So how did you two begin working together? I know the story of course, but for everyone else listening, how did you guys begin working together? It all started with a fateful, a fateful email to Alberto. Well, no, it started before that. So I own RSS.com, owned it since 2013. I had purchased it from somebody that was looking to sell it. And it was happening at the same time that Google was quote, killing the reader.
They had just terminated the Google reader and there was a lot of worry that RSS would be dead. So I bought it at that time to put a Google or Google like type RSS feed reader on it. But after a couple of years, I was noticing that in the customer support emails, I was getting a lot of questions about podcasting and they just were continuing to grow over time. And I realized I needed to offer a podcasting solution as well as a feed reader solution.
And that caused me to go out and look for somebody to partner with because none of the people in house had the, had what I thought was the expertise to really bring together a world-class podcasting platform. So I happened upon a podcast generator because it had a huge amount of downloads on source forge, which is an open, open source service. And I saw that the guy's name was Alberto Battella. I'm like, I'm going to find out who this guy is. I Googled his name.
I found out he had a PhD. I found out that he had been doing this for a very long time as podcast generators person creator. And I also saw that Alberto spoke English and Spanish and Italian and was the CTO of a, and I saw, anyway, I thought this guy sounds really awesome. I'm going to reach out to him. And I wrote him a very quick email, just telling him that I spoke the same language as he did. And could we talk basically.
And Alberto thankfully, what caught his attention was that it was a three letter domain. He, I wrote him from the rss.com email address and he for, you know, thankfully has an affinity for short domains. And so yeah, that's how we, that's how we got introduced is I had it. I saw a need in, in, in our platform for supporting podcasting. And Alberto definitely had what I thought was the world-class platform for doing that on the open source world. And so that's why I reached out.
Alberto, anything to add there? No, I think it's a great, as a, as an overview. It is true that when you wrote me, the first thing I thought, and then I wrote to you is that, do you own rss.com before even replying, you know, but after that, the, the match was, was very clear because I had these, these technology, this content management system. And there was an appetite to, to, to build it in a way that could scale up. It has been there for a while, but I never found the right opportunity.
And in the meanwhile, I was doing other things, you know, I was in startups and, and that's how, and that's why I never did it. And I think you were the, let's say the spark that started the engine. Yeah. Yeah. The spark that started the engine. Yeah. I mean, certainly it was very serendipitous that we found each other. We matched very well in our interests. And he definitely had the experience that made me believe that, yeah, this really could be something to spend time on.
Whereas before it hadn't really peaked, you know, podcasting was, was definitely not new by 2015, 2016, when we started talking, or was it 2017? I don't even remember. I left the 2017. It was, it was July 2017. I remember. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. You're right.