The year is 1938, and as you settle in for a relaxing hour of evening radio, CBS crackles to life with a broadcast adaptation of The War of the Worlds. Sirens and static conjure a chaotic Martian invasion.
The year is 2025, and before your morning commute, you scramble to Spotify, tossing on a 20-minute episode of In My Wedding Era. It’s your latest media obsession courtesy of Meet Cute—an entertainment company specializing in short-form audio romantic comedies. April, the show’s protagonist, attempts to write her wedding vows, the erratic scritch-scritch of her pen betraying her nerves.
There’s something timelessly immersive about audio storytelling—and Meet Cute’s founder, Naomi Shah, ’17, knows it. Established in 2019, Meet Cute has produced some 250 titles via a creative community of more than 1,000 writers, producers, and voice actors. The stories have collectively garnered 8.6 million downloads across streaming services including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. “Radio plays and all these formats of media are cyclical,” Shah says. “People go back to [them] because they worked, and they worked for a long time.”
In this case, the audio approach isn’t just timeless but also modern. From day one, Meet Cute’s mission was “to build stories at the speed of culture,” Shah says. “Let’s say something is trending on socials and we’re able to incorporate it into a story.” For example, they might bring in a popular TikTok creator as an audio actor. “People feel closer to that story.” Moving quickly and meeting audiences “where they’re at,” Shah says, enables Meet Cute to be “part of the conversation.” This mission caught the eye of venture capitalists looking for a solid media investment, and six years later, a marriage proposal from Fox Entertainment.
Growing up in Portland, Ore., Shah loved creative writing but identified as a “STEM kid.” At 16, Shah won the inaugural Google Science Fair for her research on air quality and lung health, an accolade that earned her and an audience with President Barack Obama and other government officials. She majored in mechanical engineering, then worked the trading floor at Goldman Sachs. But after realizing she wanted something more creative and founder-facing, Shah joined the investment team at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital fund where her work focused on supporting founders who broadened access to knowledge, well-being, and capital. Generally, it’s hard for media companies to gain venture backing—the risk-reward ratio can be bleak. “It’s such a hit-driven industry where you put hundreds of thousands of bets out there, and maybe one will work out,” Shah says. Her employer wanted better odds, but the team couldn’t find an entrepreneur with a convincing proposal. So Shah decided to try her hand at it, drawing up the blueprints for such a company—a strawman. Months later, she fleshed the idea out into an actual proposal for Meet Cute, and Union Square contributed the first of $9.3 million in backing: “I was 24, and I kind of put my hand up and was like, ‘OK, let’s do this. Let’s build this company,’” Shah says.
AUDIOPHILE: Shah built Meet Cute with an eye toward offering small moments of feel-good escapism. (Photo: Marlon Javier Antunez)
Shah considers herself a rom-com fan—though from thrillers to dramas, she’s game for any genre. She envisioned Meet Cute’s appeal lying not in specific genre conventions, but in general feel-good, nonprescriptive escapism: A zany adventure in which time travel teaches a woman the significance of weddings (In My Wedding Era). A narrative in which the government solves post-pandemic loneliness with a “National Soulmate Database” (Baggage). “Rom-coms stand for hope and human connection and love,” says Shah. But why this approach—brief, audible, and upbeat? According to Shah, Meet Cute “[brings] entertainment into day-to-day tasks and pockets of time” when you can’t dedicate hours to a screen (or a radio). Plus, without concrete visuals, listeners’ imaginations run wild: “Every single person is in the director’s seat,” she says.
As for what keeps listeners hooked on a timeless medium, Jonah Willihnganz, director of the Stanford Storytelling Project, says that while “film is always showing you a thing that your visual cognition is wrestling with,” audio removes this additional sensory demand, allowing one to truly sink into the narrative. “It feels very, very close, that contact between [the narrator’s] voice and your consciousness.” That intimacy, Willihnganz says, carries a time-transcending appeal.
“These stories get me through the day,” writes one Meet Cute reviewer. “Working, hot-girl walking . . . everything!” And Meet Cute has a lot of stories. These days, the company churns out new episodes twice a week. Each project is staffed by a creative team of director-producers, sound designers, and writers—mostly freelancers—organized by in-house heads of production, development, and marketing.
