Top of the lyne - Descript: A Billion-dollar Detour?
Descript: A Billion-dollar Detour?The story of Groupon’s infamous founder’s detour from Detour to Descript → and into every podcaster’s tech stack.
In 2000, when Star Wars: Episode 1 became the major motion picture to have an all-digital screening, there were just 30 movie theatres with digital screens in the world. Ten years later, there were more than 36,000. On June 22, 2009, Kodak announced its plan to end production of the Kodachrome film, 74 years after it first made an appearance in 1935. The analogue dynasty was coming to an end. The physical cutting and splicing together of films with tape and glue, the sprocket gears that fit into the edges of a film that feed 24 images past the lens while the shutter flashes 3 times per second, and the swapping of reels during intermissions - digital filmmaking was about to democratize all of it. The Casey Neistats and the Mr Beasts of the world today are able to stitch together hours and days of audio and video footage in minutes. A process that used to take months. As Tarantino might tell them “And I will strike down upon thee. With great vengeance and furious an-” no, we’re kidding. Their latest weapon of content disruption? Descript. Detour from “Detour” 🛣🕛 February 2013. Amidst growing public market scrutiny and a stock price that plunged to a quarter of its listing price; Groupon’s infamous CEO, Andrew Mason, in an internal memo to his employees, writes…
Here was a non-conformist, brutally honest, self-deprecating, anti-CEO; taking both success and failure with a pinch of salt. At the time of his unceremonious ousting, Mason was worth more than $200M in Groupon stocks. Yet, he has had to scavenge for the idea for his next project by reminiscing his pre-millionaire days.
The founding roots of Descript is really an affirmation of Jobs’ iconic quote “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.” By the end of the year, Mason was building Detour, an Augmented Reality travel experience app. Here, Mason and the team faced a recurring, adjacent problem worth solving for. Sessions for the tour with local guides used in Detour were easy to record but post-production would take hours, if not days to finish. To overcome these limitations, the team looked toward the advancements happening at the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Andrew noticed that the AI-ML speech-to-text was at a real inflexion point and had become accurate enough to find commercial use-cases. Quickly building a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get audio editing tool that not just transcribes speech to text but also lets you edit the audio by simply editing the text document— and Voila! you’ve got yourself a ready-to-use soundbite. Although built for internal ease of use and recording, the tool garnered interest from video producers and podcasters all of whom begged Mason to make the software available to them like, yesterday. 🕓 December 2017. Seeing more merit in their editing tool, the team took a literal detour from Detour and decided to dedicatedly focus on building an AI-led narrative-based media creation software. Today, Descript offers transcription in over 22 languages and encompasses audio editing via text-in-a-doc to doing the same for video🤯; It even reverses text into speech with its revolutionary feature “Overdub” (brought to life with its acquisition of Lyrebird); and also allows multi-player editing. Propelled by an explosion in the creator economy and a podcasting boom, Descript eliminates the uphill drudgery standing in between you and the end result, so you can focus on what truly matters: the quality of your content. ⚡️ With over $50Mn in total funding, Descript’s latest round - their Series B was led by Nabeel Hyatt of Spark Capital with Andreessen Horowitz and Redpoint Ventures participating. Product-led all the way 📈
The takers? Naval, Lenny Rachitsky, Casey Neistat, and about 4,000 others as seen in their free-to-join Discord community. They all think it’s magic. We agree. Descript is a poster child for product-led growth - with levers and an attention-to-detail that put the user experience at the centre of the organization’s priorities. Free |
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