From Sitar to Startup: Building Beatoven.ai #generativeai

So in six months down the line, I think the true magic of Gen EI is going to get integrated inside of your regular workflow. So it's not going to be about the excitement phase anymore. It's going to be the utility phase. Six months down the line, oh, okay, yeah, this is normalized. You know, this is what this technology is supposed to do. Now, what do I do with it in my regular work? You know, like I'm using it in my actual work and what would have probably taken me three or four days in six months back and I'm able to do it in three to four minutes. I think that is going to be something that is going to excite a lot of people. Mansour and Beethoven.ai has done something amazing. They have built an AI generative company within music for four years and they've come really, really far without doing anything illegal. But they've also built a platform that has a huge amount of users and I believe in time they're going to position very well in this landscape.

Hey guys, welcome to the Sound Conditions podcast. Me and Mansour have already been talking a bit about a lot of new things that's happening in the music industry with the generative AI space. We'll talk about it today. But before I get into that, Mansour, welcome and thank you for being on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me here. Yeah, really excited to be doing this. We've been trying to coordinate this for some time and I've been sick lately a few times, which I'm totally okay. But thank you for being patient. Mansour, your company is a really interesting company. It couldn't be more relevant than it is.

In music tech space, you've been a pioneer in India. You've been the first music tech company really at scale. You've also been some of the first movers within generative AI in music. Mansour, who are you and what do you do and what we're going to talk about today? Yep. So, let me start off with my background. So, I'm Mansour. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Beethoven.ai. My background is, I come from a family of musicians. So, we have these families in India called as gharanas. These are like traditional families of music that do music like generations over generations.

So, my family is one of those families and we have been doing it for seven generations and we are specialized in sitar music. So, we played this Indian classical instrument called the sitar. And naturally, being born in such a family, I picked it up from my father, who's an ustad. So, he trained me into this music. And from a very young age, like, you know, at the age of four is when I began my musical journey. But I seriously started pursuing it at the age of 10. So, it's been 20 years I'm playing the instrument as an artist. I've given more than 200 concerts, released music on various streaming, have millions of streams on Spotify, SoundCloud, various of those streaming services.

But I've also been in the technology space. So, music, being an artist has one side, but being on the technology side, I have done my undergrad in electrical engineering from an institute in India called the NIT, National Institute of Technology. It's a government institute. And post that, I was briefly working in finance, in trading. So, it was, like, nothing to do with my engineering skills, but it was pretty exciting, you know, like, doing futures and options trading for, like, one and a half year. And then I decided to fully move into music tech.

So, it was, like, my passion. And initially, it was more, like, from a researcher lens. So, I was doing research on building audio fingerprinting algorithms like Shazam, you know, doing all of those kind of research projects. I also went for my master's at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology in Atlanta in the U.S. But I didn't complete it. I dropped out, came back to India, joined a couple of startups here. So, I was working with a sound tech startup in India, building technologies for them. And then I was a product manager at an education technology startup in India. I was building an AI course for them because it was, like, a booming sector.

Tech was, like, booming in COVID, you know. So, I was working with them. And then that company exited, and they got acquired for $600 million. So, I was a product manager there. I left and then started this company, Beethoven, along with Sitar, my co-founder and CTO. Yeah. So, that's a little bit of my brief background. So, a little bit of music, a little bit of technology, but trying to be at the intersection of the two fields. So, that's what I am. It's a perfect combination. Actually, when I was doing the research, I was searching up your name, and I found, like, your family's Wikipedia pages.

And I could just click name for name. There's a new page for each person. So, Citar music, for me, is, I obviously know what it is, but it's fairly new. But that's really, really interesting. Could you explain to me, before we really sort of dive into your founder journey, Beethoven, what does it do? What is the actual product that you're delivering? Yeah. So, Beethoven, simply put, is a generative music tool targeted towards content creators. So, it simply put, you put in a prompt based on what you're thinking, in terms of what you expect out of the system, and understanding your natural language.

We analyze your prompt, and we generate original music that is perfectly curated for your prompt. And this is more targeted towards background music as a use case. So, we focus primarily on video creators and podcast creators. So, that's the whole idea in a gist. And one of the things that is very hot in the music world right now is, obviously, lawsuits within a generative AI music space. And you guys have a fairly trained method of building your models, correct?

So, what does that entail? Okay. So, just to think about what it does it take to build a generative product, right? I think the first step is data. Where do you get your data from? Because if you don't have data, you can't build a generative product. It's basically the backbone of a whole generative product. And the other aspect is mod. Like, you know, what kind of a model are you trying to build to be able to, like, you know, generate music out of it. So, when it comes to data, when we started on day one, and this is way back in 2021, February.

Okay. So, this is, like, really, really far back, much before this entire space has gotten hot. We actually thought about some of the risks of building in this space. And one of the biggest risks that we saw is copyright infringement. If we build a model, and we indeed build a really good model that has extremely good quality in music, but if we have not trained it on something that we own or have the license to train on it, we are going to land in trouble. You know, so that was the kind of thinking that we had from B1. And hence, what we did is we decided to take the hard route.

And we knew it, like, it's going to take a longer journey for us. So, it's been, like, more than three years now we're working on the idea. And what we did is we raised some funding, we raised some venture capital, and we decided to have specific budgets allotted and allocated for artists. So, we work with artists, music producers, session musicians, instrumentalists, all kinds of musicians. And we tell them, like, hey, we are building a generative music product. We are going to train your data on top of it, but we are also going to pay you for this data. And we need to have an agreement in place that you have given us the rights to use this data inside of our models.

