Today we’d like to introduce you to Audra Gold.
Hi Audra, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was in college when the consumer internet was first introduced to the world. From the moment I began using the public internet, I foresaw that this medium would eventually become the central place for almost everything we do to manage human civilization, communication, learning and entertaining. I knew it was the most important development of our generation and I wanted to be a part of building out a completely new global medium of unprecedented power. I still can’t imagine doing anything else but building online technologies for the consumer masses. For the last 20 years, I have worked with early stage startups building cutting-edge technologies that bring game-changing ideas to life that grow into scaled businesses. Through many successes and failures alike, I have gained a unique and deeply informed perspective in building and scaling digital products in several tech verticals, utilizing various web-based technologies with teams of all sizes. I co-founded Vurbl in February of 2020 right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Vurbl is a creator-first, free streaming audio platform for all audio types, including user-generated audio that is set to revolutionize the way people distribute and listen to audio-centric information across the web. Before creating Vurbl, I founded a Product Management consulting firm focused on helping early stage companies go to market. I also ran Product for Pluto.tv, The Mighty, Rubicon Project, Break Media, Fourthwall Studios/Nantworks, and held product management positions at several other LA-based technology companies.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
No, not many people have ever helped me out in my career. I don’t have mentors, I have had to prove myself every day of my entire career. I’ve had to be so far and above better than my peers just to move up and get the positions I did, which typically go to men (95% of Heads of Products are male). Mostly, I have forced my way into situations and made myself indispensable, so the many misogynists that I worked for over the last 20 years could not easily get rid of me. That’s been a big part of my survival tactic in my career: just be so good at what I do, and take on the most critical product lines in a business, that it becomes very difficult to get rid of me. That said, there is one person that helped me – in that they took a leap of faith in me to help me build Vurbl. That person is someone I worked with in the past and built a very successful product for, which ended up selling for 100’s of millions of dollars. This person wrote me the first check for Vurbl, and it is highly unlikely that anyone else would have taken this chance on me. As a woman in tech, I have only seen it get worse particularly since I started my career in tech in 1999. I have worked with very few women in my career, generally, and probably only 2 or 3 female engineers over the span of 20+ years in the business. Only 5% of all Heads of Product in tech are women, but the female product managers I have worked with over the years are some of the brightest and most promising PMs out there.
Unfortunately, almost every female product manager I worked with even 10+ years ago has dropped out of the workforce or changed career paths because there was just simply too much sexism and resistance for their taste. In regard to developing Vurbl, we have built this company from the ground-up while our team members have been in quarantine. Since all non-essential offices have been forced to close, we have not spent any time working together in the same room as a team. During this time, we have raised money, hired over a dozen employees and interns, and have been building our platform, content offering, and creating audience awareness, all from home. We closed our first check, had about 400k more to raise when our offices were closed down and we were forced into quarantine. All I had was a deck, a great team, and 20 years of proven success building consumer confidence. I thought the latter would get me much further than it did when I was fundraising. No one cared. Our lead investor all but disappeared so I was left on my own with literally no one helping as I searched for investors to complete the round.
Everyone was worried about surviving themselves and very few people had time for anyone else. It made me think about the many people I know that are not nearly as strong or resilient as me and how they might have fared, which made me also realize how few people I know that would be able to bear the torture I went through. The way I saw it, though, was it was do or die – there was no going back. I have such a clear and strong vision of what we are building with Vurbl, the problems we are solving, and the way we are going about it that I cannot imagine walking away without seeing it through to the end. There was no choice for me. I was doing this and no one was going to stop me.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Vurbl is an audio platform for people that create audio of all types and for listeners that love to be entertained and engaged by the audio medium. We are democratizing the audio format, welcoming all types in one place, from audiobooks to podcasts, to speeches and education to comedy and meditation. If it works in audio format, you’ll find it on our platform. As an added bonus, we also have expert curators making playlists around subjects and themes that we see people looking for on Google and elsewhere. We are making publishing, consuming and monetizing audio content easier and more turnkey than has ever been done.
We are the first of our kind: a singular destination where anyone can publish or listen to any type of audio content in the world, all in one place. You can also easily clip it up, playlist it, and share it in ways that no other platform has ever offered. (snippet GIF).
We are providing free audio content to anyone that has access to the internet. We are providing ways to monetize audio content that no one has ever offered. We believe we will be at the forefront of the digital audio renaissance that is taking place right now. Our timing could not be better for the product itself. More than ever, people are searching for free digital entertainment and learning resources to fill the time they used to spend at events, parties, social gatherings and work. We see millions of audio queries on Google and YouTube that reflect demand for audio but the results are generally pretty dismal. Discovery is hard, cohesive consumption experience is harder, and advertisers have very few options in reaching all the people out there consuming free audio – especially in real-time programmatic.
This has led to a huge missed opportunity for brands and the creators that can be making money from their content. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our team. Our team is a cumulation of tech-savvy, digital media innovators who saw the opportunity to create something huge that has never existed before. Vurbl really is a democratized audio platform in a space we view as the biggest opportunity in digital media today – and the most underserved, ironically. Our main goals are to change the way that audio is distributed and consumed along with creating a democratized market for audio creators to thrive and make money on their audio content. Check out Vurbl today: https://vurbl.com/
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
We created the entire business in quarantine and have never been together in person as a team.
