Three Pieces of Advice for Solo Entrepreneurs Getting Started

1. Find an area of the world that you are instinctively excited and curious about. Even better if it is a unique intersection of interests that you and your team share. Music analytics was not something people were asking about or searching for several years ago, we were creating a new market.

Each day at Next Big Sound, rather than getting more routine, it gets more interesting as we go down the rabbit hole gathering more data, signing on more customers, understanding their questions better, and providing answers which lead to more questions. This is only possible because of our innate curiosity and excitement about finding the Truth in this arena.

2. Start talking with as many other people as you possibly can about your idea and the part of the world you are most interested in. You never know who has a cousin/friend/classmate who shares a similar fascination and you want to expose yourself to as much serendipity as humanly possible. The famous saying is “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” I don’t think that’s entirely right. I think it’s more about who knows you. If you are the guy or gal always talking about bitcoin 10 years before it’s all over Techcrunch or the person obsessed with photography 5 years before Instagram’s sale makes headlines, opportunities will find you.

3. Once you’ve found the sector and others who share your enthusiasm it is time to run as fast as you possibly can. This means real validated learning with customers and users. In the early days don’t be too obsessed with A/B testing (since you have no users this will take weeks to run and provide questionable data) – build product, put it in front of people, get their feedback, rinse and repeat. At Next Big Sound we are 25 people and still trying to speed these cycles up no matter the cost. We moved the entire company from Boulder to New York City to be able to put new product in front of end customers in the music industry in half the time from when we were in Boulder. These cycles can never be fast enough.

8.12.2017

Caroline and I got married at The Diamond Horseshoe in New York City on Saturday August 12th and had an AWESOME celebration with our close friends and family (and an excellent band!). 

Monday morning we were off for a two week honeymoon in Africa: we saw Victoria Falls by helicopter, walking, and bungee jumping, spent several nights in Kruger National Park, a night in wine country and then rounded out the trip with a stay in the beautiful city of Cape Town. 

The wedding and trip of a lifetime! 

On a safari (I borrowed this classic early 1900s safari hat from the lodge)

Rainbow over Vic Falls

Wine tasting in Stellenbosch

Startup Stories The Press Doesn't Tell

It’s a lot more exciting to read about a lottery winner than a story about thousands of people who spent $20 on losing tickets that really should have used that money for groceries. Or as Kristof says even more eloquently in a recent column: journalists have a bias toward sensational news. "We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off."

Like everyone else starting a company I knew the road would be tough and that failure was nearly inevitable. Yet, we planned our launch to be a big surprise reveal. We planned to be able to technically support thousands of concurrent users. And we expected the press coverage we’d seen when seemingly every other company launched. I attribute these expectations to my warped understanding of entrepreneurship due largely to what I'd seen in the media. 

Some of the startup stories the press doesn’t tell:

• The founder that flushes her 401k and racks up hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt.

• The founder whose spouse leaves them after decades of marriage when the startup takes over their former lover’s life.

• HORRIBLE board member investor behavior that almost never comes out.

• The thousands of startups that launched last year but never closed any investor money.

• The zombie years where growth in employees, revenue, or usage is flat or declining.

I understand that no one wants to go on record talking about these scenarios but one on one over coffee or beers I’ve heard stories like these time and time again. I think it is a big disservice to the startup community that they aren’t talked about more publicly so entrepreneurs can start with better information than The Social Network as their blueprint for entrepreneurship. That would be like chefs using The French Laundry as their model for what it’s like to start a restaurant or Adele as a prototype for a singer.  

NYU Data Analysis In the Music Industry Class Recap

I just submitted the final grades for the 24 grad students of Data Analysis in the Music Industry:  Strategy and Application MPAMB-GE.2211. With that, and a quick shave of my beard, my first semester as an adjunct professor comes to a close!

I had two main objectives in the course for the students:

1. Basic proficiency in collecting, cleaning, and conducting data analysis.
2. An understanding of how data is currently being used (or could be used) across the music industry to make smarter business decisions.