Now, that's a very tedious journey, because you are going to literally be working, like, with a lot of artists on an individual pieces. But, yeah, we kept doing it a month on month, month on month. So, we did have the advantage of time, because it wasn't that hot of a space. But what it needs to be fairly trained, in our case at least, is we only use data that we have sourced from artists that are partnered with us. So, we don't use any public data sets. We don't use any copyrighted data sets. And that, of course, comes at a little bit of a trade-off, because quality is a factor of the volume of data that you train on.

But it is still also a factor of a lot of techniques that you can apply to generate music. So, we kind of try to innovate in the techniques and lesser on the data. So, that's the kind of thinking that we have as a fairly trained company. One of the things that you have achieved is you've achieved adoption at scale, because you also have a product that has product market fit, but you also have quality. And that's sort of one of the things I believe a lot of the ethically trained music, gen AI companies are struggling with right now. Also, maybe because they started a bit later, you guys have the benefit of time.

So, because there is a big race aspect to this, to some degree, it's not that winner takes all, but I think there's a lot to do with positioning in the market that's going to matter. You guys have had that advantage. So, well done for seeing that before it really, really took off. But we'll get more into it, and it's going to be a really interesting journey talking about it. But I do want to understand a bit more about you and your founder aspect and your gene. Because you come from a music family, you come from music.

Did you have this entrepreneurial drive all the time? Like, when did that sort of spark itself in your life? So, I think of entrepreneurship doesn't necessarily have to be only building a startup, raising venture capital. It is a lot of things. It could be maybe starting a podcast. It could be maybe starting an event. It's just basically the ability of being able to start something, you know, like, and doing it independently. And for me personally, it's something that just came naturally.

You know, like, from my family as well, because we are all musicians, we do organize a lot of concerts. You know, like, we invite a lot of artists. We do all of that. And I used to love taking that responsibility. So, I used to be the guy who would be like, hey, you know what? I'm going to manage this festival end to end. From logistics, from inviting the artists, taking care of their stays, their remuneration, raising funding, the ticket sales, all of it. So, I used to do this a lot as a side hustle along with my, and this is basically when I was like 17, 18 years of age, you know, so this is very, very young.

And so, that was like a starting point. And also, I had these things of doing side hustles. You know, like when I'm in college, I'm running a media website. And overnight, I just find out that media website has got like 100,000 website hits. You know, people are just reading. And this is something that I would just do for fun. You know, it's not something that I'm trying to build a venture-scale company out of it. So, and also, there were some other qualities that I believe I had. It's like also helping other people. You know, if somebody is doing some sort of an innovative project, maybe try helping them raise money or try helping them build something that we could potentially pitch to investors.

So, it was something that's sort of a natural trait that I had, and I used to really enjoy doing it. But what I did know is if I had to start a company formally, you know, where I would be doing things by raising venture capital, trying to build a globally scalable company, I needed something more than just of the side hustles. I needed to get a little bit of an experience working in companies that have already done that. And that's why I kind of decided to like, you know, join a few early-stage startups and then also join a few late-stage startups because you kind of get to see the whole story of how things go from one phase to another.

And only once I had that experience, I decided, okay, now I'm ready to start something on my own. So, yeah, I would say that I did have that itch to keep starting something or the other, but not in a formal setting that, okay, hey, you know, I want to start a venture-scale company. That is something that just happened. You know, it's just something that COVID hit. I decided, okay, doing a job is boring. You know, like, let me do something more interesting. We might just, the world might just end next year, so I might as well do something that, you know, I'm really excited about. And that's the kind of motivation that brought me to, you know, starting Vtoven.ai.

Amazing. When I look at the progression of your career, it might have just felt like that in a moment, but it seems very logical, step-for-step building experiences. And obviously, that also speaks into the capacity of getting in that venture capital is you need to instill trust in the people investing in you that you at least have the basic skill sets and experiences in order to build something. One of the things that I've done very wrong is I've never had the logical approach of career development.

I've just, like, done stuff. And sometimes that's been really, really good. Sometimes it's been bad. But it's a really interesting aspect of just going through the motions, which probably is the right way to do it, and just building that experience. Because you received 30 under 30 in Asia, Forbes. That's not something that just happens. Like, what was it about when you started Beethoven that got so much attention that you, I wouldn't say instantly got recognized, but you really hit the spot?

Like, how did those early days look like for you guys? Oh, early days. I think those are the most amazing days. I would say, like, it was super, super hard in the sense we were just starting out in a space which we have no idea of what's going to happen. And this is back in 21. Okay, we would go to people, be it technologists, be it lawyers, be it content creators, be it all kinds of people. And we would say, hey, you know what? This is something that we're going to build.

What do you guys think about it? And people used to not care because, you know, it used to be like, hey, okay, you know what? We have music that we can license from production music libraries. We have all of this content. This is interesting. Sounds exciting. You know, those are the kind of comments. And those are not really enough. You know, they don't give you any sort of confidence to keep doing something. And in a space like Gen Music, lawyers have a very different view, right? You ask them, hey, you know, what would our terms of service look like? You know, who wants a copyright?

Who wants a license? And this is back in 21 we were talking about. Like, nobody has any clue, you know, like of what? Even today, nobody has any clue. They're still figuring that out. But this is back in three years back. So, it was extremely hard. And also, you know, it's quite challenging building a global company from this side of the world. I mean, if you see most of the globally successful companies come from the Bay Area, right? And also, for that matter, Europe to some extent. India has just started picking up. So, it's very, very tough to build something from here for the world.

In the sense, like, you know, we are also kind of figuring out because consumer insights are different. People think differently. You can't think like an Indian and assume that, okay, an European is going to think like an Indian, you know, when making a purchasing decision. So, a lot of aspects. Then, on the data set side, which I was talking about earlier, right? How do we figure out the data? What do artists think about this? Like, and artists did have backlash. They think, hey, you guys are going to train and you guys are going to compete with us. And then, we would be like, no, you know, we do understand your concern. But, there is a potential for some sort of a sustainable business model that we are also constantly thinking about. So, a lot of convincing, a lot of, and apparently, doing all this convincing, you also have to convince investors to invest in this idea.

