Building Sustainable Music Tech Companies in a Resistant Industry

Jakob Wredstrøm

The way that it works is that it streams, downloads, and uploads at the same time, which also means that it might get laggy, but that's not going to affect the end product. So I get full resolution from your side. So if I go grainy, if you go grainy, if there's a bit of lagging, don't mind it. Also, we have quite good noise suppression tools we're using. So if there's background noise, don't mind that either. It rarely ever shows up. There's two things that's important. And that's sort of the...

Edward Ginis

Excellent.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Only two things that's important today. One thing is how we do the intro, which sort of sets the scene and gets the conversation warm. And the other thing is how we have a conversation. So the intro is quite simple. I do a brief introduction, that's very brief. And I ask you, as I do everyone, who are you and what do you do? And there you can spend 30 seconds to a minute describing yourself. And obviously we're going to talk about the company and niece a bit that's going to be a thought question. And then we're going to take sort of your storyline to some degree as like a common thread. Like we start a bit back in time and we move to current. Like that's going to be the general thing. And then I do back and forth and you know, topics I would love to discuss with you. So that's the, that's one thing, the format you need to know. The second thing is it's super important and really the only thing you need to think about as we speak. And that is.

Edward Ginis

Mm-hmm.

Edward Ginis

Us.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Conversation as in back and forth. So if I ask a question that might naturally lead to a long-winded answer, try to break that down. Or take pauses where I either can interrupt you or not, but like think the most value doesn't come from a great long answer, but just from the small interactions while we try to get to that. And that's really the only thing you should have in mind. My experience is if that's done successfully, it's gonna be a really great episode. If it's not done successfully, it can work, but not so often.

Edward Ginis

Sounds good. Makes sense.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay. Do you have any questions for me?

Edward Ginis

I don't think so. Think that actually helps quite a bit. I'll try to keep my answers enough to have a conversation.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Great, perfect. Great. If you do have devices, it's great to put them on Do Not Disturb.

Edward Ginis

Mm-hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And

Jakob Wredstrøm

Looking at my notes the last time.

Jakob Wredstrøm

If you are ready, then I will start in five seconds.

Edward Ginis

I am ready. Let's do it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hey guys and welcome back to the Sound Conditions Podcast. Today we have Edward in the studio. Welcome.

Edward Ginis

Thanks for having me, Jacob.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Edward, I was very excited when I did my research about you, your companies, and your career in general. And I'm so excited to talk about you today and your sort of... Wait, sorry. I've never messed up the intro, but I'm gonna do that again. I don't... I've actually had like a month break of recording, so that's why.

Edward Ginis

Yeah, no problem.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hey guys and welcome back to the Sound Connections Podcast. Today we have Edward in the studio, welcome.

Edward Ginis

Thanks for having me, Jacob.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Edward, I've been very excited doing my research for today. You've had an amazing career. Openplay is one of the companies we're going to talk about today, but you have multiple companies you're present in, and it's not just small companies. They're doing nothing. Edward, before we get into that, for the people who don't know you, who are you and what do you do?

Edward Ginis

So I'm Edward Ginis and I am the co-founder of two different companies. One is a music company named OpenPlay that is helping to solve some of the most challenging technical issues in the space when it comes to data and rights, as well as a hologram company called Proto, which is changing the way that people communicate from one place to another, as well as how AI agency is taking the next generation in retail and other operations into the next frontier.

Jakob Wredstrøm

It was funny while I was reading up on you, because I speak with so many startups that I almost always default to like the naysayer or the devil's advocate on something. And when I read about your second company, like, what? No. And then a researcher, it's them. Okay. Because I've obviously heard about your company before and I thought it was like some knockoff company, but, you guys sort of have sort of front-tiered technology of putting almost human-like people in boxes that you can connect that worth.

Edward Ginis

We did, yes, we pioneered the way that interactions can be when presence, the physical presence is brought into the equation.

Jakob Wredstrøm

We won't talk too much about that actual company today, but we will talk about your sort of approach to entrepreneurship and especially open play since this is a music industry focused podcast that will be appropriate. My first question is at work, usually people don't get advice of having that dual focus on the level that you operate. How do you do that?

Edward Ginis

Well, first and foremost, it was not something that I thought I'd be doing. I never thought that I would actually have two companies that are scaling to the degree that they are. One started as a practical solution to some serious problems and the other started just pure out of enjoyment and love for the craft of what I was doing with Proto. It just happened to be.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay.

Edward Ginis

That we were at the right time and the right place to bring the technologies to the world. And they all took off at the same time. So my advice would not be to for other entrepreneurs to try to tackle multiple businesses at a given time, given the just amount of pressure, stress and everything else that goes into running a startup, just one startup comes into play. And I think the real challenge is more about my home life, my family life that is the most impacted. When you're dealing with multiple companies at the same time.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I would love to dissect that conversation today, but we do need to sort of understand open play a bit more. So you also work in a company, well, it's a section of the music industry where it's really, really easy to get into a lot of buzzwords. And oftentimes it's actually really difficult to understand. So maybe for the listeners who struggle to understand this in depth, like myself. Could you try in the simplest form possible describe what open play does and how that actually works in the music industry?

Edward Ginis

So that's a great question because I think a lot of journeys that I see and that we all see are really predicated more on everything going right and things going well in the industries. I am an engineer by trade, so I have a computer science background. I never thought I'd be in music at any point in my life. It was not something that I aspired for or even understood well. But I had the opportunity. To get involved with a very small company at the time called Concord, which now is a household brand in the music space. But when I joined, they were really a small jazz company. What attracted me to the space was that the industry was going through this transformational period where the systems of the past were not anywhere near ready for what the future was to bring. And the amount of data challenges, technical challenges, the complexities, that needed to be solved were astronomical. And the industry has not been known to attract a lot of technologists to the space. And that made it difficult to solve these challenges. And that really attracted me to understand that there's an opportunity here to really shape and help this era of change come into the music space. And that's what really excited me to get me involved into these problems.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. And if you were to sort of really specify what are the problems that OpenPlay are working with and that you've sort of seen through your career?

