Naomi Shah on Building Meet Cute One 15-Minute Romcom Episode At a Time

Jacob: You were on the investment team at Union Square Ventures before becoming the founder and CEO of Meet Cute. What provoked you to make that jump to the media operator side? While you answer that, can you tell us what Meet Cute is?

Naomi: Definitely. I was on the investment team, as you mentioned, at Union Squares Ventures for about two years and spent a lot of time at USV working with a couple of the partners there very closely on consumer-facing companies but also companies within the well-being part of USV’s Thesis. The guiding question in that vertical is how can we broaden access to well-being in the world?

Within that well-being thesis, we were looking at mental health companies. We were looking at healthcare companies, and I spent a lot of time with our portfolio companies there and with the partners that covered those companies. Over time, we started thinking about another vertical within well-being that we thought was a little bit underinvested in on the venture capital side. That was entertainment and content and what people do for fun.

When you read a book, when you listen to a podcast, when you watch a movie, all of those actions invoke an emotion and those emotions reflect us as humans, and they make us feel a certain way. Those feelings are maybe the precursor to what we would come across in a mental health startup or even in a healthcare setting.

Coming to entertainment and content with the venture capital perspective was something that I spent a lot of time thinking about at USV in the eight or nine months that I spent building out a thesis on the investment side was also the eight or nine months that I spent building out a business model, which ended up becoming Meet Cute. I would say I kind of gradually transitioned from investor to operator while I was still at USV working out of one of the partner’s offices, Andy Weissman’s office inside of Union Square Ventures.

To answer your second question, Meet Cute, which has been a company for a little over a year now, is a storytelling platform that makes short 15-minute audio romantic comedies. Romantic comedies, we take a broad definition of the genre to mean any story that makes you feel good. These are scripted, professionally voice acted stories that we create at scale and distribute on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Stitcher.

Wherever you get your audio content, we want to be there with new stories for people to binge listen to and create a brand and a community around those stories that make people feel good. Our mission statement is hope for the whole world, and we think that, through scripted storytelling at scale in a predictable way, we can achieve that.

Jacob: Speaking of Andy, he wrote a blog post over the summer about Meet Cute. He said one thing that was interesting to me, “The company has a core proposition that quality is very hard to define, yet consistency is not.” What does that look like when it comes to your content strategy at Meet Cute?

Naomi: That is a really important part of Meet Cute in that, if you look at the traditional Hollywood model for content creation, it’s very hit-driven in that you put a talent, a person or a name or a celebrity behind the show or the movie, and you put a lot of marketing money behind that title. You spend two years or so working on the development and production and post-production.

When you put it out into the market, you have no idea if it’s going to be a massive hit or a flop. That’s just a risk profile that VC and growth investing isn’t really willing to take on, which is why you haven’t seen the overlap between venture capital entertainment in the same way that you have with venture capital and product-based companies.

The idea at Meet Cute is, instead of approaching storytelling in a hit-driven way, why don’t we approach it in a format driven way? What that means to us is consistency in the length of time of each story. Each story is exactly 15 minutes, no deviations, broken down into five three-minute chapters. That consistency allows us to create stories in a scalable way because we can model out every part of the story creation process from development to production to post-production.

It allows us also to offer that consistency to our listeners. In the same way that, when you interact with a product that you love, let’s say, Netflix or Uber and consistently that you will get the exact same experience when you open the Uber app in California or Florida or when you open your Netflix app anywhere in the world, you’ll always get that skip intro button. Those types of consistency actually matter a lot for the user experience. For Meet Cute, what that means is, every time someone comes to Meet Cute feed and listens to a story, they will be delivered a certain emotion, a positive emotion in 15 minutes.

If you take the analogy to feel-good movies and TV shows that we love, you settle into those comedies and those romcoms because, at the end of 90 minutes, you’ll feel a certain way. You don’t have to think very much. The characters aren’t going to die. You’re going to laugh in the middle. You might cry a little bit. That consistency, we’ve brought to Meet Cute and then applied a time constraint to it because we operate in this idea of constraints breeds creativity.