The first half of the course was heavy on data problem sets, APIs, building algorithms, and technical speakers and lessons. The second half of the course was much more about guest speakers from across the industry and how they use, misuse, or don’t use data in their role.  

I used two texts in the course to support these objective: Data Science for Business: Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett and The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.

Each class would have a title (Class II was Messy, Messy Data), a series of questions for the class, takeaway points I wanted the class to walk away with, and homework that supported the lesson.

There were six homework assignments, three quizzes, and a large take home group research final and presentation. My weekends were spent grading homework and quizzes and preparing for the 2 hour Monday evening class. Glad to be on summer break and back to just my full time job at Pandora!

We had speakers from Sony ATV, Warner/Atlantic, Ticketmaster, Paradigm, Edison Research, Youtube, Instagram, Crush and mTheory, Buzz Angle and many more. The class also took a fun field trip at the end of the semester to Pandora’s NYC offices across from Grand Central and was definitely a highlight. Thanks to all the speakers that came and gave generously of their time and knowledge.

One final thank you to the Pandora leadership team for allowing me to take this on -- we are all excited to see what the students go on to achieve throughout the music industry this summer and after graduation!

Raising Our Seed Financing for Next Big Sound, August 2009

Next Big Sound raised $25k in May of 2008 and $18k in the summer of 2009. Some quick math will show that we were capitalized to the tune of $40k for a year and a half for myself and co-founders. Things were pretty tight. I was used to the company just paying bare living expenses: rent for the summer, laptops when we needed them, AWS, plane tickets etc.

“How much money are you guys raising?” Investors would ask. “However much we can!” We’d gone on very little capital for so long it was really hard to come up with a number that didn’t sound outrageous. In our Techstars pitch we decided we were raising $300k. That seemed like more money than we’d ever need.

Like all companies going through an accelerator, we really wanted to be able to stand on stage and say that we had all of it committed, or mostly committed. One of our mentors that summer was a big angel investor. He was the only one I asked before demo day. We’d been working closely all summer and I’d been assured by other entrepreneurs that he invests in “tons of companies.” He said he was not in a place to make an investment in Next Big Sound, that was a really hard moment.

Everything changed on August 6, 2009. I’d been working on the pitch for a month straight while David, Samir, and Walter built the actual product and site. We launched very early that morning and had the biggest 8 minutes of our lives on stage.

At that point Foundry Group had a soft rule about not investing in Techstars companies. Jason Mendelson had been our lead mentor all summer long. He had worked with us from the time we had no idea what business we’d build to the launch of a compelling company.  Jason was far too biased towards us to make an objective investment decision but his partners, Brad and Seth, came over to him and asked him why Foundry wasn’t leading the Next Big Sound deal. Jason was ecstatic. Getting a term sheet from Foundry at the end of that summer was one of the most exciting points on the NBS journey. We’d worked so closely with them, and trusted the Foundry team so much, that I never actually signed the term sheet. After a quick negotiation, that made a small cameo in Venture Deals, Jason and I walked across the street from their office to a salon where Brad was getting his hair cut. To be specific, he was laid back in the chair getting his hair washed. He sat up when he heard us, asked if we had a deal, and with a head full of shampoo, shook my hand. That was the official consummation of the investment.

The term sheet was for $600k and Foundry offered to do the whole round or leave room for strategic angels or VCs. I flew to Chicago with 5 other Techstars companies to pitch Chicago VCs, a room full of everyone I’d been begging to invest for the year and a half prior and with our round fully committed. That was a great feeling too.

We closed our financing September 23, 2009. 45 days after our launch and demo day presentation.

Recording Your Day For A Year

I hate the feeling of wondering where the year went.

Twice in my life I resolved to record every day in an app on my phone. I did this in 2011 and 2015 and it is the single best antidote to this feeling. At the end of a week or month, if you ever find yourself wondering where the time went, you just pop open the app and flip through the days and remember each in vivid detail and realize how much has gotten accomplished in the last stretch of time. That feeling of “I-can’t-believe-it’s-already-December” instantly disappears.

