Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison: What does Clubhouse do now to regain mindshare? | | 20VC #929

(beeping) Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination. Paul, this is such a joy to do. I've wanted to do this one for a long time. We've known each other for quite a while now. But thank you so much for joining me first.

Thank you for having me, Harry. I've listened to many episodes, so I'm very excited to be here.

That is so funny. Bubba was like, "Ask him how he has so much energy all the time." Um, but I mean-

(laughs)

... I'm gonna save that for a bit later in this show. I wanna start with, um, basically the founding of Clubhouse.

(laughs)

Obviously a name we all know and recognize today. Take me back to that founding aha moment for you. And, and when, what was that aha moment?

You know, Rohan, my co-founder, and I had been building social apps for over a decade now, so we've been at it for a while. And we've always been interested in this problem space. You know, uh, the first company I started was a location-based social network called Highlight that helped you learn more about the people around you. And the whole thesis behind it was that the, the people in our lives, the people we become friends with, the people we marry, the people we do things with, the people we start companies with, they're the most important thing in the world. Nothing affects our lives and our happiness more than the people around us. But the way that we learn about people and the way that we decide how to bring new people into our lives and get to know them is just incredibly random and inefficient. And I didn't even realize that there were thematic similarities to Clubhouse till someone pointed it out to me on, on the app in Clubhouse. Um, but, but we'd been working on this stuff for a long time. Uh, eventually, we sold Highlight to Pinterest and I spent some time there, and Rohan was working on social apps as well. And we reconnected in late 2019 and we sort of said, "Man, we've always wanted to work together. Timing is liming- lining up right now. Let's do it. What should we build?" Obviously, we're not gonna do a consumer social app 'cause those things are crazy (laughs) and we love them so much, but we've got kids and, like, it's probably not a rational thing to do. So we were looking at education, productivity, and enterprise and all sorts of other stuff. And we started to get deeper into audio, and we were looking at it going, "Man, we love this space so much." Like, we love podcasts like yours. We, we love audiobooks. And I think most importantly, we love having conversations with our friends and, and it's really hard to do that right now. And, uh, we were looking at what the state of the art was, and at the time, it was basically podcasting, which is great for listening, but it's not great for participating and it's, it's a lot of work. And, and it felt like it was gonna grow quickly as a space because of AirPods and Alexa and text-to-speech and all sorts of other stuff. So as we got deeper into it, we eventually said, "Ah, shoot. We have to build a social app and..." (laughs) And I remember going back to my wife, we've been together since high school, and, and I'm like, "So I'm really sorry, but we're gonna build another social app." And she's like, "I think that's great. I know you love it and that's what you should be doing." So we sort of time boxed it. We said, "Okay, we'll give ourselves six months to try and make this thing work. And if it doesn't work, we'll go do something more boring where there's a more predictable relationship between input and output." And the first thing that we did, I think, um, I think we might have reached out to you at this time, Harry.