The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 44 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Shulman: Using copyrighted works in AI training data is industry standard
“Yeah, we know that there are some copyrighted works in our training data. That's not illegal. It's stock standard for the industry. It's what every AI company does.”
Mikey Shulman: Human taste will outweigh technical skill in future art
“It's increasingly taste is the only thing that matters in, in, in art, and skill is going to matter a lot less because you're going to be able to make a lot of stuff And the people who are going to be recognized are people who are able to pick from the vast qu…”
Shulman: Most artists privately admit to using and loving Suno
“The vast, vast majority of artists that I speak to Behind closed doors admit that they use and love Suno.”
Shulman: Suno will survive even if it loses copyright lawsuit
“If this lawsuit goes to trial and we lose, it's obviously not good for us. The company, the company's not dead, but it's obviously not good for us. I don't think that's likely.”
Mignano: Suno has unlimited upside potential like YouTube or TikTok
“So we believe that Suno has, you know, I'm using this term loosely, but unlimited upside potential. You know, if you look back at the history of media on the internet, and you think about the generational platforms that truly democratized a medium, right? YouT…”
Lemkin: Skeptical of Suno's path to a $20 billion outcome
“You know, the rate at which that valuation doubled and you know, the twenty billion dollar outcome for it, I'm not smart enough to see it yet. So it feels a little bit to me like risk on, right?”
Shulman: Users Choose Suno for Product Quality, Not Model Size
“At the end of the day people will use Suno because it's a better product, not because there's a bigger, better, bigger model under the hood.”
Shulman: Requiring complex prompts is an AI product failure, not user failure
“Well, if it took a really complicated prompt and 1600 iterations, that's a failure of my product, not a failure of the candidate.”
Shulman: Scaling AI research headcount yields sublinear returns
“The machine learning team at Suno will almost certainly not scale as quickly as the software team, or said differently, I think research is not something that you can solve with scale. You can just throw more bodies and you'll get, you know, comparatively more…”
Shulman: The term 'prompt' will disappear within six to twelve months
“I hope that, you know, in, in six months from now, or 12 months from now, we're not using the word prompt. There are just far more intuitive ways to interact with the music, and we shouldn't be guiding you we should be listening to you if that makes sense.”
Shulman: Suno refuses API requests from generative AI video companies
“The vast majority of Gen AI video companies have asked us for an API so that they can have, you know, Suno music behind their AI videos, and the answer's always no.”
Shulman: Suno actively works with plenty of music industry incumbents
“And by the way, there are plenty of incumbents in the industry who do work with us.”
Stebbings: I passed on Suno's seed round over 1% ownership target
“I turned down sooner when David Frankl at Founder Collective introduced me at The Seed. You know what the lesson was there? Really interesting. I hope Mikey's okay with me saying this. I'm sure he is. It was a 250 K check or a 200 K check. And so the ownership…”
Jason Lemkin: AI music startup Suno retains only 20% of customers annually
“They just said they have, they only retained 20% of their customers in a year”
Shulman: Suno's GPU compute spend is several times its entire payroll
“It's the biggest thing by far. Yeah. It's a few times payroll.”
Shulman: Suno users pay to create music, not to listen to it
“The thing that people don't realize is that right now we've made something where people enjoy making music so much they are paying to create the music. This has nothing to do with listening.”
Stebbings: Consumers won't pay extra for newer AI models in five years
“I don't, I tweeted this yesterday actually because of this, sorry but I don't think in the future we will pay more for access to newer models. I think that is just a stage of the development cycle that we're in. In five years time we won't pay more for a bette…”
Shulman: Interactive music will drive consumer spending like video games
“I think if you accomplish all those things and if you make music interactive and you make music engaging people will pay for it like they pay for video games.”
Shulman: Suno's edge is audio representation, not model architecture
“Our competitive edge here has not been to innovate on the architecture, and has been to innovate on the, Audio representation.”
Shulman: Infinite AI supply lowers individual track value but increases music's overall worth
“I think it reduces the average value of any given piece of content, but I think it greatly increases the value of music to society or to any given person.”
Shulman: Suno Is the Only Place Aligning AI to Human Taste
“If you are interested in a different AI problem, in the problem of how do I align Models, not to objective truth, but to human taste. I think there's nowhere else to do it.”
Stebbings: Passing on Suno and ElevenLabs were my biggest mistakes
“So I look at like my biggest mistakes this year have been Suno, And 11 labs, and both of them I didn't do because they were small checks, probably like one percent each, and that didn't fit the model, and that was my lack of mental plasticity.”
Frankel: Suno's legal battles target training inputs while OpenAI's focus on outputs
“So the OpenAI challenge is on the output, right, the LLM. Suno, the challenge is on the input, and Suno's going back and saying, we're training on the open internet.”