Edward Ginis

So there were three questions that I thought that I would help answer when I joined the music space. And then I thought I'd just move on to the next project somewhere else. And those questions were, what do we own? Where is it? And are we exploiting it to its fullest degree? And those three questions turned out to be some of the hardest questions to solve in this space because of the sheer amount of fragmentation that's been happening in the markets and the sheer amount of complexity. When it comes to the data ownership, we needed to understand how we as IP owners can build systems of record that allow anyone to be able to quickly understand the value of the IP that they have and ensuring that IP is respected and properly propagated all over the world. And this is what OpenPlay even to this day focuses on to its core, is centralizing IP, making that IP as expandable as possible and as... reachable to the world as it can be.

Jakob Wredstrøm

We'll go to talk more about open play later in the conversation, but what I would love is to sort of dissect how you came to be an entrepreneur in that particular field as your career progressed. And let's start with Concord. You said you joined this small jazz company. What was it about them that attracted you and vice versa that seems like a very weird fit?

Edward Ginis

You know, that's, you sound like my parents when I told them I'm joining this music company. They also wanted to understand why I didn't partake in the roller coaster ride of the Googles and the Facebooks and the others that were really starting at the time. But honestly, what brought me, like many stories, what brought me somewhere is someone else. Someone that pulled me in unknowingly. And for me, that person was Bob Valentine, who is now the CEO of Concord.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Edward Ginis

But he was the new CFO when I met him. And he really painted the picture of a future of music that really was attractive to me, which was data-driven, systems-backed. And to get there, we needed to reinvent the industry. And as a lifelong entrepreneur, when someone tells me that there's an opportunity to reinvent something, I get excited and I get attracted to it. And that's really how I got pulled in. I got pulled in. By the sheer amount of opportunity to reinvent something, put my brand, my own personal brand on something in a space that I may not have understood, but one that I thought would be very exciting to explore and get involved with.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Was that the first time, opportunity in your life, where you got to do something that scale, or like that intently, or what happened before?

Edward Ginis

Yeah. So, so my background before Concord was one of, worked for a large consultancy where we did quite a bit of work with many companies across the world, helping them figure out their challenging systems, whether it was financial systems, data systems. And I've always been attracted to large scale data problems. So that my background really was a predication of a lot of various factors to learn how to help companies navigate complex technologies.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Edward Ginis

And Concord was the first foray for me to take what I've learned in the several years prior, take my passion of data and combine the two together. And I fell in love with music when I started, but it wasn't again, something that I aspired for or even really understood before I joined.

Jakob Wredstrøm

What year did you join Concord by the way?

Edward Ginis

This was 2005. So this was a time where the industry was on fire. Everything was falling apart. Physical sales were completely being slaughtered and there was no Spotify yet. There was no streaming that has had any revenue value and iTunes downloads just did not have the same impact as physical sales. So this was a time where the industry was at a crossroads of does it survive or not? And of course that was the best time to join, at least in my crazy mind as a young kid at the time.

Jakob Wredstrøm

If I were to pretend to be my wife for a second and I would hear about your story, I would ask the question, so has this guy been working on the same problem for 20 years? What's going on? Like what is going on? Like why is this so complex to solve at scale?

Edward Ginis

So I think the most challenging problems are decades long. I think that there are very few challenges if you think about the most complex problems any vertical is solving. Usually time is a big factor and nothing gets solved quickly because it's not as though things are static. What's interesting about music is similar to other industries is that the landscape is constantly shifting around us. So when we solve one thing,

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Edward Ginis

five other problems arise or more so five other desires from the market pop up. So as we develop our solutions and OpenPlay expands its offerings, it's a constant addition of new adventures that come to our path with their own set of complexities and their own set of apocalyptic events that happen very frequently. And I think any company that's been around for as long as we have will tell you that there is no smooth ride up. is a constant battle and that does not just start with solving problems. It starts with shaping an industry, is what part of what we do at OpenPlay, what I do is I help guide this industry towards directions that we think and I think need to be brought into. And this is an industry that as you probably know, needs to be dragged into things to solve these problems. They don't necessarily solve things unless there's a massive fire around them.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. Yeah, there's a lot to dissect in that statement then, and it's really interesting. I think at least sort of my perception is as the industry has been like this big ship freighter sort of style, slow to turn, I also do see things happening faster now that maybe it's digitalization, maybe it's a generational shift, but... Do you perceive the industry being more foresighted and responsive in a timely manner than they used to be?

Edward Ginis

You know, it's a, it's a, that's an interesting question. because the industry goes through moments where I sometimes feel it's starting to understand and figure things out. And then some event happens and it almost reverts back to this mentality of fear, litigation. We're practically seeing this happen with AI as unfold around us. so these motions of panic and fear, which this industry has been fueled by for many, many years. continues to repeat itself. So to me, I do think that the industry is starting to develop the understanding that it needs to invest in technologies, invest in entrepreneurs solving problems, but then they always tend to find themselves coming back to their old roots and their old ways of doing things. And I think this is still, we have a way to go where it's as ingrained as is in the fintech business to understand data and technology in music.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

When you talk about the music industry, you sort of interchange between they and we. Where do you see yourself? Are you an insider, an outsider? Like, where do you place yourself?

