Building Musiio and the Path to SoundCloud

I don't think peI don't think people even I realized how much of your job as the CEO is to be a salesperson like it doesn't work if you are two co-founders and you think I'm just going to hire ahead of sales and they'll do it all like it doesn't work if you are the CEO co-founder you are the head of sales and until further notice musio got acquired by Soundcloud Hazel Savage is one of the co-founders of Musiio she's also an investor she's a thought leader and she's great to follow in LinkedIn uh that's where I got to know her she's shared the experience with building and selling Musiio and it's a really

exciting story. Hello guys and welcome back to sound connections podcast. Today I am lucky I have been following this woman on LinkedIn for some time. Hazel Savage welcome. Hi thanks for having me lovely to be here Jakob. You are the second guest we're having on the exit series uh which is about exits in music industry and I think this is particularly interesting because uh I'm a I'm a big researcher I like to read stuff uh but I really have a hard time finding great in-depth content about the processes and for entrepreneurs I think it's important to understand. So thank you so much for being here and sharing this training with us. No problem at all my pleasure happy to be here. So you were uh the co-founder of musio that got acquired per SoundCloud uh and

this sort of sets their frame but can you can you just make a brief introduction of who you are and what you do right now. Yeah absolutely uh I always say my name is Hazel Savage I'm the vice president of Music intelligence at SoundCloud and I joined SoundCloud in 2022 when they acquired Museo which was the company I was the CEO and co-founder for. Okay I'm looking so much forward to hearing about this story uh you're one of the guests I've really been looking forward to um and but before we do that I just want to want to set the scene for your life because we're going to talk about m we're going to talk about the acquisition but you're obviously very Central to the story so could you tell me in a couple of minutes how you got into music and how you sort

of got into the Journey of co-founding Mia. Yeah absolutely there's a lot of sort of um in points and uh and I know you said not to not to go back too early but I think um getting my first guitar when I was 13 is one of the sort of defining moments at which I decided this was the thing that I was most interested in life AKA music and at that time being a performer but there've been many other inroads as well so various jobs I've had that have kind of built up the base of knowledge that I've needed to get where I am. So the four and a half years I spent at Shazam um in the early 2000s um was sort of instrumental in crafting my knowledge around audio

fingerprinting but also direct consumer apps um and also so uh very early versions of Music technology and there've been other inroads as well even right up until um and for anyone who doesn't know I started myio by joining an incubator and I joined one called entrepreneur first which is uk- based but they have a Singapore office well they did when I joined it in 2018 and again that was kind of another off-ramp at which I it was sort of they called me and said would I be interested in doing this incubator program and I just left band lab and I didn't really know anything about incubator programs and I was like I don't know like what this sounds really weird they're going to pay me to build a company I don't know that's weird what's that um but then the way they kind

of hooked me in was they were like we already have James Brown's drummer doing the program and I was like I've seen James Brown live I'm a big fan of the of funk music so I was like I'm just going to go along for the initial meeting so I can just meet this guy and be friends with this guy and that was that was a great way to hook me in because obviously um and I did meet Eric and Eric's fantastic Eric harrove big fan so there's all these points all these decisions and off-roads at which that buil that Build That Built Me up to where I got to with miio I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah that's great okay this is going to be for like a pack I can already hear

uh a lot of that's the music industry yeah a lot of Random Encounters really creates the some of the hole. Okay well let's dive into it so tell me about this incubation program they contacted you and you said they want to pay you to start a company can you go a bit more into detail. Yeah absolutely and so that's that's the quick version but the long version is they when they first started in Singapore um cuz it was a UK based incubator originally and then they opened the sing or a few years later and their whole model is actually they don't even call themselves an incubator they call themselves a talent investor because what they do is per cohort they get sort of 50 to 100 people you join as individuals and then you meet somebody on the

program to work with who has a complimentary skill set so that's where I met my co-founder Aaron um however they i' I'd never heard of an incubator or a talent investor um and they were basically hitting people up on LinkedIn and doing a load of email Outreach and I just got this message and it was like um you know would you want to join E's next cohort and they do they pay you a stipend to do the program because their working theory is that the best Founders a don't work for free and they aren't going to leave their jobs at Facebook Google and all these other fantastic companies for nothing so if you can drisk the building of a company by paying the founders that's their Theory