And, this is the era of V3 and, you know, NFTs. And, back then, those were like buzzwords. AI was not really a thing, you know, 21. But, even 22, for that matter, AI started kind of picking up towards the later end of 22. So, I would say, like, the initial days, it was mostly just me and my co-founder, Siddharth, just, you know, talking to people, talking to artists, talking to creators. Just trying to gain some confidence into what we were trying to do so that we could potentially spend maybe 5, 10 years of our life into this, you know. So, I think that is the most important thing that we were doing in the initial days.

A lot of rejections, you know, a lot of rejections from investors, a lot of rejections from customers. You know, people will say, this is not going to work. The quality is not good enough. It's not going to hit the thing. So, I think the rejection is something that is so, so hard, you know, that you need to kind of develop a grit and a thick skin to keep going despite that rejection in the initial days. And, I think that is the toughest phase. You need to get past that phase is how I kind of think about it. Yeah. Interesting. The rejection side, even though I hear, I hear founder stories all the time.

I speak with early stage founders. I speak with exited founders. I, you know, I speak to you often on the podcast. And, even though my life as an entrepreneur has been just primarily filled with rejections, I still have this really weird mindset that, oh, that might have been just an amazing journey. Because, when you look at, you know, Beethoven started in early 2021, we're now mid-2024. You guys are, if not a global company, then close to be a global company, definitely leaders in this space.

And, like, that was fast. They must have had a lot of fun. And, it's really hard to understand the rejection. So, I need to understand a bit more. How did that look like? What kind of rejections did you have? And, how did that affect you? I'll give you an example. I feel, okay, in the last three years, I have seen so many phases of my life, okay? And, I've gone through so many phases. And, I think rejection, when I talk about, there are different levels of rejection that I've seen. So, let's start off when you're just starting out.

When you're just starting out, you are still at a very decent stage. You're kind of, like, ideating about the idea. You don't know what you're going to be doing, right? So, you're just looking for that sort of validation from people. Okay, hey, is this something that is something of interest to you? There's a really nice book called The Mom Test. I'm sure you have heard of it. It's a book that says, like, don't ask your mom if your idea is good. You know, because she's always going to say it's good. Because that's what moms do. So, the book teaches you the art of asking right questions. You know, like, how should you ask questions to people so that you kind of get, like, if they are kind of interested or not in what you're trying to do, but you're not also telling them what you're doing.

You know, and that's kind of, like, tricky. So, rejection is more, like, along the lines of that. You know, like, okay, if you're kind of, like, validating and people are, like, somewhat interested and they're, like, okay, you know, you don't see that kind of pull coming into what you're trying to do. It is a little bit of demotivating as a founder. You know, you kind of then go back to the blackboard. Hey, is this something that we're not doing right? So, that's the first phase. That's the ideation phase of rejection. You know, like, you're kind of figuring things out and you're trying to come to something interesting. And that something interesting is somewhere there, but it's not right there.

You know, so you're kind of trying to find that. And to reach there, you need to go through a lot of rejection. So, that is the first phase. The second phase is, when you have found it, now you need to put that into something, right? You need to put all of those elements together and kind of stitch it and build a product out of it. And you need investment for that. Now, convincing people to invest in something like music tech, especially the VC market, is extremely hard. Because of all the things that have happened in the music industry in the past, you know, like such big companies going down, lawsuits. And so, it's just not something of a sector that is particularly interesting for the venture market, you know, in general.

They see it as a small market. So, even if you might have the most amazing idea, you will just get rejected because of the space that you're working in. And that is the worst kind of rejection. It's like, it's no fault of yours. It's no fault of anybody. It's just that people are just not interested in your sector. And it starts from there. But then it goes also to a level where, you know, like you're kind of like, okay, you have scaled your business to a certain level. Now, you have put, you have been able to raise some early investment through some angel checks. And now, you have come to a point where, okay, you probably have 100,000 users using your product.

And now, you're like, you're super pumped up. Like, hey, you know, we need to go and raise again in the market. And then, okay, then you go in there only to realize nobody's interested in what you're doing. Still, you know, and that's the next level of rejection. And because, you know, it's such a competitive market, there is so much of things happening. And there is competition across sectors. I think one thing I've realized raising venture capital is you're not just competing against other startups in your sector. You're competing against sectors because they are kind of evaluating, hey, what's the most interesting sector that we need to invest in where, you know, we could potentially get like a billion dollar exit.

And music is not really one of those sectors where, you know, people usually look at it. So, there needs to be like 10x convincing that needs to keep happening for people to believe. So, for us, what really did work after all of these rejections is I think people just believed in us as founders. Like, okay, these guys, you know, they have the right backgrounds. So, we could potentially invest our money in this. So, they'll figure something out. You know, maybe they have not figured everything out yet, but they will figure something out. So, I think that belief is really, really important.

And that's kind of what keeps you going beyond all the rejection that you would otherwise face from hundreds of other funds that you would have been talking to. You know, so, yeah, it's multiple phases of rejection, I would say. And I think 90% of a founder's journey, at least for me, has been rejection. 10% is those good moments where you feel really excited about what you're doing. And I think you need to, I think rejection teaches you a lot. That's what I've kind of realized. You know, it kind of just keeps molding you as an individual and you also kind of keep changing as and when you keep getting that kind of feedback. So, yeah, that's the kind of thinking that I have around it.

And that's the kind of experience that I've faced. Rejection is such a funny thing. This is sort of insights about myself because I agree that, you know, most of an entrepreneur's life is walking uphill and being rejected. And there's wins once in a while. The way that I cope with it, which might be wrong, but sort of works for me right now, is I try to really just focus on the journey. And I don't really, and that's probably also my fault, I don't really celebrate the wins because if I did that, it would be really hard for me not to go down with the hits.