Put a 15-minute constraint on the story, and you can actually get a lot done in that time and create that consistent, predictable emotion for listeners. We’re testing that thesis in audio content and doing it in a way that allows us to create a lot of content so people think of Meet Cute, the brand as a hit rather than individual shows within our library as a hit.

Jacob: This sounds similar to what Blumhouse has done in the film world with regard to horror films, and I could very well be butchering the name of the studio. You know what to expect every time you see one of their films. It sounds like, with Meet Cute, you know what to expect every time you listen to one of the episodes. Did those other types of older legacy production companies play into your overall strategy at all?

Naomi: Absolutely. I think Blumhouse is a really good example of constraints breeds creativity to the point where– and I’ve read a ton about Blumhouse and studied a lot of their business model as well where there are a set number of characters or actors that will show up in a Blumhouse produced movie because you can model out exactly the costs associated with that and you know exactly the emotional output of that. In horror, people are watching consistently for the feels, the scary feels that they’re going to get. We’re basically doing a very similar thing in another market that’s massive, which is this feel-good comedy, romance genre.

I think that Blumhouse is a really good example of a legacy media business that you’re creating art, but the way that you’re creating art is consistently and not in a one-off way, but rather at scale. You know every time you see a Blumhouse film that you will see the same elements, and that doesn’t take away from the experience. I think it actually enhances the experience because it allows you to settle in, know exactly what you’re getting as the audience.

Therefore, you’re able to interact with the content more intimately because you don’t have to think about all the different elements of, okay, what is this going to make me feel? How long am I going to be here for? How many characters are going to show up? Instead, you have a lot of things fixed in place, and that allows you to focus on other things like the development of the characters, the narrative arc, the setting of the story, a bunch of other things that I think enhance the experience and actually are what you remember from a piece of content.

Jacob: Let’s spend some time talking about the people involved in creating this content because you create multiple pieces of content every week and, irrespective of length, whether it’s 15 minutes or a feature film, I mean it must require a lot of people. What does the team look like currently?

Naomi: The core Meet Cute team is lean and very efficient. We have five full-time people at Meet Cute. We have our head of content, head of development. We have our head of marketing who we just brought on and a project manager and then myself. That is the first concentric circle around Meet Cute. I would say that everyone there understands what our core product is and then teaches that core product in what we call our internal flywheel to the other concentric circles around us. I’ll explain that a little bit more.

Instead of creating a writer’s room where we have a set number of writers that are just cranking out stories, very early in the trajectory of Meet Cute, we decided why don’t we create the largest global creator network, and through that, bring diverse stories into Meet Cute feeds? Our creative network currently is about 500 people globally. That includes writers, producers, sound engineers and voice actors. The silver lining of working with this many people is that you very naturally get diverse stories and lenses in the characters’ settings and narrative arcs of Meet Cute.

You will see things that otherwise wouldn’t be greenlit in Hollywood because it doesn’t fit into precedent and doesn’t reflect something that’s already been successful. At Meet Cute, that’s not how we gauge whether something will be successful or not because we’re not trying to create hits, we’re trying to create consistency. If a writer comes to us from a certain community and says, “I never see stories in pop culture or in media today representative of this community that I’m a part of, do you mind if I write a Meet Cute about this?” Our reaction is to say, “why not,” and greenlight that story because we think that that adds richness to our library that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

Our core team of five people works with this creative network of many different types of creators to bring these stories to life. We have three main categories. In that process, we have the development process which is taking an idea to final script. We have the production, and that includes pre-production, so casting. Then actually recording the audio in a highly produced way. Since COVID started, we are no longer in studios, and so we have been producing all of this content completely remotely in a distributed way over Zoom and Google Hangouts.

After our final audio and sound engineering is done, then we figure out how do we bring this story to people in a fun way, so we have social content that goes out alongside of our final audio as well as some shoulder content that people can interact with, quizzes, characters. We’re also starting to kick off a video, a short form video franchise that marries the characters from the audio to another format that people can interact with. In that whole arc, we’re working with a bunch of different types of creators and we think that that enriches Meet Cutes library in a significant way.

