North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader, it's your job to deliver. But where do you focus? Where do you direct your time, your team, your budget, and your emotional energy?

We're learning this together on the North Star Leaders Podcast. In this podcast, I talk to purpose-driven leaders about the choices that they make to create audacious economic value while also realizing their distinctive purpose. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of the North Star Leaders Podcast.

Let's get to it. Today, I am so happy to be joined by Kakul Srivastava. Kakul is CEO of Splice, the world's leading platform for music creators.

Kakul, welcome to the show.

Kakul Srivastava

Hey, Lindsay. Super nice to talk to you after all these years.

Lindsay Pedersen

I'm so excited.

Kakul Srivastava

Thank you so much for having me on.

Lindsay Pedersen

Thank you so much for joining. Okay, to start us off, what is your favorite thing about what you do?

Kakul Srivastava

My favorite thing, I mean, there's so many, but it's always about the people, the people that we serve at Splice, music creators, artists, musicians, instrumentalists. They are people who love what they do and serving them and making it easier for them to make their artistic vision a reality, it gets me up in the morning and powers me through my unfortunately very long days. But it's also the people that I work with.

Inside Splice, we have a lot of people, one, who are really passionate about our mission, which is to serve music creators, but many of them are musicians and artists and creators themselves. And so just being in an environment where human creativity is celebrated, it's fun, people are funny, and it's awesome. So that's my favorite thing, the people.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love it, the people. Well, before we hit record, Kakul and I were catching up and I was telling her that kind of the inspiration for North Star Leaders is my obsession with the overlap between truly purpose-driven businesses that are also creating big economic value and kind of the tensions and interesting trade-offs and magic that happens there. And I'm curious, Kakul, when I say North Star Leaders, when I say this overlap, what comes up for you?

Kakul Srivastava

Yeah, I actually, I think it's such a profound idea. And I think it's so important that this has been the focus of your work. It's actually been the focus of my work.

I have intentionally sought out roles with companies that are fundamentally mission-driven. So even very early in my career working at Flickr, our mission at that time was to be the eyes of the world, to really allow people to share with each other what they were seeing, whether it was a really beautiful slice of pizza you just got, or a flower that fell on the bench at your bus stop, or your baby's first smile. People were sharing these photos with each other around the world, connecting with each other around these special moments.

And I think that's a profound thing. It happened to also be an incredibly successful business, but first and foremost, it was about that mission. Similarly at GitHub.

GitHub is an open source community where people can share code with each other. It's a profoundly mission-driven idea that really changed how people think about code and whether code should be proprietary and secret and hidden or something that's a public good. And it turns out you can build a very successful multi-billion dollar business as GitHub has now become for Microsoft and still be this force of good.

And I would say that about most of the places that I've worked. And certainly here at Splice, it's a core part of who we are. We are fundamentally mission-driven.

Lindsay Pedersen

As the CEO of a company that does have economic value demands and also is committed to this deeper purpose, is it sometimes harder to be leading an organization that is striving for both?

Kakul Srivastava

I think it can be, but there are live conversations that we have inside the company. So in the music world and in creativity in general, there's a lot happening right now with AI. And there are lots of different ways that people are thinking about how to use AI in building creative solutions.

And we've taken a very hard line in how we're going to do that, which is we are going to do it with an artist-first mentality, where we train our AI on content we have rights to train AI on. And that's really important. We think artists should be paid fairly for how their content shows up in AI platforms.

So that was a line for us. And would our technology be different if we were training on public libraries or publicly available libraries the way other companies are? Maybe, but that's not a line that we wanted to cross.

Similarly, our business is built on a subscription business model. And one of the things that I like about subscription models is that you and your users are totally aligned, right? So there are other companies that have free products like let's say Meta or other platforms.

It's free to use and you pay by sharing your data. And in that way, to some extent, user privacy is against how that economic model works. In our case, if we're not providing great service for our customers every month, every month our customer has the opportunity to walk away.

So we sort of have to earn that customer every single month and it keeps us very honest in delivering value to our customers. And I really like that business model. I think it's a way to align the mission and the economic incentive.

Lindsay Pedersen

I haven't really thought of an incentive structure in quite this way that the pricing, kind of like the cadence and the occasion for when a consumer parts with their money is a way to hold your own feet to the fire as an team that as opposed to like a lump sum or even if it's like even a lot of businesses with heavy repeat that don't have a cadence like a subscription, it would be harder to see the correlations that happen.

So that's a beautiful example of how you can use an incentive structure for everybody.

