How AI Is Reshaping Business and Who Will Win | Oscar Höglund (CEO, Epidemic Sound)

In this episode of Silicon Valley Girl, Marina Mogilko sits down with Oscar Höglund, CEO and co-founder of Epidemic Sound, the $1.4B music platform powering more than 3 billion daily views worldwide. Oscar shares the frameworks behind scaling a global company, including how to truly understand value chains, why AI should be used to democratize professional tools, and why the “Three Whys” analysis matters more than rushing into AI products. He also breaks down what founders often get wrong when building with AI and how to think long term while scaling fast. More from the Silicon Valley Girl: Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Marina Mogilko?

  The world is crazy right now. You're building a company in a very competitive market. How do you stay sane?

• 0:31Speaker 02

  If I were to boil it down into one word, it's

• 0:34Marina Mogilko?

  This is Oscar Hoglund, the co-founder and CEO of Epidemic Sound, who grew a $1.4 billion company behind 3 billion views on social media every single day.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  One of the most important things that we ever did was trying to understand value chains.

• 0:50Marina Mogilko?

  Can you explain value chain?

• 0:51Speaker 02

  If you understand the value chain you are in, you can get leverage. And leverage in my world is with a small amount of input, you can get a huge amount of output.

• 0:59Marina Mogilko?

  With more data on viral content than almost anyone, Oscar is building an AI that will change everything. But success came at a price, the darkest moment that almost made him walk away.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  My wife said, this doesn't work anymore because our life now is better when you're not here.

• 1:17Marina Mogilko?

  Oscar rebuilt everything after that night. Now he breaks down the framework any founder can apply. How to scale bigger, make more money, and avoid the mistakes that cost him everything.

• 1:28Marina Mogilko?

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. I have Oscar from Epidemic Sound today. Oscar's company is behind 3 billion views on social media every single day, and that's just YouTube, right?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:42Marina Mogilko?

  So you know a thing or two about going viral. Have you seen any patterns behind videos that stand out, that use your music? Is there anything like, oh, this is happening right now?

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Well, first off, thanks for having me. And then to answer your question. We soundtrack huge amounts of online video every single day across all platforms. And so we're privy to see a lot of different trends. I think that what's at the core of all of those trends, however, is like a very philosophical thing, which is content creation and going viral is ultimately about helping create meaningful human connections. And so what we do is we facilitate creativity and we help spark interest.

• 2:26Marina Mogilko?

  Do you see any correlation? Like if I'm a YouTuber, because I use music, but I feel like the way I use music is like, okay, I was at Ed Sheeran's concert yesterday. Let me just use Ed Sheeran. Like, and that the way it works for me, but I'm trying to understand the mechanics. Like, do you see anything like, oh, this jazz music performance better with this? Like, have you noticed something while analyzing that data?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Ultimately, what you're trying to achieve with music, as we said on the outset, is you want to help create an emotion. And this is similar to common belief. If you only use commercially well-known music as a storyteller, as a person looking to help create a specific feeling, you abdicate from that power because you don't know exactly who's had what kind of experience with a nine-inch nail track or an Ed Sheeran track, regardless of how romantic the track might be or how full of energy it might be. Oh, I'll share one interesting trend which we saw a few years ago, which was coming out of COVID. I don't know what the American expression is, but I think it's called comfort food. As if you're, if you're feeling down, you'll eat a bucket of ice cream to make you feel good.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  And we could literally see in the world that there was a world where the world was feeling low post-COVID and there was a lot of comfort food going on. So a lot of music, which was very reassuring, calming, warm, classical music had a huge spike because people wanted to feel reassured. It's gonna be okay.

• 3:54Marina Mogilko?