Edward Ginis

You know, I never thought I'd call myself an insider because I never felt that I was ever inside. I always felt even from the beginnings that I was an outsider kind of poking in. I think what made me more of an insider, and I think this is true for any entrepreneurial journey, is that we didn't just, and I guess I didn't just come in and solve problems. I think anyone who comes in and solves problems without living the pain. without being involved in the day-to-day process that a music company goes through, whether you're a label, a publisher, a distributor, if you're not in those walls, you're never going to find the right sets of solutions. I think this is the paradigm shift that we're seeing is a lot of technologists come into the space. You probably see this pretty frequently. They spend a year trying to do something and then they run away like Napoleon in Russia in the winter. because they are not insiders. They don't spend the time inside the walls of these companies. They're technologists first. And it took me a long time to really come to terms with I'm definitely now more of an insider than I was before because I've lived these problems like an insider has. And I think that's what allows me to start using the terms I more so versus they because again, it's an evolution both of myself and the industry.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. You mentioned a bit earlier when you sort of joined Concord that it sort of spoke to the entrepreneurial side, or you said something to that degree. But again, if you look at the first decade of your career, it does look like a very typical corporate climbing ladders kind of style. So at what point did that sort of... entrepreneurial spark happened. said, that when you went into Concord and sort of it took just a decade to become that entrepreneur? Like how did that come about?

Edward Ginis

So when I joined, it was exactly as you described. I wanted to grow within Concord. I wanted to grow as a leader myself. And it was as corporate as you can get for a small company growing into a larger company. I had a really good front row seat as being a senior leader in the company of all the challenges any company would go through as it scales. And Concord was no different than many others. You have... all the same challenges with staffing and growth that any other company goes through. And I, for the first few years of my life there, really wanted to be a good corporate citizen. We really wanted to help the company grow as a whole. And entrepreneurship, I would say, was high on my list of focus areas at the time. I think where that changed was when we started to build and really solve some of these problems. And then I started to look at the landscape of my colleagues and other organizations in the music space who were suffering the same sets of problems that we were. And that started to spark a lot of entrepreneurship interests. How can the solutions that we've solved for be brought to a wider audience that these groups don't have to go through the same process that we do and be able to still come out stronger as an industry. So for me, I think that the, the entrepreneurship spark really started along the way, but what really pushed me over the edge was pure anger. That the anger was the best reason why we launched Openplay and I can definitely talk to you about that.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I would love to talk about that before we get there because but I'm going to remember the anger is I just have a few things I want to sort of try to understand about the dynamic as this corporate soldier and this entrepreneurial journey. I will get back to it. But one of the things that sort of often happens in these big organizations is that there's a lot of competition that come into play and positioning in the market. So even though you might be solving a problem, you don't necessarily, as you solve the problem, open up that solution for everyone because obviously you need to make money and there needs to be a positioning. So is there some sort of like frustration happening where, okay, you guys, might have a right approach to something, which Concord definitely had, but that doesn't necessarily change the industry. Like you're too big of a protective player to some degree to sort of open up everything. Am I interpreting that correct or am I wrong there?

Edward Ginis

well you're certainly property the state of the industry at the time where people were highly competitive with one another protective of everything they built and really kept systems as competitive advantages that definitely was a landscape i did not agree with any

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. And was that the sort of the precursor to the anger that happened a few years later or like how did that play out?

Edward Ginis

Yeah, I think it certainly led to that anger. think what, what I never understood or never believed in is that companies, in, in verticals where the technology is effectively a commodity, meaning that the, let's take music, for example, when you look at your music playlist on Spotify and the music that you listen to, that music gets to looks the same, whether it comes from one group or another, one distributor or another, it all looks the same at retail. So. It never made sense to me why hundreds of companies around the world were building the exact same things that really did not add any competitive value, maybe a little bit of speed, but no real competitive value. And I'm a big believer in music, that the competition needs to be around the artists, the fans, and the music itself. That's what we as a music company, a music culture, need to be focused on. The systems of record that get that music into the world They should be ubiquitous. They should be like Salesforce. know, Mark Bionoff was out in the Bay when I was starting to think about building OpenPlay with a megaphone screaming, stop building bespoke CRM systems. Your first name, last name field is not any more competitive than mine. Why are we making it a competitive angle? And that really resonated with me. It really made sense that we need commoditized systems that any company of any size could leverage. and get music out into the world and manage it the way that needs to be managed. That was absolutely a part of the play there. It wasn't the anger moment, but it started to form that mentality into entrepreneurship.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But was there a viable alternative in like, you know, 2000 cent around there? Like, was there like these companies out there providing or streamlining these ways of doing it? What was the alternatives at that point?

Edward Ginis

Well, the alternatives were there were only two options. You built something yourself and built a bespoke system. And we saw everything out there from Microsoft access and file maker systems, Excel spreadsheets, even some built web experiences. And then there was the distributors themselves who offered pretty weak web portals that made their constituents use those portals to get the music in to those markets. But they were really catapults. They focused more on how fast can we get the music to market, not really how much does our music company value the data that's in there and can leverage that data to help them succeed elsewhere. That wasn't the focus of these distributors. So really nobody at the time was thinking about how do we ensure that the rights holders have systems that help them grow their business as opposed to just throwing things into the market.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Was this just a case of really not just participating in school by the industry? you know, have a, you know, data in let's say 2010, early 2010, obviously was a pretty big thing and a lot of other industries, that's not something that just happened the last five years. Was the music industry just getting that or what was the issue there?

Edward Ginis

Well, every other industry had to modernize much sooner than the music industry, because if you look at the nineties and into the early two thousands, they were still printing CDs like they'll never go out of style. And the industry was, didn't really have to manage much data at all. It was a skew that's being sold for on a retail store. was fairly insignificant in terms of complexity of data. When that changed with the paradigm of digitalization and digital, digital downloads, digital streaming, you now have. all sorts of complexities, not just getting content to those destinations, but then accounting for all that data, accounting for all that revenue, breaking it up into all the micro payments that need to be made by royalties. These are the things that really made things more challenging quickly, faster than I think I can find any other corollary in any other vertical. But every other vertical started to do a lot of digitalization in the early 90s. And that's why every other industry felt further ahead. And this is also why it took the industry in music industry nearly 20 years to get comfortable with the term metadata, get comfortable with the term data in general. And when it did, it started to over invest. And unfortunately, like we see in other scenarios, when you start to over invest, you sometimes blindly do it, not thinking about all the things that need to be done correctly. And that's why there's been a lot of startups that have common gun in the last decade, because a lot of them came in. and the industry invested in them and then it fell apart because just the problems weren't the right problems to be solved.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So what happened since you sort of left the company and started becoming an entrepreneur? I guess that's around 2013. What was it that sparked that step?

