Posts from April 2020

The SoundCloud Stimulus Plan

As Billboard is reporting this morning, our portfolio company SoundCloud is putting up $15mm to support its creator community in this difficult time for musicians.

Musicians can’t tour right now. That’s a huge part of their earnings. Many are turning to live streaming and I hope that will turn into real money for them. But regardless, everything that supports musicians right now will help.

SoundCloud is investing an additional $10mm in its Repost Select artist services platform to get money into the hands of artists now. They are also making $5mm of Promote On SoundCloud inventory free to artists.

And SoundCloud has made it one-click simple for artists to connect to Kickstarter, Patreon, Bandcamp, and PayPal so their fands can provide direct support.

And last but not least, SoundCloud has relaunched its Repost by SoundCloud offering that makes it simple for its artist community to get plays (and get paid) across all of the major streaming services.

All of this will help the SoundCloud artist community make more money online while their in-person business is offline. And that is a really great thing.

#Current Affairs#Music

An Emergency Response Startup Story

My friend Matt Blumberg, who ran USV’s former portfolio company Return Path for twenty years before selling it last spring, got a call from Colorado’s Governor Polis two and half weeks ago asking him to fly out and be the founding leader of an innovation startup to help Colorado’s Covid 19 response. A large part of Return Path’s organization has always been in Boulder so Matt is well known out there.

Matt said yes and spent fourteen days getting it off the ground and hiring his replacement before flying back to the NY metro area last weekend.

He took notes throughout the entire two week experience and is sharing them on his blog, called Only Once.

Here are Days Zero and One

Here are Days One Two and Three

Here are Days Four Five and Six

Matt will post the rest of the days over the course of the next week.

You can subscribe to his blog and get the posts via email.

I asked Matt to send me the entire thing yesterday and read it last night.

It is fascinating reading and I think all of you who start and lead companies will think so too.

#Current Affairs