So, for me, it's my job, even though I'm a very emotional person, I try to not get too excited or too much down. So, like when I get a rejection, I might be like bummed out for five minutes and like, okay, solution time. And sort of I think you need to build up a mindset of resilience, but that also means that you might also compromise on some other stuff. But at the end of the day, if you find joy in the journey, which I do, you know, it can quickly become worth it. Yeah.

I agree. No, I definitely agree with that point. I think rejection is part of the journey. You know, it's not the journey. Like the whole journey is like so fulfilling that, you know, like these are just phases and these are just parts. And I think these are things that just keep you going in some direction, you know, like they're more like they're not really rejections. They're more like feedback, which is a reorientation. That's what I look at it. Like, you know, reorient this person into some different direction so that they can rethink about it and then come back to the market stronger, you know.

So that's how I look at it. Yeah, and I've done something particularly stupid because we're running a venture studio and we have ownership in 10 different companies. So I get to get all the rejections from all those 10 different companies at the same time. So it's beautiful. It's a beautiful, beautiful game. So this wins once in a while as well. Yeah. One of the things that you guys need to navigate on is the music industry. You talked a bit about it. You talked about VCs being scared from previous lawsuits in the space, a lot of controversy.

This is happening right now again. And right now there's some really big GNI companies, especially what's in the media right now, Shuno and Udio, being sued by three major companies. Can you talk about your decision about doing fairly trained content and how you believe that's going to position you well in the future with a long-term mindset? Yeah. So I'll just give you some context into how we were parallelly building relationships.

So while we were building our data sets and while we were doing all of these aspects of product development, we were also being approached by the labels. So all the big names used to keep coming to us just to have interactions with us. We would go to their offices. They would invite us in L.A., in U.S., in India, everywhere. You know, like we would go and meet them, demo our tool and talk about how we are thinking. Because, of course, they were seeing this space coming. You know, like they knew even in 21, 22, 23, they were seeing it coming. But at some point, it was good as going to come. But we also kind of got a sense of their mindset of how they think.

You know, like it's not like they're against this technology. They definitely want to have this technology. And they're also trying to explore, like, what can we do with this technology? But in the right way, like, you know, you kind of like probably take our consent. If you're training on our data, like, you know, have this conversation with us. We are willing to collaborate. And there are these activities. They take a little longer to convert and in terms of to, like, materialize into something meaningful. But those conversations are on. You know, we got approached by them. They actually investigated, looked into our data sets to try to understand how we are doing things.

So, there is curiosity from the end to find things out, you know. And I think that's important. You know, if you're building a company in the music industry, you need to build a relationship with the labels. Because they are the most powerful people in the industry. Like, they literally own 70% of the music catalogs in the world that we consume, right? So, you don't want to be in the bad eyes of those guys, you know. So, either be, have a good relation, operate out of their existence, like, don't have anything to do with them. I mean, there are a lot of music tech companies like that, you know, who have their own business model. And they have nothing, they're the consumer facing.

And they have nothing to do with the labels. But going against them and trying to, like, you know, trying to, like, challenge them is a little risky spot to be in, you know. Because if you see history, historically, you see the Pirate Bay lawsuit, you see the Napster lawsuit. It has never worked out in the favor of the companies. Those companies have just died eventually. And only the companies that have been able to have good association and relationship with labels have survived and at least have been able to do something interesting in this space. So, particularly in this case of infringement, right?

Like, what, I mean, it's still an evolving case. It's alleged. It's not like, you know, there are a lot of, it's not like set in stone. There are certain examples. I was actually reading the lawsuit today, like, in the morning, you know, the whole PDF document. And I was reading each of those points. And I was seeing, like, you know, there are specific examples that they have, like, found. And, you know, and they're trying to basically use that as evidence for the lawsuit. What I do think is definitely what these companies have built is very exciting technology, okay? There is no question about it in terms of the quality, in terms of, in terms of, like, you know, the output.

We were also in awe when they launched, you know, we tested it. I was like, wow, this is something next level. And so, and we definitely have an appreciation for the technology and the thinking of how these guys built it. But we don't have an appreciation of how they built it. In the sense, like, the investor is giving a statement saying that if they had partnerships with the labels, we probably wouldn't have backed them. I mean, that is rogue investing. You know, it's like you're saying, like, you know, you are not going to support a company that is not doing things the right way. You're going to support a company that is doing things the wrong way. And in the music industry, if you're going to just train on data sets of all the artists of the world and say to the artist, hey, we don't owe you anything.

Your data was created to train our model. You know, that's just almost how it sounds like. That's not something we are in support of, you know, like, as a company. Because that's, it's completely against our philosophy of how we build it over. It's like, we think that artists need to be a part of the equation. You can't get them out of the equation in some capacity. And possibly it would take a little longer to build a good generic music company with the quality of the likes of these companies. And, but you can get there. We personally, as a company, we see a path to get there, but it just takes a little longer.

So if it takes a little longer, fine, you know, like maybe like do it in phases, like try to do it over time. And, and then also make sure that artists are part of the equation, but just keeping them out of the whole conversation and infringing on their data and just then facing a lawsuit. It's just a messy experience, you know, in building a company. I would say like, there's a lot of shit as a founder you're dealing with. And this is something that you don't want to deal with, you know, like, yeah, that's how I think about it. It's really interesting. I was listening to the Music Business Worldwide podcast where Ting Iman, the founder, he talked about the investor's justification for investing.

And one of the statements were that this could create already now, was it top 40 hit songs. Something in that, that realm, they were just praising the technology and how it can create songs to that caliber. And one of his comments were, he was just at a big, big concert filled with the O2 arena and just seeing the fandom there, the interaction between humans. And there was just the naivety to think that music is pretty just about the audio waves. There's so many aspects to this consistent storytelling, the inter-human connection.