Edward Ginis

Yeah, so let's, let's come back to my anger moment. Uh, th

Jakob Wredstrøm

you

Edward Ginis

connected to the music through our platform. And we were able to tell the world with our data, what we owned. So we were ahead of everyone else when it was going to societies or black boxes and unearthing all the revenue that was ours. We actually saw a 7X pickup in public performance revenue when we rolled out OpenPlay and actually told the world, this is our content and we can prove it. So that was really exciting. But to get to that state, we had to take and go and get all the data that we had placed into all of these distributor systems, these web portals that we were entering for the last eight years of data. It was ours. We keyed them in, we uploaded the data and audio. So we felt all we had to do was ask for it. And let me tell you, that was more than just asking for it, because when we did ask for it, we were told no in many different ways, because nobody was able to explain to us why this data couldn't be given. to us at first it was it's too difficult or it costs too much or we don't even know how to do it. Right. We've heard all of those statements from every one of these groups. And it took me a moment to realize none of them were true. It was all because they wanted commercial lock-in and that's how distributors operated. They operated with making it difficult for you to get your content from one and move to the other. And that was by design. And that really pissed me off because at the end of the day. It's our content, our IP. And if I'm going to Bank of America to use their banking platform, I don't want to use their version of QuickBooks because if I use it and I move to a different bank, I've got to start all over again. And that's the state of the music industry when we decided to spin out OpenPlay and go to market was to free these music labels and publishers from these predatory scenarios that they couldn't get out of. because they did not control their own data and were told that they couldn't get it. So if they wanted to do another commercial deal, they'd have to start from scratch, rekeying and re-uploading their data. And that was a huge barrier that kept a lot of commercial deals from progressing.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That's really interesting. I haven't really actually heard that side of the story before. I think there's many interesting stories in the music industry and for me this is a very like, let's call it enterprise problem, which often sort of drowns in stories that are sort of more of an emotional nature. if you want to just for me to sort of my simple mind to understand this, how big of an issue was this in like practical cases? Could you maybe just paint a practical hypothetical scenario where this would be a huge issue.

Edward Ginis

Huge issue and not just limited to enterprise. was, was pervasive across every size music company that used a distributor at the time. If you were distributed by the orchard at the time, you did not have an easy path to decide you want to move to ADA or Virgin or any other distributor in the market. You effectively had to come to terms with you will be spending a year, a year and a half getting your content re-entered somewhere else. And what that in practical terms. Let's say that you're on a 15 % distribution deal with a distributor and you have an offer from another distributor for a 10 % deal. In all practical cases, if this was any other industry, you'd say, this is great. I'm going to save 5%. Let me just move to a different distributor because remember it all looks the same at Spotify. So how I get there is not nearly as important as getting there. So if you made that decision to switch and then someone told you it's going to take you a year and a half. to redo what you've done. And by the way, you might lose all your likes and all of your stars and everything else that comes with it. Your decision will be, you know what, the 5 % is not worth it. And to me, the fact that we've created an industry that doesn't allow you to maximize commercial relationships is a huge problem for all size groups. And in fact, the smaller you are, the less leverage you have, the less opportunity you have to sway any one of these larger players to have them do what you need them to do. So. To me, taking back control is not an enterprise problem. It's an industry wide problem and the smallest players are the most impacted.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But I guess that's also the whole value chain it sounds like. It's also Spotify. It moves from the very place where people consume music to distributors from music to companies to artists, managers. I think this protectiveness of data and making it hard to shift is an industry-wide problem. Is that also how you see it?

Edward Ginis

I do, I do, but I think a lot of groups, especially Spotify, Spotify has been really good at making data available. Their API is still the most respected API of all the DSPs. They are really big on democratization of data so that it doesn't matter what size you are, you have access to that data. That certainly was not the case in other companies that are in the market. still not the case today. A lot of technology companies still build tech.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Edward Ginis

without making APIs accessible to anyone else. And to me, that's a tragedy and a missed opportunity.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I just have a question sort of as we sort of progress in this story and you start open play. I just want to understand what happened with you in your personal life to some degree as you went into an entrepreneur, you're leaving this, I would say assume safe corporate life. Did you have a family at that point? Like what did you have to lose as you jumped into this?

Edward Ginis

Well, luckily, my foray into entrepreneurship did not start with me having a family and kids, because if it did, I may have made very different decisions or maybe not even be sitting here talking to you right now. I had an opportunity in my life where I did not have the trappings of all the things that need to be in the family life. And that allowed me to really spend every waking moment building what we've been building. And I think that definitely played a big role in jumpstarting my entrepreneurship journey. If it had been just a few years later, that would have been most likely not the case.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, makes sense. And I think that's a big part of entrepreneurship. I'm still young, but I do have three kids. And like just the last five years, my hunger for entrepreneurship has not changed, but it's definitely, it plays out very differently. And I think there's a lot of like very good qualities in being a father and having a family that makes you make quality decisions, faster, you're more prioritized with your time, but the hustle that... ultimately is a big part of entrepreneurship can be really difficult to combine with those. And sort of going back to sort of where you are now, how do you do that now? Like have you found a way to be an entrepreneur with room for all of this?

