Inside FlightStory: the company scaling Steven Bartlett’s podcast empire

If you want a sign that podcasting has really gone mainstream, look no further than the most recent Golden Globe awards. For the first time, there was an award for Best Podcast, which aimed to recognise the “extraordinary and diverse talents” in the medium.

The shortlist read like a ‘who’s who’ of the podcasting world: Dax Shepard, Jason Bateman, Mel Robbins and Leila Fadel were among those up for awards. The winner? Amy Poehler’s Good Hang.

It’s no wonder an event such as the Golden Globes wants to recognise podcasting. It is now one of the most popular media formats in the world, with the biggest shows garnering tens of millions of listeners each month. Around a third of the UK population listens to podcasts weekly, more than 50 per cent listens monthly and 70 per cent have listened to a podcast at some point in the past year.

Podcasting has become big business, so much so that companies are being founded to try to crack the formula for success – both in terms of audience and revenue.

One of them is FlightStory, which is owned by Steven Bartlett and makes his hit podcast The Diary of a CEO. Georgie Holt is the CEO and Christiana Brenton the chief revenue officer. They are also co-founders of FlightStory Studio, the division tasked with scaling podcasts – and the people behind them.

The idea is to take the blueprint of The Diary of a CEO, which was rated by Spotify as the second biggest podcast by listeners in the world in 2025 after The Joe Rogan Experience, and apply it to others. This not only includes the podcasts of established names such as Davina McCall and Paul C. Brunson, but also the next generation of creative talent.

Holt and Brenton met just over five years ago when they were both executives at Acast, the Swedish podcast publishing company. Together they helped scale Acast in the UK through to its IPO, before moving to the US to help to grow the business there.

Holt recalls an “instant ideological connection” when they first met on a team video call. The pair soon realised they could be a formidable “double act”, provided they stuck to their “complimentary but different swim lanes”.

“We can read each other like a book,” says Holt, with a knowing smile and a glance towards Brenton. “So, we actually can't interview people at the same time because I'd be able to read her body signals.”

“I know what she's thinking right now,” jokes Brenton.

Holt’s background is in more traditional journalism. She spent the early part of her career at businesses including ESI Media, Hearst and The Stylist Group, before making the switch to podcasting. She has a deep passion for editorial and long-form journalism. Brenton built her career in sales and is more focused on the commercial side of their venture.

What they share is a belief in the power of long-form storytelling and the podcast medium. This strong mutual understanding lets them work effectively as a partnership, supporting each other as needed.

“There have been times when I think we’ve both looked at each other and gone, ‘I’ve got this today’,” says Holt. “Like, 'you just get into your deep work, you do what you need to do. I've got it. I'll go and take on the more public-facing stuff’.”

Acast enabled podcasters to monetise their work by connecting them with advertisers. But Holt and Brenton believed the company was missing a bigger opportunity. If podcasters were fully embraced as creators, they realised that a business could build an end-to-end ecosystem around them.

Holt and Brenton resigned from Acast in 2023 to set up their own media company, Telling Media. It launched that summer as a podcast media agency focused on planning and buying, and was bootstrapped and funded with its own capital.

Then a LinkedIn post from Bartlett changed everything. In October 2023, he announced plans to build his own network around the success of The Diary of a CEO, rather than signing with an existing platform such as Spotify, as many creators had done.

Holt and Brenton immediately messaged each other about the opportunity before emailing Bartlett outlining their background, expertise and ambitions. They were invited to a video call and their “knees were shaking under the table”, recalls Holt.

Bartlett impressed them, she says, by focusing on the human impact of his podcast’s success. Rather than dwelling on vanity metrics such as download or subscriber numbers, he spoke about people stopping him in the street or messaging him to explain how his interviews had affected them – sometimes prompting life-changing decisions.

What united the three was a shared conviction that long-form podcasting is an immensely powerful medium – a cultural force in an age dominated by short-form video. Bartlett told them he was “haunted by the potential” of what he had created. As entrepreneurs, all three saw an opportunity to build a new kind of business.

Within 48 hours of joining the company, Holt and Brenton were pitching to their first high-profile creator.

Bartlett refers to the two as “the sisters”. It’s an in-joke among the trio, but the partnership is central to the success of FlightStory and rooted in a deep understanding of each other.

