Amazing Stories from Mike Stevens’ 25 Years at Audible

Mike Stevens has the distinction of being the only person at Audible, aside from our Founder, Don Katz, to work here for all of the company’s 25 years. Stevens joined us in 1997 as our director of network operations, when Audible was a small, scrappy start-up with offices in Wayne, New Jersey. He helped create, staff, and maintain Audible’s early technological infrastructure. As he describes it: “Anything that communicated with something else, it was my responsibility to keep it running: our website, communication lines, networks, desktops, and all development, test, and production systems.” He eventually shifted to our facilities team where he applied his 40 years as a volunteer EMT to create safety and security tech protocols for our expanding spaces.

Stevens is retiring in March to spend more time with his family. Below, we celebrate his long service with us by sharing some of his recollections.

Take us back to the beginning of Audible—what was it like?

When I started, in August 1997, there were only about two dozen people. I’d come from AT&T, where I’d helped build WorldNet, one of early internet services aside from AOL and Netscape. At the time, the spoken-word market was “books on tape,” a physical medium, and here we were offering to pay publishers for digital rights and make audiobooks available online. Some could not understand this yet: “What’s a ‘download’? What are you going to ship to customers?” Every time the content team made a deal for the rights, they’d ring a bell and we’d celebrate.

Publishers would send big boxes of cassettes, and our audio team would “rip” them to digital format, editing out cues like “this is the end of side B, please go to tape two.” And since we were encoding the digital to prevent people from copying it for free, it was an early version of digital rights management. Plus, it was so expensive to record on physical media and reprint—with digital, publishers needed only to make one master copy.

What are some stand-out memories from those early years?

I have many, but here are three:

As director of operations, I got to hit the “enter” key to start Audible’s live site, at 1:15 a.m. on October 18, 1997. A lot of people’s very hard work led to our first download that night, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

In 2000, when Robin Williams had his show on Audible—the first-ever podcast—he was on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and I watched the number of visitors on our website go wild! Every time the episode aired in a different time zone, they would peak. We’d never been anywhere near those numbers before.

In September 2001, our servers were located in the financial district in New York City. When the attacks on the World Trade Center happened, power was out in the entire area, and the servers were on generator power, which was spotty. We were still a small company, and we had back-ups for a lot of things, but not for an event like that!

We sent a note to our customers explaining the situation and asking for their patience while we moved our servers to a different data center, and Don received back a tremendous amount of emails from customers expressing solidarity, saying what a difference Audible made in their lives and that they would gladly wait to the service to resume. He printed them out and created a bound copy for every employee to keep so that they knew the impact our work was having. In 2021, on the 20th anniversary, I found my copy and scanned it so this piece of Audible history could be shared with all our employees, so they’d know how meaningful their work is for so many people.

What did you think when, in 2007, Don announced the company was moving to Newark?

I became a true believer in Don’s vision of helping a city realize its greatness. We had Newark high school interns working in the office, gaining real experience, and it started a generational change, helping to address the systemic lack of opportunity while growing the talent we have right here in Newark. In time, we saw the city start turning around: I remember taking a picture of all the construction cranes downtown—those do not show up in a city in decline. A lot of people would have just written a check and that’s it, but Don was one of the first business leaders to really do something to revitalize this city.

Any personal highlights from the last 25 years?

Attending the IPO ceremony in 1999 with other employees at the NASDAQ and seeing Audible’s name on the big board; working with Secret Service agents during Joe Biden’s visit in 2018 and finding out he really is a down-to-Earth, “no fuss” person; and in July 2021, ringing the 175-year-old steeple bell at the Innovation Cathedral to celebrate our return to in-person work—the bells had been non-functional and silent, needing major work to ring again. So that’s my legacy to Newark, that they ring again. Every day at noontime.

How does it feel to look back on your time with Audible, as it grew from a start-up to being a global leader with thousands of employees and millions of customers?

It’s been a long, winding journey with some twists and turns, but after 25 years, my daily mantra has not changed: Early on, I started saying “Every day at Audible is fun! It’s just some days are ‘funner’ than others.” It is said that if you can find a job doing something you love, you will never work a day in your life. I never felt like it was a job, it was always a labor of love.

Whenever someone says to me, “Oh, you work at Audible? I love it!” I feel like they’re pinning a badge on my chest, and the people who were there in the beginning. I’m very proud of what we’ve built and the fact that Audible has gifted me such a wonderful and rewarding career.