The Joy And Doom Of New San Francisco - EP 55 Jayden Clark

**Jayden Clark** (0:00)
To me, it felt like that the hype was around media. Everyone was spinning up their new interview series. They were, whether it be like a fund or even startups at this point, right? Taking on a whole media team. And it felt very samey. It's like, I'm not gonna go ahead and name startups or whatever with media arms that do this. But to me, it just felt, I felt like I was seeing a pattern of the same interview with the same founders saying the exact same thing because these founders, they go and they're raising and they're saying the exact same thing to the exact same VC.
And they're going to be doing the podcast rounds in the lead up to raising funds or a product announcement or all these sorts of things. And I think with that, you also kind of, you get locked by comms teams, especially if you want to go after bigger and bigger guests, right? You're having to run things by comms, like all of these sorts of things. And again, these are all just people that are just doing their jobs. So definitely can't fault them.

**Kylie Robison** (0:50)
But I felt like-

**Jayden Clark** (0:51)
I can. Oh yeah, you can?

**Kylie Robison** (0:52)
I can, yes.

**Jayden Clark** (0:54)
You said it, not me.

**Kylie Robison** (1:11)
Hello, I'm Kylie Robinson, a writer for Core Memory. This is a very special episode because it's my first time hosting alone, and I brought the best person to do it with. Jayden, Jayden, how are you? Please introduce yourself.

**Jayden Clark** (1:25)
I'm doing okay. I just walked through an entire construction site, and I was escorted off the site by a construction manager. He was very, very nice, by the way. But we're pretty good.

**Kylie Robison** (1:38)
Perfect.

**Jayden Clark** (1:39)
I'm feeling pretty good. It's just a great day to be alive in the center of the universe.

**Kylie Robison** (1:45)
In the center of the universe. And for the listener with a keen ear, you sound otherworldly.

**Jayden Clark** (1:51)
Otherworldly.

**Kylie Robison** (1:51)
Perhaps Australian.

**Jayden Clark** (1:52)
Yeah.

**Kylie Robison** (1:53)
Please tell me more about that.

**Jayden Clark** (1:55)
Tell you more about Australia.

**Kylie Robison** (1:58)
Perhaps that or how an Australian ended up in the center of the universe.

**Jayden Clark** (2:02)
Goodness gracious. I mean, my story is fake, really. I mean, it really is like, I feel like if you were to sort of ask somebody, how can you build the fakest kind of character? Just the most sort of, I don't know.
My story doesn't really make sense. But I moved here just straight out of high school. So I went to performing arts high school in my little town of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia, so two hours south of Sydney. And yeah, just kind of wanted to play saxophone for a living. So people, I don't know, people on x.com, the everything app, I think they've probably been seeing little glimpses of this, this other alter ego or what would have probably been my original ego. Yeah. But yeah, that's what originally got me to the US, was actually playing saxophone. So moved to San Francisco at age 19 to go to the Conservatory of Music.

**Kylie Robison** (2:49)
Which is crazy. And a little bit more about you. You're a podcaster.

**Jayden Clark** (2:53)
Yeah, it's such a slur.

**Kylie Robison** (2:55)
It's such a slur.

**Jayden Clark** (2:56)
I wish, I like to call it a glorified consultant. Yeah. That's kind of what I like to tell women, if I ever get the urge to even speak to one. But as people probably know that I can only really do this on podcasts. What people probably don't know is I was actually non-verbal until we started recording.

**Kylie Robison** (3:15)
That's exactly right. So tell me more about how you got into podcasting from playing the saxophone. How did we get here?

**Jayden Clark** (3:24)
Yeah. I think it's like a very, very natural career path of jazz saxophone, did a little bit of time at a hedge fund, straight out of music school, so go figure, that is pretty stereotypical career path. Then went back to music publishing, did a lot of content with my old teacher, sort of like worked with his music publishing startup making what's called jazz lesson video is a really, really nice YouTube channel still. They're still going. Still going like publishing digital resources, all of those sorts of things, like making a lot of jazz tutorials. Then naturally decided to do a B2B SaaS startup, and so built that in both Sydney and moved back to San Francisco, the beginning of last year permanently to build that.