Pioneering Next-Generation Audio Enhancement with Hance.ai

So being able to create training sets when you know how music and sound actually works in real life is very important because like the engineers who makes training sets, I've seen training sets recorded in 32 bit 16 kilohertz, you know, a noise set, which is just like a super weird. Pitta Jorgensen have created two amazing companies, Soundly and Handstud.ai.

He works in the intersection between music, film, sound design, and he's created some really healthy, good businesses. It's an interesting story. Hope you like it. Hey guys, and welcome to Sound Connections. Today we have a guest that called Peter Jørgensen from Hans.ai. Hey, thanks for having me on, Jacob. I didn't know about Hans, so you have a colleague.

that reached out to me and just say, hey, I listened to your podcast. I think this is really cool. We have this company called Hans.ai in Norway that does some pretty crazy stuff with audio. And this sort of sparked my interest. I have a background in audio engineering and production. And as a startup guy, seeing other people doing something in this space is quite interesting. Peter, it's going to be about you and your founders journey today, but also about Hans. But before we get into you, can you just explain to me what is Hans.ai?

Yeah, we do machine learning on audio, basically, audio improvement. We are really far ahead, actually, in Oslo. We're very much under the radar in what we do. As I said, you've never heard about us, but what we do is super advanced. So we do machine learning on Edge, which means on like hardware devices, which are quite limited. So we can do noise reduction, stem separation and things like that. And everything's written.

from the ground up and we started before machine learning or AI was cool. So we started building the company in 2020. And yeah. And you obviously have had a journey to get to there. And before we go into Hansi and I and more, because I've tried some of your products. So I've tried, you know, a product that uses your product and it's quite impressive. But we'll talk about you first because you have a background in music and technology and programming? Like how did he end up here? Yeah, that's a good question. So, um, my background is actually in music. So I started out, um, as a musician in back in the

days and got more and more into music production and things like that. So I studied in Liverpool back in 2003, um, music production, uh, at school called Lippe over there. Um, which was a lot of fun and I got to work with some really good artists that like when we left school started doing it pretty well. I moved back to Oslo and started doing a lot of music production here in Oslo. I had a studio down in the city center and 2006-ish, 2008-ish was like an interesting time I guess in the music industry because no one was buying CDs anymore and Spotify had kind of launched but it wasn't that big yet.

And no one was really buying like digital music on Apple music. So like, there wasn't any real economy in the music business. If that makes sense. I'm not sure if you can remember this far back, Jakob, but, but it was like, it's a weird time to like leave uni and try to start working with music. Um, but it was a lot of fun because there's a lot of, in Oslo back then, lots of great musicians, a lot of passion. So, uh, was involved with some really cool projects and had lots of like songs on the radio and things like that. But.

Uh, it wasn't like, uh, very good economically to, to be doing music production back then. No. Which probably is like that today as well. It's a lot of competition, but it's. It's probably better. It's not like amazing. Yeah. It's not amazing. Yeah. Um, so I also started programming. Um, so I just, I'm just a self-taught programmer. I always been like fascinated with computers going up, uh, and writing like.

small programs on Commodore 64 and things like that. And in 2008, I just sat down and thought, you know what, I'm going to learn programming because it looks like a lot of fun. And you can do so much cool stuff. People have started, the iPhone came out and people started making like iPhone apps. And there was just lots of cool ideas floating around on the internet. And like the big hurdle to get over was programming basically. So back then at least.

If you're going to like set up a company, you needed, you kind of needed an idea guy and then you need like a team of developers to do it. So I just thought if I can learn to program, maybe I can just skip that step and just start making stuff. Um, so I sat down in 2008 and just started programming Python to see if I could do it. And then like, I thought it was a lot of fun. And like, I made a game, a super small game and released it on like a forum where I used to frequent. It's called Frick forum. It's like a.

form in Norway. And back then when you like worked on a song with a band, you released it. Maybe you got like a hundred like plays on MySpace, you know, it wasn't like a big thing. It was hard to get like attention on stuff because there wasn't weren't any like easy platforms to get music out there. But with like programming, I just made a small game, released it on the internet and got so much feedback. So I just thought, wow, this is a much cooler thing to do because stuff you do.

gets much more broad attention, which is fun. So I went from there. You can just stop me and ask me questions if there is anything else. this is great. Just continue. I'm just listening. So after that, I actually made an iPhone app called iTrust because I kind of want to learn the frameworks on how stuff works in the iPhone universe. And that was a big success.