And it's an interesting way of thinking. What I do appreciate with those companies, though, not them in particular, but more from a philosophical standpoint, is that they help define the lines of what's okay and not okay, where they're definitely, in my opinion, on the not okay side. And it forces us to really think about how this is going to affect our industry.

And for me, that's really interesting about that. Just before this interview, we talked a bit about it because right before our interview, I wrote a LinkedIn article about me not being a very nice guy. That's not what I wrote, but I wrote about we're launching a project company where we're basically using one of these companies to prove that music can be steered from these platforms into high-quality outputs into certain strongholds that can actually take market share, which I think is really, really scary.

So, we're doing that to set an example for what people need to look out for. But what do you believe? Because I'm really interested in the aspect of time. So, what I hear right now is what you say, that these potentially, allegedly, unethically trained companies might have faster progress in getting to certain quality metrics, but position themselves for questionable longevity.

Is that what you're saying? So, if you think of it, just leave music industry aside for a moment. Just look at the old AI space. How has it been built? It has been built by just training on all the data in the world. Okay? There's no question about it. And this is going all the way from the biggest company in the space, that's OpenAI. I mean, if you hear the interviews by the CTO, you know what I'm talking about, right? So, the point is, the whole industry is built on this narrative that it's okay to train on copyrighted data sets.

And we are going to probably try to exploit it as a fair use, you know? And that's just the argument that most of the big tech has about it. But truth be told, it's not fair use. I mean, an artist didn't create an image or a painting to be trained on a general model that will eventually start competing with the artists themselves. I mean, that's what's happening right now. If you saw the recent Forbes article, there was an example that was quoted about this, you know, that already workplaces are having lesser number of people working on certain tasks because of the adoption of any AI tools.

So, the people who it was employing and whose data it was trained on are now being replaced by the technology itself. And they are not even being compensated for it. So, this is happening already in modalities of text and images. Now, the reason why it didn't happen in the music industry for this long is because, in my hypothesis, is because of the fact that it is an industry that is slightly different from the rest. You know, it's a rights business. It works on royalties. It works on, you know, sync licensing. It has, like, so many licenses. It has, like, so many kinds of publishing model.

Then, you know, you have, like, this copyright, that copyright, you know, composition rights, lyric rights. So, it's, like, such a structured industry, right? Like, if you look at it in comparison to any of the other modalities. So, my belief was nobody would want to take the risk of messing with this industry by just publicly infringing. But that's not what happened. That eventually did happen. You know, like, is potentially happening right now. So, that's my whole point. You know, like, the whole industry has been made to believe that this is the way of how you should build a GNI company.

And to your point, of course, you can get quality. If you are getting access to the old data in the world, of course, you will get quality. And you are, you also have access to compute. And you're able to build a really nice model. It's going to generate really good quality. But at what cost? You are just, like, at the cost of, like, ripping off artists, right? So, that is the kind of thinking that I have. So, there can be a better model. And I think we are heading in that direction now slowly. If you see, people are starting to have conversations around licensing fees, rightly licensing data, lawsuits are coming in.

So, that, okay, you know, like the New York Times lawsuit and now the Suno UEO lawsuit. And so many other lawsuits, the Anthropic lawsuit. All of these lawsuits are going to give us some answers to these questions, right? Like, probably, I don't think the outcome of these lawsuits is going to be, like, just shutting down companies. It's going to be, like, some new mechanism that is going to evolve of how we should go from this point onwards instead of what we are doing right now. So, that's the kind of thinking that I have of what I potentially see happening in the near future. Now, I digress a bit from sort of the founder's journey.

But I think it's really timely. And I think it's really important that we talk about this, especially with a founder like you that are so well-positioned in this whole space. But let me go a bit back. You said that you guys had 100,000 users at one point and you were trying to raise more money and people weren't interested to invest still. Like, what was it about, how did you make that turn? What was the process of getting the capital in to grow the company? So, when we hit the point of 100,000 users, we got the confidence that it was not just about the users.

It's also about the use cases. So, we started seeing people using Vito and for, like, such wild use cases that we never imagined. I mean, we started with the hypothesis that this is a background music creation tool for content creators. That's the hypothesis. And we probably are trying to take on companies in the production music library space, top music libraries. We're trying to take their market share. But that's the whole idea of how we kind of thought about it. But what's interesting, it went much beyond that. We started seeing people creating, musicians creating, sampling from Beethoven and then, like, looping and, like, jamming on top of it.

We saw, like, people creating rap songs on chat GPT and then creating music on Beethoven and combining and creating songs. So, we saw this entire consumerish angle of it. You know, people doing so many interesting things with the technology beyond what we had imagined. And people creating NFTs, people creating, you know, just all synthetically generated ambient listening playlists, uploading on YouTube. So, all kinds of stuff, you know, like, which we had not imagined to be seen on the product. This got us really excited.

We realized that this is much beyond what we were thinking. You know, like, it's not just restricted to the background music creation tool use case. It's actually much beyond that. But when you just have 100,000 users to begin with, you haven't seen how it's going to evolve over six months. Are these guys going to keep coming back and using the tool? Are these guys, is it just, like, a one-time excitement, you know, that's going to happen in the market? But with all of that, you can never have all the information, okay? Like, as a founder, you are just keeping on learning in phases.

But it's important that, okay, if you have gotten that confidence, like, okay, 100,000 users, there is something in this market. You just go and you start meeting investors because you need to start talking about what, there is something here, okay? And now what happens is we went out, but when people started talking to us and understanding of how we were building it, they were not quite confident on our approach in the sense, like, will this work from a lens that these guys are sourcing their own data?

