# Clubhouse **Clubhouse** is a live, audio-only social app. Users drop into "rooms," a few speakers talk on a virtual stage, and everyone else listens. It launched on the iPhone in spring 2020, invite-only, just as COVID-19 lockdowns sent people indoors. Within a year it was valued at about $4 billion. Within three years it had cut more than half its staff and turned itself into a voice-messaging app for friends. It wasn't a podcast app. In its first form, nothing was published: rooms were live and then gone. That design is why it matters here. For about a year, Clubhouse was where Silicon Valley's investor class, led by its biggest backer [[Andreessen Horowitz]], talked to large audiences live, on its own terms, often about the press, with no reporter guaranteed a seat. The app faded. That way of talking to the public didn't. It moved to [[Twitter]] Spaces and became part of how campaigns are launched. See [[Social Audio]]. ## Origins and money Clubhouse was built by [[Paul Davison]] and [[Rohan Seth]], two Stanford-trained serial founders of social apps. Their company, Alpha Exploration Co., was set up in early 2020. The product began as a podcasting tool called Talkshow before becoming Clubhouse. The money came fast and almost entirely from one firm: | Round | Date | Lead | Reported valuation | |---|---|---|---| | Series A | May 2020 | [[Andrew Chen]], [[Andreessen Horowitz]] | about $100 million | | Series B | January 2021 | Andrew Chen, Andreessen Horowitz | about $1 billion | | Series C | April 2021 | Andrew Chen, Andreessen Horowitz, with [[DST Global]], [[Tiger Global]] and Elad Gil | about $4 billion | The Series A, $10 million in new money plus about $2 million for existing shares, came when the app had fewer than 5,000 beta testers and no public release. Forbes reported that Andreessen Horowitz beat Benchmark, Davison's former firm, for the deal. In early 2021 [[Twitter]] held talks to buy Clubhouse at around $4 billion. The talks stalled, and the Series C priced the company at that figure anyway. Twitter built its own version instead. ## The room where the press wasn't From the start the audience was venture capitalists, founders and their followers. That shaped what got said. - **July 2020: the Lorenz room.** After a Twitter fight with New York Times tech reporter [[Taylor Lorenz]], the investor [[Balaji Srinivasan]] joined a Clubhouse room she was in. She left, and the room turned to discussing her. Several Andreessen Horowitz figures were among the participants, along with Felicia Horowitz, wife of co-founder [[Ben Horowitz]]. Speakers asked whether Lorenz was playing "the woman card." Srinivasan said that if she wasn't afraid of a brown man on the street she shouldn't be afraid of one in Clubhouse. He then offered Bitcoin prizes for memes about the episode. Vice reported the conversation in detail from audio of it, and the industry's quarrel with its own press corps went public. - **Blocking reporters.** [[Marc Andreessen]] blocked most of the tech press on Twitter and then on Clubhouse. On Clubhouse, a user blocked by a speaker can't enter that speaker's room, so rooms where Andreessen spoke were closed to the reporters he had blocked. Platformer's Casey Newton was one; The Information's founder Jessica Lessin complained publicly about being another. - **February 2021: the misheard slur.** Lorenz tweeted that Andreessen had used a slur in a room about the WallStreetBets and GameStop frenzy. Another speaker had said it. She deleted the tweet and apologized. The episode became a talking point for critics of the press, [[Glenn Greenwald]] among them, who cast reporters on Clubhouse as eavesdroppers. The point isn't who was right in each quarrel. The app's biggest funder, and the people around it, used the product to hold large semi-public conversations that the press could only report on secondhand, and sometimes not at all. ## The Musk night On the night of January 31, 2021, [[Elon Musk]] went on *The Good Time Show*, a late-night Clubhouse program hosted by the married tech executives [[Sriram Krishnan]] and Aarthi Ramamurthy. It was about three weeks old. The room hit Clubhouse's 5,000-listener cap almost at once. Overflow rooms filled too, and fans rebroadcast the audio on YouTube. Partway through, Musk began questioning [[Robinhood]] CEO Vlad Tenev about why Robinhood had stopped customers from buying GameStop shares days earlier, at the height of the [[GameStop Short Squeeze]]. TechCrunch noted that some listeners saw the night as a public-relations stunt. Andreessen Horowitz had invested in both Robinhood and Clubhouse, and Tenev's arrival looked coordinated. Either way, it was the app's biggest night. Clubhouse shot to the top of the startup charts and people scrambled for invitations. It also set a pattern. A billionaire questioned a CEO about a market crisis, live, in front of tens of thousands, on a platform owned by an investor in both companies, with no reporter needed. In December 2024, Trump named Krishnan his senior AI policy adviser. ## Moderation problems Because rooms were live and, at first, not kept, policing them was hard. - **Yom Kippur, September 2020.