Stefano Fallaha and the value of an empty minute

Before there was a podcast platform, there was a schoolboy with a conference booth. In December 2015, while more than a hundred fellow International College students attended BDL Accelerate in Beirut, Stefano Fallaha had his own stand to promote an app called Fallound. There is something pleasingly premature about this scene: most school projects eventually require a presentation; his had acquired an exhibition space.

The idea was to make room for a voice when the eyes and hands were otherwise occupied. A commute, for instance. The minutes between setting off and arriving looked like useful territory. Years later, Fallaha would lead Podeo, a company sending podcasts through channels ranging from airline entertainment to taxi screens. The destinations multiplied. That original interest in the time between places remained.

Twenty-seven seconds to make yourself heard

Fallound’s first incarnation was a social network built around voice clips lasting 27 seconds. Fallaha founded it with Emad Yehya, then a computer science undergraduate at the American University of Beirut. Habib Haddad, Wamda’s chief executive at the time, advised them. Users could tag clips, add audio effects and listen to a stream of contributions. Voice commands were part of the proposition.

The format fitted a familiar regional habit: sending voice notes. Fallaha was trying to turn that private exchange into something people could discover and follow. The company envisaged advertising revenue and a free app. Beneath the youthful packaging sat a recognizable commercial question: how do you connect something worth hearing with someone who has a moment to hear it?

Eventually, the product changed into a timed audio aggregator. It could match podcasts to a driver’s interests and journey length through a connection to navigation systems. The practical charm was obvious. A good story should ideally finish before the parking does.

The business plan included coffee

At the American University of Beirut, Fallaha studied computer and communications engineering while developing the business. He described having to recruit people around a shared ambition before he had money to offer them. There were successive versions and launches. By spring 2019, he was describing a product shaped through repeated changes, with telecom and mobility partnerships on the agenda.

The support he sought could be wonderfully ordinary. Having secured startup funding from Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, he went looking for an incubator. AUB’s CRInn offered office space, internet access and coffee, alongside help with business planning and financial models. It also offered mentorship without demanding equity in return.

Tara Nehme’s weekly consultations were particularly useful to him. The detail matters because the polished founder biography tends to skip the people who help make the spreadsheet work. An office, a reliable connection and someone prepared to examine your assumptions can move a company further than another flattering introduction.

“I had no funding to start with, so I had to convince passionate people to join for the vision instead of the money.”

Stefano Fallaha · 2019

A young founder learns to change his mind

In April 2018, Fallaha gave a TEDx talk at Sciences Po’s Menton campus about starting with a simple idea and allowing your thinking to grow. The subject was the pivot, a word that can make changing your mind sound as though it requires an engineering degree. He had already accumulated practical experience of the activity.

By 2019, he had been recognized on Forbes Middle East’s 30 Under 30 list. His response was revealing. He treated the recognition as belonging to the Fallound team, recalled running the business alongside school and college, and counted three pivots among the steps that had brought them there.

He also admitted that the complete picture in his head would probably keep eluding him. That was part of what kept him working. Read alongside the tidy award, it is an unusually untidy ambition: the company would continue to change because the imagined version of it kept moving ahead. An award makes a handsome photograph. It does little to settle the next product decision.

When Beirut needed a place to speak

The Beirut port explosion in 2020 destroyed one of the company’s offices. Fallaha has described that moment as decisive in his commitment to Podeo. People used audio to share their accounts, thoughts and prayers. A medium he had approached through the practicalities of daily travel had become a way for people to speak about a shared event.

He left university to devote himself to the company. Podeo’s founding team brought together Fallaha, Anthony Essaye and Mario Hayek. The business that emerged carried an interest in expression that was larger than the convenience of matching a recording to a journey.

In March 2021, a seed round led by Razor Capital, with Globivest and other investors participating, backed Podeo’s Arabic podcast platform. At that stage, the emphasis included its listening app and a catalogue of original and exclusive shows. Fallaha wanted to improve discovery and personalization while increasing the available content. Before there could be a rich listening habit, someone had to help make the things people would listen to.