I first did this in 2011 when we raised a $6.5M Series A for Next Big Sound. I also decided to do it in 2015, the year we sold Next Big Sound to Pandora. Both were very stressful and transformative years in my life. I love that I can go back and see how I was feeling, what I was doing, where I was on the planet, and what I was excited, hopeful, and worried about as each event unfolded.

It sounds like an easy task to write down 3-5 sentences that describe your day each night but I’m actually looking forward to not having this resolution currently running and I don’t know if I’ll ever do it for a third time.

Perhaps if time starts to speed up again in my life and I find myself wondering where the year went :)

What Is Your Number?

In 2011 we had built the Next Big Sound team to 9 people, 2 of 3 major labels signed to annual deals, a partnership with Billboard to license two of our charts and a quickly growing name in the music tech world. That’s when I got a call from a large entertainment company in Los Angeles who was “on the 80 yard line with a competitor of Next Big Sound” but wanted to explore what an acquisition of NBS might look like.

Leaning heavily on the counsel of Jason Mendelson I flew to LA the next day for a one-day trip of solid meetings with their executives and corporate development team. Jason suggested that in parallel David, Samir and I should discuss what our number is. The number with which we would be excited to sell Next Big Sound. If the offer was lower, we would refuse, if it was higher, we would accept. When acquisition interest started heating up in 2015 I refused to run such an exercise, but that’s a story for another day.

The three of us went to dinner at the Boulder Chophouse. We ordered wine, nice steaks, plenty of appetizers, and talked about our business, our lives, our NBS ownership percentages, and what our “number” would be. What a surreal exercise! It really forces you to think through what you actually want in life and what’s most important to you. We were 24 at the time and had raised $860k. An NBS sale of $XXM+ would make us all multi-millionaires and we could take some time off and quickly jump into our next venture. Less than that would be awesome but we really didn’t want to sell the company as we were just getting started and finally gaining real momentum that had been elusive for so long.

The offer came in lower than our number and I politely, but promptly, refused. This was absolutely the right decision for us, and the right decision for the business. We went on to raise a $6.5M Series A later that year at a post-money valuation that was higher than our “number.”

My Information Diet

Like any diet, what you read has an impact on how you feel. I’ve been evolving my information diet over the years - cutting out things that have low intellectual caloric value, like Facebook updates of people I barely know, and trying to read more long-form pieces and books.

The Newspaper. I’m addicted to the NYTimes on my iPad. In college Northwestern was part of a collegiate readership program which offered free NYTimes, Wall Street Journals and Chicago Tribunes all over campus every day. I would try to read the paper each weekday. That habit fell off for the first 3-4 years of Next Big Sound but I would still try to read the Sunday Times as a treat for myself on the way into the office. Two years ago I decided to pony up and pay for the iPad access to the paper. At first I thought that no digital equivalent would ever live up to the physical paper. Now I like it much better. I’m able to stay in bed and with one hand spend 30 minutes feeling like I’m totally caught up with the major news stories from around the globe.

Blogs. I got heavily into blogs about 10 years ago when I first started scheming about starting Next Big Sound. RSS and Google Reader (R.I.P.) were a godsend. I now follow about 200 highly curated blogs across all sorts of categories: data viz, economics, entrepreneurship, venture capital, music, marketing, book publishing, finance, and lifestyle. Any publisher that posts prolifically is cut - sorry ESPN, Mashable and Techcrunch. I’m aiming for 100-200 high-quality blog posts across a wide range of my interests each time I fire up Reeder, the gorgeous app that I use for reading blogs. I used to be pretty disciplined about checking it only on Wednesday and Sundays but I now am less militant about it and switch to blogs whenever I’ve finished the paper. By Saturday I try to zero out anything I haven’t read.

Instapaper. Rather than having to leave a tab open until I read a long article, the Read Later bookmarklet has been a brilliant addition to my workflow. I used to have 100+ posts to read but I went through and deleted or read all of them on a transatlantic flight last year. Now I aim to keep fewer than 10 and be really selective about what actually I save to read later by previewing a few paragraphs.

