Guest
Tom Allen
Tom Allen is CTO at Downtown Music Group, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Tom Allen, CTO of Downtown Music Group and founder of Curve, explains how he bootstrapped royalty accounting software all the way to acquisition.
Questions these episodes answer
How did Tom Allen build Curve without raising outside funding?
Allen built Curve as custom software for one client, a royalty accounting firm called Music Royalty Company, while paying his bills through unrelated metadata consulting work. He spent close to two years developing it quietly, launched publicly in 2019 with three people, and grew the company through reinvested revenue and word of mouth rather than investor money.
From: Solving Music Royalties with Tech and Getting Acquired
Why did Downtown Music Group acquire Curve?
By 2022, or a year earlier by his own recollection, roughly ten to twelve companies had shown interest in acquiring Curve, so Allen hired a corporate finance adviser to run a structured process based on SaaS valuation multiples. Downtown's offer won because it let Curve keep serving its existing customers and fit neatly alongside Downtown's publishing, distribution and royalty and payment businesses.
From: Solving Music Royalties with Tech and Getting Acquired
What was Tom Allen's first startup before Curve, and why did it fail?
Before Curve, Allen left Essential Music to launch Metaball, a metadata asset management and rights-hub platform. It never raised money, ran for about two years on consulting income alongside a modest revenue of a few thousand a month, and never became more than a side project, so Allen concluded it solved a nice-to-have problem rather than a must-have one and shut it down.
From: Solving Music Royalties with Tech and Getting Acquired
How does Tom Allen describe his leadership style as CTO of Downtown Music Group?
Allen calls himself chief people officer of Downtown's technology staff, focusing on putting people in the right roles and building processes that let engineers do their best work rather than dictating every technical decision himself. He pushes for a leaderful organization where any employee can identify a problem and bring a solution to the table instead of waiting on direction from the top.
From: Solving Music Royalties with Tech and Getting Acquired
Does Tom Allen have regrets about bootstrapping Curve instead of raising capital?
Allen says staying conservative and unfunded kept Curve on a steady, low-risk path through its growth, especially going into the pandemic when clients might not have been able to pay. Looking back, he thinks raising a modest amount of growth capital at a key moment might have let Curve move faster and reach a bigger scale before its acquisition.
From: Solving Music Royalties with Tech and Getting Acquired