BOLDER & WISER with Peter Wang and Michelle Kraemer

Mark Webster: Future of Audio @ Adobe, Power of Parasocial, Starter Acquisition

• Peter Wang • Season 1 • Episode 1

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In this inaugural episode of the Work-In-Progress Podcast, I talked to my good friend, Mark Webster, who, through the combination of creativity, hackathon marathons, and his second baby SaySpring, ended up leading audio products at Adobe.

⌚️ TIMESTAMPS
01:43 From Marketing to Tech
04:46 Family Dynamics and Work Ethic
09:41 Being the Middle Child
11:25 Serial Hackathons
16:09 Getting into TechStars
17:21 Building SideTour
19:31 Lunch with a Wall Street Banker Turned Monk
25:53 The story of SideTour gives hope that great things can happen if people come together
28:55 Starter Acquisition by Groupon
32:17 Challenges of Reinventing Groupon
35:05 The Birth of Sayspring: Designing Voice Interface
43:50 Acquisition by Adobe
46:25 Adobe's AI-First Platform for WOrking with Spoken Audio
49:05 Pitching the Power of Audio
01:00:31 Launching Beta and Future of Adobe Podcast
01:06:26 Building Products within Adobe
01:10:38 The Audio Ecosystem
01:19:12 The Importance of Depth in Creative Tools
01:23:24 Approach to Product Development
01:32:43 Believe in Yourself

Peter Wang:

Welcome to the Work in Progress podcast. I'm your host, Peter Wong. This show is created on the belief that no matter who we are, where we are in life, we are all work in progress. In each episode, I have candid conversations with people that I admire and uncover actionable wisdom that you can apply to your life. Today we're starting off with my friend Mark Webster. He's a creative, tenacious, self-taught maker. Who now leads audio products at Adobe? I hope you enjoy our first episode. Mark, great to see you again. It's been a while since we've seen each other. Last time was actually physically at the Adobe office, I think,

Mark Webster:

Yeah. And yeah, maybe 2018. Yeah. Long time ago.

Peter Wang:

It's a great office. It's very quiet. I still remember

Mark Webster:

it is. Yep.

Peter Wang:

at the time you were working on a very different product

Mark Webster:

yeah, we were working on maybe Adobe XD when you, when we first talked or when we last talked. Uh, yeah. We were on the Adobe XD team for the first two years of our,

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

what is now five year Adobe journey.

Peter Wang:

five, I know five years. Mark I,

Mark Webster:

Five years next month.

Peter Wang:

you to be at Adobe for five years. I thought

Mark Webster:

None of us did

Peter Wang:

and start off thing again.

Mark Webster:

I know. No, it's been, it's been quite a ride. It's been a lot of fun.

Peter Wang:

to cover today, so we'll get started. I'm very excited to talk to you today because, I know you and I met years back when you started a company called Sayspring but you also have someone who not only started one company or two company, you start a number of companies

Mark Webster:

Yes.

Peter Wang:

So I would love to talk and you also, there's so much to cover about you, I'm sure. What sequence? New big New York column, right?

Mark Webster:

Yeah, I mean, I could give you, I could give you my quick spiel, my quick background.

Peter Wang:

your, your background.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. So grew up on Long Island, then went to school at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Chelsea, New York

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

marketing and advertising. I thought I was gonna be a Don Draper at executive. Uh, and then, uh, that was during the first dot.com boom. And so I started working for a tech PR firm. One of the first, uh, accounts I worked on as a, as a PR intern was four guys up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launching a company called Akamai.

Peter Wang:

hmm.

Mark Webster:

And so how did, yeah, so just totally got hooked on tech. Uh, started working full-time when I was still in school. Uh, totally fell in love with it, kind of. I'd always been, you know, I was more, I would say a marketing person and a, maybe a design person. Um, but fell in love with it, started working full-time when I was in school. Had the dubious honor of graduating May, 2000 a month after the Nasdaq fell apart. Uh, so ended up going to the safety of big media and I worked at the NBA for five years.

Peter Wang:

That'd be

Mark Webster:

the NBA was, I work in creative services, so it was essentially like a internal agency for the rest of the league. And the teams did a whole bunch of tech stuff there. Uh, introduced Adobe after Effects to our broadcast graphics production com, uh, suite, which was fun. That was kind of my first big Adobe thing. as part of that, I, uh, I got to take over the office of the former creative director and.

Peter Wang:

how,

Mark Webster:

His office had a PC and a Mac, and the Mac had all the Macromedia and Adobe software. And that is how I learned all the Macromedia and Adobe software and sort of started my career as a generalist.

Peter Wang:

The flash days.

Mark Webster:

Yep. Flash days, Fireworks days, Dreamweaver days.

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

Um, and so yeah, did, did that for a while, then got into a bunch of different tech companies, a SaaS company, and then, you know, all kind of leading up to, uh, working for a great company that then fell apart in the financial crisis. And so I decided, I was like, I think I'm sick of working for people. So I did some consulting and that led to my first startup. So I started a company called Side Tour, which was an activities marketplace, very similar to like what Airbnb is doing with their experiences business.

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

Uh, and then we ended up getting acquired by Groupon. I was at Groupon for a while. Uh, Groupon. I always consider kind of my, my starter acquisition and I was all the things not to learned

Peter Wang:

Oh starter Acquisitions.

Mark Webster:

not supposed to do, And so I was there for about 18 months. Went on a journey for a year, kind of figuring out what was next, uh, led to, and we, and we'll come back to this, but led to what became Sayspring uh, and then Sayspring was a journey. I taught myself how to code to build Sayspring uh, launched it br and then within, uh, less than a year of raising money got acquired by Adobe. And then I have been at Adobe for five years,

Peter Wang:

Wow.

Mark Webster:

Which is, just blows my mind. I think this is me. I mean, I think it's almost probably the longest job I've ever had.

Peter Wang:

I know. It's

Mark Webster:

I think it's a,

Peter Wang:

very rare, especially in these days. I mean, have to be in one place for five years. I also know that someone like you who's always wanted to do right, have ideas, want to try it out, right? That kind of itch. Um, but there's a lot to talk about Adobe. I wanna go back a little bit actually

Mark Webster:

let's do it.

Peter Wang:

talk about your upbringing a little bit. Cause I do think that all of us grow up differently. I grew up in Taiwan, right? And a very academic family. Like, what was your upbringing like?

Mark Webster:

Yeah, so I grew up on Long Island, uh, out in a town called Farmingville, which is kind of halfway in between the city and the Hamptons. Um, typical middle class, you know, upbringing. Um, my mom stopped working when they, I have brother or, um, a older sister and younger sister, uh, and stopped working when she had kids and then went back to work when we were maybe 12. And then my dad worked in marketing and sales, uh, something like radar systems in the defense industry. Uh, but my dad was also one of those guys who like, just does everything himself. Like I, we never went to a mechanic when, you know, he, he bought me my first car, a really old Jeep Cherokee when I was like 16 with a shop manual.

Peter Wang:

wow

Mark Webster:

There you go. learn how to do that. Um, had a bunch of rental properties that my, uh, dad had when we were growing up that we had to do all the work in. So he would hire me to come paint and do the plumbing with him, and so I can build a house, I can wire a house. And so just kind of set up this whole, I think, kind of, you can figure out anything. My dad always, his, his big thing was always, if you can read, you can figure out anything.

Peter Wang:

If you can

Mark Webster:

And that has kind of been like, Yeah And that's been like the blueprints of my life, of just kind of figuring out out

Peter Wang:

of like

Mark Webster:

all these different things.

Peter Wang:

figure it out type of person. Not afraid to jump in.

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

did you put Did you put up that panel yourself behind you?

Mark Webster:

you So have I didn't actually, I put up the, the painting, but no, I didn't do this place. I was lucky enough when this place, this place was pretty much done. Some crazy people had spent three years renovating this place and then sold it like a year later.

Peter Wang:

Oh really?

Mark Webster:

And so we ended up having to do nothing in this place, which was amazing.

Peter Wang:

That's lucky. So you're get, so let's go. So your dad's work ethic and the approach a big influence for you.

Mark Webster:

Huge influence. Yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's funny cuz and, and you know this, like, once you start to have kids and you get to a certain age and you start to like reflect on like your parents and then what you learned from your parents, right? And so I think that was, and you know, in the la my daughter's nine, so I would say in the last 10 years of kind of reflection, I realized that that's, that's like the narrative thread through my life of like learning b b basically being super independent, being empowered to think you can just figure out anything has then, you know, what led to me think as a marketing person, thinking I could be a designer thinking I could start a company thinking I could, you know, do all this stuff. Um, and so it has just, you know, it had a, a massive impact on me and I had a great upbringing. You know, my parents are still both with us. You know, I have great relationship with my sisters. Uh, so yeah, I mean, like, no, no complaints. It was, you know, very, very struggle free. It was a very like, comfortable middle class upbringing.

Peter Wang:

cool. And. do you teach your, so your daughter's nine? Actually mine is just turned 10 in December. Um,

Mark Webster:

Yeah. Little Nina. Little Nina is

Peter Wang:

Nina,

Mark Webster:

Ooh,

Peter Wang:

impart

Mark Webster:

the best.

Peter Wang:

on her too?

Mark Webster:

Oh yeah.

Peter Wang:

Oh yeah

Mark Webster:

She is, she is my mini me. She is the best super independent. She's, tonight she is coming home and is the guest speaker at the PTA meeting for her school to represent the voice of the students. Wow. She's, yeah, she's just a, an incredible kid. It's funny too, cuz so we had, you know, we had Nina and then, um, kind of when you would start to make the decisions about having a second kid is when I was doing, Sayspring. And so we always kind of joked that like say Springing was our second kid. because kind of the time the say Spring journey kind of got to a more comfortable place. Then Nina was like four and we were like, I don't think we're ready to go back to diapers. So it turned out we were one and done. So when you have one child, there's just this project that you put everything into that one person. So we are just best friends. She's a ton of fun. It's been great.

Peter Wang:

Oh, that's, oh, lucky Nina. Yes, I can. I, I mean, in some ways I can relate, but I have three kids, so it's definitely very different cuz my project has become like a portfolio that I'm managing versus like an individual project.

Mark Webster:

you gotta spread the risk.

Peter Wang:

a portfolio. Uh, there's a little

Mark Webster:

So where were w what kind of brothers and sisters did you have? Like where do you fall in the mix?

Peter Wang:

so I'm actually number two in the family of two. you have brothers, sisters?

Mark Webster:

So, yeah, the older sister and the younger sister. So only boy

Peter Wang:

Oh,

Mark Webster:

right in the middle. My older sister's exactly two and a half years older. My younger sister's exactly two and a half years younger.

Peter Wang:

kid.

