Alex Bloomberg tapes his own company's founding, growth, and 2019 sale to Spotify.
StartUp Podcast turns company-building into intimate narrative reporting, using meetings, old tape, office conversations, and private debriefs as evidence. It is less about startup wisdom than about what ambition costs when the spreadsheet, staff, home, and mission all start talking back.
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StartUp Podcast is a first-person narrative documentary hosted by Alex Bloomberg, produced by Gimlet Media, the company the show itself chronicles. Rather than a studio interview format, episodes are built from recorded meetings, phone calls, and on-the-ground tape captured as Gimlet's founders make real decisions, with Bloomberg narrating and reflecting on those decisions afterward. Recurring threads include startup fundraising and cash-flow pressure, product and app-design choices, podcast monetization, workplace diversity and hiring, co-founder conflict, and eventually acquisition and exit. Matt Lieber, Bloomberg's Gimlet co-founder, appears throughout as a frequent counterpart and occasional foil, particularly over whether Gimlet should be a content company or a technology platform. Lisa Chow, a former NPR journalist, joins as a co-host in a later season centered on a different company. Outside figures also recur, including executive coach Jerry Colonna, who counsels Bloomberg through the Spotify acquisition, and Gimlet staff such as VP of Finance Jim Grau and producer Brittany Luce, whose accounts surface internal company debates directly. The series traces Gimlet's arc from a handful of employees to a 2019 sale to Spotify for tens of millions of dollars, with the finale revisiting what changed and what didn't after the deal closed. Listeners get a longitudinal, warts-and-included account of one media startup rather than general startup advice or a rotating guest roster. The production leans on ambient tape and real audio artifacts (voicemails, meetings, late-night recordings) more than polished studio conversation.
Made for: People interested in how a specific media startup actually got built, financed, and sold, including podcast-industry and startup-operations detail.
What sets it apart: Uses real-time recorded tape of one company's actual meetings and decisions over years, rather than retrospective advice interviews with a rotating cast of founders.
A series about what it's really like to start a business.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
StartUp Podcast makes startup strategy tangible by recording Gimlet's growth, internal pressures, and sale while the consequences are still unfolding.
StartUp Podcast lets Alex Bloomberg report from inside Gimlet as ambitions become operating decisions and, eventually, a sale to Spotify. Recorded conversations with co-founder Matt Lieber give the show unusual access to the gap between a convincing business idea and the anxious…
This is the founder diary where even the awkward elevator wait survives the edit.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear-eyed farewell to Gimlet, with the Spotify sale framed as a test of scale, control, and whether the work can stay intact.
StartUp's final episode treats Gimlet's sale to Spotify less as a victory lap than as a live management problem: what happens when the buyer looks serious, the team has rehearsed its answers, and the founders have to decide whether the work will survive the deal.
A grounded look at Gimlet's sale pressure as Spotify moves from podcast research to acquisition mode.
Thanksgiving in Stockholm follows the Gimlet-Spotify sale story through a useful business lens: how little a seller may know while a buyer is already moving.
Gimlet's scaling plan meets its cash burn, launch pressure, and falling audience numbers.
Gimlet's growth story turns into a tighter, more uneasy look at what happens after a startup decides to scale. Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber are still aiming at their revenue plan, but costs have crept higher, cash burn is near its peak, and the expensive new slate has not…
Gimlet confronts the gap between a diverse-looking company and one that actually shares power.
Gimlet 19: Diversity Report treats headcount as a management problem, not a public relations problem. Alex Bloomberg says Gimlet has grown from two founders to 27 full-time employees, with a near-even gender split, but only three non-white staff members and no one who identifies…
Gimlet's platform ambition meets the practical pressure of focus, hiring, and outside design help.
StartUp catches Gimlet at the point where a founder's big platform dream has to survive contact with actual work. Alex rewinds to an early conversation with Matt Lieber, before jobs had been quit, money raised, or the podcast launched, when Matt is pushing the idea of marrying…
Stephen Dubner tests bourbon economics, Alzheimer's research, and money advice against hard data.
Daily business news with Kai Ryssdal, tracking Fed policy, oil shocks, and private credit.
Galloway rotates Office Hours Q&A, Raging Moderates politics, and China Decode geopolitics weekly.
Joel and Matt answer listener money questions weekly in the show's Ask HTM segments.
Brené Brown's long-form conversations linking grief, caregiving, politics, and nonviolence to her vulnerability research.
Alex Bloomberg hosts the final episode of StartUp, the Gimlet Media podcast, documenting the company's sale to Spotify for 'many tens of millions of dollars' in early 2019.
The clock starts at Spotify.
Season four starts awkwardly.
Gimlet has a numbers problem.
Alex rewinds the tape.