What's the moat here? What's the defensibility here? Is this even going to get to that quality bar that is potentially possible with, like, you know? So there were a lot of questions. And is there retention here? Is this something like one time or people keeping? So we believed initially, you know, like, as a founder, you have those highs and lows, you know? So we had that high when we had 100,000 milestone was at. And it was hit in one month of launch. Can you believe it? So it wasn't, like, we had to wait for six months. It wasn't, like, one month of launch. And we were, like, what we understood is it's not just about that.

We need to learn a lot more. So we went to the market a little early, and we were, like, okay, you know, this is something, this is exciting. We have a lot of, and 70% of our users are not from India. They are from U.S. and Europe. So 30% are from India. So it is becoming, like, a truly global product. And when we went out to the market to raise, what we realized is it's extremely hard. It's not, it's still not easy. It's still, now the bar is much higher. Now the bar is, the conversation quality has gone much beyond the idea of founder, prototype, sage, to now something like an actual product out in the market being usage and retention and all of those kind of metrics that you're not going to be judged on.

So it just gets tougher and tougher, honestly. It never gets easy. You know, it's like, the things on which you're going to be constantly evaluated on are going to keep changing, and they're going to be tougher and tougher. Like, today, probably, we're going to be judged on revenues. You know, so it's all a matter of, like, what phase you are in the building phase. So, and what kind of story are you selling to the investors? So you might, you don't want to be a little ahead of where you are or quite behind from where you are. You want to be selling the same thing that you are at what stage of your company you're at.

So we had a lot of rejection again. Like, when we went to the market to raise, we didn't get the funds. We had big ambitions. We did not get the kind of money that we wanted from the market. But then we kind of realized we need to survive. You know, that's the most important thing. We need to keep doing the right thing and survive till probably some point, inflection point, that we will probably see again. And you need to do that. You know, you need to keep your things afoot. You can't be like, if I'm going to raise, I'm just going to raise this much or else I'm not going to raise at all. You know, it doesn't work that way. It's more also about being in the game. Don't get out of the game. At least be in the game.

So that was the kind of mindset we had. And yeah, we're still in the game. Hopefully for a couple of years. Yeah. Now, it's such an interesting story. How many users do you have now? We have now 1.3 million users. Yeah. It's been like one year now. We've been live out in the pro. So what do you believe is the outlook on your company? Where do you see it going? See, today, I think we are not three revenue and we are generating revenues as well now.

And our thinking is, it is a very new space. It is going to take some time for adoption and it is going to take some, so there is adoption, but it is more like an experimental adoption. If you see the whole GNI space, all companies are in the experimental revenue space. It's not like it has become a part of your workflow. You know, it's like, I can't do these things without GNI. That's not where we are yet. Uh, it is more like I can co-ideate with this and I can make this a part of my workflows. Uh, that's where, uh, it's, it's at.

Where I would potentially see us going is becoming a part of integrated workflows. So, uh, in the sense, if suppose somebody starts creating content, uh, today, everything is in silos. So text generation is in silos, image generation is in silo, video generation is in silo. Uh, we were probably going to see a new editor, uh, you know, uh, Adobe 2.0 as you will, which would probably have all of these things happening into it. Uh, and music generation is obviously going to be an important part of this entire aspect.

And we believe that we are rightly positioned as a company to play a very important role in that space. Um, so we want to keep our focus on content. We are not, um, we are not focused on like making any consumer and music creator. That's not the kind of mission that we have. Uh, we don't, I honestly, I don't even believe in that, uh, hypothesis to, to be frank with you. Because I personally think, take like, not everyone wants to be a musician. I mean, if everyone wanted to be a musician, they would be doing it today. So, uh, you, no more, if you simplify things for them, of course, it is democratization, but there is no retention in it.

You know, it's not like I keep creating music again and again because I also need to make money from my music. So those are my thoughts. I don't want to get into that. Uh, so yeah, more around the lines of, uh, being a part of the content workflow and being able to give, uh, high quality music and sound effects, which is generative in nature. to these content creators. That's the kind of reason that we have. I think, I think that's such an interesting statement. And it's very funny. Uh, when I, um, when we released this, uh, not so smart company, we just released, um, we had some media cover it and I was looking through some of the commentaries on the articles about the things we're doing.

And most of the commentaries is like, so generative AI has made the music, so you did nothing. Uh, I obviously didn't comment on it, but like, that's not so important. But the whole thing about AI and using AI in general, if it's your tool, other tools is the context of what you do is so important. And, you know, most tools in the world right now, you know, unless you're Sora or whatever is publicly available. And that does not mean you can make great things. Uh, like it's, it's really about how you use it in a specific context, in a specific flow, with a specific idea and direction, with specific prompts, steering, and understanding that whole thing.

Um, so what, what I'm also hearing you saying is you're catering a product over time to be a part of a tool belt of creative expression where you got to be the best in class in that thing. Yeah. That's right. And I think that's such an interesting thing. I think one of the things that I see a lot with, uh, music tech startups is that they, they get very siloed in their thinking. You know, they, they want to do everything. They want to be the whole ecosystem and that might be space.

And I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, that is tempting, right? Like just think of it, like, uh, I would want everybody in the world to be my customer, but, but that just doesn't happen. It doesn't, it doesn't. And, and nailing one thing is so incredibly hard as a founder. Like just, you know, just one thing is so freaking difficult. And if you want to do more, like, wow, impressive if you can, if you can do it. But like, if you, if you don't look at the Hollywood movies, that's normally not the case. Like a great startup become the best or one of the best at one thing.

And when you scale that, that has incredible value for the people using it and for the founders and investors. It doesn't need to be all consuming conglomerates like Google that's, that's a misunderstood aspect of, of being a startup. I think that's incredibly inspiring and interesting. So are you looking for, uh, you can of course be as transparent as you want, but are you looking for like towards an acquisition, a merger, what, what's sort of your mindset with building this company and put it into a context of other tools?

