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- [00:00]
Kakkul Srivastava
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Dan Runcy
I'm Dan Runcy and you're listening to trapital, and you're about to hear my conversation with the CEO of splice, Kakkul Srivastava, at our second annual trapital Summit. Kakul is one of the few return guests from our first and second trapital Summit, but there's been a lot of.
- [00:20]
Interviewer/Host
Changes since she first took that stage.
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Dan Runcy
Earlier this year, Splyce acquired Spitfire Audio, and you'll hear more about what went into that acquisition and how it changed as Splyce in some of its strategy moving forward. You'll also hear Kakkul and I talk about product and strategy. Kakkul has a deep product background from her work at companies like Adobe, GitHub, WeWork, Slack and more. So she's brought a lot of that to Splice and we talk about why that's so important for how she's building this organization. And like any company that goes through M and A, there are likely some growing pains when you're trying to merge two companies together. So she talks about some of those principles and how she builds the company that she wants to create, knowing those traditional systems while also combining it with the cutting edge AI that is pushing the industry forward. And even though Kakkool did return to our trapital Summit, this is actually the first conversation that I had had with her that you're going to hear on this show since 2023. And a lot's changed for both Splyce and the entire music creator ecosystem since then. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did. Here's my talk with Kakkul.
- [01:29]
Kakkul Srivastava
Once in my life, I have someone who needs me.
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Interviewer/Host
Starting us off with some Stevie Wonder.
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Kakkul Srivastava
I know who likes Stevie Wonder.
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Interviewer/Host
Out here still might be the greatest album of all time. Songs of the Key of Life I'm.
- [01:45]
Kakkul Srivastava
A big Stevie Wonder fan. I picked Stevie Wonder. I just think he's one of the greatest artists ever. He's still so relevant and still seems so fresh and innovative to me. But he also reminds me that it's not the first time that we have gone through this crazy transition in the music industry. Synthesizers, people thought they were going to take jobs away. When you put a tool like that in the hands of an incredible creator, what he was able to do with it took music to new heights. And I feel like the same thing's going to happen with AI. And it's really our approach at Splice to build tools in the hands of creators so we can learn from them. And so he inspires me every Day.
- [02:37]
Interviewer/Host
And speaking of AI, you were recently announced on the Time 100 list for leaders in AI. That's pretty cool.
- [02:45]
Kakkul Srivastava
Thank you. It was definitely a surprise and a big honor, but I have to feel that it's not about me being recognized, but Splice people in the audience. It's our team and the philosophy of, you know, it's not AI versus the artists, it's artists and AI.
- [03:03]
Interviewer/Host
It's been a big year for you all. Made some big announcements this year, acquired Spitfire Audio. That was a pretty big move for you all as a company. And it looks like from an acquisition perspective, you already had a lot of the tools in place with just based on how your company is. You had the AI in place with the samples to help the creators, but then now you acquired a company that has the instruments with it as well. So when we talk about end to end creator stack, that was my thought when I saw the acquisition news.
- [03:35]
Kakkul Srivastava
Yeah. My background at GitHub, Adobe, I have been building tools for creative people most of my career. And being here at Splice gives us a chance to do that again for music makers. So that really has been the mission and that has been the vision that how can we build great tools for creators. We're starting with an incredible library of samples that everyone uses and has been recognized and is loved by so many people. But over the last three years, we really have been building these tools. And so the Spitfire Audio acquisition is about that. And we're really lucky to have that team be part of Splice. Now in tech, we talk a lot about how the most successful companies do things that are really hard to scale, and then they figure out how to scale them. The Spitfire Audio team does that with how they record sounds. They go into incredible spaces. Abbey Road Studios, all of these incredible spaces. And they record real musicians, the greats in their field, playing these incredible instruments. And they mic them with 3000 different mics and they record that. And then they slowly turn that into a digital instrument that any of us can play. Any of us can go and play the BBC Symphony Orchestra, like, how cool is that? And so with that, they've built this process that's incredibly hard to replicate, but they've also built this technology. They have this Merlin Audio engine that is. We've tested all of them. It's really the best. And now we have that technology to build new kinds of instruments that have never been built before. We have a lot of Gen AI technology that we've been building. So all of that does lead to what you're Saying which is the Quader stack. But I think the stack is more than that. Right? It's more than what Splice can build. It's also about what we're building as an industry. And Splice, we know we can't do it on our own. We have to partner with some of the other great companies in our space. So whether it's Studio One and Fender or Avid and Pro Tools and most recently we announced a partnership with Ableton. I think together we are all building the future of music creation and the real creator stack.
