music-production
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Jay Kurahashi-Sofue Wants Money to Move Like Music
An art-history graduate turned crypto marketer has spent a decade translating difficult systems into stories people can use. At Eco and SONARA Records, his two worlds now run on the same principle: remove friction, then let the work travel.
The $4,000 Box That Taught Music to Bend Time
Eventide began with a cramped studio, a missing tape operator and a box full of improvised electronics. Fifty-five years later, its best business trick is still the same: turn a technical constraint into a sound musicians did not know they wanted.
The Company That Turned Its Dad's Studio Gear Into a Billion Knobs of Software
Bill Putnam Sr. helped invent the modern recording studio. Fifty years later his sons rebuilt the company in his name - and turned his glowing tubes into code that runs on a million laptops.
Gregg Lehrman
Gregg Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Output, the Los Angeles music software company whose plugins and instruments turn up in records by Billie Eilish, Beyonce, Coldplay, Kendrick Lamar and scores like Stranger Things and Game of Thrones. A Cornell-trained composer who cut his teeth assisting Hans Zimmer and became Universal Publishing's youngest executive producer at 26, Lehrman built Output in 2013 because the creative tools he wanted as a working musician did not yet exist. He bootstrapped the company for seven years before raising a $45M Series A from Summit Partners in 2020, and built Arcade, one of the first cloud-based music plugins.
Splice
Splice is a cloud-based music creation platform that turned the sample pack into a streaming service. Its subscription gives producers royalty-free access to millions of human-made loops, one-shots, presets, and MIDI files, plus rent-to-own pricing on premium plugins and an expanding suite of AI tools (Create Mode, Variations, Magic Fit) that compensate the original sample creators each time their sound feeds a new track.
Kakul Srivastava
Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the cloud-based music creation platform powering millions of producers worldwide with sample libraries, plugins, and AI-powered tools. A mechanical engineer turned product visionary, she grew Flickr from 37,000 to 60 million users, led product at GitHub and Adobe's Creative Cloud, and co-founded the enterprise app studio Tomfoolery. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025 and Billboard's Women in Music Executives list three years running, she champions a philosophy that technology should empower artists — not replace them.