Even if you don’t know Charlamagne tha God, or follow his radio programs (The Breakfast Club), or know about his ambitions (to make “the BET of podcasting”), I have to flag this for you because it’s a perfect framing for creating network and enterprise value.

And an expression of it, too. Creative friends, take note of this. I love how clearly he sees it.

BET is a fascinating legacy media story in part because A. it was pretty broad in its shows and programs, and B. the owners had a BIG exit (aka they sold it for a lot of money).

When Charlamagne says he wants to make the BET of podcasting I think you need to hold both of those thoughts in your head. The money eventually follows if you build something somebody else wants, but how you build to that moment matters a lot, and it’s really easy to screw it up along the way. Like, insanely easy, because the pressure that comes with scaling can quickly have you trading off your values for a greater valuation.

That’s an expression we’ll come back to again. (And again.)

First off, BET was a channel. The closest thing it had to a niche was the cultural identity of being Black Entertainment Television. That is singular, in a sense, but also, super broad.

Compare it to MTV for a second. At the beginning, especially. It started off with being off-air or showing music videos. Then it expanded to more music videos and news. Much later it got into game shows, scripted TV, reality TV, and all the non-music video stuff.

But at first, the core drive of MTV’s value was the niche it was operating out of.

BET didn’t start there. It didn’t build an audience around one thing. It led with a broader appeal and it still worked.

I know that’s a lot of preamble, but it helps to know that before we talk about Black Effect Podcast Network, Charlamagne’s podcast company, borne out of his broader cultural radio show, The Breakfast Club.

Like BET, the Black Effect is like a channel, with shows, and all sorts of personalities on all sorts of different topics. This creates little micro scenes, sometimes with clearly defined niches, sometimes without, grouped under the same umbrella.

Or, as he says it, "The BET that I grew up on - the BET that you could go to and get a little bit of everything. You could get entertainment, but you could also get education. You could get inspiration."

Think of the Black Effect as a platform, or even a boutique shopping mall, with each show as its own store, drawing its own smaller crowd, out to show up.

When it’s done correctly, the platform can act like a startup, and each show can act like a scene. That means the platform can scale, usually for attendance and advertising revenue, while the shows can retain their scene like qualities and not feel the same pressure to grow at all costs.

Even more special is that the flagship show, The Breakfast Club, is separate from the platform brand of Black Effect. Charlamagne may be the anchor client in this mall analogy, but the network value of the business is not exclusively placed on his personality OR his show.

Think about that relative to Joe Rogan as a prime example, and less so Bill Simmons and The Ringer - which is a closer analog, but even still, not as ambitious as what Charlamagne is doing.

A network, without a narrow niche, with a ton of creative people on board to treat their businesses as scenes, with their combined mission as a startup = chef’s kiss.

Now, the risk - and it is a BIG risk - is that as Black Effect scales they start to flatten to the niche of who the highest paying advertisers are trying to reach. That would cramp the scene-cred/scene-style for sake of the startup-platform profits.

I’m a believer that you can expand without flattening. You’ll get the pressure to flatten if you’re doing it right, but it takes the right personalities at the top to resist. I think Charlamagne’s got the backbone and smarts to pull this off and I’ll be watching closely.

I believe it because he says things like this, "If what I build only benefits me, then it's not big enough."

Again, chef’s kiss.

For the record, this is exactly how I look at Excess Returns. This is exactly the types of lessons I try to draw from businesses like successful indie record labels who didn’t compromise the platform’s values for the platform’s valuation. And it’s amazing to find yet another opportunity to watch this happen in real time.

For a succinct version of how he sees it, check out his recent appearance on Forbes where he breaks it down very simply. I’m feeling inspired.