or it's that was certainly the theory in 2018 that were they were working on but because I'd never heard of it just sounded like a massive scam but they also knew that because they were like everyone thinks it's a scam because someone's you know calling you up saying we're going to pay you to for three months to build a company you think why would you do that's that sounds weird but then when you hear about the detail um but lucky for me I was like Singapore's a super safe City I'm pretty sure if I go along to this inperson meeting nothing bad will happen to me uh secondly they're offering a free coffee and uh and it's like only around the corner from my house yet another dr- risk and then they told me they had Eric harrove uh James Brown's drummer on the doing

already signed up to do the program and so I was like there's enough here that I'm going to say yes to initial an initial meeting and then that was literally the start of it and next thing you know boom got a company there it is. Wow did they pair you with your co-founder or like did you go through. No they don't they don't pair you what they do is they just say so there was about 100 people in my cohort and uh they all they say is in the first week try and go for coffee with five people that's the only requirement and then so and so every everyone's doing the same so everyone's inviting each other out trying to and the idea is to just chat to lots of people

and get a feel for who you could work with and then there is a sort of a simple methodology behind who should work with who for example I was at the time what they referred to as like a domain expert so I had 10 plus years experience in the music industry theoretically I should be able to build a better company in the music space that was that's their working theory that would be true if I was say you know if I'd had 10 years experience as a doctor theoretically I should be able to build a better med tech company than a random stranger on the street and so I was what they called a domain expert and my co-founder was like a technical expert because he had 10 plus years coding Building Products Etc and so what they say is like two technical people can work

together um because you see that quite often you know you'll get two very technical people they'll handle a different part of the technology that they will have slightly different personalities maybe one naturally is more CEO the other's more CTO but with a domain expert you have to work with a technical person what they don't want is like two domain people working together because then what you end up with is two people who know an industry really well who can't build anything um so they have these combinations if these types of people can work together these types of people will be ineffective working together and it's all data driven it's all based on the statistics from previous cohorts of what yielded success um so yeah but not strict they don't literally go oh

you and you and you and you work together um and so yeah just went for coffee with five people and for me I was really lucky it was like a pretty obvious choice who to work with you just get that connection with someone shorthand my co-founder Aaron had worked in gaming previously which isn't the same as music but the entertainment field there was like enough Shand that we were very um on the same page from day one so yeah that's kind of that's kind of how the first week of entrepreneur first went. Amazing I have not heard of this before and if someone contacted you about it I would think it is a scam say I if someone contacted me about it now despite having

done it I'd still think it was a scam it probably is a scam if you get such a message still uh but sometimes it results in M you okay well exactly yeah um okay so you have this first week you meet Aaron it's kind of obvious that you guys could be a match uh what happens then do you like do you start brainstorming ideas what was the structure. Well so basically at EF you just sort of mutually agree you're working together and then there's this slack channel right where as because which is like there's an API connecting to like the main EF dashboard so you like officially announce as co-founders and a little post pops up in the slack Channel um and what they also encourage is if you

find even within 24 hours that it's not working you're not on the same page you don't want to work on the same stuff then you break up as co-founders and that announcement goes in the slack channel so that other people can see who's available other people can work with other people and there like all the celebratory emojis like when people break up like they try and turn that into a positive experience which is based on that idea of like a Founder just constantly iterating even if that's iterating on co-founders you know can be you start working on something and you realize you don't have an idea or you don't have anything so but Aaron and I were one of the I think they

say about 50% of every cohort starts working with someone and then only works with that person but that of course means 50% of people have like three plus co-founders over the course of the program so but we will one of the um started working together and then we never changed um and so really what we started doing was we sat down I think in the first week I still have the notebook and I just wrote down the 10 worst things about the music industry um and then I read them out and I said which of these has a technical solution um and I always joke and I hope swearing's allowed on this podcast yeah absolutely because number six on the list was just people a [ __ ] um in the

music industry and uh apparently there's no way I solution for that just yet so um but the but the one on the list that we did choose to work on was the fact that there are I think at the time the number was like in 2018 I think maybe this the latest press relase Spotify done it said there's it was out of 40 or 60,000 tracks a day being released which regardless of which number it is that's insanely high it's now 100,000 but and probably more but the challenge was there's new music released every day that needs to come out in a whole year in the western hemisphere of

