Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: HitRecord's Joseph Gordon-Levitt on How Show Business Prepared Him For Life As An Entrepreneur, What Founders Should Look For Most In Their Investor Base & Why The Current Ad Model of Social Is Harming The World's Creative Spirit About this episode Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the Founder @ HitRecord, the startup that allows you to be creative, together, encouraging less self-promotion and more collaboration, so you can create things you couldn't have made on your own. To date, Joe has raised funding from some personal favourites of mine in the form of Alex @ Javelin, Masterclass Founder David Rogier, Twitch Founder Kevin Lin and CrossLink Capital just to name a few. Alongside his role with HitRecord, Joe is also an A-List Hollywood Actor and filmmaker starring in some of my favourite films of all time including The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, 10 Things I Hate About You and many many more. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Joseph made his way into the world of technology and startups with the founding of HitRecord? How did much of Joe's early acting career inform much of the HitRecord product today? 2.) Having had such success in the acting world, what caused Joe to really push forward with HitRecord? Question from David @ Masterclass: who has been Joe's biggest mentors in his transition to tech? What have been his biggest takeaways from them? How does Joe balance both being an actor and entrepreneur at the same time? What are the challenges? 3.) Why did Joe decide now was the time to raise VC funds for HitRecord this late into the company life? How does Joe approach the element of investor selection? What specific value add did Joe want to see in his potential investor? How did the pitch process go? How does it compare to presenting for a role in the acting world? What was Joe's biggest lesson about what successful technology pitches do? 4.) When Joe thinks about the HitRecord community, what has surprised him the most with the growth of the community? Why have they purposefully decide to never spend on user acquisition or traffic? What is the strategy behind this? What is Joe's biggest advice to individuals wanting to scale their community and the essentials? 5.) How does Joe assess both the content and social media landscape today? Why is the creative spirit of the world being killed by the current ad model of social platforms? How does Joe think this can be countered and where does HitRecord fit into this evolving landscape? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Joe’s Fave Book: Letters To A Young Poet As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Joe on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Harry Stebbings? We are back for Founder's Friday here on the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I answer all questions and comments personally on Instagram at H Stebbings1996 with two Bs. It would be great to see you there. But to the episode today, and my word, this is a really special one for me, to say I've been a big, big fan of the incredible work of this guest for many, many years is an understatement. And so this is really one of the highlights of my entire four-year journey doing 20 VC, having the chance to do this episode. So with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Joseph Gordon-Levitt, founder at HitRecord, the startup that allows you to be creative together, encouraging less self-promotion and more collaboration, so you can create things you couldn't have made on your own. To date, Joe's raised funding from some of my personal favourites in the form of Alex at Javelin, Masterclass founder David Rogier, Twitch founder Kevin Lynn,
0:42 Harry Stebbings? and Crosslink Capital, just to name a few. Alongside his role with HitRecord, Joe is also an A-list Hollywood actor and filmmaker starring in some of my personal favourites of all time, including The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, 10 Things I Hate About You, and many, many more. I'd also want to say a huge thank you to David at Masterclass, Kevin at Twitch, and Alex at Javelin for some fantastic questions and suggestions today. I really do so appreciate that. But before we dive into our episode today, look at the world's tech leaders and high-growth startup CEOs, and do you ever wonder, how in the world do they have that kind of inexhaustible energy to do what they do? The answer will surprise you. The latest trend with top tech leaders is sleep optimization. The first step, the Pod by 8Sleep, the ultimate sleep machine. The Pod is the first and only high-tech bed designed to help you achieve peak mind and body performance.
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2:53 Harry Stebbings? How? Well, Rike's award-winning collaborative all-company platform keeps everything in one easily accessible space. Time to embrace next-gen work management at the executive level and encourage lean thinking from the top down. With Rike, crushing your objectives and mitigating risks at scale is much, much easier. Give Rike a try for free at rike.com, that's W R I K E dot com. You've heard quite enough from me, so now, without further ado, I'm so, so excited to hand over to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, founder at HitRecord.
3:26 Speaker 01 You have now arrived at your destination.
3:29 Harry Stebbings? Joe, I mean, my word, I have to say, it is such a joy to have you on the show, Steve. I have heard so many wonderful things from so many of your investors, so thank you so much for joining me today.
