Mikey Shulman on Building Suno into a $2.5B AI Music Platform
Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
The Aha: Building an Audio-First Company
Mikey explains why Suno focused on audio when most pursued text LLMs and the founding research breakthrough.
Suno founder and CEO Mikey Shulman is building the future of music creation. A Harvard PhD physicist who led machine learning at Kensho before it was acquired by S&P Global, Mikey had a realization in 2022 that audio was a backwater in machine learning—despite being everywhere in human life. He turned that realization into $2.5B company Suno, which grew from zero to over 100 million users. Mikey shares how Suno scales to users generating seven million tracks a day, why music's format will change as dramatically in this era as it did in the shift from vinyl to streaming, and how AI is democratizing creativity for billions of people who never thought they could make music.
What You'll Learn:
- How growing up in a loving, stable environment with parents who encouraged following your passions shaped Mikey's leadership style
- Why audio was overlooked in machine learning and how Suno made it a first-class citizen
- How Suno went from zero users to 100 million and zero revenue to $200 million in under three years
- Why a quarter of songs on Suno are remixes of other songs on the platform
- The difference between creation and consumption in music and why that boundary is disappearing
- How Suno is growing the entire pie of music rather than just splitting existing revenue
- Why the business model for music will change when the format becomes interactive
- What Mikey learned about speed versus craft when building for billions of users
Chapters:
01:52 Growing Up: Following What You Love
03:45 From Physics to a PhD at Harvard
05:30 Kensho and the Path to Machine Learning
09:30 Teaching Machine Learning at MIT Sloan
12:10 The Birth of Suno
15:30 Why Audio When Everyone Chose Text
16:25 Zero to 100 Million Users in Three Years
18:55 Xania Monet: The First AI Billboard Artist
21:55 Stories That Keep the Team Going
24:15 Music Was Invented to Be Social
27:27 The Business Model for Interactive Music
29:44 Reshaping the Music Industry
32:45 New Boundaries of Music Creation
35:00 The Future: Interactive Albums and Fan Fiction
37:35 Growing the Pie for All Creators
40:00 Will There Be Agentic AI Stars?
41:15 Building Teams That Move Fast
43:30 Speed and Craft: The Cultural Balance
45:30 What's Coming Next at Suno
46:30 Guardrails in a Lower Stakes Domain
47:47 Managing Chaos as a First-Time CEO at Scale
49:55 Quickfire Round
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