In person, they refer to each other simply as G and CB. The chemistry when you meet them is clear. “Let me be honest here,” says Holt, “I love her and trust her with my life.”

“Very successful companies are built on extremely strong co-founding relationships and there's a reason that exists,” she adds. “As a human being, doing it with someone else is an unbelievable joy and experience. But you fundamentally need somebody to go through those trenches, as well as someone to celebrate the moment with.”

While male partnerships are common, Holt and Brenton’s dynamic remains relatively unusual in business. “I don’t want to make this gender-coded, but you don’t see a lot of female co-founders. I don’t know whether there’s enough examples of women co-founding businesses,” says Holt.

The pair feel they are far stronger together and that the mutual support they offer each other is vital, particularly as they work to build what they see as a new kind of media company. Despite their shared outlook, there are times when they do not agree.

“We are not conflict averse,” explains Brenton. “But we are able to disagree and commit and move on fast – and that’s a superpower.” If you can’t do that, she adds, huge amounts of time are wasted. “The number one trait we look for when hiring,” she says, “is high humility, low ego.”

Walking around FlightStory’s Shoreditch offices, you can feel the buzz. The building is a warren of talk-show style film sets spread over several levels. There is the space where McCall films her Begin Again show or where Brunson meets guests for We Need To Talk. The lower level looks bare because it is being gutted to install video walls.

“To scale the content at the rapid rate we want to, to build brands around inspirational creators, we need a space that is more flexible,” says Holt. With new video screens, sets can be transformed at the push of a button to appear like The Diary of a CEO studio or the bustling streets of New York.

The workforce is visibly Gen Z and the atmosphere is vibrant and informal. There are people curled up on sofas with laptops busy editing the next video podcast destined for millions of views.

This building once housed record labels and music industry marketing teams. Two decades ago, bands including Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Chiefs would rehearse in the basement. That feels fitting – podcasters are, in many ways, the new pop stars.

“We’re trying to pioneer new media, if you want to categorise what we’re doing here,” says Holt. Brenton adds: “Typically, a podcaster would [just] sign to a label, but we do everything in-house – book deals, events, branding opportunities, all aspects of monetisation.”

Around half of FlightStory’s revenues come from advertising, with the remainder generated through those other channels. The pair believe the new creator economy, driven by social media, presents huge opportunities. “We have a fundamental belief,” says Holt, “that the next billion-dollar media companies will be from single human IP.”

FlightStory’s LinkedIn page underlines that ambition: “Diary of a CEO is not just a show, it’s a proof of concept for scaling high-value global IP from principle-led creators.”

That philosophy increasingly means using data and technology, as much as human-led creativity. This is an area in which Bartlett takes a deep interest and is closely involved.

“He is an unbelievable builder of tools and technology,” says Holt, “because he’s built through the pain of being a creator and felt the frustration of human effort being wasted.”

Incidentally, his other major contribution to FlightStory is to act as a talent magnet, she adds. “He’s our greatest recruiter and collector of people,” explains Holt. “He will uncover impressive people in his various exploits and bring them into the orbit of the business.”

One in-house tool, Guest Radar, aims to “kill the guesswork” when it comes to guest selection by analysing performance data across platforms such as YouTube and Spotify. The focus is not necessarily on high follower counts but on more complex community engagement.

“Other podcasters may have missed a beat [because] celebrities don’t necessarily perform the best,” says Brenton.

Holt believes this is a very different approach to that taken in traditional media, where editors make “bias[ed]” decisions based on “culture and taste”, she says. The same tool can also identify content gaps – spotting discrepancies between what people are searching for on YouTube and what content is currently available then suggesting topics to fill those gaps.

However, some argue this relentless focus on following guest data in the chase for more subscribers has led Diary of a CEO down a dangerous path. Especially since it departed from its remit of interviewing business leaders and music stars, to speak to health experts and cultural commentators. A BBC World Service investigation in late 2024 found that the podcast was “sharing harmful health misinformation”, letting misleading claims from guests go unchallenged. FlightStudio responded that it was in favour of “freedom of expression”, but later employed a medical PhD graduate to fact check health interviews, writing commentary and clarifications in the detailed show notes that are published with episodes.

Another tool, Creator Radar, helps FlightStory identify new presenting talent. To fit FlightStory’s business model, creators need to think like entrepreneurs and have a “unique perspective on the world”, explains Holt.