Kakul Srivastava

I'll give you an example, you know, in the time prior to Splice existing, the way people would buy samples would be you'd go to some website, you'd put in your credit card, you'd pay some company $50 and you'd download a zip file. And maybe that zip file was full of really great stuff, maybe it was full of not great stuff, you didn't know, you'd already parted ways with your $50. And if any some of those files were corrupted, good luck trying to get support for that.

And so to your point, the economic incentives weren't aligned there for that provider to continue to provide great stuff. And don't get me wrong, there were great providers doing engaging in that business model, but the incentives weren't as aligned. So you did get bad content.

Now, if we want to earn your business next month, we have to make sure that one, all the content you're getting from Splice is really high quality. So we have a team of people who are ensuring that. But two, we've got an amazing support team that's standing by to help you if you run into any issues.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's a relationship. It's like a true relationship. There's reciprocity and a long term outlook for both.

There has to be. That's exactly right. What is it do you think about music, as opposed to other expressions of creativity that's so important to these customers and also to you, the people who are building this product?

What is it about music?

Kakul Srivastava

Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. My work has been around creative people for most of my career, whether it's software developers at GitHub or photographers at Flickr or graphic designers or web developers at Adobe. And so I feel like I've worked with creative people most of my life.

And I love that now that I'm working with music creators. I think there's a lot that's similar, right? Your workflow is really important.

Quality ingredients are really important to a creative work. And I think there's something about music that's different. Music is a vibration.

You feel it as a vibration against, you know, inside your ear, but you feel it as a vibration in your body as well. And I think that that makes it a much more visceral art form than some others which are perceived through the eyes. And it's almost like a little bit more, I don't want to say academic, but it's different.

You don't feel it the same way. And I think that makes musicians and music creators just a little bit more raw, a little bit more down to earth something. It's hard to describe, but you definitely feel it.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's so like, I imagine from what little I know about neuroscience, like our visual, when it's a visual consumption of a creative expression, it goes through our prefrontal cortex. I'm sure I'm totally butchering this, but I mean, what you just described with music, it almost like circumvents that filter. It's like straight into your bones.

Kakul Srivastava

Yeah. I mean, you know what it feels like when you're at a concert, you can feel, you can feel the music in a certain way. And there's also just the way it bypasses sort of the intellectual center into your emotional centers.

You know, music has the ability to really change your mood. If you were listening to a sad song, you will feel it along with that. Or if you're listening to a happy song, all of a sudden your foot starts tapping and you're like, maybe it's not so bad right now.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. And you can employ music as a tool to help shape the way that you want to feel in a given moment. And maybe you want to actually kind of indulge feeling sad and nostalgic.

And maybe you want to pep yourself up.

Kakul Srivastava

Music can bring you back to that moment when you, you know, first met your husband across the quad or whatever, those kinds of things that really triggers memory in certain ways. And you hear these incredible stories of people who've had physical trauma that impacts their brain in some way, that music promotes healing in extraordinary ways.

Lindsay Pedersen

Wow. I love this. What are you like as a leader?

So I, for listeners, Kakul and I went to graduate school together a long time ago. So Kakul and I know each other as peers. I'm curious what you're like as a leader, like how would the people around you describe the way that you lead Splice?

Kakul Srivastava

I think probably the first thing that they would say is that I care. They can tell that I really care about our business. I get into the details.

I really care about the team. I care about my reports. I spend a lot of time on their personal development and I care a lot about our team as a whole.

I spend a lot of time in all hands, communicating out to the group, staying in touch with people, regardless of where they are in the hierarchy through Slack and things like that. So I think that I care is probably one thing that'll come up. I think that they'll say that I have pretty high standards.

And for me, that really comes from being committed to that mission. I think the act of creativity is so challenging and so hard. Just getting that idea from inside you to come out, to be real, that our tools shouldn't get in the way.

So I hold my team to a high standard because I want our tools to be worthy of being part of the creative process. From a management leadership sort of business-y style of things, I spend a lot of time with the data. And the reason I spend time with the data, I mean, I'm comfortable with numbers.

I'm a quantitative and analytical person. But for me, what's important about data is that it's fingerprints from our customers. They're voting with their clicks.

They're voting with how they interact with our software, about what's working with them, what's not working for them. What content are they downloading? Trends are they interested in?

And so all of those insights really help us build better experiences. So I always want to be as close to the data as possible.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, I totally feel that. I once heard you talking about your customers and what drives them and how they identify as creative in the sense that they can't not create. Like it's such a part of their identity.

