In the context of the pandemic, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth’s audio-only apps are fascinating. Now comes the difficult part: how to hold a global talk without side effects.

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Editor’s note: Because of the epidemic, many people are forced to stay in their own homes. The desire for interpersonal communication finally found a catharsis here in ClubHouse. With the pursuit of well-known venture capital institutions such as A16Z and celebrities such as Musk, this train that was originally intended to develop steadily began to rush at high speed. The founder’s dream of building a global-focused startup seems within reach, but its The speed of development may have been so fast that it is beyond the control of the founder. Well-known technology author Steven Levy used a long article to focus on the rise of ClubHouse. The original text was published on the “Connect” website under the title: The Buzzy, Chatty, Out-of-Control Rise of Clubhouse. For the length of the publication, we will publish it in 4 parts, this is the first part.

Key points:

ClubHouse has become a gossip place in the era of epidemic isolation

It took less than a year to achieve a valuation of 1 billion U.S. dollars, even Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. that year did not achieve it.

But the future of ClubHouse is still uncertain: it has not yet found a business model, and even the finished audio can spread hatred and chaos.

The gossip between journalists and the “pharmaceutical brothers”

The article in Elle magazine was shocking. It went live a few days before Christmas and told the story of a news reporter. Because of falling in love with her source, this reporter lost her husband and job, and this source happened to be one of the most annoying people in the world, Martin known as “Pharma Bro” Shkreli. Why did Bloomberg News reporter Christie Smythe abandon himself in “Brooklyn End”Beautiful petty bourgeoisie life” to pursue a seemingly inevitable romantic affair with a criminal who is known for raising the price of medicines by 5000%? Why did she tell her everything she knew as it was? I can’t wait to know this. Gossip. Many other people are the same. But when the epidemic spreads, the usual gossip gatherings are gone.

Unless you go to Clubhouse.

Within a few minutes after this article appeared, someone opened a “chat room” on the Clubhouse to discuss this matter. You must have heard that Clubhouse is an invitation-based audio social network that attracts millions of people who are eager to socialize and want to listen to other people’s endless chatter, just like Twitter, Facebook, and all the text of “Interview” magazine They all have the same vocal cords. I entered a chat room called “That Martin Shkreli Article” through the app on the iPhone. When I unmute and contribute to the chat, my profile picture thumbnail quickly upgraded from “listener” to “stage” “(Stage). I found that there are more than a dozen people like me who want to inquire about the relationship between Smythe and the pharmaceutical brothers. Maybe the whole thing is to make a movie deal? Is it a plan to help that wicked person be released? Everyone had a great chat.

Suddenly, a new avatar appeared on the “stage”: Christie Smythe himself arrived. Someone in the chat room knew her email address, sent her an invitation from ClubHouse, and then guided her to join the discussion. In the next hour, she answered some of the questions we asked, including venture capitalist Jason Calacanis, who used inappropriate and ambiguous questions like the prosecutor. He asked: “How did you feel when you kissed him?” Although we can’t see Smythe’s facial expressions or body language in a purely voice-only app, the language is naked—instinctive, subtle, and meaningful. The pause-the privacy that makes the discussion disturbingly private. It felt like a suspect in a suspense novel suddenly jumped out of the book, ordered a cup of tea, and asked you to interrogate her.

For this app that has only a short history of 1 year, the emergence of Christie Smythe is just one of the most impressive moments. There are other unforgettable moments, such as the well-rehearsed Clubhouse version of the musical “The Lion King”, the summit of famous hip-hop creators, and the appearance of Musk, which detonated with the influence of a royal wedding. The entire Internet. Thought leaders, politicians, and first-line celebrities have made headlines in countless ClubHouse chat rooms. There are also some chats that are more boring, such as deceptive get rich quick speeches, hysterical discussions on current affairs, etc.. Some of these discussions have become notorious, such as racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and false information. All of these have made everyone more curious about this app.

