PodTech.net

» see podtech.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

podtech never reached me. i was 22 in 2006 and finishing school in ankara with a fresh ttnet broadband line, and the US tech-podcasting scene was one of those things you read about on techmeme without ever pressing play on. the audience for a menlo park studio doing enterprise vendor interviews was silicon valley itself, plus a thin ring of listeners at the periphery. i was not in that ring.

podtech.net was founded in may 2005 by john furrier, who had spent years running a talk show called "infotalk" about startups and venture capital. the studio version was a scaled-up version of the same idea. more or less, a full production house for tech podcasts and video interviews aimed at the corporate marketing budgets of silicon valley companies. by early 2006 venrock and US venture partners had put in a first round. later that year a second round closed the total at $7.5 million.

the hire that put podtech briefly on the front page was robert scoble. in those days, scoble was microsoft's most visible blogger, running the "scobleizer" blog from inside the beast and doing on-camera interviews with the channel 9 developer video series. him leaving microsoft in june 2006 to join a menlo park startup was framed as a signal that podcast studios were now real businesses that could pull anchor talent out of the platform companies. that was the peak of the story.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

of my life. podtech ran a mix of interview shows and sponsor-branded video segments, plus live event coverage. the model was closer to a boutique agency than a media company. sponsors paid for produced content that lived under the podtech brand and appeared on the podtech.net player. cisco was one of the named customers. sap was another. the format was long-form video years before the youtube business model made long-form video make sense on the open web.

for whatever reason, the studio piece was expensive relative to the audience. a podcast interview shot in a proper camera setup with editing and post-production cost a lot more than a laptop-mic recording, and the ad market for tech podcasts in 2006 was small. adsense and pre-roll for video did not really work at that scale yet. the whole product sat in the gap between blog-era self-published podcasts and the mature branded-content industry that would exist ten years later.

~ the decline ~

by summer 2007 the wheels were coming off. techcrunch reported in july that investors and early employees no longer agreed on the direction, with the board wanting to reposition podtech as a blog network alongside the video business and the founding team resisting the pivot. furrier stepped down as CEO in august 2007, staying on the board for a few months more. scoble made his own exit in december 2007, moving to fast company to launch a new video project there.

the post-founder version of podtech was not a stable structure. by early 2008 the company had reportedly stopped paying some employees and was carrying more debt to its investors than it could service from operating revenue. the studio kept releasing content but the runway was gone.

~ the day it died ~

on 17 july 2008 podtech sold to viewpartner, a los angeles video-technology company, for less than $500,000. investors had put in $7.5 million. the difference came out of everyone's equity. the podtech brand and player kept running under viewpartner for a while as a long-form tech-video property, then faded out over the next couple of years.

the podcast studio idea did not die with podtech, either way. by 2015 branded podcast production had turned into a real market with real ad rates, and by 2020 gimlet media sold to spotify for around $230 million. podtech had the right business ten years too early, with the wrong cost structure and a board that could not agree on what the company was supposed to be.

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