Imagine you're watching a Seinfeld or a Friends rerun. An ad-break comes up, but instead of seeing an ad from today, you see an ad from when the show originally aired back in the 90's. Sounds crazy, but that's how podcast ads still work today. The ads are baked in the episode.

This was my realization in 2016 as I was biking across the Brooklyn Bridge, listening to old episodes of This American Life and Planet Money. I was crazy about podcasts: they worked like education but felt like entertainment, and I was sure podcasts were only going to get more popular. But, the more I dug into the details, I realized podcasts faced some really interesting challenges to growth, including monetization, measurement, and discovery.

In mid 2016 I founded Pippa. I decided to start with a B2B angle, focussing on creator tools, building a platform to help podcasters publish and share their shows to any app or device, and delivering detailed analytics to the creators about how their show was being consumed. I brought on board some truly exceptional cofounders, Timothy Voice, Erwan Jegouzo, and Victor Decroix, all brilliant engineers from whom I've learned so much.

In early 2017 we went to LA to be part of the first Techstars Music accelerator with MD Bob Moz. After raising some seed capital, our small team set about building a platform that podcasters truly loved. In my experience, building great products requires strong instincts and excellent taste to get started—but a robust ability to listen to the actual users, and amend or even discard your assumptions when receiving feedback. The most effective tool in our arsenal was the customers themselves: we installed an Intercom chat widget which went directly to my phone, and this provided incredible insight into what our customers actually wanted. It supercharged our development, helped us build more appealing features, and we caught bugs much earlier, too.

By 2018, our business started soaring. Once we aligned our pricing, our product-market-fit let to a relatively explosive growth in our users and SaaS metrics: we were growing new users by double digits every month, our churn was near zero, and when we implemented new upgrade paths, we had negative revenue churn. We expanded into other countries, quickly becoming one of the most popular podcast platforms in France and the Nordics. This growth took us to a fork in the road: to sustain our growth, we needed either to raise further capital from VCs, or sell Pippa to a strategic partner. Fortunately, owing to the close industry relationships we had cultivated and the highly visible traction we had received, I shortly received multiple acquisition offers for Pippa, helping us to alight upon the correct choice.

In April 2019, Pippa was acquired by Acast, the world's largest independent podcast company. As CEO, running the gauntlet of due diligence and legal restructuring—while still running the business itself—was brutally difficult. But the satisfaction of a successful exit for my team and our investors was absolutely worth it, and Acast was the perfect partner to take Pippa to the next level. Acast has always been laser focussed on podcasts, and a champion of the open podcast ecosystem. Following their astonishing success in Europe and the UK (where they had about 75% of the top podcasts), Acast were looking to make a powerful push into the USA, so the stars truly aligned perfectly for Pippa to be the engine for this next phase of growth. 🥂