I'm Noah Abrams and welcome to The Days Between. The show where I talk to my friends, people I admire, and people I want to better understand about success, failure, happiness, and misery, as well as all the other elements that make up a life well-lived. Along the way, we'll look at mental, spiritual, and physical health, and when life didn't go as planned, the steps they took to get themselves from A to B and beyond. This week I'm speaking with Ian Rogers. As a kid growing up in Indiana, Ian's only plan was to smoke weed and ride skateboards for the rest of his life. And while he has managed to accomplish those goals, Ian has also established himself as one of the most influential voices of the digital age. From music to fashion to finance, his ability to successfully navigate the intersection of human beings and technology is second to none. And it is executed with a humility that only the Midwest could produce. It was as a student at Indiana University where his passions for music and computers would collide, resulting in one of the first music streaming platforms, a feat of engineering that he would continue to refine for more than two decades, culminating in the launch of Apple Music in 2015. Seeking new challenges while catering to his preference for discomfort, Ian made his way to LVMH, where he was tasked with digitizing the world's largest luxury conglomerate. After working with names like Louis Vuitton, Selene, and Dior, Ian found himself immersed in cryptocurrency, NFTs, and digital security with French startup Ledger. While Ian's timing has certainly contributed to his wins, it is his curiosity and belief in the mission at hand that has fueled much of his success and even some of his failures. During the course of our conversation, we discussed the importance of knowing when to leave the party, the niche culture of the internet, and why Spotify's discover weekly recommendations are so good. It is my pleasure to present Ian Rogers on the days between.
So, I'm here in Malibu, California with Ian Rogers. You spent a lot of your time and a lot of your career in Los Angeles, but you are not from here.
I'm not from here. I'm from Gan, Indiana.
Tell me about growing up in Goan. You know, I I always say that the Midwest is a great place to be from. I don't want to live in Gan Indiana anymore, and I didn't want to live there since the time I was 13, but it definitely gives you something. You know, you've got this kind of extreme boredom to fuel you. For me, I was just looking for the exit. I think I was really lucky cuz I kind of lived in the middle of the identity crisis that that the Maple City, Gan, Indiana had town of 20,000 people. You know, when I was born, there was a McDonald's, but no globalization, no Starbucks, no Taco Bell, etc. That stuff all came later. And it was this town that had this split personality because it was very much an industrial middle America factory working town. I lived on the south side of town, which was a little nicer and it was partly nicer because there's Goan College and Goan College is this little Menanite college. My mom worked in the factory and my dad was a fireman. So we were, you know, pretty bluecollar family and my friend's parents were, you know, professors at this Menanite college. You know, you you had this culture where, you know, there there was art, there were plays, there was, you know, kind of what a little college brings in to a town and then you also had the kind of bluecollar thing. And I and I I feel that actually I I feel that that tension in in me and my family, you know, who who are music fanatics and like lovers of art, but also sort of especially my grandparents are definitely like, you know, life sucks and that's how it is kind of people, you know, real salt of the earth. And so I I I don't know, those are nice ingredients. I I feel like it served me well, but uh but yeah, I feel like Go is a great place to be from as opposed to being a great place to live. Well, you mentioned wanting to get out of there at the age of 13. What was your ticket out of Goan?
I didn't have a plan. You know, my plan was really just to smoke weed and ride skateboards for the rest of my life, which I've done, but that wasn't really a plan out of Goan at the time. I did one smart thing, which is I I love music. That's just what I wanted to be a part of somehow was music. the career center of the vocational school where you could go learn body shop or silk screening or a number of things. They also had a radio broadcasting course. They actually had a radio station WVP88.1. Um it's still there, but it it it was a radio station and you could take it as a class. So, I went to my guidance counselor in high school and was like, I want to do radio broadcasting. And and I was a reasonably smart kid. I was in the honors classes and they were like, oh, no, no, you can't do that. that the the vocational school is for people that are going to drop out and we have to keep them from dropping out and so we just we give them vocational training instead. You know, you've got to take another Shakespeare class and and like calculus 2 or whatever. And I was like, wait, that's messed up. Like, I don't care about Shakespeare and calculus 2. I care about music. And so, I actually like just went around my guidance counselor and enrolled myself. I realize now that that that was a start of of me just sort of taking control of my own destiny and not listening to, you know, what other people had to say. And it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. You know, I had a lot of responsibility there. You know, the irony is is that I had to pick up a second job because the other part of the story is that when I was 17, my girlfriend got pregnant and then it was like, okay, wait, now what am I doing? I didn't have a plan. So, I had to pick up a second job. I was washing dishes at the general hospital in Goan, Indiana. And I remember I made $5 an hour as a jazz radio announcer at WBPE and I made 650 an hour washing dishes all day. And that also was my first music business lesson because people recognize my voice. I remember I I you know I cut my hand open once and had to go to the emergency room. There's this, you know, older doctor stitching me up. I'm a 16-year-old kid and he's like, 'You're on the radio. You're you're just a kid. Like he but he recognized my voice. I had like a little bit of, you know, I don't know what you call like local fame, right? Local talent, but I made five bucks an hour compared to washing dishes. So there I had I understood the music business, you know, very early with that with that lesson. But then the to answer your question, the way I did get out of Goan was I went to the community college for a year cuz I was not collegebound. I'd never even thought about applying to a college. So, I just went to the community college uh when when my girlfriend got pregnant. She was the validictorian of our high school though, highly intelligent woman and still a good friend. And she got a scholarship to go to Indiana University, Bloomington. And so, I was like, let's go. I could transfer my credits. I had done okay in my first year community college. And that's how we got out. We got to Bloomington. And then I I just kept going with music and digital music in particular in Bloomington, which is ultimately what what got me out of there.
