Naomi Shah founded media company Meet Cute when she was just 24 years old.
Naomi Shah is the founder and CEO of Meet Cute, a modern entertainment company that produces original, scripted rom-coms that are feel-good in content and delivered in bite-sized podcast format. Meet Cute prioritizes diverse storytelling and characters by sharing stories across the full spectrum of love.
Founded in 2019 when Shah was just 24 years old, already Meet Cute has gained venture backing to the tune of $9.3 million and produced more than 450 rom-com stories with over 3.5 million listeners. In just over two years, they have built one of the largest and most diverse networks of producers, actors and writers globally.
Before starting Meet Cute, Shah was a member of the investment team at NYC-based Union Square Ventures and looking for a media company with a production cadence like Meet Cute to invest in. Since it didn’t yet exist, she drew up a business plan and created it herself. Union Square Ventures became one of her first investors. This year, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List in the Hollywood and entertainment category.
Before joining USV, Shah worked as a macro equities trader at Goldman Sachs. She studied mechanical engineering with a minor in human biology at Stanford University. In high school, she won the Inaugural Google Science Fair at the age of 16 and did a TED talk about her research. She also placed first at the Intel Science Fair four years in a row.
Shah founded Meet Cute to fill a hole in diverse, uplifting, bite-sized content.
“Our new model of entertainment brings the largest network of up-and-coming writers, directors, and actors into the mix, flipping the script from a more traditional hit-driven Hollywood model,” Shah explains. “With the goal of building a community around inclusive and representative stories, Meet Cute creates original entertainment that you can consume anywhere, anytime.”
As Meet Cute’s audience grows, the company is branching out from podcasts to create more feel-good stories for traditional TV and film, short-form video (Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), story-specific artwork, original music, books, and eventually live theater.
Driven by purpose, Shah believes that fiction storytelling is an important way for people to feel heard, represented, and empathized with. “I feel lucky to be working on a company that has a ripple effect into our audience’s emotions and day-to-day lives, as well as storytelling and pop culture more broadly. I love when listeners DM us about their favorite story or character. It shows that our stories have impact.”
Meet Cute offers a powerful platform for up-and-coming content producers.
Shah acknowledges that founding a company involves tremendous risk. But she has learned to embrace the discomfort that she experiences at each phase of growth. The greatest reward of a career with meaning is that “the hard times are a source of pride and motivation rather than something to shy away from,” Shah says. This is the first job where she has felt real ownership, not just over the product and the relationships, but in the ideas Meet Cute is putting into the world.
Tackling the idea of life purpose is daunting for anyone, Shah says. She recommends breaking it into smaller pieces. “What personality traits are you the most proud of? What is the impact you want to have on your local community? How do you want to be remembered by the people around you, friends, family, and colleagues? Breaking down life purpose into smaller pieces changes the lens. You end up finding the behaviors and habits that ultimately lead you in the direction you want to go.”
