Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
The Pass
Mikey Shulman built Suno into an AI music generation business. A mutual friend, also an investor, asked Sarah Guo of the venture firm Conviction to put money in, and she said no. Her thinking was that she couldn't see many people wanting to make music, and she wondered whether it could turn into a social network and how much anyone would consume.
The Rethink
She now thinks that intuition was wrong. She had underestimated how much expression, entertainment, and creation people want from AI tools, and she picked that up by talking with Shulman about his business and what people try to do with it.
Where Learning Time Goes
Learning time now goes to founders whose companies create behavior she doesn't understand, researchers working in interesting directions, and businesses with their own plan for AI. Circular debate about what the big labs' strategies mean for every application teaches her far less.
How does an AI model generate a song?
Audio is turned into a sequence of compact digital pieces called tokens, in much the same way text is chopped into word fragments. A model trained on huge amounts of recorded music learns which pieces tend to follow others. Given a text prompt, it generates a new sequence and converts it back into sound. Systems like this can produce vocals and instruments together from a short written description.
Why do investors pass on huge winners?
Venture returns are dominated by a handful of outliers, so every investor passes on some of the biggest companies. Early in a company's life, the product often looks like a toy or a niche, which makes the demand hard to see. Bessemer Venture Partners publishes an Anti-Portfolio page that lists its own famous passes, including Google, Apple, and Facebook.
How do creation tools turn into social networks?
Musical.ly began as an app where teenagers made short lip-sync videos to popular songs, and the sharing grew around the clips. ByteDance acquired it in 2017 and merged it into TikTok in 2018. Instagram followed a similar path, as a photo app whose filters made pictures worth posting. Instagram launched in October 2010 with filters as a central feature.
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