- [06:04]
Interviewer/Host
And of course part of this is how the company fits in with each other and that works and that makes sense. I also know that M and A is very tough and it's something that I don't think a lot of people may realize unless they're really in it. And especially with a company like Spitfire Audio. Different cultures, different continents. How do you help make sure that goes as smooth as possible?
- [06:26]
Kakkul Srivastava
It's funny that you say that we did a retro on how the Spitfire Audio acquisition went with our team and with the Spitfire Audio team. Hey, what could we do to do it differently? And the team came back and said these are all their recommendations. I'm like, great, the next time we acquire Spitfire Audio, we'll do a much better job. That's really just to say it's so hard and you can never really learn how to do it because every company is so different. I will say that I have really high standards for how we operate. Even for my standards, I think this acquisition went really well. The secret to that is the two companies have very shared set of values. Artists at the center, really respecting the sound creators well and building great tools for music maker. That is as true for Spitfire Audio as it is for Splice. So it just resonated super well. The other thing is we knew exactly why we wanted to do the acquisition. We wanted to build a new kind of digital instrument that brought together some of the best of Splice and some of the best of Spitfire Audio. And. And when we acquired the company like literally that day, the team started working like racing towards this new product. And we haven't actually announced it yet, but I'm going to share it here at trapital. You heard it here first. We're probably two to three weeks away from launching a new kind of virtual instrument that I think the industry hasn't seen yet.
- [07:58]
Interviewer/Host
Appreciate you sharing the news with us. Thank you. You did mention about if the team was to acquire a Spitfire Audio again, it seemed like there's all these lessons Learned obviously you're not going to acquire that company again. But if there are other acquisitions on the horizon, what is an example of something that you learned this time around that you would do differently now that you've done it before?
- [08:20]
Kakkul Srivastava
Yeah, I would definitely look for that values match. I think being aligned on the mission of what we're going to do together is something that we have to prioritize and make sure we focus on. I think one of the things that I would do is integrate a lot faster. So we acquired Spitfire Audio in April. We took some of that team and immediately put them to work on this joint project that we were working on. But most of that team has stayed separate and I was actually in London two weeks ago and one of the things we announced then was we're going to bring the product and technology teams much closer together over the next two to three weeks. So there's a part of me that wishes we'd done that sooner. I know why we didn't do it sooner, but I think when you have so many like minded people, bringing the teams together faster is something I should have done more quickly.
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Interviewer/Host
I know for you, you do think a lot about just building organizations in general. Like a lot of tech companies, product is the largest organization that you have and a lot of the other parts of it serve the business. Can you talk a bit about not just why that's important but what do you think about whether it's acquisitions like integrating this new company or just changes in general from when you took over the company? How has that been and why is that so important?
- [09:42]
Kakkul Srivastava
Yeah, product is how we serve our customers. So it has to be where we invest in as a company. We're a technology company so a lot of focus is on product engineering design. Another team that I over invest in is our data team. It's really a hallmark of how I operate. Every role that I've been in my career I've over invested in data and it's really paid off for us. It pays off in how we build our product. We're running experiments all the time and learning from those experiments. We use data in how we build our content strategy. So we've got some people here from our content team. We use data in how we do marketing, in how we serve our customers that way, how we tell our stories. So data is pretty core to everything that we do. But increasingly it's not just data that's useful for splice business. We're sharing our data stories with the world because I think learning about what trends are exploding, what new ways of creating music are growing. I think those insights are important not just for us, but for the industry as a whole. So we're excited to start sharing that data as a service to the ecosystem as well.
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Dan Runcy
Let's take a break for our chart Metric stat of the week. Coachella 2026 has officially sold out. I was interested to see how do the top artists build on 2026 Coachella compared to each of those artists. Sharp Metric Rank the Sharp Metric Rank is an absolute number that's given to every artist in their database and it's based on the artist's overall presence and relevance and includes factors such as fan base size, engagement on platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, TikTok and more. And it gives a weight to each of those artists. So it's an interesting way to see how do the biggest artists in the world or the smaller artists all line up with each other. I looked at the top headliners built for this year's Coachella. Justin Bieber is currently number one on the chart Metric Artist Rank. No surprise there. He just put out an album. Sabrina Carpenter is 20. Carol G is 19. So having three artists in the top 20 is pretty strong for the three headliners. But when we go to the first artist on that next row, those artists that are still likely bringing in seven figure checks per weekend per Coachella, it gets a little interesting. Young thug is at 136. The strokes are at 890. The excess is at 1615 and anime is at 2203. Again, it is very hard to put an apples to apples comparison based on streaming and social media engagement compared to how many people actually show up and buy tickets to go to a music festival to see an artist. But it's an interesting example to just see how different metrics can be with the lineup as broad as Coachella. Let's get back to the episode.