What did you study at IU?
I started at IUSB in South Ben with elementary education. But an important part of the story is is that I had started programming computers when I was 8 years old. Um because my stepfather had studied computer science in the 70s and he had a little software company called Who's Your Software. and we had computers in the house. So, I had that and then my mom and Mike divorced when I was around 14 and then the computers disappeared from the house. That was when I was just skating and, you know, listening to punk rock. But when I when I got to the community college and I was studying elementary education, I was helping my friends with their computer homework and I thought it was funny that I could still do it. And I talked to my stepdad, my former stepdad, and it was a pivotal bit of advice that I listened to because I was just laughing. I was like, 'Oh, Mike, you're not gonna believe this, but I'm helping my friends with with their computer homework.' And he was like, 'Ian, change your major.' He was so serious. He was like, 'You got a kid. You're going to need to make some money.' He's like, 'You're always good at that.' And I was like, 'Oh man, I don't even I don't even know what these computers are. These like IBM clones. Like, I've never even seen them.' He was I just remember he was like, 'They're all the same. Trust me.' I was like, 'Okay.' And when I got to Bloomington, I walked into the guidance counselor's office and I was like, 'I'm going to declare my major is computer science.' She's like, 'Okay, email me.' I was like, 'Okay.' I had never heard of email. I was like, 'Sure, sure.' And I like walked out. I was like, 'I have to learn what email is.' So, I had declared my major computer science and I did not know what email was. I really started at the bottom with that, right? So, I went in the recycler and bought a a used computer and then like found my way to Usened and found my way through and ultimately like drifted to exactly what I cared about and I think you are what you do and I just put the time in. Like I was obsessed. I'm I was obsessed then like I am with NFTTS today, you know, but like that obsessive thing is what drove me into the internet because I found these it was before the web there were these news groups. You can think of it like Reddit, you know, there were these little communities of people that were passionate about music. I'm here talking to you today because I was the keeper of the frequently asked question list in Alt Fam Beasty Boys. You know, we had to crowdsource all of the David Bowie lyrics. There was no lyric sheet in Young Americans. So, I had to sit down and listen to Young Americans and transcribe every lyric that I could figure out, post them, get feedback from the other people. It's like, I don't think that's what he says. I think he says this. You're like, oh, okay. Right. And I'd edit it and repost it. I mean, this is like the early days of the of the web, but it wasn't the web. It was it was it was Usenet. That was like kind of how I found my way into uh into not just computers, not just computer science, but like really the internet and this kind of like reconnectivity of humanity. And it was not a small thing for me. It was not like, oh, this is neat, or oh, this is education. It was like, 'Holy shit I've been a weirdo my whole life, and I grew up in Go, Indiana, and I never knew anyone who liked the same things as me, but look, I have access to all of these people across the world.' And the other thing to remember is like in those days in the early 90s, before America Online came onto the web, before there was the web, before America Online connected to the internet, all of the people quote unquote on the internet were in academia for the most part. like everybody was smart. If you were if you found your way into that rabbit hole, you were not a dummy because it was not easy to do. And so there was this community and and that was the thing that like hooked me and and to be honest like still drives me today. Like I feel like I'm on the internet in 1992 and there's just a few of us. That was like what drove me academically and socially into this kind of like brave new world.
Tell me about Dr. David Fensky in variations.
When I got to IU, I had a kid. Basically, Zoe was born August 5th and I started school at IUSB, you know, September 1st. And then we moved to Bloomington a year later. So, she's, you know, I got a one-year-old kid when I come down there. We need money. I go to the the honor school where they give out work study jobs. There's a form. What are you interested in? Music. What are you studying? computer science. Like I think that's probably all I wrote on the form. And I get a call from Dr. David Fensky asking me if I'll come help him, you know, program. Well, his idea was so Indiana University has the world's largest school of music. Not the best, but by an order of magnitude, by a factor of two, I think, the world's largest school of music. So they have problems of scale. If you're taking M101 and everybody's got to come listen to Vagner, it wasn't like hit play on Spotify. It was come to the library and check out an album. Well, that doesn't work if 200 people in M101 have to listen to it. So, they would these long tables with headphones on the tables and somebody would put a record on, you know, a turntable behind the the desk and put a needle on the record and then everyone at the table, you know, come in at 700 p.m. on Tuesday and we're going to listen to Sprock or whatever, right? And so Dr. Fensky knew that this was possible with computers and he was like, 'No, no, this is going to be workstations throughout the library. You're going to search the card catalog and you'll find a piece of multimedia and you'll just hit play and it will just play this.' Come on, man. Fence key saw Spotify in 1991. Clear as day. He had the product back and I was just the kid that he paid $6 an hour to make it real. So, I built it. We had I had to deal with this notice database. We added multimedia records to the card catalog of the library and then I made this client that would search the database and if it found a multimedia record then it would try to stream it. David Fensky put me on this digital music path that I didn't even know was possible. And I what I know and I'm really proud of this as well is that Dr. Fensky knows that there is a connection between the work that we did in the