Leah Culver

Forward Thinking Founders · Leah Culver (CTO of Breaker) on the Future of Podcasting and Audio

• What Advice Does Breaker CTO Leah Culver Give New Founders?

  Leah Culver, then CTO of Breaker, told Forward Thinking Founders to go build the thing and not let anyone talk you out of it. Learning to program felt like a superpower: if someone described a product, she could see how to make it, even though the work would take time. She would rather ask what could exist than what exists today. She will happily say she has no forecast, including a bet that a social app bigger than Facebook would appear within ten years, because products turn over and Facebook was already struggling. Her summary for the listener was the same. Start, keep going, and ignore the claim that the category is finished.

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• How Did Breaker Evolve Since Its Founding

  Culver says that she and Erik listen to their users and built features that support their ideas. For example, Breaker now has " Breaker Upstream ," a service that enables podcast makers to push exclusive content to a subset of listeners that are paying membership fees.

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• How Did Breaker.audio Start as a Company

  Breaker co-founders Leah Culver and Eric Berlin started working on it as a side project, primarily because they wanted a new way to experience podcasts. One thing led to another and they got accepted to Y Combinator, raised funding, and started to do Breaker full-time.

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• What Is Breaker

  Breaker is a social app for listening to podcasts, where you can like and share your listening experience with your friends. In return, the app will learn from your likes and recommend new episodes for you.

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