156 Andrew Mason - An Appetite for Creation

If you’ve ever used Groupon to grab a discount at a local business then you can thank Andrew Mason for that. He’s the founder and former CEO and he has an appetite for creating cool and useful products like Groupon.

Four years ago he took the idea of Groupon’s ability to use a phone’s GPS to provide discounts to its customers and applied it to location-based audio tours with a company called Detour. His latest venture, Descript, the world’s first audio processor, is geared towards anyone who works with audio and is in need of transcription services.

With the ability to transcribe hours of audio in under five minutes, Descript is a tool that podcasters might want to take note of. But the real magic of Descript is its ability to edit audio by editing text. Magic! Listen in to find out what else Descript can do, it may just be the tool you’ve been waiting for.

• 05:32 - Andrew’s company, Detour, and its role in the podcasting space
• 07:11 - If he thought Detour would be as easily consumed as podcasts are
• 08:42 - The potential of taking snippets of Detour to use for a podcast
• 10:15 - What he’s learned from launching Detour
• 11:46 - How the idea of his transcription tool, Descript was born
• 14:43 - My first thoughts on Descript
• 15:39 - Descript’s ability to insert voices and delete words
• 17:56 - Andrew talks about how Descript can be integrated into your workflow
• 22:42 - Descript’s machine-learning capabilities
• 24:15 - Andrew describes who can benefit from using Descript
• 26:54 - Descript’s goal in the future
• 28:10 - Descript’s ability to conduct phonetic analysis of words
• 28:43 - If Descript’s technology is new or if it was already around
• 29:36 - What has him excited about the podcasting space
• 31:09 - His two favorite podcasts
• 32:12 - If the desire to create things has always been in his blood
• 33:41 - The person who showed him what hard work looks like
• 35:57 - What he’s learned from previous experiences in his career
• 39:12 - If a podcast is in Descript’s future
• 40:44 - Why he loves podcasts and The Daily podcast
• 42:32 - What he learned about empathy and judgment at Groupon
• 44:38 - The one most misunderstood thing about him

Full Show Notes: http://podcastjunkies.com/andrew-mason-interview

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