Mark Webster:

like smack in the middle. Yeah. Which is also clearly part of like my independence, my, you know, overlooked from day one. Has like the child, only boy

Peter Wang:

of like you her, her name's Eve. She's seven now and she's like a complete, she is a wild card. I call her. We call her. I call her, I'm not sure. My head is, she's a wild card, independent. She will be taking on projects, but she's also kind of like me, so I'm the second one. But my brother's only 13 months older than me, so we were treated pretty much the same way. What he

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

is what I do. I keep following his footsteps, but I'm very different from my creative point of view. I like to go and explore, be different, or do something that I've envisioned my head, right? Like my birthday, I wanna go to Oceanside and fly my drone cuz I really wanna, I should love new perspectives even though I've already crashed one drone. I have this feeling of I wanna fly the drone. I'm picturing my head up here. I will just fly over. You know, you, you have this shot in your mind, right? I wanna get that shot.

Mark Webster:

That's so

Peter Wang:

there, it's windy. I was, I was like, oh no, I should look up, know, the, whatever the wind resistance, can it fly through it? Anyways, it took too long to look up. I said, no, I'm just gonna fly it. I said, I will fly it over the pier so that if it falls, it falls on the pier. Anyway, it's long story, but my middle one, Eve, it's very much like that too. She would all do projects and my wife Abra, she, she would say he was doing something. Again, we have no idea what she's doing. I said, you know, just let her be, because it may not be clear at the beginning, but at the end I know she has a vision. So

Mark Webster:

Yeah, I mean that's similar, you know, I think that being the middle child also gives you that space to explore that, right? Like the first kid got all the attention,

Peter Wang:

Mm-hmm.

Mark Webster:

kid comes along, and then like the third kid's, the baby, and so like the second kid kinda left to their own devices, but also an opportunity to kind of spread their wings and be more creative.

Peter Wang:

Yeah. So now let's talk about a few of the startups. I know you had start acquisition. I never heard of the

Mark Webster:

Yes,

Peter Wang:

that one. Start acquisition. Was it hard? What was it like as you're starting out? Did you know startup?

Mark Webster:

Yeah. So it's interesting. So I very intentionally wanted to be in the startup world and I wanted to start my own company. I had worked for a bunch of startups. I kind of felt like, I had 10, 11 years professional experience and kind of was ready to, to jump in. Uh, and so started doing the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon.

Peter Wang:

Well, wow.

Mark Webster:

And that was very much a very intentional entry into being part of the startup world, right? Because especially this is, you know, 2010, so New York was just kind of starting to build like a Tech

Peter Wang:

in the New York scene.

Mark Webster:

It was, and it was huge at the time, right? It was the first time,

Peter Wang:

Yeah. Remember?

Mark Webster:

it was the first time Disrupted come to New York. And so he did the hackathon, uh, and built something really cool, but, didn't win anything. But also looked at okay, the people who won, how did they think about what wins at the hackathon at TechCrunch? So then a couple months later they had the San Francisco one. So me and my buddy flew out to San Francisco

Peter Wang:

Oh,

Mark Webster:

and we did another project there and did the hackathon again.

Peter Wang:

serial hackathoners.

Mark Webster:

yes, and we got, and we got honorable mention. So I was like, all right, all right, we're, we're figuring this out. And then

Peter Wang:

Wait. Was it the

Mark Webster:

the n.

Peter Wang:

or different idea the second time

Mark Webster:

No different idea. So the first idea was a project called Fly Moto where you could tweet and use a hashtag of a flight number and it would check you into that flight. And then there was a whole experience where you could track how many miles you've flown. It was almost like four square ish, but for flights. And so you could become like the king of an airport. Uh, it was at the time JetBlue was that. So we, we launched it didn't get much recognition for it at the, at the conference. But then JetBlue two months later did this all you can jet promotion where, for$500 you could fly as much as you wanted for one month. And so a whole bunch of people did it. And we launched it targeting all you can jet.

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

then it became a whole thing where people were tracking all their flights. We'd have a bug and everyone would panic. My miles aren't on my leaderboard, so they got really excited, but there's no business there. The second one, It was something we called Pinocchio and the whole point was to lie to your social network. So you connected it to your social network, so your Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter,

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

you'd pick a story, uh, on a date with somebody, meeting with clients and then over a set schedule like a couple hours, it would check you into a restaurant, post a picture of food, and basically tell a story for a couple hours of where you were

Peter Wang:

was fascinating.

Mark Webster:

So we got honorable mention for that one, and then we come back and I was talking to a bunch of two of my other buddies and we, and my buddy had just spent the summer traveling around the world. And so he basically came back and was like, I have this idea to be able to bring those like authentic kinds of experiences into your own city. And so that became what was Side Tour.

Peter Wang:

Mm,

Mark Webster:

Uh, and, and right around the time that we had this idea. Techstars was, which is a, a tech accelerator here in New York, was launching their second class. And so we applied to it and through that application process, TechCrunch Disrupt came to New York again. So we went in, did the hackathon again,

Peter Wang:

time.

Mark Webster:

got written. Yeah, written up in TechCrunch. It was called Joinable and it was all about, um, voicemail and email over the phone for the homeless and jobless so that if you don't have an email address, you could still get speech to text

Peter Wang:

that's cool.

Mark Webster:

check messages. Yeah, it was fun. We built on top of Twilio. The hackathon was on Sunday and they present everything on Wednesday, all the like award winners of the hackathon at the conference and. Uh, like that Monday, I think it was, or Tuesday, there was a really bad tornado in the middle of the country. And so there's disaster relief and it was in the news. And so we, all of a sudden we had a bunch of organizations reaching out to us to want to use Joinable cuz they had read about it in TechCrunch. So we ended up sending an email to Michael Arrington and we're like, Hey, this has gotten a great reception. We think you should consider us a winner and put us on stage on Wednesday And he was like, great, let's do it. And so we got presented as a winner of the hackathon. The two guys who were managing, Dave Tisch, who was managing the managing director of Techstars at the time was in the audience.

Peter Wang:

Yes.

Mark Webster:

and I think that helped push us into Techstars and then yeah, built the business. I know that was a good time in New York.

Peter Wang:

they gave I Yes.

Mark Webster:

It was, it was Adam Rothenberg like box group guys. Yeah. They were, they were managin directors.

Peter Wang:

It's, it is. I've forgot, you know, I have, it feels so long ago. It's not that even, not that long. Maybe 15 years ago, but it

Mark Webster:

That's still, that's still

Peter Wang:

that's

Mark Webster:

pretty long, though.

Peter Wang:

I guess little perspective. I,

Mark Webster:

We're just getting old. That's all.

Peter Wang:

we're all getting old and nostalgic too. Um. But that was actually a very special period in New York.

Mark Webster:

It was amazing. It was amazing.

Peter Wang:

Yeah. It

Mark Webster:

And it also,

Peter Wang:

root.

Mark Webster:

it was, and it was, you know, and that's when you had your four squares, right? And like all the,

Peter Wang:

that's

Mark Webster:

all the, so the, the new darlings. And Techstars felt like such validation that we were like, oh, we're like part of the startup community. We spent a year and a half very intentionally trying to get into it. And then we were like, we're here, right? And, and raised money from Foundry, RRE and we were just like, we've, we've arrived. This is, this is our shot. And then yeah, built a Side Tour business.

Peter Wang:

And did you, so Joinable become site tour

Mark Webster:

Yeah, joinable. So the Hackathon projects ended up just being the hackathon projects, and I think Joinable is actually something that we may have pursued had we not gotten into Techstars with Side Tour,

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

because it did start to get a little bit of interest and traction, but at the same time we got into Techstars with Side tour, so we focused on that.

Peter Wang:

And you've had so many different ideas.

Mark Webster:

So Endless

Peter Wang:

So

Mark Webster:

Brain never stops,

Peter Wang:

keep coming?

Mark Webster:

keeps coming. That was what was fun about hackathons is like you could just run with something. You'd stay up all night. I think that it was like something like you'd start at 6:00 PM at night and you'd present at like 10 30 in the morning. So you basically just stayed up all night and just like build something. It was, ah, it was awesome. So fun. I mean, I'm way too old to do any of that now, but

Peter Wang:

This is why I feel like I, I was like, I can't come with any good idea after eight o'clock

Mark Webster:

totally. totally.

Peter Wang:

Um, that's, it's interesting because you, would you, did you join the hackathons first, then come with the idea, or you had like a notebook of idea? I just need venues to go and actually pursue.

Mark Webster:

It was joining the hackathon first, and then what are we gonna build there? Yeah. I mean, and because it was, we, we had no intention of trying to launch a startup or build a startup in the hackathon.

Peter Wang:

the

Mark Webster:

The hackathon was literally, yeah. It was just a project. Let's just go in and be interesting. Right. So like, fly, I mean, flight Motor was awesome. Uh, you could have potentially tried to make a startup out of it. Um, but we were just, we were just there like love of the game

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

building something and, and, and our, because participating in the hackathon gave you tickets to the conference, so then you get to go to the conference. Right. And I couldn't afford those tickets at the time.

Peter Wang:

See, the prize was much smaller than the time. It was like, I wanna get tickets to the conference.

Mark Webster:

That was it. That was it.

Peter Wang:

Um, c toured. What made you to go say, it's not a project, I wanna make it a business. I'm gonna raise.

Mark Webster:

Yeah, I think a few things. I think looking back, I think the fact that at the time there was four of us, and then one of the guys left pretty early on. Um, but I think just like the conviction of like having some of your friends who want to go do the thing too, and it's pretty rare for everybody to just align with like, this is the thing we're gonna go do. That was a starting point. And then Techstars helped. I mean getting into Techstars and was like

Peter Wang:

Give

Mark Webster:

you know, tons of confidence, like lots of people apply with their six month old, one year old startup to accelerators. We went in there day one, like, what were we gonna do? We were starting from scratch. It was also just a super captivating idea. I mean, it was a super fun business. It was, we had amazing experiences on there. One was, I think one of our biggest attention grabbers was it was lunch with a Wall Street banker turned monk at a monastery on the lower East side.

Peter Wang:

did you have to

Mark Webster:

And it was like,

Peter Wang:

or did you just curate

Mark Webster:

no. So what we did is we found interesting people and we kind of pitched them on ideas and a big thing which, whether or not this was a good idea for the business, it probably wasn't. But we didn't want anything that was on other platforms. Like we wanted unique stuff.

Peter Wang:

that's unique to this platform,

Mark Webster:

Yes. And we used to, and we used to always rag on the big red bus, like the double decker red bus in New York is exactly what we're not going after. And so like all like, we don't want to aggregate existing activities.

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

there was a lot of pressure too. And maybe we should have.