popular music nobody could listen to that amount of music so what do we do how do you ever know what's good how do you ever know what you have how does any streaming service ever playlist anything um and so the idea was just could you build an AI that could be like a first pass filter could you build an AI that could listen to music and uh my co-founder thought that he probably could and so that's what we started working on of course much later on it became productized and it became you know it became Musiio and it became a more sort of defined company but really it was just finding that problem solution which is there used to be very little music released now there's

a lot how do we what can we do anything with that. So at the end of those three months did you form a company and then start pursuing the product. Yeah so after the 3 months of sort of that sort of ideation and initial Bild uh I think we incorporated at that point um so we were a Singapore based Company Incorporated in Singapore and again as part of the EF program they and again it's different for every country they pay you a stipend for 10% ownership in your company and that's the sort of the more traditional incubator style of things so yeah very much

became like the first investor from that respect then you build for another three months so it's like a six-month program in total and then you do a demo day at the end of the six months which is they got us in a room it was at the Google offices in Singapore pitch to about 200 investors um oh yeah okay yeah which like again and again like music tech is not really a big thing in Asia or in Singapore certainly so you know a couple of my actual investors they had like the little pamphlet and they were sort of as soon as I got on stage and I said the word music they said they all just turned the page like not interested so um so we had a bit of an uphill struggle um I think as

well there was an I just you just give me a flashback there I just remembered there was an Excel sheet um of all the teams that had pitched and there was a tally of how many meeting requests they'd got off the back of demo day like how many of the 200 investors in the room wanted to meet with your company off the back of your pitch and I think there was maybe around 20 companies that pitched and I think we were like I don't think we were last but I think we were second last we were like 19th most requested AKA not really requested at all like and I think we only had a couple of people want to meet with us and I don't think some of them were that serious I think they were just

Yeah the more deal flow the more analysis we can do the better whereas like right at the other end you know in the in the pole position was a good friend of mine who was building a um a Medtech company using AI for cancer detection and you know that was that's right up their street in Singapore that's exactly what they want to look at and invest in but some music tech company no not really interested. Yeah and we won't we won't talk too much about it today but I just briefly come into it because yeah you also invest and you've been quite you know active about speaking about it but this is something not just back then in Singapore but globally still meets a lot of

reluctance from investors it's sort of the lack of domain expertise for you know normal investors that really makes the financing Journey complicated um 100% I think um I think it's a it's a multitude of things I think it's very hard for a non-industry specific investor to do the due diligence there are just things about our industry that if you know you know and if you don't you don't and that's not helpful for um for traditional investors and I also think that another part of the challenge is a lot of them have been burned so if they have done investments

in music tech they've either gone spectacularly wrong or the founder has claimed the mark the Tam is bigger than it is or the opportunity is bigger than it is because and this is another thing like I looked up the other day which is like the total yearly value of recorded music is around 20 billion like that's how big our industry is which is like yeah that's okay 20 billion that's not pocket change but when you compare that to the size of other Industries like I can't even off the top of my head but like what's the size of the medical industry in the us alone like yeah

it's in the trillions you know and even I was even looking this up the other day like the HR software work dat just because I was just curious just Googled it's worth 70 billion dollars and I was like okay so the one HR platform is technically worth triple the entire music industry on a yearly basis and that's just because every single company in the world needs a HR software whereas not everyone in the world needs an AI that can listen to music right so we're getting into a slightly Niche area the reason I invest in it is because I can do my own due diligence I've worked in this industry for like 18 years it's really easy for me to assess whether an

opportunity is good I love this industry and I love working with Founders but I see why a lot of more traditional investors are skeptical or a little standoffish with the with the area. Yeah no I agree and we spend a lot of time finan fundraising on behalf of a companies and we've been relatively successful at least in the preed in the seat stage um but we've been focusing a lot about which I believe a lot of music companies don't uh is sort of parallel n narratives to other Industries uh for examp you know one example I use all the time is you know when you have a record label for example it's not about creating you know hit songs it's about creating you know IP rights that are non correlated assets to generate Equity markets with you know yearly dividends with

