55: Dan Lilienthal & José Chayet - As [untitled] as it Comes

16:09José Chayet:But I think musicians just, they have a, because like, I guess sound is like so, could be so like therapeutic to anyone. like it feels like music is like so i guess democratized in the sense that like anyone can enjoy it i would go beyond that and say that music can be a form of um it can be like psychedelic like yeah it is a putting on music walking around it's like changes the scene in the movie yeah for sure in a way yeah for sure but also like for example reading you have to have like a certain level sometimes you have to have a certain level like literacy you don't have to have a certain level of like focus to be able to do it um you know same with books or sorry same with movies and and whatnot whereas music can like be enjoyed by anyone you know whether you're like a five-year-old kid who like doesn't know how to read yet to like a 70 year old lady who like has dementia you know like anyone can enjoy it so it's like a

17:09Dan Lilienthal:different i don't know just different frequency and then the other thing is is that abstract element right so like if you think about movies they do have to be you know there's some great movies that are um you know not so on the nose that you know it's kind of a you know it's pulling you in slowly but ultimately there's gonna be some storyline there's gonna be some plot some of our favorite music i mean we were all you know in carnegie hall you know you i told you you you you shed a tear basically and one you know and if we were to say like what the what what's what's that whole album about like what's the point what's the point you know it would be a it would be a interesting conversation i don't know if we would arrive anywhere specifically but that but that's what makes the best artists right that that whole and i would i would say that does apply

18:03José Chayet:to other mediums but it's like oftentimes the best films they are challenging they do but but music

18:09Dan Lilienthal:especially so yes yes yeah no that's what i'm saying is like movies can have that like what did I just watch element but music has it to another level I think also music compared to

18:22José Chayet:like a movie for example is less like is not as much like escapism of your own life whereas like watching a movie even if it's like the best movie ever that you're you left and you're like what the just happened like you escaped your own reality yes in those two hours or three hours however long the movie is right whereas with music if you listen to an amazing song an amazing album you never escaped a reality you went within yourself and you probably imagined yourself with the lyrics of the song you imagined your reality and how it related to the songs or what you just what you

18:53Dan Lilienthal:said about the like it changes the like the filter of life right right like you've got airpods in the grocery store and you're but it's still life that's why it's psychedelic it's not an escape

19:05José Chayet:it's still life but it's uh yeah it's an overlay it's like overlay it's like ar versus vr it's a It's a great way of putting it. It's funny, this reminds me of a conversation I had with Henrik Carlson, the writer, and he was talking about how certain forms of media or certain forms of art, they sort of suck you in. But when you come out of them, like a TikTok, you didn't really learn anything about yourself. You didn't put any of yourself into it. Whereas he was talking about, he wasn't talking about music, although I'm sure he would agree. He was talking about a painting. He's like, when you look at a painting for 10 minutes, which is probably as long as you could realistically actually look at a painting, it almost sort of spits you back out and you, and you, you are almost prompted to have your own experience.

19:48José Chayet:It's not so much like come be engaged here. It's like, this is a thing for you to go put yourself into and, and, and learn some things. And I think that the best art and certainly, um, some of the most interesting mediums, including music, it's closer to that versus like, um, you can even imagine two different types of film um uh an avant-garde kind of strange film that would take three watches to really understand versus a marvel movie the marvel movie is really entertaining but like i i've rarely ended a marvel movie like with thoughts about myself or with thoughts about my life yeah and so i think that music is is beautiful in the way that it's almost always uh prompting something yeah i've definitely never left the marvel movie feeling like oh my god it's gonna change this like change something in which is okay like i think besides the joy that i can be entertained two hours but it's yeah you're more on a track yeah um i think this is also you jose uh art was democratized through conceptual art and photography we believe the same will happen for music it's going to be reduced to a series of choices yeah a million places that could go obviously the ai piece is is hanging over it but i think it also is a nice setup for what a title is and is doing maybe to start how is music changing all mediums are very similar they all have their own methods

21:08Dan Lilienthal:of creation distribution and consumption and we we in art history we saw that you know as these painters these photographers they were like messing around and Marcel Duchamp primarily was really really just curious and like trying to like poke holes and and and and figure out what's next and he's like holy shit it's just really like my choices you know like it's that's that's all if everything else is reduced down to zero from a um cost standpoint or a labor standpoint or whatever um it really is just like what do i want you know what what do i see what do i want to see um so for music that's been happening slowly but surely for example in art you've got found objects right like that's what duchamp was and then in music sampling hip-hop found sounds you know it's the same thing people although for what it's worth a found sound

22:18José Chayet:And part of the reason I asked this question is you guys have built a company more or less kind of fundamentally oriented around the idea of a work in progress. Yeah. And implicit in a work in progress is process. Yes. Notably, a ready-made at least, unlike a sample.

22:36Dan Lilienthal:Which I pitched down on ready-made being the name of the company.

22:40José Chayet:Really?

22:40Dan Lilienthal:By the way.

22:41José Chayet:A ready-made is almost without process, right? Like in a world where you press a button once with Zuno or whatever and you generate a song. Yeah. that feels energetically pretty like far from a app and product that is almost entirely about like artists and musicians being able to share the entirety of the process and all of those choices i think one thing that and i guess it goes back to us being like obsessed with like new things right and when we get obsessed with a new thing with we go very deep right like we don't want to just like listen to a great song. Like that's it, right? We want to like go deep on the artists, find their interviews, right?

23:20José Chayet:Like scour the rep, try to find everything about them, you know, see if there's movies on them, see if there's TV shows. Like we get obsessed with that type of stuff. And one thing that Jose and I would talk a lot about, you know, as we were starting the company before the company, is how a lot of the greatest artists in the world were incredible draftsmen, right? And like Picasso would go through, with tens of versions, hundreds of versions for any of his big paintings, right? Like Wernicca had a bunch of versions to them. And one thing that exists in that medium, in the medium of painting is the museum, right?

23:53José Chayet:And being able to like go through the versions, getting all the context on the story of that painting and then you get to see the painting, right? In music that didn't really exist. You know, like if you really wanted to like get an understanding of the story of an album or the story of a song, you have to do a lot of research. You may have to go online, try and find things. and most likely you wouldn't find all the demos, you wouldn't find all the voice memos, you wouldn't find all the notes. You know, nowadays you have obviously podcasts that try and do this retroactively with like Diary of a Song and Song Exploder and whatnot, but that just didn't exist.

24:24José Chayet:So one of the things that, you know, as music fans really inspired us to want to build Untitled is to be able to build that place that stored the entire story of your music and documented the whole process so that as fans and as people who just love music, you get to have all that context in one place. And the story, in some sense, is just a string of choices.

24:44Dan Lilienthal:Yes. No, that's the whole thing. So with Fountain, which kind of kicked off the ready-made and things like that, you show up to a museum, you don't really know what's going on, you're not reading, you're like, okay, so the guy bought a toilet? Yes. Like, that's what happened. But then if you really are interested in the story and you realize that this guy was on the board of this exhibition and submitted it anonymously and then saw his peers disregard it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then made a fake newspaper saying that this is ridiculous. And the newspaper was by him, but like him talking about this anonymous person that submitted it and like just all these things.

25:30Dan Lilienthal:And you're like, this guy's like kicking and screaming about something. And you kind of read about it. and you're like, whoa, that's cool. And the physical, the last piece of it, so if we want to talk about AI or whatever, it's like, oh, that last, we don't know. I don't think Dan and I have fallen in love with the song yet that the last stroke of the story was a prompt and you hit a button and then you listen to it. I think we're certainly excited about that happening and we will feel the same way that we felt when the iPhone came out or the first time that, you know, I connected with, like, the Beatles music.

26:16Dan Lilienthal:It's highly unlikely that it's going to just happen in a vacuum. You know, I think, like, everything is storytelling, right? Like, thousands of years ago, like, all we just care about is telling stories and we're just getting more sophisticated at doing that. And there's all these different mediums of how to tell a story. We all choose our different tools, movies, podcasts, music, art, photography, company building, fashion. And ultimately speaking, music will resonate if people can get behind the story. And the story is at the will of the storyteller. And again, a series of choices. Like it's just what, you know, what are you going to do?

27:00José Chayet:also the the best art the best things usually are the most unexpected right like we didn't see it coming right like the best you know Kanye West album right like when he made it was like whoa I didn't see this coming um and I think right now with AI specifically like when you make something with AI like it's kind of expected it's like you never hear something like wow that is so unique you know that is so weird and actually something that we hear we've heard a few times already from artists that we hang out with is like they actually liked music AI more in the earlier days when like - I've heard this point made about GBT2 and poetry as well.

27:39José Chayet:Yeah, when it was like, it just like spit it out the randomness, like weirdest shit. And it's like, you had no idea that that's what was going to come out of it. Whereas like now it's like - It's almost too good. It's like so specific. It's too good. Yeah, it's too good. You mentioned mediums. I think this is from your guys' jobs page. And this is a way into actually talking about the product. now that we've circled in the clouds a little bit. The deeper bet is that we're building a new medium, not just a better set of tools. Music in progress is its own form of communication and it has never had a place built for it.

28:10José Chayet:I think it would be helpful first for those unfamiliar to talk about what Untitled is as it stands today. And then I suppose my follow-up question would be, where are you on that spectrum from set of tools to new medium? assuming that it is a work in progress?

28:29Dan Lilienthal:We think that when you blur the lines between creation and consumption, right? So like you've got things like 20th century in Paris, you're painting right across the street for where you're showing your artworks. And those two methods of production and consumption are getting nearer to each other. Distribution goes to zero. with Instagram or with Snapchat when you're taking the pictures on the same platform that you're distributing the pictures distribution goes down to zero so our whole idea and then when you democratize creation anyone can do it and so you have this amazing flywheel of creation and consumption I'm seeing you make something and I can make it too and so we're just all kind of inspiring each other to make things so Untitled from the very very beginning was always centered around we're going to build something for artists to make music here but it has to be just as good for listening as it is for creation because listening is that thing that powers the whole thing it's a flywheel I listen to the demo then I want to make the first version then I want to make the second version then I want to mix it then i want to post it then they listen to it and then i want to make more and that whole mechanism maybe existed a little bit on soundcloud and myspace a little bit closest common music yeah i think myspace for some earlier generations i think they they felt that way too um but dan and i felt like we could actually bring design and principles to the product itself such that it doesn't turn into a Frankenstein product, doesn't turn into something that the founders or the builders of it don't even know what it is.

30:19Dan Lilienthal:And they're just like throwing paint at the wall. We felt like music deserved something that had craft, that had strategy, that had principles such that we could turn this thing into the operating system for musicians. The way that Notion exists for the workplace or GitHub exists for engineering or Figma exists for design, And we were like, let's bring that level of focus and craft to a medium that we genuinely love.