And that's really intriguing to me that they're less extrinsically motivated than intrinsically motivated to create something. Can you talk more about that? Like how it finds its way into what you bring to them with Splice?

Kakul Srivastava

I would say it slightly differently. I think they are intrinsically motivated. I think you have to be to be a creator.

Some of them are also extrinsically motivated. I think for a lot of our customers, it's very important for them to be recognized to find financial success in their art and their music. So I would say that we serve both kinds of people.

People who do it for personal enjoyment, for their hobby, for their craft, and people who do it because this is their livelihood and they want to make money at it. I will say that sometimes the extrinsic motivation gets in the way. So I can't tell you the number of music creators that I talk to who say, well, I have to create the music, I have to make a bunch of social media posts around it, and then I have to go show up at various places to network with people, and then I have to do these brand deals.

You know, the business of doing music can be overwhelming and exhausting, and so if we can make the creative process that much easier, I think it's a welcome thing. I think for a lot of people, especially with the rise of independent music makers, there's a big burden that they carry around making money from their music as well.

Lindsay Pedersen

And I imagine this happens in music as well. There's very famously artists and there's kind of a complicated relationship between being an artist and being in a capitalist world where they need to make money and like selling their money for art that's like, wait a second, am I an artist or am I a mercenary here? And that that conflict can be a limiting factor in an artist's success if they're not contending with it.

Kakul Srivastava

I think it can be. I think generally speaking, we want to live in a world where artists are fairly compensated for what they're doing because it's hard. And I think that again, you know, going back to this AI concept right now, I feel like to some extent that livelihood is under attack because there's definitely a feeling that well, if the computer can create this music, am I still needed?

And I would say that art is needed. Art feeds our souls. Art helps us understand our own feelings.

It helps us understand our world in it. And the music that we listen to, we listen to it, not just because it's music and it sounds a certain way. It's because of the stories, the stories of the artists, the story of the music itself.

So I think that that's an important thing that we have to preserve and making sure that the economics and the industry continue to support that is really important.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. It's an interesting tension. And I actually don't consider myself so much an artist, although maybe I should, but it's an interesting, I'm kind of a writer.

I mean, that takes some creativity. Well, actually, let's take that because I think that for me anyway, creating, it really puts you face to face with your own demons, whatever your demons might be. If there's any demon around a funny relationship with money, then it could be a battle.

Or if there's a relationship with, for me, it's more people pleasing and, you know, writing something bold is going to be irritating to some people. It's not going to please everybody. And so it's actually a very juicy place for personal development too.

But what I also hear you saying is like, we as a society need for artists to be receiving compensation because if there is value, then they should be enjoying value from it. And it should be something that they aren't merely doing as a hobby because we need it. All of us need to experience that in order our spirits need it.

Kakul Srivastava

Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think we'll notice it when we don't have it.

But I will say that I'm an optimist. We've gone through multiple rounds of this where I think, oh my God, it's the end of music. The synthesizer is here.

It's the end of music. Oh, funny. Samples are here.

It's the end of music. AI is here. And I feel like in all of those cases, artists have taken these tools and made them into powerful, creative resources.

So I'm hopeful that's what's going to happen again. And that's in the music world. It's the same thing in video.

It's like, oh, YouTube will kill, you know, video creation and almost in a renaissance where there's so much great quality, high quality video being created in the world. And there's a bunch of great UGC video also being created. And so I'm optimistic.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, UGC, user generated content. I just needed to translate that for myself. Yeah.

It's interesting how in a lot of industries like entertainment, acting, professional sports, there's this drastically disproportionate focus for most of the public on that one percentile and the rest are underserved. So the superstars, the super famous, it seems like with Splice that there's an underserved market that you actually are paying attention, like whereas the rest of the world might be. I would never pick on Taylor Swift, but just to say the non-Taylor Swifts of the world as well.

Is that is that true?

Kakul Srivastava

Absolutely. I think that is true. I'm lucky at Splice that we are being used by all most of the top billboard stars in some way and their teams.

But there are a lot of people who create music who aren't the top, top, top hit stars. There are, you know, 500 million plus musicians in the world.

Lindsay Pedersen

That just made my brain like, whoa.

Kakul Srivastava

Isn't that crazy? Yeah. But I mean, you think about like how many kids do you know who take music lessons?

People who sing in the shower? Why not? Yeah.

Most of the people who pick up an instrument, it's largely an analog experience. But when we live in a primarily digital world, they are going to move to digital workflows. And that's where Splice comes in.