a multiple acquisition per like it kind of have these kind of terms terminologies you know and use the same language as you would use of any stock and you know what happened with jukebox it makes it even easier to make that comparison. Yeah and that's why we focus a lot of about energy on especially actually did a LinkedIn post about this two days ago um because I believe there's so few uh investors in the music industry music tech industry and what they usually do is they invest a bit later than the early stages like uh so these early stage um influx of money is just very difficult uh very difficult um more difficult to other Industries I would say at

least. Yeah let's not go too deep down that rapid hole that could be a whole different episodes in 50 episodes from now um but uh okay so you have the six-month program you do the demo day you're not very attractive but do you do you get to get some more investment so you can keep on like financing this thing. Yeah we did and so the other thing learn is that the number of meeting requests do not correlate to successfully raising around you don't need 40 50 investors to want to meet with you only need the right one investor and so we were very lucky in that when we did the program entrepreneur first and I credit EF with like two things like they introduced me to

my found co-founder who I never would have met otherwise and they introduced me to our first investor that wasn't themselves so they have these venture Partners who are basically your mentors on the program who you meet with every week they ask you lots of questions etc ours was a Dutch guy called ad and he put in like the first 50k check and so he put in like a 50k check from his own his own personal Angel Investing but he's also incredibly well connected so he was then able to go and help us set up strategic meetings and as I say that investor who

had said they'd looked at the booklet and heard music and turned the page he was able to go back to them and go take another look seriously take another look and that's how I even heard that story because then we had that meeting and that person did end up becoming an investor so again just having someone who reputationally is well known who can then um Advocate on your behalf who has those relationships so taking that initial 50k from ad was fantastic it really showed he believed in us but he was also then able to make some really great strategic in um introductions which yeah was completely um completely the most valuable Priceless I would

say. One other question that comes to my mind and I don't know the answer to this is how many qualified founders with great f co-founding teams don't have the opportunity for having these freak accidents to start with it just ends up not having the opportunity to build something um I don't know but I think a lot about it because I believe if the music technology industry should get better the music industry in general we need to have um prompted situations where these freak accidents can happen does that make sense we need to as an industry. Yeah and I think there's a you know another EF concept is that uh Talent is uh equally spread globally but opportunity is not

and so hence why they were opening up cohorts and they still have one in Bangalore um Singapore France Germany um I'm not quite sure where else they're focused on at the minute us as well I think now and you know it's so true that great Founders can come from anywhere but we tend to see great Founders focused in certain areas due to opportunity and I think I but I also love I love that some of the assets are becoming more democratized as well so I find myself sending the link to why combinator's startup school and because a lot of people reach out to me like very early stage like they're not they think they might think they want an investor

but they haven't got an idea or a pitch deck yet so they don't need an investor at this stage um but to be able to learn how to build a company and how to do it something like why combinated startup school it's online it's free you know if someone's Keen enough and wants to be an Entre rur enough they can find these online resources that didn't even exist back in 2018 so I'm kind of hopeful and positive that more opportunities are being created and actually probably Co accelerated that because when everything had to go 100% online a lot of people realized it mattered even less physically where you were so yeah it's interesting that okay

you get this money and you able to support some sort of livelihood as Founders and you just start building uh can you tell me about that process AI is really expensive so H so that's why you need to raise money to build to build it um so it was myself and my co-founder initially um I think our seed round we did 1.2 million uh Sing dollars and we then made a few strategic hires that we that we needed at the maximum size of our company we were like 15 people um but back in those early days we were probably about five or six it very quickly become about okay well we were doing

the entire job of running the company between the two of us but you know to grow or to do anything else we're going to need to hire people to take over trunks of what we're doing so for example in the beginning I was doing all of the uh the QA all of the user listening to see if the AI had accurately categorized certain music um and but that's incredibly time consuming very office-based no time for going out and doing sales no time for working on the brand no time for meeting with investors so then I think we so then we hired I think Isabelle was our first hire who was basically I think she was a fresh grad or she had one or two years experience music