Jacob: You mentioned this already, but you launched February 2020. A month later, the world shut down or at least here in the United States we shut down. You’ve had to do all this audio recording remote which is not easy. I mean I’m currently recording on my girlfriend’s makeup table in our bedroom. What lessons have you learned creating an audio company while remote where quality is so hard to get right?

Naomi: Yes, it’s a really, really good question. The first two weeks back in March of last year when we went remote, we were deep in contingency planning. We had no idea what it would look like to create the scale of library that we intended to in a completely remote world with everyone working from home, no one meeting in studios. A huge part of that is our head of content web working with each of our producers in our network to come up with basically a set of rules or a set of constraints that would allow us to operate in a remote world.

That meant, okay, if we’re not in studios, where do we have to reallocate budget and timeline in order to make the stories sound amazing, bring them to life in the same way that we would in studios? At first, we were really nervous that things like having two actors in the same space bouncing off of each other visually would interrupt the flow or the vibe of the story. What we found is that that vibe still persisted when you were on Zoom and Google Hangouts as long as there was trust built between the voice actors.

The entire core Meet Cute team actually sat in on an intro call in a pre-reading of a script for a longer season that we just published called That Summer. It was incredible to watch the producer and the director, one, just go through these exercises to make the voice actors feel comfortable around each other, things as simple as everyone go around and tell us your favorite color, tell us where you’re from, describe your room to us.

Those things might not seem the most important. When you’re recording audio, it might be the quality of the mic and making sure that you can stitch all the audio together in a seamless way, and those are super important as well. It was simple things making sure that we replicated that in studio experience of chemistry between different voice actors so that it doesn’t sound any different than the stories that we were producing pre-COVID.

I would argue that, we not only got more efficient producing this content remotely, and that from a time perspective we were able to cut down on costs where people weren’t traveling to studios. We were also able to increase creativity. Since COVID started, we’ve played around with 3D audio and– our Halloween slate of content in October actually is a very immersive experience because we started experimenting with different audio techniques that allowed us to make it feel like you were in the room with the voice actors, which is really one of the things that I think makes audio sound like a film.

It basically plays in your ears like a movie would. The other things that we’ve done is started integrating music, original music into Meet Cute in really creative ways. We’re figuring out how to, with fewer words, convey emotion. Instead of using a sentence or two or bringing another character in to convey awkwardness or silence, what if we just pause for two seconds and convey that same emotion.

I can’t take credit for any of this. I think it’s all our creative network becoming more and more flexible with the way that they work. It infuses creativity into the stories in a completely different way that I don’t think we would have been able to do had we not been forced to shift our production process to completely online. At this point, Meet Cute has made about 90% of our stories in a remote way, and it gives us the confidence that we can do this whenever we need to. If we ever need to go back into lockdown, I think that this is a really sustainable way of creating content and delivering content to people.

It also has opened up a lot more opportunities for people outside of New York and LA to join our creative network. In the last few months, we’ve been working with international talent. We’ve been working with people in small cities in the South that we otherwise might not have met, but we’re really expanding our creative network broadening opportunities for creators to join Meet Cute in a way that we probably wouldn’t have been able to or wouldn’t have thought to before COVID.

There are a lot of benefits to the shift to producing this online as well as a lot of logistical things that we had to figure out. It’s not all rosy, but after a year of doing this, I think I can look back and say there are very clear lessons and very clear things that we learned in the process and have now developed the muscles for.

Jacob: Being an audio first company means you are by and large dependent for discovery on podcast platforms. What sort of tactics and strategies have you used to grow your audience and keep people listening?

Naomi: It’s a great point and something that we think about a lot which is the idea of discovery. I think discovery for a lot of creators in audio is something that’s still very nascent and something that we use. We rely on existing platforms to bolster our discovery. As you mentioned, we’re on every audio platform. We don’t have our own app or our own subscription which is a very purposeful decision. Just out of the gates, we want it to be discoverable anywhere and everywhere, and also be really accessible.

