding what they actually need, and building something specific for them. Not necessarily an additional media product. We could do subscriptions, something around that. I think for us, the more attractive thing would be finding a tool that would be useful for the various niches of our audience.

And there's no interest in like evergreen online courses or anything like that?

It's not that there's no interest. There's quite a few people that are doing it, doing it pretty well. So I think some type of corporate education, yes, if we could figure out the right model. We just haven't put our finger on what that right model is.

So kind of looking forward to the future, what do you want to be doing three years from now that you're not doing today? Is it more shows or do you want to be doing something completely different?

I would be fine if we didn't do more shows. I think it would be, you know, if we can continue to build the quality of the existing shows, the affinity with those existing shows, the quality of guests, the events that we can have on the back of them, just making it into truly a self-sustaining economy where you have the listeners who could be the guests, which could be the sponsors, which could be the hosts. Anybody could be interchangeable in this system. And we are creating this world for you to come into and be operating within it.

And I can speak for myself, just this past year, the quality of the conversations, the people I've been able to meet. The opportunities that have come across our desk, 99% of which we pass on, have gotten more and more interesting. So I think it's that. And I think it's finding if there are interesting commerce opportunities, product opportunities that we could develop over time, given what we have today. That is not to say we won't add another show. I think it's always possible and we want to be opportunistic where there's the right fit for us, but to me if you ask me you know what would I rather be working on, it's taking what we have and building on it and attaching something else in terms of a monetization opportunity that would take it to the next level

You see with some companies like Blockworks and Morning Brew and a few others that started out doing one thing like podcasts or newsletters, and now they're full-fledged media companies that are operating in different verticals. I know you do a newsletter, and you're thinking about YouTube. Does that appeal to you, or do you think your North Star will always be podcasts?

I think we can get better at those. I think our North Star will always be podcasts. I think it will always be audio. It will be the art of the conversation. It will be... That power of social relationship in your ears, which I actually think is stronger on podcasts than it is on video for a variety of different reasons. But that goes such a long way. I still don't think it's nearly appreciated enough by anyone, really, in terms of how impactful it is. So I always think that's going to be the core to everything. But we can make our newsletter better. We can make more people interested in that. We can make our website a destination. We can roll out other forms of media, whether that's print or something else that is more... You can touch it. You can feel it. You can... basically have it on display. There are things with video, with YouTube, all of that could come to be.

And it just has to fit the core of our brand. I think all those companies that you mentioned have done a good job extending and they all have personalities. When you think of Morning Brew, it has a specific personality and things that fit their brand. If they roll out things that don't fit, then you know right away. And I think it will ultimately be the same for us. We have a different type of personality and it just is going to have to match what our personality is.

And around how many people are you employing now?

So we have four full-time people, if you include contractors, it's closer to 12. And then if you include the full group of people in and around the organization, it's closer to 20. But for the revenue to employee count ratio, we'll use four.