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Interviewer/Host
Obviously you're working to serve creators, make sure they have what they need, that they can be most successful. And you also spend a lot of time looking at that data, looking at their preferences. Is there anything on the creator side specifically that gained insight of things that they're telling you, oh, this is how.
- [13:08]
Dan Runcy
You should be building the product.
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Interviewer/Host
This is how you're doing things that may change your direction, that maybe changed some actions for Splice all the time.
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Kakkul Srivastava
So two weeks ago we announced our Genome project, which is our Genai set of capabilities. I think we have four or five different Gen AI tools that we're talking about on our innovation page, but the people who are inside that beta have these plugins from Splice and they are installing them and using them in their DAW based workflows right now. And we're listening to them and they're like, this sounds crunchy. I don't like it. Or actually like that. It sounds like this because it's giving me the grit that I wanted for this particular track. They're telling us what feels like cheating. This is too easy. It's really taking my creativity away. And they tell us when something really gets them into the flow. There was one user actually love her voice so much I won't share her name because she's actually a famous artist. But she was using our tool and she's like, I don't know if this is AI or not, but it's really useful. So I really like it and can I keep it now? And I think that's what I want artists and musicians and music creators to say is they shouldn't have to care whether it's AI or not as long as there's a values match. And you know that you're doing the respectful thing with your training data and all of that stuff. They can just focus on, is this actually helping them get into the flow, use the tool, get their ideas out of their head and out into other people's ears.
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Interviewer/Host
Is there anything that creators are asking for that doesn't exist today?
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Kakkul Srivastava
I think what they're asking for are more creative controls. I'm one of those people. I really feel that it's very difficult for most people to imagine tools that don't exist yet. And so the way we try to get feedback is put things in front of people and is this getting warmer? Is this not getting warmer? And try to iterate on that from there as opposed to saying, here's a blank screen, tell us what you need. Because most of the people we're working with, they're musicians, they're not UI designers, they're not software developers, they're not AI engineers. So I think it's better to put things in front of people to see what it is that they want. But what they want is their rights to be respected. They want to make sure that whatever they're creating, they have the ability to monetize someday if they want to or not, if they don't. And they want creative control. They don't want something that just gives them the answer. They want to be able to express themselves. So those are the principles that we're going to keep working on.
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Interviewer/Host
And it feels like there's a pretty wide range of what creators want just because there's so many of them. And while it seems like the splice creators, like you said, maybe they don't want things to be too easy, or maybe they don't want things to be the push of the button, but based on the way the martial arts gift places in the landscape, looks like there is a market for that. It seems like there are people that do use that as part of their creativity. So I wonder. I know your stance on this, but where the nuance does lie, because it feels like so much of this is so subjective just based on what certain creators may want prefer even if they're not within the splice market.
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Kakkul Srivastava
Yes. And I'm not a great photographer or anything like that, but I was making some slides for a board meeting. I had a board meeting this morning. So I was making some slides and I wanted to use the phrase skate to where the hockey puck is going. Great phrase, right? Always want to be skating where the hockey puck is going. And so I asked an AI tool to make me a photo of a hockey puck going fast on the ice. But I wanted the hockey stick in the background and it made me that photo not realizing that the other hockey stick also has a hockey puck. And I don't know much about hockey, but they're not two pucks on the ice, right? And then I'm like, oh shit, like how do I get the other pocket out? And then I'm like, okay, now I have to crank open Photoshop and figure it's so painful and I'm not a fancy user. So I just feel like those of us building AI tools like we just have more work to do. It's such early days and I'm excited to be doing that work with a lot of great people who are building these tools as well.
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Interviewer/Host
This is coming from a former Adobe executive, so if anyone you would know.
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Kakkul Srivastava
I don't love using Photoshop. This is true.
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Interviewer/Host
Well played. Well played. Your business model of course is royalty free. We had you on the stage last year. We talked about the success of Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso. That of course came from a sample pack. The beauty of your model is that with royalty free, it does allow this to be a cost effective thing. One aspect of that means that some of the creators behind that, just based on the way the economics may work out, if that becomes the song of the summer 2024, do they capture at all the economic upside with that? How do you think about that when you think about the future of not just your business model, but where you stand and how you look at the types of opportunities you're marketing the business towards.