3:38 Speaker 02 Oh, thank you, I'm flattered already, thanks.
3:41 Harry Stebbings? But I would love to start there with a little bit about you. And I was chatting to our mutual friend Alex at Javelin before the episode. And he said the founding story for HitRecord is one of the most unique stories. So how could I not start with that? What is that story and the journey to being a venture-backed business today, Joe?
3:56 Speaker 02 Well, thanks, it's a long story, so I'll try not to make it overly laborious. But it begins not as a founding story at all, because HitRecord did not start as a startup in the least. The place to really begin the story is actually when I'm six years old, is when I started acting. And luckily, I'll skip a number of years and say that I acted and had a great time doing it until I was 19, and then I quit for a while. A while to go to college and after I wanted to get back into acting, I couldn't get a part. No one would cast me and this was a really painful time in my life because I felt this really strong desire to be creative and my creative outlet was acting, but if you're an actor and no one will give you a part, then you can't do your creative thing and that's painful.
4:39 Speaker 02 And I realized at that moment, I have to be the one to take responsibility for my own creativity. I can't wait around for somebody else to give me permission to be creative. And at that time, HitRecord became this little symbol or mantra that I had for myself. The round red record button was this metaphor of I'm gonna push it, I'm going to hit record, push the button and I'm gonna get started and regardless if anybody cares or anybody gives me a part or whatever, I'm going to be creative. And I started making little short films and songs and stories on my own. And this is a long time ago, back in the early mid 2000s, so it wasn't so common to just post your stuff on Facebook, YouTube yet, etc. And so my brother helped me set up a very simple little website. My brother
5:22 Speaker 02 was a coder and it was just a single page of HTML with a few links of things that I had made. And we called it hitrecord.org after this thing that I would say to myself when I needed motivation or encouragement. And a couple of years later, I mean, this was just a total hobby, a couple of years later, we put a message board on this website. And that's where the community started to form and that's where it actually started to get interesting because what we noticed about the people on this message board was while some of them wanted to check out the little songs and stories and videos I was making, what a lot of people on the message board wanted to do was make things together. And we thought that's sincerely interesting and new, meaning just watching a video or
6:02 Speaker 02 listening to a song on the internet is not really different from what you could do on old technology with a television or with a radio, but using the internet to collaborate, to make something together with other people that you might not have been able to make on your own, that was sincerely new behavior that was only made possible by this new technology. And we thought that's fascinating and we kind of leaned into it. And like I said, my brother was a coder, so we started building little features. On top of this message board to try to help people collaborate more. But at that time, still, we had no plan of making money, no plan of spending money. We weren't a business. We weren't a startup. We were just really doing it for fun because we had the time to do it.
6:42 Speaker 02 A couple of years went by and the community kept growing and thriving and kind of kept getting cooler and cooler. And that's when my friend Jared, who's one of my co-founders, said to me, hey, this thing you're doing, Hit Record, is really cool and I wonder if it could be something that could facilitate even more ambitious creativity. Jared comes from a background of producing live theater and events and things like that. Producing shows at Carnegie Hall when he was in his early twenties and we were just good friends. And he brought up the notion of could this community that you've got going, power a production company? And we both thought that was a really cool idea and we set about trying to do it. So the hardest thing was the legal part, actually, the intellectual property of it all.
7:25 Speaker 02 Because when people are collaborating, when they're not just sharing something they've made on their own, but when they're building off of each other, remixing each other to make finished things. If we were going to be a production company and monetize those finished things, then that would involve kind of a whole new licensing agreement. So we worked for a long time with Wilson Cincini to build a unique Terms of Service so that we could allow our community to remix each other and we could monetize the finished pieces that came out of those collaborations and we could pay the different contributing artists. And we made a set of goals of like, okay, what should we try to make as a production company? And we thought, well, maybe we could make a short film that was good enough to play at a festival. Or maybe we could publish a book. Maybe we could make enough music to press a vinyl record. Or maybe one day we could make a whole TV show this way.