Peter Wang:

bar cuz you're not aggregator, you're creation

Mark Webster:

yes. And so, but we got really, really good at it. Like we were excellent at it. We, and I mean this, frankly that's why we got acquired was because, you know, we were having trouble figuring out demand. We launched a couple cities, we did a partnership with acquisition to sell some art of our inventory, on their platform, non-discounted, interestingly enough. And they saw that like when they were putting our stuff in, like the subject lines of emails, people opened them cuz they were super interesting. And so they were like, Hey, so like we hadn't figured out demands, but we were excellent at supply. And they were like, Hey, why don't you come here and be part of acquisition and do it that way. And so that's what led to us going there.

Peter Wang:

see that's fascinating because, so it remind, it makes me think about your background, right? Creative marketing. Did that play a big role in creating the supply?

Mark Webster:

Oh, huge. Huge. I mean, it was for a few reasons, right? One, it's what's the idea and kind of how do you take a creative person and build a good experience around it? How do you help somebody beat a good host who is not a host or a tour guide or anything? So like we had a four page booklet of like how you build good experiences. we ended up coming up with a format of how do you write up a description, right? So we ended up having a 13 page style guide of like, this is how you explain the experience. Every title has to start with a verb. The first paragraph's goal is to do this, never say this. Mention what's included in the third paragraph. We were super prescriptive

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

how to build it. I figured one at one time when we were getting acquired, we actually had to kind of price out what is our production cost for an experience. We figured it was about$180. because it was like within kind of three hours of, of total effort. Yeah. Template. We were just, we got really, really good at it.

Peter Wang:

That's fascinating. Makes me think, you know, this is our season one of podcast. I'm r writing the playbook right now. How long this

Mark Webster:

Yep. Yeah, I mean, that's what we did. We,

Peter Wang:

Alright.

Mark Webster:

you do it a few times and then you kind of see what works and what doesn't, and then yeah, you just have a flow. Right. And then it just makes it easier and better to just kind of fly through it each time. Right.

Peter Wang:

And then for that wall, Streeter, what was incentive?

Mark Webster:

So, I mean, they, you charge for, so his name was Ross. Ross is an incredible individual. Um, he, you know, because he was a monk, he was charging like$20 a person, four people at a time. And it was really a donation to the monastery. So he had a very different motivation than I would say most hosts, but for most hosts, it.

Peter Wang:

initial.

Mark Webster:

You know, partly it was fun, but then it was commercial, right? You could make a couple extra a hundred bucks doing whatever it is you love to do: graffiti, jazz, musician, photographer, architectural tour. I mean, we had tons of crazy stuff. It was definitely a mix of the, I would say the money was the grease that made somebody participate in the experience, but everybody who kind of stuck with it and built an interesting little side business on it, like it just enjoyed it. It was just fun.

Peter Wang:

We're talking now in 2023, creator economy. Right? almost like that's a little bit of a, I can imagine that idea coming back

Mark Webster:

Yeah. Well, I mean, Airbnb launched their experiences business, right? Like, it, it ended up being a, you know, kind of what they saw as like a core part of their brand and offering.

Peter Wang:

To differentiate not just a place, it's also an experience

Mark Webster:

right. It's just a, I mean, and, and so, you know, they co they obviously do it in a travel context. We decided to do it in a more of a local context, like find.

Peter Wang:

Mm.

Mark Webster:

Interesting things going on in your city. But yeah, there was, there was one woman, so we, one of the ways we experimented, uh, with like how we found people. So like sometimes we would read newsletters about mixologists and reach out to them. Uh, we also just tried posting ads randomly, like Craigslist, There was a woman who responded to an ad on Craigslist who was a former, uh, chef at, uh, Aquavit. She was like a sous chef at Aquavit, and she wanted to start doing dinners in her home. So she started hosting dinners in her home. Uh, after like I met her at like to get coffee and then helped her set it up. She, it was actually the very first side tour ever went on was her, was a woman named, Elise Kornack. Uh, it got so popular that she ended up opening a little studio restaurant down the street from her apartment in Brooklyn. Uh, it was like two seatings a night, 12 people at a time ended up earning a Michelin star.

Peter Wang:

No

Mark Webster:

just like this. So it's like,

Peter Wang:

a story,

Mark Webster:

a woman who like, who came through Craigslist, ended up starting her journey on side tour that led to her private dining studio that got a Michelin star. So it was just like super fun, incredible business, but also possibly hard to scale. So that was,

Peter Wang:

the supply side as an

Mark Webster:

yeah,

Peter Wang:

Mm-hmm. but that must mean, made a really good pitch story,

Mark Webster:

Where we were digging him. Yeah.

Peter Wang:

Actually if I actually, that kind of story gives people hope well. That things things can happen if we come together. Right? And she didn't

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

she could, but you came along there's this little platform called side tour and then experiment and then little experiment of grow into something amazing, something so unattainable. Like I mentioned the Star, but it happened in the

Mark Webster:

Yeah, it,

Peter Wang:

And that's actually really hopeful actually. Even I like, first time I listening about this, like, you know, give me hope we can do

Mark Webster:

yeah, it was just, I mean, it was an easy way to take a little jump towards what for some people became a big thing. We also had, uh, I think we had a total of three couples meet who ended up getting married on different side tours. And we had one proposal that happened on a side tour, so it was just, yeah, incredible business. It was like, it was so fun and you know, I'm just a New Yorker through and through and it was all focused on New York at first. It was just amazing.

Peter Wang:

It reminds me of, maybe a derivative business, which is, unique experiences for people who are dating. And then the metric is really about right, because actually that's really hard to do.

Mark Webster:

Well, it's funny, we, um, what was the name of that business? How about we remember there was a dating website called, how about we, my co-founder of Side Tour went on a date with a girl from How about we that he ended up marrying. And so same, same, thing. They went on experience,

Peter Wang:

New

Mark Webster:

started dating, dated for a couple years, and got married, has two kids.

Peter Wang:

Wow. so let's talk about acquisition.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. Wow. What a disaster that place was

Peter Wang:

18 months at acquisition. What was,

Mark Webster:

Oh yes.

Peter Wang:

What was, you know,

Mark Webster:

So acquisition's an interesting business, right? Like acquisition, you know, if you remember at the time, acquisition, when it first launched was like the hottest thing in the world, and at one point was like the fastest growing company of all time, right? So,

Peter Wang:

based. It was like, oh, the first Midwest, right. Big

Mark Webster:

yep,

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

yep. Uh, and just really wacky culture, right?

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

and so the business just exploded. Uh, as part of that explosion, they literally like duct taped their products and their tech together. Uh, and then when it kind of started to flatten out, it's one of those things, right, where when you're eccentric and your business is growing, you're amazing, but then when you're eccentric and your business isn't growing, you're all of a sudden become a liability, right? So Andrew Mason, you know, who's, I think a super smart dude and builds a super interesting culture ended up leaving. And so Eric Lukowski, was kind of the initial funder of it. Lightbank was his, the name of his fund, and they kind of incubated it. So he ended up becoming the c e o and they had a whole vision of building the os of local commerce.

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

there was a bunch of companies that they acquired at the time. And so we were one of them. And so that was really our function. Our function was to change people's perception of what a acquisition is and find interesting, unique inventory you can't find anywhere else. And when you get a group on email, you know, instead of a discount at a bating cage being the subject line, you get jazz concert and a fish fry at, uh, Brooklyn Brownstone,

Peter Wang:

right.

Mark Webster:

who doesn't open that? Everyone opens that email, right? And so just like the open rates from our content, were just, so we, and, and we came in, I think we were in three or four cities and then exploded to like 26, within six months. Um, so it was a lot of fun. But that, that business kind of ran itself, right? And as far as like that, that became, Not about our product, but our inventory. And so me on the product side ended up sort of becoming the head of product for what we called G Live. So it was a, a joint venture between Live Nation, Ticketmaster and acquisition. And cuz they're, they sold a lot of tickets to live events. Right? There was, it was kinda like a yield management strategy around tickets to live events. Um, zero integration. The entire group on business was like run within Salesforce, which is insane. Uh, it was like auto generating PDFs with a ticket. It was so, it was just nuts. And so we took on this whole project, um, called uh, I don't even remember what it was called, but it was basically to build an integration between acquisition and Live Nation,

Peter Wang:

Mm.

Mark Webster:

Ticketmaster's ticketing system. So when you were actually like picking dates on the acquisition website, you were actually pulling live inventory and all that stuff. Uh, and it was just a absolutely brutal project. Like just horrible from like a tech perspective. We were rewriting so much stuff. Uh, tried to launch a new venture there. So we tried to pitch a business called acquisition Movies, and the whole idea was, could we, you know, at the time I think the customer acquisition cost was like$8 or something. And so

Peter Wang:

That's

Mark Webster:

the idea was what's that?

Peter Wang:

$8. Great.

Mark Webster:

Eight,$8, right? And so the idea was acquisition movies, could we sell movie tickets, but then just take all the affiliate commission and just give it back to the customer so that acquisition is always the cheapest place to buy movie tickets.

Peter Wang:

Mm-hmm.

Mark Webster:

And then by doing that, that's just basically customer acquisition for us. So, you know, you, you just drive down customer acquisition costs. And so we went to trade shows for, you know, national exhibitors, trade shows and stuff, and, and kind of, and designed the whole site and pitched it and just couldn't get traction on it. So then we ended up pitching a whole vision how to, like, reinvent tours and activities and, and, and local content on acquisition. And so we started that, but it was just, it was just miserable. Like I did not enjoy it at all.

Peter Wang:

Was it

Mark Webster:

Just the tech was hard.

Peter Wang:

What was

Mark Webster:

I think it was

Peter Wang:

hard about it? Yeah.

Mark Webster:

I, I think it was three things. Um, and to his credit, Eric Lefkofsky is one of the most impressive people I've ever met. He was super supportive. So I, I, you know, I went in and pitched like, Hey, I'm gonna need like a million and a half dollars to go rebuild this whole thing. And he was like, done so good, dude. Uh, you could see why he's like, started four big companies,

Peter Wang:

Mm-hmm.

Mark Webster:

Um, but it was a mix of, N not being like a tech company really. Right? Like trying to like reinvent tech and trying to build a tech platform at a place that, that really wasn't their dna. It was like a very sales driven culture. So that was hard to begin with.

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

Um, the second was just like acquisition was in the middle of reinventing itself to begin with, right? And so like, that was just a hard thing to deal with. Um, and then just, you know, trying to be a change agent from the New York office when it's based in Chicago.

Peter Wang:

Hmm

Mark Webster:

so, you know, the kind like, like the scope. So if, I always think that if I had, if they somehow group on movies would've worked as like an idea and like, go get that started, um, I would've been there longer.

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

the thing I got caught reinventing was like such a core piece of the business that like, I couldn't affect it the way I wanted it to.

Peter Wang:

Yeah. That's you. That's a very, I think that's something that a lot of people can resonate with. It doesn't have to be someone who's acquired. Right. Came in through requisition. but many people go into a company thinking or not thinking at the beginning, but imagining have idea and pitching it. And that pitching process is brutal

Mark Webster:

Brutal.

