#117 - Craig Cannon and Adora Cheung

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Canann, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is a bit different. Adora Cheung, who's a partner at YC, suggested we do an episode about podcasting. So in this one, I'm actually the guest.
You can find me on Twitter at Craig Canann and Adora at No Limits. All right, here we go.

**Adora Cheung** (0:20)
Welcome. I am Adora Cheung, I'm a partner at Y Combinator, and I am here interviewing Craig Canann.

**Craig Cannon** (0:26)
How's it going?

**Adora Cheung** (0:28)
Good, how are you doing?

**Craig Cannon** (0:29)
I'm doing very well.

**Adora Cheung** (0:30)
Great, thanks for being here. Thanks for being on your own podcast.

**Craig Cannon** (0:33)
No problem, I had a great time setting it all up.

**Adora Cheung** (0:37)
And so Craig is the head of marketing at Y Combinator and also the extraordinary host of this great Y Combinator podcast. And he actually asked me a few weeks ago on topics I was interested in and doing on a podcast. So I thought about things I wanted to learn more about.
And one of those things is actually podcasting itself. It's hitting its stride, I think, and who better to ask than someone like yourself. So I want to spend most of the time talking about podcasting trends, what you think about it, how to do it correctly, things like that, and about the Y Combinator podcast itself.
But maybe you can start off with telling us, you know, people, lots of people listen to you, you know, what, two to three times a week?
And I don't think they know anything about you. So why don't you start off with who's Craig Canann? Where are you from? You know, how did you, what's your background? How did you learn about YC? And how did you even end up here?

**Craig Cannon** (1:26)
Yeah, that's a big question. I'll do the quick version. So yeah, hi, my name's Craig. I'm from Boston or near Boston. I went to school at NYU and I was an English major. So I was like the guy all you people, all you CS engineers made fun of.
And I was about to graduate and I realized that I was like moderately unemployable. I didn't have very many skills, but I was running the comedy magazine at NYU.
And so I was like, well, maybe I can get a job at this place called The Onion. And so I just sent out an application and that was the one thing I got. So I started working there. And while I was there, I actually started reading HN and programming on the side.
And after a few years there, I started this hackathon series called Comedy Hack Day where developers and engineers, or developers and comedians made stuff together. So that like-

**Adora Cheung** (2:20)
It was like literally hackathon. Oh, that's funny.

**Craig Cannon** (2:22)
Yeah, yeah, because I was going to hackathons and realizing that they were mostly presentation competitions, not really programming competitions.

**Adora Cheung** (2:29)
What's an example of something that got produced during one of these things?

**Craig Cannon** (2:32)
So one of the early ones was called Timesify, and it was a Chrome extension that would allow you to turn any website, usually a junk news website like Buzzfeed, into a site that looked like the New York Times, but it would inject the article into it. And then like you could click the ads and it would basically create a slideshow of all the images.

**Adora Cheung** (2:53)
Yep.

**Craig Cannon** (2:54)
So that was great. There were a ton of them. Yeah, so I did that for like four years with a few of my friends, and I had gotten into cycling when I was out here.
And I found this thing, this like world record that I wanted to go for, and I did it and it worked out. And people started treating me differently, and it was really weird. And I like started feeling this like pending doom of my youth and vitality fading away.

**Adora Cheung** (3:21)
What was the world record again?

**Craig Cannon** (3:22)
It was most elevation climbed in 48 hours.

**Adora Cheung** (3:25)
Oh wow, how much is that?

**Craig Cannon** (3:27)
Well, mine was like 97,000 feet.

**Adora Cheung** (3:30)
Got it.

**Craig Cannon** (3:30)
Yeah, so yeah. So people were treating me differently, and I was like, oh shit, I'm not gonna be young forever. And so I quit, and I went on like a five month bike tour.
And I was like out of the country, and I went to Japan and Vietnam and New Zealand. And I came back, and I had no job, and I had no idea what I was gonna do. And then Luke Iseman, who used to work here, called me up and asked me if I wanted to do a contract for the blog. And so that started three years ago.