early 90s at Indiana University and Apple Music. you know, there's this whole arc and he knows that there is this connection between those two and that makes me so proud. I know he's proud and he should be because, you know, it's like he had the vision. The rest of us just kind of like took the baton and just kept running. So anyway, it's just one of those things you realize like how random, you know, life life can be. So you graduated in '94 and what were you doing? I graduated with a degree in computer science. I had options. That's a nice thing about having a computer science degree. You know, I I'd really changed my circumstances and I recognized that actually. So, I had options. I could work. I could have gone full-time on this um research project, variations, actually. But I had a full ride to grad school and I was like, 'Okay, I'm going to get a PhD. I'm going be I'm going be Dr. Rogers.' So, I I started the PhD program. But something else happened to me. I was like, you know, for the first time ever, I'm going to take the summer off. I'd had to work every summer and go to school every summer because if you didn't go to if you didn't work and go to school then then you then the money stopped, right? So I needed to go to school in the summer so I could get a student loan so I could pay my rent. So I'd never taken any time off and I was like I'm going to take this summer off because I can. But of course I didn't. I I had started building websites and I'd started building a website for the BC boys. And it was that summer between undergrad and grad school that I met the Beasty Boys in person. So I'd started working for them actually in the fall of 93 just because I'd done their website as a fan and our mutual friend John Silva called me up and said, 'Can I pay you to do this?' And that was a total surprise to me. I didn't even know this was something I could be paid to do. I thought it, you know, it's like someone calling you and saying, 'You're really good at collecting baseball cards. Can I can I pay you to collect baseball cards?' Like, wait, what? So, but that's what I was doing. But and then John as started asking me to do other things. We had other bands and he wanted to pay me to build their website. And then I started to meet other people. I started to meet record labels like Liz Heler at Capital Records who was building Megadeith Arizona and Charles Ko at underground.net and Rob Lord at Internet Underground Music Archive. And there were not that many of us who were doing this thing, but you know, you kind of all find each other one way or another. and and and then someone calls me and they're like, 'Hey, can I give you a ton of money to make a website for my vitamin company?' And I'm like, 'Well, you're going to pay me a ton of money then?' Yeah, actually. So, I started grad school, but I had started this little business and and I'd hired a couple of my friends to help me out and I did really shitty at grad school as a result. Like, I got the first bad grades I'd ever gotten in my life. I was trying to run a business. I was making real money. And so, yeah. So, that that was what that was what I did. The the the Beasty Boy story is a is a good one. I met them for the first time on La Palooa in '94. I'll never forget Mike D calling me Beasty Boys had a not for-profit organization called Millera. They wanted to take Millera on tour, but they knew that like a not for-p profofit was not going to like draw a crowd. Mike called. He said, 'We want to do something. We think maybe there's something that we can do with like technology and the kind of stuff that you're doing that will be like noisy and exciting and it'll bring people over to the table.' And we had been working on like a CD ROM at that point. So we had we were actually, you know, digitizing videos in QuickTime and and and videos from the Beasty Boys and their record label, Gran Royal. And we'd kind of built this experience, QuickTime VR in their studio. And so I would tried to figure it out and I was like, 'Okay, Mike, I've got an idea. What you should do is you take the the CDROM that we're building and you put it inside of video game machines. It's like you take old Space Invaders machines and you make them like a Beasty Boys video game and you stand them up in the concert and people can do that. And he's like, 'Okay, cool. Well, let me talk to Adam and Adam and I'll call you back.' He doesn't call me back. It's JC John Cutcliffe who calls me back. And he's like, 'Okay. Um, the guys love the idea. Uh, tour starts in May. Pre-productions on the Universal lot in LA in April. Um, so yeah, we're going to need you there at the beginning of April. I'm going to need a budget. Um, we're going to have to find these video game machines. I mean, you know, cutcliffe and and I you got to imagine like I'm a 20 or 21y old kid in Indiana, right? I've got a three-year-old. I'm living in a cement box in Indiana. I've got an an ex-wife lives across the street. Like, I'm in grad school. I remember saying to him like, 'Oh, no, no, wait. Wait. You there's some misunderstanding here.' Um, it's the first time I've ever talked to Cut Cliff Cliff in my life, too, by the way. Right. There's some misunderstanding here. Like Mike called and he asked me for an idea. I gave him an idea. I'm glad you like it. You should totally do it. I was like, I I I don't I can't do it. I I I'm I'm in Indiana. I have a kid. Uh I'm in grad school. I don't even know how to do it. I I just had the idea. [laughter] I'll never forget JC goes, 'You want to do this, kid? We'll figure it out.' And I hung up the phone. I called Zoe's mom and I was like, 'I think the BC boys just asked me to go on tour with them.' And to her credit, she goes, 'You got to do that. We'll figure it out.' And I was like, 'Okay.' I I feel like there are many points in my life when there are people who have believed in me much more than I believed in myself. That was definitely one of them. Beasty Boys are definitely those people. John Silva definitely one of those people who believed in me more than I believed in myself. Dave Goldberg at Yahoo for sure. I mean, for sure. Jimmy Ivine, right, believed in me more than I believed in myself. For sure. even Ben, I don't know, you know, and like I feel like that is definitely a recurring theme for me and that was an important one. JC not taking no as an answer from me changed my life.
Tell me about working with Dave Goldberg.
