← The Digital Executive
The Digital Executive
Rohan Nayak on Reimagining Audio Entertainment and Empowering Creators with AI | Ep 1093
00:17:24
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Rohan Nayak. Rohan Nayak is the CEO and co founder of Pocket fm. Inspired by his entrepreneurial instinct, Rohan and his friends Nishanth and Pratik Dixit co founded Pocket FM in 2018. Rohan is the guiding force behind shaping the business aesthetics strategies, growth and expansion. Under his leadership, Pocket FM has witnessed phenomenal growth and emerged as a strong force in the audio OTT landscape. He has five years of experience in product development and scaling content platforms. Acknowledging the audio content consumption ecosystem gap, he recognized the need for an independent audio OTT platform meant for entertainment. Today, the platform is disrupting the entertainment industry and introducing a new way of audio storytelling. Well, good afternoon Rohan. Welcome to the show.
- [01:06]
B
Thanks Ryan for having me on the podcast.
- [01:09]
A
Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it because you're right now hailing out of Bangalore, India, which is a big time difference for me here in Kansas City. So I'm up early in the morning, you're up late and I appreciate that. But I do know you travel quite a bit to the us. So Rohan, I'm going to jump into your first question. You made a bold pivot from investment banking to product development and eventually co founding Pocket fm. What sparked that transition and how did early career experiences shape your approach as a founder?
- [01:37]
B
I was in investment banking for a couple of years and I sort of realized that I enjoy building products. I would rather enjoy building products that are being used by millions of users rather than in trading or traditional investment banking. I just didn't enjoy that at all. And I was very clear that I wanted to build something of which creates value. From early on and after investment banking I sort of just deep dived into the Indian startup ecosystem building social media products and content platforms and that sort of shaped my journey to become a founder and start Pocket FM because I just got obsessed with content and the core philosophy was that I started seeing content platforms bring new art forms to life or new creators to life. When I was building a short video platform in 2015, I realized there's so many creators who have no platform to share their content or art form. And that sort of inspired me because it's never been possible ever in our history that artists can get distribution without a gatekeeper, without someone in between deciding their future. And that sort of led to a rabbit hole. So to say that when I was building a few content platforms I started consuming all form of content from manga, anime, movies, TV shows, everything just to sort of go deeper into this ecosystem. And that's when I sort of realized that while there has been so much innovation that has happened in, in video entertainment, you know, you have long form entertainment which is, you know, your video streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney, Hulu and your short form entertainment platforms like TikTok, Instagram. But when it comes to audio entertainment, there's just been no innovation. I mean, there's literally no audio entertainment platform that existed before 2018. And that obsession with content and figuring out a gap in audio entertainment. While, you know, podcast and audiobooks and music have existed for a while now, none of them are really audio entertainment. They're more around if you want to learn something from, let's say the specific podcast, it's a, it's a great one. And so that sort of shaped my, a content obsession early on, shaped my journey to start Pocket fm because I was just consistently looking for something to build which brings new art forms to life.
- [03:55]
A
That's amazing. Thank you. I appreciate the backstory as well. And I think a lot of people really enjoy building stuff, especially if they know it's going to be for a bigger purpose, to help people help society like you did. So that departure from investment banking to Pocket FM was certainly a big stretch, obviously, but then you've become very successful because of your passion of what you like to do and you're certainly solving a problem, you know, giving creators and artists a platform that gives them an opportunity to be independent, creative and be found. So I appreciate that. Rohan, the next question I have for you. Pocket FM has rapidly grown from being an audio entertainment platform to a full fledged storytelling powerhouse. As you scale across markets, how are you reimagining what it means to build a next gen entertainment company?