I trust it's like an app that lets you see if other people are snooping on your phone. So you just like put your phone on the table and forget to lock it. And then if someone starts pushing buttons, then save a log of like what's been pushed. And then you can have a look at the log when you come back from the toilet. So we made a fun ad for it, like me and a couple of friends and just got the app into the app store. And it was like, back then, like there was a saying, oh, there's an app for that. And people were writing lots about apps in like the papers and stuff like that. So it got really popular and like the video had like 500,000 views on YouTube and people were buying it a lot, but it kind of felt it was a project to learn programming for iPhones and like the idea felt

a bit cheap in a way. So I never wasn't very proud of it. I kind of just let it die from there. But like I could really see how easy it was to get from an idea to a popular product. as long as you know how to do programming. So from there, I just kept on creating stuff. Another really cool thing I made was I was working with a band over here called Team Me, which is like an indie band, very popular around, I guess, 2010. So instead of making a music video, I sat down and programmed a music video game in Flash, which was like a popular developer tool thing back then that could run in any browser.

So I made a music video game in like an eight bit style and all this was kind of new back then. And that got really popular. It had like 2 million plays around the internet and lots of people completed it and like tens of thousands of comments and things like that. So yeah, so I just felt really at home in like being somewhere in between programming, music and art. And I've kind of kept on doing things related to So that another cool project that we made back in 2015, which might be worth checking out. It's called Inspirobot, inspirobot.me, which is a website that generates an unlimited amount

of inspirational quotes on pictures, like the stuff you're on with posts on Facebook, basically. Like, yeah, cease the day and then a picture of a blue sky, but it's auto-generated. This was long before AI in a way. So it's like, a very complex product of stitching together the sentences that kind of make sense and putting them on images. And it's a lot of fun and it's also been like hugely popular. It's has its own like Reddit groups which are constantly active with like thousands of people voting pictures up and down. And it's like still going really strong. So, but we're very like anonymous in making it, but it's, it's actually, it's fun to just create something and then

just let it live on the internet and see that it kind of just lives on and. lives through the purpose and we put in like super small Easter eggs. If you click a lot of times, then you might get the weird thing and people start talking about that. Then yeah, you can like put things into it. So I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna start talking about Hans soon. There are a couple of other projects. Yeah, because you know, after all these kind of things, he created a product that basically is really well running business today that I guess you sort of base your commercial founder career on. And that is...

Soundly. So my background was in music, but it's kind of hard to make money doing just music. So I started doing more and more music for advertising and doing that, I also started doing sound design, which I found super interesting. And you, I think Jacob know very well what sound design is, but to most people, they don't realize that on a Hollywood film, like every sound is layered afterwards. Nothing is basically recorded on set. So, and sound design is a very interesting thing to do because you can make a scene come alive with just adding lots of sound and there's a lot of creativity like

blended into it. And it's just, I especially like working with animations that has no sound and then you kind of just start layering sounds. And I like the feeling when you start buying. Or you start accepting that what you hear and what you see are combined, even though it's just sounds from one universe and animation from another. So sound design is kind of coming up with cool sounds to create emotions when you watch something. So I started doing more and more sound design and started working for a sound design company and had a lot of fun doing like mostly ads and things like that. And I needed a tool myself to find sound effects quickly and get them into the mix.

And this was, I guess, back in 2012. This was really hard. People were still buying CDs with sound effects. And there wasn't like any subscriptions, nothing. You had to pay a lot of money to get like a good sound library. And then you couldn't really search it in any easy way or find the right, you like had to open a catalog. So it's really like old fashioned, the whole system. So I had a look at Spotify and just thought, hmm.