Edward Ginis

Well, so I have four kids, so, they're all still young. And I would say my desire for entrepreneurship and my hunger has not shifted, but my respect for my time has gone up tremendously. I'm far more judicious now with how I spend my time when I'm not building things, how I spend my time with my family. Again, these are things that I had to learn to do concurrently with launching the business. But to the other end of the spectrum. They provided huge drive to succeed because now it's no longer just me trying to build something if it fails, no problem. We'll just move on to the next invention. No, I, me, the desire to succeed has really gone up tremendously because it's not just for me anymore. It's for my family, for my children. I want them to be proud of what I've done that I want them to be involved in, you know, the things that I'm doing. And it's important for me to, respect the fact that they did bring a whole new paradigm to my journey that I did not even recognize when I started.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, I think, you as you progress with life and journeys, there's always like these sort of different times where you need different types of motivations. Like conversations have happened with my wife recently as a company and us on the internet, we're doing quite well, we're growing quite well, but it's always a struggle. And there's always these conversations like, it worth it? Is it worth it? And recently my answer has been different than it's been in the past. Recently it's just like... I have too much flexibility now to give this up because I want to deliver the kids in school, I want to be home when they get home, and I want to work in the evenings. I want to be there for them. And if I get a normal job, I'm not going to have that. So it's just like the arguments change, but it's still very valid. Like I cannot not be an entrepreneur because my flexibility is so good that this is how I want my life to be. Like it always changes.

Edward Ginis

You know, I think that I couldn't agree more. think the biggest draw to me to just running a business or running anything, and this is not probably talked about often enough, is you get to control your time. And if you were working in a company, in a corporation, doesn't matter how senior you are, you're still at the mercy of that company's timetables, at the mercy of that organization and their schedules. You don't have much control over that. I'm not sure if I know even though how to operate in a world where I have to lose control of my own time.

Jakob Wredstrøm

No, and think it's actually important to mention that is a big upside, but I think it needs to come to a point where there's some sort of stability in order to do that as well. Like I've always felt it very weird for these sort of CEOs I see on TikTok, whatever, like going out training in the morning and spending so much time in training. I've never really understood how do they time for that? But now when I have myself like a semi-big organization of 80 people and I have a PA, like... If I want to go run in the morning, I just cancel some meetings. It's fine. And I do it. That it doesn't, I don't want to make it seem as if things are easy then, but like there's certain things that are also so attractive with being able to be Johann Boss. Well, obviously you have a board of investors, that is also the good side of entrepreneurship. But it does of course also come with bad sides with responsibility and last man standing.

Edward Ginis

Yeah, I'd say that those TikTok reels are probably more publicity than not. And I think if you actually look behind the scenes of most of those CEOs and executives posting this stuff, know, their lives are nothing like those reels. You know, they're oftentimes not able to do the things that they really think they can do. And I think if they really are in that place, I'm not convinced that their businesses are getting as much focus as the heliskiing that they're doing on the weekends.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Makes sense. But when it talks about sort of the entrepreneurship life and the hustle, how did your life look like when you didn't jump into creating sort of open play? How did your everyday look like and how did you even jump into the journey? You just said, we've got to start a company or what happened there?

Edward Ginis

Well, the first part was we had to get our IP back because remember I built the first parts of OpenPlay while within Concord and music companies or any IT companies are not in the business of giving up IP and what we had built was IP. So first and foremost, the first part of the journey is, is it even feasible to take what we had built and spin it out into its own venture in a way that would be successful? And I think that...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, you told me.

Edward Ginis

Was really probably the most difficult, challenging early stage for us was trying to figure out how we navigate this extraction of IP in a way that we could still build a business that people would want to invest in and people will want to purchase and utilize. And I think this was a two year process. We started in 2010. We didn't finish until the end of 2022 in figuring out how we extract IP out of Concord. And it probably would not have happened if it was not for folks like Bob Valentine, who believed in what we had built and also wanted to see how what we had built could be used at a larger scale.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm and how did that go about I would assume maybe there's some heavy NDAs in this but what can you sort of tell about the journey?

Edward Ginis

Well, I think it started with at least a mutual desire. And the way I positioned it was that there were really two options that were going to happen. I've already kind of hit my limit as a corporate soldier. I think I was already dreaming of moving on to building the next great thing. And I wanted the next great thing to be open play. But I also was a realist and knew that maybe we would not be able to spin out the IP and I didn't really want to start from scratch all over again, if and most likely be solving some other problems at that time. So the two options were what we had built could become one more bespoke system in this sea of bespoke systems of music companies and Concord will forever have to maintain that software on its own or we could potentially spin this out. Concord gets a license to use the software for free for in perpetuity, we will continue to evolve it and make it stronger and better. And Concord would win on the premise that they will have the best in class systems maintained in perpetuity. And given that Concord is a music company, not a software company, in fact, music companies make terrible software companies. That's not what their DNA is. They are built for acquiring catalogs and scaling. What do you need for that? You need great working software to do so. And that's what they cared about. Wasn't, we wanted an ownership stake and we needed to make sure it's ours. They wanted to be able to continue to use it. And that was where we knew that there were some legs, that they were open to us, wanted to spin it out. I was young and I didn't know what I was doing. So complexity wise, it was much higher than I would right now. But we effectively spun out in a complicated three-way relationship between Concord and Sony.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Wow.

Edward Ginis

At the time Sony was a was one of the early sponsors of spinning out and bringing open planes to the market.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay, that sounds very progressive of the leadership of these companies to allow that.

Edward Ginis

I'm still shocked by it. It still doesn't make sense to me. To this day, I don't know what they were thinking.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Well, yeah, but I think your argument was pretty valid, then for me it's like, but guys, you own this. It's worth so much money. But again, I think the argument still stands. I would imagine as well that the personal trust that you've built as an early employee and central in this happening playing into that decision.

Edward Ginis

Hahaha!