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Kakkul Srivastava
Yeah, Dan, I would say that there are three ways that I think about that question. The first is as a business person, right? It seems like there's a lot of money to be made in royalty bearing samples. There really isn't because it makes things so much more complicated for the music maker to have to keep track of. This sample was used here and this is where it was derived. And that's I think why Splice has been able to grow is we take that headache away from the people who use Splice samples and it's been such a value add. We've been able to expand the market because of the royalty free aspect of our product. Even without participating in Sabrina Carpenter's incredible success with that song. There are a lot of people on the Splice platform who are sample creators who make really good living out of that work. So I think we are giving back to the music community and people are building careers on Splice as a platform. So I think that's an important thing to acknowledge. The third thing is that in the world of AI and we've been thinking about this really hard and I will say that I think we're ahead of anybody else in the market in our thinking around this, which is how do you fairly remunerate artists who provide that original sample and that original sound In a world of AI and the way we are building our tools, one of our design principles is when you start with a Gen AI based experience, you will start with a sample that we know who the music creator who created that sample is and we have a real relationship with that person. And so that if you create a derivative of that sample using Gen AI like I love this flute, I want to turn it into an electric guitar. Even if you're using the electric guitar version, that artist, that original sample creator is seeing a Mind Station event. And I think that's really core and it's possible because we're a royalty free model and I think that's a really big benefit to the community. I think we'll be one of the first companies to really pay people back in a post AI world.
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Interviewer/Host
And I feel like too being able to operate in both those lanes reminds me of things you've talked about with how there's two cities in music, one where you're more focused on recorded revenue and charts and dominating in many ways the lane that Expresso has thrived in. And then there's A whole other aspect of creation, people doing it for themselves, that isn't tied to that, but there still is a business to serve. And in certain ways, you're now operating in both of those. Even though this is still your core business over here, you provide the infrastructure to allow for that other part of the business to thrive. For whether it's Sabrina or the other unnamed artists you're mentioning that's used your sample packs. So both seem to work.
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Kakkul Srivastava
Just our sample packs are gen tools, so that everyone uses sample packs already. We want to make sure that the artists who provide the original sounds that make up the core of our experience are paid fairly. If we don't do that, we will not have a business. So I think that's a really important part of what we do. The core of what we do, though, is to serve the music maker with the tools that they need. And whether that music maker is going to go on and win the Grammys next year or it's the kid down the street building his first track for TikTok, we want to be part of that journey, we want to be part of that experience, and we want to be the full stack around that experience. So that's what we're going to keep focused on.
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Interviewer/Host
As you mentioned, of course, you are one of the leaders in AI in the space, but outside of Splice itself, what's your broader take on where we are right now with AI, the companies that are pushing things forward? Where do you think we're heading?
- [22:12]
Kakkul Srivastava
I think it's so early, and I think we're going to look back in five years and just think, oh my God, we were so dumb back then. I was just at another technology conference listening to how these massive companies are using AI in their workflows, and it feels very much like the early days when people are like, oh my God, this is a web company, this is an Internet company, it's a dot com. And now every company uses the Internet all the time in almost every aspect. It's how you do HR software, it's how you manage time cards. It's every single aspect of how our products are built. I think AI is going to be the same way, but we're so early in that right now, and I feel.
- [23:01]
Interviewer/Host
Like that's a common thing. We've continued to hear today, whether it's from you, from Oliver, from Andrew, or other speakers, we're figuring out a lot of it right now. But we're still early. We just got to see how it plays out.
- [23:12]
Kakkul Srivastava
And I think we just have to focus on. At least I believe with AI and particularly in this field, in the world of music, we have to build great tools and we have to respect our artists, our musicians, our creators and the rights around them, their work.
- [23:29]
Interviewer/Host
Well, I'm sure we could continue and have a whole nother 25 minute conversation.
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Dan Runcy
But I'll pause there.
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Interviewer/Host
Kakul, I appreciate you making the time.
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Kakkul Srivastava
Thank you, thank you.
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Dan Runcy
And that is a wrap for my conversation with Kakul Subastova. Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again to Kakul. Thanks to Francis McCann and the whole Splice team for everything you did to help make this happen and for your continued support as a partner on our Travital Summit alongside Rain, Warner Music Group, Beat Bread, Live Nation, Urban, Linktree, Luminate 2 Lost and Soundcloud. We couldn't have done it without you this year. Thank you as well to our audio and video producers G and Eric for everything that you do to help make this podcast possible.
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Interviewer/Host
And thank you for listening.
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Dan Runcy
Like we always say, if there's one person you know that would really enjoy trapital, that would get a lot out of this episode with Kakkool or any of the conversations that we've had on the show, send them a link. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow. And if you feel so inclined to leave a review, rate the show that helps spread the word about trapital and.
- [24:33]
Interviewer/Host
Make sure that this show gets in.
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Dan Runcy
Front of the right people. Thanks again. Talk to you next time.