Creator Last Clubhouse Townhall
Holding a weekly meeting is a great way to run a community.
That’s the premise of Clubhouse Townhall, the Creator First idea from Alpha Exploration Co’s Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, the founders of the Clubhouse Drop-In Audio app.
Most companies simply publish a blog and updated terms of service, but Clubhouse wants to be different. In addition to the regular Sunday townhall, he holds a weekly welcome room for new users that he believes is a great help to the community.
As the founders and people in charge of this app, Davison and Seth are wholly responsible for the way things are run. Clubhouse was valuated at $4 billion earlier this year, and I can’t help but wonder if these two noob entrepreneurs are capable of running such a business.
It reminds me a lot of the Silicon Valley TV show on HBO — in it, a fictional tech company called Pied Piper is built from the ground up in Silicon Valley. I’m also reminded of Mythic Quest on Apple TV Plus (and I often think of Anu Alturu as Poppy Li).
Davison has a really happy voice that belongs on Leave it to Beaver, and he is always pushing such a high energy sales pitch that I can’t ever trust him. He sounds like a nice guy, but there are just so many bad ideas on display every week in these townhalls.
The Creator First pilot season rated people on how they use the platform, and if that’s how we’re doing this, it’s only fair to flip the tables on you.
Let’s examine Clubhouse’s own Townhall to determine how it compares to the Creator First pilot season finalists.
Broadcasts/Podcasts vs Conversations
Besides the fact that Paul has the fakest voice I ever heard and is trying way too hard to sound excited, I don’t think he’s a competent leader at all. In fact, I’m the only person who attended all finalist shows, and your staff couldn’t even pretend it cared about this program.
While I was sitting in their pilot rooms, Clubhouse staff like Fadia and Anu were fawning over Nicki Minaj.
You started a program and then didn’t even support it, and that’s how I know that neither Paul nor Rohan is at all capable of running this company. A real CEO and executive leads by example, and we are actually seeing this happen. Everyone does follow Paul’s example, but it’s a really bad example to set.
I can’t imagine how Clubhouse convinces any brand to come on its platform and use its features when the CEO himself never does. Paul is terrified of talking to anybody, and he turns the Clubhouse Townhall into a stale, one-directional podcast because of it.
And unlike a podcast, I can’t speed this amateur hour up to 2x speed. Paul didn’t even give me the ability to listen to his boring podcast the way he listens to podcasts.
I’m sure Paul is a great guy — he sounds to me like a prepubescent teenager from the 1950s discovering something exciting and being unable to hold in his “zowie!”
But having worked in Corporate America and seen real leaders of real multi-billion-dollar companies, I think Paul is the most incompetent leader and the reason Clubhouse is failing right now. While he may love using the platform and get giddy like a child over it, I can’t stand listening to him because I know he’s completely full of shit.
The only person Paul Davison cares about is Paul Davison, and that’s obvious every townhall when he promotes the same users (News News News, his daily morning news show). Just about every townhall, Paul pitches an idea for a show he’d like to hear that already existed for a long time but he just didn’t know.
Paul is so interested in having fun on his platform and fanboying over celebrities like Tony Hawk that he’s not running this business. He’s just in it for the clout, and I don’t think Paul has even the first clue of what he’s doing.
That’s why Clubhouse needs a new leader that it won’t get. Because its investors a16z are just as incompetent and they’re all only looking out for themselves.
Why Townhalls Don’t Work
The reason a once-a-week townhall and a once-a-week welcome rooms don’t work was outlined in Loss and Gain. Those lazy Plastics were trying to hold support groups once every other week. But the thing is, people need support 24/7, and that’s true of Clubhouse too. You can’t just provide a once-a-week update — it needs to be accessible 24/7.
What you’ve set up here with these townhalls is a very bad and amplified version of the telephone game. If you’re not familiar with the game we all played in kindergarten, people pass a message and track how much it changes as it’s passed on.
They’re also known as Chinese whispers, which is fitting, since your servers are set up in China, where they’re probably recording more than you are. The game works because we all know that the message decays when being passed.
Children know this Paul — why don’t you as a grown ass man?
Documentation is how you hold people accountable. It gives people a repeatable process. Every business has documentation, and Clubhouse isn’t pioneering anything by not having proper documentation. Instead, the platform is slowly killing itself and spreading a toxic culture that can only be blamed on the people at the top.
There are over 10 million people on Clubhouse, and only 8,000 can fit in a room. That means that Paul is personally guaranteeing that Clubhouse always works like a bad game of telephone.
Don’t even get me started on how these townhalls never address real user problems. Instead of doing their job, everyone at Clubhouse is more focused on how to talk to us about why they’re not doing it.
Final Thoughts on Clubhouse Townhall
The Clubhouse Townhall is the single worst example of what a Clubhouse room should and could be. It’s a stale, one-directional podcast that involves nobody from the community. The reason it involves nobody from the community is because Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison lives in a bubble.
Clubhouse is an isolated platform in which everyone at a16z gets promoted above everyone else. They’re more “famous” on Clubhouse than anywhere else in the world, and they love it.
Paul sounds like 1950s sitcom caricature because he loves using his platform to meet celebrities. He loves getting on stage to tell Bill Gates he feels like Clippy and create awkward silences. He likes having users perform for him and feeling popular. He wants all these things but he doesn’t want to actually put in the work.
Like everyone else on Clubhouse, Paul and Rohan are full of shit. A once-a-week townhall and welcome room that don’t use the platform’s features? How can you convince a brand to onboard and use features you’re not even using?
Every week, the Clubhouse Townhall reminds us how poor of a leader Paul is. We need documentation to hold him accountable. He may be a nice guy and did a great job with $1 million Clubhouse, but he’s entirely too incompetent to run a $4 billion Clubhouse.
This platform outgrew Davison’s ability to lead. He needs to be replaced. In fact, everyone in charge of Clubhouse does, because the leadership on this platform is the worst I ever saw in my life.
Creator First isn’t the pilot. It’s Paul making the same mistakes that burned all his money in November. He learned nothing.
Final Grade: D-
And if you want to see how this garbage fire compares to the talented Clubhouse creators being exploited by this cult leader Davison, here’s the report card on all Creator First pilots this year.
#HASHITOUT — D
Maze Runnerz — A-
She Bites — A
Veterans Network — Classified
Poetry in Motion — A
The Iron Mics — C-
Loss & Gain — C
NNPR — A+
UFOlogy — B-
Shift Happens — C+
Be Well, Sis — A-
Nightmare Fuel — F
Stories from the DB Room — Pass
Supermoms — A
Command Your Brand — C-
Mind to Mind — F
Are You Tripping?! — A+
Sex Profiteers — B-
The Pop Spot — A-
Jury Duty — A
Bippity Boppity Who — A+
Comedy Court — B-
Clubhouse Squares! — C+
Positively Sex! — A
Sex, Drugs, & Magical Thinking — A
#Hairology — C+
Sacred Realms — A
Against All Odds — A
Letters to My Younger Self — A-
Frontier Psychiatrists Daily — A
Inside K-Pop — A
The Global Lowdown — A+
Serial Killer Speed Dating — C-
Beauty Headlines — A-
The Salty Vagabonds — B+
Career Crush — A
Psychic Pool Party — B-
“The Lobby” — C+
Dingers — B-
No Comprende Espanol
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