Descript

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch/Oct 24, 2025/1h 16m

20Growth: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) 101 | The Rise of User Generated Content and How to Use It | TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality | Hiring for Growth: When and Who with Sandy Diao

Sandy Diao is one of the most exceptional growth leaders of the last decade. Sandy has scaled products to over 200M+ users and led growth teams at Descript, Meta and Pinterest. She is also a prolific writer all on things growth here. AGENDA: 03:59 Biggest Growth Lessons from Pinterest 08:01 What is a Good vs a Bad Growth Hypothesis 11:11 Common Mistakes in Growth Strategies 14:57 Channel Fit: When You Have It & What To Do 25:43 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) 101: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine 30:08 How to Do SEO and Long-Term Growth Investments 33:22 Doubling Down on Successful Channels 36:31 The Unchanging Foundations of SEO 37:52 Generative AI Engines vs. Traditional Search Engines 41:12 Paid Marketing Channels: What's Overrated? 43:42 The Rise of User-Generated Content (UGC) 46:34 TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality 49:55 Brand Marketing: What is Real vs What is BS? 53:33 The Importance of Feature Launches 01:01:50 Hiring for Growth: When and Who? 01:08:55 Quick Fire Round: Onboarding, Notifications, and Growth Channels

Sandy Diao

Growth Leader

How I Built This with Guy Raz/Sep 9, 2024/1h 11m

Groupon and Descript: Andrew Mason

Andrew Mason was a 27-year-old with a degree in music when he co-founded one of the fastest growing companies of all time: Groupon. Its deep discounts on everything from sushi rolls to plastic surgery soon became a ubiquitous part of life in cities across the world. In 2011, just three years after launching, Groupon had the largest internet IPO since Google, with a valuation of $12.7 billion. But people began to complain that Andrew was not up to the role of CEO: he was quirky and unpredictable, and unable to navigate the company’s rocket-ship growth and the surge of copycats that threatened it. Soon, Groupon’s revenue slumped, and Andrew was fired from the company he’d started. But like many of the best entrepreneurs, he learned from his failure. Today, Andrew runs a new startup, an audio and video editing platform called Descript. In fact, we use Descript to make this show! This episode was produced by Chris Maccini with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Edited by Neva Grant, with research from Kathrine Sypher. Our audio engineers were Maggie Luthar and Robert Rodriguez. You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at hibt@id.wondery.com. Sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

CEO and Founder

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis/Aug 3, 2024/46m

Underlord: Descript’s AI Video Editor, with CEO Andrew Mason

Nathan interviews Andrew Mason, CEO of Descript, about their AI-powered video editing platform. Learn how Descript is transforming content creation with features like AI transcription, custom voice overdubbing, and eye contact models. Discover the future of video editing and how AI is making it accessible to everyone in this insightful episode of The Cognitive Revolution. Apply to join over 400 founders and execs in the Turpentine Network: https://hmplogxqz0y.typeform.com/to/JCkphVqj Looking for podcast production? Our production team, led by Adi and Sai from AI Podcasting (https://aipodcast.ing), is now open to taking on additional clients for podcast production and AI-driven workflows; if you need help with your podcast, you can contact them directly through their website (https://aipodcast.ing/contact/) or reach out to me for more information. RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Second Opinion A new podcast for health-tech insiders from Christina Farr of the Second Opinion newsletter. Join Christina Farr, Luba Greenwood, and Ash Zenooz every week as they challenge industry experts with tough questions about the best bets in health-tech. Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1759267211 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0A8NwQE976s32zdBbZw6bv - 🎙️ History 102 with WhatifAltHist Every week, creator of WhatifAltHist Rudyard Lynch and Erik Torenberg cover a major topic in history in depth -- in under an hour. This season will cover classical Greece, early America, the Vikings, medieval Islam, ancient China, the fall of the Roman Empire, and more. Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36Kqo3BMMUBGTDo1IEYihm Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-102-with-whatifalthists-rudyard-lynch-and/id1730633913 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@History102-qg5oj SPONSORS: Building an enterprise-ready SaaS app? WorkOS has got you covered with easy-to-integrate APIs for SAML, SCIM, and more. Join top startups like Vercel, Perplexity, Jasper & Webflow in powering your app with WorkOS. Enjoy a free tier for up to 1M users! Start now at https://bit.ly/WorkOS-TCR Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off https://www.omneky.com/ Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to https://choosesquad.com/ and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist. CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) About the Show (00:00:22) Sponsor: WorkOS (00:05:18) Creating Descript (00:06:53) Favorite Features (00:10:41) Descript Workflow (00:14:10) Product Strategy (Part 1) (00:16:45) Sponsors: Oracle | Brave (00:31:12) User Fine-Tuning (Part 1) (00:32:24) Sponsors: Omneky | Squad (00:34:10) User Fine-Tuning (Part 2) (00:34:54) Content Creators (00:42:20) Small Businesses and AI (00:43:42) Hiring AI Engineers (00:46:25) Outro

