This Ex-Googler Sells Her Half-Million Dollar Home to Build a Podcast Mega-Platform
How a founder battled depression, risked everything, and is making bold predictions for the future of audio
Renee Wang was born as an only child during China’s one-child-per-family policy, a.k.a. the ‘loneliest generation,’ according to The Guardian.
At 12, she attended a boarding school in the rural countryside outside Beijing with 75 kids in each classroom, showers once a month, and no phones.
Depression
For three years, she faced loneliness and depression. The other kids entered the school with 16–17 classmates from the same village. As the only girl from her city, she spoke a different dialect.
Despite a growing sense of isolation, Renee had the highest scores in the class. She wanted to leave. But one teacher told her if she left she would’ve been hated. He shamed her into staying so that the school looked better with her high scores.
Renee, as she put it, “solved the problem” of isolation by politicking her way into the graces of the three social circles of the school: the “mafia”, the good students, and the misfits.
She won over the rough-and-tumble mafia gang members, tutored the good students, and protected the misfits using her leverage with the mafia group.
In high school, her depression grew worse. This continued for ten years and ultimately became the reason why she chose psychology as a major.
“I wanted to study myself and learn why I was depressed,” she said.
Code
One night in college, her ex-boyfriend who was a computer science major had a coding assignment due the following morning. He was struggling to debug a Visual Basic game and so he called Renee for help. She never coded before but obliged.
Renee downloaded a VB environment and nestled into a 24/7 coffee shop with her computer. After hours and hours of Google-searching, she finished the assignment at 4:00 a.m.
“Coding gave me a sense of achievement and self-esteem,” she said.
Soon other computer science friends asked her for help on homework projects. The more she did it, the more Renee found she was good at programming and enjoyed it. So she asked herself, “Maybe I can make money from this?”
During her junior and senior years in college, she began forming an agency that built CRMs, ERPs, and websites for clients.
After college
After college, she saw how introverted she was. So she challenged herself by joining a company with a poor reputation as a salesperson. Most of her friends joined technology companies. She sold educational consulting services that helped students prepare for significant exams like the SAT and GMAT. She earned $200/month.
By sleeping in a sleeping bag on the office couch and watching how the top salespeople performed, she sold more in the first month than others sold in the first year.
Her sales secret: data and details.
Google was her dream employer, but she didn’t speak a word of English, a requirement for all Google employees. When an invitation to interview came through, she quit a second job at a mobile analytics startup to prepare for the interview. She studied a seven-page paper that her friend translated — English on one side of the page, Mandarin on the other. She taught herself English over three months.
The day the interview came, she didn’t get past the first round.
She slept in a friends dorm because she had no savings. In the suite bathroom, she’d ask the computer science majors for referrals to Google. She applied for three jobs at a time, changing her name every time. “I was rejected more times than I can remember,” she said.
It took eight months to get in.
Meanwhile, she was turning down offers from Baidu, Tencent, and other top tech companies in China. She wanted Google.
One day she was in a final interview with Tencent discussing salary when she heard Google was at a job fair at a nearby university. She excused herself from the interview and took a taxi to the job fair with a resume in hand.
Six months later, she was rejected again, for being “too junior.”
Then the software giant Oracle called and offered her a job. Desperate and poor, she settled and accepted the position in 2011.
On her first day at Oracle, she gets a call from human resources at Google. The person asked for a “Renee Wang” (her real name is “Wang Xiaoyu”) and offered her a job as an assistant. She accepted and departed her job at Oracle in less than 24 hours.
The idea for CastBox
Over the next four years at Google, Renee worked her way up to account manager with a focus on mobile monetization. The search giant moved her around to Ireland and then Japan.
At the Google Japan office, her commute was an hour each way. As a person who is “obsessive about productivity”, she used the time to listen to spoken audio and practice her English and Japanese.
“It took me just as long to find good audio content as it did to listen to it,” she said. “It took hours.”
Itching to get back to coding, she quit her job in 2015 to fix this problem; to build a platform that made audio content easier to search.
“I’m not a side project person,” she said. “‘All in’ is the only Texas Hold ’Em play I know,” she said with a smile.
She built the platform in four days. In early January 2016, when it was time to upload it to the Google Play store, she had to come up with a name.
In typical, logical Renee Wang fashion, the name CastBox came from wanting to have a name that started with A, B, or C since these letters are at the beginning of the alphabet and tend to be at the top of lists. From there, she sandwiched the word “broadcast” with “box.”
Within 30 days, over 500,000 users downloaded CastBox and she knew she had found a market need.
But the numbers weren’t enough. She needed to understand the user base more. However, audience insights cost money and she was running low on funds.
So in March, she sold her house in Beijing for $500,000 to pay for the startup’s expenses, including Adwords and making new hires.
“I felt nothing when I sold the house,” she said. “Selling the house gave me a better version of myself. That’s my safety. Industry knowledge is worth more to me than a house.”
With the new funding, she learned that users were spending an average of a half hour in the app every day.
“Attention equals money,” she said. If you can get people to spend time in your app, you know you have something valuable.
In two months, investors came knocking.
In one half hour meeting, she signed a term-sheet for a $1 million investment to begin building the iOS app. By mid-2017, CastBox raised a total of $16 million in funding and registered seven million users. By March 2018, CastBox grew to 15 million users.
How is CastBox different from other podcasting apps?
Apple and Google have their own native podcast apps. Why try to beat the giants at their own game?
Renee pointed out two differentiating factors she and her San Francisco startup are betting on:
- Platform agnostic — CastBox works on any device whereas Android users don’t have access to the App Store and iOS users don’t have access to the Play Store. CastBox works on any web, mobile, or voice platform, including Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, Android Auto, and iOS CarPlay.
- CastBox is the only platform with in-audio search — Audio has always been a black box. Unlike text-based content, where Google is king, audio content is unreadable and search results only surfaced words in the title and meta description. With in-audio search, which the company launched in October 2017, CastBox transcribes each recording into text and indexes the content for up-to-the-minute search results.
Predictions for the future of audio
With advancements in natural language processing, voice tech is surging. Some of Renee’s predictions surprised me.
- Get ready to have Alexa, or a cousin from another company, in your car.
- By 2020, we’ll be consuming 10x more data compared to 2017.
- Soon, we’ll be talking to the internet just as much as we type into it.
- With in-audio search, there won’t be as much reliance on podcast subscriptions, just search. When we want to know something on the web, we usually start with a Google search. When we want to research something, but in audio content, we’ll start with a CastBox search, allegedly.
A lot remains to be seen with the young audio startup, but as one of the most ambitious female founders I’ve met, Renee’s stoic tenacity may be the ticket needed to capitalize on the current podcasting wave sweeping the digisphere.
3 Key Takeaways from Renee’s Story:
- What can you do that will give you a sense of achievement and self-esteem? For Renee, it was coding. Find something you’re good at and become even better. Use it to help people (e.g., friends stuck on a project) and you may find a happier version of yourself.
- Attention equals money. Renee knew she had found product-market fit when users were spending a half hour a day in her app. What can you do to get users to spend more time on your platform (using your service or product)? How can you add value to increase users’ time-in-app or time-on-site?
- “Selling the house gave me a better version of myself. That’s my safety. Industry knowledge is worth more to me than a house.” Renee was willing to break away from traditional thinking to fuel her vision. What’s holding you back from learning more in your field? Maybe it’s time to say no to something normal (e.g., a house) to realize a dream.
Want to give CastBox a try? Start with my channel, Adventures in Entrepreneurship, which records my Medium posts with professional voice over.
