How I Landed My Dream Job

For most of my life, I had dreamed of working in the music industry. The catch? I didn't see any jobs which didn't require either a) making no money (I'm not greedy, but I don't want to live in credit card debt), or b) fucking over the artists. The latter gave me more trouble than the former. In the traditional music model, where was there room? There wasn't.

Thank God for the internet.

But even among all the technologies out there claiming to enable and ensure artist success, one stuck out to me: Topspin--they weren't just building tools, they were building solutions for how artists could legitimately ignore the traditional label structure and make a living on their own. This is the story of how I landed my dream job with Topspin.

Earlier this spring, I noticed my idol Ian Rogers had made the shift from heading Yahoo! music to heading Topspin. Here was a guy with nearly limitless options in the digital music world, and he took a position with a stealth startup with a 3-page website. Really? Surely there must be more to it.

There was. The more I learned, the more I was enthralled. Topspin was founded by Peter Gotcher (who, among MANY other things, holds an Oscar and a Grammy for creating ProTools recording software) and Shamal Ranasinghe (who managed MusicMatch for many years, including their acquisition by Yahoo!) and described themselves as enabling bands to become their own businesses. I was intrigued, to say the least.

Doing a bit of research on LinkedIn, I discovered my friend Mike Harkey (with whom I had chatted extensively about my attempted startups NewkBox and Scenem) had been a business school classmate of Shamal's at Stanford. I asked Mike if he would be kind enough to pass along Shamal's contact info, and he was kind enough to give me a very nice introduction.

Unfortunately, my e-mail to Shamal ended up in his spam folder. Oops. Luckily, a few weeks and a phone call later, Shamal uncovered my e-mail and shot me one in return. I then did a phone interview with a manager and with Shamal.

Then silence. Topspin was in the process of moving offices, and Shamal told me they needed a bit of time before he could come back to hiring decisions.

Luckily, being the Ian-stalker that I am, I noticed Ian posted something about a job on Twitter, so I took that as a sign that I should call Shamal again. I did, he said he'd talk to Ian the next day. Well, the next day I also received a rather lucrative job offer from a consulting firm in Dallas, so I had to apply a bit more pressure to Topspin. Within 10 minutes of my e-mailing Shamal, Ian called me (surreal, yes), sang my praises for 8 minutes, and spent 1 minute telling me they wanted me to start tomorrow. The offer letter came in 10 minutes later, with a note from Ian requesting an "I <3 TYWHITE" t-shirt (as featured in picture above).

I was sold. But I had to be absolutely positively sure they were for real (keep in mind, they were still in stealth and hadn't publically revealed any funding), so I asked them to fly me out. They said absolutely and had only rushed the offer knowing I had to make a decision on the other job soon.

When I arrived in Santa Monica, I was greeted by Shamal and a sparse office that had more musical instruments than computers. As the employees trickled in, they were all smiling, kind, and smart. They had all read my blog, been to my website, and probably knew more about me than I know about myself. Even one guy who hadn't started yet, but swung by the office briefly, had checked me out. This was a tight-knit group who knew exactly what they were doing, both with computers and with other people. Sold.

I did lunch with Ian (how many people would pay how much money for that opportunity?), where we saw his idol (ironic?) ride by on a one-speed. It was storybook. He then layed out why he chose Topspin over all the other opportunities he had. Sold.

I took an afternoon break (while Ian, Shamal, and Peter ran off to a Billboard cover shoot) to wander around Santa Monica (and take a nap) before returning to the office to sign my contract. When I returned, Ian was chatting it up with my old friend from middle school DA Wallach, whose band, Chester French, is making quite a splash even before their album drops. Unbelievable.

I signed my contract and have never looked back. I started last week and it truly has been a dream come true. These people are brilliant, creative, and highly motivated to produce the best products on the market. It's everything the digital music business should be: beautiful, powerful tools that sit behind the scenes helping the artists build their relationships with their fans. While it's been a journey to get here, the true journey lies ahead, as we play our (hopefully sizeable) role in changing the music industry forever. I'm not sure I've ever been more excited to be a part of something.

Thanks to all who have helped me get this far, and to those who will continue to help along the path to the future.