What we have done that’s worked really well besides just getting the amplification from the platforms themselves is building a community around content, and that primarily happens on socials. What I’m fascinated by is not only creating incredible content, but then using that content to build a community and then build a brand.

If you think about the classic marketing funnel of discovery, engagement of the listener, then like a community member so they’re interacting with other community members and then paying subscriber, we’re really at the top of that funnel right now where we are just trying to grow visibility of the brand, and also create characters, create universes that people feel they want to be best friends with and they want to live in and they want to interact with outside of just the audio itself.

When people DM us saying, “I love this character, or this story helped me get through a really hard block of studying, or I fall asleep listening to that summer every night,” which is one of our newest longer seasons of content, those are the types of community building examples that I think is really guiding what Meet Cute is trying to do. Our goal is not just to be an audio-only platform even though that’s our first wedge into this market. Our goal is really to be this fully vertical, integrated company that revolves around the mission statement of hope and making people feel good through storytelling, but isn’t limited to just one channel or format.

When I think about the vision for what this community looks like, it’s people feeling like they are part of the Meet Cute community. They want to interact with the characters, DM them, be best friends with them. They want to wear merchandise that Meet Cute creates. They want to watch the movies and TV shows that are based on original Meet Cute IP and audio stories, and that entire vertical is what we’re trying to build in a step-by-step methodical way starting with audio as our first place.

I would say audio is really our primary marketing right now because that’s where people are finding about us on the different platforms. Then social is where we transition users to, once they’ve been hooked onto the audio, they’ll come find us on socials and then start interacting with us in that community. That shows that people want more than just the audio content from Meet Cute as a brand, but the audio content is really our retention tool that allows people to keep coming back into the platform.

Jacob: In the audio world, Apple and Spotify really are the two biggest players for discovery. As a company that is producing so much content and is starting to really grow and get a lot of listening, what sort of interactions do you have with those two brands as you are trying to distribute your content.

Naomi: Right now, Meet Cute doesn’t have any exclusive content relationships. We own all the IP. We want to distribute it everywhere, so the conversations that we have with them is really about discovery and marketing and ensuring that our content is being surfaced in the right way to their listeners. I think that that’s in the benefit of those platforms as well just given that scripted content is still a very new market, especially fictional scripted content.

If they, on their back end are funneling the right listeners to Meet Cute and funneling Meet Cute listeners to other content in the best way possible, they win by making sure that those users stay on their platform for longer because all of these companies are just looking to gain more and more of the audio market share. The conversations we have with them are around content that we have on our editorial calendar, on our release calendar, ensuring that they’re aware of it so that they can surface it to the right listeners and also pull us to the home page or the carousels that make the most sense for the right listener to find us.

The Meet Cute listener generally tends to be a little bit younger. We say that a lot of our listeners are gen Z and millennial audiences even though there’s nothing about the stories that limits that audience to the younger end of the age range, and it also tends to skew slightly female. Knowing our demographics, these platforms can start to figure out, okay, if a listener is listening to Taylor Swift or to Selena Gomez, they probably will like we should be surfacing Meet Cute stories to them.

I think there’s this really interesting marriage between music and podcasting that hasn’t yet been tapped into. What we’ve been playing around with at Meet Cute is bringing music into our stories but also making playlists of Meet Cute and music in the same playlist, so you get this dual experience in a really interesting way. The conversations with these platforms is really about what innovation looks like, what discovery for our stories looks like, and then what tools they are coming up with on the back end, on the analytics to amplify to more listeners that we think will be subscribers and followers of Meet Cute on their platforms.

At the end of the day, we haven’t done any exclusive deals or anything so the conversations are a little bit more about discovery and marketing rather than content partnerships with those platforms.

Jacob: I would say 99% of all podcasts out there derive the majority of their revenue from advertising, but there is not a single ad on any of the dozen episodes I listen to in preparation for this and none of those episodes have ads. What is the actual business model for Meet Cute?