Writer Zoe Sonnenberg, ’18, stumbled across Meet Cute on LinkedIn. Though she and Shah never met at Stanford, they shared a handful of mutual connections. Intrigued, Sonnenberg reached out to Shah and was directed to a Meet Cute producer, Lucie Ledbetter (now director for scripted development and production). Per industry standard, Sonnenberg pitched a few ideas. But at Meet Cute, things work a bit differently: “[Ledbetter] kind of came back and offered me a pitch,” says Sonnenberg, who went on to write Baggage. After being assigned a plane-themed romance, Sonnenberg was given a formula to follow: “‘This episode is the climax. This episode is the denouement. This episode is going to be something more fun-and-games.’” Meet Cute’s calculations can get even more minute: With Sonnenberg’s piece, for instance, Ledbetter moved a major plot point before an act-break jingle, a tactic proven to minimize listener drop-off. By knowing when and how to hit certain narrative beats, “you get more space and more time to tell better stories,” Shah says. Her formula means producers pay more mind to the nitty-gritty: iterating minor story details, for example, or clearing a high bar for sound design.
“It was fun to have an idea pitched to me and then get to flesh that idea out even further,” says Siena Streiber, ’18, writer of In My Wedding Era. Sonnenberg praised the six-month pitch-to-publication turnaround. “I have many, many, many projects that I’ve worked on that are sitting on someone’s desk somewhere.” It’s a limbo so ubiquitous in Hollywood, it even has a name: development hell. By contrast, the Meet Cute machine chugs along with ease.
‘Rom-coms stand for hope and human connection and love.’
In the company’s early days, Shah found herself plagued by uncertainty: “Existentially, is this company going to make it, and are we going to build a name and a brand for ourselves?” At first, the company relied on word-of-mouth referrals to find writers and voice actors. But then Shah began developing relationships in Hollywood and “really started learning the agency world, the manager world, started meeting studios and production companies”—opening access to celebrity talent and new opportunities.
In 2022, Meet Cute signed its first TV deal with the independent studio wiip, paving the way for Meet Cute intellectual property to one day be developed into a television series. For Shah, that was a particularly “buzzy” moment: “It meant that we were on this playing field with Hollywood as a really new start-up.”
“I’ll never say, ‘I made it,’” Shah says. Yet Meet Cute has worked with stars such as singer Idina Menzel and lit up billboards in Times Square to advertise a partnership with Amazon. Shah recalls standing with her team in the sweltering New York summer, waiting for the Meet Cute ad to slide by. “It was just this moment of, like, ‘We don’t want to leave.’”
Earlier this year, the company was acquired by Fox Entertainment, where Shah now serves as senior vice president of strategy and operations. She says the acquisition has been the “most insane” part of her career. After years of independence, she pursued the sale in order to scale her vision: Meet Cute can now tap the wealth of Fox-owned stories and convert them to audio, and it has multiple global platforms on which to distribute its stories. No longer is Meet Cute racing to find equal footing with Hollywood. Rather, it’s giving cues to mainstream players. “Innovation in digital storytelling is shaping the future of entertainment,” says Hannah Pillemer, the head of scripted entertainment at Fox Entertainment. According to a company statement, it was Shah’s data-harnessing and “agile, cost-efficient production model” that caught the entertainment giant’s eye.
“What I loved about the acquisition is that it actually really valued a lot of the things that we were doing,” Shah says. As a senior VP, Shah spends part of her time helping Meet Cute build its revenue and audience, and work on new ideas. And Meet Cute still does what it’s always done: use creativity and productivity to enhance each other, providing reliable gig work for fiction writers while bringing what Fox calls “data-driven decisions” to Hollywood at large.
“It’s not over,” Shah says. “That is something that I’m very proud of, to have built something that’s going to keep going.” With its next chapter—episode?—unfolding, Meet Cute “definitely holds the same magic” for Shah that it did six years ago. And when she strolls the streets of L.A. in a company hat and finds herself running into a fan in the wild, she experiences her own kind of meet-cute. “I think that’s part of the magic, too.”
Chloe Shannon Wong, ’28, is a former editorial intern at Stanford. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