Frankel: Suno experienced far lower dilution than Whoop due to rapid momentum
“Like we're so proud to be in both, but sooner, you know, sooner has been a very quick journey. So if you look at like how lower, how much lower the dilution is, part of it is just how quick the momentum of that has been versus a whoop, which is hardware took a…”
Mignano: Suno Driven by 'Creative Entertainment', Not Distribution or Monetization
“What is happening now in Suno is what Mikey and the team have been saying for a while and what I now believe it's that it's literally a new behavior. The team calls it creative entertainment. People are coming into Suno. They're making music for the pure joy a…”
Stebbings: Suno Raised $400M at $5.4B Valuation Led by Bond
“Suno the AI music creator company raised four hundred million and a 5.4 billion. Teasing first license model. Bond led that one. It was double the previous valuation just six months ago.”
Shulman: Suno chose to charge users from day one rather than stay free
“We made a decision to start charging from day one, which is like a little bit against the traditional wisdom of Silicon Valley of just like give the product away for free, scale, scale, scale.”
Shulman: Suno prioritizes user growth twice as much as revenue
“If you, like, you know, hold my feet to the fire, maybe I can give you a quantitative number of, I care about growth twice as much as I care about revenues.”
Mikey Shulman: Great AI software UI must enable novel workflows
“The UI should just in no way resemble what it does today. But I think good UI is just like, what did you enable that is like completely not doable in the old pattern?”
Mikey Shulman: Suno aims to make musicians, not just music
“You know, I like to think we're not making music, we're making musicians.”
Shulman: Suno's primary user success metric is hitting the day-one paywall
“The most salient one is actually just like, did you hit the paywall your first day? Because even if you didn't go through it for whatever reason, if you hit the paywall, you just enjoyed the last 10 or 12 minutes of your life, and I know I did something good t…”
Mikey Shulman: Suno pays employees less than OpenAI does
“Let's be honest, I will pay you less than OpenAI will pay you, and I need to find a reason to convince you to come join us.”
Shulman: Suno Will Not Reach Sub-Second Generation Speed Anytime Soon
“And so I don't see us getting to one second anytime soon, but I think the crossover that you're talking about, we're still kind of far away from.”
Shulman: Suno topped generative AI corporate card spending on Ramp
“We were at the top of what people put, the gen AI products that people put on their ramp credit cards, which means that like lots of, and so we were surprised people are using this for Cold outreach for sales, for marketing, for all kinds of stuff.”
Shulman: 90% of Suno traffic migrated from Discord to web in five days
“And so we released this app, we released this web app, which is not even the full functionality of the Discord bot in November, and it takes five days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. Five days.”
Mikey Shulman: Creating AI songs for loved ones is more social than streaming
“Like, that is not something, that is so much more social than what exists now, where you listen to music from artists, and you love the music, and you see a piece of yourself in the artist, but you don't actually interact with them.”
Shulman: Suno's subscription revenues offset a lot of GPU burn
“Even, even without the revenues, which are fantastic to have, and they offset, you know, they offset a lot of GPU burn knowing what gets people to subscribe is such valuable data that I don't know, like, how we would do this without it.”
Mikey Shulman: Major AI companies are hitting data walls
“I think the bigger players Are hitting data walls and are more actively working on it, and like everything else, it's really nice to have the big players solve a lot of the really thorny problems for you, and you can kind of focus on your competitive advantage…”
Suno does not pay Timbaland in cash for partnership
“No, we don't pay him in cash. He's, yeah, he's an advisor to the company.”
Shulman: Suno blocks users from generating music with real artist names
“You've noticed in our product, you can't make Ariana Grande songs. If you put her name in, we're going to wave our finger at you, and you're going to say, like, that's not what the future of music is. That's not original music. Suno is for original music. It's…”
Shulman: Integrating AI Music Creation with Streaming Creates a Larger Market
“That just shows you that there is a lot of friction, and if there were two worlds of music, I think that would A, be friction for the average consumer, but I actually hope it's much more than just consumption. I hope that, like, there shouldn't be, like, a set…”
Mignano: Nat Friedman introduced him to Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman
“Yeah, when Nat would send me a deal, which he did on multiple occasions, and I, and by the way, that's actually how I met Mikey from Suno You know, I always knew to pay attention. You know, if Nat's sending me a deal I gotta pay attention to that.”
Shulman: Suno was built in-person, only allowing remote work exceptions
“We never, you know, we built the company in person, and we make exceptions for people to be remote.”
Shulman: Suno abandoned sense-making tool as generative audio advanced unexpectedly fast
“Our backgrounds are all NLP, and we thought it would actually be a lot harder to do good generative stuff, and so we thought the first product would be more sense-making. You know, try to scratch your head and think back to, like, GPT-II. No one was really mak…”