Yeah, I'll be very frank with you. I've raised venture capital, so I have to think about it. So, so I, I would be lying if I'm telling you that I'm not thinking about an exit. Uh, but to be very frank with you, I, I've always thought about this from day one. Um, I don't believe, um, music tech is such a big space to be an IPO level company. Okay. Like, um, uh, it's, it's a, it's, it's a very hard thing to do. IPOs in itself is like extremely hard and unique to have really large volumes of market to be able to do something with that.

Um, and we kind of operate in the niche, right? Like we are pretty aware of that. Like, uh, you know, we are not building for everyone. We are not like, uh, our focus is very targeted towards content creation. Uh, we are, we are more like a feature inside of the whole ecosystem, you know, like of, of content creation. Um, and of course it's a product, but it's in, in the realm of the larger context of things, it's a feature. Um, and if I think of it, um, a more likely outcome, if we do everything right, would be an acquisition, uh, you know, from the lens of, uh, being a part of a workflow company, you know, that is building that end to end.

Uh, generation tool, uh, and we are being the company that is powering the music and sound effects for that entire experience. So that's how I kind of think about, and because that's something that I would enjoy, you know, acquisition is not just about selling your money, sending your company and getting out. It's also about staying there and working for a couple of years, uh, you know, building that product for them. So I personally would enjoy doing that because it would just be an alignment towards our current vision, you know? So that's the kind of thinking that I have for this girl. So let's, uh, let's hypothesize that this happens and hopefully it does.

What, and after you've sort of been through the accident and worked a couple of years, what's your thoughts on the music industry? Is this a space that, you know, you want to spend your career in or, uh, it's a weird question, but the reason why I'm asking the question is it's a very specific thing. Uh, and you, you can't fall in love with it. Um, yeah. Um, so I have thoughts, I mean, um, on this is, there are so many opportunities out there, uh, in terms of a startup.

Um, and it's possibly going to be the same amount of effort that you're going to build, uh, you're going to put inside building a music tech startup or any other startup in any domain. And the likeliness of you getting a much interesting outcome in something like, let's say manufacturing or something like speech or like, you know, something that is more larger sector markets is much higher, but it's also very much competitive. Uh, so how I kind of think about it is I personally am open to doing opportunities when outside the music industry.

It's not like I'm very tight to this industry. The reason I'm building my first venture in this is because I understand this industry pretty well, you know, in the sense I want to do something for the first time that I have some level of confidence in, and I have some level of connections and also an understanding of the industry, but it doesn't necessarily mean that, okay, like I'm only going to be working in the music industry for the rest of my life. So, um, so that's how I kind of think, and personally speaking, I have an ambition to keep building more and more ventures, you know, like I, this is probably my first, uh, venture scale business. I want to do a lot more. So why restrict myself to music when I can see much larger opportunities beyond that?

So that's how I kind of think about it. Yeah, no, I would love to sort of also have a full life of building ventures. We have a guest in a couple of weeks that's built, um, built two unicorns and it going for his third. So that's going to be an interesting thing. And some people have that sort of, well, that journey. Um, amazing. So, so what, a lot of things are happening right now in Gen.AI. What do you believe is going to be the next things that will come in this space? Do you, do you know what will shock people in six months?

What's your predictions? I definitely think this agents thing is super interesting. Like I've been seeing a couple of posts. I'm sure you have also seen a little bit of R100. Um, I think, um, Gen.AI has a lot of utility, uh, in terms of what it can do for you. So I personally have been trying to automate my workflows. Okay. So even at work, I've been trying to see how can I use probably like, uh, so there are so many tasks, right? Like, which are like manual and so irritating. Like, uh, I need to go through my emails and look for some particular conversation.

I need to see like the whole conversation thread to get some context out of it. And, um, and recently in Google's, uh, event, they just spoke about Gemini's integration with Gmail, where, you know, you could do all of these things just using things. I am super excited for that because I want to use those things. And I see a utility for those things. It's just going to make my life much easier as a business holdup. Uh, so in six months down the line, I think the true magic of Gen.AI is going to get integrated inside of your regular workflow. So it's not going to be about the excitement phase anymore. It's going to be a utility phase.

So right now we are in the excitement phase. It's like, wow, Jenny, I can do this. Jenny, I can do that. Uh, you know, so everybody's just sharing, like, you know, this is what I created. Uh, so everybody is like so excited about this new technology. Six months down the line. Oh, okay. Yeah. This is normalized. You know, this is what this technology is supposed to do. Now, what do I do with it in my regular work? Uh, and I think the wow factor is going to come there. You know, like I'm using it in my actual work and what, what would have probably taken me three or four days in six months back and I'm able to do it in three to four minutes.

I think that is going to be something that is going to excite a lot of people. That's how I love it. The effectiveness, but it also comes to sort of Beethoven and what you do, like having that a part of a tool built where you can quickly live out your vision, iterate the product and make sure that sort of the, the thing you're working on. And at the end becomes the most optimal self. That's important. Like, you know, talking about the post that I did today that you read, um, I, I literally do not write anything anymore. I've just have very, very clear custom instructions and custom GPTs for every single function I do.

For example, for the post, I was painting my house. I have paint on my fingers. So sorry guys for doing that. I just came from, from painting my, my new house, but I was basically just painting a room, talking to the AI. I was talking about what I wanted to write. And then I just put the chat function on with voice and just take, ask me a lot of questions. I was just chatting for 20 minutes. And then because it knows me, knows my style and sort of trained on it and customer structure that it came with the article. I have a few changes that doesn't make it less my words because I've really made sure that the way that, you know, it writes with me is me and how I would write.