It should be able to do something like that where you have a big sound library in the cloud. You have a local application that connects to whatever applications you're using. So I created SoundLit to use it myself first and got in all the functionality I needed. And then I kind of started to spread around Oslo. Different sound designers started using it. And in 2015, I also got a good sound library on board. My colleague Christian, he's a renowned sound designer from...

both Hollywood and worked a lot in the big movies in Norwegian. He had a big sound library. So we kind of combined forces and created the company Soundly. And it's totally bootstrapped. We never had any investors. But we just like build it brick from brick. And it's luckily gone really well. So now we're a company of, I think we're something like eight, 10 employees here in Sagve in Oslo. And we have lots of freelancers and doing lots of new projects in the Soundly project.

all the time. So it's a local application that connects to all the popular audio and video editors and lets you get sound into them quickly. So from there, in 2020, just before Corona, like a couple of weeks before it hit, we went to NAMM, which is a music, Messe, it's not called Messe in English, it's called...

conference trade show and met another Norwegian who was doing sound and programming which is kind of not something you do every day because there aren't that many people in Oslo who does sound and programming. His name was Stian and he's from a company called Akon Digital and we checked out his products and they were really good like the programming quality or his understanding of DSP was super far ahead of anyone else so he was He makes plugins for audio applications, which are highly regarded and used in like Hollywood. So if someone has to alter like the voice of an actor, they can use his plugins to do that easily. And then they're very popular. If you need

to add like a reverb or an echo to a voice, he has plugins that does that really well. So we thought, hmm, this machine learning thing, which is kind of starting to take off a bit or... very little in 2020, but still there's something there. Maybe we should start looking into it because I think at some point we'll need this stuff in Soundly and you'll probably need it in Acorn as well. So we founded a company between us called Hands, where Soundly, where I work, has a big sound library and a lot of technology that can be used. And he has a very deep understanding of signal processing.

So we combined forces and started making products from day one, really. Again, super bootstrapped. We just thought we'd see what we could make. And the first model that we made. So we wrote everything from scratch basically. So back in 2020, all machine learning stuff was made for images. So image recognition and stuff like that was kind of, you tried to use it on audio, but it didn't really work because there is some overlap, but it's really slow to do it that way. So we started building it.

for audio from scratch, which was really smart, I think. And we released again, a plugin based on machine learning, which removes noise from dialogue. I mean, these days everyone is removing noise from vocals, but back then not very many people were doing it. So we released again, a plugin called Extract Dialogue, which became super popular instantly because finally you had something that could just run on your device.

in an audio or video editor. And it's been used a lot in like Hollywood and like big films. If you see like a film, chances are they've used hand technology to enhance the audio or remove noise. So we went from there to started creating, building the company more and figuring out what we actually want to do. And we found that the stuff we're making works really well and it runs on super lightweight hardware. So maybe we should.

start licensing the models out to hardware renders. And then we got Jota on board who contacted you. He's more of a businessman than us. We are more just recreate stuff and just do what sticks if that makes sense. But he's much more organized and really good at building companies. And we're so happy to have him on board. So he's the new CEO of Hans. He was hired two weeks ago or something like that. So I'm stepping up. I've been like the CEO there for only a couple of years.

Uh, so that's where we're right now. It's a very interesting journey. And when I hear you speak, you know, it obviously sounds like, oh, it's just been a dream. And, but, but I know being a founder and building stuff, there's a lot of downsides as well. Can you walk through what is it that has been difficult about this journey as well? It's, uh, it's, it's been a lot of work. Uh, So the most difficult thing has been time, at least for the last few years, I would say.

There are lots of projects I want to do, but it's hard to find the time to do all of them. And then combining all the sound work with all the hands work with all this stuff can be quite challenging. But saying that, I think I've been quite lucky because I'm lucky enough to be able to work with stuff that I really enjoy and jump on new projects when I see something interesting. So...