Peter Wang:

the incentive structure, you know, if acquisition, was it acquisition public at the time already or is it

Mark Webster:

Yeah. acquisition was public. Yeah.

Peter Wang:

harder? Right. So

Mark Webster:

Yep,

Peter Wang:

so, because even though you can see it to make, to adjust the system, to make it work, to carve out the funding, the teams Right. Revenue predictable, not predictable. That's

Mark Webster:

yep.

Peter Wang:

I, I can definitely relate to, you know, it's not the quality of the idea, but it's

Mark Webster:

Yeah. It's just, there's a lot, lot of moving pieces to it. Right. I think another thing that, so, so learning about kind of a starter acquisition. And lessons learned for the second one when we came in the group on like, we broke up, right? So I was in the product org. Engineers ended up in the, the engineering org,

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

like our, our host acquisition people ended up in, uh, the sales group.

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

we kind of all broke up

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

and then had different bosses. And so like, that was kind of a, that was, that was hard culturally, right? So I think that also led to like

Peter Wang:

one

Mark Webster:

bunch.

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

Yeah,

Peter Wang:

you do it differently the second time

Mark Webster:

we did. So that was one of like the main things

Peter Wang:

Mm-hmm.

Mark Webster:

when we came into Adobe, uh, we stayed a unit. And so when we were an xd, we were a unit when we, you know, we can go through the Adobe journey, but I think for one year, like maybe year three, we broke up for a year and engineering went into engineering and it didn't work. And so we kind of rolled it back all into one team. Yeah.

Peter Wang:

talk about safe springing

Mark Webster:

Yeah. Say spring my baby, my second child.

Peter Wang:

the second child.

Mark Webster:

Seas springing. will

Peter Wang:

That's how we met. I still

Mark Webster:

as an investor.

Peter Wang:

visiting you,

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

out the interface. Uh, Alexa.

Mark Webster:

It's just the seas springing will forever be my, like, the best idea I've ever had in my life. Like, it was just so, so outta left field and it was like, so, I mean, it's funny thinking about a collection of, of life experience and, and professional experience that leads you to have an idea that I think was just super unique. Like, so the, the big insight was, um, so we left acquisition and I left acquisition at the time with my two co-founders from the first business. So we all left like in the same week. Uh, and we sat in an office and we're like, we're gonna come up with the next big idea. So we sat there and we never came up with something we were all excited about. But one of the things we did is spend a bunch of time looking into, um, like. What was called silver tech at the time was a bunch of like, uh, of software solutions for aging populations. Uh, and so I got, and this is kind of right when, you know, voice assistants started to, to take off,

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

uh, and the, the echo was introduced. And so I got really fascinated with the idea of like voice assistance for aging populations. Uh, and as a design and prototyper, I'm used to designing and prototyping mobile apps, websites. Uh, and then when I went to go play around with voice, like there was nothing.

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

like, oh, like we just, we just need design and prototyping for voice as well.

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

at the time there were like a lot of like chatbot builders. There were like no code chatbot builders that then introduced voice features, but, and the idea was, you know, you could deploy it at the end. And so a lot of the stuff for these platforms was, was kind of repurposed chatbot builders. Uh, but I was like starting from scratch. And so the whole idea was, like designers need simple tools without understanding how voice tech works. That just lets you do basically like if thens right? Like if, if somebody says this, say that back. And then being able to connect it to a device without deploying it. Uh, and so, I mean, it was, it was so simple that it was like the first Rails app I've ever built. Like I taught myself Ruby on Rails in order to build safe springing. I'm like, that's how straightforward it was. Uh, but nobody had anything like it.

Peter Wang:

No. Yeah,

Mark Webster:

And so it was, you know, so, so really early on before we even read, so we, you know, I built a prototype, and then had an opportunity to meet the team at ERA, which is another accelerator here in New York.

Peter Wang:

you're

Mark Webster:

Uh, it was amazing. so joined that accelerator and the little money from that, let me bring my buddy Scott on as the co-founder. and when we first met, Khoi Vinh who, is from Adobe, he was like the lead designer in Adobe XD. We got introduced to him. I remember meeting him in the conference room and I gave him a demo of it, and he was just like, he goes, I don't, I don't wanna be that guy. He's like, I feel like I should have thought of this. This seems so obvious, like this needs to exist.

Peter Wang:

Mm-hmm.

Mark Webster:

And I was like, are you guys working on anything like this? He's like, no, not at all. And so he was, you know, I mean, it was, it was an excellent demo. You open a laptop, you type something. you turn to the Echo device, you talk to it, it says it back like live,

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

right? It was such a good demo and, and, and, you know, people started using it. Growth took off really quick. Uh, so I didn't know this at the time, but so Khoi goes back to Adobe and we hadn't even raised our round. And he was like, I found this team we need to acquire. And everyone's like, ah, we don't know what our voice strategy is. He's like, no, this is our voice strategy. Like these guys, this, and, you know, I, I've used Adobe Tools my whole life. Like I speak that language, right? I, that's how I think about the world of design and prototyping. Uh, so coy basically went on like a secret charm offensive on our behalf inside Adobe for like six months. Uh, he did a whole interview with us on his blog. He has a very popular design blog called Subtraction. Uh, so we ended up doing an interview on it and I didn't know it at the time. And, and so he later told this whole story. Uh, and so I didn't know it at the time, but that article was really to pass around inside of Adobe.

Peter Wang:

Mm.

Mark Webster:

And he ended up giving it to

Peter Wang:

afterwards.

Mark Webster:

it was,

Peter Wang:

Mm-hmm.

Mark Webster:

it, it was, I mean, it was super fun and it wasn't, you know, a puff piece. Like he, you know, asked me hard questions. Um, and then I had a call with Corp Dev and we were just thinking about building like plugins for other design tools. And so we had like a working demo of a sketch plugin.

Peter Wang:

Mm.

Mark Webster:

And so when I went to go meet the team at Adobe, they thought that they were just gonna see the Sayspring platform, but they saw the, no, they didn't even know at the time. So they saw, so when I met with, with Khoi and the, the VP at the time of, of Adobe xd, uh, I showed the plugin and they were like, oh, like I, I hadn't even thought of like how that fits into our tools and stuff. And so that just became like an acquisition conversation that was like, you should just, you should, you should come here.

Peter Wang:

But that's really interesting because actually, this is actually fascinating because I didn't even know about this backstory around the plugin, but the plugin was the missing piece, the bridge between the independent tool and their whole complicated ecosystem.

Mark Webster:

Yes. And what's funny is the way it came to be was, um, so there was really no established workflow for like working in voice design, right? Usually people were making some sort of flow chart in some tool, and then they were working with a developer to like stand up a prototype, right? And so we were meeting with the team at Vayner Media, uh, Gary's, uh, Gary V's. Firm, and met with the design team there. And so it was just like a, show me how you work. and they had a sketch document that had like this flow chart in it that they were just like adding all of the utterances and stuff, like into the sketch files. Like, that's insane. Like why, why would you do this? And so I was like, so it was such a weird workflow that I was like so shocked that somebody had a come up with but then was like doing and like this is how they were running, you know, uh, huge engagements with major brands. Um, that like a couple weeks later, uh, we went to, there's a campground in upstate New York that's like Yogi Bear, it's like called Jellystone. So it's all Yogi Bear branded. And so me and my family went with, my daughter at the time was, I guess four ish, three. Uh, and we, and we go there for the weekend and I remember at some point, like my wife brings my daughter to the little playground that's there and I'm just like sitting on the little porch of this cabin drinking a beer at like two o'clock and on Saturday. And I'm just sitting there on it just. It falls in my head and I keep thinking about it. I was like, I can't believe they use Sketch. That's so weird. I was like, I bet we could just take a plugin and make a plugin for Sketch that like we could just take all of their utterances from the sketch file and then just like, have it work the same way it works in the safe springing platform. And I was like, oh. I was like, I'm gonna talk to the team on Monday when I come back about that. So I, I come in Monday morning, I was like, I have this idea. I came up with a Yogi Bear drinking a beer. I was like, we should have a sketch plugin. They're like, I don't even understand how that would work. And so like, we sit down, we go through how it would work. I, the team at Sayspring, just excellent engineering team, Scott is, is brilliant. And so we just dig into it and they're like, yeah, I think we can do it. We can just like, make this plug-in shelf. It's basically just a web website front end. It's just hitting the same backend. Like it doesn't even seem that hard. It seems pretty straightforward. Like the APIs for Sketch are, are pretty straightforward.

Peter Wang:

Mm

Mark Webster:

Uh, and so we built like a working prototype and. We were like, oh, this is interesting. And so we re we were gonna start like reaching out to some people and get more feedback on it. We didn't even get to that point. Uh, and I remember Scott and one of the other engineers on our team, Blake, uh, were going to October. They were buddies when they joined. Uh, and so they were going to Octoberfest and I had a meeting coming up and I was like, you guys aren't allowed to go to Octoberfest together until you, the plugin. Like, I need a workable demo. So they're like, okay. So I got done like a week and then, then I started to demo it to a couple people

Peter Wang:

mm.

Mark Webster:

and then I ended up having it ready to go like two weeks later. I went and met with Adobe and showed it to Adobe. And that was just like it, they were just like, oh, yep, and we should just bake it all natively into xd. And so that's what ended up happening. And so, and so that was, I think we raised our money in May, 2017. We talked to Corp Dev July, 2017. We met with Adobe October, 2017, and then that conversation just kind of stretched its way out. And then we ended up announcing acquisition like April, 2018. And so it was, it was 11 months.

Peter Wang:

incredibly

Mark Webster:

It was wild. So, yeah, and, and back to like, I love Adobe and have used Adobe to my entire career. I didn't even try and go get a different offer. Like, I was like, I wanna go to Adobe. I totally wanna go there. So it was definitely not trying to sell the business, it was an excitement about going to Adobe.

Peter Wang:

yeah, it's almost like now you have a distribution natively with the right people who should be using this in the first place.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. And it was, it was funny too, when we were talking to the PR team, when we were gonna announce this, um, because we were gonna integrate it into xd. we didn't wanna announce that our team was joining xd. So like the announcement's like super broad, that like safe springing and their voice technology is becoming part of Adobe and we'll be part of Adobe products, but like, didn't say XD or what the plans were. Uh, so it was very secretive while we were building it. And I remember talking to the PR person and she was like, everybody's gonna know this is for Adobe xd, it's design and prototyping. I'm like, no one's, I promise you. Like no one's even thinking about

Peter Wang:

Audio.