  Have you seen any like zero to one examples where creators came with not a lot of views? Then they added music and boom, it started exploding.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  To be quite honest, we see that all the time. When there is a unique and distinct connection between what's being said visually and then what's being said from an audio perspective, when that creates. Like either an extreme symbiosis or an extreme dissonance. But there's something which people find fascinating. There was a story that I heard many, many years ago, which relates to the crosses, right? And so the background was that one of my co-founders was having lunch uh with a tabloid editor. Um and this is many, many years here in downtown Stockholm. And so uh the tabloid editor was eating and looking at my colleague. And he said, have you understood this the crosses?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  My colleagues go like, the crosses, what do you mean? And he said, well, humans are drawn to crosses in the sense that if on my tablet, if I put a very famous um sports star and they talk about their sports success, nobody cares. It was okay. However, if I put that sports star on the front of the magazine and they tell me about that they're battling um alcoholism or some kind of substance abuse, nobody's anticipating that that's gonna happen. And so people are immediately drawn to something where there's a cognitive dissonance. And so that's like, that's something about humanity and the nature of being human. And then my co-founder was like, wow, that's insightful.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  I don't know what to do with that information, but I'll save it for a rainy day. And so years passed and then uh my co-founder, who's a serial entrepreneur, his name is Zach. He was running one of the biggest uh commercial TV broadcasters in northern Sweden. And he was their head of content. At the time, they were looking to go from being a small insignificant player to try and break through and become the big broadcaster of their time. And they had tried many things, they'd struggled. And then eventually they decided to go all in on this one format. And the format was the most commercial TV show you can imagine. It was an entertainment show. It was designed for Saturday slots at eight o'clock. And it was all about um two teams battling it out together.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  And it had been engineered in such a way that the show was meant to be great for men, women, young, old. There was adventure, uh there was a com- uh an element of. Competition, you could be eliminated, there was danger, there was humor. They basically created almost like a Frankenstein. They put together different parts. And they engineered the most commercial show you can think about. But the show needed a front runner, somebody who was gonna be the face of the most commercial show ever. And that this broadcaster, their entire future was betting on this show because it was incredibly expensive. And so my co-founder was put back to the point in time where he was thinking about the lunch that he had. Like, I need to create a cross, something that people are excited about.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  And he said, okay, what's the polar opposite of the most commercial thing ever? And he thought about, and this was back in Sweden. And so we have this incredibly beloved cross-country skier. His name is Gudus Van. He's from the north of Sweden. And he's about as far from commercial television as you can imagine, always wearing a hat, always in the bush and always out skiing. And he said that this guy has to be the front runner of the show. It makes no sense whatsoever, but if I've ever felt a cross in my life, this is one of those. So he suggested to his boss, they all think that he's had a stroke. And they said, this is not gonna happen. And he says, it has to happen or I'm gonna quit. I didn't want him to quit. And so they put him on the show.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  This was a show that altered the course of history in Swedish TV production. It became the most popular show ever. It still runs ten years later. And it's one of those is crosses. And I bring it up because I think that that's the role that music can play as well. I think that when music really sets something apart. And when you see huge engagement, virality and things exploding. It's when music can play the role of a cross. You can tell a visual story and a different audio story. Building out crosses, I think, is incredibly important when you build businesses, when you build podcasts, when you tell stories.

• 8:13Marina Mogilko?

  And you're, are you building a tool for that? I was talking to your CTO and I think he mentioned something, if you can talk about it, because this is fascinating for me. Because we still can't figure out music progression. I have amazing editors, but I feel like we have to have an additional person on the team. Which, you know, is, it's expensive, but if we could have a tool that could analyze the video and tell us like, hey, this is where progression needs to start. This way you pause.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  So. If I were to frame it, I'd say the following, what we're trying to do is we wanna try and usher in a new world where everyone who's a storyteller, whether or not you're a two hundred person editing team and a full production, or if you're a solo entrepreneur, we feel that it's about time such that everyone gets access to same kind of tooling and a level playing field, such that you would want recommendations, like a music supervisor, supervisor, somebody who can help you edit, somebody can help you understand when music makes sense, when it doesn't, sound effects, how you master, how you make it all come together. Historically, that's been incredibly expensive and difficult to pull together.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  But we've found that we've come to an inflection point now where we have the roster of music, the roster of catalog, customers and the understanding of the platforms out there, such that we're very, very confident now that we think that A I has an incredibly important role to play here, such as an unlock. It's never gonna be the case that A I could or should replace the human connections, but it can play a crucial role in facilitating that. And so what we're able to see now is we can accumulate huge amounts of data in terms of, this is the music that we have at hand, these are all the artists, this is all the art that we work with, and we've known historically over time, this is how it's performed, this