8:09 Speaker 02 And then over the years, we did all those things, actually, and really had a great time doing it. We did publish a book with, a number of books, actually, with Harper Collins. We put out records. We've screened a whole bunch of stuff at Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival, et cetera. We made a TV show. It won an Emmy. We've paid out different contributing artists. We're almost at $3 million now. It's like 2.9 now. And we've generated a community of people that are doing this together. Over 700,000 registered users now. We've never paid a single dollar to buy traffic or registrations or downloads. Or anything like that. And thing I'm most proud of, though, beyond any of the productions is the community itself.
8:46 Speaker 02 If you come to Hit Record, you'll find a really unique little corner of the internet where people treat each other quite differently than they do in the typically toxic online environments that are so prominent nowadays. And I think there's a reason for that. And the reason is the basic premise of what they're doing there. People on Hit Record aren't just competing for attention. They're working together with a common goal. They're making things together, whether they're making little videos or they're making little songs or little stories or they're making books, that whatever it is that they're making together, when you're relating to other people on that basis of like, hey, we're making something together, that elicits a different kind of respect, a different kind of like mutual encouragement and warmth.
9:26 Speaker 02 And it's really sweet and inspiring to see. And that's, I think, the thing I'm most proud of that we've accomplished. That didn't get into like how we've now become a venture backed company, but that's, I guess, the next chapter of the story.
9:38 Harry Stebbings? It is indeed. I mean, I guess my main question, and it was so funny because before the episode, obviously, I sent you the schedule and you said about it being quite defined and written out and going slightly off schedule. I'm too intrigued. You mentioned that incredible development there of Hit Record and alongside it, your acting career also exploded in terms of success. I guess my question is, how do you define yourself? And what I mean by that is, would you say that you are first a tech founder? Would you say that you're first an actor? How do you define your own self in that respect, given the success of both dual roles in your life?
10:08 Speaker 02 That's very kind of you to say. I guess I would consider myself first eclectic. I would be sad if I had to give up any of the wide variety of things that I am fortunate enough to do. And by the way, I never considered myself a tech founder when we never really considered Hit Record a tech company until very recently. We always said, I don't have a tech background. Jared doesn't have a tech background. Our third co-founder, Mark, his background is in architecture and design. We're three artists, really. And we always said, technology is not our strong suit. We have a small team of engineers who have been able to build a website and an app based on what Mark draws. And that's fine. Whatever is adequate enough to allow us to make the art that we want to make, that's good. And we're not going to lean any Further into technology than that.
10:51 Speaker 02 But then, after we sort of ticked all the boxes and accomplished everything that we had put on our list originally, what we noticed was we're hitting a certain limit of how many people we can really include in these productions when we're a production company. And we started thinking to ourselves, what if it wasn't always us leading the productions? What if anybody could come and have the tools to lead their own project? We could take what we've learned as a production company, leading these collaborative creative processes for all these years, and build the tools to let other people lead their own projects and the ecosystem to allow other people who want to find and get involved in projects. We can build that ecosystem, but it'll take much better technology than what we have.
11:34 Speaker 02 And that's when we sort of said, okay, let's embrace the tech side of ourselves. And that's when I met Alex, who you mentioned. That's when we went up to Silicon Valley and pitched the idea of we want to evolve and take this production company that we've built and build around it a larger ecosystem, a larger platform for anybody to come in and lead projects the way that we've been doing it for years. And we were able to raise a great series A with Javelin leading, Crosslink Capital came on after them, Shari Redstone's venture fund, Advance It came on. We had a great few angels, David Rogier, who you mentioned, the co-founder of MasterClass, Kevin Lin, the co-founder of Twitch, Steve Chen, the co-founder of YouTube, all came in and put in some money into our series A. We raised six and a half million dollars.
12:17 Speaker 02 So it's been really gratifying and validating and encouraging and daunting because now we've got a plan, we've got the resources to do it, and now we're just heads down executing.
12:27 Harry Stebbings? I mean, my word, what a great segue. You mentioned some of the incredible investors. I think I actually spoke to every single one of the names you mentioned. Clearly, I don't get it out enough. I mean, I'm also very single, Joe, so it's a lot easier when you're very single.
12:39 Speaker 02 I'm very impressed.
12:40 Harry Stebbings? Alex is an incredibly good-looking chap, I know. But in terms of the investor selection there, given the traction that you had, you know, you had your pick of investors, relatively speaking. How did you approach the investor selection, Alan and Joe?
