The Exchanges

Q All right. So you're, you're doing a little writing and, and kind of getting into the music scene in London. And, and I guess one night you're out at dinner and you meet a guy who winds up Kind of launching your career in, in journalism. What's the story?

A Absolutely. Sitting next to a guy named Robert Greenfield, who introduces himself as a Rolling Stone writer, and we just get chatting, and I basically told him about some of the things that were going on, notably what was going on in Spain at the end of Franco, and I talked to him about what was going on in Northern Ireland, because I had a, you know, a very different perspective on the world, because I was based in London, and in Reading the European press. And he said, you know, you should package one of these things and write This guy, Jan Wenner, who I work with at Rolling Stone, um, a letter with some ideas, because you could, you could just, you know, write about things. These are great stories you've got. And I went ahead, and I sat down, and I wrote this letter. I had two or three ideas.

AI assessment note: “Sitting next to a guy named Robert Greenfield, who introduces himself as a Rolling Stone writer”

Q Stone. You got this great job. Uh, you're getting paid and a salary. When did you, I know that you, you wrote your first book, which was the story of Sears, the department store. Um, I guess the history of Sears and then kind of like the rise and fall of it. And the book came out in like 87. Why did you want to write a book about Sears?

A Well, I kind of thought, how weird would it be to take this, you know, this hippie counterculture storytelling and write about a big old American company and what happened to it. And I wrote another letter. I wrote a letter to the, the CEO and chairman of Sears, a guy named Ed Telling, who was famous for never having given an interview. Completely introverted guy. The beat reporters couldn't get anything out of Ed Telling. And basically, I said that if he, if he can deal with the great American corporation of the 20th century changing itself so as to continue to be the most beloved and trusted company of the century, it's a matter of historical record. And, um, he just decided that he'd let me in. And this was really rare, because as you all know, corporations tend to Be, you know, Pentagon-like in their control over, over the truth, and so, uh, I proceeded to show up as a bearded, still looking quite young guy, and people who worked at Sears decided I was okay, because I had sold Ed Telling on something they never thought anybody would sell or not, so I was a salesman in their eyes, and I just tried, you know, I spent, you Years on this.

AI assessment note: “how weird would it be to take this, you know, this hippie counterculture storytelling”

Q So at what point were you like, wait, I'm, I may have a business idea here. Like how did, how did that happen?

A So, so I, I had this book contract. I, I began to connect with people who were teaching me what I didn't know about technology. And one of the people who was my key contacts was my college roommate from NYU, Ed Lau, one of my close friends to this day, who was a computer friggin' genius, and we were talking about signal compression, basically about analog to digital signal compression, and I was asking all these questions about how text fit through The internet, which was, wait for it, the phone lines. There was no broadband at all, and these discussions were happening in 93, 94, and he had this thought, he said, you know, you know, you could, you could get voice through the phone line. It could be compressed, and we went back and forth, and I said, Ed, you know, if you could take audiobooks and send them through the, the phone line, the cost of the Of the packaging, and all those tapes wouldn't be there. You could lower the cost. I remember saying, we liberate the signal. Meaning, how do we get the audio into my belly pack? You know, so I can watch, go around with it. Um, or how are we going to get it into cars? Because that's where people have, have a lot of time. I remember thinking, if you took these audiobooks, you could actually liberate time for people. And we got kind of more, Excited about it, and I got more and more interested in what it would mean to do this, because…

AI assessment note: “these discussions were happening in 93, 94, and he had this thought”

Q So, so what kinds of things were you doing?

A So one of the first things we did was just said, you can't be a nepotistic intern anymore. You, you gotta be a kid from Newark, and you'll be a paid intern in our little world. So then you get like this carpet culture, which includes These incredible cutting edge technologists, and all these English majors turned into business people like me, and then all the best, some of the best actors in the world hanging out. And these kids, and, uh, and you start to realize that this is an unusually rich company culture, and, you know, we, we started paying our employees, uh, 500 dollars after taxes rent to frame, and if they moved downtown Newark, and to be part, to be urban pioneers, I started Newark Venture Partners, which has become an international level of, you know, success, drawing companies from all over the world to Newark, to an accelerator. It's anyways, it's just applying the kind of entrepreneurial thinking that gets to create an audible to, to, you know, to, to social purpose.

AI assessment note: “So one of the first things we did was just said, you can't be a nepotistic intern”

Q It just, to me, it just sounds amazing. Incredibly overwhelming, like an overwhelming amount of things to do. I, I understand that you had written books about leaders, but you'd never had like a leadership position at any of the publications where you worked. You weren't an editor at Rolling Stone. Were you nervous about becoming a manager of people in any way?

A I was definitely nervous, but I was, I was on point, you know, look, I, um, I definitely felt More concerned about having put Three and a half million dollars into play that was other people's money, and feeling deeply responsible to them and to others, particularly people who left perfectly good jobs, because a lot of these people left really nice jobs to join this, uh, this vision of the possible. So, uh, yeah, it was incredibly stressful, but, but, but you did say that, you know, part of the thing was about getting the content, and I would argue that probably our original funders I discounted how hard it was going to be to convince the gatekeepers of, of the content that existed to see this particular, you know, future.

AI assessment note: “I was definitely nervous, but I was, I was on point”

Q had a plan, but it unfolded in ways that he probably couldn't really have anticipated, although maybe he did. But when you, when you, when you look back, do you often sort of kick yourself and say, God, I should have known from the beginning this was going to be audiobooks and never have wasted my time on the devices, on making the devices, and just focused on the audiobooks?

A No, because then, um, you're, you're not going to be The leader, unless you take the big risk at the point that people don't believe. And, and, you know, and then the question is how, how early is it? But I, you know, look, I am stunned by how quickly, you know, some of the companies formed after us did come together. But you know what? Most companies are based on productivity improvements. You, it's like Uber gets you from here to here like a taxi, but it just, It's better. Most businesses, you know, have some level of productivity improvement, like all software businesses and the like. Um, That wasn't this idea. This was creating a media category. This was basically creating a spoken word category when it didn't exist in the country whose entire literary canon was based on how we talked and told stories. I wanted to basically say there would be a spoken word category, yeah, called audible if it had to be, It sat next to all permutations of video and movies and TV. It sat next to books, and it sat next to music. And we kind of pried this thing into the light. And, uh, that's just a little different than, um, a better way to use your computer.

AI assessment note: “No, because then, um, you're, you're not going to be The leader”