I just feel every day I wake up and just feel super lucky that I can just, okay, today I want to program and suddenly I want to create this feature and I can sit down and do that. And then the next day I might want to try to experiment with a new training set for hands. And then I can kind of just do that. So I have to say it hasn't been that difficult. It's taken a lot of time and I've had like, I had a full time job until 20, well, I guess 2019 or something like that. Like I had a full -time job on the side while doing all the other stuff, but it's, I don't know from like, I feel I so say 10 years ago, I would sit in

the studio for 12 hours a day doing music and, um, and that you kind of get into like the vibe of just working a lot in a way. So I just kind of took that with me and the programming and all the other stuff. So just, you kind of just used to working a lot and then it's, it's not that bad. I should probably have said something that was super hard, but it's been quite okay actually.

It's fine. I'm kind of curious because, you know, one of the things that I do hear over and over again in the music industry is these kind of like way too difficult final journeys. And when you talk about yours, I obviously have an understanding it's difficult and working hard is also difficult, but it might be because you're not really working in the music industry per se, you're working in the intersection between music and film.

synchronization if you will, or sound design. Do you have a sense that is a more stable, sensible, lucrative place to be than just purely music? Yeah, that's a great question actually. Because that's exactly what I, I've forgotten about it now, but that's something I started thinking about because are you familiar with Gearspace, the forum? Yeah, I haven't used it for many years, but I am familiar, yes. Yeah.

or Gearsless as it was called back in the day, they changed the name. Cause I remember reading, cause say you're thinking about buying this Neumann, Neumann mic, right? KM84 or something. And then I go on there and you start reading about them. There's so many opinions and it's like, so at some point it gets obvious that there's a lot of like musicians who are like amateurs.

They're not really making a living of it. They're just like very opinionated and have a lot of opinion on it. And then on the same forum, there's some like, a sound design talk and stuff like that. And it's quite obvious. These are professionals. All of them are actually working and making a living doing this. So I kind of started thinking the same thing. It looks like people actually have like real jobs in sound design where they come in at nine and leave at five while in the music business is kind of you come in at 11 and then you're home at four in the morning. If that makes sense. So it's, and that's what I found as well that in the intersection between sound and film.

It's a much more stable economy and much more stable jobs. But in the hardcore music production field, for example, it's not like any steady jobs, everyone's doing freelance work and you always have to find the next job, I guess. So I think I've been lucky being more in the stable film than just the hardcore music stuff. It's just an interesting observation because...

One of the things that I'm very hopeful for is the music industry over time will become a better place, a better environment to have a career. But film in some degree is so many years ahead of the music industry and the way that it's commercialized itself and also the market it addresses and there's a lot more money in it. I recently had an interview with a podcast guest. Actually, I think it's two episodes before you with Shane Shapiro.

And he says that he really believes that the music industry over time will be worth three, four, five times what it is now when it comes to revenue and stuff. And hopefully it will come to that point. But obviously this podcast is for entrepreneurs. So I do want to dwell a bit on this space because it's for entrepreneurs in the music industry, but the music industry does also cover your area. Do you feel like it's a hard space to carve a business in? Like what's the competition space in this intersection? What's your sense of the industry?

Are you thinking about the music industry more? The intersection that you're working with between, you know, music and film. Yeah, I think it's, I'm a fan of small niches because it's so much, if you're, if you're in a small niche, it's, it's easier to be like a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond, I guess. And I've always been a fan of like finding, I don't know why, but just like finding small niches that you can become good at instead of.

Trying to like take over the world with something. But that's just like my philosophy or where I come from because I see it's, it's easy. So in the sound, in the music space, say you're making plugins effects that people can purchase. The competition is so hard because there are so many people doing it because music is a passion product for a lot of people. So just idea of having a job in the music industry is.

Super like high up there and a lot of people want to do it but in like the intersection between film and sound it's a lot of passion but it's more of like a job in a way which means that there are less people doing the same thing so if you have like a lot of passion for what you're doing and you think you can create projects it's a good product it's much easier to get ahead and people are also out looking for better ways to do what they do.

So I would definitely say that it's an easier area to be in than just like the music. But the other side, the music side is much bigger. So I'd say like the sound design side is 10%, 5 % maybe of like, maybe 5 % of like the music industry. But if you hit it big in music, then you're big in a way. Like say waves plugins, for example, they're like super popular and...