12:53 Speaker 02 Well, it was about having a lot of conversations with a lot of different people. And we were not just looking for money. Wanted to raise money, we probably would have had an easier time in Hollywood raising from media funds because that's where my connections are. We spent, not exaggerating to say years, forming a new network in the technology community and meeting various people, seeing what it would be like to work with them. Because what I wanted even more than the capital was the guidance. I think I had grown old enough to do away with the hubris of my youth that would have said, "Ah, you can do it by yourself. You'll figure it out." I was like, "No, there are people who are very good and experienced at doing this. I'm
13:35 Speaker 02 good and experienced at doing some things, but I've never seen this done. And I want to surround myself with people who have." That was really the litmus test for me. Who can I envision having conversations with that can really provide guidance, that can really put me together with good people, and who can be collaborative, and who are not purely motivated by profit? I know a VC has to be motivated by profit. That's realistic and that's important. But Alex has a genuine passion for movies, for art. If you get into talking with him, it won't be long before you're talking about movies, Lord of the Rings. He had a million questions for me about inception. You can just tell
14:16 Speaker 02 this is a guy who legitimately cares about the creative process. And even though it's his job to make sure that his company sees a return, you can tell that he loves this. And that love is crucial to me because that's why I'm doing HitRecord. That's why I've always been doing HitRecord. I told you the origin story. It didn't come out of an idea of like, "I know what will make a lot of money." It's never been that. It's something that is very deeply held in my identity and my enjoyment of life, and it's what I care about. And that's why I'm doing it. So I really resonated with seeing that Alex felt some of that as well.
14:50 Harry Stebbings? I mean, Alex absolutely did. And in our conversations before, I could barely stop him when it got to that element. I do have to ask you, you mentioned the element of learnings from maybe the more technology side of the equation. When I chatted to David Rogier at MasterClass before the show, he asked, "Who've been your biggest mentors?" And what have been the takeaways from them?
15:07 Speaker 02 Well, David himself has been one of the biggest mentors. Mentors and in fact, you asked what I saw in Alex, a lot of it had to do with a really thorough, specific endorsement from David at MasterClass. I think MasterClass has been just incredibly impressive in what they've been able to build. Javelin was there at the very beginning and has been there throughout. And David was able to tell me all about Alex's real contributions because again, Alex is not the VC who will just write a check and then see you at the board meeting kinda. He's involved. We talk all the time and when I have a question, I text him and he answers. He answers right away. I mean, it's, it's really, really a big value add. And so I think really you asked who are my mentors. I think David and Alex honestly.
15:50 Speaker 02 And who could you ask for more than the people that you're really working closely with? The people who are investors. That's who I wanted to be, my mentors. Another person I would like to mention though, who's been a wonderful mentor that I've gotten close with over the last few years is Jaron Lanier, whose philosophy on technology and creativity is so inspiring and resonant to me. Do you know Jaron? Have you ever talked with him before? I have not. So Jaron started the first VR company back in the eighties. He's an incredible artist and engineer and computer scientist. And he's written some of I think the most insightful books about technology today. He actually was raising his hand about some of the concerns and red flags that people bring up about social media today in the past couple of years since 2016.
16:35 Speaker 02 He was raising his hand and voicing those concerns many, many years ago. His first book, You Are Not A Gadget. His latest book is called 10 Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, which is a blunt title, but is actually very thoughtful and very specific about what he thinks is wrong with the business model, not with the tech actually, but with the business model and how that's undermining to humanity in any number of ways. And for this audience, uh, listening to a podcast about venture capital, I think maybe the most interesting book of his would be Who Owns The Future, where he really dives into the economic impact of this business model where products or services are given away for free in exchange for the right to opaquely gather lots of data around people and use that data to manipulate them according to the will of
17:20 Speaker 02 advertisers. His argument is that that business model is massively damaging in any number of ways. And in Who Owns the Future, he really breaks it down thoroughly and even offers some alternative solutions that I think are quite compelling, if ambitious. So he's a friend and a mentor that I think is worth mentioning as well.
17:37 Harry Stebbings? No, I mean, absolutely. And I'm so pleased that you said about the social landscape there with the book. I do have to ask, just before we move on from the fundraising element, in terms of that, you said the word pitching. In terms of the pitching process itself, Joe, how was that process for you? And how does it maybe compare to pitching for roles in the early days of your career? And really kind of presenting what you can do and what you can do, both in terms of the technology pitching for fundraising? And then in the acting world, how do they compare?