30:47José Chayet:But the big problem before we even existed was that different companies were focused or different products, different companies, whatever you want to call it, were focused on like a very specific use case. It's like, hey, we need to build a better tool for publishers to get songs heard by sync people, right? Which at the end of the day, people are using Untitled for that now, but that's a very myopic use case, right? And the thing that we brought to the table and we brought to, I guess, to the world is that we were just outsiders to everything. Like we were outsiders to making music. Like we made musicals.

31:28José Chayet:I was making a bunch of music on GarageBand. I was managing my older brother, but we were still outsiders. Like we'd never worked in it. We didn't have parents that worked in it. We really didn't have friends that worked in it. So we were outsiders and we had that perspective. On the perspective of technology, we're not engineers. And we're also not technically like designers when it comes to the pixels, right? So we also weren't the ones going to be building it. So what we had was just basically an intuition around what type of product we wanted for ourselves.

31:58Dan Lilienthal:Based on what? based on your using GarageBand? I think GarageBand and music and all that stuff was sort of like inspiring our music intuition, but our product intuition was like Snapchat and Instagram, you know, and obviously everything Apple. But like with Snapchat and Instagram, like I don't know if you remember, like people were using Snapchat in such weird ways. Like people had like Snapster pieces. They literally could, do you remember that? I remember, yeah. That they would like do all the doodling and the drawing and all that stuff. It's like all these products that, you know, I can't speak for Snapchat in the last eight years, but back in the day, it really felt like Evan Spiegel and, you know, whoever was around him were doing things in a very principled, very intentional way where a product like the camera could be just as good for texting as it could be for broadcasting.

32:58Dan Lilienthal:And it's like, I'm going to create here. I'm going to be fun. I'm going to be loose. I'm going to post a story. And it was all through a simple system that starts with the camera, blah, blah, blah, dun, dun, dun. So that's Dan and I's philosophy is like simplicity and flexibility where a product isn't just built for submitting songs to appear in movies. A product isn't just built for let me get my management company to give me support on this album or let me get the label to sign this project or let me get this producer to send me a beat or let me get this songwriter to help me finish this song.

33:39Dan Lilienthal:There were all these products that existed for those individual things and maybe in B2B SaaS, you could create those like individual like wedges that turn into billion dollar businesses at least pre-ai that was a whole thing of like you know yep but super simple simple problem music's not

34:01José Chayet:big enough for that simple and very intentional so for example before we existed you know a lot of artists and producers and some of the biggest names in music to make their albums would use the notes app you would literally go on they would you go on their phone and they would you would just see a literal notes doc like on the apple notes app with tens hundreds of files and that's how because there weren't enough people building dedicated music companies wasn't simple tools

34:27Dan Lilienthal:built for that the people that were building the dedicated music companies were basically building these like niche bootstrapped apps that are like hey i'm a mixing engineer this is my workflow i'm gonna automate it and then have other mixing engineers enjoy not very the fruits of my

34:45José Chayet:thing, but you know. What about the stuff, like the bigger names that people know, so Ableton or whatever, like they're just too much horsepower? I mean, Ableton is built for creation, right? Like Ableton is purely built for producing music, you know, getting very in the weeds with sound, you know, getting very in the weeds with like, basically, I don't know if you're the cameras catching this, but like this, these knobs right here.

35:06Dan Lilienthal:That's Ableton. Yeah, that's literally Ableton. No, seriously. Right here. No, like this is what Ableton is. And that's the thing, Dan and I come from that sort of like tree of simplicity. So like, obviously like Ableton would be Photoshop and then Instagram, Snapchat, you know, like or the camera app or the photos app on iPhone. That's sort of what we're aiming to be for audio. So you go back to your Snapchat analogy.

35:31José Chayet:Snap was built around this. What can you do with a camera that anyone has? Is there a metaphor for entitled initially?

35:39Dan Lilienthal:Such a good question. So no, like it's not like you open up Untitled and you have this like blank canvas where you can start recording music. In fact, again, because, you know, one of the things that's sort of different between and obviously like, again, it's been six years. We haven't built a feed or any sort of like social network on Untitled. The way that people connect on Untitled is implicitly using other platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, etc. There's no way to like send someone something on Untitled inside of Untitled.

36:17José Chayet:You're relying on like the internet's distribution. Yeah.

36:20Dan Lilienthal:So and the reasoning behind that is because, you know, music is still a very sensitive medium compared to photography, texting and all these things. So like we felt like all the apps that had sort of internal networks for music just got really cringe really, really quickly. Yeah. Right. Because music is one of these things that like, to be honest, like I'll work on something for a really long time before I want someone else to listen to it. Dan, you know, similar, like just artists similar, right? Like even the most prolific ones where everything that they make is amazing. they're still very shielded so you have to start from a place of privacy like you're on a slower

37:05José Chayet:sharing kind of like i'm gonna share it with one person and then two people and then five not

37:09Dan Lilienthal:i mean oftentimes and tiktok kind of like when when i saw tiktok drafts uh for the first time i was like oh these this is the first time that i've seen in in social media and like you know pop consumer products actually have this like private place for you to do stuff And honestly, you got to give them credit and they crushed it. But that kind of felt rare at the time of us exploring all this stuff.

37:38José Chayet:Yeah. I mean, I think in general for people who take photos, right? You have the photos at, right? You have a great place where you can just like go back and see all the photos that you're taking. You know, if you want to edit one, you can go back and, you know, edit it a little bit. If you want to share it, you can obviously share it from there. In music, that just didn't exist, right? But if you're someone that is making a lot of music for yourself, for your friends, for others, like the existing tools that existed before us were something like the closest thing was probably like a SoundCloud.

38:08José Chayet:And SoundCloud, going back to like unintentional tools, is a platform that throws a bunch of random music at you when you open it. Right? You go on SoundCloud, you open it up to a feed. You see a bunch of random tracks by random people that are being recommended to you. If you want to get to your own music, it takes like three to four steps just to get to your own music. and when you're in the mindset of like, hey, I want to go listen to my own song. I want to go listen to the song my friend sent. Like the last thing you want is like to enter this place that is all noisy, you know? Like imagine if you open your iPhone photos, you know, when you want to go see the photo of that restaurant that you took, like you then, the first thing you see is just a bunch of discovery, you know?

38:46José Chayet:The Instagram algo in your face. Yeah, it's a great point. Can we just quickly for people who aren't familiar or haven't used the product, what is Untitled today? what is this sort of assuming it's again somewhere on that spectrum of set of tools to medium yeah um i also want to talk about where it's going and where it's been but what is it sort of as it stands today who's using it what can it do i mean the the one sentence that we usually say with untitled is that we're the best place to store listen share and organize your work in progress music so most users are musicians ranging from total amateur to professional they have a couple songs in there to 100 songs in there and are they they're not making music

39:32Dan Lilienthal:in untitled for the most part or they are like making making like you know well i this goes

39:38José Chayet:back to our able this goes what's how much of music is the thing behind you versus i have a guitar and a voice memo. Just one thing I do want to say is that the magic about Untitled and us building such a simple, flexible tool is that the platform is being used by people who literally know how to use this, like the back of their hand, who could like fucking wire things, move things, know everything about sound, to literally a 16-year-old kid who just started making music on BandLab on their iPhone. Got it. What else can you do with the product? to like maybe the the double click on that line around creation consumption well there's creation there's workflow distribution and consumption so what is what are those what does that mean today

40:26Dan Lilienthal:i would say just as a baseline for people that maybe don't make music and we would talk about this when we were fundraising back in the day is like sort of we you know there's like an unbundling of a lot of things and Dropbox was being unbundled into, you know, different verticalized solutions. So you had frame.io for video. We were unbundling Dropbox into this audio centric cloud service. So instead of receiving a series of audio files that didn't have those special features for audio inside of the product, you know, we built this like purpose-built thing that you receive 10 audio files and you can actually play them through front to back you can loop the audio file you can do time stamped comments you can do things that are specific to the medium yep um and audio is a first class citizen and that was drop like a

41:24José Chayet:really great dropbox for songs was effectively like the very very first product yeah yeah i mean one One thing that Jose and I talk a lot about, and it's funny because we were very young, right, when the iPod came out. But one thing that we talk a lot about is that the last time that it was easy to listen to your own work-in-product music.

41:44Dan Lilienthal:As easy.

41:45José Chayet:As easy was with the iPod. Yeah. Right, because the iPod obviously had the beautiful connection between iTunes and the iPod. It was easy to upload the files from your computer to iTunes and sync it to your phone. That's it, easy. And obviously the iPod was built purely for listening to music. whereas the last 25 years during the iPod and after the iPod people were using Dropbox and Google Drive and all these tools that were built for everything and for nothing at the same time whereas we decided to focus purely on music and what that medium needs. And so maybe to go backwards set of tools now, by the way you have other things you have now you can actually sell access to songs before they're released, these different types of things presumably more creative tools are coming so on where are you on this sort of vision of creating a new medium for work in progress stuff where are you and the sort of set of amalgamation of tools to medium spectrum like what does that even mean yeah our philosophy up until now i think things

42:46Dan Lilienthal:are changing a little bit because we've reached this kind of interesting point right now where we have over 50 000 paying customers we're about to hit 5 million in annual recurring revenue and I think Dan and I are now thinking about you know how does Untitled go from here because we're not a tools company we're a creativity company and we want to build the biggest creativity company possible but up until now it's been like listen build tools that are very useful in a very simple, principled way. And if you just kind of get out of the way and you don't do too much, the medium will start sort of emerging.

43:37Dan Lilienthal:So for example, like if you don't really think too much about like what a string of tracks is, like don't call it an album. Don't call it, we actually originally in the previous app, We had a few versions of the app before we released it publicly. We used to call it a work in progress, a whip. And there's going to be like a whole advertisement campaign of like, yo, check out my whip, like things like that. But we ended up calling it a project because it just felt like the most flexible, the most like neutral, the most like out of the way. And so now people share projects as their albums people share projects as beat tapes as beat packs as like a string of demos that they actually want to go record Some people actually record voice memos this one artist she was telling us that she records She recorded a one-hour morning routine Inside of untitled that every morning she wakes up and she basically tells herself what to do like have coffee for five minutes like meditate for two minutes.

44:40Dan Lilienthal:Do your, like make your bed, like things like that. And so the more you get out of the way, the more that you just kind of like put stakes in the ground wherever necessary, but outside of that, like don't overdo it. The medium will start emerging without much like force. Yeah, much force. Exactly.

