Paul Davison on Clubhouse: "Our goal is to give everyone instant access to meaningful conversations and human connections."

Paul Davison and his cofounder, Rohan Seth, are in a really crazy career moment right now. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, they’ve been in the game for awhile. They’ve tried some things that have worked, and many things that haven’t. Then last spring, they launched a social app that took off. It’s called Clubhouse. It’s an audio social network--think WhatsApp meets Radio-- and more than two million people have signed up so far, according to Paul.

Clubhouse is growing fast. I didn’t open it for one day last week, and when I opened it again, 45 people I knew had joined.

Imagine for a second if two million people moved to a piece of land that had never been inhabited before and tried to set up a city. Build the houses. Make the laws. Develop the schools and parks. Decide who gets to be influential and how to protect people. That’s what’s happening right now over at Clubhouse. 

So, I invited Paul on the show to tell us about what it’s like to design a social app as it goes viral—and what he hopes Clubhouse can become. You can download the episode to hear about it, or listen to it below. Then, please, share your own thoughts and tag them #HelloMonday so I can jump into the conversation.

??Here are some highlights….

On communications technology: "I do often think that the best communication technologies, the most impactful ones that have ever been created have effectively taken something that we all love doing and made it dramatically easier to do. They sort of change physics."

On what makes the best social software: "I would say you want to look for opportunities where you could do even better than you could do in real life. So I think some of the best social products allow you to do things that you would like to do in real life, but that aren't even possible to do in real life."

On being invitation-only: "We've just been trying to scale it in a very measured way because we're building Clubhouse for everyone. We were so excited to have it be wide open and have the whole world be in there. But we just want to make sure that each time a new wave of users joins, the experience for everyone who's already on the app gets better, not worse."

On diversity: "In the early days, we said, 'It's really important to us that this is a welcoming, diverse space. Please help us with that. ...Please invite more women, please invite more underrepresented minorities, please invite people from other parts of the country. Please invite people that you think bring a different perspective.' And, and I can't even tell you how, how helpful that was and how helpful they were, you know, in allowing us to do that."

On moderation tools: "When it comes to moderation tools - the first principle that we always think about is “creator first,” we always say creator first, make sure the creator is always in control. And when we say creator, we mean creator with a lowercase C— it's really just the person who starts the room."

On keeping things safe: "To us, we break it down into three buckets. We think about the people that we have internally to come at this with expertise and also fresh perspectives who can really spend all of their time thinking about this. That means everything from our community guidelines in terms of service or privacy policies that are visible to the users and our internal playbooks and policies for how to deal with incidents that they ever arise. And the third thing is really product. That means being really thoughtful about product features that you have, and that people can use to ensure that they have a good experience on the app. It also means having internal tools that can detect if abuse ever takes place and make sure that you're swiftly taking action on it."

On what it takes to be successful on Clubhouse: "Moderating a conversation is a different skill. It's not like posting texts or posting a photo. You're bringing people together. You're managing personalities. To some people that comes really naturally. They're just great hosts naturally. To most people, it's a learned skill."

On how Clubhouse plans to support creators: "There are so many people in the world who are smart, who are funny, who are creative, who are great at bringing people together. And we want to build in tools that allow them to get paid directly by listeners who are happy to pay them for the experiences that they are creating. So that might be subscriptions. It might be paid events. It might be tipping. That's really what we're focused on when it comes to building out our business."

?? Office Hours: Taking your questions

How do you use social software to build intentional communities? It's a question that has been at the center of my reporting for two decades—ever since the days of Friendster and MySpace. Clubhouse has us thinking about it with newly. I hope you’ll let me our Hello Monday producer Sarah Storm to discuss on this week's Office Hours. We go live every Wednesday at 3pm EST to talk about the week's episode, get ideas for the future shows, and generally catch up. We've got a steady group of listeners who join us every week and quite a few people who pop in occasionally. Sometimes we invite guests; sometimes we keep it very informal. You can RSVP below or email us for a link at [email protected].