Naomi: Great question. We very purposefully did not put ads in our content for our first year. The reason for that is, in a 15-minute story, a 30 to 60-second commercial for a razor or something like that does interrupt the flow of the stories. We really wanted to, as I mentioned, build the user experience to be one of consistency, predictability, and engagement so that we can build that community and build that brand through our stories rather than monetizing up front.

The ad-first model is what most podcasts go with and, actually, we’ve gotten a lot of advice from a lot of different people that we should just start running ads in our content. We have stayed away from that because I think that there is a much larger play to be made by building the brand first and then figuring out monetization. I’ll explain that a little bit more now.

With the library of stories that we have, there are a few different things that we’re thinking about. The first one is advertising in a slightly different way. We’ve started working with a couple of brands to integrate the brand or the product into a story more natively, so examples of like what this could look like.

I think in Andy’s blog post, he actually referenced this which is you could have a Meet Cute in the back of an Uber or in an airport where the context for the story can be set by, “Paging passenger, blah, blah, blah, come to the Delta Airlines desk.” There are lots of really interesting ways, and it’s very akin to product placement or brand integrations that we’ve seen in legacy media, in TV and film. That’s one thing, it’s not recurring revenue. It’s not the same programmatic ad, inbound dollars that you get from running ad content in your stories, but I think that there’s something interesting there especially given that we’re doing scripted stories.

Then there are just so many offshoots of what you can do by actually just owning all of this content and this library of 200-plus stories. I alluded to this at the beginning of when we started talking. Our goal is really not to just be an audio company but to be a media company in that you take some of this content from audio into TV and film. People are already starting to tell us like, “I listened to the story, and I just imagined it as a Netflix series, or I imagined watching an anthology of TV shows that followed these characters.”

There is a pipeline that’s being formed right now in the market from audio to TV and film that I think is particularly compelling for us and for our listeners in our broader audiences where they want to continue to interact with Meet Cute content even outside of audio. We’re particularly interested in all of the inbound interest that we’ve gotten in turning some of our content into video content, TV, film, short form, vertical, you name it, and I think there is a Meet Cute story that would fit that format and then different styles to like animation, live action.

We’re starting to play around with this in a smaller way with social content, so we just launched this franchise called a Meet Cute moment which is basically a 30-second video based on story IP that we’re releasing that week where, on TikTok, Instagram reels, you get served this 30-second mini movie that can stand alone but that explains the Meet Cute moment of the story from that week.

We’re starting to play around with how people can interact with those stories outside of audio. While that’s not a monetization technique, that shows that there are legs for this content in different formats that could be a revenue opportunity for us. Then there’s licensing of this audio. There’s exclusive audio deals that we could do. Then in an opposite fashion to many companies that start off as subscription businesses, our model is very much based on let’s broaden access to start.

Then as we gain those fans and super fans, maybe there’s a model for Meet Cute where some content sits outside of the paywall that people can always interact with, but then there’s a community that people are willing to pay for to be a part of, whether that is just audio content or a combination of audio, video, editorial, many different types of content behind that paywall. I think that there is a subscription play that we can build to eventually.

I basically outlined four to five different business models. The reason I did that without committing to one is because I think, to a large extent, in building this community and in building the audience, we get to watch the audience tell us which of those options makes the most sense. We will learn from that as we watch our listening numbers grow, as we watch our subscribers grow, as we see retention stay high and constant.

I think all of this will start to tell us which direction makes the most sense, but our goal is really to build that brand, build that community before we put a paywall up or before we run ads in our content or any of that, rather than starting with that monetization strategy right out of the gates.

Jacob: In many respects, what you’re creating is a lot of individual small pieces of IP where you don’t really know which will hit, but at some point, a piece of content or multiple pieces of content might really become fan favorites. With data so limited on the many podcast platforms, what are you looking for to help you make decisions around the types of content to create, but then also which direction to go in? For example, how will you know when it makes sense to try to do a deal with Netflix to take one of your Meet Cutes and turn it into something far bigger?