45:03José Chayet:Can you guys talk a little bit about, as far as I understand, six years into the company, product initially launched in late or mid 2023? August 2023. What was that period from 2020 to 2023 like? And what, I guess one, why did it take so long to launch something? How much did the idea evolve? What was that process? Well, I think the first thing to say is that idea didn't really evolve. Okay. Like one thing that's extremely unique about us, about Jose and I, compared to like other startups is that the idea from the very beginning was very clear and we knew what we wanted to build literally the first day we started the company like officially we wrote the product spec it was the and what did you write it was the best day ever number one the best day

45:51Dan Lilienthal:ever we went that was that's what i was telling you about like like kind of like you know watching one of your earlier interviews really got me re because you know because um dan and i would wake up every morning that morning we woke up at like 5 a.m we went on a run we were in san diego by the way where we're both from right so like kind of you understand the analogies of like the tvpn guys you know going to the gym and like you know getting like we literally went on a run on the beach this was september 2020 talking about the product talking about hiring fundraising whatever all the things that were in our heads we would go shower dan would pick me up we went to the office and we just started cranking all day.

46:35Dan Lilienthal:And as Dan said, we wrote the entire product spec in one day.

46:40José Chayet:The product spec, and I want to be clear, the product spec of like what we launched with in 2023 was basically that product spec. Now, since then, it's been three years. We added a lot of those editing features, those creation features. That was always part of the vision, right? But the product spec for V1 of Untitled was what we wrote that day in 2020. But what happened was that a lot of people you know iterate on the product on the concept you know to get to product market fit to get to you know the next stage much more top down it was a vision it was for us it was like we had to iterate on like how to build the thing what did you write like what did you write this line you just gave me which is like whatever creation credit blah blah for work in progress music

47:21Dan Lilienthal:what did you what did you write yeah no it was it was something along the lines the best way to

47:27José Chayet:do the Dropbox.

47:28Dan Lilienthal:It was like the mission is help artists nurture and maximize their creative process. What are we building? The best place to share, listen and yeah, share, listen and collaborate on work in progress. And you expected like

47:44José Chayet:our customers are going to be artists themselves. Yes. That was always from the very beginning. Like we were, we would talk, I mean, we were just saying this, like we talked a lot about, you know, like, oh, there's a lot of different companies and products building tools kind of like this, but focus on different people, like focus on the industry person, focus on the manager, focus on the A &R. Since the very beginning, we were always going to be focused on the artist.

48:09Dan Lilienthal:For selfish reasons and also for strategic reasons. Selfish reasons is like, we want to be building a product where like our, the customer that we're building for is someone that we're very inspired by. So it's like, we're just dreaming of the day that our favorite artists, we're going to use the app. And then from a strategic reason, we kind of intuitively felt that, but as Dan and I didn't know anything about the music industry, we didn't understand the leverage that kind of existed.

48:36José Chayet:We basically said that we were really focused on the DIY artist, right? So Jose and I were really obsessed when we started the company with this playlist on Spotify called Pollen. And back in the day, Pollen was a really, really special playlist because it was basically featuring DIY artists from all over the world. And what we mean by DIY is an artist who's very much in control and has a say into the entire process of their music, right? From the songwriting to the beats to the creative direction to the rollout to the tour, right? They have a say in everything and they're pretty much in the driver's seat for the whole thing.

49:14José Chayet:And Pollen featured artists in that world. and you know we were getting to a place in that era with pollen that diy artists were getting very big you know tired of the creator you know i mean literally his name has the creator in it right like he is almost like artist that's the example yes got it yeah so anyways we were really focused on these these artists that are very genre-less very diy and highly collaborative right like they're collaborative all the time um and then anyways going back to what jose asked like one of the big strategic reasons that ended up working out with artists is because artists, you know, if music is a pyramid, right?

49:51José Chayet:Artists are at the top of that pyramid and then everyone else serves whatever the artist wants, you know, as fucked up or as sick as that is, you know, it's very much like it's the artist, then it's the producer, you know, a little step below that, then it's the manager, then it's the A &R, and then it's probably publicity, right? And everyone just serves the artist so if the artist loves your platform and they love your tool and they're putting all their music on there then everyone else will follow and that's exactly what happened got it got it got it maybe not unlike uh some of these other metaphors you use around github and notion and figma like you can get the person who's good interesting and it's crazy because like now

50:29Dan Lilienthal:that we're a little more far along like sometimes we'll be having conversations and you know someone will be telling us like why they use the product or whatever and now it's like kind of like it's it's um one producer told me that this huge artist forces him to use the app and he doesn't actually like using like that's what i'm saying is like nowadays i don't really mind someone telling me they don't like the app because it's like it's fine but like this huge artist is like yo like if you're gonna work on my album like you gotta use this app you gotta why do you think the

51:03José Chayet:artist do you have a sense when somebody has that level of need for it is it it's the easiest way for them to share it's they like to listen to their own music there is there is there a most

51:14Dan Lilienthal:common reason that it's so sticky the bread and butter of of our product the reason why people fall in love with it is the listening experience it's just so good and listening is so critical to making great music and um you know listening to maybe in a non-intuitive way for a non-musician

51:32José Chayet:listening to your own work. Listening to your own work. I mean, we made your own music feel like your personal Spotify. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like literally like I go on Untitled and I literally make really, you know, not amazing music, but I love it because it's my own. And I literally go on the project and it feels like I'm looking at a project on Spotify. Yeah. You know, and I have control over it, right? I can change the cover art. I can rearrange the track list. I could change the title. I could then share it with Jose, you know, if I wanted to. but it's very empowering you know to be used to like going on spotify and listening to some of my favorite music from history and then going on entitled and looking at my own music and having it feel the same way it's cool you mentioned as i understand you guys are not engineers you're not really musicians you're not even maybe really designers we're not no we're not we're as untitled as it comes i was talking to our mutual friend and one of your investors ethan daily about you guys and what I should talk to you about.

52:31José Chayet:And he observed that with all that context, you also didn't really have like a technical why now for this business. There definitely is no technical why now, but I do think there's like a cultural why now, you know, in the sense that, you know, Jose was alluding to this earlier. Basically, if you look at music, right, you have consumption, you have distribution, and you have creation. And then workflow is kind of like wedged between creation and distribution, but you have those three. right? And consumption basically is what most of music tech innovation has been the last 25 years. We basically have spent the last 25 years trying to figure out how we consume music digitally in a way that the rights holders get compensated.

53:16José Chayet:So until that was figured out, it was very hard to think about everything else. Well, and that was obviously the biggest market. Yeah, of course. That was obviously the biggest market. And that's where also most of the graveyard is. That's why a lot of VCs are scared of investing in music because there was a lot of companies that died in that era. And obviously Spotify figured it out. And obviously a bunch of companies followed after that to build streaming like Apple. But consumption had to get figured out before you could think about everything else. So when we started the company, you know, and I spoke a lot about this and we're like, okay, consumption is like 99 % optimized, right?

53:47José Chayet:Like Spotify and streaming figured it out. So like, let's not do that. Distribution, right? Which is kind of interesting is that music still has to go through a distributor to get onto streaming services. Most of the rest of media is - Yeah, most of the - Distribution's over. It's direct, right? To post this podcast online, you don't have to go through it, you just post it. Whereas in music, you have to go through a distributor. And to play in that game and to do anything new, you really have to be in that world. You have to have a lot of relationships, you have to be a music industry insider.

54:17José Chayet:And as we alluded to, Jose and I were like, nope, we didn't do anything in music before this. So we didn't have any insider knowledge or insider relationships. So we couldn't do anything there. And then creation, you know, felt like the area that was the most fertile for innovation because the last 25 years, no one was really thinking about it too much. Everyone was really thinking about, you know, consumption or distribution, but no one was thinking about creation. So I think there was a cultural right now where, you know, when we started the company, Spotify was popping. Artists can now know that they, if their song was good and their music was good, they would make money, right?

54:50José Chayet:They wouldn't lose money as they did in the piracy era and all that. So I think that was a big deal. Where does this level of your product, I mean, I played around with it enough to have a sense for someone who's not a musician. And this, from everything down to pixels and in the beautiful animations, everything like that, but also like it is clearly built with a deep level of empathy for your user. And yet you are not, you don't have like any of the, credentials, credentials may be in the wrong way. Like you could imagine a former musician being like, I'm going to make the perfect app for me.

55:27José Chayet:That is usually how products like this emerge. It's like, I'm just going to build the thing I need. And I don't want to discredit, like, it sounds like you were making some music, but like Ethan's prompt and point was that perhaps the only real edge is that you have just an obsessive level of empathy for your user. You could call that also product instinct or intuition or taste or something. Where do you think that level of intuition and empathy comes from, given that you're not inherently making something for yourself?

55:59Dan Lilienthal:Yeah. Well, I think we, so Dan and I, when we started the company, we were like, we're going to be method actors. So we were building something for ourselves. Okay. And even if it's not great music, like we were still like, we are, we're going to, you know. but the one credential that's the most important for this product to work was like product sense you know and and and dan and i we've just been students of products we're fans of um of our favorite products and we've studied them and we talk about them and that was that's what was missing in music is someone that came in with an opinion on product and had principles, had a philosophy of how to do things and can direct a team and organization with that strategy and that vision in mind.

56:56Dan Lilienthal:So yes, you're a hundred percent right that, you know, like we were talking to a big musician the other day and they're like, it's like, as if you're in our brains and like, You know exactly what we want. And to your point, why didn't a big musician successfully build a product like this? Because some have tried. And the reason is because the product sense wasn't quite there. And then why didn't these amazing engineers or amazing product builders not successfully build some of these products for musicians? Because some have tried and it hasn't quite worked out how they wanted it to. and again it's that empathy, that method acting, that research, that like genuinely putting yourself in their shoes that didn't quite go that far so Dan and I as people who didn't go too deep in either side of it we decided to go super super deep in the blend, the blend, the amalgamation of what these people need and how you're going to build it.

58:01José Chayet:And I think part of important context as to why did José and I end up doing things in music is that music is a key part of our DNA and our relationship. José and I, our older brothers, we're both the youngest of three siblings. We have two older brothers with significant age differences. And growing up, all of our older brothers were musicians and some of them were actually in bands together. And they were all into the same music. This was like San Diego, early 2000s, pop punk era. So Jose and I, when we'd be going to school, we would go on the same bus to school. We grew up five minutes away from each other.

58:40José Chayet:And I was five years old. He was seven years old. We would be talking about all the bands that our brothers were into. So music has always been one of the main things that we would talk about. And funnily enough, during that era that we were on the bus together, Jose would always come to me and be like, yo, we need to start a band together. I'll write songs. You play the songs, you play the instruments. So music is a big part of us. And to be honest, maybe this is very selfish, but we really wanted to work with each other. We really wanted to build a company together. And because music was the thing that we were always talking about and music was a big part of our DNA, it naturally felt like music was the right thing for us to spend our life working on together.

