This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That is me. I am part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm recording this at Vox Media Headquarters in New York City. In a minute, we're going to go back in time to my hotel room in Austin, Texas, where I talked to Ben Rubin, the founder of House Party, also the founder of Mirkat. But first, my very brief request to tell someone about this show, but only if you like it.

On Facebook, Twitter, in person, you can go to Apple Podcasts and rate and review us. You can go

anywhere you listen to this podcast and rate and review us. It helps us. So thanks in advance.

Okay, we're about to go to Austin. Sometimes the media podcasting business is very glamorous.

You get to record in a really cool space.

Sometimes you're in a pretty small hotel room with two other dudes, one of whom's sweating a lot, sitting on your bed.

That was this situation. But it was cool because I talked to Ben Rubin, a really interesting entrepreneur.

A few years ago came out of nowhere. Golden loves the story from the sweating.

Came out of nowhere with Mirkat, which was a really hot app for about a minute before Twitter

crushed it. Then he pivoted that into House Party, which I think is a pretty popular app right now.

We talked about that process, how you pivot a company, what he's learned.

Amazingly enough, Ben Rubin is the kind of guy who comes to South by Southwest, not to promote his company, but to hang out and to drink a beer with me. We drank a beer during this podcast as well. That was exciting. All right, enough preamble. Here is me and Ben Rubin talking in Austin. I'm here in a hotel room. It's not that fancy hotel room, but it's a hotel room in Austin. South by Southwest, if you hear ambient noise, that's South by Southwest's ambient noise coming to you. I'm here with Ben Rubin, who have had conversations with the before back when he ran Mirkat. Now he runs house party. Welcome back, Ben. Hey, thanks for having me. You're right off the boat, too. So thanks for coming straight from the airport to come talk to you in my tiny hotel room in Austin. It's very cozy here. I want to talk to you about house party and what you're doing now, but I want to go back in time a little bit because the last time I talked to you in Austin was three years ago. Is that right? Yeah. You had launched Miracat. Yeah. I think we were just talking about this off the air.

You were like the last big, hot app to come to South Buy. There was a ton of excitement about you. It was a live streaming app. Yeah. And I'll let you talk in a second. You're good at talking. But the story was, and you can go look it up. You had launched. People were excited about what you were doing. It was on, you were acquiring users through Twitter. It was really interesting. Then it turns out that Twitter has spent their own $100 million buying Periscope, which did more or less the same thing. They sort of made it more difficult for you to do work. People love, but people love your story because you had become this viral app.

And I was talking to you three years ago and you were in this swirl of publicity.

And now things are much calmer.

Yeah.

So welcome back.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I was just asking you, like, I assumed that you were going to be promoting something for house party here, but you're just here to hang.

Yeah, I'm here to see friends, people and colleagues, and it's a great opportunity to get the boat coasts in the same place and get to have some beers and enjoy it.

I haven't been last year.

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