The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were "Impossible" Until Now

**Michael Mignano** (0:00)
I think, increasingly, we're finding ourselves betting on people who are just great at building products, and kind of trusting that maybe there's an opportunity that we can't see that this person can through the opportunity of AI. The hardest thing with consumer is not only identifying the trend and the team, but getting the timing right. Like, when is this thing actually going to tap into the culture and be relevant with the culture? And that's like almost an impossible thing to predict. I just think it's a great time to be betting in any category.

**Garry** (0:32)
I'm thrilled to be sitting down with Mike Mignano, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures. Before Lightspeed, Mike founded Anchor, a podcast platform that was acquired by Spotify in 2019 At Lightspeed, Mike's invested in some of the most legend companies in consumer and in tech overall, Neuralink, XAI, Suno and Granola. In addition to his work as a VC, Mike recently co-founded Obo Labs, an AI-powered learning platform. Mike has a ton of thoughts about consumer startups and how AI is reshaping media and what founders should be paying attention to right now. Mike, thanks for being here.

**Michael Mignano** (1:10)
Thanks for having me.

**Garry** (1:11)
Actually, I'd love to start off with your founder experience. I mean, we're doing a podcast now, got involved and built one of the major pieces of infra that everyone uses. What was that like?

**Michael Mignano** (1:22)
Never intended to build a podcast infra company, or even really a podcasting company overall. My co-founder, Neer Zickerman and I, when we first started building Anchor, we were actually trying to make a social audio platform. We had both fallen in love with podcasts. This was back in 2014, 2015 Kind of like when, if you remember, Serial and Grantlin and all that stuff. We got into it and we realized that it was really hard to make them. And so we had just built all of this photo editing technology for mobile phones in this company, Aviary. And we thought, wait, could we do the same thing for audio and podcasts? But at the time, if you remember, like everything that was launching on Producton or the App Store around the time, it was all social networks. So it was like, oh, we need to build the social version of audio, as if that hadn't been tried before. And through a bunch of pivots and starts and stops and sort of near death moments, we ended up landing on the easiest podcast creation platform. Basically, a mobile podcast recording studio like we have here, but in your pocket and easy enough to just tap a button to end up on Spotify, Apple podcasts, start monetizing right away.

**Garry** (2:34)
Yeah, that was the 2014 era was right at that moment when people went from, almost all startups were consumer, and then they became all prosumer and B2B. It sounds like that was actually part of your story as well. It's like you started off consumer like quite a lot of other people. And then that was also the moment when the social platforms were coalescing.

**Michael Mignano** (2:58)
Totally.

**Garry** (2:58)
And then the platforms were closing down a little bit. So the explosion in consumer in the 2008 to 2012-2014 period, that was an opening up of platforms. And then as the consolidation happened, distribution closed down, which sort of spurred this move over to B2B.

**Michael Mignano** (3:20)
Yeah. And I think our thesis was similar to how Instagram had made it really, really easy to create and share photos, but to do it in a format that kind of existed uniquely just in their own platform. We wanted to do the same thing for audio. We wanted to make it such that on your phone, you could tap a button or you could hold the phone right up to your ear, talk, maybe do some light editing. And then people would just come into this app to listen and interact with this content just inside of Anchor. But what we found was increasingly, like over many iterations, people were good to create content on Anchor. But when it came to listening, it was like, why would I listen to this, like not great quality audio in this other random app, when I have all these podcasts, like every podcast in the world on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and I can listen over here.

**Garry** (4:09)
I was looking at sort of the ranking listings of all the top consumer AI startups today, and you have sort of two of the absolute top.

**Michael Mignano** (4:20)
Yeah, and I think actually, Suno is an interesting one because I think the thesis of Suno is actually quite similar to the thesis that I just described for Anchor.