electronic-music
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The Synth That Took Nine Years to Ship
Tangible Instruments raised $94,713 on Kickstarter in 2015 to build a pocket melody machine. It shipped to backers in November 2024. Here is what took so long, and why people still wanted it.
Ian Asher
He was the first DJ to go big on TikTok, then a French singer's decade-old song became his loudest moment. Ian Asher on trusting his gut, ignoring the noise, and building a career that outlasts the algorithm.
CrowdVolt
CrowdVolt is a New York-based, Y Combinator-backed marketplace that lets fans buy and sell tickets to live events - starting with raves and EDM concerts - through a bid-ask model similar to StockX. Buyers name the price they are willing to pay, sellers set an ask, and trades clear automatically when the two meet. The platform handles secure payments and automated ticket transfers to cut fraud, inflated fees, and the opacity of the traditional resale market.
Sebastien Deguy
Sebastien Deguy is the founder of Allegorithmic, the company behind the Substance 3D texturing suite that became an industry standard across games, film, and design. After Adobe acquired Allegorithmic in 2019 he served as VP of 3D & Immersive, won a Sci-Tech Academy Award (2023) and an Emmy (2024), then left in 2025 to build content instead of tools. He now runs Sans Strings Studio in San Francisco, a digital-puppetry company chasing 'animation with a soul' through a real-time performance pipeline. He is also an electronic musician under the alias Matterflow and the author of a book on Allegorithmic's history.
Jason Cui
Jason Cui is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) investing at the intersection of foundational AI, developer tooling, and scientific platforms. A Harvard computer science graduate, he co-founded Jemi (acquired by Brat TV in 2023), led product at Databricks, and previously worked at Uber and Hulu. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2021, he joined a16z to back the infrastructure layer of the AI era, with bets like the $150M seed round for Inferact, the next-generation commercial inference engine built by the vLLM maintainers.