I used to be an engineer at a startup that Groupon was acquiring. One day we were at their Chicago HQ being interviewed by their leadership team. I was waiting outside the conference room, feeling super nervous, when this really tall guy with messy hair just sort of saunters over. He looked pretty aimless and carefree. It turned out to be Mason, and he came over to talk to me. I was super nervous, as he towered above me. But he turned out to be so nice, and had a very calming effect. He knew about our company and even knew who I was, I was so surprised. Since then, I've always wished the best for Andrew, as I really believe his heart is in the right place, and he wants to build great things. Glad to see he has a new project cooking up.
Many of the best products seem to come when the founder has enough capital to self fund a solid base product versus needing “metrics” that at such an early stage often track nothing imo.
People will be able to create some serious deep fakes of audio recordings with Overdub. Where it will get really wild is when you can change the voice of the original recording into your "voice of preference" for listening purposes. Ie- instead of Ira Glass narrating This American Life, think what it will be like when you can listen to TAL with Morgan Freeman narrating it!
As stated in the article, Overdub forces you to read random sentences so you can’t just feed in hours of audio. That being said, this technology is quickly becoming commoditized and I suspect others won’t be as scrupulous.
In between Groupon and Descript he was working on a product I loved called Detour. Our first time trying it, my wife and I lived at 24th and Valencia (San Francisco), and we walked over to Mission and 24th for a group tour they were launching. Detour was creating audio walking tours driven by GPS.
Keep in mind, at the time, Andrew was sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars from Groupon.
We walked up to do the tour and to test the product. There were like 4-6 people there, and I'm sure others had already started the tour. My wife had zero idea who he was, I vaguely knew what he looked like.
We get there and Andrew is standing there at the 24th street bart with a Detour t-shirt on. My wife's app doesn't work, and he helps her get it installed. He is annoyed that the software isn't working, but couldn't be nicer. He patiently figures it out and we were off.
I told her, I think that is Andrew Mason, the guy that started this company, and also the guy that started groupon. She laughed, and was like, no wonder he cared so much.
I guess the point of the story is that I have zero idea what he is like to work with from experience, but my moment meeting him, he came off as humble, smart and nice. Most importantly someone who cared deeply about his company. I like working for and with people like that.
Thanks for sharing the story – love hearing early accounts of when companies start!
The key takeaway from the story is that Andrew, as a founder, was willing to roll up his sleeves, get in the dirt and talk directly with customers to get early feedback. He didn't use his liquidity and profile to hire someone else to do this – that would have been too easy. A good founder will always start at the foundation, and build from the ground up.
