Startup!

I’m pretty into podcasts, and one of my favorites is StartUp, the podcast about a, you guessed it, startup business. In an incredibly transparent and entertaining series of episodes, the podcast follows the entrepreneur and podcaster, Alex Blumberg of This American Life and Planet Money fame, as he builds his startup from the ground up into a media company (Gimlet) that produces podcasts that are downloaded 12 million times…per month!

After the startup turned into a full fledged company, they continued to produce the StartUp podcast, though turning their focus to other people and startups. Their first forray into other startups focused on a company trying to create the Uber of dating apps. Later they documented the story of Dov Charney, the former founder of American Apparel as he tried to come back from his stunning and scandal filled fall. The season just before their current season they followed the intriguing venture capitalist Arlan Hamilton, as she attempts to build a venture capital firm from scratch (i.e. no trust funds here).

I greatly enjoy StartUp, so I was delighted when I found out that this season would be about church planting. It’s a natural fit: like entrepreneurs, church planters start out with nothing but a vision, and have a limited amount of time and resources to get that vision off the ground. But still, I wasn’t expecting a media company like Gimlet to cover the world of church planting any time soon. 

I am a little over the halfway point now, and for the most part I have been satisfied with what Gimlet has done. The church and planters that they focus on are interesting, although probably not the most representative of your average church plants (a biracial couple planting in urban Philadelphia). And it’s informative to see a large, non-Christian media company’s take on what it’s like behind the scenes with a church plant. I guess my only disappointment with the podcast is that it doesn’t spend all that much time looking into the broader, in many cases more problematic trends of the church planting world. The church and couple StartUp follows are in many ways really exceptional and inspiring which is great, but that keeps the podcast from having to deal too much with the dark side of trying to build an self sustaining (i.e. self funding) organization from scratch. 

With all that said if you’re looking for a new podcast, you won’t regret tuning into StartUp!