59:20Dan Lilienthal:We always wanted to work with each other. And we both, in college, and you know I a couple years graduated college waiting for Dan to graduate the obsession with music was like I think Ethan was 100 % right in saying that it's like this level of empathy obsession with this category is what you know made this work out that combined with like our deep level of excitement to work together. Those two things combined is what... It's the ignition. It was the ignition for this company. Because Dan, at some point he came up to me and he's like, yo, I want to start a real estate company. This was before he was excited about starting a music company.

1:00:05Dan Lilienthal:He was getting very into music, but for one reason or another, real estate was a possibility. And I was like, great, go do that. I can't go do that with you I don't know what you know I was literally banging my head on the wall thinking about music I couldn't stop thinking about music all day long it was I would annoy my roommate I would annoy the people around me at Facebook like I would just be like I can't stop thinking about music like I need to work on music it's like okay go like on this like random niche you know music team or whatever but like it's like pre-reels and and even now music's not that important you know it's not front and center at at those types of companies so um i was just waiting for the moment and then dan calls me one day and he's like what if we start a music company together and i was like finally a hundred percent let's let's go can you talk a little bit about maybe this ties into some

1:01:07José Chayet:what you were saying about Snapchat. This is a product that is quite complex. It does a lot of different things to the sort of suite of tools point that comes in a very simple package, which is delightful when pulled off well, but like very hard to do, especially on mobile. Mobile like compresses that, like you just have less real estate. You have less. Can you talk about how you've navigated that, especially as the product has gained more and more surface area? I mean, to be honest, though, it's definitely something that we're starting to struggle with because we do have a lot of features. We have a lot of things that you can do on Untitled, right?

1:01:48José Chayet:Everything from just storing your music and listening to it to stem splitting and changing the EQ of the song, right? And a bunch of other things in between. And so we are getting to the point, and we've heard this already multiple times from users and artists that they're like, do you guys have some sort of FAQ video or something so that I know what I can do with this app? Because obviously I love this app already, but I know there's something - I love it for this one thing. Yeah, I know there's more things I can do with it. I just don't know what. So we've definitely up until now have gotten to a place where we've been able to pull off, being able to have a very simple intuitive tool that works for whatever you need it to, when you need it to, right?

1:02:28José Chayet:But it doesn't get in the way if there's things that you don't want to do with it. But I think now, which is part of Jose and I thinking about this next chapter of the company, thinking about how do we present all these magical tools that we've built in a way that's more intuitive. Well, especially if they have very different contexts, e.g. the place where I listen to my own music as an artist also being the place where I can sell or even share it to all my, it's delicate, right? Very.

1:02:55Dan Lilienthal:100%. I think that the one thing that, you know, we have an amazing team that's number one And Dan and I, part of that 2020 to 2023, like, odyssey that we went on was figuring out how to deliver the package in the perfect way. But Dan and I not being technical, not being, like, in the pixels all day, we have to do something, which is, you know, we're usually talking to each other all day long. and we're debating each other about like literal buttons, where the button is placed on the screen, like how the interaction comes up. And then we bring that level of debate to the rest of the team. And so we love when our designers bring like 30 different versions of an experience.

1:03:48Dan Lilienthal:And then we get to discuss aggressively together as a team. Iron sharpens iron. And then we finally like find the truth. like the thing that just feels right. And so everything inside of the app, and this is one thing that worries us a lot, is like as in the early days when the app was just listening and sharing, you know, there was such little features that you could debate something for a day and it would be worth it and you could get through it. If you've got more and more engineers working on more and more features, how do you actually scale that philosophy, that form of debate that filter almost yeah because a lot of do a lot of untitled went viral on twitter when we launched originally with designers like artists started so like a lot of designers hit us up about like how did you think of this how and we generally like really love the way that we have come to to make decisions about product but we are realizing that it doesn't scale.

1:04:55Dan Lilienthal:We just created a clod agent thing called product assistant that basically summarizes all the discussions in Slack. And it basically divides them into two categories, like decisions that are left outstanding and decisions that were made. And every day at 5pm, we get this sort of like digest just to like review, like what decisions are is everyone collectively making what's left to be outstanding, what's still yet to do as just an exercise to see is like, is this a way for us to keep up with all the different things? But the main thing that Dan and I have to do is QA, the product itself. I'm actually hearing with AI, people talking about QA being more important because a lot of PRs are getting through and people are spending more time QAing.

1:05:41Dan Lilienthal:So I assume QA is now a more important function inside of tech companies. QA has always been the most important function Dan and I have ever done at this company.

1:05:51José Chayet:We literally say that is our job. You know, back in the day, we would say like our literal job is just QA. But I think the thing that's really tough is kind of what Jose is saying, like, how do you scale intuition, right? Because at the end of the day, a lot of the decisions that we've made on the product and basically everything we do has been our intuition. And we are obviously trying to build the biggest music company on the planet. and so to do that you obviously need to grow the team a lot and you need to hire more people and you need to hire more designers and you need to hire people beyond you that make decisions.

1:06:24José Chayet:You're trying to build the biggest music company on the planet. Yeah.

1:06:28Dan Lilienthal:Trying.

1:06:29José Chayet:Yeah, you have some competition for that. Yes, for sure. There's some big ones. I mean, the best things in life are usually very hard. Have you found, maybe to talk about scaling intuition, have you found you've been able to sort of download your intuition even to individual members on the team. For sure. For sure. A hundred percent. What does that process like?

1:06:50Dan Lilienthal:Download or there are people that are on our team? Yeah, we've chosen people.

1:06:54José Chayet:I think we've chosen people to be on our team that basically collaborating with them feels like ping pong. It's magic. It's honestly like there's moments. That's when they're coming in. That's like, obviously it compounds over time, but like there's something they have before they've even joined that has like.

1:07:11Dan Lilienthal:Yeah. And it's this like perfect marriage. like it makes me want every time that there's this moment where we arrive at a solution for example like recently it was this we just built commenting and inside of the comment I won't get into it but inside of the comment basically we arrived at a solution around commenting to be able to listen to the music while also being able to navigate to the project and it was hard it was a UX problem and we landed on a solution that was so great and exactly what we needed and it just kind of worked just like I wanted to cry because I was so happy you know and and those types of moments of collaboration are like Dan and I we've been telling each other recently like we love our team so much and it's so much fun being with them because you push each other you make each other better we really believe in that band mentality of like just you're just a core contributor to something bigger than you um and i think as non we talk about how like you know the best that these non-technical people are the end up being the best recruiters because they literally can't do something by themselves so they need other people so they become social and you find you find the best people because of that because you feel

1:08:33José Chayet:out of necessity for lack of a better word just desperate chip on your shoulder it sounds like maybe that described you guys i mean that was literally those first three years of the company you know when you asked us like what happened from 20 to 2020 to 2023 is like we were very clear on what we wanted to build we did some crazy things we had no idea how to build it and we

1:08:53Dan Lilienthal:didn't know who the right people were we once like hit up an engineer saying like hey we're just in the city for yeah we bought a flight nice like four hour flight or three hour flight just to have dinner with someone but told them like hey we're gonna be here we're just we're just here

1:09:11José Chayet:i mean i would literally see someone i would see someone on the subway with a swift shirt and i would go up and go talk to them wow or like go to a we work and see people coding and just start trying to test for this um intuition ping pong thing though like i think the one thing that you know it's we're still figuring it out right like we're basically but you clearly hired enough people that have you have this relationship with hearing you talk about it i mean look our two founding engineers for example who we have this like ping pong like relationship with ryan and miles both of them are really really strong designers even though they're engineers they're really really strong designers on their own and have a really good eye for design which is very important to Jose and I because that's one thing that we really value in ourselves is just having a good eye for design.

1:10:00José Chayet:And then two, they are builders, right? Like both of them had a lot of side projects on their own, you know, outside of the work that they were doing. Miles, our founding iOS engineer had his own music app called Andante. Ryan had his own agency called For Green Engineering. He had both built a lot of things where they had a lot of agency over doing things. So I think both of those things made them like a perfect fit for us you know strong design sense and then just builders at heart so which balanced us because we're not builders in that sense what about designing a product that on one hand is used by presumably tons of kids uploading their first song they've ever made and a product that whatever two weeks ago lord dropped a like that i think as far as i understand you guys had very little notice on all organic she organically dropped a basically follow up to her album with.

1:10:54José Chayet:Those are very, very different stratas of users.

1:10:59Dan Lilienthal:That made us cry too because she dropped the museum behind her album. What Dan was saying about how you walk into a museum and you get to see all the notes, all the drafts, all the context. She used our product in the way that we dreamed about using it. This is sort of the evolution of the medium, right? Literally a dream come true. Yes, it was so cool.

1:11:20José Chayet:And you don't understand how many times in the last like six years we try to force that. Like we were like, we try to convince artists like, hey, drop the demos. Hey, put liner notes. We try to like literally brainwash them to want to do it. And then we see Lorde, obviously one of the biggest artists in the world, do this out of her own volition. How did that happen? What was your initial reaction when you? And we just got a call from the manager. We didn't even believe it. Yeah, we got a call from the manager. There's no way this, you know. Especially in music, like the one thing you learn is that like musicians are very flimsy, you know, and they one day they say they're going to do something and the next day they say they're going to do something else.

1:11:55José Chayet:So we never we never. Nowadays, it's sad, but we never believe anything an artist says until we see it happen.

1:12:02Dan Lilienthal:And no, straight up. That's one of the most fucked up things about about this is like Dan and I would get so excited. Like talk about innovation, talk about childlike curiosity. like in some ways dan and i would get so excited about certain things yeah six years ago in music that were just very new to us yeah and nowadays it's like do you you don't understand how much stuff happens in this office on a daily basis like amazing artists recording music amazing artists getting interviewed building product events performances like just all sorts of things are happening all day long here and we're getting a little desensitized and it and so with the lord thing like it was such a surreal moment when it happened what do you think she saw also for

1:12:50José Chayet:listeners context yeah check it out we can link to it she dropped i think 49 49 demos demos demos from her album on the annual virgin on the um anniversary yeah yeah and it was like kind of like

1:13:02Dan Lilienthal:five-ish demos per song right and and she had liner notes saying like this is the beat like i texted when i heard this beat originally i told jimmy like do not send it to anyone this one's mine jimmy is for context jimmy eastak jim eastak is her producer who worked on the entire album

1:13:20José Chayet:with her so you would see notes between like what their story was in the song and yeah you would

1:13:25Dan Lilienthal:play it through and there'd be like little differences yeah yeah yeah and the one thing

1:13:29José Chayet:that's really really cool is that i mean as we told you like the manager called us two days before it happened saying like hey we want to do this we just have these like technical questions like all right cool like here are the questions and jose and i kind of stopped talking about it because again we are so desensitized this these things that we don't expect them to happen until they actually happen yeah and then it happened um and i think what was really cool of an experience was that you know getting i mean we taught we used to talk a lot about this but getting all the context of an album or a project makes you then want to go listen to that project more yes so for so for example reciprocal yeah so for example like i know jose this was a big thing for him with the beatles right like watching the get back documentary was what led him to want to go actually listen to the

1:14:15Dan Lilienthal:beatles his album not the other way i was kind of i wasn't a beatles hater but i was kind of like why does everyone love the Beatles so much? Like, I don't, it just feels kind of like, like, you know, just plain to me. I don't know why I thought that way. And then I see the Get Back talking to me. I'm like, why does anybody else make music? Like no one, like, why did anyone try to make music? It was like a complete 180.