CEO and Founder

The a16z Show/Jul 12, 2024/46m

Live at Tech Week: Delivering AI Products to Millions

Less than two years since the breakthrough of text-based AI, we now see incredible developments in multimodal AI models and their impact on millions of users. As part of New York Tech Week, we brought together a live audience and three leaders from standout companies delivering AI-driven products to millions. Gaurav Misra, Cofounder and CEO of Captions, Carles Reina, Chief Revenue Officer of ElevenLabs, and Laura Burkhauser, VP of Product at Descript discuss the challenges and opportunities of designing AI-driven products, solving real customer problems, and effective marketing. From the critical need for preventing AI misuse to ensuring international accessibility, they cover essential insights for the future of AI technology. Resources: Find Laura on Twitter: https://x.com/burkenstocks Find Carles on Twitter :https://twitter.com/carles_reina Find Gaurav of Twitter: https://twitter.com/gmharhar Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16z Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/ Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated: Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube Find a16z on X Find a16z on LinkedIn Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Gaurav Misra

Co-founder and CEO

Captions

Carles Reina

Chief Revenue Officer

ElevenLabs

Laura Burkhauser

VP of Product

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats/Aug 18, 2023/1h 1m

Supper Club × How Descript Built A Next Gen Video Editor In The Browser With Andrew Lisowski

In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Andrew Lisowski about working on Descript, web streams vs local storage, using state machines, writing CSS with Radix, monorepos, and more. Show Notes 00:35 Welcome 01:07 What is Descript? Descript | All-in-one video & podcast editing, easy as a doc. Work — Sandwich 02:21 Who is Andrew Lisowski? Andrew Lisowski (@HipsterSmoothie) / X hipstersmoothie.com Descript (@DescriptApp) / X devtools.fm 04:51 How does Descript interact with the webcam? 08:52 Web streams vs local first Web Streams Explained — Syntax Podcast 587 10:06 How are you exporting video? GitHub - Yahweasel/libav.js: This is a compilation of the libraries associated with handling audio and video in ffmpeg—libavformat, libavcodec, libavfilter, libavutil, libswresample, and libswscale—for emscripten, and thus the web. Riverside.fm - Record Podcasts And Videos From Anywhere 14:40 How does Descript deal with recording fails? 17:17 How does Descript design and build the UI? 19:37 What did you like about state machines? XState - JavaScript State Machines and Statecharts 24:12 How are you writing your CSS with Radix? Themes – Radix UI Home | Open UI 30:30 How does the marketing site’s tech stack compare? 31:44 Playwright vs Cypress Fast and reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps | Playwright JavaScript Component Testing and E2E Testing Framework | Cypress 36:26 What tech do you use for monorepos? 37:01 What’s your build tool? Workspaces | Yarn - Package Manager Turbo webpack 40:18 Moving to the web means moving things to the backend 41:37 Descript focuses AI tools on helping creators Eye Contact: AI Video Effect | Descript 50:50 Supper Club questions Topre Switch Mechanical Keyboards REALFORCE | Premium Keyboard, PBT, Capacitive Key Switch Iosevka Github Dark High Contrast - Visual Studio Marketplace 56:21 SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Lexical shadcn/ui Shameless Plugs devtools.fm Tweet us your tasty treats Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets Wes Bos on Bluesky Scott on Bluesky Syntax on Bluesky