degree music production and you know she was just really switched on I could teach her to do what I did on in the music listening space and then she could take over that portion of it great now I've got a whole batch of free time that I can fill with other stuff and that was kind of our hiring methodology the whole time like what can we chunk out and give to someone else because the two co-founders can do everything but that doesn't scale um and you know just little things like finding a little co-working space to go to go to taking the team out for cheap dinners you know doing everything to keep it sort of like fun but like yeah doing everything on the cheap um yeah but I enjoyed that. Yeah and did you pursue so you talked about sales so tell me about

the first sale how did that happen. Yeah I think and one of my insights as well is and I think this was some feedback on the incubator we did that a lot of the other co-founders had which was I don't think people even I realized how much of your job as the CEO is to be a salesperson like it doesn't work if you are two co-founders and you think I'm just going to hire a head of sales and they'll do it all like it doesn't work if you are the CEO co-founder you are the head of sales um until further notice and I still am so even you know I've been able to Outsource it more and more as

we go but um I still I still do sales I still have clients that come directly to me um but getting that first sale was incredibly difficult um and I really credit our lead investor um you know cuz we were like we had like three Deals that were like super close and I was convinced like when we closed the funding round in December 2019 I was like one will sign in January one will sign in March one will sign in July and we'll have lots of time it'll be great on boarding in fact all three of them signed within like 48 hours in July um which meant that January to July

was incredibly like tense yeah because there was you know s there was no sales so that was very no Revenue which was incredibly stressful don't recommend raising pre Revenue if you can avoid it um it's a lot of pressure and then you know basically just trying to get that first one over the line but I really credit our lead investor wav maker Partners Paul Santos who was our board member who was like just say anything to get them to say yes like what can you put in that initial deal that's just they've just have to say yes it would be so stupid for them to pass on it and what it ended up being was the reason why one of our first clients was holding off on

signing is because they were worried about uh the implementation and they were worried about getting it on their product road map and having the resource so I offered within that first deal that I would fly two developers to the UK we were in Singapore to come and build it on site for them to do the work for them now obviously l in the long term we never did that again like we never like was like I'll give you two full hires for a week to come and build it for you because there's no profit in that but really when you're still trying to reach that product Market fit and you're still trying to get anyone to say yes to this to prove that it will work doing something

But I almost felt like because the idea came from the lead investor to get do anything to get them to say yes it almost felt a bit like permission as well because we were certainly a bit like oh can we do something that's such bad business technically you know is that what should we do so but yeah so that's kind of what we did and once we had that first yes all the all the dominoes fell very quickly um so yeah interesting times stressful times I can imagine it and one of the benefits from me running this podcast as an entrepreneur myself and I can well some of the things we've done we've done pre-revenue uh luckily most of the stuff we do now is post- revenue but it's incredibly stressful uh and you're at the better you're at the mercy

of someone different and uh than yourself and that Pride wise practically wise tiny wise is just incredibly draining yeah um yeah and I did find it incredibly stressful um building a company um but it's also a bit of a buzz like the bigger the theer the success and I there was also somebody else and this is this is what I was really grateful of as well you know a lot of people have said the entrepreneur or the Founder's journey is quite lonely like I never personally felt that way because I had a co-founder but also because I had this community from the startup incubator and there was a really great uh there was well there was a second Aaron in our cohort

So not my co-founder Aaron but the other Aaron we had two Aarons and he said a great quote which was like if everything goes right you don't learn anything yeah um and I was like and so I kind of kept that with me and I F I found that really motivating and I think I've said it to other people since which is you know if everything if you wanted to raise money then suddenly there was money and if you wanted to get a deal and suddenly there was a deal like if everything went that easily you would learn absolutely nothing um because it would all just fall in your lap it's through the failures and the things that don't work and the struggles that you become

the founder and the entrepreneur that you that you are and so and without those struggles you really don't learn anything at all so even though it kind of sucks and it kind of feels a bit rubbish at the time yeah you don't learn anything otherwise so to be grateful for that opportunity which I really so I really like that phrase by those metrics I should be quite clever as well um there you go good okay well okay this is great so you land the sales you have Revenue um like do you do scale more like do you can you make your enough money on your own like what's the process there yeah so we pretty much um got to sort of Break Even slash profitability