• 10:03Speaker 02

  is where there's engagement, this is where there is feedback, and we can start to play that back individually to content creators, such that we're gonna be in a position where basically everyone has access to all of these insights. And so you can start to utilize services which were previously only made available if you had huge budgets. And so this is gonna help you analyze, how is my own video performing, the music that I've used, what are my peers using, what are the different platform trends?

• 10:34Marina Mogilko?

  So when is it gonna happen?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  So this is something that we are working on as we speak. We've already started to release quite a few tools within this area. So we released A I voice a few months ago, we've released the opportunities to alter the length of the track such that, that was actually a pretty big breakthrough because historically, the way that an editor has had to work is if you found a track that you liked, you would typically have to re-edit your content, your story, to fit the track, because it was very cumbersome to try and do it the other way around. We've now gotten to a point where we can actually do the opposite such that you have an edit, you're super happy, the story works, you've cut it in the way you want. You have this incredible track, but it turns out it's one minute too long or it's a little bit too short.

• 11:20Marina Mogilko?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Well, you can now use our AI tools to use that track. So allow for the artist's track and vision to be slightly adapted such that it fits better to the actual stories that you're looking to make and that you have in your head.

• 11:34Marina Mogilko?

  So can you give advice to a creator or maybe a small business, someone who is doing some content for their business, uh, what are the steps that they should take to increase the views, to create this emotional connection with their brands?

• 11:46Speaker 02

  I think the first job to do is, okay, let's establish what would I like to sound like? What are the values? What are the core stories I'm trying to tell? And then using that insight, that's when you come to Epidemic, right? And so you come to the platform, uh, create a free account. And then you can start to use the tools to look at your videos. We would come with suggestions. You tell us, this is my channel, this is the direction I want to go. And we then can aggregate huge amounts of data to determine that this is where we think that you're going. And then we can start to serve you suggestions. And the more we interact with you, the more we get to know you and the better our suggestions can become.

• 12:22Marina Mogilko?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  And then I think it also comes down to being, I love the term being a ferocious learner. And so I think as a storyteller, as passionate as you tend to be about the stories you want to tell, I think you should be similarly about who do I look up to? Who else sounds or feels or creates that emotion, that connection? And then from that information, we can derive a lot of insights as well and help build recommendations around that too.

• 12:45Marina Mogilko?

  So I I heard you say, uh, when you build a product, you start with a feature.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 12:50Marina Mogilko?

  Then it becomes a product, then it becomes a marketplace.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:53Marina Mogilko?

  I absolutely love that because as someone who loves building companies, it's really hard to start when you think about your company, oh, I'm gonna build the next marketplace. But it's really easy to think about your company when you think, I'm gonna build a feature, which is going to make people's lives easier. Can you talk about Epidemic Sound, how you built it out?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Uh, so first off, that quote's not mine. I've heard it and I've used it profoundly, so I I.

• 13:17Marina Mogilko?

  I love it. I I've heard it from you, so for me it's your.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Feature product platform.