They're making a lot more money than if they were just in like the sound design community. But then again, there are so many small fish trying to jump up that you always have to stay ahead of competition. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It does. It does. We have also had Hannes Anderson from Oik sound on the podcast and they've done the same, like found his small niche, but they're definitely more on the music side. And I also know that they're doing well, uh, because they, they're playing in a bigger market than just, you know, It's interesting, but what's your outlook with Hans? Let's go to Hans a bit. Because Sali was successful in a healthy company. He found his partner from Akon that was also successful in his own right. You create this company together and you

Create some technology that's really interesting. Where are you going with it? What do you want to do? Yeah. So in Hans, we want to enhance the world. We're kind of working on a slogan right now. See what we can come up with. But... We are very much dedicated to doing machine learning on device, but with a quality as good as it would be in the cloud. Because most machine learning or AI companies these days, they're just getting models off the shelf basically, or off the shelf components, put them together. They need to run it in the cloud. It's like super inefficient and super big. And then you can do stuff, but it takes a lot of CPU power to do it basically. We're just trying to make this simple and usable.

And we've created like the most amazing product we've created probably is live stem separation. So stem separation is about pulling elements of a music mix out and then doing stuff with it. So we've created a plugin which runs in real time on any computer, even like on a Raspberry Pi that can, for example, remove the vocals from a song. And Stem separation is something that's been around for, I guess, four years or something, which was quite amazing when it came out because with the music background we have, Jacob, we know that the mix is a mix. You can't really do anything to it while it's mixed. But then

Suddenly you can start with machine learning, pulling just the vocals out of a mix again, which is just, it's crazy listening to Freddie Mercury in solo, for example. You've probably done that as well. But yeah, we got this running on device. So we've had... Uh, in the studio where I'm sitting now, it's one of the soundless studios. We've had a couple of like karaoke parties basically where we just open Spotify or Apple music, which has lyrics and then run it through or a stem live stem separation and then can do karaoke on any song. And it's been like, we were amazed ourselves when we actually started using this as just like a karaoke thing

And everyone just loved it. Like people wouldn't go out to the studio to just stay here and just. do karaoke to like weird Norwegian songs that doesn't have a karaoke version. And so I'm enhanced with doing lots of different projects, but right now I'm really trying to get some hardware vendors on board to create like the perfect hardware karaoke box, which can just run on Apple music or Spotify, whatever you'd like. That's amazing. But that's sort of, so you have this underlying technology that can do some cool stuff and then you try to productize it and commercialize it. That's right. Yeah. So.

Right now we're in like the commercialization bit and Joate is doing a fantastic job, the CEO there. So we have meetings with lots of like big players in the industry and both the hardware and the software industry and trying to get the word out that this stuff is actually possible and we can deliver the technology behind it that makes it possible. So, and every week when we have our meeting, it's like always something new. We've discovered something new. We created improved our models.

Or we talk to new customers who are like have new ideas for where this could go. So it's, I really liked them in, in like the industry of machine learning and audio. Right now it's there's so many cool new ideas floating around and we can just jump on them and try them out. And, and I really liked being in a place where there's like, it's going really quickly, but you can also like stay out of the game and like keep trying just cool stuff. And I would say, or background, this is.

Jakob, you have talked about machine learning a lot, but our musical background is actually quite important because the big companies have a lot of engineering, like hardcore DSP engineering, digital signal processing engineering, but they don't really understand music or sound that well. So being able to create training sets when you know how music and sound actually works in real life is very important because like the engineers who makes training sets, I've seen training sets recorded in a 32 bit 16 kilohertz, you know, a noise set, which is just like a super weird, you probably understand that

That's just like a super weird format, but if you don't understand music, then you think that's a good idea for some reason. So there's something really strong to be said about having the experience in like just general audio when working in this Klein Dyke. we're in right now where everything is kind of possible. When I hear you journey, it strikes me as quality product first and then reaction later. Like it seems like, okay, I made something cool, put it into it, there was a reaction. I made something cool, put it into its reaction. I made a machine learning hardware device thing and we commercialized it later.

