Descript

“But, and it just makes me sad because they got to fifty million in revenue. And it got hard. The CEO stepped down, gave the keys to his VP of product, left the company because it got hard.”

“Two years later, we have a web version of the app. I thought this is going to be our step function increase. Like we're just going to blow up user acquisition. Conversion rates are going to triple and I can just go on vacation after this because the growth tea…”

“We want to incentivize you with a 15% recurring commission on paying subscribers that you refer to us, and you would be a lot more likely to put the link up front and center, right, because you get something positive out of it.”

“Build Out Affiliates as a channel drove over 25% of the new users that we were getting in that entire year, and it was virtually self-service, right?”

“So with Descript, for example, we wouldn't have been able to rank for some of these video editing pages and some of these use cases and topics we cared about if we hadn't built that original topical moat in content Creation more broadly earlier on, right?”

“So for example, when Descript really decided we're going to go after the video editing market, we basically worked with a video production studio that, you know, six figure video that would essentially allow for us to retell the narrative of the brand.”

“Descript is so much funding. They had OpenAI invested in them, and they still suck.”

“Descript, I think Descript is some of the best product design in AI, and, like, they've clearly put so much time into the workflow.”

“That itself, like, putting your content in different language could be the difference between, like, getting product market fit and not have product market fit.”

“As we talked to investors there just wasn't a lot of enthusiasm about it.”

“Everything that I've done that's been any form of success has not been the obvious thing from the start. Like, you end up finding it in the rubble of some mess that you've created.”

“I think the other thing is I've spent a bunch of time looking at this, and I think, to Elizabeth's point, I think most of the discrete problems have been solved, but the podcast producer's problem isn't a discrete problem, it's a workflow problem”

“I don't think it's actually that important if the cumulative time savings is meaningful and that you're good enough at all of the individual components.”

“We've tried using Descript. We don't like tools like that, but we do need help on the marketing on the other side.”

“We work with companies like Descript where AI is very, very core to the product experience. We power a lot of AI features that Patreon has shipped.”

“You've articulated why I've missed my biggest misses in investing, which is Riverside and it's Descript. And I miss them both because I said, the only thing creators care about is do you bring me more cash or more fans?”

“So I missed Riverside, which is a great, you know, podcasting tool. I missed Descript because I was like, I knew this better than anyone. I've done 3000 shows. Idiot expert.”

“I turned down to script, and I turned them also down every round.”

“So the way that we edit is our editor takes the first pass and he's unbelievably good. And that's, we're so lucky to have him. And then he sends us a rough cut, I upload it to Descript, and then we listen, like, and read while we're listening, word for word, s…”

“I turned down Riverside. This company is fantastic. The product is amazing. What a mistake. I also turned down Descript, the editing tool, which Andreessen did.”

“Okay, well, that's fine, but there's 20 Chinese companies that are already making them, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you're just going to have to get, think about what that means. In the same way, like anything could be fake, Google can't stop t…”