1:14:40José Chayet:So that's what happened with the Lord thing for me personally, you know, it was like now I actually listen to the album more, whereas before I, to be frank, I didn't really listen to it. so that's what's so beautiful about getting these experiences is you just develop a deeper relationship with the music you get to understand it more and I think with Laura what's cool is that obviously she's one of the biggest artists in the world and is doing this but now you know we're seeing I mean the other day there was this kid in the studio named Zayok he literally started he's 16 years old now he started making music with Untitled at 13 this kid just got a record deal like he's actually growing a lot right as an artist in a bidding war like he was one of those types of situations now imagine a world where zay is like 28 29 he's a big artist you know he's a massive artist and now he gets to he's still using untitled he gets to go into untitled and see the shit that he was making when he was 13 in an easy way like the same way we do with the photos app right imagine if tyler had untitled tyler the creator had untitled when he was 15 but the problem is he didn't right so now it's like oh i want to go find the demos that i made when i was 15 my old macbook the fuck knows where those are but but yes i think that just going back to your question

1:15:51Dan Lilienthal:of like why is a 16 year old using the same product as like a bigger artist like a lord or how does how does it work it's we generally think of it similar to why does everyone use iMessage literally everyone or or whatsapp abroad i suppose my counter argument would be and to be clear my

1:16:12José Chayet:My question is less, why does this happen? My question is more, how do you design for both? Oh, oh, oh. But I guess my counter argument would be like, everyone uses a message because of network effects. And obviously your product has some network effects, but like for it being a great tool for an artist, it's less about that and way more about, is this ergonomic and useful and intuitive? Yeah. Maybe in Lord's case, it was particularly about the distribution part of it, but like designing a product for both those users is really, really. I mean, it goes back to what Jose was saying, which is around listening.

1:16:42José Chayet:Right? Like we first wanted to build a tool that was so simple to listen to your own music or the music that your friend or collaborator is sharing with you. And the reality is that whether you're a 14 year old kid who's barely learning how to make beats in his bedroom or you're Lord, you both want to listen to your music as easy as if it were Spotify. Cause you both probably use Spotify or Apple music. Right? So you both want that experience. And Lord, for example, I mean, we've never talked to Lord directly, but if I had to guess the reason why she did it was because listening to her demos on Untitled is extremely easy and seamless and a much better experience than like listening to them on like Dropbox.

1:17:22José Chayet:Why would she share a Dropbox? Yes, yes. There's a quote you guys have that I think ties into something we were talking about around the museum idea. In fact, if an artist is releasing maybe, let's say 10 albums over the course of their career, which is maybe like 100 to 200 songs, then they definitely made over 10 ,000 songs. A lot of that music gets sent to just a few people, whether it's your mom, your significant other, whatever. I was thinking about this, and it was funny you brought it up because I was thinking about that moment in the Get Back documentary where Paul's strumming his way into Get Back.

1:17:59José Chayet:It's one of the more miraculous sort of seeing the... And you see the song go from nothing into something. Yeah. Like one of the best songs ever.

1:18:08Dan Lilienthal:You hear it over and over. It's miraculous. Which repetition in that thing, like, Don't Let Me Down is maybe one of my favorite songs now because of that. You hear it so many freaking times. So many times that there was a moment where Paul actually tried to fuck up the song and add like these like, this kind of like back in this like call and response between him and John. And John actually was down. Yeah. And they tried it out. And then you never actually realized, you never get told in the documentary what happened that went back to the original vibe, but they still tried it out. And yeah, it's a story.

1:18:47Dan Lilienthal:It's the story of the song.

1:18:48José Chayet:So I was thinking about this. And granted, I think it's important context that that documentary came out, whatever, 50 plus years after the album was made. There's a, in many ways, like this is kind of a thematic of, we talked about this a bit earlier, your product, at least from a distribution standpoint or a consumption standpoint for artists sharing with the world is about work in progress, the museum. There's a line I come back to often from Jerry Seinfeld. And he says, all art is disguising work. And his point is that artists are a bit like the magician who hides something behind the curtain.

1:19:25José Chayet:And the thing you see, it just looks easy and simple and elegant. But in fact, all this work is hidden behind. Yes. And so in some sense, there is this tension, which is like, we live in, especially today, maybe more than any other era, creatives are putting the process on display more than ever before. The tech analogy would be working with the garage door open. And yet, there is something to like, I don't know how. Building in public. Yeah, I knew that was coming. I knew that was coming. yet there is something to like i don't get any of the process and i just get delivered the magical finished thing yeah i guess this and it's a false uh dichotomy like i don't think it inherently these things aren't inherently at odds but i am curious how you especially going back to the medium stuff weird how do you think about this what are your expectations for how artists will play with this spectrum obviously your product is in some sense kind of on one end of the spectrum it's an amazing question because honestly part of what we learned of the last six years when we were trying to brainwash artists to share the demos yeah is that one many artists don't want you

1:20:37Dan Lilienthal:to see the demos right right like that was a big issue like the first the three years before

1:20:44José Chayet:launching yeah if you know how the trick is done many artists don't want you to try i mean it's like it's like frank ocean's whole thing where he had the hard drive that he would travel with one for security and two because he would say that if he died he didn't want people to like listen to like the unfinished music he wanted the the tracks to go down with him if he like the plane fell down so like people like some artists don't want you to see that you know and many fans at the same time don't give a fuck about the demos you know you have to be a psycho or maybe Maybe I care a year in or 50 years in.

1:21:17Dan Lilienthal:It's niche. It's niche. Yes. Back in the day, Dan and I would personally onboard every single artist. Wow. And we'd be like, you can share your demos. You can, the whole story, the museum. Publish with us, right. All these things. It's like, they'd be like, I don't care about any of that. Why would I want to share my demos with anyone? And then we'd be like, you don't understand. And it's, look, it's true. Like it's not at scale, you know, Seinfeld quote is amazing, you know, and people barely have enough time to look at the main thing that you work so hard and that is perfectly polished. It's rare that we get a get back documentary.

1:22:01Dan Lilienthal:That's a rare thing. And that's why.

1:22:04José Chayet:You almost have to earn the right to give that.

1:22:05Dan Lilienthal:And that's why this version of Untitled, the one that launched, it's not called the work in progress, the medium. Or like the project primitive is not called the work in progress, it's called the project. Because we decided, you know what, let's just, and that's kind of the getting out of the way thing. It's like, let's let people use it for however they want to use it. And we are so grateful that Lord used it in that way. So grateful and we hope that she got a lot out of it and her fans got a lot out of it. We certainly connected to her record more because of it. And we'd love to see some of our favorite artists do it more.

1:22:41But we're also very aware that the product needed to be kind of directed and carved in a certain way that wasn't going to pigeonhole itself into that.

1:22:52José Chayet:Yes. I would also observe that it's telling that your incentives from a business standpoint, the majority of your revenue is not artists selling unreleased songs to their fans. It is artists and creatives paying a subscription to you to use this tool. Yes. I mean, that's the magic of Untitled, right? Is that we're focused on the artist, right? And we want to build great tools for the artist. And the business model is incentivizing us to do that. But I think it's kind of interesting. I mean, we don't need to dwell too much on this. But it is interesting how like this museum analogy, like the museum only matters if you're a goat.

1:23:31José Chayet:you know like like no one wants to go to a museum of someone who isn't a goat right you know like

1:23:36Dan Lilienthal:so i mean and that that specifically happens in the art world yeah so there's so much friction there's only so many museums right you have to be lindy for anyone to care about you being in a

1:23:47José Chayet:museum like someone's going the only people that are gonna you know be able to like get their fans to drop what they're doing and listen to their demos and listen to the work in progress are the artists who made such an amazing piece of art that people are obsessed with it and love it so much in the same way that the Beatles did. And, you know, I guess Lorde now is doing that too, because her fans clearly wanted to listen to that stuff. How do you maintain trust with artists? Maybe this is debilitative, but yet what is the like philosophy around maintaining trust with a bunch of artists who love your product as you're trying, maybe a different way to frame the question would be if this product is really beloved that's relatively simple that's adding complexity and yet you also want to build the biggest music company in the world it seems like making sure that artists still trust you on that way up by the way as you introduce AI features as an example or whatever it's going to be like maybe it's just intuition but how do you think about that yeah so you know part of us wanting to build the biggest music company in the world is because we want to build like the best ecosystem for the artist.

1:24:59José Chayet:And to be able to build the best ecosystem, we think, because it hasn't existed yet, is that you have to build a vertically integrated music company. You know, a company across creation to consumption. Obviously, this is very ambitious and this is part of our 10, 20 year plan. But we genuinely believe that if we're able to do that all in one place, it's going to be a way better experience for the artist, right? If you're using one thing to do it all, then it's going to be a good experience. But I would argue that makes trust even more. Yes, for sure. And look, at the end of the day, we're figuring this out ourselves, right?

1:25:33Because it's kind of part of the growing problems

1:25:35José Chayet:and the growing pains. But I think at the end of the day, the main thing for us to be able to continue scaling and continuing earning the trust of artists, we just have to continue to build tools that are genuinely useful to artists.

1:25:48Dan Lilienthal:And I do think the incentive piece is important. like artists can just intuitively so many people come into our studio or you know meet with us and they're like you're the only company that cares about artists and i see so many companies like for example like a title for example or you know other people that are like gen like doing so many campaigns and marketing like saying like how much they care about artists or like doing so much tactics to to kind of prove to artists that like they they should be the brand that artists rep the most and yet with us it's i think it's part of the fact that they love the product and they just are are in love with it but it's also just the business model is so clean and so aligned like we're not doing anything that's like raising eyebrows so from that perspective they come in here and they just get it they get that we care about them and we're charging them yeah you know but they feel good about that yeah it is um it is really quite quite beautiful to know that at the

1:26:59José Chayet:end of the day the thing that keeps the lights on is like making sure artists love what you're doing and it even goes down to like you know something that is newer at untitled but it has become a meaningful part of our day-to-day is our brand, right? And we call our go-to-market team the brand team because at the end of the day, we don't really feel like we're going to market when it comes to Untitled. We feel like we're building a great tool and naturally artists are finding it and using it and sharing it with others. We don't have to do much to go to them nowadays. I mean, in some ways they're coming to us because we have a studio.

