The typical branded company podcast is started by someone on the Marketing team, or maybe Communications, to align with their department’s goals on brand awareness, perception, or maybe employer brand or driving calls to action towards closing sales. I have a special appreciation for the shows that were started by an individual employee because they cared so much about sharing the stories from their company with the world, like Lyle Troxell has done at Netflix:

WeAreNetflix

Lyle is a Senior Software Engineer and started the show back in 2018 and he’s gone on to host over 40 episodes. The recruiting team got on board with the show and it is now featured in their recommended material for prospects applying to work at Netflix.

I got to meet Lyle back in the early days of the show, as I was hosting and producing my podcast for Dropbox employees with a similar model of telling stories from across the company. The breadth of coverage on WeAreNetflix is impressive, and demonstrates how a show can capture the essence of what is going on at the company when it isn’t constrained to a formal set of topics that go through excessive layers of PR concerns. There are episodes about making movies, and investing in games, but also interviews about being a parent at Netflix and how the company does career development. Don’t worry that the most recent episode was published in December. It sounds like Lyle and the show will be back for another season, and the episodes cover evergreen topics so you can jump into any of them.