The path to get there is we had a company in the late 90s called Nuloft that made an MP3 player called Win Amp and it was made by this guy Justin Frankle, my friend Rob who I mentioned earlier because he did Internet Underground Music Archive. He had come in as kind of like, 'Let me help turn this this Win Amp thing into a company.' And I came in to run Winamp.com because Win Amp had uh skins and plugins. It was a community around it. And and and we built that out. We sold that company to America Online in 1999. Rob and I left and started a new company and and it was kind of a web-based version of of Win Amp, the media player. Well, Dave Goldberg was running Yahoo Music. He had had a CDROM company called Launch. He turned it into a website, sold it to Yahoo. It became Yahoo Music. Dave had big big big visions for the music industry. Brilliant guy and a really great human being. You know, he wanted to buy Rob and I to come in and build a subscription music service for Yahoo, which we did. We built the first $5 a month all you can eat subscription music service, basically Spotify, for five bucks a month. We launched it in May of 2005. It was Dave who brought us in and really like, you know, empowered me. And I I didn't want to work at a big company like Yahoo. Like I wanted to go back to startup life. So and and Yahoo was kind of this weird machine and Yahoo Music was kind of a weird machine because it was like this weird LA satellite on this like Sunnyvale company and I don't know. I just couldn't find my way really. I tried and and I and I was but I but I wasn't like I had an itch like I had in Goan I guess. And so the third time I tried to quit on Dave, you know, Dave was trying to like he was always giving me a carrot to stay. He's like, 'We're going to make you a VP at Yahoo.' I'm like, 'I don't care about being a VP. I don't I don't I I just want to do cool shit you know?' And he's like, 'No, no, you care. This this kind of shit matters here. You're going somewhere, man. Don't like like let me let me show you where you can be.' I You got to remember I'm the person that put tattoos on my fingers when I was 22 expressly so that I would never be an executive anywhere. I I just I wanted to protect myself from that boring fate where you like had to like have meetings and do emails and be nice to people. But Dave thought I could do both. He thought I could be me and I had something to add and, you know, be successful and have a career. And he actually really cared about me and my family in a way. He was like, 'Look, you know, you're you're this is this is this is a long a long a long run here, man. like you can't you don't need to just do these like little companies you know like [snorts] and then at some point third time I tried to quit on him he took me out for lunch and he's like you know would you be interested in running Yahoo music and I was like well wait I don't understand that that's your job like you are Yahoo music how could and also he had a lot of people around him that I would think would be more heir to that throne than me and for whatever reason he was like look if you're interested in it just sit still like I'm not going to be in this job forever. I think you're the right person for it. And so he did. He set me up to be in that role. And and it's really incredibly interesting to watch. Now even more fascinating is I don't know how he did exactly this for so many people. He was, you know, sort of famously Cheryl Samberg's husband and he passed away a number of years ago. And you know, I mean, everyone from Silicon Valley has a story like mine about what Dave did for them. And it's just incredible that one man did so much for so many people. The story that I have is it's like one of 2,000 similar stories of this guy like shaping the career of somebody. But but yeah, I'm super lucky to be the beneficiary of that for sure.
You went on to run Yahoo Music in 2008. left and created Top Spin, which was a direct to fan marketing company, uh, which ultimately ended up getting acquired by Beats in 2014. In that 5ear span between leaving Yahoo and going to Beats in 2013, tell me about that. You know, maybe this is just how I contextualize it for myself because I see it as a as a commercial failure, which it was. We raised 19 million in venture capital and we sold the company. It was really what they call a safe landing more than a sale, right? We sold it for for 3 million. We had Google take a hard look at it. I don't remember the year exactly, 2012 to see if they wanted to acquire it. And in the end, they didn't want to cuz they didn't. They felt like they wanted me and Bob Mazlowski to come work at Google on Google Music, but they didn't want to pay 40 million bucks for the company to buy the people and Aqua Hire. I'm really proud of ideologically what we did. You know, we for me when I saw the the internet and thought about music on the internet all the way back in 1993, as somebody who who grew up, you know, mail ordering records from the back of Maximum Rock and Roll, I saw the internet as this democratization of music distribution opportunity. You know, music music was what I cared about. Music distribution I found to be quite hard. The albums that I wanted were not at the local record store. And so, I just saw that I was like, 'Oh, well, this is going to fix that. This fixes that problem.' The other thing then, you know, when I worked with artists and I realized, I mean, the Beasty Boys really had this. They wanted a direct connection to their fans. They knew that if they had to go through radio and MTV to get to their fans, that they didn't actually own their future. And they and they'd been through this. They'd been through like microwave rotation on MTV in 1986 and then making a masterpiece in 1989 with Paul's Boutique that they couldn't get played on the radio and they couldn't get played on MTV and therefore they didn't exist on a relative basis. And so what we saw was that you know artists could build up this connection with their fans and that you know what I always said is and I say this today in in the world of you know NFTTS and creativity in web 3 there's only two people who matter in the music business. People who make music and people who love music and all the rest of us in the quote unquote industry are actually in the way you know so we have to provide value or get out of the way. You know you realize who your master is. I work for the artists and I work for the fans. That's who I work for. There's no like music industry that's like the puppet master that calls the shots. And you know what we believed was that you know there was going to be this direct connection between artist and fan. If someone doesn't know what Topspin is and wants to kind of understand, take a look at Band Camp. Band Camp started same time as us. I think they did a better job than us. In those days, Bandamp had nobody you had ever heard of. They were just a platform for aspirational artists. And we had Paul McCartney, Eminem, Beasty Boys, David Burn, Brianino, you know, Trent Resnner and his solo projects. You know, we ran the fan club for Lincoln Park. We had we had like a lot of people that you'd heard of. You know, Paul McCartney and Eminem is not a bad place to start in terms of known artists, but commercially unsuccessful. But I think ideologically what we did is still very much alive, you know, and so I I know that we created something that kind of spiritually lives on. I would say I look I buy a lot of vinyl from Band Camp. To me, Band Camp, they just did it better. You know, we we knew we had the connections with the music business and, you know, we maybe did kind of bigger things at the time. there's a lesson in it because they built something that's that's like a platform and and that there's and they built something I didn't want top spin to ever be a brand the way Band Camp is a brand and I think that was a mistake on my part but the idea is exactly the same which