Clubhouse, a tiny audio chat app, breaks through as new hot thing
SAN FRANCISCO» Robert Van Winkle, who is better known as rapper Vanilla Ice, held court online earlier this month with more than 1,000 fans.
In a rambling conversation, Van Winkle praised the poses of the 1990s band Bell Biv DeVoe and demurred when asked about his relationship with Madonna. He dispensed advice on real estate and life, saying, “You got to protect your happiness to protect your life.” At one point, an attendee serenaded the gathering with an a cappella version of his hit “Ice Ice Baby.”
Several hours later, Van Winkle confessed that he needed to leave before the mother of his child got angry.
It was the kind of freewheeling and unpredictable event that has been happening around the clock on Clubhouse, an 11month-old social media app that has exploded in popularity with the tastemakers of tech and popular culture. It is quickly becoming a town square for debates over free speech and politics.
The app, which lets people gather in audio chat rooms to discuss different topics, has been downloaded nearly 4 million times in the last month alone, according to Apptopia. Public
figures as various as Elon Musk, Ai Weiwei, Lindsay Lohan and Roger Stone have joined it, and the unconstrained conversations it has enabled have incurred the wrath of China, which banned Clubhouse earlier this month.
In the process, Clubhouse has generated debate about whether audio is the next wave of social media, moving digital connections beyond text, photos and videos to oldfashioned voice. In thousands of chat rooms every day, Clubhouse’s users have conducted unfettered conversations on subjects as varied as astrophysics, geopolitics, queer representation in Bollywood and even cosmic poetry.
“This is a major change in how the social internet works,” said Dave Morin, who founded the social network Path more than a decade ago and has invested in Clubhouse. “I believe it’s a new chapter.”
Clubhouse’s trajectory has been rapid — it had just a few thousand users in May — even though the app is invitation-only and not widely available. The invitations are so coveted that they have been listed on eBay for as much as $89. Media companies such as Barstool Sports have also set up Clubhouse accounts.
The attention has overwhelmed the tiny San Francisco startup, which has around a dozen employees and was founded by two entrepreneurs, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. While Clubhouse raised more than $100 million in funding last month and was valued at $1 billion, it has struggled to handle the surging traffic. On Feb. 10, the app crashed. Also, Facebook and Twitter are working on similar products to compete with it.
Clubhouse is also contending with rising complaints about harassment, misinformation and privacy. In one incident last month, a user promoted conspiracy theories about coronavirus vaccines and discouraged people from getting the shots, leading to harassment of a female doctor.
This month, German and Italian regulators publicly questioned whether Clubhouse’s data practices complied with European data protection laws. China blocked the app after political conversations popped up on it outside the country’s tight internet controls.
Clubhouse is following a classic Silicon Valley startup path that social media companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook have also trod: viral growth followed by the messy issues that come with it. It is the first American social media company to break out in years. The last global social networking hit was TikTok, a Chinese-owned app that catapulted 15second videos into the cultural discourse.
Davison, 40, and Seth, 36, declined to be interviewed. In a Clubhouse discussion Feb. 14, Davison said the company was rushing to hire, build new features and release an Android version of the app.
“It’s just been crazy, we’ve had so many people joining,” he said.
Davison and Seth, who both attended Stanford University, are repeat entrepreneurs. Davison created several social networking apps, including Highlight, which allowed users to see and message people nearby. Seth was a Google engineer and co-founded a company, Memry Labs, which built apps. Those startups were either bought or shut down.
In 2019, the two men — who had met through tech circles in 2011 — built a prototype podcasting app, Talkshow, which they called their “one last try.” But Talkshow felt too much like a formal broadcast. so they decided to add a way for people to spontaneously join the conversation, Davison said in an interview with the “Hello Monday” podcast last month.
Last March, Davison and Seth started Clubhouse. They added a way for multiple speakers to broadcast at once and allowed people to bounce between digital rooms as if they were going from stage to stage at a music festival or business conference. To avoid overwhelming their startup, they doled out invitations slowly.
The app caught on as people sought new ways to connect with one another in the pandemic. Some of its earliest users were Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen and his business partner Ben Horowitz, who introduced Clubhouse to their networks. Oprah Winfrey, MC Hammer and John Mayer joined.
“There’s this feeling of access that’s really hard to replicate,” said Andy Annacone, an investor at TechNexus Venture Collaborative, which operates a fund that invested in Clubhouse.
TikTok influencers, YouTube stars and cast members of “The Bachelor” soon became active. It also spawned its own stars, with some people on its “suggested user list” amassing more than 1 million followers. In December, Clubhouse unveiled an invitation-only “creator pilot program” to help so-called power users make money on the app. “People are already building brands,” said Sheel Mohnot, 38, founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, who has 1.2 million followers on the app.
Davison and Seth have said the company plans to make money through ticketed events, subscriptions and tipping, but will not sell ads.
The growth has been accompanied by criticism that women and people of color are frequent targets of abuse and that discussions involving anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism and misogyny are on the rise.
In a Clubhouse discussion, Davison said the company has explicit rules against spreading misinformation, hate speech, abuse and bullying. The startup said last year that it was adding advisers and safety features and empowering moderators.