• 13:21Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  And so in the early days when Epidemic launched, uh, I would a hundred percent argue that we were a feature. We were a feature in that we were a one-trick pony. We were a nice-to-have and not a need-to-have. And the initial innovation that we came up with was that we were five co-founders. We came from storytelling, we'd made TV shows, but we saw earlier than most that the internet was transforming. It was moving from a world which was initially very tech-centric. We would anticipate that there's going to be a picture component to this, but over time, we were utterly convinced that everything online is going to be video-centric. But we also knew, coming from traditional TV production, that most problems could be

• 14:02Speaker 02

  solved, bar the music one, because music was a very complex legacy business. It had evolved over time. And despite best intentions, it was a complex beast where it was very difficult to clear music, to use it in television, and bar impossible to use it online, where consumption would happen instantaneously all over the world. So we were pulling out the little hair that I had left and saying that this needs to be solved. And so step one for us was a legal innovation. We took a step back and we said, the traditional music industry hinges on representation, such that a track that's created has multiple interests. There is a producer, there's an artist, there's a songwriter, there are labels, there are

• 14:46Speaker 02

  publishers, there are PROs, and they all contribute with fractional pieces of value. They all feel entitled to the upside, but nobody has like final say. Nobody can determine how or where this track gets used. And they have two things in common. They all sort of hate each other with a passion, quite often, because they have very competing views in terms of who's contributed most value, and they all have veto rights, such that if one party was unhappy with any commercial deal, the track was made void and you couldn't use it in your video, it couldn't go on YouTube or on TikTok and other places. And so at its core, our initial like big innovation was Let's move away from a model of representation to one of ownership. And the only way of doing that is by doing right by artists.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  So we said, we'll start to pay handsomely upfront and acquire all of the rights. We make sure that we keep the artist whole because we think that if we can build a huge compelling catalog of amazing music made specifically for soundtracking content, bringing stories to life, we think that will be a huge breakthrough. Because we can then be the only provider in the world which has a complete catalog, where we can reach out to storytellers and say, hey, this is similar from everyone else. We have a hundred percent of all the rights here. So we can indemnify you and say, you can use this for all of your content across all platforms across all of the world. And epidemic exploded, like it was instant product market fit. But we were a one-trick pony.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  And that's what I mean by we were a feature. We were nice to have, but we were more like a vitamin, which is great if you take your vitamin in the morning. But if you forget.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus.

• 16:50Speaker 04

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• 17:19Marina Mogilko?

  You still live, yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  You you wanna be something which is a necessity. And so the first innovation, the first part of the journey was being a feature. And so what we did, number two, is we said, let's complicate, let's complement the legal innovation with software. Let's make sure that we come a sound tracking platform. We wanna be at a point where we understand our customers so well that they cannot think about editing a video without having all of our tools made available to them. And so that was point number two. That's when we became a product. We realized that, okay, we're past feature, we're a product now. We're integrated into, we work with millions of content creators. We soundtrack seventy percent of all the world's biggest YouTubers. And that was our version of getting to a product. The third point was, how do you become a platform?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  How do you get to a point where there are more people seeing value and providing value through the infrastructure that you've built? And so about six months ago, we realized that we're having our Amazon moment. And what I mean by that is, there was probably a point in time where people at Amazon said that, okay, we've been building out the best tools, the best infrastructure for years to help our business grow, to help our business scale, to be insightful. We've developed processes and we've hired people such that our infrastructure is amazing. Why don't we open this up as a product for the rest of the world,

• 18:50Speaker 02

  such that other people can scale using our internal infrastructure? A version of that discussion probably happened. They decided to call it AWS and the rest is history. So everyone got access.

• 19:03Marina Mogilko?

  The most profitable product that they have.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  That wouldn't surprise me. But AWS was the result of an internal tool that was so good that they turned it into a platform and everyone started using AWS to power and to scale their businesses. Now, how does that relate to us? Well, six months ago, we realized we've gone to a point where we are probably. The best positioned, we have the most amount of data, we have the most sophisticated uh group of employees, we built the most amount of proprietary um data stack such that we understand better than anyone else how music travels online, what kind of emotions it make, how it can commercially make or break content creators, where uh music could

• 19:46Speaker 02

  and shouldn't be launched um and in what order. And we said, I think that this is our platform moment. We should probably open up similar to what Amazon did. And we said, we're called Epidemic, so let's call it Antidote. So we become a platform for helping both storytellers and artists and people who have IP to connect to each other. From a tactical perspective, one of the most important things that we ever did was trying to understand value chains.