1:27:37Dan Lilienthal:And our favorite products. like the way that Dan and I kind of fall in love with products is the storytelling and the brand so for us it's like oh okay if that's how we engage with products you know we want to sort of cry and we're still figuring this out we have no idea how to do this but we're temporarily calling the entire go-to-market team the brand team it's like everything is brand and everything is a story and it's just how we get the thing that we're making here out to customers and that all requires this like very meticulous storytelling effort.

1:28:14José Chayet:And brand really is like this universe that we're building, right? So part of our dream before actually starting Untitled, this company, was actually getting a piece of land. Like before we decided that we were going to build Untitled and then build the software company, we wanted to get a piece of land. We're going to call it manzana, which is Apple in Spanish. But it was going to be stylized as two words. Like manzana. healthy, healthy man. But we were going to get a piece of land and this land was going to be the place where we did all of our experiments. It was going to be this like ecosystem of all these like cultural music experiments that we wanted to do from a festival to a recording studio to having also a software play, et cetera, et cetera.

1:28:53José Chayet:But we decided that obviously that was quite the endeavor to try and start with. So we wanted to first build software. And now that we're obviously six years in, we've been fortunate enough to get this amazing building in Williamsburg where we're sitting in now. We have a three-story building. We have the retail floor. We have the second floor and we have the third floor, which is where we're sitting in, where the studio is. And then we also have the rooftop where we do shows. And essentially with this whole building, we've essentially allowed ourselves to build an ecosystem of everything that an artist needs, right?

1:29:25José Chayet:We have the second floor, which is like where we build the software, you know, where we build the tooling. We have the third floor, which is where we've built the studio. It took us a year to build the studio. and this isn't like one of those like hyper like simple studios. We literally have this super technical thing that Jose and I barely know how to use, but we know a lot of artists really appreciate. What is that thing? It's the patch bay.

1:29:45Dan Lilienthal:It's like a, it's a rack of preamps. Yeah.

1:29:49José Chayet:Okay. And like, have you ever seen like plugins, like a revert plugin? Like those are like the physical versions of it. Ah. And then we have the rooftop where we do shows and artists can come perform. Cool. And then the retail floor, which is still being built out, is a place where we're going to have more office And also we're going to have a little area where art is going to be able to actually sell things, right? So if you want to sell your merch, you want to sell vinyl, you want to sell rare music here, you could do that all here. So this whole building is almost turning into like the Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory of Music where you can do it all in here.

1:30:18José Chayet:And we have our own universe.

1:30:20Dan Lilienthal:8 ,000 square feet of indoor space, 5 ,000 square feet of outdoor space. Crazy. Four different performance spaces and the engineering, design, brand team all intermixed. Doing research with an artist to see what we want to build with them. They're performing, they're recording, they're selling their stuff all in the same place.

1:30:46José Chayet:It's almost like the Get Back documentary, but with software too.

1:30:54José Chayet:you call on the website and many other places you say entitled is a sacred place for your unreleased music what does the word sacred mean to you guys

1:31:06Dan Lilienthal:i think it's like the feeling that you get where you're like vulnerable you know or like kind of comfortable um you know sometimes you might feel it when you're like at home in your pajamas like i was actually thinking about it yesterday like i was like why do i feel so comfortable on my computer right now doing work would i feel the same way at the office right now and there's like a feeling of like doing work at night like kind of like by your bed you're kind of getting ready to go to sleep. It's like this feeling of vulnerability, rawness. So that's what we want people to feel when they enter Untitled is this feeling that it is really like their home for their unreleased music, a sacred place being sort of the up-leveling of that word.

1:32:02Dan Lilienthal:It's kind of like a, it's a little bit mystical, you know, not just your home. It's, you know, the sacred place.

1:32:09José Chayet:I think sacred is also something that you don't take for granted. You know, I think it's very easy. For example, I think we were talking to an employee right before this. It was their one-on-one and accidentally like we like passed, like we missed it because we were in another meeting. And I think Jose said, like, this is like a sacred time for you. You know, it's up to you if you want to do it or not. Like it's, we don't, like, if we have something to discuss, we'll tell you, but regardless, like, it's a sacred time for you. Which that made me feel like, oh, it's a time that you just, you don't need to take for granted.

1:32:45Like, it's something that's special and it's something that is very intentional, you know?

1:32:50José Chayet:So I don't know. I think that's, that's what I feel when I open Untitled, right? Like it feels very intentional when I'm going on there because I open up Untitled. And oftentimes, like, I'm going on there because I want to listen to something very specific. Yep. Like, I very rarely, I mean, now it's a bit different because I have so much shit in my Untitled now that, like, I do sometimes go in there and browse and, like, look for things and not know what I'm going to listen to. It's more like browsing a library than an algorithm. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's very intentional when you get in there.

1:33:17José Chayet:You have to, like, choose specifically what you want or you have to go in to do something specific. There's a quote from an interview. I think the big kids interview, they'd asked you about discovery or something. And you Jose say, curation is hard. I can barely get Dan to listen to the music I like. We build products for ourselves first. As people who love music, it's refreshing to have a platform where you have to actively seek things out in a world of passive listening. Untitled is for active choices. And then you, Dan, nothing feels better than an artist sharing something unreleased with you.

1:33:48José Chayet:It feels amazing.

1:33:50Dan Lilienthal:There's like a partial truth to that. there's also like a partial like us like like we're we're afraid to do um discovery because we don't want to fuck it up and that's part of this next chapter scaling a sacred place is not easy yeah that's part of this so like i think like the issue with spotify like dan and i have gone through the hero's journey of like being obsessed with spotify's discovery and curation and algorithmic playlists, all those things, and then staying on there long enough to like not like it, you know, and I feel like all of these different products are just staying, and then, you know, there's some algorithms right now, like, you know, that are just super relevant, but not in music.

1:34:39Dan Lilienthal:In music, it's, it's, it's just hard, you know, it's like, like, my brother Leon just started using Spotify for the first time in the last couple of years, he's obsessed with it, but I wonder how he's going to feel in like four or five years, you know, like, cause he's, you know, he's discovering music from like 10 years ago that we would all listen to. Um, so that's the thing. That's the fear there is that like, we've seen even the best of the best kind of crush it. and then like no longer crushing it in certain ways. So that's kind of the fear part of it that's not in that quote. But we're like kind of getting over it and we're just going to do it and just see what happens, you know, big risk, big reward.

1:35:25Dan Lilienthal:But it is actually true. Like you send someone a song and it's like, did you listen to it? you know and and then they're like oh sorry not yet you know so it's like if I if you're getting a recommendation from a friend and you're barely listening to that like how do you expect me to you know trust some tastemaker you know in union square you know telling me to to to listen to this up and coming musician? Yeah, one thing that I think going back

1:36:01José Chayet:to building a platform that you don't take for granted and that you approach with a lot of intention is that we've actually built certain mechanics that make it feel very special when you receive unreleased music. Because when you receive someone's music, if Jose shares a project with me on Untitled, we send notification when someone listens to it. So if Jose sends something to me, he's basically waiting for my red receipt right you know he's waiting and i know because i obviously use entitled i know that he'll there's a norm established yeah i know that he'll see if i listen to it or not so i want to make sure he knows that like i received his music and i and i listened to it you know whereas with other platforms like with spotify as i was just saying like for me to know if he listened to something i sent him i have to like annoy him like yo did you listen did you listen and there's no there's like a template there for there is a red receipt

1:36:54Dan Lilienthal:now on Spotify, not about listening, but it is kind of cool. So every week we have this thing called Song of the Week. This guy calling on our team when he first joined, he's like, hey, is there a place where we can all share music with each other? And then we decided to make a channel called Song of the Week on Fridays. And I noticed that if you put in a Spotify link into that Song of the Week channel. Oh, it saves it in the DMs. Whoever clicks on it will appear in your dms so i the other day someone sent me music yeah from our company and i clicked on it and it took me to the dms and then the song that i'd sent for the song of the week up here that i'm like you clicked on the link you clicked on and you know he didn't tell me about it but you know it's kind of cool there's a template here i think around we just like we have so much quote-unquote abundance

1:37:43José Chayet:in digital space and like very we have very few sacred things there's very little weight there's very little substance and so i do wonder if there's a template here to like explore making digital interactions more meaningful separate like not all links are created equal yeah and so there is something about how yeah how can a song share with me on entitled feel totally different and almost heavier or um more substantial than a random other link and i think we'll probably see lots of exploration across digital mediums in that way as as we just become so numb to everything

1:38:17Dan Lilienthal:people are yearning for that i'm seeing i'm seeing so many apps like these like kind of like disposable camera like like these limitations these like um you know even the things that are like turn off your phone like what's the thing that you use oh opal like all these things

1:38:33José Chayet:that are just like let me like try to like people are just craving like offline irl feeling experiences you know like even in the digital right like like what was i just friction creates meaning yeah exactly and even in the even if we're artificially creating those constraints

1:38:49Dan Lilienthal:people are craving that yeah and i will be honest like i you know i'm i know that this is obviously super biased on our end but if we're talking about that like what is a product out there that is super sacred feeling offline irl physical whatever you know analogy adjective you want to give it feeling

1:39:13Dan Lilienthal:and works, like that people like actually like, it's not just a gimmick like, oh, I'm going to do this once or I'm going to do this twice or whatever, like you actually use it on a weekly basis. I actually do think like if for some reason the future is moving in that direction where people are searching for more like, get rid of the noise, give me that like human connection that we've all needed for thousands of years and it's kind of escaping us. I do think Untitled is kind of like, yeah, I can't think of another product.

