Anyone with a microphone and an internet connection can start a podcast. But crafting an original format and building an audience takes help from someone like Sarah Hack ’12, whose startup MOSH Audio launched On the Clock: A Women’s Hoops Show Special Series this spring, just in time for the WNBA draft.

Sarah Hack ’12

“I work in the digital space, because it has become what independent film was when I graduated law school,” says Hack, who used her experience at Magnolia Pictures, Lemonada Media, and Disney-ABC Television to co-found MOSH with Molly O’Keefe. “Today’s creator-led ecosystems are a Wild West, a truly savage frontier where tech, story, dialogue, personality, and ideally veracity and expertise converge. We are constantly seeing new business models and new creative frameworks.”

Following Cornell Law, Hack joined the in-house legal team at Magnolia, where she ultimately became head of the business affairs/legal department from 2016–2018. By the next year, she’d founded her own advisory company, managing talent negotiations for Good Morning America and The View, among others, and unknowingly building the foundation for what would become MOSH.

Six years later, with a website that’s big on attitude, MOSH markets itself as a full-service production company dedicated to disrupting the status quo of audio storytelling. (“We don’t just get more earballs on your show,” says the website, “we get you the right earballs.”) A playlist of recommended podcasts, from Kreative Kontrol to Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day, demonstrates Hack’s sense of style and points toward a boundary-pushing sensibility for MOSH’s projects.

In just the past year, MOSH has worked with the Obama Foundation, Magnolia Pictures, and a film producer dating a chatbot boyfriend, whose podcast was teased by a conversation between the host and MOSH board member Antonio Haynes ’12, Hack’s friend since 1L. MOSH is about to launch a show hosted by astronaut Aisha Bowe, and it completed the first season of On the Clock, scoring with a promising trifecta: MOSH’s first collaboration with hoops analyst/historian Jordan Robinson, first sponsorship with DICK’s Sporting Goods, and first partnership with platform giant Audacy.

“There’s no linear path to success for a company like mine, and there’s absolutely no playbook that can show us the next right move,” says Hack, whose “sprint” model uses attention-grabbing, feed-within-a-feed programming to capture the market around culturally salient events, such as the WNBA offseason. “With On the Clock, I learned what my team could do on a daily show. They excelled! It’s not enough to have Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C, because everything is in flux. We often went with Plan D, a Hail Mary from my associate producer or development coordinator.

“My MOSH journey is akin to flying a plane while I’m still building it,” she continues. “And we are so darn lucky to have Antonio in our corner, challenging and supporting us, as well as a fantastic, dogged, creative, collaborative group of advisors and contractors.”