is you know you're you're you're building this connectivity directly between artists and fans 2013 you go to Beats 2014 you guys launch Beats Music and one of the things that jumped out at was an interview you did with Fast Company in 2014 and you said specifically, 'We want to be of service, not just a server for the user.' Tell me about Beats. Overall, it's such a great story because, you know, Jimmy had tried to hire me in 2008 to come run MySpace Music. I went to Top Spin instead. And I think I made the right choice despite like losing money, losing five years of my life, making half as much money as I was making at Yahoo, and it being a commercial failure. I'd still think it was the right choice because of what I learned and and you know the the kind of the connections that I made and etc. going to MySpace music would have been more lucrative, but I don't think it would have been as soulful. And I I never lost touch with Jimmy and Luke Wood, especially Luke, who really, you know, believed in me. And Jimmy always had this dream of building a music service. And I I was definitely like, 'Oh my god, Jimmy, like be careful, man.' Like, 'This is not an easy thing to do.' But that doesn't scare Jimmy. Like, you know, and saying it's not easy only makes Jimmy want to do it more. I feel the same way, by the way. When somebody tells me something is hard, like you know, my job now, there are many, many, many times my tech team is like, 'Oh my god, yeah, come on, that's hard.' I'm like, 'It's hard. Really?' Well, now we got to do it. That's how you make great companies is you do hard things extraordinarily well. Jimmy's Jimmy has that. Maybe I learned that from him on on some level. But what happened specifically was we were working with Trent Resnner at Top Spin and Jimmy was like, 'You know, we got Trent designing the product for our music service.' I was like, 'Really?' And Trent's amazing. Like he he's truly a renaissance man. Like what Tren is capable of, I don't think anybody really understands. Trent asked me, he said, ' Do you want to come see the vision for the product? I said, 'Of course.' So I go across the street, literally their offices across the street from Top Spin offices. Trent shows me his vision. And it was incredible. Like I just wanted it to exist. I I I was really like [snorts and sighs] and and but I I also knew enough having done Win Amp, done shoutcast, done mute. which was our media player in the early 2000s, built Yahoo Music Unlimited, Launchcast, all the stuff we did at Yahoo, built the software at Top Spin, and now I'm looking at what Trent wants to build at Beats Music, and I'm like, 'Okay, Trent, hold on. This is totally possible, but it's you're it's not you're not going to get it done.' And let me tell you why. Because the basics of building a music subscription service are really daunting. You've got tens of millions of songs. You've got to do all the label deals. You've got to pay the artists. You just have to have the basic functionality of artist, album, track, genre, search, playlists. Like this is three years of work just to get to the basics. You guys should go buy one of these existing services. It's failing, right? Because you got iTunes works, but it's not a subscription service. You've got Spotify and wow, these guys are really starting to get momentum, right? This is like 2013ish time zone and they've been around since 2009 and they built a nice product. And then you had all these others. You had Rap City, you had Mog, and Mog in particular was one that I really liked. I thought it was a great product, but it had no brand. I liked it because Mog was clearly built by people who love music. It was one of the only ones that was sort of still album focused. I really felt like the, okay, these guys like music. They understand how music is is sort of culturally organized, not just organized as data. And I was like, you've got a brand and no platform. These guys have a platform and no brand. you should do this. And then I go back to my office and you know Luke calls me a month later. He's like, 'We're buying Mog.' And I was like, 'That's awesome. Good work. That's that's killer.' Great guy, Dave Heyman, ran Moog. And I just I I don't want I mean, know I know Dave. I know Jimmy. I'm like, it doesn't feel like a fit, but you know, who knows? Like, you know, this is this I get a call maybe two, three months later like, 'Ian, it's not going to work out with Dave.' I'm like, 'Okay, I'm not surprised.' They're like, 'We need you to come do this.' And I was like, 'Okay, I'll figure it out.' Because I at that point I was just sold. I was like, 'Wow, Transvision is amazing. You have MOG, which is a great service to back this thing up. So, you're not starting at square zero. Like, we can actually add features, right?' They had an amazing design team from RGA, which is a crazy idea to hire the agency RGA to design this app. No.com company would think of that. And no dot company board would approve that because you're paying like super bowl rates for design. But if you're Jimmy and trend, they're like, 'It's worth it.' Like, you know, making it like look and feel perfect is important and it's worth paying for. And it's like a magic trick that like startups don't understand. And but Jimmy and Trent were willing to do it. and Jimmy could go raise the money from people like Len Bllovnik, Mark Rowan, and these like big heavy hitters who were not Silicon Valley VCs. So, they weren't going to be tied up to these like kind of similar they they were like, 'No, no, we're going we're going to go get I mean, Len Blotnik was the owner of Warner Music Group. You know, Mark Rowan is uh you know, more of a of a private equity investor. you know, these guys are not, you know, short-term time horizon small potatoes investors. They had a completely different way of approaching this. And then at the end, you know, Jimmy started selling this thing to Apple the moment we started. Like he it was always his vision. One of my first meetings at Beats Music, Jimmy's like, 'Can you be in the office tomorrow morning at 8:30?' I'm like, 'Sure.' I have no idea why. I walk in and it's Tim Cook and Eddie Q. And he's like, Ian, show them the designs for Beats Music. Okay. Like, we've barely started and we're already kind of, you know, hey guys, look, we're going to do this. And we did absolutely everything we said we were going to do. We said we're going to build the best service and and we said we're going to distribute it through a big carrier like AT&T. We did. We're going to do Super Bowl level marketing. We did. We launched our service with a Super Bowl ad with Ellen DeGeneres. You know, we we did everything we said we were we were going to do. And that's why I think Apple bought the company. I'm still friendly with Daniel Ek. I think he's an amazingly brilliant human being. I always begged uh reporters. I was like, 'Please like put me on a music trivia contest, me and Daniel Ek, because music is all I know. I'll go up against anybody.' We are those people. And Jimmy is that that person, too. And I think, you know, Jimmy knows that that I know and care about music deeply, right? And and so that was what we tried to build was this music service. You know, Spotify's uh slogan at the time was it all starts with the search. We're like, 'No way, man.' Like, people don't want 50 million songs. They want one song right now and they don't know what that song is. And that's what DJs do, right? Like I always say this, Virgil Abau, he's not a designer. Well, was not a designer. He's a DJ, right? And that's super important. Like knowing what song comes next out of 50 million songs is a real gift. It's a meta gift. It's different than the being the person who makes the song. Knowing which direction culture is pointing. People want that. They don't want 50 million songs where 49 million of them are garbage. That's not what they want actually, right? And so we wanted to build a music service that that really was like, 'Hey, we know you and we think you want to hear this right now.' That was what what we wanted to build. And I really felt like none of the music services were doing it. Music music services were all just like Google. It's like, 'Yeah, here's a search box. Humans made tech, right?' And as Clayton Christensen says, there are no new human problems. 