I'm leaving Udio
Letting go of my $500k software job and building in the age of fast fashion software
So...I’m leaving Udio
It was crazy working on the frontier of generative music, and I’m grateful for the experience. I had the chance to ship a mobile app, build experimental products like Moments (https://moments.fm), and do a bunch of crazy infrastructure changes. Many of the people on the team I’d regard as some of the smartest people I know (and helped me write Part 1 and Part 2 of my AI DAW tutorials). It's also been fun arguing online with music label shills who confuse a music label's shareholder value for musician value.
I left for a variety of reasons but lately, something else has been pulling at my attention.
I've been thinking a lot about the pace of software and LLMs being capable of generating really complex pieces of software. It really do be feeling like that Sam Altman quote that we’ve entered the the fast fashion era of SaaS. Ideas are cheap and unless a company has: a strong brand, a marketplace, a proprietary dataset, or hardware they don’t really have a moat anymore. A single developer can prototype and launch a product in a weekend that would have taken a VC-backed team months to build just a few years ago.
With all that being said, I’ve got a mix of “fast fashion” ideas and defensible ones that could be the next big thing. For the next little while, I'm taking some dedicated time off to dive into this idea. I'll be spinning up a bunch of my own software projects, partly to see what sticks, but mostly to get a better feel for this new creative landscape. I also plan on getting my hands dirty with some hardware projects that yearn to be realized. I want to build things.
btw the subtitle is a reference to this yt short my friend Ilias made years ago while working on Tapped. I got paid at Udio market rate for a developer in NYC.