Big Technology @ Five Years

0:00Hey everyone, Alex Cantrewoodz here. Big technology has hit five years old. I can't believe it five years since we started. So I just wanted to do a quick solo episode here with you today. Very brief, just to say thank you, to talk a little bit about where the show is going and what it's going to sound like moving forward, to share a bit of the editorial philosophy I have here, and then a little bit about how you can help the show if you'd like, and then we're going to wrap. So let's begin with gratitude. I need to say thank you. We're five years in, and this show is sustainable. And with podcasts and with most of the media, the audience size is going to correlate directly to your ability to produce the show.

0:40And I'm happy to say that we have crossed the threshold where this show works. We're consistently in the top 10 for tech news on Apple Podcasts. We're often in the top five. I'd like to be at number one, but I would say so far, so good. So what's going to happen next? I think as our audience grows, we're going to end up getting more prominent guests. And I think you've started to see that already with Demis Asabas coming on twice this year, the CEO of Google DeepMind, and then Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder, deciding to show up to that interview at Google I.O. I don't think we're going to stop here.

1:14I think that we'll see more heads of AI research houses coming on. Just to cue you in, I'm pitching their PR operations all the time. And I think that there's a new openness because of the fact that this show has grown. and I think that they will. My prediction is we will see a leader of another AI research house coming on in the next couple of months and hopefully a former U.S. Secretary of State. These are informed predictions and I think the show will build and it's just going to get better. And again, because you tune in, be it once a week or twice a week or wherever you can, that's giving Big Technology Podcast the ability to do that.

1:56Now on the business side, we've been fortunate to be part of LinkedIn's podcast network for the last three years. That is going to end as of today. So we're going to switch up the business a little bit. What does that mean? Show continues as normal, but it's going to sound a lot more like a quote unquote, real podcast now, which means you're going to get a lot of the podcasty ads that you might be used to hearing elsewhere, ads for maybe ZipRecruiter or MailChimp. I'm just throwing out names, but you know, the standard array of typical podcast advertisers will start to join us. I hope we have a great sales team that it's working on it.

2:32And I would love to take like one or two anchor advertisers and then just right in the front slot in the beginning of the show, maybe one or two of them. I think it's going to be like maybe a six month or a year or maybe in perpetuity where we say the show is brought to you by maybe read a short message from them. So if you're interested in doing that, you can write to me, Alex at bigtechnology.com and be happy to talk to you about rates and what it might look like. But the idea is we want the ads to continue to feel high quality, to continue to feel native. And, you know, with that said, the anchor sponsor would be terrific.

3:08But I also will promise you here and now, I'm not flooding the zone with ads. This will not be one of those podcasts that stops every five seconds for an ad break because the podcaster can make money. I care a lot about the experience that you have on the other side of this mic and I am not going to flood the zone with ads. Are we going to do programmatic ads? Not to start. Those are the ads that are automated and you don't sell direct. So I don't think we're going to do those to start. Are they going to come in eventually? Probably. But is it going to be 15 ads before you can hear the show? I don't think so.

3:39I want it to feel mostly the same. And on that note, I just want to thank LinkedIn. The LinkedIn podcast network has been incredible. Absolutely blew up this show. We 7x 7x the audience since joining the LinkedIn Podcast Network in 2022. And the team there is amazing. I'm super grateful. I'm going to continue to work with LinkedIn through their creator and news partnerships. And I think that if you're not following me on LinkedIn, you should, because a lot of bonus content, conversations around the show and our shorts, short videos, the highlights from the show, they all show up there. Now, briefly on editorial strategy, we had this interesting comment.

4:20I'm not going to read it word for word, but it was like, Alex is relentlessly negative on AI. And I just want to talk about like our editorial strategy here. So I think that AI is the most important change, the most important technological change I've seen since I've started covering this. And many people listening will be the most important technological change of their career. When I was with Sergey, basically he was like, you know, in helping build and shape. And then he says AI is going to be bigger than that. I think there's a chance that right, I'm not 100 % sure. I'm still trying to sort through the hype.

4:58But what that means is that if you're a critic of AI, or if you're a booster, we want to have both of you on there. Because ultimately, we are trying to learn, I'm trying to learn, I think our audience, you, the audience are trying to learn how this is going to change our lives, our careers, what we do. And so we're going to try to have opinions from all sides. And that can be unrepentant critics and unrepentant boosters of the technology. And that means that when they come on, we're going to hear your thoughts. But I'm also going to try to ask you the hardest possible questions within reason.

5:30And I'm not trying to box people into corners. I'm just trying to be surprised when they hear questions they don't hear too often. And they start saying what they really think. And I think getting to the truth is really important. So that's the help if you're interested in helping the show now that we're moving into this new chapter. Best way to do it is to tell a friend or to tell a coworker or to drop the show in Slack or to email it to your team or to text it, I don't know, to your cousin. Because word of mouth is the best way to grow a podcast. It's the thing that works best. And so if you enjoy it and want to share it, I would be extremely grateful.

6:08The other thing, and I know I talk about this all the time, but to rate the show five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Pocket Casts. Probably sick of hearing me say it, but really it's true that ratings are the only publicly identifiable metric for podcasts. And so let's say you have a big CEOs who's looking at the show to decide whether to come on. They are gonna look at how many ratings do they have? What is the average rating? Luckily, we have a good number. we have a good number of quality ratings. I think we could probably get those, the quantity of ratings up. I think we should have close to a thousand ratings on Apple Podcasts.

6:50For instance, we have 418. I won't belabor the point. I think you've all been amazing in rating the show. And so I want to say thank you for that. Another thing you can do is join as a paid subscriber. If you're a paid subscriber, you get access to our Discord where we talk all the time about the changes we talk about on the podcast during the week. This is just a running conversation. I will add a discount code in the show notes here. And then again, if your company is interested, signing up to be that anchor sponsor would be huge. All right, last question or last thing I want to end on is some optimism.

7:22Like I said, it's amazing to be in a media format that is ascending. I feel like we're just at the beginning of what podcasting is going to be. I feel like I've got at least 20 years left doing this show and there's some real staying power. So I hope that we can have this like very interesting relationship continue for many, many years to come. And if you've been here for our first five, just wait for what we're going to do next, because I think we are just warming up here. So if you're here, again, can't thank you enough. Thank you so much for being part of Big Technology Podcast. You really are the reason why we or I'm able to do it.

7:59And I can't thank you enough. And of course, thanks to Ronjan, who comes in and lightens up my week and many of our weekends, you know, every Friday. So that'll do it from here. Five years of big technology. Here's to the next five. And as always, we'll see you next time on big technology podcast.