- [04:40]
B
When we started Pocket fm, we realized that we need to create a new entertainment category which happened in the form of audio series or serialized fiction content. But in audio, think of audio series as TV series. In audio, it's sort of like fast paced, it's engaging, it's long form. An audio series can have 500 episodes, but these episodes are bite sized. So the format of audio entertainment is very unique. The format of audio series is very unique of what we have discovered. And whenever you like in a team thinks of a new category, you tend to reimagine all the fundamental stacks of entertainment because when you're building a new category, you have all the freedom and liberty to do whatever you want and not conform to how entertainment platforms have been built in the past. So we looked at the three fundamental Pillars of any entertainment platform, be it audio, video. The first one is content production. The second one is once content is produced, blockbuster identification, that which shows can potentially become big hits. And the third one is marketing. And when we thought about reimagine all of these three sort of pillars or stacks of entertainment from ground up, we realized that AI has to be at its core of each and every one of these verticals. Because given the fact that we are thinking from first principles and disrupting creating a new entertainment category. We reimagined content production by enabling writers to produce high quality audio content using AI. The second one was which is content production. The second pillar is blockbuster identification, which is a very complex one. If you have, let's say thousand shows on the platform, how do you know this show or specific show is going to be a hit show? So we started leveraging AI to predict if the show has the potential to become a blockbuster. That has helped us scale rapidly given the fact that there's a steady stream of blockbusters that are being identified every quarter, every month. The third one, which is the marketing, all of our marketing today. When you think about these promotional videos, trailers, all of them are AI generated. And what that helped us do is that let's say you have a blockbuster now, you found a blockbuster like My Empire system. And we leverage AI to create thousands and thousands of videos based on that storyline using AI. It's sort of like a kick of a button, right? And that helped us scale rapidly once you identify a blockbuster. So I think we have sort of reimagined all these three stacks of entertainment which is content production, blockbuster identification and marketing. And that's what we believe, that the way we have built out Pocket FM need not be limited to just audio. It's just a new way to build an entertainment business as of today.
- [07:30]
A
That's awesome. I love how you broke that down for our audience as well. You're totally reimagining audio entertainment. And as you mentioned, having a new entertainment category allows that full autonomy in this space to be more creative and do what you want. Let's talk about your three pillars of growth. You had content production, blockbuster hits and marketing. And I like how you're integrating AI artificial intelligence in there to help scale scale that growth. Obviously AI can do so much more nowadays to assist with those three pillars there. So I appreciate that. Rohan, the next question I have for you, what's your approach to identifying building stories that have the potential to become long term high value IPs?
- [08:10]
B
My core philosophy here is that I've always believed as mentioning in why I started Pocket was that I believe that there's so many talented writers all over the world whose stories have yet not been discovered. What if there is a next Harry Potter Game of Thrones in just someone's drawer, right? I mean they tried to get their book published, they went to a production house in, in la and no one really picked their stories. What we've started building out is to think of this Pocket as a platform where any writer can come in, we help them with a fiction writing model or a copilot which has been built on top of large language models which help the writer write better quality fiction, which is not like a general purpose LLM which is everything. Now this writer comes in, let's say I have a writer, has a great story, but you know, writer is not a great writer. They know the basics of it, but they're not professional. The copilot would help them write better content. And then you have, let's say an option to select a voice out of 50 or 100 AI voices and you click a button. Then there's a post processing, sound effects are added on the background, background music is added and it goes live on the platform. What I feel this will do is that there's never been democratization of storytelling while there has been democratization of other forms of content. But what we are seeing happen in Pocket is that just in the last one year when we rolled out the UGC, the Copilot and the AI Voice, we have seen over 50,000 shows being produced by AI. And what we feel is that enabling the and empowering writers to produce high quality content is the only scalable way to create long term IPs because I mean, there's so much talent, there's so many, so much stories which are so unique. And if you listen to any of our shows which are doing really well, they've written by authors or writers who tried to get their books published but it didn't work out. But they saw a platform used, leveraged AI and now their series is being listened by millions of listeners and they're making a living out of just writing content. I feel this is how I believe AI will unlock human creativity like we've never seen before. And that's I believe, the only sustainable way even for a platform like Pocket to generate or find great ideas.
- [10:39]
A
That's awesome. I like your core philosophy that you brought up. You wanted to start the platform to provide all these creators so that their stories could be discovered. As you mentioned, traditionally it's Hard to get started or be found or to scale something. But you're helping creators with writing better quality fiction and entertainment with the help of AI. Obviously your platform and tools will help them get discovered and scale. And what I really like about it is in your purpose, you're truly helping make the world a better place. And I appreciate that. Rohan, the next question. In traditional entertainment, IP development is often talent or studio driven. Pocket FM seems to be disrupting this by making it data led. How is data informing your creative pipeline from story ideation to development to scaling?
