4 takeaways from our 3 years working with Anchor

By Hadley Harris, Founding General Partner, Eniac Ventures

Today, we’re announcing that our portfolio company Anchor has agreed to be acquired by Spotify in a significant acquisition. In the three short years since we led their seed round, Anchor has created significant value, becoming the dominant platform for creating, distributing and monetizing podcasts. As of January 2019, Anchor powers 40% of all new podcasts.

We led Anchor’s seed round in 2015 because we believed audio was an underserved form of content and a platform that enabled people to easily create and distribute podcasts was a natural way to address that unmet opportunity. While huge platforms had been built around photos (Instagram), video (YouTube) and text (Twitter), there wasn’t a platform that let users share audio as a way of communicating and expressing themselves.

My partners at Eniac and I have thoroughly enjoyed working closely with Mike Mignano, Nir Zicherman, and the incredibly talented team they’ve built. We are thrilled that Anchor will continue to execute on their vision of democratizing podcasts.

Reflecting on our time with Anchor, there are four key takeaways we feel will continue to drive how we work with founders.