Don Katz created a whole new kind of audio experience online and on demand with audible back in the mid 1990s.
Today audible holds the biggest audiobook catalogue in the world with over 600,000 titles and the company is now part of the Amazon family.
He was one of these guys you would want it to be, you're gonna, you know, best friend, I looked up to him, I probably wished he was Home more because he was frankly like I became someone who worked a lot.
He was also a war hero, he ran away from home basically with 17 and uh was was behind enemy lines, highly decorated italy or he was in the black forest in Germany.
Ralph Ellison taught me how to read in a way that I fully didn't understand and I knew that I I loved more than anything the sound of literature.
He also gave me the confidence to try to be a professional writer, which I proceeded to do for for 20 years was was ralph Ellison.
Bob Greene met a Rolling Stone writer who asked him to write a story about a dictator in Spain.
Greene says he had no idea what he wanted to do when he got a telegram saying, go to Spain to cover the funeral of the last dictator of the World War Two era, you know, dictators.
Greene: I think attacks all people who go way out with crazy ideas, whatever they are, are about to find it out.
Why did you want to write a book about Sears?
Well, I kind of thought how weird would it be to take this, you know, this hippie counterculture storytelling and write about a big old american company?
And I wrote another letter, I wrote a letter to the Ceo and chairman of Sears, a guy named Ed telling who was famous for never having given an interview, a completely introverted guy.
And he just decided that he'd let me in.
And so I proceeded to show up as a bearded, still looking quite young guy and people who worked at Sears decided I was okay because I had sold at telling on something they never thought anybody would sell it on.
The author is a hockey player who runs or did run a lot so as to keep in shape.
His regimen was to take off in riverside Park and run several miles at the end of the day.
While you ran, what would you listen to music?
Sony Walkman in a belly pack, knocking around.
Walkman painful.
Walkman on cassette, on cassette.on cassette.
on cassette.
Sony walkman in belly pack in a. belly pack.
I remember thinking if you took these audiobooks, you could actually liberate time for people.
I remember all these things coming out saying, can't you see it?
And like people thought I was out of my mind.
I mean, I couldn't find anybody who knew what I was talking about except for Ed Lau, my college roommate from N. Y. U.
And I said, head, you know, if you could take audio books and send them through the phone line, the cost of the, of the packaging and all those tapes wouldn't be there.
You could lower the cost.
Because you were writing a book, how did this idea just take over your mind and your life?
Because all of us get ideas.
We've all had a business idea and sometimes it captures us for a week or two weeks.
The other thing was I kept going to people who I otherwise respected, who thought I was crazy.
They thought you were crazy because you had a great gig.
Don Katz is trying to build an audio player and platform for audio books, interviews, comedy and more what will become audible.
Katz took an 85% year over year pay cut to start audible.
Katz: "I was freelancing book writer and everything, but I was scared.
I mean I had three kids and a mortgage"
I thought the content would be a mixture of literally the best possible public expression in words.
You know, if the Churchill club had profound speeches, I wanted to carry that.
If, uh, if we turned the SAn, Jose Mercury news into an audio program, you have people reading the newspaper as content.
Well, we got some of your buddies at NPR, so we could have car talk or marketplace, which car talk, which was owned by those guys.
So you don't have to deal with NPR, by by 99, I'd signed up Robin Williams to do original programming for us.
The first download when it finally happened was in october 31st of 97 it was men are from MArs and women are from venus.
The idea was way ahead of its time.
The audio quality was not good.
It literally sounded like somebody talking to you with a covid mask in the bottom of a bathtub.
He said, do you know about crystals?
I said, I think I know about crystal, he said.
You can't shoot a crystal it because they had to grow them to grow the fragrant crystals.
These are crystals for the for the.
for the liquid crystals.
audible went public in the fall of 1999 and by the spring of 2000 the dot com bubble burst crashes.
Robin Williams had come in and bought 500,000 shares of common stock before when the public, he was part of the roach, you know, and he was because he was real techie guy.
Some of our vcs right after we went public began to as the term was puke out their shares in very public filings and they were right.
Don Katz: Being a public company was not fun.
He says he was incredibly anxious, but he just kind of had a attitude about it because we weren't out of capital yet, you know, and we had investors who had not given up hope and it felt like there was just another reason to keep fighting but still don't.
Katz: We decided to not be technology agnostic when we went public.
It was difficult to bridge a world that is very much not technology focus publishing, no book publishing is is people who love books meaning that they're willing to get paid less or they have the wherewithal to not get paid a lot.
Eventually we did start to break through and be able to carry these audiobooks at a different cost.
It was 9 95 for two audiobooks and we started a month a month and uh, it gained traction and frankly, the phone call I got around this period from Cupertino California from steve jobs was a ray of hope that was really meaningful.
We have many, many hundreds of thousands of thousands, obviously 20,000 audiobooks in 2000 and seven and 45,000 other kinds of content including Robin's programs, Ricky Jarvis is programs the amazing Susie Bright erotica series which has had, which was pre podcast before the yes, they were all short form programs.
Newark was thought to be a scary city.
I wanted to move us there when it came out growing this very ramshackle headquarters, which instantly was $12 a square foot with furniture and wiring.
We moved in with 100 and 20 people and nobody left.
Newark venture Partners, which has become an international level of success drawing companies from all over the world to Newark to an accelerator.
So then you get like this carpet culture which includes cutting edge technologists and all these english majors turned into business people like me.
In 2007, your annual revenue at Audible was like $110 million.
January of 2008 amazon announced that they would acquire audible for $300 million in cash.
In retrospect, they got a great deal for you, especially given that your revenue was 110 year before.
But at the time, did you think it was the right move for audible?
I think it's something on the order of 55.5 to 51% purposeful, good calls and brave moments and, and times when you just didn't give up the rest of it is definitely luck because otherwise how could I have made so many stupid, boneheaded decisions along the way that didn't kill us?