• 20:17Marina Mogilko?

  Can you explain value chain?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Before we had a product which was good enough for online creators, we started in our local vicinity, which was broadcasting in the Nordic. We realized that there were roughly about five thousand freelance editors in Sweden sixteen years ago when we launched the company. No matter how hard we racked our brains, we couldn't come up with a plan to reach, let alone persuade five thousand freelancers to use our music instead of everything else out there. And so we needed to understand, like, what was the ecosystem? And it turned out the following was true in Sweden back then. We realized that, yes,

• 20:59Speaker 02

  there are five thousand freelance editors, but they're freelancers. And there are a total of fifty production companies that produce the vast majority of all the TV shows in Sweden. And we said, okay, can we, can we entertain the idea of reaching out to fifty production companies and trying to persuade them? And the answer was still, no, like, we don't have enough clout. And then we took another step in the value chain. And we said, okay, of the fifty production companies, who do they work for? And it turns out that there were four major broadcasters who were commissioning the vast majority of all the shows from the fifty production companies and from the five thousand editors. And we

• 21:39Speaker 02

  said, okay, can we pull together four meetings with four major broadcasters? And the answer was yes, of course we can. And because we understood their pain points, the following happened. Like all of the four deals within like weeks, as I remember it was probably months, they all closed. And they said that you've understood where we're heading, we're on the journey.

• 22:01Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Our catalog at the time was tiny, but the vision was right, the empathy and the customer centricity was there. So we signed multi-year deals with all of these broadcasters.

• 22:11Marina Mogilko?

  Fascinating.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Day number two, what they did is they said that because all of the revenue from the production companies come from us. They called the meeting the day after and they summoned fifty production companies to come and meet Epidemic.

• 22:25Marina Mogilko?

  They did the work for you.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  And then the week after, the fifty production company booked fifty separate meetings where they summoned five thousand editors. And say that if you want to make any of our shows, you have to come meet Epidemic because they're a new kid in town.

• 22:38Marina Mogilko?

  Wow.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  And so like, that's how I came to understand the power of understanding. If you understand the value chain you are in, you can get leverage. And leverage in my world is with a small amount of input, you can get a huge amount of output.

• 22:54Marina Mogilko?

  I love this story. Uh, is that also how you hire people? Cause your team is amazing.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 23:01Marina Mogilko?

  Your product officer used to build the initial Amazon app. You have ex co-CEO of Klarna.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:09Marina Mogilko?

  I was like reading through the list and I'm like, this guy knows how to hire.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:13Marina Mogilko?

  Can you uh, give us a little secret?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Well, first of, thank you. I tend to agree. Um, I have a very strong belief in a few things, obviously. But in terms of philosophy, when you hire, I only believe in hiring people smarter than myself. Because I fundamentally want to hire smart people to tell me what to do. Again, taking impressions from others who've said this before me. But I strongly feel that if I'm the smartest person in the room, we're all doomed. And so I need to make sure that I have other people who are way smarter than myself.

• 23:45Marina Mogilko?

  And then you find the.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Yes, and then you find the crosses. Exactly, and then you find the crosses.

• 23:50Marina Mogilko?

  Love it. And you don't believe in hustle culture as a Swede, right?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  No.

• 23:55Marina Mogilko?