18:01 Speaker 02 There is a lot of overlap. It's a good question. And it's funny, because I think my background in show business has prepared me in many ways for being a tech entrepreneur. And then in other ways, it's not prepared me at all. But one of the ways I think it's prepared me is in pitch rooms, that's something I'm good at. That's something I've been doing ever since I was a little kid, is going into a room, understanding who you're in a room with, understanding how to connect with those people, understanding how to speak their language, understanding how to get them to understand what you're saying. Like I said, I've been doing that my whole life. Doing it in a pitch meeting is rather different than doing it in an acting audition, or even when you're pitching a movie as a filmmaker, because when you're pitching a movie, it's purely emotional.
18:42 Speaker 02 All that matters is that you get the story to resonate emotionally with the people you're pitching it to. That's it. When you're pitching a company, what I found is there's also this analytical, quantifiable component. And what's funny is I thought at first that that's all it was going to be. I thought, I'm just going to have to be able to go in and present the math and the science of why this is a good investment. What I found, though, once I started going in and pitching is like, oh, this is actually more similar to pitching a movie than I thought. There is that analytical component, but there's also the emotional component. And even though it seems like everybody in Silicon Valley says that data is the most important thing, what I've found in my brief time in this world is, yeah, data is important, and that's fantastic.
19:24 Speaker 02 But there's also really an emotional and an intuitive component to how decisions get made, and that's more. My domain, so I guess I had that going for me.
19:32 Harry Stebbings? No, I couldn't agree more. And I always think storytelling is absolutely the crucial element, so to speak. I do want to touch on, as we said there, that in terms of the social landscape and move a little bit above both you and the hit record, because I want to discuss the media landscape. It was something that Alex said I had to discuss. He obviously talked about the book itself. I was chatting to Alex before the show and he said I had to ask about the current state of social media. How can I disobey Alex? Never a good idea, as you know. So how do you view and assess the current social media landscape, Joe? And what are your thoughts on it? Maybe from a more macro perspective?
20:05 Speaker 02 Sure. Well, there's a lot being said about how social media is impacting the entire world. And I'm not really the expert with the authority to speak about how it might be undermining democracy or how it might be creating negative impacts on our economy. I'm not an expert in political science or economics. What I can speak to, though, I think with some authority, is how social media today impacts creativity and the creative process. And it goes back to that business model that I mentioned Jaren is critical of. The business model of Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all these companies is based on an attention economy. They sell attention. They sell the attention of their users to advertisers. And so it's in their interest for the users to get as much attention as possible.
20:47 Speaker 02 And so when you're a creative person and your destination for your creativity is these platforms, your whole focus, whether you're quite aware of it or not, you've been trained with very powerful behavior modification techniques. You've been trained to be wanting attention. And I know from experience that if your goal in a creative process is to get attention, you're never going to be satisfied. It's always going to be a hollow and an anxiety laden experience. In my experience, the attention that you get, the applause or the box office or the walking the red carpet, these things that I've been very privileged to experience myself, those are actually not the things that give me joy and fulfillment in my life.
21:29 Speaker 02 The things that do give me joy and fulfillment are being on the set and actually working with other people to make the scene and figure out the story and play the character. That's the stuff. That really makes me happy, but that creative process isn't emphasized by today's social media companies because that creative process can't really be measured and can't really be monetized the same way that they measure and monetize clicks and attention, followers and likes, and of course, ad dollars at the end of the day. So I really think that that ad model, I'm very concerned for the whole world's creative spirit, especially the creativity of younger people who've spent their whole lives with YouTube
22:10 Speaker 02 or Instagram or other places like that, other ad-driven platforms as the destination for their creativity. I think it gets in your head and it twists your motivations and I think it steers you in a direction that misses the real lovely and valuable and nourishing part of creativity.
22:30 Harry Stebbings? Can I jump in and ask, is it possible, given that the attention economy is so permeated into our media structures today, do you think it's possible to move away from it and to maybe disengage slightly from it? And how would ideally the next steps play out for you in your mind?
