“We’re just getting started,” podcasting veteran and newly-realized businessman Alex Blumberg said ironically at the very end of his appearance at Memorial Union’s Shannon Hall Tuesday night.
Blumberg, however, wasn’t referring to his speech, but rather the podcasting company that he founded in 2014, Gimlet Media. Gimlet, unique in being a for-profit podcasting company, currently boasts four shows.
Blumberg, who has about 15 years of experiencing in podcasting between producing the podcast giant “This American Life” and starting the successful “Planet Money” for NPR, used his skills in podcasting in his speech by incorporating recorded audio.
While explaining his time at “This American Life” and the lesson he learned there about the unique power of audio, Blumberg incorporated a piece from the show to demonstrate how audio can “wrap you in a narrative that takes on a life of its own” and “makes you want to hear what comes next.”
To illustrate another benefit of audio — truthfulness — Blumberg played a clip from Dave Ramsey’s radio show in which the host could see through a lie told to him by a caller.
Blumberg said he “learned to dig deeper” at “This American Life” and began to think of storytelling as a craft.
He continued by describing his experience starting “Planet Money” and specifically the influential episode, “Giant Pool of Money,” and a project to track the manufacturing of a T-shirt, which netted 25,000 investors and $600,000 from a Kickstarter.
Blumberg described how he used realizations gleaned from this project to start his own company.
“We found out there’s a market for these stories — listeners are really excited, these stories can be applied to many different areas and we made over half a million dollars,” Blumberg said. “[Founding Gimlet] felt like something I had to do … It was so clear.”
From there, Blumberg restated information about starting Gimlet. Most in the audience, however, had probably already heard much of the tale from the podcast “StartUp,” which documents the company’s beginnings. Blumberg even played a few clips from the show.
The second and third Gimlet shows, “Reply All” and “Mystery Show,” were also mentioned, respectively.
“Before I started this company, I never would have thought that something like [“Mystery Show”] could work,” Blumberg said. “It opened my eyes to a whole new realm of possibilities.
In essence, Blumberg’s talk combined the power of storytelling and the unexpected joy and success that can be wrought out of taking a chance and creating something.
After describing a particularly enthralling and well-done episode of “Reply All,” Blumberg said, “Never in a million years could I have imagined it … It’s one of the things that have made me most proud this year. That’s a reason to start something, you have no idea where it might take you.”