Andrew Lisowski

Engineer

The Stack Overflow Podcast/Aug 10, 2021/20m

Using AI to fake your own voice, podcasting never been easier

Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startup. Slack began life as a video game company, eventually pivoting to make an internal chat tool it had built into its main business. Descript had a similar journey, taking the editing software Mason and his team developed at Detour, and moving it to become the center of a new business after Detour was acquired by Bose. Headquartered in Montreal, Lyrebird is the AI division of Descript . It was founded by PhD students studying under Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Prize in 2019 for his pioneering research into deep learning and neural networks. Our lifeboat badge of the week goes Avinash, who explained what to do with a invalid syntax error that arises while running an AWS command See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mason Wartman

CEO

NVIDIA AI Podcast/Dec 4, 2019/26m

Pod Squad: Descript Uses AI to Make Managing Podcasts Quicker, Easier - Ep. 105

You can’t have an AI podcast and not interview someone using AI to make podcasts better. That’s why we reached out to serial entrepreneur Andrew Mason to talk to him about what he’s doing now. His company, Descript Podcast Studio, uses AI, natural language processing and automatic speech synthesis to make podcast editing easier and more collaborative.

CEO and Founder

Product Hunt Radio/Nov 20, 2019/30m

The future of podcasting with Andrew Mason

On this episode Abadesi talks to Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Descript. He was formerly founder of Detour, which Descript emerged within before it was spun out into its own company when Bose bought the technology behind Detour. Andrew was also founder of Groupon. In this episode they talk about... Descript’s origin as part of Detour, and how to know when it’s the right time to pivot from your original idea “We would have been over-investing in Descript if all we were using it for was for Detour, but we knew there was a potential business there and were treating it like a kind of a backup plan when you’re pre-product-market fit, like we were. You’re staying open to different paths.” Descript actually emerged as a part of Detour, the company Andrew founded to create local audio tours. The team built themselves a better workflow for editing audio and realized that the internal product they had created could be much larger than Detour itself. They also recognized that a confluence of factors in tech were going to allow them to create the next generation of audio editing tools. Andrew explains how he went through the process of figuring out when to “cut bait” on Detour. He previously had pivoted The Point into Groupon, so he has some insightful things to say about when and how to pivot. “We tried every last possible approach that we could think of and eventually it was like, it’s not supposed to be this hard. Having been through this before, it felt like we were doing the most elaborate things to market the product and reach customers, and at some point it just clicked that it’s not supposed to be this hard and we should move on.” Andrew’s advice on managing people and scaling a company “In a lot of companies the way that people get into management is they'll be individual contributors who have great ideas and nobody wants to listen to their ideas because it's the people in management that get to have those conversations. So people say 'okay, I guess I'll become a manager' and then they become a manager for completely the wrong reasons — not because they care about people or unlocking the best possible incarnation of their teams, but because they care about having their ideas listened to.” He gives a rundown of the history of the company and where they are at now, after having raised a large Series A round and made the acquisition of Lyrebird. He talks about what the next stage of growth will hold for them, and how he is managing the scaling process by putting into place processes and protocols that will provide structure for the company as it grows. He also talks about the importance of delegating the work that the founder has been doing in a growing company. Personal development as a leader and helping your team grow Andrew explains what a typical day looks like for the team at Descript. He explains how they manage internal tools and how he tries to create an environment where feedback can flow freely among the team members. He talks about some of the best ways to grow as a leader, including some of the events that he attends and why he reads a lot. He also says that they have created an internal podcast for the team, a cool idea which you might expect from the company given what Descript is typically used for! Andrew also tells us about one of his favorite products that he uses to build tools for the team. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. 😸 Companies and Products Mentioned In This Episode Retool — Customized internal tools in minutes.

CEO and Founder

Decoder with Nilay Patel/Dec 13, 2017/1h 5m

Recode Decode: Andrew Mason, CEO, Descript

Andrew Mason, the founder and former CEO of Groupon, talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Casey Newton about his latest startup, Descript. The company bills itself as a “word processor for audio,” making podcasts and other spoken word recordings easy to edit for non-technical content creators. Mason also talks about the “surreal” rise and fall of his career at Groupon, why he regrets publicly announcing that he was fired as CEO and why he once brought a horse to Groupon’s office as a gift for Michael Bloomberg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

CEO and Founder