1:39:50José Chayet:I mean, one of the things that we used to say when people would ask us like, oh, why isn't there a feed? And one thing that we would talk about is that we're a very intimate product. And for you to have things on your Untitled, you need to like connect with people outside of Untitled. right like i need to like meet you and hang out with you and be your friend most likely for you to like send me something on untitled and even now like talking about curation like honestly jose and i talk a lot about this but the way i discover most music nowadays is literally via this building and the people that are coming in and out of this building like this building is

1:40:29Dan Lilienthal:my algorithm and you know so we're like okay so how do we because it's like oh in the spirit of building things for yourself how do you build that into untitled it's like all right i guess we got to build for vr yeah because like literally like i don't know how you would

1:40:43José Chayet:i don't know how you yeah i don't know how that's that scales i mean it's it's weird world building of some kind yeah we have to talk about it briefly i think a lot of artists and maybe even more than artists a lot of fans of music are very stressed and upset or afraid about ai um as i understand at the product today you have stem splitting that's probably it yeah from yeah from an ai standpoint yeah yeah um i guess i'm broadly curious how you guys are feeling you made a comment earlier um about being there there's going to be a point where you listen to ai music that gives you that special feeling yeah i'm curious how you think artists are feeling how do you think about how does all this inform our product standpoint very quickly we were we were in

1:41:32Dan Lilienthal:the presence of greatness a few months ago just like I was saying the same thing such a goat and they played an AI song and they're like just listen to this like best song ever made and like it was all made with AI and we listened to it Dan and I did not get that feeling that we were talking about but just seeing someone but the artist was earnest about it this person is like in their 80s or 70s. They were very excited about that song, which means something, obviously, coming from a goat. So it's clearly happening. All I want to say is, I don't want to lie and say that I've experienced that yet, but I'm so open-minded to it.

1:42:18Dan Lilienthal:Whereas most people in the audience are not.

1:42:21José Chayet:Yeah. No, continue. Please. I do want to say, I think there's one quote that we got from a goaded electronic artist. Oh. That is based in Stockholm. I'm not going to say specific names. Oh, my God. But their band name is synonymous with Sweden. Okay? We were in his presence, right? He's an amazing human being, really smart dude. This is a bar. We asked him, you know, what does he think about AI? and AI being trained on his music. And he said, I trained on other people's music.

1:43:03So.

1:43:05José Chayet:Do you think you'll let, when it comes to the intuition around this and your next AI feature, will it be driven by artists asking for it? Will it be driven by the AI stuff? The capability, yeah. Because by the way, I think it's worth noting that one of the earliest points we hit and I think when I first met you guys a couple years ago, we talked about this. Part of the implication with that, what's changing in music as a medium, like it being reduced to just the choices is that way more people are going to be able to create music as a result of this. In some sense, it's very in line with the thesis of the entire vision.

1:43:45José Chayet:And yet it's delicate, I guess, is my point. Let me ask it in the simplest way possible. How will you, what will cause you to launch Untitled Second AI Feature? I think the thing, I mean, going back to incentives, right? We built a company and we built a business model that depends on us building amazing tools for artists and tools that they find extremely useful. Yes. Right? If not the company, the business doesn't work if we don't do that. Yep. And so when it comes to any tooling, whether it's AI or not AI, our biggest question whenever we introduce something is, is this useful to an artist, right?

1:44:20José Chayet:And with AI, you know, Jose and I, as we were telling you, like we love music and we want to be making music a lot, but we're not musical. And so AI is the next thing to allow people like us to make music. And it's the next thing to allow the next billion people to make music, right? So we're very much, you know, open-minded about AI and we're excited about the future that it brings. now is AI, you know, in the place that it is now ready for Untitled? And is it something that we think could be really useful to artists on Untitled right now? We're still unsure, you know, we're like figuring it out.

1:44:59José Chayet:We know it's going to be at some point, you know, we know at some point the artists right now who are feeling very, you know, negative about AI, which we understand because AI maybe trained on music that they didn't get the access to. And we totally understand where that sentiment comes from but we know that at some point or another ai will be in a place that most artists are going to want to use it because it's very useful to the workflow in the same way that autotune is now like unanimous in music like no one no one like criticizes using autotune because everyone knows it's very useful but in the early 2000s when autotune was barely new

1:45:33Dan Lilienthal:people were criticizing it a ton by the way that same person amazing bar by the way and i think like that really would help anyone like in the grand scheme of things the the fact that we all train on other people's music that same person said like listen like i still haven't had a like i'm again he said i'm super open-minded to ai being the thing that i use but i still haven't been able to make something that i couldn't make otherwise with ai the way that autotune literally actually allowed you to sing like 808s and heartbreak literally kanye started out it wouldn't exist kanye started singing it wouldn't exist without it yeah he's like i still haven't in fact ai right now is like regurgitating things that i could already do right um so we're kind of figuring it out like dan and i as non-musical people it actually does for us like we are the target market you know we're the the icp or whatever because we love writing songs and we love being creative but we aren't musical at all so it is giving us you know musical superpowers the issue with it is that untitled is this very intentional place where you like work on something for hours and you put it there and it feels good with ai it really does take like 50 tries to get a good song so we're wrestling with the idea of like can we create a dedicated place inside of untitled that can be this like massive like think about work in progress take take work in progress and take it to the nth degree because it's like it's not even like work and it's not even really

1:47:23José Chayet:in progress it's like like the playground 800 directions and find the one that works it's kind

1:47:29Dan Lilienthal:of like crazy so it's like can we actually redesign untitled in certain ways to let in all of that output and not distract from the really really good stuff that you want to kind of sit there

1:47:43José Chayet:without distraction yeah and i mean i would say that i think it's funny because now nowadays when you say especially ai and music the thing that people only think about is like generative shit right like people are like oh musicians hate ai and it's like the only thing that they think of is like suno and like you know generative models but there's so much other types of ai that can be used to actually superpower the creative process that isn't generative and that's something that we're thinking about right now you know right now we've built this corpus of unreleased music we've built the de facto storage tool for a lot of artists and producers.

1:48:17José Chayet:Now, how can we use AI to help them, you know, organize that scattered brain? Like, how can we turn into, you know, the Google Photos and music, you know, where like, we help you organize, we help you be, you know, like your assistant, your producer, who's like putting everything together in an easy to understand way.

1:48:34Dan Lilienthal:Even just being able to say like, hey, what synthesizer did Stevie Wonder use or whatever so that you can go into your computer and like pull up a similar sound. Like ChatGPT is helping a lot with that. Dan was saying the other day, like he loves doing research on artists using ChatGPT.

1:48:51José Chayet:Yeah, it's the best. I mean, it's literally like going back. It's kind of interesting. When I first started doing it, I was like, this is magical, right? Instead of me having to go and like spend hours trying to piece together all the interviews and and the videos and all of that, ChatGBT or Claude can literally just make a deck for me with like the entire just like synopsis of the artist, which is awesome. But then on the other hand, I'm like, damn, surfing the web is so fun. Like the literal word, surfing the web. Like you're surfing, you're going through the whole process of like finding things and putting them together.

1:49:24José Chayet:That stuff is fun. That's the part of the exciting part. A couple of questions on you guys and your collaboration. uh first are you guys artists

1:49:39José Chayet:i promise it's not what is an artist i don't know you know so do you feel like artists

1:49:52José Chayet:i feel like a spiritual human being that's you know that's it i'll take it

1:50:00José Chayet:what is the best thing about working with a very close friend and maybe to add it what is the worst thing

1:50:11Dan Lilienthal:there's work and there's life and when you do what Dan and I are doing you get to pursue your life's work, you know, and the clock is never off, you know, but you get to have fun with your best friend all the time, you know, so you can't escape work. You can't compartmentalize that much the things in your life will sort of always be there while you're at work um but you get to go to stockholm and go on an amazing five mile run with your best friend and hang out with one of the coolest artists in the world and sort of enjoy life while also pursuing your curiosity

1:51:10José Chayet:100 i think the other thing that i've been reflecting on recently is that as you get older right like once you like become an adult and you get married and you have kids and all of that like spending meaningful time with friends like close friends like people who just enjoy their company there's no like agenda right becomes much more difficult yeah right you have with like schedule and you have to find time and you have to like, you know, go out of your way to find time with these people, right? Like maybe I only get one or two dinners a week with this person for like two hours, right? It becomes much harder to schedule times with friends that you have no agenda with, that you just want to enjoy the company.

1:51:53José Chayet:One or two dinners a week would be a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, that's a lot. Maybe I'm not married nor I have kids. So, you know, maybe it's a bit different, but it just becomes more difficult. So when you work with your best friend, right? and work is the thing that most humans spend most of their time in. It's very, very magical to be able to have the opportunity to just go hang out with your friend and it's still work, you know? And like, you don't have to like schedule anything. I don't have to schedule time to go get lunch with Jose or to go get dinner with Jose. You know, I just see him at the office every day, you know?

1:52:28José Chayet:And I think that's something really magical. I think that's something really magical oftentimes like family businesses, right? Because like you get to go see your family every day because you just have to work with them. So I think that's one of the most magical things about working with someone. Have there been any challenges or anything you guys have had to give up?

1:52:44Dan Lilienthal:You also have, well, you have enough time, part of challenges and things like that, you have enough time to get to the bottom of things. You know, which is both beautiful once you get there, but it can be really hard as well. But to Dan's point, like, who do you really have in life

1:53:03José Chayet:that you can spend that much time with yeah you know like how many unresolved issues are there

1:53:11Dan Lilienthal:between a bunch of people that are close different levels of closeness um that if you had all the time in the world if we had all the time in the world you know please ai let's please build this give everyone all the time in the world with every single person that you love really hard really really hard especially you know your parents you're you know like it's so hard dan and i have the privilege of having all the time in the world with each other and that's allowed us to get through so much and that's the only reason that this company has gotten to where it is today it's a miracle that we're here as non-technical founders non-musicians you know who built this company um but that's it's our relationship and our ability to get through anything together is is the is the thing that that gets it there dan and i did trade sort of you know this is our first business so we did trade this like you know uh how would you say like un we had a sacred we were basically teasing each other flirting with each other for like whatever 24 years dreaming about starting a company then you start the company and then the you you know you get the full reality of what it's like to do everything together right so we definitely entered a new universe together yeah and there's really no going back and the only way is through.

1:54:43Dan Lilienthal:And, you know, thankfully we have all the time in the world, but, you know, I think that's one of the elements that you get when you go so deep with someone, especially when, you know, it's not like it's like CTO, CEO, you do this, I do that. Most co-founder relationships are these, you know, it's more transactional. Yeah. But I don't, yeah, it's not even like, let's like compare. It's more so it's like, I do this, you do that. Like I bring this function to the company and you bring that function to the company. And that's why we're here together at work.

1:55:15José Chayet:Yep. I also think the last thing I will say about this is that we're a hyper creative company. We're a creativity company. You know, the thing that we have going for us is our ideas and our intuition. And in order to tap into that creativity in you, you oftentimes need to feel like a child, right? The childlike curiosity. And so if you're literally working with your childhood best friend, it's almost like a hack to tap into your childlike creativity. And there are people, I think any of us can relate to this, there's certain people when you get to be with them, you get to almost go back. Yeah, you feel silly.