22:45 Speaker 02 Well, look, I don't know about what it's going to take to have Facebook or Instagram or these other platforms become not so dominant in our society, but what I spend a lot of my time doing with HitRecord is building an alternative where at least people who have the wherewithal and the volition to come and try something else can. And what we're trying to build on HitRecord is an ecosystem for creativity that emphasizes what, in my experience, is the more joy-filled and meaningful parts of the creative process, which is not about how much attention can I get for this? It's about the making itself. When you show up on HitRecord, it's not about post what you've made and try to get attention. It's about,
23:29 Speaker 02 hey, what can we make together? Find some people, join a project, start your own, focus on the actual creative process. Here are the steps. And I think when people engage and focus on that part of the creative process, it makes a very different feeling. And I know I feel it anecdotally in speaking to our community. I know a lot of people feel it as well. Spend 20 minutes looking at the HitRecord app and you find a little writing challenge that you find amusing and you end up writing a little poem or a little story or rewriting someone else's story or drawing a picture based on someone else's story or any of the other creative prompts that are going on on HitRecord all the time. You spend that 20 minutes, you're gonna come out of that experience feeling
24:11 Speaker 02 a little lifted. Whereas, I know me personally, if I spend 20 minutes scrolling through Twitter, I come out at the end of that experience just feeling worse, worse about myself, worse about the world. I do feel all the more compelled to look at Twitter again because it's very effective, it's very addictive, but it doesn't make me feel good. And I don't think technology has to be that way. I, I think phones and the internet and the connectivity between those phones on the internet and people connecting from all over the world, it doesn't have to be a sort of anxiety inducing popularity contest. It could be something people get a lot out of where people are helping each other, find each other's creative selves and make things together that they wouldn't have been able to make on their own. The internet is exactly conducive to that and I don't see any reason why it
24:56 Speaker 02 shouldn't work like that. And that's what we're building and, and we even have early signs that it's really working and, and people want that.
25:03 Harry Stebbings? And listen, I couldn't agree with you more. I always thought when I started doing the podcast that it would be when you reached 100,000 plays or whatever that metric is, it would be the thing that makes me happy. And then I realized actually that it's kind of doing episodes like this that makes me happy and where I derive the most joy. I do wanna finish though on a quickfire round, Joe. So this is my favorite element of any interview. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to roll?
25:25 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
25:26 Harry Stebbings? Okay, so your favorite book and why?
25:28 Speaker 02 Well, I already mentioned Jaron Lanier's books. I'll go with Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke. We were just talking about creativity and being sort of extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated. If you read Letters to a Young Poet, it's very much a rant, if you will, or a manifesto maybe of honoring your own voice and in modern terms, not doing it for the likes. But it was written 100 years before likes were a thing.
25:55 Harry Stebbings? How do you deal with shit hit the fan moments, Joe?
25:58 Speaker 02 First, I go into a closed room and scream, "Shit!" Then, after I get that out of my system, I walk back out to where everybody else is and try to stay as calm as I can and remove emotion from the equation and get lots of different opinions. I think especially in shit-hit-the-fan moments, it's easy to get emotional, and when you get emotional, it's hard to get out of your own perspective. So it becomes all the more important to really get a wide variety of opinions.
26:25 Harry Stebbings? Well, I love that initial reaction, but tell me, you have the day off. What does that day look like in your ideal day?
26:31 Speaker 02 Well, I have a family. I'm very, very blessed to have two children and a partner, my wife, and they bring me unbounded joy that I couldn't possibly describe. That's what I do with my time off.
26:41 Harry Stebbings? When I say success, who's the first person that comes to your mind, Joe?
26:45 Speaker 02 How about Jim Henson, one of my favorite all-time artists who took incredible talent for puppetry and storytelling and filmmaking and blew it up into something so much larger that was so impactful on so many people. If you talk to almost anybody about Sesame Street, they will be two steps away from tears because they feel so grateful for how it imbued their young selves with an instinct towards kindness and cooperation and a love of learning. And I don't know any other artist who had such a powerful and positive impact on so many people.
27:22 Harry Stebbings? A question from a mutual friend of ours, Joe. Where did you learn to do such an insane standing backflip?
27:29 Speaker 02 Who's the friend?
27:30 Harry Stebbings? Well, you know, you might have danced with him at the Oscars.
