Hit Start Media is my latest investment for K9. Historically, I have avoided content companies. In fact, if you look at my investment criteria you’ll notice that media is filtered out. But Hit Start isn’t just a media company; it’s an enterprise services company. Media just happens to be its product. 

Hit Start Media is a startup that helps enterprise companies “Own your narrative.” My thesis here is that there is a transition happening in media, where more and more media and corporate communications are going to be direct from the company to its audience rather than being intermediated by the traditional press and media sources. The audience can be either external (customers, partners, developers) or internal (employees). The idea is that the company can very easily and quickly create high-quality podcasts for distributing to these audiences as first-party content.

Theo Miller, the founder of Hit Start Media was an early Carta employee. He has a background in theater and storytelling and left Carta to start his own podcasting operation. He has already done a series of such first-party content podcasts with Carta. They have one series that is targeting new fund managers (helps Carta bring in new fund administration customers) and one called Execute which tells the backstory of Carta. You can find all of these and more on the Hit Start Media website.

Through tech-enabled services, Hit Start helps companies of all sizes build their own first-party media networks. And to that end, their own podcast Tech Tmrw launches in early 2022. Above is a clip of me and Theo Miller, founder and CEO of Hit Start Media, having a lively discussion about the role of data and instinct in product development.