I think we probably by 2021 to be honest um so and so the pandemic was interesting CU I just basically used to work till like 3:00 in the morning in Singapore and then sleep till midday like I shifted my whole day to like us and European working hours since I couldn't go and visit clients and yeah we ended up with enough clients that we basically were covering all of our costs on a on a monthly basis by about 2021 so to get from like fun idea fundraise um for sales to kind of break even in about three years was fantastic and I appreciate that is quite

a short timeline for anyone and I do think as well you know my opinion well my opinion and experience is that music tech is very high acquisition there's a lot of Acquisitions in this space and I told my co-founder this I think on the first day of meeting at EF I was like by the way if we decide to build a company together chances are lots of people will try and buy us or ask if we're for sale or that may be a reasonable outcome are you okay with that um and he said that he was like and we had that discussion like week one and yeah it's true I think maybe even in that first three years I think we had two serious offers that were that we entertained But ultimately were

not the right fit for one reason or another um and then in obviously we sold year four to SoundCloud and you know what wasn't known at the time um because I would say 70% of all of our clients did not reveal that it was our tet they were using um they wanted a lot a lot of companies wanted you to think maybe they built it in house or something so even all the great customers we have on our case studies page is less than 30% of those who would allow us to talk about it um so SoundCloud were a client for about a year and a half before they acquired Museo um and it made

a lot of sense cuz they were one of our biggest clients because we had volume based pricing and they have 345 million tracks so they kind of um you know they've been working with us for a year and a half and they kind of come across with a you know hey would you be interested in an acquisition the correct answer to that no matter who asked you is always I'd be open to a discussion um and then you see where they go uh and so that so that was it really and I just you know we really had two options we either joined with a bigger company to keep growing the technology and growing the impact of the technology or we would have gone out and raised a series a and you know tried to

build those elements ourselves um but yeah music tech tends to be high acquisition so was always a it was it was always a potential outcome yeah let's go a bit more into detail uh what actually happened so they were your client for one and a half years they it's a volume game so they can see okay this is getting expensive for us but it's high value it's better that we buy it did they like did they send you an email how was the conversation started and how did they approach it always goes the same every time like you'll have um you'll have an account manager or someone that you would like liaz with you know because with separate companies SoundCloud and musio so

there's someone you work with on the integration side but there's someone who's essentially your point person for anything you might need on the tech the invoicing you name it and then suddenly one day and this is true of SoundCloud but also all of the other offers we had suddenly one day you get asked oh hey could you join a call with this person and the answer is always when they rep yeah of course join any call you want me to um and then when you go and look it up you see that person Works in cor Dev yeah okay and it's as simple as that and I'm like oh I've got a meeting with C Dev now um some sometimes you're misled cuz sometimes they don't have a COR Dev title but they have something like strategy or something and you think oh maybe they want to expand the deal maybe there's more opportunity and then they get on a call and they go are you for sale um that's

happened that happened a couple of times um and I this I'm trying to think I don't want this to sound arrogant but it would happen with most of our big clients and really it then became a question of going oh well thank you very much it's absolutely delightful we'd absolutely be happy to consider it and then the next thing you want to do without sounding too pushy is be like give me a number um because a lot of people have said they want to buas but if they're not actually going to send a term sheet over or give me any specifics they're not that serious they're not that far down the line in the discussion like yeah I can say we're open to it but that's

as far as the conversation goes so as I say on only three occasions and one of them being SoundCloud did they did we ever get given a number and so I was able to then pass it into they're not really serious if they're not giving me a number you know what was the what was the you don't need to go into specifics but what was sort of the um the shareholding structure like you and your co-founders had some shares and you have investors diluting that or like what was the situation there yeah so our cap table when we sold there was I think there was about 13 of us on the cap table um myself and Aaron I think we Ed something like we had like 49 or 51%

like barely a majority if a majority between the two co-founders and he and I were 5050 again that's a that's an EF requirement um when you join their program as individuals all companies started through efr equal ownership um which is not true in every case but I guess it massively simplifies things as well with their program and then obviously when we took on you know e had the initial 10% I think they got diluted down slightly after we raised um our seed and then we did a we did a bridge round as well um and essentially yeah the rest of the cap table Wave Maker Partners was our lead investor but it was relatively clean but we were a relatively young company um so yeah