Edward Ginis

I think that was it. And again, it comes back to solving problems from within the walls. I bled with these guys. Went, we, Concord has had many downs at that time. It was a very difficult time in the music industry for anyone to survive. So we were in the trenches. And when you spend time with people in the trenches, you build that trust, you build that understanding. They knew me, they knew what I was capable of. They knew what I wanted to achieve. And they were supportive of that. They were supportive of that in any frame of endeavor that I would step into. It just happened to be that we did something great within their walls that I really wanted to bring out into the rest of the world.

Jakob Wredstrøm

It's interesting that it stands in such a contrast to sort of where your frustration came from with these sort of solutions being not deployed everywhere and everyone building their own solutions for themselves that's, you know, of poor quality and having such a large company being progressive and allowing this that really speaks to them probably also seeing this issue that there's an interest of course in building a very strong Concorde, but there's also an interest in building a strong music industry and that move was probably a wise one of them to see that happen. Do you think that's what happened or?

Edward Ginis

I think, again, coming back to Bob and Glenn too, who was the CEO at the time, they're in the business of buying catalogs. And when you're in the business of buying music rights, you want those rights to be in the best shape possible when you acquire them. You want them to be clear. You want them to be available, accessible. For them, a better industry only suits their purpose, which is how fast can we find the rights we want to acquire? How fast can we acquire those rights and get them back into the market?

Jakob Wredstrøm

In

Edward Ginis

Those are the things that they wanted to improve in the space because everyone wins at that time. Everyone improves when everyone's quality of data goes up tremendously. And they saw that early on. They knew that the long-term value for the space meant more revenue for them faster as soon as more data out there is as clean and as available as theirs was inside their walls.

Jakob Wredstrøm

When I go on your LinkedIn and I look you up, you describe yourself as Chief Client Officer of OpenPlay. Could you break that down for me?

Edward Ginis

You know, we were never big on titles when we launched. In fact, we didn't even think we were worthy of certain titles when we got started. It was me and my two co-founders and we just started to do the things that we were specifically good at doing and building the early stage venture. And it was really me who was client facing. So I was the face for the industry. It was why I called myself a chief client officer. My co-founder, Brady Brim De Forest was... the key product guys. So he was the head of product and my other co-founder Ben Alavi, he is a brilliant technologist and an engineer and he called himself the head of technology. We actually just didn't even look at titles other than function. And any entrepreneur will tell you that you wear every hat of every title. Your day goes from brain surgeon to janitor very quickly. And again, I think we, as we matured, I think our, our titling has gotten stronger, but, we, we never really shed the, the mentality of your function or what you're perceived of. Let's, let's let, let that be the, what defines us. And then anyone who we talk to and I work with knows what I'm focused on in the company. And that was really the entomology of how we didn't have the more standard titles that this industry or any industry usually has. Let me tell you, investors hate it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, it was confusing for me when I was doing my research like what?

Edward Ginis

Investors hated they hated it's i will tell you that we've had countless conversations with what do you mean there's no CEO, what?

Jakob Wredstrøm

I have sort of left or center question and that's because I'm a bucks thinker not because That's a good thing. That's just how my brain works and I usually put people in boxes I know the boxes don't exist but just help me put things into context and when I think about sort of your type of personality professional background this technical Entrepreneurial solving problems splitting IT systems and then looking at your title chief client officer that you call yourself, they seem very contradictory in how I normally see these stereotypes. Could you walk me through, have you always had like a natural lean towards relationships or is that something you've sort of built over time?

Edward Ginis

So I've always been, people would describe me as extremely charismatic. I've always wanted, and I think one of my skill sets early on, I discovered this when I was very young, I was that nerd in school, in both middle school and high school, where I would help teachers through their technical challenges. Would wire the buildings over the summers for cat fives. So to me, really early on, had an opportunity to interact with adults and those around me. And one of the things that I've learned early was that if you can take complex things and distill them into simplicity, into something that connects with someone easily, you've already done a big chunk of the, of the effort. So to me, I've always been very much on the forefront of the, client or the person that I'm working with less about the technology. In fact, I, one of my pet peeves is when I talk to technologists and it's just a stream of technical jargon and acronyms. To me, the most brilliant people I've ever met that are technologists speak in a very humble, easy to understand way, can distill very complex topics without using a single acronym, without devolving into technical jargon. When I mentor entrepreneurs now, I spend more time helping them to talk more plainly and more in a way where it connects than it is to try to make their technology seem super complicated with some technical jargon and acronyms they speak. So again, that DNA in me has always been the case. And I think a lot of it came from the fact that I also was a consultant before I joined Concord. And when you're in the business of consulting, you need to be very charismatic in winning the business. You need to be able to explain what you're to be doing for them. And you need to deliver on what you're doing in a way that their executive teams understand. So consultancies are actually a great place for any entrepreneur to get a great start on how to be more personable with people and in a way that will help them on their entrepreneurial journey. If you have never been a consultant before, you're probably, missing out on a skill set that I think is important for any entrepreneur to have.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm, that makes a whole lot of sense. So you've always had both the technical and the charismatic. I think, you know, as I speak with you, again, I'm a box person, I tend to put you more like, okay, he's the sort of charismatic with a sort of technical skill set. But then if I look back at your LinkedIn, it's like, okay, CTO of one of the most innovative hologram companies out there. So there must be like a really strong technical side as well, obviously. But can you sort of... maybe tell me a bit about that. So your hologram company that you said was just fun and then is one of the probably when you talk about TikTok and hype and stuff like that, your product has definitely been there. Walk me through this. How did this happen and how did you end up being the CTO of such a thing?