1:55:55Dan Lilienthal:You feel like you can make weird jokes. Dan and I constantly just bait each other into these like bits, these like just like weird. And we have some weird ass inside jokes. weird things with you just yeah and so we kind of constantly bring each other back into like yo

1:56:11José Chayet:this is fun yeah i really like that that quote by josh kushner which is i don't know if he said it but i think maybe his grandmother said or something which is that you know success in life is like being excited to go to work and being excited to come back home from work indeed yeah a few final things um do you have a dream untitled user that you're willing to say paul mccartney

1:56:44José Chayet:that's a good choice i'm two for two on paul mccartney last two podcasts paul's been mentioned so it's just someone who's such a goat you know and like has had such a profound impact on my life and has had such a profound impact on culture at large and you know is obviously at an age where you know maybe you're like less inclined to like try out new technology and like less inclined to like use a new device or use something new whatever so having someone like a paul who obviously has made music at the highest levels and is at the kind of tail end of his career in his life, use entitlement and actually find value out of it would just be a really nice feeling.

1:57:24Dan Lilienthal:The dream sort of like art, I mean, yeah, dance, you know, going back to just like a, someone that's at their end of their life, you know, kind of thing. And I think there's definitely that. Um, but for me, favorite artist changes so often right now, speaking about like the algorithm being this this building for us um i never used to listen to this artist named porches um his name's aaron and he did a show on our roof uh like a week or two ago and it was amazing and my entire apple music right now is his entire discography because he's been making music for 10 years i don't even know if he uses the app he does okay i spoke to him about it okay so i was be like maybe he's my dream no no i was gonna say he already uses it but he is a savant yeah like he is truly wow and i'm so excited about his music we have some things coming up with him that were idea it feels like we're like connected in some way and so i love his music i want him to keep if he uses the app i want him to keep using it and i'm very excited for where we're like some of the ideas that we're cooking up because it's really special i mean this is one of the coolest

1:58:39José Chayet:things about this life that we've designed for ourselves is that literally i mean we listen to music all the time we can be listening to a new artist right like for example there's this new artist named ryan brazil right who's a really sick new popping artist still doesn't have that many listeners but is rising a lot and we could literally just dm them from the untitled instagram and be like yo i love your music and they answer us i love untitled my entire life is on untitled so let's do something it's like i love you yeah it's just cool it's just like it's just like uh It's like, it's very, yeah, it's very nice.

1:59:13José Chayet:I have some brackets for you guys. We can speed run through. Oh, cool. Cool. San Diego or Mexico City? San Diego. San Diego. The Beatles or Frank Ocean? The Beatles.

1:59:36Dan Lilienthal:Frank Ocean. All right. Warhol or Duchamp? Duchamp. Warhol.

1:59:43José Chayet:Drake or Kendrick?

1:59:47Dan Lilienthal:You're catching me at a specific time with that question.

1:59:51José Chayet:I was going to say Universal because they signed both of them.

1:59:58Dan Lilienthal:Right now, I'm going to go Drake. but i love both yeah and i was kendrick during the beef so wow wow you know it's possible it's like the answer was not my drake answer was not about the beef it was about like what music am i listening to right now yeah yeah i'm gonna say drake outside of the universal common uh record store art museum art museum yeah art museum but but record store will usually be all love art museum will be like either fucking obsession or like, what the fuck is this? Like all this sucks. I don't like have a vinyl player at home.

2:00:41José Chayet:I very rarely listen to vinyl. We have a vinyl player in the office, but still don't really use it much. You know, my music consumption happens on Spotify or on YouTube. So a record store, while very cool, like honestly, it doesn't mean that much to me. You know, and that's a weird answer coming from someone who's obsessed with music. Whereas an art museum, like I don't consume art on my phone. Like I'm not like scrolling like different like webpages, seeing like new art and learning about it. You know, so art museum really is much more of a special experience. Well, maybe on that note, studio or live show?

2:01:14José Chayet:What's happening in the studio? Are we playing music or are we watching someone make music in the studio? You're watching. Watching someone make music in the studio versus watching someone perform a live show. I'm going to say studio. I guess that's on brand.

2:01:28Dan Lilienthal:we are going to really do a festival one day that blurs the line between production and performance so like there's like kind of like it's like is it are they making music are they performing so we'll get there but i'll um in the spirit of that i'm going to go with studio for now

2:01:44José Chayet:all right to lean into that uh blink 182 or brockhampton blink 182 blink 182 Steve Jobs or Walt Disney? Steve Jobs. CD or cassette? Or I guess vinyl? CD. CD. You guys like CDs. CDs are not totally in vote, but there's something about the CDs. I mean, CDs for me personally were the first music that I owned. Like I had the fucking huge-ass binder, where you would just go through the CDs, whereas vinyl, no, and cassettes, neither. So if someday, hopefully in the far future, hopefully never, but maybe in the far future, Untitled ceases to be, what impact do you think, would you hope that you had on musicians and on music?

2:02:35You know, that thought rarely enters, I think, both of our brains right now.

2:02:41Dan Lilienthal:But sometimes that thought does kind of come up. just racing thoughts sometimes you'll catch it for a second and I am so at peace I'm sure Dan is too with what we've done so at peace in fact talking about the 13 year old kid that's now 16 and made his music the archives the work all of the music that people have made over the last few years um it's making its way into pr management companies record labels the stories behind how songs were made are all stemming from untitled and similar to get back taking 50 years for those stories to come to fruition i don't even know what stories are going to come out of it but But Dan and I did not start Untitled to create the most game-changing technological innovation of its time.

2:03:46Dan Lilienthal:We didn't start an AI company. We didn't start an energy company. We didn't start the types of companies that right now people are talking about as the multi-trillion dollar markets. We started it because we're obsessed with music and we're obsessed with each other. And we really wanted to make something that we were proud of. And we've done that already. And now we want to take it to the next level. And now it's all just time to like, what would you do if you weren't afraid kind of vibes. But in terms of that question, you know, we are very at peace with whatever, whenever that thought, which rarely comes up, comes up, you know, it's a very peaceful engagement with it.

2:04:25José Chayet:yeah i mean i think that i know for a fact there are many albums and songs that wouldn't have existed without untitled for sure you know i know this is a bold statement and i can't qualitatively say anything specific right now but i just know that you know because of the types of messages the types of ways that people describe untitled like it's pretty bizarre to see the messages that we get from our users. It's almost as if we're an artist and we're getting messages from fans saying how their song changed their life. We get messages like that all the time. And now, honestly, we take it a bit for granted, but it's very powerful.

2:05:08José Chayet:And it's clear that we built something that has helped people express themselves in ways that they couldn't before. So that's the one thing. But I think the other thing I would say, which is similar to what Jose is saying, like I think something that we both love and our favorite artists is that they like constantly reinvented themselves, right? Like the best artists, like from one album to the next, like constantly reinvented themselves. Bob Dylan goes electric, you know, like that type of vibe. And I think we're in that right now where we like made like a hit freshman album. You know, we did it.

2:05:41José Chayet:We did something amazing. We did everything that we wanted to do when we were kids. And now it's time to like make like the sophomore album, right? and make like the next big one. You know, there's many analogies you could say, you know, like it's time to burn the ships, you know, and like build the next thing. And I think some of our investors will be happy about the way we're thinking about the future, but we really are in that mindset. So it's like almost like shed the past, don't think about what we've done before. Like now let's just think ahead. One final, very cliche or silly question, but how do you know when something is ready for a title?

2:06:21José Chayet:I don't think you do. Like, I think it just like, it's like.

2:06:25Dan Lilienthal:It's like you call time. Yeah. Like on your podcast right now, it's like, yo. There's like, it's like constraints, literally. Yeah. I think that's what the, honestly, that's one of the beauties of the past.

2:06:36José Chayet:You know, when we actually had to like print CDs and like press vinyl is that there was like a forced constraint. It's like. Necessity is another one. You know, we're going to spend millions of dollars printing this thing. we're going to spend millions of dollars distributing this thing like this thing needs to be ready by this day yes and it all needs to be decided on it's deadlines you know something that we talk a lot about internally like how we set an engineering culture that has deadlines um you know back in the day when everything was so physical you know we created that constraint

2:07:02Dan Lilienthal:and that led to decisions having to be made yeah nowadays it's more more difficult not to discount some people that have like created these like amazing concept albums or like they like imagine something and it was always the same thing from the beginning but yeah i think a lot of music a lot of works are yeah you know i do think that it's just use use constraints to your advantage and get out of the way i mean oftentimes many artists like the first the title of their song

2:07:32José Chayet:is like the first the first thing that came up in their head when they were saving the session on ableton or even like what the voice memo was called or in our case you know we knew that that was going to happen we knew there was going to be many artists that like didn't want to notion wait notion yeah oh yeah oh that's a yeah it's a great segue so the the name untitled without the brackets when it first came into into fruition was because when we first started the company we set up a notion right to like start organizing documents and whatnot and because it a little real yeah because we didn't have a name for the company yet we just put untitled hq that's it and then as we were thinking about what the name for this company should be.

2:08:12José Chayet:You know, I think it was saying ready-made. I think it was saying whip. And there's been many times in the last six years that after the company was originally founded that we were like debating the name again. But anyways, in that first week that we started the company, you know, we kept going back to this notion. We kept seeing the name untitled. And they're like, wait, that actually might be the perfect name. And the coolest part is that as the company has evolved, the more we've discovered why it's the perfect name. It's almost like God gave us the name. Yep. And then, you know, he's like, yo, you need to go figure out why it's called that.

2:08:46José Chayet:Live into your destiny. Yeah. Gentlemen, thank you so much. This was wonderful.

2:08:50Dan Lilienthal:Thank you. This was awesome. That's all I got. You're the best.

2:08:52José Chayet:Thank you for listening to my conversation with Dan and Jose. And thank you to Notion for presenting Dialectic. Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work that people like Dan and Jose a few years ago at the very beginnings of Long Journey, all the way up to larger organizations used to collaborate and run their businesses. Today, having a place where everyone on your team is on the same page, it's working off the same information, and now your agents have direct access into as well is truly powerful. Notion has also transformed itself in the last year to become truly native for working in the AI era.

2:09:26José Chayet:That starts with custom integrations around AI, but also includes custom agents, little guys who work in your workspace, Notion workers, which are part of their large developer platform that allows for fully custom integrations with all of the AI tools that you use and allow things to run 24-7 even while you sleep. In many ways, it's allowed Notion to become something like an operating system for your business to run and work with AI. You can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. If you don't use Notion or haven't tried it in a while, I would encourage you to check out all of the leverage and power that comes from the modern version of Notion.

2:10:04José Chayet:And maybe even create a new blank page, perhaps with a collaborator, and attempt something ambitious. With that, thank you for listening to Dialectic, and I will see you next time.