70,000 years of human history, humans haven't had a new problem yet. Clayton Christensen's words are we just hire new technology to solve old problems and we have these things we want to be entertained we we want to feed our families we want to have social status we want to get laid you know and we just hire you know new bits of technology to get those things going and you also have to remember that like again 70,000 years of human history recorded music is like less than 150 years of that right and so that evolution is is still quite early and So, you know, I love thinking about like what what can that be and what do people really want in in that world. One of my favorite quotes that I came across from you in regards to beats was that uh it's an algorithm that understands user preferences and handcrafted playlists that are blessed by human beings. And one of those happened to be your mom, Pette. That's right. She was doing the Americana playlist. My mom is an Americana music expert. Now, if you talk to uh Jed Hilly, who runs the Americana Music Association, I would like to think, and Jed, you tell me if I'm wrong, but my mom would be on the top five, you know, if you were if you were asked who knows the most about Americana music. Um Jed knows my mom because my mom is truly an expert. And maybe your listeners will find this interesting. The way that the algorithm worked was very, very, very cool. I'm on the board of a company called List, Lys, that's a fashion search engine and their head of product CEO and I were talking about this just a couple weeks ago because it's still relevant. It's amazing how relevant it is. You know, we had hired a team, this is Trent, too, by the way. I got to give Trent credit for this. We had hired a team from YouTube to build our personalization. And they were taking a, you know, kind of collaborative filtering sort of approach to that. that's the kind of people who like also like sort of approach and looking through the catalog and trying to make connections uh the way they do and the results were not what we were hoping for in terms of quality and we hadn't given them very much time so I'm I don't think that that's probably the main thing but also Trent had met in the meantime a guy named Adam Bllye who is an incredibly brilliant human being who thought he had a different approach and Trent being bold as Trent is Trent was like we got to fire these other guys and hire these guys. And we did like it was painful. We just hired these guys from YouTube and we fired them and we hired Adam and his team to do it. People always have blind spots, right? And so the people who are editorial thought computers can never do this because it's too cultural and it's just not possible. The the technical people thought humans can't do this because it doesn't scale. Humans can't curate 50 million songs. What Adam and his team realized is that there was this intersection of the two. There's a practical intersection. I love this this insight that they had. You know, if there are 50 million songs, there are actually only about 900,000 that people really love and listen to. And it's not actually about uncovering what's great in the other 49 million. That would be kind of the tech guy approach. Like, let's find the other ones that they they're going to like, but they don't know they like. We just need to play the right ones out of here. You've only got 24 hours in a day. You've only got a couple hours a day you're going to listen to music. I just got to give you the right song in in that. So what they did is they let editors pick the music. So the first task is you take out of the 50 million only the ones that editors say these are truly great, right? So editors uh are basically picking here's the good songs. Then I I reach into that bucket and I give to you the ones that I think are right for you. and I'm gonna have a pretty high hit rate because everything in the bucket is good. There's nothing in here that's garbage. There's a human filter. In other words, I might pull a Simon and Garfuncle song out of there. I'm very unlikely to pull an Art Garfuncle song out of there. No offense to Art. I use this example back in those days, too, because here you have, you know, a great artist whose solo records were never kind of critically acclaimed, right? And and so doesn't mean I keep you from listening to Arc Garfuncle. But it means if I'm going to pull out a song, I'm going to grab Cecilia and you're going to be like, 'Fuck yeah, I love that song, right? Or it's a good song.' Or even if you're like, 'I never really like that song.' You're not going to go this algorithm is garbage. That song sucks, right? You because it's it's sort of in the right context. Then the other thing they did is instead of dividing the music by like rock, rap, country, cuz that doesn't tell you anything. No, no one is a country music fan. That the country music doesn't even mean anything at this point in time. Like the country music that's on the radio sounds like, you know, 70s rock. If you're super into Hank Williams...
That's not your jam. And what they did is they created these cultural spaces for the music to live instead that were editorial, and the editors could make as many of them as they wanted. So what that did is it acknowledged that there is a cultural space where Drake lives next to The Weeknd, and there is a different cultural space where Drake lives next to Nicki Minaj or Lil Wayne. And that is very subtle, and only a music person would make that distinction. The record store is going to put both of those things in rap or R&B or whatever, and it doesn't fit. The cultural spaces don't even need names. But then what I do for you the user is your DNA is some percentage of each of these cultural spaces. So when you walk in, I can say, okay, you are 2% bluegrass, and also for someone like me who is maybe 2% bluegrass, 20% Americana, 40% hardcore 90s rap, 15% dub reggae, I like 50s and 60s Blue Note jazz, and I like 80s metal like Angel Witch. So it would actually manage to capture me, and it could recommend to me King Tubby right next to Angel Witch's 30th anniversary reissue of the self-titled album. And that's beautiful. I do want both of those things today, actually. And there's a great part to the story when we sold Beats Music to Apple. This is all Adam Blind, his team who built this amazing system to do this, and it really was novel. I think it was a novel way of recommending music. And when we sold Beats Music to Apple, we tried to get them to buy Adam's company as well. And they're like, 'No, we're Apple. We don't need that. We've got more data than God. We don't need what those guys do. They're just doing recommendations. It's easy, right?' Well, when Apple didn't buy them, Spotify did. What anyone who was a Spotify user will realize is there was this weird correlation where the recommendations on Spotify got better when Apple bought Beats. Well, there's the answer because Apple bought Beats, Spotify bought Atom, and Spotify recommendations got better because they had Beats Music's recommendation people. So anyway, I love it because it was what I wanted as a music fan. I wanted to be surprised. I wish when I went into Apple Music's For You right now that I felt like I was getting that experience that we were building at Beats Music. But unfortunately, instead my friends say to me, 'This Discover Weekly on Spotify is actually really good.' I'm like, 'Yeah, well, okay. You're welcome.' So in 2015, Apple acquires Beats. You go over to Apple and then leave, which generated quite a few news articles. Yeah.