Six tools are quite a lot of tools

Making those shows exposed another difficulty. Creators were piecing together the process with six or seven separate tools: recording in one place, hosting in another, handling post-production elsewhere, then sorting out the branding. The prospect of having something to say came with an unexpectedly busy software itinerary.

Fallaha and his colleagues responded by building a more complete working environment. A creator could record, manage a show, carry out post-production and distribute it through a single platform. Podeo also put creation functions inside its listening app, lowering the distance between hearing a podcast and trying to make one.

By May 2023, the company was reporting more than 20,000 new podcasters. It had also developed over 250 original shows along the way. These were different forms of work: producing a catalogue and helping other people produce theirs. The latter opened a path toward a much broader business, with Fallaha increasingly concerned with the machinery behind a creator’s work.

In 2021, he had also received an additional prize in the Entrepreneur ESA-HEC Paris competition, giving Podeo remote support from HEC’s incubator. He saw the relationship as a way to develop connections in Europe, beginning with France. Even then, a regional starting point did not imply a regional stopping point.

The audience may already be on a plane

Podeo’s distribution strategy takes a generous view of where listening can happen. Its network has included radio, airline entertainment, ride-hailing, games and messaging apps. Partnerships with Anuvu, imo and Rotana formed part of that effort. The person who might never open a dedicated podcast app could encounter a show while doing something else.

It is a strategy with an appealing lack of ceremony. The listener need not first become a podcast enthusiast, reorganize a phone or adopt a new daily ritual. A show can turn up inside an existing habit. For an independent creator, those routes are difficult to negotiate alone.

On September 30, 2024, Podeo announced a $5.4 million Series A led by Oraseya Capital. The company reported more than 100,000 creators and an audience exceeding 50 million listeners. Those are company-reported figures from that announcement, rather than a live counter. They describe the scale the team said it had reached when investors backed its next stage.

Fallaha’s earlier concern with the commute becomes recognizable again here. The opportunity keeps appearing outside the conventional listening destination. Someone is travelling, playing or passing time; a voice has somewhere useful to go.

A familiar voice, a different dialect

There is a personal reason behind Fallaha’s interest in whose voice travels. Speaking at The Podcast Show in 2024, he connected his Palestinian family roots and upbringing in the Middle East with a desire for a more balanced media landscape. He wanted underrepresented stories to reach listeners who could consider them for themselves.

He has argued that sustained conversation allows audiences to question, interpret and participate. The appeal is easy to understand in a medium where a specific subject can sustain a whole community. In his account, publishing and listening belong to the same social process. People gather around a voice, then bring their own judgments to what it says.

Language makes that process local. In an April 2025 interview, he described the Arabic-speaking region as a collection of distinct dialect markets. He discussed dubbing between languages and developing more localized dialect versions. He also announced an agreement with Saudi Media Company and identified the United States as Podeo’s fourth market for demand, driven by Arab expatriates. Familiar stories could travel a long way without losing the connection to home.

“flexibly stubborn”

Fallaha’s description of his approach · 2024

Stubborn about the reason, flexible about the route

Fallaha’s phrase for his approach is “flexibly stubborn.” It fits a career in which the format has changed repeatedly while an interest in audio has endured. A short-clip network became a commute companion; Podeo grew from a listening destination toward a platform serving creators across multiple outlets. Each change required a different answer to how people would hear the work.

His advice to broadcasters includes patience and attention to a defined audience. He expects radio and on-demand listening to coexist, and sees practical reasons for them to work together. There is little point in winning a theoretical argument about the future of audio if a useful distribution partner is sitting across the table.

By the end of 2025, he was also making a case for movement in his own working life. He attributed a reported 700% increase in revenue to a year spent travelling for roughly half his time, arguing that distance encouraged team independence and exposed organizational gaps. It was his account of the year, rather than an audited performance measure.

For someone who began by fitting audio to journeys, the explanation has a certain symmetry. Fallaha keeps finding value in the intervals between destinations. The empty minute has become a business proposition, a place for another person’s story, and a reason to keep moving.