☕️ TBC Events + Interview with the Founder of Vastly

Miami, New York, LA

Author

Morgan Barrett
April 02, 2024

Today’s Menu ☕️

👋 Hi, Breakfast Club Members!

I’m getting ready for Miami Tech Week - so pumped to celebrate the launch of Lit VC with Litquidity on April 8th. If you’re going to be in Miami and want to grab coffee or lunch, let me know.

A lot of Tech Breakfast Club members already know Jonathan Baer, founder of Vastly. For those who don’t, keep scrolling to see how he’s bringing real innovation to podcasts. I want to give a special shoutout to Wil Hagen (who I’m cohosting April NYC TBC with) for this intro.

Also, thank you to Clerky (how the best startups get legal paperwork done) for sponsoring this newsletter. Respond to this newsletter if you’re ready to form your startup - TBC members (you) get $100 off Clerky’s already low price for setting up your company.

MIAMI, NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES
Tech Breakfast Club Event Signups

Teaming up with Litquidity to celebrate the launch of Lit VC in Miami April 8th - during Miami Tech Week. (Not a breakfast)

Tech Breakfast Club NYC April 18th with Kylie Krejmas from InnoCrew and Laura Hamilton/Wil Hagen from Partner Path.

El Segundo Tech Breakfast Club May 8th with Riot Ventures. Shoutout to Meghan Moreland and David Tearse from Riot.

Clerky 🤝 Tech Breakfast Club

Shoutout to the Tech Breakfast Club Members who have already taken me up on this offer!

I’m beyond excited to announce that Clerky and Tech Breakfast Club are partners. When you’re ready to start your company, email me (or reply to any TBC newsletter), and I’ll invite you to a special Clerky portal - as a Tech Breakfast Club member, you’ll save $100 on Clerky’s already reasonable fees.

Whenever a founder comes to me for legal services and I find out that they’ve incorporated with Clerky, I breathe a sigh of relief. I love Clerky and trust their documents. As a lawyer, it saves me a ton of headaches if you just use Clerky and get formation done right the first time.

Tech Breakfast Club Member Spotlight
Jonathan Baer Fixes Podcasts

Jonathan, CEO and cofounder of Vastly, is unapologetically a fan of podcasts. The medium is a bit stale though. Where’s the innovation?

Recently, I was listening to Acquired - one of my favorite podcasts (thanks Jack McClelland for telling me about it) - and they mentioned that subscriber/listener growth rate had been steady since 2015.

I was shocked, though. If you’re turning out fantastic content, shouldn’t your growth hockey stick at some point? Why did it take almost a decade for Acquired to reach half a million listeners?

There’s a problem with podcasts - listeners have limited bandwidth and it’s difficult to discover relevant content.

Luckily, Jonathan is fixing that with Vastly.

What is Vastly?
It’s a new podcast app that uses AI to give you curated, personalized clips about business and tech topics. 

Before business school, I worked on public policy at Facebook – I always knew I wanted to be at the intersection of consumer tech and media. Podcasts have always been an interesting space within media. I’m a voracious listener, but the space itself is pretty stagnant. More and more people are listening. More and more people are recording podcasts. But there isn’t a ton of innovation in the space. 

I contrasted what I was learning at Stanford with what I was getting from podcasts and realized that I was actually learning just as much via podcast content. And in talking to my classmates, I found that they also wanted to learn via podcasts. There’s so much knowledge buried in the podcast ecosystem, but they [my classmates] either didn’t have the time or the know-how to sift through the content. After thinking about how to build a podcast platform optimized for better discovery and curation, I teamed up with my co-founders, Buzz and Casey, to build Vastly.   

You mentioned Andy Dunn (founder of Bonobos) previously and his impact – I really love this story
Yeah, he spoke to my business school class, and said you shouldn’t try to predict the future. 

That’s pretty counterintuitive. What did he mean by that?
He meant that you should be looking at current behavior – look at what’s happening in the corner, or a behavior that’s less paid attention to or can be improved on and turn that into a new business. 

That’s what we’re trying to do. Short form video podcast consumption has exploded on social platforms, but that doesn’t always translate into people listening to full episodes. Vastly combines short form video podcast consumption with full audio episodes you’d find in your normal podcast app. 

Given time constraints, people only listen to a couple podcasts in full, but they’re actually consuming like 20 other shows via short form video on TikTok and Twitter. And there’s often relevant content buried in a very long episode that listeners would never find on their own. 

One of our users described Vastly as ‘TikTok for podcasts meets a smart radio station.’ And so when you open Vastly, you get short clips of podcasts about topics you’re interested in – it’s a very TikTok like experience but applied to podcast consumption.  

You can swipe through clips or put your phone in lock screen and just solely listen to podcast clips. You can also click into the full episode if something really resonates with you.

How far along are you?
We raised a pre-seed round with some angel investors in the fall and we’ve been building since then. 

We just put it in the App Store and all of the growth so far has been through word of mouth. When we switch to growth mode, our plan is to leverage social platforms to post clips that have performed well on Vastly and use that for top of funnel user acquisition.  

What is the experience like for podcasts that want to join your platform?
Right now, you should just get in touch with me. We have a long waitlist of podcasts who want to join the platform. We’ll eventually have a self-serve model.

We take their library of video podcasts – all the shows on Vastly have a video component – and we feed it into AI tools. The AI cuts it up into the most compelling clips and then that goes on our app. 

The All In podcast was one of the first podcasts on the platform – how did you pull that off?
Those guys are great. Shout out to David Friedberg. He’s been super helpful for us. All of those guys understand how difficult it is to be a startup founder, so they’re willing to help out where they can. It’s also a win-win: we’re getting their content in front of more people.  

One of the reasons that I focus on written content is that I think people have a lot more bandwidth for written content – they can skim, they can read quickly, it’s easier to discover content... 
If you were to have a podcast - and I think you should absolutely have a podcast, Morgan – Vastly would be able to find what’s relevant to a user and serve it up to them. Maybe there’s like a five-minute clip from your podcast where you talk about startup law or what a founder needs to know at the early stages of their company – Vastly would find that clip and show it to a user that wouldn’t have discovered it otherwise. 

I know you’re a newsletter guy. For the record, Vastly is starting a newsletter. But one of the amazing things about podcasts is that the hosts, if you’re listening consistently, become your friends in a way. It’s a parasocial relationship where you’re hanging out with them every week and you’re probably spending as much time with them as you do your real life friends. It’s a really powerful connection that not many other mediums facilitate.