Mark Webster:

problem this way. I was like, everybody thinks our competitors are like all these chap hop builders. Like nobody's even thinking about voice and design tools and nobody picked up on it. Like, no. And, and no one ever built that sketch plug and otherwise nobody ever did like another design focus tool just like that. Like it was a completely unique idea and, and frankly like perfect for Adobe, right? Like when I think of, sure, you could have got acquired as a tool, maybe a Google or you know, Amazon, but it was like just perfect for Adobe and we were just like the right DNA for.

Peter Wang:

Yeah, it makes a lot. Yeah, it, it's, there's actually a lot to unpack but also describe like the characteristics. You had a good product market fit for a very niche right. Set of use case that is emerging and there was a lot of experimentation, even brands that I think the fact that brands were behind it was a big push. It was not just,

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

it was actually brands figure this out, even though

Mark Webster:

Yep,

Peter Wang:

out the chatbot phase, if you will. Right. Fizzled out cuz they

Mark Webster:

yep,

Peter Wang:

enough to be useful enough. It couldn't scale more efficiently and so on. But it's making way back. Right. That's gonna come back

Mark Webster:

It is,

Peter Wang:

Right.

Mark Webster:

is. Turns out to be a technology problem. It's, I would argue it's partly a design problem too.

Peter Wang:

Yeah, and actually I think voice actually what makes it way back, because you could actually smarter, it wasn't just right, it was

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

flow that you map out now is actually, so I'm actually excited to see that coming back. Chat bot, audio interface combined with

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

um, equals the utility. Then therefore dollar will flow to it. So, okay, so Adobe, let's talk about the world of audio.

Mark Webster:

Yeah, so one of the goals of the acquisition, there was like three stated goals and the third stated goal was to come up with a broader voice strategy for Adobe. And the interesting thing is like we got acquired into Adobe xd, right? And, and like any group, like they were very focused on Adobe xd, right? Like they weren't thinking a broader voice strategy for Adobe, but that was kind of, you know, that's why I wanted to go to Adobe, like, cuz I wanted to, you know, play big. And so we basically came up with the site. So it would've been really easy to be like, oh, we should, you should be able to talk to Photoshop, or we should have like a creative cloud voice assistant. Uh, but we took a step back and we were just like, you know, in a, in a world of voice interfaces, in a world where all audio hardware is smart, right? Where we all wear AirPods all the time. Like, what does the world of spoken audio consumption look like and like, then what does like audio content creation look like? And Adobe has audition, which is probably like the most popular software for working with, for pros, working with spoken audio. Um, but audio's just so much bigger than that. And so we basically came up with this vision of an AI first platform for working with spoken audio. And so our AI strategy was basically, let's look at all of the pieces of working with audio and what makes it hard. For people or time consuming for people who still know how to do it, and then where can we use AI to attack those problems? And so we kind of had four main start, three main starting points. But then I'll tell you how we got to the fourth one. Uh, it was basically tech text-based editing. So text-based editing had been sitting in Adobe research since 2014.

Peter Wang:

Wow.

Mark Webster:

Like it was just like an intern worked on it and nobody ever productized it. The research group was trying to productize it, but nobody in the product teams had picked up on it. It was called Project Lex. So we were just like, yeah, Lex is the starting point here. And then there was a service that became our enhanced speech service, which takes any spoken audio, makes it sound like it was recorded in studio.

Peter Wang:

Mm.

Mark Webster:

And then they had something that became Mic Check, which was an AI service that gives you a bunch of feedback on your recording environment, gain settings on your mic, all that good stuff. And so the idea was like, let's focus on making sure people have really good audio. and then like, let's make it easy to work with the content of that audio, because like if we could solve those problems for people, like that just completely opens up the world of working with audio. So that was our starting point. And so pitched it to, you know, my boss in XD group, he's like, ah, it's amazing, but it's really hard to get new stuff. Started at Adobe. And then I pitched it to the VP and he was like, oh, that's really interesting. It's really hard to get stuff started at Adobe. I would just like pitch people over and over. Oh, that's really hard. So I finally reached out to Scott Beski, who was our Chief Product Officer, and I just met with him for 30 minutes, maybe it was even 15. And I was just like, are you ready for a big idea if I go spend time putting together a big idea and bring it to you? Are you gonna listen to it? He goes, yeah, I'll listen to it. So I was like, okay. I'm gonna schedule time with you in two weeks. So go back. We put together this whole deck about what this pitch is, what this platform should look like. You know, it was also, it wasn't just a product too, it was like Adobe is a very product-centric company, like we think in the logos of our flagships. So it was also like a platform pitch though, right? How do we also use a product strategy to also build an audio platform that is then gonna bubble up throughout, all of our other tools

Peter Wang:

See, I think that's an interesting point. What's the difference to you between a product and a platform

Mark Webster:

to, I mean, to me it's like, like in an Adobe context, it is a downloadable piece of software that is like sitting on somebody's computer

Peter Wang:

product?

Mark Webster:

versus like a, a surface that is connected into a whole bunch of services. Right? And I think for, you know, Adobe, we came up with the subscription business, which, which is maybe one of the best business model innovations of all time Game changing. right? Shantanu is a brilliant, brilliant person. But to be fair, we called it Creative Cloud, but it wasn't really cloud, right? It was cloud subscription for downloadable software.

Peter Wang:

Yes.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. And so starting a couple years ago, and then this is, I think gonna be the next five to 10 years of Adobe is truly building a creative cloud, right? And, and building a lot of web surfaces and interconnected APIs in the backend that handle lots of AI stuff, file transfers, right? All that stuff. And you see it, like Photoshop introduced cloud docs, where now it's all stored there and you can collaborate and invite other people into it. the company's clearly getting there. I mean, it's a, it's a big lift for a company that's been around for 40 years. Um, but so we had this, this vision and so put together this crazy deck and was getting ready for my meeting with, with Beski and realized a couple days in advance that I was like, I'm gonna go pitch the power of audio with a visual slide deck. And I was like, I feel like that I'm like playing everybody else's game. I was like, I'm doing something wrong here. So we came up with the idea to do a mini podcast to pitch the idea. And so within two days we made five episodes that were all two minutes each. And it was like the introduction of the idea, what is happening in the world of audio, what we propose to build, how that would impact our customers, and then what the ask is. And so five days before, like I think we were meeting on a Tuesday and like Friday morning, I like sent'em an email with the little podcast series in it. And I was like, all I ask is that you listen to this before we meet. So he is like, fine. I think it was like 12 minutes, 13 minutes of content total. An hour before we meet. I get a message from him and he says, totally sold. Let's just spend that time thinking about how we make this happen. And so like, never saw a visual image of it, never saw what the product experience was gonna be like. Never saw the size of the market or what's the TAM? It was just the opportunity and the way we told the story coupled with the ask, I mean, the ask was literally like, Hey, let the five of us go work on this. So it wasn't like, Hey, we need 30 people. So it was like a pretty easy ask. And it was also, I think coupled with, we had made what felt like the right size voice and audio investments in xd. And so it was kind of like, you know, our, our team could do more here. Uh, plus there is something about, so this, I mean this is one of the reasons I'm a huge believer in the power of audio is what's called the parasocial relationship. It's the reason why we think what Parasocial relationship is when you think, you know somebody who like has no idea you exist, right? So like the way we like, feel like we know podcast hosts the way people feel like connected to Peloton instructors. Like that strong parasocial relationship is, it's super powerful. And so the idea that the pitch was like my voice in somebody's ear for 12 minutes, like that's, it's just powerful. It makes a big difference. It, there's no distracting slides. You're walking through the world and like Mark Webster's, like talking to you for 12 minutes in your ear, in your head, and like, I think that was a big part of like the power of that pitch.

Peter Wang:

I honestly, I am fascinated, like I'm dumbfounded actually. Because I just realized as you were describing how you pitched to Scott, imagine the thousand, hundreds of thousands of VC pitches. They're in depth

Mark Webster:

Yeah.

Peter Wang:

now

Mark Webster:

I mean, why doesn't every CEO of every company release a five minute weekly podcast that all of their employees listen to Every week? Audio only. Yes. Buried in your, I mean, it's literally burying a voice in your head. Like how powerful.

Peter Wang:

Do you feel if you, you feel this is audio only audio with transcript? You can see audio and video, audio, video and transcript, kinda like you do sound social today. Which one's more powerful to form that parasocial relationship you feel?

Mark Webster:

I definitely, I, I think audio only with headphones on walking through the world, you know, like I, I think that, I think that is like one of the most powerful ways to connect with people because you're, you're getting them when they're doing something else, right? It's usually you're, you're usually occupying their brain well, like their body is doing something else, Right. You're

Peter Wang:

I'm folding laundry. I'm listening to

Mark Webster:

right. Folding laundry. You're on the subway, you're driving, but. You're occupying their mind, and we have, there's no visual distraction, right? Like, we're still, you know, just got the lizard brain, right? We're still just monkeys. Like, so like we're, our brains are always constantly evaluating what's in front of us, making sure nothing's gonna attack us, right? Like, there's a whole bunch of ways that visual stimuli affect you and affect your brain, but when you can like separate those things out and the visual stimuli is related to like the tasks that you're just trying to complete, but like your brain is just completely focused on the audio content, I think that's super powerful.

Peter Wang:

That's. What's an idea to play off as well? I imagine if I'm on Instagram Reel, instead of everything is hundred visual first, a sound second

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

that there is an option to actually, well, for certain, maybe I can choose as a creator if this is a sound first.

Mark Webster:

So, so it's, I think it's an, it's also important the way you create content, right? Like some, some content is meant to be visual first, right? Listening to a movie would be, Some movies would be, would be boring, right? Um, so I think like you need to think about like, what is the, you also need to think about the function of it, right? So putting an audio file on Twitter wouldn't work right? When they tried to do voice tweets, like that didn't work. Um, but when you're going through your, your newsfeed and you see a audio clip with just like the animated text captions, that captures your visual attention as well. Like that's pretty powerful. But like when it just comes to like the Parasocial relationship. You know what's funny? So I, I'm a Peloton guy and I got a Peloton during the pandemic and all of the, they were no longer classes, right? They were just the instructor. And so like the, my, the first two years of the Peloton experience, it's basically just you and the instructor. They were in empty studios and now they've started to reintroduce people back into the studio. And I find it interfering with the Parasocial relationship. It was a little bit like, Hey, I thought this was just me and you, now like you're in a room with all those people. Now I'm just like a bystander,

Peter Wang:

Oh,

Mark Webster:

right? It's like not core of the experience. Like I feel it like viscerally that like the experience feels different in classes where there's people and I go out of my way to pick classes where there is Noo studio.

Peter Wang:

Oh really? That's fascinating. They usually, you gimme a bunch of ideas just thinking about. but that, that almost say recognizing the parasocial is key to the pitch. It's such that's

Mark Webster:

It was,

Peter Wang:

powerful, that's a

Mark Webster:

yeah, super important part. And it, it also, I mean, for, for Beski too, he's a super visual guy, right? And as, as, I mean, most of us are, and uh, whenever you present to him, he gets like really in the weeds. He's just like, Hey, like, have you thought about this?