  Because what I've seen from the last weekend when we spent time with your company, we're doing snaps, we're eating crayfish. So you're proving it's actually possible to build a billion dollar company without having to hustle all the time. And everyone is relaxed. What do you think is wrong then with American culture? Why is in the US, you're gonna have to hustle?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I love the US. I deeply respect US culture and I take a lot of inspiration. I try and mix the best of as many worlds as I can. I studied at Wharton in the US and there was this term I learned, which is being a ferocious learner. And I really took that to heart. So I try and try and learn as much as I can, read as much, study as much as I can. And so where I come down on hustle culture and basically what you need to succeed. Because it's not as clear cut as I don't believe in hustle culture. I think that in order to be successful as an entrepreneur in general and as a storyteller in particular. My current best thinking, until I come up with something better, is that there are four components.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  I think it starts with talent. And I'm going to, as a hot take, I think this is the least important. And so you need to have talent when you start, but talent isn't enough. Talent is a ticket to ride and it allows you to participate. And it's less about talent in absolute terms, but more talent relative to your competitor set. Like, do you have an edge from a talent perspective? But that's just a starting point. Point number two, I think, is grit. Like, if I ever were to get a tattoo, Swedes are the most tattooed people in the world. Fun fact. Uh I have zero tattoos as of yet. I'm forty seven. It's not too late.

• 25:42Marina Mogilko?

  It's coming.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  If I get one, my favorite word, all categories, is relentless. I can have it on sweatshirts because it just reminds me, it's it's cousin to the word grit. And I think it's such an important component. So you need to start with talent. But then you need grit and you need to be relentless. You need to acknowledge and be willing to sacrifice. It's probably gonna take seventy, eighty hour weeks for many, many years before you even lift.

• 26:10Marina Mogilko?

  Did you have those weeks in your life?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, very much so.

• 26:13Marina Mogilko?

  So witnessing like fast hustle.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Yes, very much so. And so I think hustle can mean different things for different people. One version, like the harsh definition of hustle is dishonest. Hustle is saying that this is great, it's not, and then trying to sell. And so that's one version. I think hustle also means just going at it constantly all the time.

• 26:35Marina Mogilko?

  Seventy hour weeks.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so I, that's why I wanted to create some nuance. Because I think it's super important that you need to acknowledge that there is a lot of grit, a lot of relentless. And I think that that's, I rate that higher than talent. I, because talent is your ticket to play, but then grit on top of that, which you can choose. That's like a very important component of success. But then I think the third part is is lost on most people, and we alluded to it before. You need to acknowledge that in your career, in your line of work, in the industry you choose. There are tons of tastemakers, facilitators and gatekeepers. And you only identify, and let alone meet, a fraction of them.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  So there are so many people who have a say in your ultimate success and in your liftoff. And the only takeaway that makes sense for me is that you need to create a culture. You need to conduct conduct yourself as a person who other people want to succeed. Because they will have infinite amounts of opportunity to either help.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Or destroy your opportunity to grow. And the only way I've come up with to do that is to make sure that you are a person who is like a net provider in that when I'm dead on my tombstone, I think this is one phrase. This was Oscar, he gave more than he took. And I use that phrase all the time. I think as an individual, you should conduct yourself where you wanna make sure that you're always giving more than you're taking off the table.

• 28:08Marina Mogilko?

  I absolutely love that.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  So if you push that out there, and it's deeply selfish, because if you do that, it makes you feel good in the moment because it feels good to give, much more so than to get. It's selfish because it scales so incredibly well, such that I try and often when people reach out to me, like one way to prime yourself is that when I'm introduced to somebody that I've not met before, I just, the first thing I say is, hey, how can I help? It's just a reminder, also, hey, how are you or who are you? But hey, how can I help? And invite them to ask me to do something. Because if I can be helpful in any way, like not only will that compound, because suddenly, oh, that compounds over time. So I'll have hundreds and eventually thousands of people who are indirect backers of me and