And it's a really cool way of doing it because a lot of founders sort of go the other way around. It's like, okay, we want to do this and then all about building towards that. And then... It's a difficult way to do it. And you've done it, I would say, textbook the right way. But that's not always a luxury, but I think it really stems from you going back to say, okay, I want to have the shortest way possible between my idea to actually having a product by doing this programming yourself. Is that how you also read it? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I think it comes from like just being able to create something yourself instead of relying on a lot of other people.

You kind of quickly learned that it's better to just build a product and get it out there than trying to get the team to build a project and then the project does. And then sometimes it fails. Sometimes it goes well. So it's just, I guess this has been discussed a lot as well, how long you should spend on the prototype and things like that. But both me and Stian, the other guy in hands who's like the smart guy over here, I'm just doing training sets. He is also the same like bootstrapped idea of making good products.

sell them, make sure they work before you like try to go big. Boom. So we're very aligned. Well, Jota on the other side, he's a bit more, let's just focus on something, get money in and then just like build it. But I think there's a combination here, which I used to be very much like everything should be bootstrapped and like you should have a product before you go for investors and things like that. But I'm starting to see that. I think like, I think.

There's like a hybrid approach, which is probably the best way to do things, which is to be able to build something yourself to a point where you figure out, okay, we need to get more people on board and then get people like Jot on board to help just build a company much quicker with like funding. So that's what I've learned from my experience so far at least. Yeah, it's definitely, I personally, I come from like, let's sell the idea first and then build it later. But, and that, that's.

that's not always turned out well. And I'm definitely trying to meet more than middle. I'm trying to meet people that are more like you that I can combine with because I'm a storyteller, right? So my skillsets are probably closest to you. And that is also super important, but it needs to be with that practical aspect. Let's also just build a great, great product. And I really also, I think it speaks to the necessity for founders to have...

other people that has other skill sets that can do great things. And you and your first partner can build great things. Then his role is coming in and sell it, telling the story, scaling it, creating possibilities that you guys maybe wouldn't be able to do. But your journey as a soundly, let's go a bit back to that because you are still CEO of that company. Yeah, that's right. So my passion is both very much in Soundly and in the hands of the company. But I've been working at Soundly's super fun place to work, basically. And we've just built it brick by brick with hiring friends,

basically. So we're just a bunch of friends sitting out here doing stuff we really like doing. So we spend a lot of money on just making silly ads because we think it's funny. So we have like a big YouTube backlog of just films we made and we're producing lots of other new films now and we are also innovating a lot which is fun coming up with new ideas and we have like a new big release coming in not too distant future with some new stuff so I'm kind of juggling my life between like the hand stuff which I think is a lot of fun and also the soundless stuff which is a lot of fun so it's I guess it's a privileged place to be but I have

done a lot of hands work over the years. I'm just trying to answer the question in some way, but I've got my absolute, my biggest role and job is in the soundly company because that's a lot of work basically to be SEO in it. And we have a lot of stuff going on and you need to hold all the threads. So it's like there I have some very like things that structure things, a lot of emails I need to do, lots of meetings I need to have, which are good meetings and fun meetings, but still is like enhances a lot.

or I can kind of just say, okay, I want to work on this for a while. I want to see how this works. And which like gives me a lot of like creative freedom to work on other stuff. So I kind of like doing both things if that makes any sense. But yeah, my like biggest workload is by far in soundly and day to day business. Yeah, but it seems like there's a very clear synergy. So, you know, the work you do in soundly probably translates very well into hands. But yeah, can I ask you to... can use technology.

As a founder, you have probably have some sort of visions for both Soundleaf and Hans. When it comes to the companies, like Soundleaf, is that a company you just want to be profitable and live over a long time? Or do you want to sell it? And sort of the same question for Hans. Like what's your exit goals or results you're looking for financially for both of those companies?

