This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That's me. I'm part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm here at Vox Media,

New York headquarters with Larry Fitzgiven, CEO of TastMade. Welcome, Larry. Thanks for having me, Peter.

Thanks for coming down, all the way down on a hot, sweaty day. All the way over from sunny California.

You flew from Los Angeles for this podcast.

Santa Monica, yeah. I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast will know what TastMate is or have heard about it. But just in case they haven't, give us the two-sentence description of TastMate. Absolutely. So TastMates are global food and travel network for digital platforms. In today's world, that means mostly mobile.

So it's kind of like a...

You make videos about food that are usually consumed on someone's phone.

Food and travel.

Yes, usually on someone's phone, about 80% of the time.

So, again, most people who listen to this

understand that food performs very well as a category on video.

I think it seems super obvious now.

When you launch, I'm not sure that was as obvious, right? I think that's true. And you also have to

go back in time a bit. When we started, which was back in 2012, really the only game in town

in kind of a meaningful way for video was YouTube. Right. So we got kind of our start on YouTube.

Certainly a popular category on YouTube, but not the most popular.

Right. People, and I wrote about what you guys when you launched, and I think I was already, like there's a great

mint, pomegranate lamb shoulder recipe I got randomly off YouTube.

There were tons of ways to get food stuff on YouTube,

but you guys said we're going to do it as a category. Again, the pitch made sense, right?

As I recall the pitch was, I remember if you guys said it, this frankly was, look, there's the

food network and other related channels like that on cable. Those are worth a lot of money.

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