• 28:50Speaker 02

  my colleagues and my company, cuz I've helped them, because when they, when they mention us, like, he's always so helpful. Yeah, they helped me do this, they didn't have to, they opened the door, they made an intro. If you do that enough times, there is gonna be, and you never know where it comes from, there are always opportunities when they have the, the chance to reciprocate. Can you recommend anyone? Like, we're doing this new Netflix show, who should we reach out to? Epidemic is great. I, I've spoken to them so many times, I can only endorse them. And so I think that you need to really sort of lean into that point. And it's, it's great because it gives you also a sense of, I'll give you another example, like a, a concrete way of doing that is introductions. Um, I pride myself in doing great introductions. I don't do them often, I do them about once a week, but if somebody wants an intro, I always do an open intro.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  So let's say that you wanna meet a friend. Mind here in the industry, of course, I'll reach out, are you okay? And then, are you okay? I'll do a little bit of homework. You can use chat GTP or something else, or just read up online. And then I take what I know and I do like two paragraphs. So I explain you in a serious, but also like a fun fact about you. And I'll take the other person also serious and then a fun fact, which I somehow weirdly relate to your first fun fact. And then you should meet. And then I also tend to write in there like, I love introducing smart people to each other because two things happen. One, the world is a better place when great people know each other. And two, when two smart people know each other and I'm the source of that, your genius reflects positively to me

• 30:19Speaker 02

  because you think about me in a better way.

• 30:22Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  And so I think that that's the third component. You just do that. And so we just had a great weekend together, same thing here. We just, we do great stuff and then we think that over time, we don't know how, but this is going to play out well.

• 30:35Marina Mogilko?

  Quick pause here. If you're enjoying this podcast, you will absolutely love my inner circle newsletter. So what I basically do is I take all the tips from these podcasts and I apply them to my personal life, to my investment portfolio and to my businesses, this media company and my language teaching business. Sometimes we get amazing results and I share our real tactics. Sometimes we don't and I share that too. Think of it as an insider version of this podcast. The link is in the description. Join my free newsletter to stay ahead. The world is crazy right now. You're building a company in a very competitive market. You know, the labels are after everything. How do you stay sane?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  If I were to boil it down into one word, it's discipline. I think that the best thing you can do in order to stay sane is be disciplined. I can give you a case in point. So my wife and I have three children, they're older now, but throughout the first 10 years of epidemic, discipline was the key. So. Everyone always, if you're an entrepreneur, finance people always want morning meetings. I would always say no to them because it was crucial for me. I knew that the likelihood of that pandemic being successful, if I ran the numbers, was very low. And so I knew that there was a chance for failure. And I said that I'm willing to bet on that, but I'm not willing to bet on my relationship with my family. And so I put guardrails in place. And I said that I never do meetings before nine AM.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  And because I always went up and took the kids to school, I had a bike. I would drive them to daycare, make sure that that was done. And it would be always to like the detriment of financial people, but they had to adapt to me, not the other way around. So I didn't do anything before nine. And then between nine and six, I would go at it work wise, like a crazy person. But then six, I have a function in my phone, stops working, shuts down. And between six and nine, I'm unreachable. I never do meetings, I never do exceptions. So Monday to Friday, that was the case. Go home with the family, have dinner, put the kids to bed, read a bedtime story. My wife is up in the morning, she's a superwoman, and then she falls to sleep around nine. That's when my phone starts working again, and that's when I did my second run.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  So I would work from nine to one in the night when the US got up or it was Asia. Oh, wow. And so I did a night run and then I'd go to bed. But then I would never work weekends, ever. What about travel? Uh, no, so I would typically travel during the weeks. So I'd, I'd keep the travels Monday to Friday. And then I made a big point of taking proper vacation in the summer. The hardest moment in my entrepreneur entrepreneurial journey was when I couldn't reconcile family life with business life. Our kids were young at the time. I'd been out traveling nonstop the entire year. It was probably my sixth or seventh trip to the US in that same year. And when I came back, um, my wife and I sat down and my wife said something to the tune of,

• 33:20Speaker 02

  this doesn't work anymore because our life now is better when you're not here. And that was without compromise or without any comparison, the darkest moment in my entire life. Um, day after I called my co-founder and said, I'm gonna quit. Uh, I get all stoked up when I talk about it. Um, and we made some incredible changes, like we rethought the business, I rethought my role. We made a ton of big changes and I was super close to quitting. Uh, cause I've always been family first. And as I said, I work to live, I don't live to work.

• 33:58Speaker 00

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• 34:23Speaker 04

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• 34:52Marina Mogilko?

