My SoundCloud Journey
From Stockholm to Berlin to San Francisco
Earlier this year I quit my job as the VP of Platform at SoundCloud and moved back to Stockholm. Working at SoundCloud was a hell of a ride which began back in the summer of 2009. At the time, I’d just graduated from KTH and was doing some work at Propellerhead. I was dreaming about starting my own company after falling in love with entrepreneurship during my time at SSES. Through SSES, I’d also met Eric who’s the SoundCloud co-founder and CTO. We have a lot of shared interests and became great friends.
Knowing Eric was a good reason to frequently visit Berlin where SoundCloud is headquartered. I fell in love with the city and was lucky to experience one of the legendary rooftop parties in SoundCloud’s first office. The team was starting to grow and eventually I got an offer to join. The opportunity was perfect; a chance to join a music tech startup I really believed in, work with people I really liked, and finally make the move to Berlin. We agreed over the phone on a Wednesday and started working the week after.
When I joined SoundCloud, we were less than ten people in a scrappy office and the whole company was doing daily stand-ups together. My job was to build relationships with other companies, mainly music software makers, and get developers to hack on our API. There was so much to do and so much to learn. I loved it and was so excited about getting stuff done that I was almost running to work every day.
We thought we were the coolest thing since disco, but in the beginning it was really hard to convince other companies to partner with us. After all, we were just a small startup from Berlin with rapid growth but uncertain future. However, sending thousands of emails, doing hundreds of calls, taking tons of meetings, and traveling to as many conferences as possible, eventually started to pay off.
As we got bigger, things got a lot easier and eventually we reached a point where we couldn’t even handle all the incoming requests from potential partners. I learned the hard way that it takes time to build good relationships and get people to buy into your ideas, and that timing is super important when it comes to closing deals, so you have to be patient and persistent.
Since I was doing partnerships with other tech companies, I traveled a lot to the US. At a certain point, we needed to establish a permanent presence in the Bay Area, and it was natural for me to make the move to San Francisco and setup our new office there. I was of course stoked about the opportunity to work in SF and get a chance to build a small office from scratch.
It took some time to get things in order, but eventually we got the paperwork sorted, found a great space, and started bringing on new people. I got to obsess with things like office furniture, culture (introducing Friday fika), finding the right people, maintaining the connection to our other offices, and evangelizing SoundCloud in the bay area. It reminded me how naturally passionate I am when I get to coordinate things and craft them down to the details. In the end, things worked out great and I’m really proud of having brought the SoundCloud culture overseas and established so many great relationships in the US.
Over time, we expanded the platform team and scaled up our efforts, and over time we managed to connect the vast majority of music apps and a ton of different web services. We launched partnerships with companies like Apple, Twitter, and Facebook, and created a big developer community who built hundreds of hacks on the API. I was also part of the management team and an active contributor to the overall company strategy work.
Starting a company has always been close to my heart, and as things were running smoothly in SF, I felt the timing was right to leave and build something new. I can’t help loving to build things from scratch and I’m constantly looking for new challenges. In addition, taking some time off would give me a chance to charge my batteries and think about my longterm goals in life.
I’m super proud of having contributed to building a such a great company. Building a startup is an amazing experience that I really recommend. I don’t think there’s a better way to try and learn new things. I’ve learned so many great startup lessons along the way and now I want to take that experience and create something on my own.
A massive thanks to Alex and Eric for giving me the opportunity to support their mission and the freedom to do a great job, and to all the awesome people I’ve worked with along the way! I’ve had so much fun and learned so much.