My weekend in social media

Two interesting snippets from the weekend:
1. I came across my notebook from Junior year (two years ago, for those counting), which included notes from my radio show, "Middle School Dance." I noticed one point where I had asked my roommate Jared what the worst thing on the internet at that moment was. His answer? "Facebook's 'How I know this person' option." I agreed. At that point, that was the first sign we had that Facebook was becoming something bigger than a way to keep track of and interact with your closest of friends, mostly at your own school (not even all the schools had Facebook at that point; as I recall, High School Facebook caused the next uproar). Many of my friends are now very rare Facebook users for precisely these reasons: the original social graph made sense, and made sense in our context--the people we interacted with most online were the people we interacted with most in person. As connections became more and more distant, more and more people were turned off. As soon as coaches were found digging through athletes' personal photos online searching for incriminating evidence, nearly all the athletes significantly limited their Facebook use. Facebook has grown dramatically, but they've lost much of their core original audience. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's a bad thing or a worthwhile sacrifice.
2. I went to a bar with some friends this Saturday. None of us had been to the bar before, but we were wary because it had potential for being a "hot spot" and thus far too crowded for our liking. Turns out it was incredibly crowded, and one of the people in the crowd is a star of Gossip Girl (Chace Crawford? is that his name?). Anyway, as I pushed my way through the crowds to catch up to my friends, I overheard nearly constant chatter about Facebook. But this story isn't about Facebook. When Chace walked past, the girls I was with swooned. One spent the rest of the night (and probably longer) kicking herself for not jumping his bones. The other was on cloud nine because he brushed her chest as he squeezed past her in the crowd.
What was their first move upon leaving the bar? Telling everyone they know, of course! First a series of TXTs, then a phone call or two, update the Facebook status, then send a few more TXTs. This is precisely why Twitter, if they get their problems solved, will hit it big in the mainstream. The objective of all those TXTs and the Facebook status could have been accomplished with a simple TXT to Twitter saying something like "OMG Chace Crawford just touched my boob!" On the surface, Twitter messages are little more than Facebook status messages. The difference is in the response they elicit. While 95% of both just get read and passed by, there's that 5% there on Twitter that make people want to respond to each other--and Twitter gives them the mechanism to do so (either @(screenname) or direct messaging). Plus, if Twitter catches on for purposes like it did at SXSW last year (note to developers: geotagging will be BIG with Twitter), lots more people would have tried to cram themselves into that bar. If I were a bar owner, I'd be studying up on ways to get people to tell their friends about the bar via Twitter--it might not be necessary now, but will become a huge boon to word of mouth very very soon.

Mobile Social Interaction

Three of the hottest topics these days in the tech world are Twitter, mobile social networking, and the iPhone. For those who don't know a thing about these, let me take you on a quick overview.
Twitter is a microblogging network that allows you to blog in spurts of 140 characters or less, which allows you to blog via text message on your cell phone. You can also follow your friends and "tweet" at them, thereby holding conversations via blog. The big controversy right now is whether it will make the jump from the early adopters (tech people use it so incessantly that one of the hottest areas is building applications around Twitter and Facebook feeds) to the mainstream. The issue is that to get value from it, you need a lot of your friends to use it as well. But once you're all on it, it's horrendously addictive, to a point where the tech world has a crisis every time the servers go down (which is too often).
Mobile social networking is the movement to add physical location relevance to the functionality of social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc--though most talk on the social network scene is separate from the big guns in traditional social networks).
The iPhone has two big things coming soon: a developers platform (allowing anyone to create their own applications for the iPhone) was recently released, and those programs will be released soon; and there are loads of rumors about a 3G version (meaning faster data transfer for internet, plus potentially really good GPS) of the iPhone being released within a month, potentially with a price drop to $199.
Up til now, though, these conversations have been largely separate from one another. There are exceptions--TechCrunch wishes there were an iPhone-only social network, Twitter essentially acts as a stripped down mobile social network--but essentially these topics are discussed in their own realms. I take issue with that.
If I went into all the possible tie-ins and reasons, I'd be writing pages upon pages. Instead, let me posit my idea of a "killer app."
Picture an iPhone/mobile application that keeps track of where you are and adjusts accordingly. You can see where friends are and message them directly, or you can "tweet" (to borrow the Twitter term) from/about where you are. When you tweet, your message gets geotagged. All the public messages from that immediate area (adjustable on preference) would be accessible to anyone in that immediate area or to anyone searching for that area (thinking they might go there). Think of it as dynamic geospecific message boards.
If that doesn't immediately make sense, consider how Twitter first became popular: South By Southwest. People twittered about where the hot parties and shows were, other people picked up on those tweets and showed up to join the fun. Now translate that to everywhere.
You've got a few minutes away from a conference in another city and aren't quite sure what to do. Whip out your iPhone, launch the program, see what others in the area are up to, see if any friends (or friends of friends) are around, get geotagged Yelp reviews, etc. In the most active areas, you could even post a sort of "help me" question and anyone within your range could see any help out. You could also find a way to reward folks who were willing to receive and respond to TXT messages when those "help me" messages popped up near them.
There are, of course, also tie ins to media, being able to tweet photos and videos from anywhere (I would think someone will be making an app that lets you Twitter and automatically upload any attached video or photos to YouTube/Flickr). Fuzz just came out with a Twitter-like mashup with Seeqpod and Skreemr called "Blip" that lets you attach streaming audio to your tweets (follow me here: http://www.fuzz.com/blip/user/tygergolf), and I can only imagine that more will follow.
Personally, I struggle with Twitter simply because so few people I know are on it (if you are, hit me up at http://twitter.com/tygergolf). I think the way to bridge that gap is to build utility around it that makes it useful both to those who don't use it, and to those who are interested in using it, but don't have friends on it. The geotagging ability of the iPhone makes that possible, and can essentially turn it into a social network. I'm not the only one who sees this, but I think there are a number of ways to go about all this integration, and there will be a long tail with this sort of application if they are open enough.