You've discussed it at length in other interviews, but I'm curious for you. How important is it to know when to walk away from something?
So, we just shut down my daughter's company. It was really hard to do. It was her decision. We talked about it for months before she actually did it. And in the end, I said, you know, you got to trust your instinct. Like, you just listen to your heart on this. And maybe I'm lucky to have that voice that I can trust because I can imagine maybe not all instincts are the same, but in my life, I've definitely learned to trust my instincts. You know, when you should have left the party, even if you didn't, you can always look back at last night and go like, 'Oh yeah, I should have left then and I stayed like two more hours. I had like three more drinks and I definitely could have moonwalked out of there around 11:30 and it would have been a better night.' And so I think you have that experience enough times and you go, 'Yeah, this is the moment I got to leave the party and I got to actually leave the party. I got to get my ass up out of here.' I think there is something to that. For me, I really haven't ever been ambitious in the kind of career or money way. It's not what motivates me. Maybe I'll ultimately drive the car off the cliff, you know? I mean, because I'm definitely willing to take a lot of risk because I think I come from nothing. So there's a long way to fall. I know that the money doesn't make me happy. So I can imagine living with a lot less money. So therefore, I'm not feeling like, okay, how do I stack five more chips? I'm like, how do I have a better life? And for me, what I really felt was this fear, and maybe it's a silly and irrational fear, but I felt this fear that I would never be able to do anything except digital music. And that was okay with me, to be honest. But I also just have a curiosity that goes beyond that. So when somebody says to you, hey, do you want to try this? I don't get scared. I'm like, could I do that, too? Like, maybe I feel like I won this game. Can I play that game? I don't know. They say we all rise to our level of incompetence. And I was like, I want to find that. I want to hit that ceiling. Also though, for me personally, I just like an adventure. I realize this about me, and I realize that other people like comfort, but I prefer discomfort and I prefer adventure. I want there to be a little bit of discomfort. I want it to be a little bit tricky. I think that this is in life, too. It's like when you're skateboarding, like you and I are both skateboarders, you have to push beyond what you could do yesterday. If I'm running, I'm not just going to go run 5K every day. I'm going to be like, well, what's the next goal? There's a marathon. What was my last marathon time? Can I beat that? Now I can't because I'm almost 50. I'm not going to have a better marathon time than I had when I was 39. But still, I'm like, might I qualify for Boston when I turn 50? All right, let's try. I don't want to just go for a run. I want to like, what's the next goalpost? But for me, getting out of the digital music bubble was really exciting. And I felt like I had nothing to lose. Also, I felt like I had watched music go from 0% digitized to 99% digitized. I watched that whole journey. And then when LVMH came to me and said, hey, we've got this industry that's 3% digitized. Would you like to come help us make it more than 3%? I was like, that's super interesting, very interesting culturally to watch that happen. And LVMH is in a really interesting vantage point to watch that happen from what I believe about culture. In other words, and this is a little more heady, I apologize, but I think that what I've always been actually is a student of the way the internet is changing culture. And the internet moves us from the mass culture of television and radio to the niche culture of the internet where you recommend me something. I read about something on social media. I'm in a little group and I get recommended something. Like that's just the physics of the internet. There's another thing. There's quality instead of marketing. And this I learned from a guy named Umair Haque who wrote a piece in 2004 called 'The Blockbuster versus the Snowball' which I've referenced a bazillion times. But it was that influential on me because what he was saying was that on the internet, quality is more efficient than marketing. In other words, this is like the success of Netflix shows and Amazon shows. They're successful because people love them. They're not successful because they market the hell out of them and shove them down your throat. That actually doesn't work. That's why you have a Marvel movie in the theater. But online, you have more of the snowball, the Stranger Things. Why do you watch it? Because 10 people told me, 'You've got to see this.' In the world of limited distribution, where you're just trying to get people to go to theater A instead of theater B tonight, marketing is what's hyperefficient. In the world of unlimited choice on the internet, quality is hyperefficient. So I looked at LVMH and I said, 'This is a collection of niche cultures. The Louis Vuitton culture, the Dior culture, the Hennessy culture, the Celine culture, the niche, niche, niche, niche, niche collection of niches, or as Jeff Jarvis put it in What Would Google Do, the transition from mass to massive niche. I was like, LVMH is a massive niche and they are legitimately focused on quality. The CEO of Louis Vuitton will tell you that the whole company has taken an oath against short-term revenue. And Bernard Arnault will tell you with a 1000% straight face that they take a 100-year time horizon when they think about their brands. So they are focused on this long-term value and building very tight-knit niche cultures. And I was like, that sounds like Trent Reznor and the Beastie Boys to me. Long-term artists, communities that are focused on something very specific. And so I just saw like, wow, this LVMH thing is a massive opportunity. Also, you're talking about a business in LVMH that during the time I was there went from 35 billion in revenue to 50. And the entire music business went from 30 billion to 14 billion during the time I was in it. So you've got one conglomerate in Europe that does more revenue than the entire music business. And so that as a playground was super interesting as well.
