Mikey Shulman
Co-Founder & CEO, Suno. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Mikey Shulman is the Co-founder and CEO of Suno, an AI music generation platform. He previously served as the Head of Machine Learning at Kensho Technologies and has a background in physics.
3shows
3appearances
90statements
7resolved
4supported
1contradicted
57%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Mikey Shulman said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
Shulman: Empty text box UI is wrong for most AI products
“They did every AI company a huge disservice because everybody thinks that just like empty text box is now the right interface, and it is for ChatGPT, and it is incorrect for basically everything else.”
Shulman: Scaling laws will not solve AI music generation
“For music, It's very different from text, and I think people will very sloppily look at the world of OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers and say audio is just a couple years behind, which it is, but that scale is gonna solve all these things. But unlike …”
Shulman: Quantum computing startups face fundamental physics challenges, not engineering ones
“The challenges are not they're still physics challenges. They're still like basic research challenges that have to happen here, and so it's not something where you can kind of just turn the crank and make companies out of it, and to my knowledge, all of the co…”
Shulman: Music incumbents suing AI startups before negotiating is inefficient
“On paper, I would say it just seems silly to throw a bunch of venture dollars at lawyers instead of sitting down and talking about how you could Work together. You know, like, deciding to sue first and then ask questions later seems to me to be inefficient, bu…”
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.”
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.”
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: AI companies will soon stop releasing standalone raw models
“At some point, I don't know if it's version four or version five, there will be a last model release that is released as a model, and everything else is just product releases.”
Shulman: VCs will not get timely returns on quantum computing investments
“I don't think you're gonna get your money back in a reasonable time.”
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: 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: 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.”
Shulman: Most people do not enjoy the time spent making music
“It's not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time …”
Shulman: Hit songs succeed via algorithms and promotion, not quality alone
“I think that they probably reverse the causality. Things break on TikTok, and then they become famous on Spotify, but that is a function of both algorithms and people pushing music, and not necessarily only a function of the quality of the music.”
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: 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: 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: VC promises of reserve capital are actually not founder-friendly
“So that's, you know, that, that's billed as very founder friendly and it's actually the opposite.”
AI music models must learn inductively without hardcoded music theory
“The model shouldn't know about music theory. You don't tell GPT, this is a noun and this is a verb. GPT figures it out. If I tell my model, there are only 12 tones. My model will only know how to output 12 tones. If I tell my model there's 50 different instrum…”
Suno aims to be a mass consumer product, not a DAW plugin
“We are trying to change how the entire globe interacts with music and to open new experiences for people. And so what that means is that this is a consumer product. This is not sprinkling AI into Ableton or Logic or Pro Tools. This isn't for the person already…”
Generative AI SaaS pricing models are likely outdated vestiges
“Everybody's doing kind of something that looks like SAS pricing, and it's kind of done very crudely, and we are certainly no exception to that. But I don't know if this is right in the long term, and it strikes me as probably just a vestige of, it is the same …”
Generative AI will blur the boundary between music creation and consumption
“And I think these set of technologies have the ability to skew that much, much farther because the creation process is so enjoyable. But I actually think if we do this right in the future, these are not going to be the Terms that we use to describe what we're …”
Generative AI will dramatically increase time and money spent on music
“If we are correct that there are just modes of experience around music that people don't have access to, that we can get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now, that just in terms of the number of dollars or the amount of time people a…”
The other half of the tape: Mikey Shulman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most David Frankel 4Mike Mignano 1Harry Stebbings 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 6
Latent Space 2
2026 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses? | David Frankel
- The Future of AI Infra: from Kubernetes to Agent Sandboxes — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO
- Why Now is the Time for the App Layer | Why Startups Should be TokenMaxxing | Mike Mignano, USV · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mikey's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Suno | 1 | 53 | 60% 3/5 | full record on 20VC → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Suno | 1 | 22 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Latent Space → |
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Suno | 1 | 15 | — | full record on No Priors → |