That's a good question. I haven't thought that much about it, to be honest. I kind of like... I really like working in Sound Lab. We're having a good time. And it's very much a passion project for everyone here. So it's for us, as long as we can just keep going and be profitable, I think we're quite happy with where we're at. It will be interesting to work with some bigger industry players as well. Maybe see if we could do... Sound design is kind of very niche. It's still like a big market where you can also go in and work.

And for the hands company, I think it's pretty much the same. We were having a lot of fun working on it, inventing new stuff like our main goal have never been like to make money. It's just been to see how far we can take machine learning in a way. When in my experience, it's like often a good, when you're starting something, if the end goal is money, it might not be that easy to, to keep the passion going while you're working on it. But if the end goal is just to see.

around the next turn, can we make this even better just because the users we have will think it's cool, then it's easier to motivate you at every step. So we don't really have any long -term goals in any of these companies. It's more just seeing what's around the next turn and just go with it if it works and then create new projects from that. So Hans in the big part is just like going around the next turn and seeing what's there and then maybe going there, maybe just do some stem separation.

Maybe we should have a karaoke party. Yeah, that was really fun. Maybe we should make a karaoke box. If you understand what I mean. Absolutely. The road kind of comes as we're walking. I think it's also inspiring to hear like, you know, I love the music industry and I love being a founder, but it also, it can be quite depressing, you know, and I speak to a lot of founders that are really passionate and, you know, just work and work for years. But the truth of it, it can be quite depressing. And one of the...

One of the statements I get from a lot of guests is like, they would not go into the music industry if they knew what was coming. And it's kind of beautiful to hear a story from your side where it's actually possible to thrive. It's actually possible to have fun and have karaoke parties with your company and do that. And I think that's an important narrative as well. Like, not because, you we assume just from this podcast, your life is, you know, a dream in all aspects, but it's good to say, okay, we can actually build healthy companies that do well.

And, and enjoy the journey. Um, and it also sounds like you just expect to, you know, work hard and enjoy the journey moving forward. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So my like impression from founding things and it has been very positive, but I'm in a very lucky position where I can, where this is my full -time job. Uh, I don't need like investors coming in and things like that. So I feel super lucky because I've had full -time job.

on jobs on the side always. And it's hard to manage that, to create something on top of something you're doing. But yeah, I just feel, I feel super lucky to be in the position I'm in, to be honest. Well, I'm very, I'm very curious to follow Hans and the technology and how it moves forward. And you guys have some, if people haven't seen it, you've got an amazing advertising video on your website, Hans .ai. That's just, the first time I saw it, I was like, okay, well, I get it.

I want to speak to these guys because that's quite impressive and I've used some of your technology and it's all quite impressive. And I really believe you guys are tapping into right things is sort of taking these machine learning AI and just applying to things that needs change and improvement. And you're doing that pretty fast. So I hope the best for your company. I'm very happy you came on the podcast. It's super inspiring to hear a positive story from a founder in the music industry. And maybe it's because you're in the intersection between music and film.

Let's reflect on that, take it in. Maybe change careers a bit. No, no. But it's been a really good interview and I hope to meet you in person soon. Yeah, sure. If you're in Oslo, come by the office. We have nice offices with nice lunches. So you'd be more than welcome, Jacob. You can use me in one of your advertising videos. I'll try to do my best. So that advertising is like a product of all the stuff we do soundly in a way. We've done a lot of videos over the years.

But I just want to say that like the overlap between if anyone is like thinking about okay, maybe we should look into like the film world a bit to see there's like the overlap in what you do is very big and very broad. So like it's not a very long trip from like doing just music to doing like music and sound design is very connected the whole thing in every way really. So I think maybe you're absolutely right. The intersection between film and sound might be easier than just music, which is much harder and much more competition. So you can take something from that. Maybe it's worth looking into that direction as well. I'll definitely go look. It's been super good being on. I feel I've just talked and talked. You should have

stopped me more and talked more. It's the perfect episode. The less I need to say, the better it is. I don't know. I don't know, Jacob. You just kept me going. But it was a lot of fun being on and getting a chance to talk about this stuff, which I'm very passionate about. You can probably, it shines through up. Very clear. Okay. Thank you Peter. Talk soon.