So I think that you're right. A lot of people focus on the top, you know, one percent. And there are a lot more music creators and artists and painters and photographers in the world who need better tools.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. What are you most excited about right now with Splice? Like what's something that's just like making you smile when you think about the future of the company?

Kakul Srivastava

You know, one of the things we've been talking about a lot at Splice is that our users are asking us to be deeper in the creative workflow with them. And so far, I mean, historically, Splice has been an ingredients company. And so, you know, we provide the flour and the sugar and the butter, but we're not really with you in the kitchen as you're making the cake.

And people are like, actually, it'd be really useful if you could be, because sometimes I don't know what ingredients I need and I need them right in my creative workflow. And so we launched an experience last year where we provided a part of our service that's deeply integrated in the core creative product that people use in the space. And we are looking to bring more of the Splice service deeper into the creative workflow.

And there are several new products that we'll be launching in the second half of the year that will allow us to do that. And the reason that makes me smile is I really think that's where the magic happens in a user's creative workflow. And so if we have permission from our users to be closer to that, I think we can hopefully provide more value to them.

So I'm excited about that.

Lindsay Pedersen

That's so cool. You personally, what are you working on as a leader right now? What's your growth edge?

Kakul Srivastava

Scaling. I mean, Splice is growing in so many interesting ways. We're growing in terms of our business.

We're seeing strong business growth. We are growing in terms of the breadth of products that we provide. And we're growing in terms of our team.

So just last month, we acquired a company called Spitfire Audio that's based in London. And so making sure that I can be a great leader as the company grows, that I grow with it is something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about.

Lindsay Pedersen

What do you do to fill your cup? Like what's the rituals or good healthy habits that set you up for a good day, a good week?

Kakul Srivastava

So I'm a runner. I try to run every morning. So that really helped.

I have a family that is really important to me. So really being thankful and appreciative of the time that I have with them fills my cup. And I have teenagers.

So that also can be sometimes my cup runneth over. And then it's the reminder of the why, you know, the why, which is really where we started this conversation about the mission. And that definitely keeps me motivated.

Lindsay Pedersen

That fills your cup.

Kakul Srivastava

Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, this has been such a treat. I have a few rapid fire questions as we finish. Five rapid fire questions with one word answers.

First one. What is your favorite movie?

Kakul Srivastava

Godfather 2.

Lindsay Pedersen

Love, love it. Love.

Kakul Srivastava

It's the only sequel that was better than the first.

The first was really good too. It's still. Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

Love it. Okay. The best kind of candy, in your opinion?

Kakul Srivastava

The Heath bar, you know what the toffee in the middle.

Lindsay Pedersen

Your favorite productivity hack or your favorite app on your phone, either one you pick.

Kakul Srivastava

So I have this super geeky thing that I do, which is I have this document that it's this one Google doc and it starts with like, what are my big goals? Like life kind of like across the next two, three years. Then I have like my calendar for the whole year.

You know, what are the big things that I expect to happen in the next 12 months? And then there's a separate section that has like the next six weeks. And then of course this week, and then like, what do I do today?

And I know that sounds really overwhelming, but it's a necessary document for how I operate. And it just, I feel while most of the time I'm focused on what's happening this week, the fact that I have to think about it in the context of all of those things really keeps me grounded on what's most important and what's not important.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. Yeah. It keeps you out of fire drill.

Yeah. Oh, you've gotten the wheels turning for me. Okay.

What is a fun fact? Most people don't know about you?

Kakul Srivastava

I'm probably tone deaf. So very odd thing for the music company.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh my gosh. That's a juicy one. Okay.

Your favorite thing to do on a Friday night?

Kakul Srivastava

Sit on the couch and hang out with my daughter.

Lindsay Pedersen

Watch TV or just like?

Kakul Srivastava

Yeah, we parallel play. I will be listening to some documentary on or watching some documentary and playing solitaire at the same time. And she will probably do the same. They have very different tastes in videos.

So it's parallel play for sure.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. That was so wonderful. Okay.

As we wrap up, tell folks how they can learn more about splice or about you online.

Kakul Srivastava

So splice is easy, splice.com. Please come find us. If you're excited about music, you want to learn how to make music, do more, come check us out and I'm on LinkedIn.

So that's hopefully pretty easy. If you can spell my name, you can find me.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh yes. I'll put it in the show notes as well. I love this.

Okay. Thanks so much, Kakul.

Thanks for listening to this episode of North star leaders.

Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North star leader, whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter.

I hope you join us again for another episode of North star leaders.