Naomi: You really hit it on the head just with that comment about data being limited. Podcasts being still a nascent market, you don’t get the same analytics that you do on social platforms yet just because it’s really distributed, and you don’t know the story behind an individual user. That said, you get these metrics around how many downloads an episode gets, where in the story people stopped listening, which stories retained listeners for the entirety of the 15 minutes. Did people listen to another episode after they listened to the first one? Are people subscribing and following? We can back into a lot of those metrics just given the data that comes out of Spotify, Apple.

We use Simplecast as an aggregator of all of those metrics from the different platforms. Through that we’ve been able to say, okay, these stories do really well generally when we have a cliffhanger at the end of chapter 3 or when we introduce music in the first 10 seconds. We’re actually able to, in a really interesting way, narrow down on what works and what doesn’t work in the creative and feed that back into our writing and development flywheel. That said, what we’ve noticed with Meet Cutes which goes back to a previous point that we talked about, is that one story can become a hit, but there’s nothing different about what we do to create that story than the story before or after it.

For the most part, we’ve seen this high and consistent engagement across every Meet Cute story in the platform. When I say high, I mean our average consumption rate is 102%, which means that a listener is not only listening to the entire story, but they’re re-listening to parts of the story, which is something that we haven’t heard of or seen in many other podcasts or storytelling platforms. There’s interesting behavior tied up in there that supports our hypothesis that you can create an entire brand or entire catalog of stories to become the hit rather than focusing on individual shows that are the hit.

I truly think that then it comes down to other types of metrics around the story, which include sentiment, how people are reacting to the story, how people interact with some of the social content, and shoulder content around the story. As we grow our audience, because to date we’ve done no paid marketing on our existing library of story, we’re just starting to figure out what that looks like to grow our top of funnel. Right now, I would say that we haven’t seen a big difference between week-over-week stories that we release. I do think that we will see one or two stories break out, and those will be very clear winners that we then take to market for Netflix or a video distribution platform.

I think that there is another play though which is, instead of waiting for those hits, we turn a lot of this content into video content that people can interact with in different ways and start to build out engagement on different platforms. That isn’t a monetization strategy, but it is a distribution strategy that allows us to grow our reach and grow our audience before we start monetizing it.

To answer your question, while there’s limited data in podcasting, I think there is enough data to suggest that a story or a set of stories is doing better in terms of both listenership and engagement. Those are really the two primary categories of podcast listening data that we’re looking for in order to suggest whether that creative worked, what elements of the creative worked, and if we want to expand that series either in audio or in different formats outside of audio.

Jacob: You come from a venture background, and now you’re the CEO of a media company. Historically, the two have not had the best success over the years. Why do you think Meet Cute fits a model that is more likely to succeed as a venture-scaled business than other media companies?

Naomi: I think it really comes down to having a perspective in media. What I mean by that is, building a media company 5 years ago or 10 years ago was very different in that you could just say we want to build a studio with the best content and put it out there. I think today you really have to have a narrow wedge and a perspective that will create a community and brand around the content and bring people to your platform because they understand the value that they’re getting from it, and they can in one sentence summarize why they are spending 15 minutes of their day or X dollars a month interacting with that platform.

With Meet Cute, the consistency, the predictability, the format control, and the specificity of just being audio and positive and hopeful, I think all of those in tandem suggests that, if someone is interacting with Meet Cute and engaging with Meet Cute, there is a high likelihood that that becomes a super fan because they are coming back day after day to consume more content. They’re interacting with our platform in interesting ways. They’re going to grow into consumers and into subscribers. That feels like a much stickier business model than just being a more generic content creator.

I think that that perspective is something that Meet Cute has really honed and prided ourselves on since day one, that we’re not just building a podcast, we’re building a brand. We call it a story incubator internally because it does feel like we’re taking a lot of creative risks because we know what our sandbox is to play in. When you create that sandbox, both for creatives and from the business side, you can experiment endlessly within that sandbox, and that’s where I think you get a lot of creativity and a lot of innovation in audio.