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

right? Like, where does this thing go when you click this thing, right? Like, why, where, where is the user in the experience when they're seeing this page? And I actually think presenting without a product let him, alright. I mean, I never actually asked him this question, but like, let him focus on just like the overall concept here, right?

Peter Wang:

there's a parallel to using documents as a narrative versus vision. Visuals as a, as a deck, like I prefer

Mark Webster:

Yes.

Peter Wang:

similarly. As a matter of fact, I actually wish this a plugin that is probably one where it just reads documents to me. Um, then I

Mark Webster:

Yeah.

Peter Wang:

it because I just want to hear the flow the connective dots, and then I can pause any time to focus on and say, Hey, what was that quote? That was interesting. But I have the visual to go back.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. That's, it's a famous part of the Amazon culture, right? That you can't hide behind your deck. You can't hide behind the visuals.

Peter Wang:

The six pager. The famous six pager. Um,

Mark Webster:

Nope.

Peter Wang:

it'd be awesome. I

Mark Webster:

And so we, so, so we started, so he, he let us go do this,

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

reported into him directly for the first three quarters of, of building this, just to give us some freedom to like, figure out what we wanted to build here exactly like what the opportunity was. And the very first week our entire team worked on it was the first week of the lockdown.

Peter Wang:

Oh.

Mark Webster:

this is it. The whole entire thing has been built during the pandemic. Uh, and it's funny, there was, uh, you know, so we have a feature. So this goes to, so what I was saying was kind of the fourth, um, feature. So we had this vision for working with audio, uh, but we didn't include recording. So we thought we were editing and it was text-based editing and it was, um, you know, the two services to make sure the input sounded good wherever you were recording it. And then making sure that, you know, we had this AI service that made it sound good. And so we didn't plan to have a recording functionality, but then the pandemic hit. And then even if you were a professional recording, good audio content was really, really hard. People weren't getting in the studio anymore. And so we decided to wrap in, uh, recording as part of it. And one of the pieces of that was to have local recording happen, right? So I can send you a link. We both record, emerges the file in the background, right? Then you can edit it. So the recording piece only came because like as we were building this, the world changed on us. And so we were like, in order to deliver our vision, we need to like figure out recording as well.

Peter Wang:

That's interesting cuz when, when you guys launched beta it was recording. Was it the forefront? How do you make it

Mark Webster:

Yes. Yes. And so, so one of the, so, so, so Lex as a, as a product, never went anywhere. I mean, it was, you know, developed within research. And so our, our plan was really to kind of take the thinking and the research behind Lex and kind of really productize it. But Lex was very focused on just like text-based editing. Uh, so research had like a bunch of projects, right? So they had Lex, which was text-based editing. They had what was called izer, which we renamed in hand speech researchers have amazing names for things. Uh, and then what became mic check. And so we were like, Hey, like let's kind of bundle those things together

Peter Wang:

huh.

Mark Webster:

in what this experience is. And then because re the recording piece of it changed, we included recording and then solved a bunch of the quality issues by also having local recording. And so emerging the files. And then if that's also gonna give us a bunch of cool. So it's funny, most people who use podcasts like you have no idea that it's recording the files locally, uh, and uploading them in the background. But by doing that, we're able to run the enhanced speech service on each track individually, which makes it sound much better. And it's gonna set up a bunch of cool stuff we can do to like manage crosstalk. So like we're doing a whole bunch of work to like eliminate crosstalk, automatically slide things apart because if they're different tracks you can do that kind of stuff. So there's gonna be a bunch of AI stuff that comes out that is empowered by the fact that we have individual tracks, even if the user never knows that that happened.

Peter Wang:

Oh, that's fascinat. So, okay. Can, are you, could you talk about a bit more about a future, kind of, what can people anticipate

Mark Webster:

Yeah, so, so everything was funny. We actually, we tried to pitch Adobe on letting us release just the recording piece with transcription, no editing in summer 2020. I was like, that was the first thing we built. We built the recording. We would do daily stand up in it every morning. And we were like, we should, like, that's the problem literally everybody has now of like just recording. We, you know, it was before some of the other products that are in the market, you know, are, are doing a better job solving that I would say now. Um, but it was like a big problem. And so we were just like, let's just release this. Let's just, you know, we're start up DNA n we move fast and, you know, it was like, ah, this is Adobe. We need to like, figure out editing needs to be a end-to-end solution. I'm like, okay. So, you know, it took us another 18 months to build, um, the, the, the editing piece. Uh, and even today we're still behind a wait list. Uh, we're hopefully dropping that pretty soon. Um, but so then we've, you know, we launched, we announced what, what became Project shas.

Peter Wang:

right?

Mark Webster:

in December, 2021, uh, and launched it on Product Hunt for the wait list. And like huge response. People loved it. And I think for a few reasons. One, I think it looks very different than Stu I think a lot of people have a perception of what Adobe products are. Cuz you, cuz it's Photoshop, so everyone thinks Photoshop and Photoshop is a fighter jet. I mean, it's complex because it needs to be complex. It's, you know, like the most used design tool in the world. Um, and so it was colorful. We had a good brand, right? We would call chassis. We didn't even say it except it was like from Adobe Labs, but we didn't call it a, we just called it Project Shasta. Uh, and then a big part of it was like, we we're super forward with like, they're real people building this. Like I'm all over Twitter responding to people. The sample project is me and our lead designer talking. Our big video is Sam, our lead line are doing a walkthrough, the product. So like any place you touch what is now podcast, what was shas at the time? Like, it was very apparent there were people behind this. This wasn't just the monolith of big Abi releasing some new product. Right.

Peter Wang:

that's actually

Mark Webster:

Uh, and so we,

Peter Wang:

was on Twitter. I found out.

Mark Webster:

yeah, I mean, so it's just the other community has really embraced us, uh, which is, which is thrilling. And then so we, we built that and then we needed to get people into our beta. And so over the summer we were just like, you know, why don't we take some of our big features, enhanced speech and mic check, and why don't we build these like single serve pages that's not behind a wait list. Anybody can go use it, uh, in order to like experience what it does. Cuz enhanced speech is like pure magic. Like I, I'd, our best thing in the market by far is just like total home run. Our research team is super brilliant, um, and like let's just give people a taste of it. And so we launch it in late August. Uh, and it started to take off, like pretty quick

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

to the point where I, I, I was panicked of like, we are calling this project Shasta and we are building brand equity into a name like that we know is gonna go away. Like we need to change the name like right away. And so somehow convince Adobe to let us change it to Adobe Podcast in October. Um, and the name change and the, the growth, it just has totally taken off. I mean, I, I, I'm pretty sure it's like one of the fastest growing new products that Adobe has ever released. Definitely one that doesn't have any marketing support. That is four people building it. I mean, it's just us

Peter Wang:

because the

Mark Webster:

to Adobe's credit, they've let us do it this way.

Peter Wang:

the go to market was so, is so different. Actually I didn't, I didn't even realize at the time cuz I just knew you so I didn't think SEC for a second. This is actually coming out of Adobe and you should have done this way. I was, oh Marcus, this new product I'm doing this

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

Lemme

Mark Webster:

Felt like startup.

Peter Wang:

But it's fascinating. How did you convince them to the PR team? Like what marketing

Mark Webster:

I,

Peter Wang:

How'd that work?

Mark Webster:

so it's a, it's a mix, right? I, I think at, at its core, and the reason I'm still here five years later is like, Adobe knows how to do acquisitions and they understand creative people, right? And, um, you know, it's a big company. It can be hard to take risks, but I would say it's on the, the right side of risk taking and innovation.

Peter Wang:

Mm-hmm.

Mark Webster:

and so they've let us do a lot, right? And I think Bellsy has been a great supporter of us and even protected us from the overhead of the organization in the beginning to let this thing, you know, get some, get some feet. Um, there was also a piece of it where we just didn't ask people, we just took a bunch of career risk. I was like, we'll just launch it and see what happens. Yeah, just do it. See, I mean, we, I don't even know if I've ever mentioned this before. Um, but when we launched our launch video for Project Shasta, uh, we never showed it to anybody. We just launched it one day. Yeah.

Peter Wang:

that?

Mark Webster:

got approved, no legal review,

Peter Wang:

Wow.

Mark Webster:

which. which. is funny cuz it's like, you know, people, so now that Adobe podcast is doing really well, people reach out all the time and they're like, hey, like what are some secret, you know, internally of like, what are some secrets, like lessons learned. And a big contributor to our success has been taking calculated risks of like, not worrying too much about like approvals or stuff if we, if we feel confident, but like you are taking on a massive risk and you are taking on risk on behalf of the company. Right. And. And reputational risk. And I'm always willing to put my reputation at risk and my career at risk, but at not putting Adobe at risk. And so like, you know, I've been doing this a really long time. I've had plenty of jobs where I was the person approving all the creative, the MBA was insanely strict about brand usage guidelines. So like, we are tight as a drum, we are buttoned up. And so, you know, we take risks, but we take risks because like I, I'm pretty confident that like we're not introducing any real risk for Adobe. And it's worked out so far. And like all of our, Stu you know, I think if you look at Adobe podcast, I mean, that's one designer and four developers, and I think we have a super high bar execution. You know, like we are really careful about like what we do with people. You know, we, we still have to go through like security, privacy review, like all that stuff. I mean, we, we have to still check the boxes. But you know, we're just like an experienced button up team who's done this before at other places and stuff. And so, you know, whereas it might seem like risk, it's, we're only taking risk when I feel really comfortable and, and, you know, my, my boss and VP feel comfortable that like we're in a good place. And so, so far it's worked.

Peter Wang:

That's, I just pictured you guys this product within Adobe. Right. Actually, when I saw it, by way from my point of view, I know many of the back stories I thought was very polished. I

Mark Webster:

I appreciate that.

Peter Wang:

was actually really helpful. Um, example, I just started learning Premier. Premier man. It. It's a beast.

Mark Webster:

Another fighter jet, It's complicated.

Peter Wang:

I gotta watch videos. I'm like, I'm watching videos. So I loved about an actually podcast, I didn't, I was Adobe Podcast. In a story like Shasta, the podcast is very clear. is four podcasters. Um, that's why another thing I loved about it

Mark Webster:

Yeah, it's a very different naming strategy too,

Peter Wang:

right?

Mark Webster:

Like, like

Peter Wang:

about XD relationship and podcast.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. It's funny cuz so it has nothing to do with one. I mean, it's designed in XD, we use XD to design it. Um, when we started to build it, we used the audio prototyping features. We built an XD to then show how podcast would work, which was fun. Um, but you know, so like completely unrelated in, in that respect. But our lead designer, Sam, was one of the designers on xd. Um, and you know, when it comes to like Adobe has just world class design organization and so, you know, we basically, we go through reviews and like get feedback and stuff on it. Um, but you know, again, like this company has given us a lot of latitude to do this and a lot of trust and,

Peter Wang:

actually. I

Mark Webster:

you know,

Peter Wang:

about Adobe in terms of, we see a lot of what's on above the surface, but not about what you know, what's behind it. Now let's talk about the other products in this audio space.

