The Jay Kim Show #123: Jay Kim (transcript)

Jay:  Happy Holidays, podcast listeners. Hope you’ve all been well and having a great holiday season. Today’s episode won’t feature a guest. We’re going to have a short radio show to review the end of the year, and I have a few announcements to make for next year before we sign off and let everyone enjoy their family times and the holidays.

First and foremost, I wanted to take a moment, obviously, to thank all of my listeners, again, for your continued support. It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years now since I first launched the Jay Kim Show here in Hong Kong, and I can tell you with confidence that it’s been the single greatest thing that I’ve done for my business, my career, and my network in the last decade, hands down. Of course, none of this would have been possible without you, the listener. The feedback and support I’ve gotten over the last two years has been nothing short of remarkable — mostly positive but seen negative too. And I actually welcome all comments, suggestions, and critiques because, quite frankly, this show is for you guys, and without an audience, I would have no show. So I’m here to serve you as best as I can, and I hope to continue to bring as much value as possible to you in the coming year, 2019.

On that note, I’d like to talk about a couple changes that I’ll be making starting in the new year with regards to the regular programming schedule of the show. When I first launched this podcast, I made it a goal of mine to produce a weekly episode that would provide as much value to the listener as I possibly could. A lot of people advised me against doing a weekly show due to the workload and suggested that I do a monthly podcast to start off with or to do seasons, which is sort of a new format that a lot of podcasters are using these days to publish. What they do is they’ll do a season of 10 to 12 episodes, and they’ll record and release that in one go, similar to a TV series, and then take a break in between seasons over the course of the year.

So I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and after 122 episodes published over the last two years of the show, I’ve gotten to a point where a weekly release has really forced me to compromise the quality of the show guests and the value that I feel that I’m delivering to you, the audience, which is the one thing that I promised myself, from the very beginning, before I even started this podcast, to never compromise.

So from the first episode which I ever recorded — which was about two and a half years ago, and that was with author Ryan Holiday; this was back in the summer of 2016 — the one overarching goal of the podcast was to always be providing value. As the show grew and my subscriber base grew, the show took on two major themes. The first theme was to interview high-profile or celebrity-type entrepreneurs with the goal of sort of teasing out advice for young aspiring entrepreneurs in my audience and startup founders.

The second main theme and goal or purpose, if you will, of my podcast, was to profile innovative and up-and-coming startups within the region of Asia. This was a way that I felt that I could help showcase and market these companies for free and also a way for me to give back to the community because I’m a huge advocate of the startup community here in Asia, particularly here in Hong Kong. Finally, it also gave the people in the audience and some of the potential investors a good overview of the investment opportunities that are available for us out here in Asia.

So you’ll notice that in this past year, 2018, I’ve actually put a lot more focus on profiling companies — Asian startups, Hong Kong startups here — rather than actually seeking out “celebrity” entrepreneurs.

Going forward and to that end, my core mission is not going to change. I’m going to continue to focus on these very two distinct aspects of my show. And based on the feedback that I’ve gotten from a large number of you guys, my audience, this is exactly what people want.

So in 2019, I also plan on doing more shows that focus on general investing, including things like public markets, asset allocation, wealth creating, and that sort of thing. You guys will know by now that my day job is I work at a hedge fund, so I look at markets all day long, and as opposed to just solely focusing on entrepreneurship and startups, I thought it would be kind of neat — and I’ve had some requests — to talk about more general investing and markets and that sort of thing. So I plan to add some of those types of episodes in, and I also plan on doing some radio show formats where maybe I’ll bring one or two of my business partners on the show, and we can discuss broader market themes, whether it is in public market investing or in early-stage venture capital, or private equity investing. And we can talk about investment ideas and different ways to grow your wealth.

Of course, I’ll do the usual peppering in a few of these celebrity-type entrepreneurs because that always keeps things interesting and exciting for the audience.

This is all based on listener feedback from the audience. I basically want to enhance the overall offering of the Jay Kim Show.

Finally, you might have noticed the new introduction that we began with, a new theme song, and it’s just been redone to sort of expand the offering. Suffice it to say, I’m very, very excited to jump into 2019 with a brand new lineup of outstanding guests and, of course, the original goal stays the same. It’s the goal of providing you knowledge and actionable insights with every single episode.

So looking forward to 2019, I’m going to slow it down a bit on the quantity, but I’m also going to crank it up a bit on the quality. I’m going to push up the publishing scheduling to every other week or maybe even less, depending on the quests that I can curate. But the goal is, again, I want to provide the highest amount of value to my audience and the highest quality content overall, and I don’t want to be forced to just publish weekly episodes if I don’t feel like the guests that I’m showcasing provide any value to you guys. You’ll be hearing from me regularly, and I hope you continue to get a disproportionate amount of value from my show versus the time that you spend listening to it.

So that’s about it for the week and for the year. And once again, I want to wish all of my listeners a very happy holiday season. Please take some time to be thankful for the year and spend some time with your loved ones and be kind to those around you. We’re going to be offline for the next two weeks and back on the air on January 7th with a very special guest that I think will help everyone focus and hit the new year running. Thank you once again for all your support and constant feedback that you’ve provided. Happy Holidays, and we’ll see you in the new year.