Podcasting and the Future of Angel Investing
Sheel Mohnot is a partner at 500 Startups, founder and CEO of Thistle, as well as a baller angel investor who has invested in Coinbase, Instacart, and Flexport, just to name a few. He also hosts the podcast The Pitch.
This post is part of a series on the future of storytelling, in which I interview storytellers on new platforms.
Podcasting has been around since the early 2000s, but if you’re a newcomer to the medium, you’ve probably been tuning in since 2014, when the publishers of This American Life created their riveting and addictive smash-hit, Serial.
Sheel Mohnot wants to use podcasting to change the way businesses get funded — by featuring startups on his angel investing podcast, The Pitch.
As big as podcasting is today, he believes that it has even more room to grow.
Q: Why podcasting? Did the medium have any unique features that drew you to it?
A: I’ve always liked podcasting as a medium. I used to like listening to NPR on the radio but needed it to be asynchronous because my life doesn’t align with any particular times, so I’ve always been into podcasts. And given Serial & Gimlet Media’s success in the past year, the time seemed ripe.
Q: How did you decide to do a podcast on angel investing and pitching?
A: I’ve been an angel investor for a few years and had been a fan of Shark Tank but didn’t like how unrealistic it was.
Two thirds of the deals that are done on the show don’t actually get done! Many of the companies are not venture-investable. For instance, I don’t know of many VC’s who would invest in a towel with a hole in it.
That coupled with my love for the podcast medium made it a pretty easy connection.
Q: What are you trying to do with The Pitch?
A: I’d like to continue to grow the audience of course, though we already have way more listeners than I thought we would.
I would like to see some change come from the podcast, like maybe getting a company getting funded via the podcast directly. I got a lot of joy out of being able to say that the podcast built a home in Haiti.
I think podcasting will continue to grow. There are so many people on their daily commute NOT listening to podcasts. It seems like they are just wasting time!
Q: What have been some of the challenges you encountered? Anything you didn’t expect that could help others who might want to start their own podcast?
A: It is SO MUCH HARDER than I thought.
I thought: Hey, I’m listening to pitches all the time anyway, now I can just hit “record.” Umm, nope. It takes us probably 20 hours to edit an episode — with most of the leg-work being done by my co-founder Josh Muccio.
I record for 40 minutes, we get it down to 12 minutes and then add in the investors and sponsors. Lots of back and forth. Here’s the stuff you need to buy. I think that is probably most helpful.
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