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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast.

Today we have three special guests, Roman Mars, of 99% Invisible, an extremely popular

podcast about architecture and design.

And we also have Ryan Hoover and Eric Torrenberg of Product Hunt.

Roman, Ryan, Eric, welcome to the A16Z podcast. Thanks for having me.

Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having us. We're going to do a podcast about podcasts,

which is a little bit meta. I know. Roman, you were at public radio here in the Bay Area,

and they made this shift. And did the shift kind of, was it conscious, did it

happen to you, or did you happen to it? I would say mostly it happened to me. Ninety-nine percent

invisible started as a little four-and-a-half-minute drop-in that KLW in San Francisco would

put in their morning edition. And I did about four or five episodes. I had a

Tumblr page, which just had a, you know, like where you could stream them, uh, and listen to them.

And I would send up to my friends and say, you should listen to my new little show. It's four minutes

long. You'll like it. And they were like, I'm not going to listen to your fucking tumblr. And they're like, you should put it as a podcast. And so I did. You know, I did it that way.

Is it just a distribution tool? And it really found an audience in the design and architecture world

pretty quickly. I mean, I knew that it could occupy that space well because no one was doing the types

of stories I liked. You know, I had this notion, I guess, that it would be out in the world,

the larger than just being on KALW. And this was, you know, I just celebrated our fifth

...