Just over a year ago, I left the only world I’d known for 15 years, the non-profit world of public radio journalism, and became the CEO of a venture funded company. I was 47 years old. Being a CEO was the first full-time job I’d ever had in the private sector.

This might sound familiar to some of you. I documented my adventures in a podcast called StartUp. A podcast about the starting of my company, Gimlet Media. A podcast company. Meta, I know.

I was worried that my previous career wouldn’t help me at all in the cutthroat world of business. But now that I’ve been a podcast businessman for a while, I realize I was wrong.

Here, then, are three things I learned in my old life as a journalist and radio story-teller for This American Life and Planet Money that bear relevance to entrepreneurs and startup employees:

1. Find your angle

When I started in journalism, I wanted to cover the big stories: war, politics, business. But I quickly learned that to be effective, I needed to break those stories down into smaller parts to find a way in. In other words, I needed an angle.

For example, I did a story about campaign finance by asking the simple question, what’s the ROI on a lobbying dollar? Or when I began the first episode of my business podcast StartUp, I didn’t open the story with a big treatise about business in America, but with a scene in which I argued with my wife about what shoes I should wear to my first ever investor meeting.

Businesses in the beginning are like stem cells; they can be anything, and the endless possibility is overwhelming. In our StartUp podcast, you’ll hear my co-founder Matt and I go back and forth about whether this company we’re starting is a content play, a technology play, or a combination of both. For a long time, this discussion paralyzed us.

But just like a good story, a good business needs an angle. And so we decided to focus on what we were best at. That meant pursuing a content-focused business model. The market has rewarded this focus, and we haven’t looked back since.

2. Develop your first assignment on spec

When you start in journalism, you’re an unknown entity. No one will hire you without seeing what you can do first. And so, editors often ask you to do your first piece ‘on spec,’ aka, for free.

When we first started fundraising for Gimlet, many investors were interested in meeting with me because of my track record. But they were reluctant when it came to actually writing checks. It wasn’t until we released the StartUp podcast that the money started coming in.

The StartUp podcast proved to potential investors, that we could do the thing we were claiming. In the language of journalism, it was a piece we did ‘on spec.’ In the language of startups, it was our minimum viable product, or MVP.

It wasn’t easy. Developing StartUp required a lot of time. I had to quit my job. I had to fund it with my own money. Taking this approach, however, was critical to Gimlet’s early success, and I’d urge anyone with real conviction about their business to do the same.

3. To get an answer, start with simple questions

This seems obvious, but even journalists forget it. One of the most celebrated stories I ever did started with a question so basic, I was afraid to ask it. Why, in the early and mid 2000’s, were banks falling all over themselves to lend money to people who had no chance of paying it back?

At the time I was asking that question, the subprime housing crisis was well under way. Bear Stearns, a huge investment bank, had already collapsed. The media had been covering the story for months, and all the news outlets had their theories about what was happening.

But when my story, The Giant Pool of Money, came out, the response was overwhelming and nearly unanimous: “Finally, I understand what’s happening.” The story went on to win every major award in broadcasting, and was named one of the top five journalistic works of the decade by NYU. The lesson here: start with questions.

I, of all people, should have learned this lesson. I, the person whose career was built on posing a question so dumb it didn’t even occur to anyone else to ask it. And yet, I still forget. Especially in my new role as CEO.

The importance of asking the obvious question came to me when I faced my first major management issue at Gimlet. My employees came to me to say their workload was unsustainable and they were feeling burnt out. I didn’t ask any of the basic questions. How long had they been feeling this way? What did they think were the contributing factors? What could be done to alleviate the situation? Instead, I reacted defensively, and started prescribing a solution that didn’t work.

Fortunately, (or unfortunately for my self-esteem) all these interactions were recorded for the StartUp podcast. It was only when I listened back through the tape of me talking to my employees did I realize I’d failed to do that one obvious thing: ask questions, shut up, listen. Once I did that, we figured out a solution that actually worked. You can hear all the grisly details on the episode we did on the subject: Burnout.