I think there was about 13 on the cap table lead investors incubators angels Founders and then of course the 10% ESOP as well for the for the staff yeah amazing I would like to talk a bit about how that impacted you and of course also go back to how the company operates now under the ownership of SoundCloud but was this was this like a lifechanging event for you that acquisition uh the exit decision specifically uh yeah definitely um it's given my husband a rather large guitar spending habit um which I you know one of them is mine I think it's on this wall my one

but um you know it's uh yeah it's definitely lifechanging you know especially coming from the northeast of England um a background where you know I've always had to work to pay the bills and even from the point of view as you know my very first job was I used to work at HMV a record store in London on minimum w age so this was 18 years ago but I earn £4,000 a year like total so my take-home pay after tax was about 900 a month my rent in London was 500 which meant I had £400 to live on for everything for bills for clothing for food and you know just learn you know

could go for a night out on5 would always get the bus because it was a pound and the tube was one 80 you know like would buy a pack of pit breads for 21 p and a tub of hummus for a pound and that's lunch for three days like you know just that was that's where I came from and you know could never work an internship at a big company because they were unpaid back in the day and I couldn't afford to work unpaid and live in London so to go from you know to work that hard and then to be able to I like to think I still work hard but um but with a with a slightly high level of comfort and

slightly more guitars and you know that's the that's the that's the main outcome absolutely let's just here and I think you know obviously I rarely hear of Founders that are successful that did it for the money because that's just it's a poor motivation it won't stand the Testo time and as I say to many people the music tech investing space if you are moot or even working in the music industry if you are motivated by money there are a lot of easier ways to make money and there are a lot of other industries that pay much better um you know so if you are a developer or

you are a marketer or you're even an HR person those med tech companies and those like fintech companies are paying significantly higher wages than music tech so generally only in music tech because you want to be um and if you're in it for the money you've picked poorly yeah I had a quite elaborate discussion with Mike Bensky about this very topic about being the lifers in the music industry even though I'm only 30 uh like I'm a lifer already like you know if I were ever going to change it's because my wife would twist my and break it uh for financial

reasons which is a valid reason but besides that you know you could never get me to leave it yeah okay so I always say I'm a lifer as well but for slightly different reasons in that I'm now not qualified to do anything else um because I turned 40 last year and I have only ever worked in music and music tech so I feel like if I applied for a job at a fin tech company now they'd be like maybe you have some transferable skills but you don't really know anything about any other industry so um so I'm locked in now that's it permanent oh that's good okay so we're sort of uh at the ending note podast but I want to understand what changed in the company's life in your

life practically speaking after acquisition did everything just continue as rual or what's the change um the most exciting change is I no longer have to do payroll um which is brilliant um yeah obviously we were still a small enough company that was still a lot of like HR and admin stuff that I had to do like if someone's Visa was going to expire in Singapore like I'd have to log into EP pass online I forget what it's called and um and do the new registration and now there that's not my job anymore like I don't I don't do those things at SoundCloud so there was some changes there was a there was a nice lot of that you know day-to-day BS you know invoicing

that I was able to be like oh great there's a finance team there's an HR team that's really enjoyable but especially in the very short term it wasn't massively different um because the we kept the technology available in the market so we still have all of our clients and we still sign new clients so the job hasn't changed too much um but we you know it's more like half my time is spent in doing the exact same job did before the other half is treating SoundCloud like an internal customer and thinking about how best the technology can be applied facing inwards and

so that's probably the biggest change that and no payroll that and no payroll okay yeah um but and how about your stress levels like is it is it a more comfortable like human position you're in um I don't know it's that's a really hard one to judge because um I haven't really had any time off so like I haven't really had like a reset from that perspective but then again I've never like taken a gap between jobs either and I don't know that I'd be very good at it so egg a bit of a workaholic so I sort of I'm sure I think there's a there's a there's definitely a

much lower stress level in that even though we got to sort of Break Even it was it still felt entirely my responsibility to make sure that Revenue keeps coming in and that it keeps growing because if it doesn't then people lose their jobs and that is directly on me um obviously a bigger company like SoundCloud has its own board has its own investors has its own seite which I'm not part of so therefore those things are not my responsibility anymore and I don't it's not whether people keep or don't keep their jobs is no longer a direct impact of financial decisions that I have made um and I used to find that very stressful like knowing that um people's