ClubHouse appeared at the right time. It provides natural dialogue and encounters for people trapped at home. For those who are tired of organizing and curating the Zoom background, the pure audio format is an advantage. Even if you can only use the iPhone, you can only use the invitation system, and it can’t stop its popularity. New users tend to be addicted, spending 20, 30, or even 40 hours on the app every week. There will be various languages ​​such as German and Greek in the chat room.

Contrary to the rules of Fight Club, people who go to ClubHouse do discuss ClubHouse. Talking all the time. Every Sunday, thousands of Clubhouse members enter Town Hall to chat with the two co-founders of the app, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. The chat topics include both feature previews and post-checks, and users will be addicted to talking about the future of Clubhouse. The level of analysis is not even comparable to the Super Bowl.

In these conversations, users have been trying to predict who will make money and influence the app. At the end of last year, VCs invested US$100 million in the company at a valuation of US$1 billion. (It took several years for Facebook, Google and Amazon to reach this valuation.) Naturally, after the news broke, the app itself opened several chat rooms to discuss these numbers. The general feeling is that the valuation given is too low. A professional investor said that he expects the company’s market value to reach 100 billion US dollars.

There is still a lot to do before any one of those hundreds of billions of dollars is realized. Clubhouse hasn’t paid a penny yet, and its business model (including eventually allowing everyone to pay to enter certain chat rooms, etc.) has not been confirmed. And it appeared at a time when our words were under unprecedented scrutiny. The founders of Clubhouse may have learned something from the wrong way Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube handle unpleasant content, but they may not be able to avoid this quagmire. Even audio that’s finished talking can spread hatred and chaos.

Davison and Seth are directly facing the toughest problem in the tech world. They must cross communities and social groups that have a lot of noise and lack common participation rules to encourage healthy real-time dialogue. With the advent of the challenge, it may be more difficult than offering courtesy to Martin Shkreli.

The past between Davison and Seth

Davison and Seth are entrepreneurs in their hearts. The 41-year-old Davison is a native of San Diego. He is childish and full of energy, and he behaves like a host of a children’s TV show. As long as he slightly agrees with any statement, he will easily yell “Yes!” to show his agreement. I have been chasing a dream for more than 10 years and probably won’t affect his mood, because now this dream is within reach: to build a well-known startup company that can change culture.

When he was a high school student in the mid-1990s, Davison went for an internship at a startup near his home. He was thinking at the time that I should do this too. Like many fans of Larry Page, he also went to Stanford University to study engineering. He went for an internship in a biotechnology laboratory, and then went to the consulting company Bain to find a job, but he had been planning how to start his own company. Later, he went back to Stanford University to get a business degree, and then went to Google for an internship. Later, a professor helped him find a job at Metaweb (a startup company that extracts information from the web to help computers understand the world better). When Google acquired the company in 2010, Davison chose to leave. He became a resident entrepreneur at the venture capital firm Benchmark, where he managed to figure out which of the 10 entrepreneurial ideas he should pursue. A year later, he thought he had found a winner among them.

This is an app called Highlight. Using the location of your mobile phone, it can help match accidental encounters by pointing out people nearby who have common friends or shared interests with you. When explaining his ideas to venture capitalist Andrew Chen in 2012, the VC was not only impressed by the idea, but also by the people who promoted it. Chen wrote in a later blog post: “It took me about 10 seconds to realize that he is one of the most charming and energetic founders I have seen for so long.” (Although (He didn’t invest) Just like Twitter 5 years ago, even though Highlight was launched only 6 weeks ago, it was already the darling of the South by Southwest conference that year. At that event, in an interview, Davison said: “Being able to come here and say:’This is my company. It is my job to make it successful, and what I do has a huge impact on this. Influence.'” Obviously, he thought he did it.

But the subsequent development of Highlight faltered. (One of the problems: asking it to find nearby friends will drain the iPhone’s battery.) This app finally came in 2015