- [11:26]
B
Exactly right, Brian. I mean informational entertainment is all very sort of, you know, it's subjective. And coming back to the core philosophy that we never want to be gatekeepers. We want users to determine if a show is good or not and sort of give all the tools to writers to be able to produce high quality audio shows. And the way we are leveraging data is twofold. One is that think of Pocket as a platform where writers are just experimenting with concepts. So we tend to feel that creative process is often iterative. I know the traditional book writing philosophy is that you would spend a couple of years to write a book and then you realize if it does well or not. What we have done is to our writers. You know, when, let's say I'm a writer, I come into Pocket, I start writing a few episodes. We'll start giving you real time data which will start showing you that either your concept is being appreciated or liked by listeners or not. And what we have seen the impact of that is that a lot of writers tend to experiment a lot of concepts before they really figure out, okay, this kind of a storyline is actually working for listeners and, and then you double down on that particular log line or storyline and then you go deeper into that show. Even when you're writing as a writer writing, you are at hundredth episode of the show and you realize that, you know what, when I uploaded episode 101, I saw a drop in listeners and I saw a lot of negative comments that, you know, maybe because users didn't like what I created. And a lot of writers are leveraging that data to course correct or to fix the show before users disappear from that show. So that's one that is how do you enable writers to understand the data and take actions and experiment? So sort of like making content creation a more iterative process rather than just taking a couple of years to write something. So that's one way we're leveraging data. The second one is as we scaling the Pocket FM platform Think of it, we have minute by minute retention data of over 50,000 shows. And this data can then be leveraged to train or fine tune fiction writing models to be able to get better at pattern matching, to get better at writing better quality fiction content, which then helps the writers write better. So I feel it's sort of like a flywheel if you think of it. Think about it, because you're helping writers leverage data to take action to write better. And then this data is also fueling your AI to be able to suggest better concepts to or suggest better tropes or episode refinements to the writer in the first place. So I think these two is how we are leveraging data in Pocket.
- [14:09]
A
That's awesome. Appreciate that. I really like how you give full autonomy to your creators. You know, you're not the gatekeepers, you're allowing creators to be them creative selves. A couple of things you highlighted there is that creative process obviously is iterative. So your platform starts to provide that data analysis back to the creators on how their first episodes are doing and how well they're being received by their audience, which I think is really cool. And of course scaling the platform, you know, with all that data you mentioned about 50,000 shows, they're leveraging machine learning AI to help your creators with suggestions on how to get better at what they're producing. And of course we want to see everybody be successful on your platform. And then the last question of the day, Rohan, with AI and IP converging, do you see a future where some of Pocket FM's most successful stories are co created by AI and humans?
- [15:00]
B
Absolutely, Brian. I mean the way, the way I'm thinking about entertainment evolving is so think of stories as the core of entertainment. Like a story in itself, like this 5 Empire system. It's a great story. And every other format is a wrapper around a story. So if you think about it like someone writes a great story and an audio version is in Pocket fm, which is an audio series, and you leverage AI to just convert the story into an audio show, then you leverage AI to convert the story into a comics or a webtool, then you leverage AI eventually to convert the story into a movie. So if you think from that lens, then story is the core of entertainment and everything else is a wrapper on top, an AI wrapper on top of it. So that's sort of how I'm seeing AI evolve. And broadly, I believe the synergy of IP plus AI will drive the content industry forward, which will sort of create a new ecosystem that stretches from content creation to user consumption. I think at a very fundamental level, I believe AI empowers ip, while IP provides scenarios for AI. And this interplay will have. This interplay between IP and AI will just have a huge impact on the entertainment industry in, I feel, the next couple of years, maybe sooner. So it's going to be interesting even for Pocket fm as we evolve to Pocket Entertainment, that is from just being an audio storytelling platform to be more AI in that entertainment platform where the IPs that get discovered in audio will then be adapted into comics and eventually into movies, but with AI.
- [16:43]
A
Amazing. I appreciate that. And foundationally you talked about this starts with a great story, right? Leveraging AI. And you've got that human AI connection in there, of course. But leveraging AI allows for an evolution which may turn it into a book or a comic book, or eventually it could turn out to be a blockbuster movie. And I think that's amazing. AI and IP will certainly have a major impact on the entertainment industry for sure, especially with all the work you're doing with your platform. So, Rohan, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [17:13]
B
Thanks, Lord Brian, for having me.
- [17:15]
A
Bye for now.