But that took me 20 minutes while doing something else. Would that have taken me hours to write? Uh, and I think the whole aspect to what you do and what other companies do is in the space. If you use it right, it can be an extension of your vision. It can be sort of, you can be the facilitator of your vision and actually have a practical outcome. That's going to have, you know, uh, have a higher quality at the end at a faster speed. And when you talk about the creative industries, especially music, uh, we are fighting against, uh, the time it takes to create stuff because the monetization of the output is not that high.

Uh, so, so we're dependent on having more effective use of time to justify, uh, the investment of life we put into pursuing the music. Um, I think it's important. You know, and also, um, so I spoke about what things I'm excited about in my work, but, uh, even in my company, um, you know, what we are excited is the multimodal modality aspect of things. You know, like, uh, this whole new angle, um, of communicating with an AI in the language you best understand.

So today it's natural language, you know, text prompts, but the very fact that I can now kind of just give a video and it kind of figures out, okay, this is what's happening in the sea. And then it generates music. We are kind of already working on that repeat to one, uh, or also like, um, maybe voice, like, you know, I speak to the air, maybe I hum a song and then it generates something very similar to it. Or maybe I could give like a sample and it understands the context and it generates. So all of these technologies is something that we are pursuing internally and we are also building it by ourselves. You know, it's not like we are relying on any open source.

There is not much open source in the space. So, uh, you have to kind of research, productize, bring it into your product. Uh, I think these, this multimodality is super exciting. It's like, it's so convenient and it's so efficient. You know, if you think of it, it's like, I can just give a video and, uh, and this AI is going to figure out, you know, what's the right music for it or what's the right transcription for it, you know, anything for that matter. So, uh, I think that entire aspect of things, it's more like teaching a human being to, uh, I'm sure you would have seen the GPT-40 demo, right? Like, uh, the, the use cases around education where, you know, the child is kind of drawing and the AI is kind of evaluating.

This is superb stuff. Like, you know, it could just transform so many industries and, uh, and, and it's very powerful, you know, like it's just showing the humanity that all you need is one smartphone to learn and do things, you know? And, uh, that is super exciting to me, to be honest. I haven't, I agree. And I was just going to make a small analogy of this before we sort of close out the episode. Uh, I haven't said this on the podcast, but I have a master's in music technology as well. Uh, and right now on the side of my way too busy life, I'm also doing finishing a master's in music business.

And I have the relatively, uh, the, well, I have ADHD, which means I don't learn by sitting down and someone talking at me. That is like the least thing I've learned from it needs to be into action. And so, so I haven't attended much classes in school. And to be honest, I haven't really, you know, done much that I was supposed to do, but instead for every single subject I've built my custom professor that I just speak with the same way that I speak with you and learn. So the way that I study is basically building what I'm supposed to learn in a AI teacher.

And I just speak with him. I just try to understand. I ask questions and, you know, not to show off the podcast, I've only got top grades on all subjects. Throughout school with minimal effort, just making sure that the way that I learn is the way that I'm taught. And I can build that myself. And I think that's, that's the really interesting things about what the whole space that you guys are operating in is it can be customized to your way of expression, of externalizing and using things.

And I think that's beautiful, even though everything is scary because at the end of the day, this is scary. Like even, even what you are doing, even though it's fairly trained, it's scary because it's, it's challenging an industry that employs people. And some people will be displaced in their jobs and that does not mean they will become jobless. It's just, it's very hard for them and for us to understand where this is heading.

And that is scary. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I, I think about that a lot, very frankly. Um, I mean, I'm, I'm an artist at the end of the day and, uh, I, I do think is you, I think you should always keep thinking the things that you're building, what kind of impact are they having on society? You know, like, uh, then, and they're always going to be positive and negative impacts. So that's, there's no question about it, but I also believe it comes down to business models. You know, like you, if the right people are kind of building things and if the right people get successful, they will also try to do some things in the right way.

In the sense, what I've been trying to say is why not build a royalty mechanism, you know, for artists, why not build like some sort of, uh, ref share business model? You know, if you're doing like billion dollars in revenue, like have a certain percentage going back to like a couple of, uh, folks that are contributing to your data set. So I think those kinds of possibilities will mitigate those risks that, you know, of replacement and making people jobless. Uh, and maybe those would be the new avenues of making revenues, you know? So I think it's again going to be like those, you know, whoever's going to jump fastest onto this bandwagon are going to figure out those mechanisms for themselves as it happened with YouTube, as it happened with Spotify, as it happened.

So it's just another new technology, uh, which is right now, very hot and very talked about, but it's going to normalize in a couple of years. And it is going to be like the normal thing and, you know, uh, and humanity moves on, you know, like the humans figure out things. Uh, so I have that belief in humans as a collective concept. Yeah, I have as well. I think just this seems particularly scary because the narrative drawn is, is just very, uh, um, it's very dark to some degree. Uh, but it doesn't mean that everything that happens in space is dark, but it's just going to disrupt things very fast in all industries.

But at the end of the day, you know, I'm here, my kids are there, my wife is there, they're still here, we still have each other. Uh, but again, the, the financial surroundings of that, the, the macroeconomics, the microeconomics, they will be affected and that will change our lives. I agree. I swear this has been a great talk. Uh, I really hope that Beethoven will continue growing, uh, getting market share, uh, developing their technology and we'll find his place in a pretty healthy ecosystem in time.

Uh, one of the things that I really love is you have players in this space like yourself that are building something great, but also doing it, uh, the right way, uh, through having fairly trained material. That is licensed and respects what has been, uh, as, as you pursue what's to come. And I think that's important. You cannot discard the past just because you're building a future that, that is not sustainable. That's a very nice statement.

Uh, you cannot discard the first vision of future. Love it. Thank you for your time. Um, I hope to meet you in person one day, uh, but thank you for being, being on the podcast. Yep. Thank you for having me. And I really enjoyed having this conversation with you. Thank you so much.