** A room called "Anti-Semitism and Black Culture," with more than 300 people, turned into a run of antisemitic tropes, including claims that Jews control the banks. It ran on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Bloomberg reported that Andreessen and Ben Horowitz were among the listeners. Clubhouse published a statement condemning hate speech and promised moderator training and better reporting tools. The [[Anti-Defamation League]] said the setup still left targets with little recourse. Clubhouse kept a temporary recording of a room and saved it only if someone reported an incident while the room was live. - **April 2021.** Clubhouse shut down several rooms after complaints about discussions of "Jewish privilege." See [[Antisemitism]] and [[Content Moderation]]. ## A window into China, closed in a week In early February 2021, thousands of users in mainland China joined Clubhouse. It wasn't yet blocked there, and they used it to talk directly with people in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Uyghur diaspora. Topics included the Xinjiang camps, the Hong Kong national security law and Taiwan's status. Some rooms drew more than 4,000 listeners. On February 8, 2021, the app went dark in China, added to the [[Great Firewall]]. Human Rights Watch called those few days "a brief but marvelous moment" of free expression. It is a useful contrast. In the same weeks, the same product carried billionaires' talk past the American press and gave ordinary Chinese users a rare space beyond their state's control. It was shut down only where a government could reach the network. ## Collapse and pivot The boom didn't outlast the lockdowns. By mid-2021, Twitter Spaces, Facebook, Spotify, Reddit and others had copied the format, and Clubhouse didn't reach Android phones until May 2021. Clubhouse made some job cuts in 2022. On April 27, 2023, Davison and Seth announced they were cutting more than half the staff. They wrote that as the world opened up after COVID, it had become harder for people to find their friends on the app and fit long conversations into their days. In September 2023 the company relaunched as an app for voice messages between friends. By the end of that year Facebook, Reddit, Spotify and Amazon had closed their live audio products. Twitter's Spaces survived. Clubhouse is still available in the app stores, run by Alpha Exploration Co. and selling a paid "Clubhouse Plus" tier. It's no longer a political venue. ## Why it's on the map - **The incubator of the "go direct" habit.** Clubhouse was the first place where the [[Andreessen Horowitz]] circle, [[Balaji Srinivasan]], [[Marc Andreessen]] and their peers, practiced at scale what became a standing doctrine: skip the press and talk to the audience directly, in a room you control. The same instinct runs through the [[All-In Podcast]], [[David Sacks]]'s [[Callin]] and, later, a16z-funded media of its own. - **A Musk–Krishnan link.** *The Good Time Show* is where [[Sriram Krishnan]] built ties with [[Elon Musk]]. He joined Musk's Twitter takeover team in 2022 and was named to a White House AI post in December 2024. See [[Musk Twitter-X Acquisition]]. - **The template for campaign launches.** Clubhouse failed as a business, but the format succeeded in politics once Musk owned the biggest version of it: [[Ron DeSantis]]'s 2023 launch on Twitter Spaces and the 2024 Musk–[[Donald Trump]] conversation on X. See [[Social Audio]]. - **The private room in public.** Clubhouse made an elite conversation look public while keeping control of who speaks with whoever runs the room. That's a recurring feature of the [[Tech Right]]'s media. ## Connections - [[Social Audio]], the wider format and its political uses - [[Tech Right Group Chats]] · [[It's Time to Build]], the private chats the same circle started in spring 2020, and the essay they discussed on Clubhouse - [[Paul Davison]] · [[Rohan Seth]], the founders - [[Andreessen Horowitz]] · [[Andrew Chen]] · [[Marc Andreessen]] · [[Ben Horowitz]], the lead investor - [[Taylor Lorenz]], the reporter at the center of the app's press fights - [[Sriram Krishnan]] · [[Elon Musk]] · [[Balaji Srinivasan]] - [[Twitter]] · [[Callin]] · [[Rumble]] - [[Content Moderation]] · [[Great Firewall]] · [[Tech Oligarch Media Map]]