So you left LVMH in 2021 and went to Ledger. Tell me a bit about Ledger.
So when I moved to Paris in 2015, one of the first people I met was a guy named Pascal Gauthier, who was the first seed investor in this little French crypto startup called Ledger. What these French geniuses in cryptography and cyber security had figured out was how to take the technology that was in your credit card, the chip and pin technology, and simply apply it to securing crypto. When you're using digital assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, what you have is a new human invention. This is I think still very underappreciated. People think about crypto as just like a thing. It's a thing. It's digital value. It's actually a critical digital asset. It's a digital scarcity. It's a digital item that you could lose. Like you could lose a $20 bill or your cell phone or your headphones. You can lose them. You can lose a bitcoin. You can lose an NFT. You can lose your value. So you got these things that have value and will have a tremendous amount of value. We're going through this moment in human history when everything will become digital. We've kind of lived through it with music and videos, but what I'm talking about is your passport, your mortgage, your cash, all of this stuff will become digitized over the next 20 years, just like the world's information has become digitized over the previous 20 or 25 years. Now, in that world, security is going to be incredibly important because if I'm going to use a digital object to show you that I can drive a car legally in California and I'm allowed into this bar because I'm over the age of 21 and I can immigrate into the EU because I have a carte de séjour that says I'm legal to work there. And these documents will all be digital in the future. And by the way, that digital document is better technology than the driver's license that's in your wallet today. If you think about the driver's license's actual ability to prove something, the blockchain is a better technology to make that proof than a piece of laminated paper. So therefore, it will become true. But security of that is going to be incredibly important. And that's what this young company Ledger had figured out starting back in 2014 actually. And I had met the guy that was the first seed investor who became the president and then the CEO as the company scaled because the world was like, yeah, this is important. Security around these digital assets is super important, and it's not just security but the self-custody of them. In other words, I don't want to keep these assets in a bank. There can be a run on a bank, and the point of this is that I have a digital asset which is mine and is non-fungible. I can have digital gold and I don't have to entrust it to anyone else. I can actually hold on to it myself and I can not worry about that kind of run on the bank scenario that happens when bad things happen in the world and in the economy. And so that's what these Ledger devices do. So Ledger is a technology for the secure self-custody of digital assets such as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other digital documents. And that is the equivalent of a digital safe in a world where there is a digital gold rush. How important is timing and how do you control for it? I think timing is everything. Someone famously said, I learned this from Peter Gocher, but the quote is actually coming from someone else, but being early is the same as being wrong. And I've seen that many, many, many times personally, and I think people often like to say, 'Wow, I did that first.' Like, it doesn't matter. There's timing. Don't build a 2008 company in 1998. What I mean is we are in the kind of 1998-99 zone in terms of cryptocurrency adoption. And I think that's really helpful to know because in 1998 in digital music, we were right but you couldn't be too early. In other words, if you tried to build Spotify in 1998, which some people did, it was called Rhapsody. It launched in 2000, then you were just going to be too early. And being early is the same as being wrong. Look at Magic Leap. Magic Leap is probably exactly the right idea, and Rony Abovitz will go down in history as a CEO of Magic Leap. Even though Magic Leap is considered an abject failure because of the amount of money they raised and then got kind of washed out and Rony got pushed out, it's not a good company story. That's going to go down as the Amiga of augmented reality or the NeXT of augmented reality. So being early is the same as being wrong, and timing matters completely. I remember really well in 1998-99 we believed deeply that digital music was the future. And I think that we've been proven correct. But at the time, your computer didn't come with an audio card. Your audio card didn't come with a speaker. The audio quality of MP3 encoders was spotty. 128 constant bit rate didn't sound that great relative to compact discs. Not very many people had broadband. There were obviously no smartphones. So now we take for granted that I can open my phone and just say, 'Hey Siri, play some Slayer,' and Slayer starts playing. The speakers don't sound half bad. If I'm in a hotel room, I'm totally happy with what I've got there. But in 1998, that was all kind of vision, but it was not reality. I see exactly the same thing in the world of Web3 and NFTs today. I was trying to explain this to my daughter's grandfather a couple days ago at the piano recital, and he was like, 'I don't understand what it is you're doing there.' And I said, 'Look, you remember when in 1998 the internet was both totally overhyped and overheated and also absolutely, unquestionably, inevitably the future. Well, there you go. It can be both things.' And that's why timing is so important because if you had a dot-com portfolio in 1998-99, you probably got clobbered in 2000. And if you have had a crypto portfolio in the past 6 months, you got clobbered. It's exactly the same thing. But at the same time, technology marches on. We always find, when humans have new inventions, and I don't care if it's fire or train travel or air travel or radio or the internet, we make use of those inventions in our lives. We hire these new technologies to solve old human problems in all cases. And right now when you go to the grocery store and you pay with Apple Pay, Visa International is in the middle of that transaction for no good reason at all. So that will go away. I promise you. It's just a matter of time. We have global cash settlement. I tried to buy a mountain bike on specialized.com this week. I wanted to buy it on the French site with my US card. Couldn't. Ultimately, I failed. I still have not succeeded in giving Specialized my money to order this mountain bike because the financial system that we live under has major limitations. If I want to send you a million dollars in Bitcoin, it will take me about 30 seconds. If I want to transfer $100,000 from two of my own accounts with my name on it, it will take me an hour at the bank, three phone calls, and several days for that to happen. This will change. I promise you this will change. So what Ledger does is we have an important part of this, which is giving human beings the way to securely hold their own digital value. And that's the company that we're building and the belief that we have that that's a fundamental human right and freedom.