Our goal is not only to be innovators in storytelling, but also to be innovators in audio storytelling and create those films that people are playing in their head constantly because they have their AirPods, and they’re just imagining all these stories come to life to the point where they’re like, when is this going to hit screens? When is this going to be a separate Instagram feed that I can subscribe to? When am I going to get to DM this character or rep this character on my sweatshirt or tote bag? I think those are the types of affinities that will make Meet Cute successful. We’re already starting to see that happen just in our first year and after our first 200 stories.

Our next year, as we create 400 or 500 more stories in our library, I think that the goal is really to see that affinity and engagement go up. That’s why I think, from a venture perspective, this is interesting because it’s not that traditional hit-driven model where you’re making 10 shows a year and you’re crossing your fingers and hoping that those do well. Instead, it’s we have no idea what’s going to work.

Art is subjective, creativity is subjective. Everyone likes different things, so who are we to say this is the story that’s going to work and take off. Instead, it’s our job to create the platform and the process to let creators do their work best, and then to let consumers tell us which of the stories is going to be the winner. I think that that is where Meet Cute stands out and where there’s an overlap between the traditionally VC-backed product companies and entertainment.

Jacob: I want to end with the same two questions I ask every operator that comes on the show. First, what is a mistake you’ve made in your career, and what did you learn from it?

Naomi: Ooh, this is a good question. I would say I started out my career on a very traditional path. I graduated school with an engineering degree and was recruited by Goldman to work on their training floor. I mistook stability and the safety net of a large company for success. The moment that I left USV to start building Meet Cute and building a team around Meet Cute, and I will say it’s a kickass team that we have around Meet Cute, that moment is where I first felt like my neck was actually on the chopping block and that sounds really scary, but it also is probably the most exciting move that I’ve made in my career.

It’s obviously been quite a short career so far, so I just hope that now when people ask me for advice, the advice I give is, in your first two years of your career, if you can try and make moves that put your neck on the chopping block earlier and you start developing that muscle of what is it like to take a risk so big that you could fail, I think those are the risks and the career moves that I wish I had had someone tell me that earlier just because I think I would’ve probably started off my career in a different way.

I don’t regret being on a traditional path and trying that and seeing if it worked for me or not. I loved working at Goldman. I loved working at USV. I loved learning about venture capital. The first moment that I really felt like I had ownership over something and that, if I didn’t grind and make something happen, it wouldn’t happen, that moment I think was where I realized that it’s very energizing. The mistake was, I guess, starting off my career in the safety net.

Jacob: Second, if you could offer some advice to current and prospective media operators to have the most success in this business, what would that advice be?

Naomi: I would say creating a space that is uniquely your own. That ties into it, I just mentioned about perspective, which is you will be told by so many people this is what you should do or this is what you should do. When we first started Meet Cute people were like, no chance that you can tell a movie-length story in 15 minutes. There’s just no way that people are going to fall in love with the characters, that you’re going to be able to develop those characters. We stuck with it because we were like, we want to make this happen.

That’s our moat, if no one else can do it and we can do it. I think that in media it’s so important to take advice from other people, but not to waiver on your core beliefs and on your mission statement and the unique perspective that you’re building because, the moment that you waiver and you start standing for everything, you don’t actually stand for anything. The moment that you start expanding to places that aren’t perfectly aligned with your vision, you’re not building something super unique. You’re basically chasing momentum because other people tell you, this is successful, that’s successful, why don’t you do it like them?

Then you’re not actually founding something new, testing a new hypothesis, bringing something innovative into existence. I think that that’s really the excitement of being a founder or a media operator today. I have to constantly remind myself that week over week because I have so many conversations with so many people that all have incredible careers, are so smart. It’s hard to stick with what you believe the hypothesis is that you’re testing and you want to stick to.

I think that, as advice for someone in this space, I would say like, honestly, just put a Post-It note on your laptop. This is the thesis statement that I want to test and I want to bring into the world. Everything you do should somehow fit under that thesis statement. If it doesn’t, you put blinders on, and you don’t focus on that stuff because that’ll be a distraction in the long run.