Edward Ginis

Well, so it again did not start with a desire to find another company. And certainly my family was not thrilled when I started to go down this path, but it was in the pandemic. So Proto launched in 2020. And there was a time where everyone was immediately being ripped from their own access to humanity. And the technical background that I've always been interested in is taking large amounts of data, in this case video transmission, and making it as accessible as possible around the world. And I had met my two co-founders, David Nussbaum, who's the CEO of Proto, and Doug Barry, who's the COO. And they're the ones who kind of exposed me to the early hardware that David was prototyping in his garage. And it was effectively a technology of transparency that created this effect of being physically behind the glass. So think of a refrigerator that's all glass in the front and then anything you project inside feels like they're standing right there in front of you. And I thought, hmm, this is interesting. It's more novelty than business. But then I started to ideate about what an infrastructure that powers this holographic. Communication looks like. And I sketched out kind of an early version, and this was just me on a weekend of what this technology roadmap could look like. And I shot up to David and Doug, just so for them to have it. I wasn't even ready to be a part of this thing yet. I got an email probably 30 minutes later saying you got the job. I like I didn't want the job. But they agreed that what they had built was interesting, but to really

Jakob Wredstrøm

Thanks

Edward Ginis

Make this expandable on a global scale, which is what Proto is now, they needed the architecture that I sketched out. And then that's how I started getting involved in the early days of Proto. And it's expanded over the years from just communication to now an entire app ecosystem that's now the face of AI. Every AI company that's building anything of worth is doing something with Proto because for the world we live in today, you can't just have AI trapped in a chatbot. Or some other experience behind the scenes. If you really want this to be as a global exposure, you need to put these avatars, these individuals in physical space. And we've already been on that forefront through communication. So it was a natural evolution. And the company just kept scaling Tim Draper and Draper Associates with the first backers of this technology. And it's been growing. And it was a very different journey for a number of things. One, I wasn't at the CEO, which was actually refreshing. That means someone else had to make the more difficult decisions. So for me, I got to do the fun things, but not necessarily have to do all the things. And I also got a real great view of a business that was venture funded because OpenPlay was always bootstrapped. We never experienced what it means to receive a large check from anyone and be able to just live off of that scale. We had to do everything independently. Proto raised $15 million. So it was a whole different... paradigm for me and it was a great exposure for me to know and understand what investors look for and how they should be positioning the technology.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Did you use any of that experience with investors into OpenPlay? Are still a bootstrapped to this day? Well, you recently raised some capital, I read,

Edward Ginis

We did. That's correct. And yes, I'd say the best outcomes for me in any of my entrepreneurial journeys is the cross-pollination of those experiences that benefit all the companies I'm involved with, anyone that I'm mentoring. For me, there's never a lesson that is a bad lesson to learn. Whether it was good or bad, those lessons have really either saved me pitfalls in other ventures or taught me how to do something and be more efficient in doing it. So Proto's influence on OpenPlay has been huge. OpenPlay's influence on Proto has also been large as well. So yeah, cross-pollination of skill set, I'd say the best outcome for any entrepreneur that's tackling multiple businesses is maximize that cross-pollination of expertise.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. Going back to the bootstrap days in 2013 when you spun this out as a company, I would assume that you had some sort of commercial activity in a sort of license with Concord, but you also told that they weren't paying anything in perpetuity. So how did you make this go around bootstrapped?

Edward Ginis

Well, let me tell you, if I had a family and kids, that would not be the case. When you have no money, it's really easy when you're single. Otherwise, it's definitely a bigger problem. We had really difficult growing pains in the beginning. We had one customer, and that was Universal Music, who came to us after they saw the platform and said, we want to license this for our labels. That was the only customer we had because we were actually not allowed to sell our software for the first several years of our existence. Because when we spun out, the deal was struck in a way that Sony was the exclusive reseller of our product. And that did not pan out very well because when you entrust someone else to sell your product, it's never the way a founder would sell it. And I think this was my first major lesson. In entrepreneurship. You as the entrepreneur have to be the one selling your solution. You need to be the one in front of customers. And that was a difficult time for us. We were not able to navigate customers until the deal expired. And as soon as it did, I took my client officer hat and I went door to door to as many companies that could to effectively do hundreds of demos per month in showing off what we had built. That's the only way that you could really scale as an entrepreneur is when you're hands-on into all of the work that you're doing.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, and this is one of the most difficult thing as an entrepreneur as well because there's so many things you need to navigate as an entrepreneur. Everything from having no money to then having employees to issues. And sales is such a key thing that requires so much presence as well. And it's really difficult to be able to do all the multitudes you must do. And then also have presence. So how did you guys do that? Like how did you really just allow yourself to focus in on having all these calls?

Edward Ginis

Well, I think in the early days, it was a little easier because we had, only had this one venture to focus on. So every morning it was how do we move this a little bit forward? My advice to any entrepreneur watching this is think of this as dribbling the soccer ball carefully and slowly. Don't, every day should be about moving something forward just a little bit. You're not going to have moments where you're going through transformation of your company or have large sales cycles that succeed every day. Many of them take a long time. Many of them just you need to for your own mental health, you need to show yourself some level of progress every single day. And that's how we, when we launched the venture, really started to look at how we progress open play a little bit every day. And that little bit was How do we put exposure in front of OpenPlay? How do I get into more rooms to show off OpenPlay? And you're right, and focus are really important in those early days. In fact, would be no way possible that I could launch Proto anywhere in the vicinity of launching OpenPlay because the amount of focus you need as an early stage entrepreneur is just unbelievable. You just have to be involved with everything. It was only seven years later.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Edward Ginis

When we had some stability and growth and I had a leadership team that was able to operate day to day and navigate day to day, that I was able to take a sidestep into a little adventure that would probably, again, would not have been possible seven years earlier.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So where is Openplay today? You recently raised some capital, as far as I know, your first sort of capital from, as far as I can read, pretty much big music industry angels and players. To do what? What are you doing?