27:34 Speaker 02 Daniel. Okay, so you're succumbing to the stereotype that all British people must know each other. He's such a swell guy. Yeah, we did dance together at the Oscars, and I think maybe while I was bragging in some moment, I did do a backflip. I did gymnastics when I was young. It was one of the other things I did, along with acting and baseball and piano and things. I grew up in, you know, a middle-class suburban house where I was lucky to get the opportunity to try this and that, and my mom would drive me to these different activities, me and my brother. And it's such a lovely thing to get to do these kinds of extracurricular activities. I wish, you know, and a lot of people do get to do it, but it always makes me sad to think that not everybody gets the opportunity to do gymnastics when they're young or sing in a choir when they're young, and it seems like they should.
28:14 Harry Stebbings? I totally agree with you. Having said that, my flexibility is limited, to say the least. So I think it's probably a good thing I'm not allowed in a gymnastics studio. But tell me, penultimate one, what do you know now that you wish you'd known at the start of your journey would hit record?
28:26 Speaker 02 The thing I'm learning a lot over the last couple of years is how to be scientific towards things. It's very different than being an artist. Art is subjective, but when you're building a product, it's part subjective, but also part objective. You can really measure and quantify, is this product working for people? And when I was younger and we were first doing Hit Record, that was just not on our radar at all. We didn't know what a KPI was, didn't know what that stood for. And it's incredibly powerful way of seeing the world. I think it can go too far if that's the only perspective you have is the the metrics driven one. But it's incredibly powerful if you can balance it with the other qualitative side of things.
29:02 Harry Stebbings? And then the final one, and perhaps the most exciting here, Joe. What do the next five years look like for you and for Hit Record? Just how big could this get?
29:10 Speaker 02 Well, our target with Hit Record is not people who are trying to break into the creative industry or people who are aspiring to it. It's really not that. It's any human being with the urge to be creative, which I think is in many ways, any and all human beings. What we have found over the years of doing this as a production company is that when you invite people into a community, rather than saying like, hey, post what you have, you say like, hey, let's all make something together. It really brings people out of their shells and unlocks a creativity in a way that you don't see when people are doing it alone. And so I think that there is literally billions of people out there who really have that urge to be creative. They want to write or they want to make a video, they want to make a song, they want to draw, they want to do it.
29:54 Speaker 02 But it's hard to do it alone. And today's dominant platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, they don't really offer a path for folks like that. Folks like that feel like, oh, I'm embarrassed. I'm not going to post my thing on Instagram, like no one's going to like it. But on Hit Record, it's not about that. It's about like, hey, come, let's do it together. And so I that's what I want to build is is a thriving ecosystem where everybody in the world who has that urge can find someone to do it with.
30:22 Harry Stebbings? Listen, Joe, as I said, I spoke to pretty much your whole cap table before the show. They all said the most wonderful things and it's been such a pleasure having you on the show today. So thank you so much for joining me.
30:31 Speaker 02 Thank you, Harry. It was a blast. I really appreciate it.
30:36 Harry Stebbings? I mean, what an incredible and inspiring individual. And if you'd like to see more from Joe, you can find him on Twitter at HitRecordJoe. Likewise, you can find him and the site at HitRecord.org. It really is a must-checkout, so do head over there. It'd also be great to welcome you behind the scenes here. You can do that on Instagram at HStabbings1996 with two Bs. But before we leave you today, look at the world's tech leaders and high-growth startup CEOs. And do you ever wonder, how in the world do they have that kind of inexhaustible energy to do what they do? The answer will surprise you. The latest trend with top tech leaders is sleep optimization. The first step, the Pod by Eight Sleep, the ultimate sleep machine. The Pod is the first and only high-tech bed designed to help you achieve peak mind and body performance. The Pod dynamically adjusts the temperature on each side of the bed, so you're comfortable
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Previous 20VC: Bessemer’s Byron Deeter On Lessons From Investing in 14 $Bn Companies, What The Heck Is Going On In Cloud Today and Why Cloud IPO Floodgates Are About To Burst Open Next 20VC: Zoom From Series A to IPO, How VCs Can Provide CEOs with Additional Leverage and Why The Negative Effects of Signalling Are Very Real with Santi Subotovsky, General Partner @ Emergence Capital Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