Techmeme and Social. Throughout the day I check Techmeme 4-5 times to make sure there is no breaking tech news I need to be aware of. I skim Twitter as well but no longer feel like I need to (or am able) to keep up with the ~500 people I follow. I’ve unfollowed 1000+ people on Facebook (not unfriended, just their posts don’t show up). This process took months of active effort each time I checked my timeline but Facebook is actually now a total joy to use, every update is by someone who I am eager to hear life updates about.

Books. On Saturdays during coffee shop crawls I try to make meaningful progress on a book. I typically read 20-30 books a year (Goodreads profile). I don’t read the paper on Saturday since I figure the important stuff will be covered Friday or Sunday. Sundays I read the NYTimes.

Think that about captures it! I’m sure there are plenty of blind spots here but this is obviously a priority for me and I pride myself on not missing too much.

A Book Club For Ideas, Part II

So what sorts of things would be discussed and what’s the purpose? There is no intended outcome other than an intellectually rigorous conversation around a large, interesting topic, with no right answer.

There are five main branches of philosophy: the study of existence (metaphysics), the study of knowledge (epistemology), the study of action (ethics), study of force (politics), study of art (esthetics). As a simple starting point, a rotation with one session dedicated to each of these five areas in order would be a great start.

Some other specific ideas for topics for the first year might include:

• How one finds meaningful work.
• The two-party system in the United States.
• What will be obvious 10 years from now that we can’t see today?
• Affirmative action.
• Upward social comparisons.
• Family relationships.
• The purpose of higher education.
• Funding space exploration.
• Income inequality.
• Happiness.
• Executive actions by a US President.
• The meaning of life.
• Luck.
• Stoicism.
• Finding the Truth.
• Defining Beauty.
• Friendship.
• Donald Trump.

This list is far from exhaustive but gives a sense of the wide variety of issues to cover.

Data Analysis In The Music Industry: Strategy and Application

In the Spring of 2015 NYU’s music business graduate program at Steinhardt offered a course on analytics in the music business. This was the first time, to my knowledge, a full course like this was offered at any university. This news was one of the most validating moments of my career. After years and years of beating the drum of the importance of data and analytics in the music industry, NYU’s prestigious music business program was offering a course on the intersection I’ve been obsessed with for years!

In 2014, as the course was coming together, I was too busy running Next Big Sound to be very involved but I did help the professor, Larry Miller, with my thoughts on the syllabus and I did host one of the class sessions at the Next Big Sound offices on 19th and 6th Avenue. The second year the course was offered Larry Miller invited me to co-teach the course as the “entrepreneur-in-residence.” I became even more involved in planning the syllabus, reviewing the proposed assignments, discussing lesson plans, coordinating speakers, and leading some of the sessions completely on my own. We hosted one of the class sessions up at Pandora’s NY office across from Grand Central.

A few of my favorite parts about teaching so far:

Clarity of thought. I live in a music data bubble surrounded by colleagues who know what we do and why we do it. It’s very refreshing, and a great reminder, to meet 20-30 grad students who have very little idea about Next Big Sound, social/streaming/video data, or what a data scientist actually does.

Meeting new people. Everyone comes from such different backgrounds and is headed in so many directions, I really like hearing about why people are in the room and what gets them excited.

Flexing different muscles. I really love the practice of constructing a course curriculum, reading assignments, and figuring out the optimal way to lay out a progression for the class.

Industry relevance. Every single person I’ve asked if they’d like to come speak to an NYU class has enthusiastically agreed. People have generously re-arranged their schedules and sacrificed travel to be there. It is neutral territory on behalf of the students so even folks that compete vigorously in the market agree to come in and candidly talk to us about their challenges and opportunities. We’ve had folks from Pandora, Spotify, Youtube, Facebook, Ticketmaster, Sony/ATV, mTheory, Warner Music Group, Edison Research, and many others.

I’m excited to announce that this year, I will be teaching the course completely on my own as an adjunct professor at NYU! I still have my full-time job as Head of Next Big Sound at Pandora but with the support of my team and Pandora - I will get to spend Monday evenings for 14 weeks (starting tonight!) with a few dozen graduate students talking about data analysis in the music industry.