Mark Webster:

Yes, do it.

Peter Wang:

what are ones that you admire, you look to and say, Hey, that sets a new bar.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. I mean, so this maybe, this maybe seems like a lame answer, but like, I mean, I kind of admire a lot of them. I mean, there are a lot of creative teams and people who usually go into the tool space, um, are opinionated about it cause you need to be Right. And so they, they may build something or do something that is not my cup of tea. Uh, but there's a lot of really interesting people out there. And so, you know, I mean, one of the things I love is Descript. Descript is Andrew Mason,

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

the CEO group on, um, who then started an audio tour company called Detour. Right? And then, uh, that led to text-based editing and then leaned in. Um, and so, you know, I think like text-based editing is, is coming to premiere, like text-based editing, I think. it's gonna be pretty standard in every kind of video product. Uh, but give the script a lot of credit for, you know, being kind of first to the space, uh, popularizing it.

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

Uh, so I think, you know, they did a great job. Um, so I think what they're doing is interesting. It's funny though, like one of the things we hear from audio creators about the script is like, as soon as you introduce video, it gets way more complicated, right? And then one of the, like, so it, there may be a day where we introduce video as a format into podcast, but like, I will never build a video editor in my entire life. Like as soon as you, cause as soon as you touch video, like the benefit of Adobe is that we can always send you somewhere else, right?

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

But like an independent company can't do that in the same way. And so once you touch video, people are gonna be like, I need color correction, I need a multi-track editor. You know, I need, I need titling. I need to put lower thirds on it.

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

and it's just, it's like a completely different direction, right? And so I remember when, you know, the script first supported video, uh, I was just like, Ooh, they're, they're in for it. Like they're gonna, they, they're gonna have to go build Premier. And so, yeah, I think they're doing a great job to their credit, but it's, it's a very different kind of lift, right? Uh, and, and I think it's really hard to have a general purpose tool in the creative tool space that doesn't become really complicated.

Peter Wang:

Yeah,

Mark Webster:

And so it'll be interesting to see kind of where the script goes. Um, Riverside, I mean, this is a brilliant experience.

Peter Wang:

right now. Yep.

Mark Webster:

Yes. A brilliant experience, right? Super smart team. Uh, and, and it's like almost jealous of the fact that they were able to just focus on like that one problem space. Cuz we were just like, that's what we wanna focus on. And Joey's like, yeah, we gotta. branch it out. And so, you know, I, uh, very cool to see what they're building. Um, yeah, I think, I mean there's like a lot of cool people in the space. It's funny cuz I don't, I have a very weird view on competition, if you even call it competition. Um, I think good product ideas and product concepts have to be authentically created, right? So a lot of people ask, like, recording, are you trying to compete with Riverside? And it's like, it came from like the problem that we saw when we were doing recording, right? When we had the other vision. Uh, and if people use Riverside, like they totally should use another product, right? Um, we don't need to be everything for everybody. Um, but I'm obsessed with watching what competitors do because it's almost like a multiverse. You're like,

Peter Wang:

right?

Mark Webster:

another group of smart people.

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

With different life experience, different professional experience, looking at a similar problem space and like seeing the decisions they make.

Peter Wang:

Yes.

Mark Webster:

And so it's not that like, you know, when I look at like new features that other or related products launch, I don't think of the feature. I'm like, Ooh, why did they do that? Like, what is it that made them prioritize that on the backlog? Like, why did that

Peter Wang:

The

Mark Webster:

out now? Right. And so, like, that's fascinating to me. So like, just the, the inside baseball of, of competitive products. And so, you know, sometimes I'll look at something and I'll be like, ah, my theory is like, that person doesn't know what they're doing. Like I've tried to introduce that kind of feature on a product at this point and they're gonna learn that, you know, blah, blah blah, whatever. It's, um, but then you look at some other stuff and you just like walk through the space and you're like, yeah, why do I think they did it? They're like, I would guess that they were seeing people do X and so they thought, and so it's like, that is what I like about looking at other products. And I just, you know, I love the craft of it. Like I love the game of building things and, and so I love looking at everything. I mean, I, you can anyone can nerd snipe me into giving a product review on anything. Cuz if you're just like, what do you think of this? I'm gonna spend like 30 minutes looking at it. I'm gonna send you a bunch of feedback and then like the next day I'm gonna send like, additional thoughts. Cuz I was like thinking about it in the shower like, I just, I can't help myself.

Peter Wang:

Yes, breaking it down. Actually I'm very similar in that way. That's why I like trying different tools, piecing together. And I think right now in, in the audio and video space, which are now overlapping,

Mark Webster:

Yes.

Peter Wang:

the, it's still a, a relatively fragmented workflow and it's fragmented also based on, let's say the type of creator you are or type of output, let's say. Right? A po, audio only podcast, a video podcast, one that is shoot in studio in person A. Actually I have some problem. I have, pointing like some pelican cases I have because of, like, I want, I need to, I need to duplicate what I do,

Mark Webster:

Mm-hmm.

Peter Wang:

location. But at that time I had to figure out multiply the problems. Three cameras recording time, how do I send this back? Cloud become important. And I started looking at cloud that can upload directly to it. Because I'm not knowing the studio. So it's still fairly fragmented. I actually went through this over the last, you know, let's say six weeks or even longer, to like re dive in and there's still tons of product opportunities.

Mark Webster:

Oh.

Peter Wang:

In every stage of that value chain with different personas. Right. And then there's also integration opportunity to make it seamless.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. I mean, creativity's hard. It's complicated. It's super complicated. Workflows, and, and to your point, there's so many different personas. You know, there's, there's a video I share internally all the time because, you know, like any big company, we try and group people into buckets, right? So we're just like, Hey, they're professionals. They're what we call communicators, which is maybe prosumer, right? And then there's like, uh, consumer, and we, and, and then, so we, we take those categories, then we split them by genre, right? So then you're like, there's video pros, there's video communicators, or there's, you know, visual design pros.

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

And there's this video, an interview with John Mayer where he's giving an interview and he talks about, somebody gave him a website to look at and give feedback on. And the first thing he noticed was it was a free font. And he's like, I, it was very obvious that somebody went to defont.com and downloaded a free font and you can tell he's like, the mind doesn't always know, but the heart knows when there's a free font cuz it's just awful little, all the K's off a little bit. Right? And he is like, and, and so like I share that video all the time. He's like, cuz there's a Grammy award-winning musician talking about looking at a website and free fonts. So like, creators are not simple people, like, they do not fit into like easy boxes to understand. And so like workflows to some degree will always be fragmented because the process of creation is just fragmented. And so there are pieces of it that like you can improve, there are pieces of it you can just totally zero in on and focus and, and improve, right? Um, but there's, whenever anything, I think it's something like 80 plus percent of people who use premier use plugins. Like, it's really hard to just have an end-to-end product.

Peter Wang:

Yes.

Mark Webster:

And even when I meet startups and their vision is to like, if you have an end-to-end product, you have to be super narrow who you're focusing on. You're just like, this is the best platform for like teachers to record a lesson plan. Like it needs to be hyper-focused. Because if you start to just expand to like a general creative workflows, especially around video, like it's hard, it's hard to just stay end-to-end. So like podcast, podcast is end-to-end for some people, but there are reporters who record in it and just pull out the tracks after they put in hand speech on it. There are people who, uh, do a rough edit of the transcript, bring it into audition, do the editing there, right? I mean, so like, it, it's, and that's fine. Like that's, there's no way to not do that. Right? So even, you know, which is why I put quotes around the word competitive because it's, it's an ecosystem. And so I don't think of, I, I think in, in these, in creative tools, I actually don't think that there's, like, it's hard to have like super direct competitors. There's adjacencies. Right? And so they may be competitive to a piece of what you're doing, but

Peter Wang:

Right,

Mark Webster:

there's, this is a big market. There's a lot of, there's a lot of pie out there for everybody.

Peter Wang:

and we actually do need the assort, like the assortment of tools because when it comes to craft, the depth is so important. That's

Mark Webster:

Yes.

Peter Wang:

tools we can use for recording. But choosing Riverside is right. It's specific reason for that. It's actually not, not just a user interface or the flow, but the output, for example. Right. The quality. I can, I can, very little things, actually. Little little options without that little one option is no

Mark Webster:

Yeah. And, and you have to be fanatical to like build something great in that space. And so like we're, we're never gonna have a recording workflow that's like as smooth as Riverside cuz like that's what they're focusing on. And if Riverside Tomorrow is like, and I don't know why we're picking up Riverside, just cuz we're in it. I'm looking at the logo. Uh uh. Like, I mean, the day that they're like, you don't need to leave Riverside and you can edit video, I'll be like, oh God. Like, don't do that. Don't go build a video editor.

Peter Wang:

Yeah.

Mark Webster:

you have no idea what you're getting yourself into. Right? And so it's just making sure that, you know, when I see certain products and they just introduce certain things, you're like, oh, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into. It's gonna be a mess. Yep.

Peter Wang:

Well script, it's interesting. I'm definitely watching, I'm using scripts. I've watched it for the last, I would say, four years I've started using the video cuz I'm editing the transcript inside of it. They introduce like things, they sings and transitions and like, low, like exactly what you're saying. Lower third, I'm learning it and then I'm still exporting it out into Premier the fitting shop. Right. For example, well how do I wanna frame us, right? What, what, what's the overlay? adding sound, the, you know, introduction and so on and so forth. And that exporting. But then once I, what's interesting about the flow is I can't really. It's actually fairly, fairly, uh, one directional flow I found in podcast, at least in my right now,

Mark Webster:

Yeah.

Peter Wang:

once I update something, I export it, it goes one direction, my find out

Mark Webster:

Yep.

Peter Wang:

not gonna import that back. I'm Do it

Mark Webster:

Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, and, and, you know, you're one guy making a podcast and like, look how complicated it is, right?

Peter Wang:

Know.

Mark Webster:

Um, yeah. It's, it's fascinating. We had a, we had a lot of discussion about hierarchy

Peter Wang:

Mm.