livelihoods are your responsibility um I would find I found very personally stressful so to not have that is probably a lesser stress but that one element but at the same time you still have a full-time job you're still working Monday to Friday and you still have a lot a lot to deliver and I still have a team that I'm responsible for even if it's not for from a payroll perspective so I think all work stressful um to an extent and I feel like I'm constantly looking for that work life balance um will I ever find it who knows who knows well that's a great question I think

we were both strucken by the same uh sickness of Entrepreneurship uh who knows that's great um well thank you so much for going through the Journey uh I really appreciate you being honest and open about it I think it's an important thing in the music industry to have the opportunity to hear about these things um obviously the main audience intended for the podcast is entrepreneurs or people curious about entrepreneurship in the music industry and I try to leave each episode with some sort of advice from the guest uh about entrepreneurship is this something some of the learnings you've had throughout the journey that you think is particularly interesting for other people to hear about and well I think I already dropped the uh the sort of the

absolute gem from Aaron second Aaron uh which was if everything goes right you don't learn anything um I think on I love being an entrepreneur but also I do accept that it's not for everyone you have to be really comfortable dealing with ambiguity you have to be really comfortable like not knowing what's going to happen you have to be really comfortable not being told what to do um and that you know and you have to be comfortable with when you hear no or rejection um and those things no longer bother me if somebody says they don't like my idea they don't like the thing we've built I'm like really don't care what this person thinks most of the time um yeah so yeah you just

have to have that resilience um and if you if you're tempted I think it's worth a shot uh becoming an entrepreneur but as I say if it's not for everyone so there that's no bad thing as well good so I see you traveling to conferences and um you must be contacted by a lot of people who's really interested in uh getting some sort of association with you uh is that overwhelming for you after the exit yeah a little bit um and I F I do find that really difficult because I like to reply to everyone and I like to like read every deck I get sent and I like to be able to

help everyone if I can but it's got to the point where it's um that's probably not realistic or not possible I sort of toyed with the idea of like oh do I want to be one of those people that like you know basically do that thing on LinkedIn where you can only add me if you have my email address um because I just get so many people trying to add me and but I didn't do that cuz I thought no cuz I'm still technically in sales you want to be as accessible as possible and you'll end up shutting out some people that you do want to contact with but basically if someone connects me um I either have to absolutely know who they are or they have to tell me where we met and how

I met them and then I will accept it if it doesn't meet that criteria and it's just somebody wanting to add me probably because they want to try and sell me something um then I'm not I'm not going to accept that invite so I have like a couple of hundred sat in my um invite list that I don't know who they are so I'm not going to accept them and likewise you just kind of have to figure out a way to kind of like pass that information and figure out you know I could I could fill 10 hours a day every single day of the week with calls for people who just want to pick my brain have a chat hear about my journey um and so then I like to sort of direct them to podcasts like this and

be like hey I spoke about that exactly that thing listen to it listen over here um but I can't do that oneon-one for everyone who requests it which partly makes me sad because I remember you know when I was first starting out and trying to make connections and trying to meet people it was it is really sad to like message someone and just never get a reply so I try to mostly at least reply to everyone even with it if it's with a hey I'm not taking on any calls right now and I got that tip from my friend who works at Disney I was like how do you just say no to calls and he was like tell them you're not taking calls outside of your job and I was like that's good I'm going to do that

so if someone wants a call but it's not related to SoundCloud which is what I get paid to do then I'm not currently I'm not currently available yeah I mean I've learned so much from you from this uh from this podcast and uh I'm not going to say who it is but there's some coming some great guests on the exit series as well so hopefully the purpose for me is um is that we founder by founder exit by exit understand more about the process because at the end of the day uh most music companies have investors and need sylvesters and we're responsible to deliver some results and we need to understand how we take those Journeys uh ultimately we need to create worth obviously

but we need to know how to navigate thank you so much for being on the podcast Asel I wish to meet you in person one day uh I read many good things about you I know the people around you uh and they all appre appreciate you so you must be a great human being I'm going to I'm going to trust that do doing what I can doing what I can thank you Hazel we'll talk thanks Jacob [Music] bye