In this sense, technology is “democratising access to opportunities” compared with the closed networks of the past, she argues – and that is vital to FlightStory’s future success. “We’re convinced that whoever wins the creator acquisition game, will win the creator economy game,” says Brenton.

Challenges lie ahead. FlightStory is competing with talent management agencies, digital publishers and traditional media agencies. So far, many of its most popular shows are fronted by people who made their names on television. But that is beginning to change. A recent addition is Maggie Sellers Reum, the American host of the Hot Smart Rich podcast, who has just joined the FlightStory fold.

The podcast market itself is also becoming increasingly crowded, with almost every celebrity worth their salt seemingly starting their own show. Everyone from Ant & Dec of ITV to Amol Rajan of the BBC is now joining the party. At times, it can feel as though there are barely enough guests to go around.

FlightStory’s business is built around podcasting, but Holt and Brenton are under no illusion that this will always be the case. “As soon as you get romantic, businesses die,” says Holt. That’s why “kill the romance” has become one of the company’s mantras. An air of romanticism around how things are done, she argues, is often a signal of decline. So, despite their own attachment to long-form podcasts, Holt and Brenton know their digital offering will have to adapt.

“Look, five years ago, Steven would not have believed he’d be doing three-hour episodes on YouTube,” says Brenton. “The thought of that would have been insane.” Yet podcasts now need to embrace video and platforms such as YouTube to grow, partly because short video clips are essential to aiding discoverability in a saturated podcast market.

“Potentially, in six months there will be new formats we haven’t even imagined yet,” adds Brenton. That uncertainty has been baked into the company’s structure. FlightStory has a commitment to constant reinvention, supported by an internal team called Flight X. “Their mission every day is to disrupt and kill what we’re doing,” Holt puts it bluntly. The team operates independently, challenging accepted ways of working across the business.

Bartlett also tracks the number of failures his team is clocking up, treating this as a positive metric because failure is essential to innovation. He has even appointed a head of failure and experimentation at FlightStory Studio. These initiatives are designed to encourage experimentation and prevent complacency. For example, Flight X might suggest a different way of finding guests, promoting clips or using AI.

However, that last area presents one of the biggest unknowns for FlightStory and the creator economy it is trying to build. AI has the potential to revolutionise the digital space, but also to undermine it. There are growing concerns around the volume of low-quality content – so-called ‘AI slop’ – being produced using generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s Sora and shared across social networks. AI is also being used to game growth on platforms from Instagram to LinkedIn, generating content at an industrial scale.

It’s already possible to generate podcast scripts using AI, or even use the technology to create realistic voiceovers, so that in theory a whole podcast could be created with minimal human involvement. The fear is that audiences will turn away from social networks if they become a sea of AI-generated material, stripping away the human connection they were meant to foster.

Holt and Brenton can understand those fears, but they also sense an opportunity. “2025 or 2026 will be the last year of media as we know it,” says Holt. “We are moving to a new AI world.” However, she believes this will eventually result in a swing back towards more human-made content. “We will be pulled to the human content, because we are humans,” says Holt. There will be an increasingly obvious tension between AI and human-generated content until the latter “will feel like an elevated experience”.

That belief underpins their continued faith in long form. Holt believes that well-crafted, long-form podcasts, made with care and attention by humans, will become a premium, highly valued experience. Audio-only formats may even stick around, valued for the superior experience and authenticity in the same way vinyl records are.

And she remains committed to the power of the crafted offering in an age of short attention spans. Short-form video, she argues, is the “packaging” for discoverability, while long-form interviews remain the big draw.

Even if the social media space becomes increasingly dominated and defined by AI-generated content, Holt and Brenton are working on another opportunity that AI cannot touch – real-life events. Podcasters are like modern pop or sports stars, Holt suggests. In the same way that we like to signal our allegiance to a particular band or football team through items such as branded t-shirts or the magazines we read in public, podcasters have the potential to capitalise on the identity economy.

“In an age when people are locked in on their phones, FlightStory sees an opportunity in connecting people in real life, in person,” says Holt. The company has a growing team dedicated to putting on live events curated around its creators. Podcasters build worlds and attract “an audience of like-minded people who want to connect”, says Holt, making events a natural area of growth. Another lesson they learnt from Bartlett, she adds, is that when everyone is going right, it can be the moment to turn left.

Don’t be afraid to be contrary.