Edward Ginis

So we raised a little bit of capital to help us with some of our growth scale. But the real win for us was bringing on Tracy Maddox as a board member. Tracy is a storied entrepreneur in the music space, big background in taking CD Baby to the next level and being sold. He was chief commercial officer for Downtown. So he got a front row seat of almost every acquisition that they've done and has a good command of where the space technologically is headed. And I have been, I've known Tracy for over a decade and I've long wanted him involved with our business. This was a way for us to get him involved that I, you know, having some of his money invested in the business makes it so that he'll always pick up my phone call. And I can always use him as a sounding board because the one thing that entrepreneurs are really challenged by is that they're often in a silo. They're often in a vacuum. They're in an echo chamber with themselves and you need outside. People who have seen things and done things. If nothing else, pop you off the ledge or help you navigate through something that they've dealt with before, or even look at the landscape and a different lens than you in your own mind have been playing out for weeks at a time. To me, that's what we got with this investment round. It was really more about the people than it was the money. In fact, as we look at other raises in the future, as we're talking to other capital partners, my desire is to find capital partners who will expand my circle of soundboards that I can spend more time with and learn from and help shape this business as it scales, because no one can do this alone. Not one entrepreneur is going to be successful without having people around them that'll help them succeed. This is why this raise was so important to us, because it was not just money, it was people.

Jakob Wredstrøm

The way that you talk about it, sounds like sort of the mentality of just getting started. But obviously this has been a journey you've been on for I guess 12 years now. How do you feel about the whole journey now?

Edward Ginis

Well, I'd say the first 10 years of the journey was trying to convince this industry that data is important. I think the first 10 years was less about moving OpenPlay forward the way that I'd like it to be, but to educate this industry on the importance of what OpenPlay is doing, the importance of the challenges that we're solving. As much as I'd like to say we're 12 years into a scaling venture, I'd say we're two years in. To an industry that's finally realized the importance of what OpenPlay is and what it does. And the next five years is about picking OpenPlay and making sure it's in the hands of every IP owner around the globe. We're spending a lot of time localizing OpenPlay. It's in 30 languages now. We operate across 22 countries. We've got 6,000 daily active users. The average use of OpenPlay is two and a half hours per day per user. So we know that the connection is there, we know that the value is there, we just now need to put it in as many hands as possible. And it's still an uphill battle every single day. It's still a battle to convince music companies to embrace the need for something like OpenPlay, because it helps them and protects them from the future. But nevertheless, this is not a scenario where you have radical scale and you're just sitting back and watching the money come in. Every single day is still a battle in winning business and expressing what we do and the importance of what we do.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I think there's something very beautiful about that. Also, I guess from American sort of storytelling, invested story, also frustrating thing about that timeline, but like that is how the music industry works to some degree and to big degree or entrepreneurship in general. I'm lucky to having one of my mentors, Jonas Norbag, who made this company called Pacemaker. His entrepreneurship journey was 18 years, 18 years from starting the company to exiting. I'm so fascinated by his sort of like longevity mindset and not giving up and sticking in because I can imagine you, let's say two and a half years ago, that would probably be a tough spot. Like, you know, you've been spending 10 years and trying to convert people and they're still not religious. So.

Edward Ginis

I'd say that is also where venture investors make things worse, right? Because when they look at a 10 year horizon that a business has been operating in, they already look at it as a failure, right? They want to see unicorn growth and an exit in three to five years. And if you're outside of that window, something must not be connecting. Whereas in music and IP in general, this industry specifically doesn't work the same way other...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Edward Ginis

industries work, you need to develop a deep understanding. And then you also have to build a deep level of trust with the industry and the customers. And that takes a lot of time. Takes a lot of time. In fact, when I went to my first conference in 2014, a music conference called MusicBiz, I met a senior person from, from a major label who saw what we had built and pulled me aside and said, why are you doing this? Just stop. We're never going to use the software. Because you'll be out of business in two years and then we're going to be left with what. So we don't license other people's things because they're never in business long enough for us to actually utilize it. So why would I put my trust and my content into a system that won't be around in two years? And that really resonated with me. That just shows the way that this industry has been building up these defensive walls to protect itself, but also can't look past those walls to see the opportunities ahead of them. That was, it's still to this day, we battled those challenges because look at the consolidation that's happening in this space. People worry as to what's gonna happen with their technologies.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, but to some degree he was right, right? And you proved him right to some degree because he was right to be skeptic. And your company has now been along for these 12 years and they can trust you.

Edward Ginis

I would say that absolutely right. And this is why the music technology space is littered with nothing but failure. This is a, as you know, as an investor, music tech suckers and struggles quite a bit, but I'm on a mission to change that. Fact, open play is probably the best position to have the most impact on technology in the music space, because what open play has done now that we've got thousands of music companies on it is that any time you have a central marketplace of use, like open play. You can start plugging in all of these technology companies that can find their footing with their customers who can be discovered, who can now connect all their data and music content through these technologies. And this is what OpenPlay's next foray and what we're focused on now is launching a marketplace of services where you, music company that wants to use an audio shake or a disco or any other technology, you're effectively going to the app store, selecting what you want. And then subscribing to it. No longer is it these tech companies have to first go door to door and find you, then get you excited about it. And then once you're excited, you have to figure out how to operationalize it, which usually means spreadsheets and Dropbox links. That's not sustainable. You can't scale as a technology company to do so. And we want to change that paradigm. We want these music companies, these technology companies to thrive with ability to be able to transact with their customers. Without having to do and go through the same hell that Openplay went through over the last 12 years.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. I think with that statement, I think it's great to end the talk. I think that's a very grand vision to start with and which is going to be the start of this new part of your journey, which hopefully is commercialization and adaptation at scale with a faster reacting industry. Edward, it's been a pleasure. I've learned so much and thank you for affording me the time of asking you about your journey.

Edward Ginis

Jacob, it's been fantastic and I look forward to keeping the dialogue going.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Thank you, Edward.

Edward Ginis

Thanks, Jacob.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Great, stopping the...