  Is that when you discovered this discipline thing that works for you now? Especially when it comes to kids, right?

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yes, but it's true for exercise, like being disciplined. It's true for food and alcohol, like everything in moderation. But just having-

• 35:06Marina Mogilko?

  Sweets have a different understanding of moderation and alcohol.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Okay, alcohol, fair point. Alcohol, fair point. But otherwise, I think that, um, I think the discipline is the unsexy answer to success.

• 35:20Marina Mogilko?

  I love it.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  That's how you get somewhere.

• 35:22Marina Mogilko?

  What are your top three favorite AI apps?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Oh, so I'm a huge user of the default Google Switch within Gemini. ChatGPT use all the time. I think I'll stop there because I say these are the two where I'm investing most of my time now to make sure that I understand them. And more importantly, they understand me, so I get more and more value from them.

• 35:39Marina Mogilko?

  Playing with anything right now, like vibe coding or?

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Uh, yes, so I can't disclose too much, but from a vibe, vibe coding perspective, um, we think that there's a huge opportunity to be the default provider of music to vibe coders. Like, if you think about vibe coding, I think it's a beautiful thing because roughly what? 1% of the world's population can code. And what vibe coding is looking to try and solve for is how can you get the other 99% of the world's population to code? We think that within that world, like all of what they're building is currently muted. Like there's no music component to that. We think that that needs to change.

• 36:18Marina Mogilko?

  For someone who's willing to start a business using AI, what would be your one advice that they should stick to?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  One of the best frameworks I ever learned was when I was a mediocre management consultant. I worked for BCG for a few years and it was not my calling. Uh, I got the job. I did it. I learned a lot. Uh, but ultimately it wasn't for me, but they taught me a framework in terms of. Uh, do you know when you're allowed to call something an analysis, when you've analyzed something? So when you ask the question, why three times? And so the example is the following, there's this company that doesn't make money anymore. You need to understand like, why is that? Analyze it. And the only time you can call it analysis is if you dug down into why three times. Okay. So why is the company not making money anymore? You look at the revenue numbers. Have they gone down? The answer is no. You look at the cost numbers. Have they gone up?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Yes. Okay. So it's a cost question, like the costs have increased. That's why we're not making profit. That's the first why. Is why have the cost numbers gone up? You look at the inputs, are they at the, the same amount? Like, are we buying the same amount of, uh, input? The answer is yes. And you look at the unit cost. Is the unit cost the same? And you go, oh, no, the unit cost has gone up quite a bit. Okay. So it's not about the materials per se. It's about the unit cost having gone up. And then you ask the question like the third time, why have the unit costs gone up? And you go down and you analyze and you ask a number of questions and you realize that. Well, we used to have three providers and we would play them out towards each other and such that we were the market maker.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  But then one of our suppliers went into bankruptcy and the other two suppliers acknowledged that and they merged. So we have one supplier and they dictate the price. And so the answer is like, the reason why we're not making any money is because there's a cartel going on down here. And the, the solve is let's do a tender. We invite five other suppliers. And we introduce competition and then we'll start making money again. But you have to ask the question, why? Three down, three times down, and that's when you have an analysis. So in the age of AI, I think that. As a name implies, you have artificial intelligence, which is in abundance.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  I think you need to be really good at asking, like making an analysis of the different situations, like going down three steps. Why, why, why, why is this going to work? Why isn't it? Why is this? If you can understand that root cause and then you can deploy AI around that in order to help quickly serve or understand and build things. So complement the human condition, being curious and being rigorous and having discipline and then unleashing AI tools to help you understand and answer these questions as soon as possible to find inefficiencies and market opportunities.

• 39:01Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, before just rushing into an idea, just dig deeper.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Don't just go why, go why, why, why?

• 39:06Marina Mogilko?

  Love it. Thank you so much, Oscar. Oh my, that was amazing. That was so good. Thank you.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  I hope so. I hope it was okay.

• 39:15Marina Mogilko?

  Thank you. It was great.

• 39:17Speaker 05

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