Mikey Shulman on Building Suno into a $2.5B AI Music Platform

Dec 17, 2025

Mikey Shulman, Founder and CEO of Suno, a $2.5B AI music platform, shares his journey from a Harvard physics PhD to revolutionizing music creation. He discusses the explosive growth of Suno to over 100 million users and its 7 million daily tracks. Mikey explains how AI is democratizing music, blurring the lines between creation and consumption, and fostering a remix culture. He envisions a future where the music format is interactive, creating new business models and reshaping the industry.

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INSIGHT

Audio As A Missed ML Frontier

Suno focused on audio because it was an overlooked, high-impact domain in machine learning.
They made audio a first-class citizen and pushed through research barriers to generate high-quality music now.

INSIGHT

From Party Trick To Habit

Suno transformed from a party-trick demo into a product people return to repeatedly.
Deepening creation tools turned casual users into engaged creators who share music socially.

ANECDOTE

Users Make Deeply Personal Songs

Suno powers personalized and emotional use cases, like volunteers making songs for sick kids.
Users also turn family poetry into songs and reconnect with instruments they abandoned years ago.

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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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