Venture capital was a black box.
We cracked it open.

The Pitch is the startup podcast where real founders pitch real venture capitalists for real money, founded by Josh and Lisa Muccio in 2015. As of June 2026—197 episodes across 15 seasons, 30M+ downloads, and $26.3M invested in 74 startups on the show, $7.3M of it from listeners.

What happened to this show had never happened to a podcast before.

Before the fund, before Gimlet and Spotify, before 74 startups raised $26.3M, Josh and Lisa Muccio were founders themselves. They started an electronics repair company called iHeart Repair in 2010, 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 in the room. So in 2015, they decided to open it.

The concept was simple. Record real founders pitching real investors for real money. No scripts. No retakes. No fake TV drama. Just the raw, unfiltered reality of what happens when someone asks a stranger to bet on their dream.

The early days nearly killed the show. For 55 episodes, not a single investor committed money on the mic. There was a lot of “Sure, I'd take another meeting.” And “If I were to invest...” Nobody wrote the check. The show was making about $2,000 a month in ads, in a good month. Josh and Lisa were burning through savings, and by 2016 they were talking seriously about shutting it down.

Instead, they made one last push. They rented the cheapest, strangest recording studio they could find in San Francisco's Tenderloin—the kind of place with a boat strung in Christmas lights next to the mics. They recruited five investors willing to commit real capital on tape: Phil Nadel, Jillian Manus, Jake Chapman, Sheel Mohnot, and Howie Diamond. Twelve founders showed up to pitch.

They recorded for two straight days. By the end, the investors had committed over $1 million on tape.

That was the format. That was the show.

Subject: Amazing tape

With a format that finally worked, Josh cold-emailed Matt Lieber, co-founder of Gimlet Media, the Brooklyn podcast startup that was becoming the gold standard of narrative audio. He attached an episode and asked him to listen. Matt loved it. A few weeks later, he and Alex Blumberg made an offer to buy The Pitch. Matt believed Gimlet could turn the show into a “juggernaut.”

Josh and Lisa sold. The deal was announced on June 6, 2017, and joining Gimlet meant learning the business of podcasting from the best in the industry. The ad revenue grew. The production leveled up. They built relationships that would outlast the company itself. 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 February 2019, the streaming giant bought Gimlet in a deal reported at $230 million, and The Pitch went along with it. There were perks: a company phone, great healthcare, and off-sites in Sweden (that Josh never took because he was a workaholic).

Then came a pandemic that made it impossible to do the one thing the show exists to do—put founders and investors in the same room. The team limped through 2020 on remote episodes that weren't really pitches. In December 2020, after episode #100, the feed went silent.

It stayed silent for 19 months.

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.

In media, when a big company buys your thing, it stays bought. It gets absorbed, reformatted, and eventually forgotten. Josh and Lisa refused to let that happen.

Return of The Pitch

In the summer of 2022, they bought their show back from Spotify. Bloomberg broke the story on July 27, 2022. One podcast, three acquisitions. The third time, they were the buyers.

“I get to be an entrepreneur again,” Josh told listeners, “at my own fledgling startup.”

They came back swinging. When a founder cancelled last minute before the comeback episode, Josh and Lisa took the founder's chair themselves and pitched The Pitch to the investors on their own show. Episode #101, “Josh Pitches The Pitch,” released November 30, 2022: $55,000 committed on tape, and the public launch of The Pitch Fund. Within seven days, 83 listeners had applied to invest $1.5 million.

Season 9 rolled out weekly from February 8, 2023, with Vox Media handling ad sales and distribution while Josh and Lisa kept 100% ownership. Season 10 put the show on YouTube. Season 11 put it in front of a live audience in Miami. The founders kept coming. So did the checks.

Some of those checks turned into stories of their own. Hykso pitched in 2017, rebranded to FightCamp, and raised a $90 million round backed by Mike Tyson and Floyd Mayweather. Caribu pitched in 2018 and was acquired by Mattel. Jiobit got a no from all four investors in the room, then sold to Life360 for $37 million. We remember the ones that got away, too. And in 2024, Nectir founder Kavitta Ghai broke the all-time show record, raising $1.4 million on air, anchored by a signed $1 million term sheet from Cyan Banister.

Today, The Pitch is fully independent. 197 episodes recorded. $26.3M invested in 74 startups, $7.3Mof it by listeners. And it's no longer just a show: The Pitch Fund deploys capital alongside the VCs you hear every week. Fund I put $6.4M into 43 startups. Fund II is open, targeting $20M. 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.

We're not Wall Street. We're not Silicon Valley. We're a couple from Tampa who started The Pitch to open the door, and ten years later we're still holding it open: for every founder with a story worth telling, every investor willing to listen, and every listener who wants in the room.