Mark Webster:

podcast of like, is, so, it's funny you say that it, you know, just focus on podcasts. The irony is that like podcast is focused on spoken audio and there's not a better term for spoken audio than podcast. So like you upload a video to YouTube, but like, you don't listen to audios on Spotify. Like audio isn't what you call the file format. You know, like there's not, like the audio category is like really weird and broad, right? Like video, everyone's like, okay, I know what video is. And so we basically called it podcasts. Cause we're like, well that's the closest and like the biggest use case is probably podcasts, but voiceover is audio books, right? Like little short video or audio updates, 15 second audio ads that you run on Spotify. Like there's a lot of use cases, but like, podcast was kind of the best term for it. But, so we had a big conversation about like hierarchy, like, are you creating a podcast and then you are creating episodes within it. And so like when I go to my dashboard, am I seeing a, an, you know, a, a podcast and I dig in and then I see the list of the episodes And some are in giraffe mode and some are published and right. And, and so the decision we made was like, let's keep it as simple as possible. like it's, you have projects one thing. And so if it turns out someone's doing a whole podcast series, they can have 12 projects sitting there, that they're probably only doing one podcast. But if like a pro user is like, Hey, we actually do, you know, six podcasts and every week we do like two or three episodes.

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

like, well, when we get to that point, we'll think about it. Like, we're not there yet. So like, let's not overthink this,

Peter Wang:

right. Industry be like folder, for example. And then within

Mark Webster:

right? I mean, this is Premier it, right? You got, you got asset folders, you got sequences. I mean, it's just a lot in a project. And so it's a, it's a great way to make, you know, uh, everything everywhere at once, which just won best editing. It was made in Premier. Uh, but that's really hard to like, have the same tool for like a video podcast for a single creator and a major motion picture that just won best editing, right? Like in the same tool. Like that's, it's nuts. So like, in order for that to happen, it's gonna be complicated. So in order to keep something simple, you need to like be pretty focused with like what you're trying to accomplish. And so we focus on spoken audio.

Peter Wang:

So, okay, so let's, let's zoom out for a second. I know we're about an hour, we're, uh, 25 in there, but I want, I wanna zoom in a little bit or zoom out on just product development a bit more.

Mark Webster:

Yes.

Peter Wang:

You talk about being focused, right? It's a really, other things would you Would you give, I

Mark Webster:

Oh, I mean, that could be like another whole long hour episode I mean, I'm, I'm fanatical about product, I mean

Peter Wang:

I mean, no kidding.

Mark Webster:

That's right. Like how many, how many folders do you have From all my thoughts on product development, uh, I mean, I, we are so, we are fanatical about how we build stuff and our product process. Uh, you know, we were talking about sort of the glory days of 2010. New York City Tech, uh, if you remember Pivotal Labs, uh, which is still kind of around, but like Pivotal Labs at the time was. Development shop in San Francisco in New York. Built the first versions of acquisition, built the first versions of Twitter, uh, Ruby on rail shop. And they had a very specific form of agile that we're head of engineering from the first startup did. And like that's what we do. And everybody in our team is one degree away from Pivotal apps. And so everybody like follows like, you know, we have to use Jira cuz it's Adobe, we can't use Tracker. But it is the way we write stories, the way we prioritize the backlog, the way we think of the problems we're solving. The way, like our design process is very focused on a very specific thing that then turns into the design company, gets attached to the story that we do. Design does all the acceptance on all the stuff we create. So I mean like the, the process of product development, like we are, we're very rigid with how we do it cuz we all like are very.

Peter Wang:

you versus,

Mark Webster:

Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's a, another podcaster named Jacko Willin. He was a former Navy Seal, and he has a, an expression, oh, you know, Ja, you, you gave me the extreme ownership, uh, overview. So he talks about, um, discipline equals freedom. Right. And so discipline, we are extremely disciplined in like the things that we feel like we need to be disciplined in so that we have freedom in the things that we think matter, right? And so, like we are, we move extremely fast because our process for creation is extremely disciplined, which gives us a lot of freedom to decide what to work on and to iterate and to experiment.

Peter Wang:

yeah. That's fascinating. See that one just you went straight to the root. Right? Just like how your work manifests the decision. Even like the quality decisions It's one of the biggest pitfalls. How does a team make decision? You can often,

Mark Webster:

Yeah.

Peter Wang:

you can tell is the probably gonna be good enough.

Mark Webster:

Yeah. And it's, it's, and again, right? Like we, the only thing we make decisions on are, are the things that we think are impactful because all the other decisions have already been made, right? Like the process, the what does, what does done mean? What does good enough mean? Right? Like, so we kind of have all of that buttoned up. And so w this, and, and because of that, it lets us move fast and iterate quickly, right? And so, you know, and to have a team at Adobe that has only six weeks of a line of sight ahead of it, to know what we're building or what our priorities are, that's pretty rare.

Peter Wang:

is guys, the rest of Adobe work similarly of differently than the way you guys work

Mark Webster:

Wildly differently. Yeah.

Peter Wang:

differently.

Mark Webster:

differently. Yeah. I mean very, I mean much. And to, to, to be fair, some of it is because we have downloadable software, right? That is a 30 year old code base in some cases in c plus plus. Um, so structurally there's a lot of that stuff. Uh, but you know, I think also because of that, a lot of engineering cultures have like developed in that world, right? And so because hours comes from rails and the web and continuous deployment and all that stuff, like just the muscle memory that you have is just so different.

Peter Wang:

Right.

Mark Webster:

even, even, even, if you take somebody who's been working on downloadable desktop software for 20 years and you were to bring them into our team, just like the entire muscle memory is so different.

Peter Wang:

Very different.

Mark Webster:

So

Peter Wang:

And I thought you already have, it's actually very rare to hear someone who has worked with this close group of people over this long period of time and also held on to similar, like the same way of working Right. this long period of time.

Mark Webster:

it is

Peter Wang:

very rare. I don't,

Mark Webster:

It's hard to scale too, right? Because I mean, especially now, anyone who has roots back to 2010, pivotal Labs

Peter Wang:

Yep.

Mark Webster:

is pretty experienced at this point. Pivotal Labs was an excellent machine for taking relatively junior developers and making them excellent developers. And like, I actually think that the fact that the New York Tech community doesn't have that right now is a problem. And so we always kind of joke like, we want our team to be that team.

Peter Wang:

That's

Mark Webster:

We want to scale it up and we want to bring in, you know, we have enough people in our team who work that way. That if we were in a place to be able to, you know, to to macro envi economic environment was different, we could hire more, like, we could bring in more junior people and coach them up and like train them to like do software the way we do software now.

Peter Wang:

do shut down a couple years ago. Is that what I actually, I feel like I'm

Mark Webster:

Yeah. So I think Pivotal, so Pivotal, uh, they got acquired by like EMC

Peter Wang:

Hmm.

Mark Webster:

got acquired by some other, maybe the part of Dell now, and it was really kind of San Francisco. I'm pretty sure they shut down the New York office. But yeah. Pivotal Labs, New York City, 2010 Magical Place.

Peter Wang:

You remind me. This conversation is taking me back a lot of memories For

Mark Webster:

Oh, yeah.

Peter Wang:

Even Pivotal. I still remember going to their office. There's a huge Kong

Mark Webster:

Yes. So Tech Techstars took place in the Pivotal Labs office in Union Square. Like we, our, our accelerator was actually in the same office. This was fun.

Peter Wang:

This is, this is actually, I being, I I feel like I have a lot more questions. I have to like write, I have to cross them out. Okay. I not, not, not for this

Mark Webster:

I wish

Peter Wang:

I was still on top of Harlem. You know, there's a whole

Mark Webster:

we could probably do a podcast series, just me and you.

Peter Wang:

A series episode season. Uh, the whole hierarchy. Um, to close this out, I would say, I'm gonna ask you this for people who, I mean, you clearly, you have a very self-directed journey. Um, and I think your storytelling background actually plays, it has, has shaped your path in a way. Someone came from engineering background or some other background wouldn't have just because that's not natural for them. and I think in 2023, as we're recording right now, has a hard year for a lot of people. Tech and non-tech. Right. And I was just speaking to like Fordham students maybe two weeks ago, and they were like, they were a little concerned. They're like, what do we do? What, what can we do, in this environment? So Mark, to close this out, what would you, what advice would you give to people who young starting out?

Mark Webster:

Yeah, the only advice I might give, uh, and this is one of those things that if I was young and somebody said this, I'd probably roll my eyes. But every I, I've had several big moments of collapse in my professional life. So I graduated in May, 2000, right as tech exploded. Um, the first day of my honeymoon was the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed September 15th, 2008. So I spent two weeks on my honeymoon watching the financial crisis unfold. And then when I came back, the company I worked for was no longer in business. Uh, but that led me to go on my own path that led to startups, uh, the, you know, graduating when I did force me to go to the NBA and work at the nba, which was a life-changing experience. Uh, and then, you know, when I left acquisition and didn't know what I was gonna go do with my life, you know, it all kind of led to say spring. So I've had kind of these three big moments of despair where it felt like everything I had worked for fell apart. Uh, and then the thing that came out on the other side of it was like, way better than what I had going in. So it always ended up being a really good opportunity for reinvention, you know, figuring out what you wanna go do. So if I, without the life experience, if I heard that as a young person, I'd be like, ah, heck, okay. But it has, it has been helpful for me. And I think, uh, as I see younger people develop their careers, it's usually the same case.

Peter Wang:

Yeah. I actually feel like, because I do know you, I feel like you have this belief in yourself. Maybe it came from your

Mark Webster:

Yeah.

Peter Wang:

Like I can, if you can read what was his quote? If you can read, you

Mark Webster:

If you can read, you can do anything. Yeah, I can.

Peter Wang:

That's actually

Mark Webster:

That's it. And it is, it's really empowering.

Peter Wang:

Okay. If you can read, you can do anything. Actually, actually, actually I'm gonna teach that to my kids as well because can be very confusing for them what to do, what happens, And

Mark Webster:

I know you got, you do have to walk the walk though. I mean, you, it means like if you, if you bring your oil to get changed, you're not walking the walk. I've never seen my father drop off the car to get the oil changed

Peter Wang:

you're right. I'm terrible with drywalls.

Mark Webster:

Right. So it's, you know, you gotta, you gotta, my dad did the hard work too. Right.

Peter Wang:

You know

Mark Webster:

And was the model of it.

Peter Wang:

recording, editing my own podcast.

Mark Webster:

That's true. That's true.

Peter Wang:

that, you know, actually I'm really enjoying it because it's actually the creative freedom. Um, but a software I can undo, I can make copies, I can, you know, hardware

Mark Webster:

And,

Peter Wang:

if I mess up.

Mark Webster:

and we haven't gotten into, I mean, your career has plenty of the same stories, so, you know, I think we're, I like to think we're modeling good behavior for our children, even if it's not drywall related.

Peter Wang:

that's true, but that's my fear. I gotta face it sometimes. Um, but hey Mark, thank you so much for taking the time during

Mark Webster:

This was fun.

Peter Wang:

so much wisdom and actually real experience with folks, um, teaching them to be fearless. Thank you.

Mark Webster:

All right, we'll talk soon.

Peter Wang:

Alrighty, take care.

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