#57 - Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Alex Blumberg. Alex is a co-founder of Gimlet Media, and Gimlet makes a bunch of podcasts that you've probably heard of, like StartUp and The Pitch and Reply All. And before Gimlet, Alex worked on This American Life and Planet Money.
All right, here we go.
Maybe the best place to start is, which seemingly was the most common question. Ro asked it and a couple other people on Twitter, how do you source stories?

**Alex Blumberg** (0:37)
That's a really good question, and it's one that we're sort of working to answer sort of more systematically.
So right now, stories have come, so part of it's like we're not sourcing stories, we're sourcing podcasts. So on one level, the people who are sourcing stories are the actual teams themselves. So like The Nod, one of our podcasts, it has this whole editorial process around finding stories that they're gonna do. And StartUp has a whole editorial process, and Reply All has a whole editorial process. So that's team by team, and those teams know sort of like what their shows are about and what their audiences are into. So they have a process by doing that.
And it's sort of the normal process of just sort of like reading widely, talking to people on the phone, going out, hearing stories at cocktail parties, whatever it is, you know, and it's sort of like finding something in the news that piques your interest in making some phone calls. Like that's always, that's the way stories are sort of like, there's no magic formula to it. You just sort of try to be curious to the world.

**Craig Cannon** (1:45)
So then thinking about sourcing podcasts, are people pitching you?

**Alex Blumberg** (1:49)
So sourcing podcast is a very different thing because it needs to be sort of like, it's not the actual plot line. It's the sort of like, I remember this, somebody for a while, like somebody at This American Life was friends with, one of the people who started Friends, the TV show Friends, and Alexa was her name. And she was on the show a couple of times, she did a couple episodes. And I remember, I think somebody was telling me a secondhand story about like how she talked about, like sort of coming up with the idea for Friends. And she was like, starting a TV show is like, you want it to be just specific enough so that there's something that you can remember about it, but then also very, very open. And basically you always need a couch.
Sort of like where action can happen, you know?
And so I feel like sourcing a podcast is sort of similar to that. You need like what's, it needs to be about something, but it can't be, the concept can't be too binding, otherwise you're not gonna be able to find enough stories to sort of keep it going. Now sometimes it can be sort of a limited series, and we do a couple of those, and we go back and forth on sort of like what the model is for that, and can they be profitable or not? So some of it goes back to economics. But if like the basic unit is the regularly occurring sort of weekly or almost weekly podcast, like let's say that's the basic sort of like template of podcasting, those come to us a couple of different ways. Sometimes people inside the company have ideas and we'll sort of do a piloting process to try to see if we can sort of make it, we'll make it and see how it sounds. People pitch us from the outside. Sometimes we will acquire shows that already exist out in the world.
And we've done that, and we've done it a bunch of different ways.

**Craig Cannon** (3:37)
Yeah, because it's sort of, it's not all that different from, you know, someone interested in doing a start up sizing a market. And so when someone pitches you an idea, are you like, hmm, intuitively this feels like it has legs, or do you do any kind of like analytical process around the picking a show?

**Alex Blumberg** (3:56)
We don't do any kind of analytical process around it. And partly because it's not like, it's like we don't, right now, sort of like the main, the capital that we need to start a show is human capital, right? We need somebody who has a vision, has expertise and can sort of make it happen. So we need somebody who can sort of like take it and run. And so a lot of times what we're looking for is somebody who has a vision.