Real Founders.
Real Investors.
Real Money.

Before The Pitch existed, Josh Muccio was recording a daily podcast called The Daily Hunt from his apartment in Florida. It was 2015. He had no audience, no revenue, and no clear idea what the show would become. What he did have was a conviction that venture capital, the industry that decided which companies got built and which ones died, was happening entirely behind closed doors. And that was a problem.

Josh and his wife Lisa had already lived the founder life. They built a company called iHeart Repair, ran it for four years, and sold it. They knew what it felt like to walk into a room full of investors and fight for your company. They also knew that millions of people would never get into that room. So they decided to open the door.

The concept was simple and, at the time, completely untested: record real founders pitching real investors for real money. No scripts. No re-takes. No safety nets. Just the raw, unfiltered reality of what happens when someone asks a stranger to bet on their dream.

The early days nearly killed it. For 55 episodes, every single investor on the show would say something encouraging and then pass. “Sure, I'd take another meeting.” But nobody wrote a check. The show was pulling in around $2,000 a month in ad revenue. Josh and Lisa were burning through savings. They talked seriously about shutting it down.

Instead, Josh made a bet. He rented the cheapest recording studio he could find in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, recruited four investors who were willing to commit real capital on mic, and flew in a dozen founders. They recorded for two straight days. By the end of that session, investors had committed over $1 million on tape.

That was the format. That was the show.

It started with a cold email. Josh wrote to Matt Lieber, co-founder of Gimlet Media, the Brooklyn podcast startup that was quickly becoming the gold standard of narrative audio. He told Matt what they were building: the podcast version of Shark Tank, but how deals really get done, without the fake TV drama. Matt listened to the first episode and loved it. A few weeks later, he and Alex Blumberg made an offer to acquire The Pitch. Matt believed Gimlet could turn it into a “juggernaut.”

Josh and Lisa sold. Joining Gimlet meant learning the business of podcasting from two of the best in the industry. The ad revenue grew. The production quality leveled up. They built relationships that would last well beyond the company. But they also learned what it means to hand over something you built. Josh was a salaried employee now. Lisa was contracted as an “event planner.” The Pitch was no longer theirs.

Then Spotify came calling. In 2019, the streaming giant acquired Gimlet Media for a reported $230 million. The Pitch was part of the deal. There were perks: great healthcare, company phones, off-sites in Sweden. But there was also a pandemic that made it impossible to record founders pitching investors in person. The show went dark.

During the silence, something happened. Josh stopped hustling. He rested. He brewed beer. He spent time with his three kids. And from that stillness, as Lisa later wrote, “the ideas started flowing again.” The only problem? Every idea was for The Pitch. And they didn't own The Pitch anymore.

So in the summer of 2022, Josh and Lisa bought the show back from Spotify. One podcast, three acquisitions. The third time, they were the buyers.

Think about that for a second. An independent creator sold his show to a startup. That startup got acquired by the biggest music company in the world. And then the creator bought it back. That almost never happens. In media, when a big company acquires your thing, it stays acquired. It gets absorbed, reformatted, and eventually forgotten. Josh and Lisa reversed the equation.

They came back swinging. Season 9 launched in February 2023 with a Vox Media partnership for sales and distribution, but full independent ownership. In the first episode back, Josh did something nobody expected: he pitched The Pitch Fund on his own show. No script. No rehearsal. A founder cancelled last minute, so Josh sat in the chair and pitched his own investors, live, on the air. That's the kind of show this is.

Today, The Pitch is fully independent. 197 episodes recorded. $26.3M raised on the show. A venture fund that lets accredited investors deploy capital alongside the VCs they hear every week. Hundreds of thousands of founders, operators, and investors tune in because this is the only place where you can hear real venture deals happen in real time. No gates. No gatekeepers. Just the pitch, the deliberation, and the check.

The Pitch is the only podcast where real venture capitalists make real investment decisions on air. Since 2015, over $26.3M has been invested in 74 startups, with $7.3M coming from listeners alone.