Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:37:05 · Alexa von Tobel, Mikey Shulman
[00:37:05] S1: No. Not yet. It's on my bucket list for soon as possible. [00:37:09] S0: There are concerts, and then there are concerts. And you think you've been to some amazing concerts, you think all concerts are the same. And then you go to the sphere, and you realize that there's just another level of amazing that is possible. And I think that that is probably true in most things. That is definitely true in digital musical experiences, but it is also true at the nexus between digital and IRL musical experiences. And, again, it is just for lack of imagination that we haven't built these things yet. The technologies exist. [00:37:35] S1: In the same way that YouTube exploded video, and you now can follow your creators in very different ways. You can you can interact with them in different ways, and traditional television probably had some something to say about the YouTube. You're imagining a way where you can still be in love with your creator, but you can engage with them in ways that we've never been able to do before. Let's talk a little bit about those creators because what you're really doing is actually allowing more people to make money on music, more people to make a livelihood from something that they love, and potentially for people who are the best of their game of music actually to be more successful, which is a little bit of what you're really saying, which is Suno is gonna raise all boats. How do you think about that in terms of the the wealth creation for more creators?
00:38:37 · Mikey Shulman
[00:38:37] S0: I think about it like this. At the end of the day, all of the dollars in the ecosystem and music come from consumers. And if we don't build better end user experiences that people want to pay for, then we are forever in this place where we are now of inventing new ways to split the pie. And if we... That's like a bit of a... Like a fixed pie mentality makes a bit of perverse incentives for all parties. And so if we focus on giving the end user better experiences and growing the pie, it's actually just better for everyone. And so, like, a large thrust of the company is actually just thinking about, like, how are we going to end up growing the pie of music? And that is why we don't just clone other services and just make them AI powered, and we're actually trying to invent new things. I think there's something else about YouTube which is really interesting, which is a new type of star got created. You know, early YouTube, it's like these niche things, maybe I'm a I'm a gluten free chef. Maybe I'm like the best quilter of blankets in the world. What... You know, whatever it is. And this kind of slowly evolves, and these are like little micro communities, and I think, like, the musical equivalent will be these little micro genres. But eventually, that evolves into something like mister beast. Mister beast is not for linear television. Mister beast is a u... Is a YouTube star. And there will be new types of music stars, I think. And I don't know exactly what they will look like. I think Xania Monet is, like, a step in that direction, but it's it's it's not her either. And so I think this is really exciting. Like, the new forms of entertainment will get created, and, like, that's really cool.
00:40:14 · Alexa von Tobel, Mikey Shulman
[00:40:14] S1: That is really cool. Actually, one of the questions I wanted to ask you is, how do you think about agentic artists? Right? Like, I've seen the hologram AI people who... Or the now agentic movie stars, and you're starting to see the edge of what that could be. How do you think about what that looks like, Mikey? [00:40:34] S0: I don't think a ton about agentic stars. I think about... In music, people resonate both with the way things sound and with the message and the person behind the music. And I think it is impossible to really remove either of those. It has to sound good and interesting, and there has to be a person behind it. Even if the person is not, you know, front and center, there is a person behind it whose message you are resonating with it. And I think you see that in Xania Monet. There's a person behind Xania Monet who has a message that resonates very deeply with a lot of people. But you also see that in artists today who largely don't write and produce their own music, and there's nothing bad about that at all. Like, you are still getting that artist's message and that... The performance of that artist, and they are getting helped by other people along the way to help write and produce their music. So I see I see actually not a huge change happening there. The thing that changes is who is doing it and how are they doing it. [00:41:29] S1: And how quickly they're doing it. [00:41:31] S0: Yes. 100%.
00:41:31 · Mikey Shulman, Alexa von Tobel
[00:41:31] S0: Yes. 100%. [00:41:32] S1: One question I just wanted to make sure I asked you because I'm so interested, and this is a little bit on the technical side. In less than two years, Suno moved from early generation model to a V five. So just rapid iteration is happening. And a plethora of product launches. What have you learned about structuring teams and your own sort of cultural... You know, pay it forward to all the entrepreneurs that are listening, sort of the cultural tenants to be able to move at the pace and speed that you've had to maintain at Suno?
00:42:03 · Mikey Shulman
[00:42:03] S0: I think the the thing that dictates the pace here is how much people actually enjoy their work. And it's like if you're really excited about your work and everybody here, like, truly deeply loves music, it ends up it ends up helping a lot in terms of just getting you excited enough to make the next breakthrough and the next breakthrough and the next breakthrough. I think culturally, there's something I think missing in a lot of AI companies, which is that a lot of products start as thin wrappers around the model. It's like, my product is whatever thing my model can do. And that is not a terribly user centric way of thinking about things. It's appropriate in some domains. But I think when you think about building a consumer product that is intended to be used by billions of people, it's not that. And so at the beginning of the company, the whole product is the model, but there needs to be some cultural shift of... And it's actually a challenge to the machine learning team. It used to be that the machine learning team comes up with the entire product, and now you actually need your users to come up with the product and to challenge your machine learning team, can you build this? And it's actually flipping it around. And culturally, making a one eighty like that is actually very tricky. But I don't think you can really service hundreds of millions or billions of people if you don't make that flip.
00:43:22 · Alexa von Tobel, Mikey Shulman
[00:43:22] S1: Mikey, just again, very few CEOs, founders are sitting in a seat where you've grown from zero to 200,000,000 of revenue in honestly, like, weeks in some ways, and from zero users to north of a 100,000,000, and I know that number is growing rapidly. Talk a little bit about the culture of speed and how you guys are managing that. [00:43:48] S0: You know, it's a really tricky balance because different trade offs are appropriate for different companies and products. And I think we have two things that are somewhat opposed. Like, speed is obviously good, and it's because, ultimately, if you're trying to invent new consumer behaviors, which is what we are trying to do, you need to show your users a lot of things. You need to ship things very, very quickly to get feedback from people. And I think, ultimately, the experimentation velocity, velocity, the the the how many experiments can you ship to your users and learn from, that is ultimately the thing that the company will live and die by. So speed is very important. But there are two things, I think, that push against one another in the speed direction. One is, at the end of the day, we are not building airplanes. We're not making medical devices. When our site goes down, it's not good, but it's not catastrophic. And so that is something that can actually allow you to move more quickly. [00:44:41] S1: That's a really good point, Mikey, that I didn't think about, which is no one's dying, and you, as a result, can go a lot faster than other businesses.