#479 Rewriting the Music Playbook: Jeremy Sirota on Innovation, AI, and Artist Empowerment

Episode 479

[00:00:00] 

Mehmet: Hello and welcome back to the new President of the CTO Show with Mehmet today. I'm very pleased joining me from the US Jeremy Sirota, Jeremy. He is the CEO of Merlin. The topic that we are gonna talk about today is something new to the show, but it's quite interesting. [00:01:00] We're gonna talk about music a little bit, but of course.

From a technology perspective, and this is why, you know, I'm very pleased again to welcome Jeremy to, to the show, Jeremy, the way I love to do it, as I was telling you before we hit the record button, I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves. I have a theory, people introduce themselves better than other people does.

So I gonna keep it to you and I will pass it to you. So the floor is yours. 

Jeremy: Great. Well thank, first of all, thanks for having me. It's, uh, great to be here today. I'm excited to chat with you. Uh, I. Actually start got my start in technology. Uh, I, I was a technology lawyer at first. I spent two years, uh, working at Meta on their music team there.

Uh, working very closely with the technology teams and the product managers. But today, uh, I am a CEO of Merlin. I've been here for five and a half years. Uh, we are the digital licensing partner for independent record labels [00:02:00] and distributors around the world. Uh, we have members in 70 different countries, uh, including, uh, in United Arab Emirates.

Uh, the way, uh, your, um, fans can think about you and those who listen to your podcast is we are like the fourth major. So you have Universal Music Group, you have Sony Music Group, you have Warner Music Group, and you then have Merlin. And the way I like to describe ourselves in a very simple, succinct way is we are the major for independence.

So we help to ensure that independents can better compete, uh, by putting them on a level playing field. And so we do that through deals with companies like Apple and Spotify and YouTube, and then more innovative licenses with companies like Canva and Twitch, and ensuring that independents have access, uh, and uh, can benefit in the same way that artists who might go through a major record company do.

Mehmet: [00:03:00] Great. And thank you again Jeremy, for being here with me today. Out of curiosity, like what was the turning point to decide, you know, you've been like a, uh, a lawyer in tech, so what attracted you to to, to, you know, lead Merlin? 

Jeremy: Uh, so the very, very brutal honest truth is complete happenstance, and I've always described my career as intentional serendipity.

I, I went into law school, in fact, not so much to be a lawyer, uh, though I enjoyed it tremendously, but for the opportunities it could bring. And I spent five years working in a major, uh, law firm and working with a lot of, uh, technology companies, a lot of early SaaS companies. And then we started working with entertainment companies and that just kept snowballing till suddenly we were working with music publishing companies.

Then we were working with Warner Music, [00:04:00] and when I was doing work with Warner Music, it wasn't, it was on the digital side. I was helping them with their digital licensing deals. Uh, so that was some of their earliest deals with YouTube, but with a lot of very, very early tech startup companies in the music space.

But I was primarily doing, primarily their outsourcing deals. Mm-hmm. I was primarily doing, uh, their technology deals. So I did their first deal with AWS and. I really got to enjoy the culture of music companies and what they were doing to support artists and people in the creative space. And so when I was looking to leave the law firm and go in-house and work inside of a company, uh, Warner Music was in fact seeking to hire a technology lawyer.

And so I suddenly had this best of both worlds. I could be. The technology lawyer, I'd always want to be still be involved in tech and then work in this, uh, company with a strong creative [00:05:00] culture. And suddenly I'm working in music 'cause space I'd never expected to be in. 'cause most people get into music.

They start off their, they manage artists. They're DJs at their local colleges. They're in bands. Yeah. I've always loved music, but I didn't have that same path. And what just continued to happen is I continued to find opportunities doing what I love with tech, whether working with tech or working with tech companies and still working in music.

And so the pivot to meta was really what exposed me to this larger world where I'd always had a global role at Warner, but it was global in more of a western sense. Yeah. Whereas when I came to Merlin, it was truly global. Excuse me. When I came to Meta, it was truly global and I was working with, uh, uh, labels around the world.

I was working with teams at Meta around the world, and that really exposed me to this idea about this, um, uh, what [00:06:00] was being called a collision, but I really saw as an opportunity for partnership between technology companies and people in the creative space. 

Mehmet: Great. Out of Christie, Jeremy, do you, do you have any hobby in music?

Like, do you play any instrument or something? 

Jeremy: Oh, if my daughter was here, she would, she would have so many answers for you. Uh, the, I, I'm, I'm, so two things, which is, one is I'm completely tone deaf, never take me to karaoke. Uh, I'm really bad at playing instruments and I can never remember lyrics to songs, and I love singing.

However, what I have learned in life is that your ability to be talented in something doesn't mean you can't support that. So I look at this in my complete inability to be musical, and I look at everyone who is musical, and I'm just absolutely amazed at what they can do. And what I've recognized is that my skillset.

Whether it's around [00:07:00] business development, whether it's around complex partnerships, negotiations, uh, trying to find paths through really complex, uh, disruption to industries, that's what I'm really good at, and that's an area where I can then help people in this creative field where I have a huge amount of respect for, to navigate that area.

Mehmet: Okay, great. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm like you. I'm, I'm, I love music, but yeah, I can't claim any of this. I tried at some stage, but yeah. Now, um, of course I was doing my own research and, you know, of all the public information available. So, uh, murder represent around 15% of the global record music market. So, um. So what, what, what Merlin brings to, to the independent music, like, um, that the other labels, let's say they cannot.

So what differentiate if, if, uh, if that makes more sense? 

Jeremy: It does. So the way I [00:08:00] think, uh, your audience should think about Merlin is a bit of a unicorn even within the music space. Uh, so what we do is we represent and we call them members, and I'll explain that a little bit. We represent our members. Their rights.

So our members are a collection of labels and, uh, what are called distributors who distribute labels, and we have about 450 of them around the world. So that ranges from some very large independence. So someone like a secretly group, uh, so they work with artists like Miky and Phoebe Bridgers. Uh, to maybe some of the smaller labels.

Uh, a great, great one is one who just joined from here in the US called Poly Vinyl Records. And, you know, they have very small team, uh, but incredible artists at the same time. Or take, uh, another one from, uh, the Netherlands, uh, our modern music group. Mm-hmm. Uh, they, that was a label founded by a DJ named Armand Van Buren.

Uh, and they're very, very [00:09:00] strong in the electronic space. So each of these individually are relatively small, particularly compared to a major record company. You know, universal Music Group represents maybe 35% of the global market share. So individually, their ability to access the marketplace to achieve premium deal terms on par with the largest rights holders in the world is very challenging.

It's, it's not impossible. And so when we aggregate together as a collective. We collectively as Merlin represent their rights with these large stakeholders. The Apples, the Spotify's, YouTube, we can help them achieve more than they can individually. And so that's the role that we play, is that people join us.

We're a membership. We're in fact owned by our members, which is very unique. My board is actually comprised of my members. So many of the, uh, owners of these companies sit on my board. What that means for our members [00:10:00] is that they know that their rights and their interests are being represented throughout the organization.

And you know, we really look at our North Star as, are we empowering independence? Mm-hmm. And are we celebrating music? And that's how we kind of approach our jobs every day. And it's, uh, it's a really, it's a special, unique mission and it's something we're very proud of. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. Now. You mentioned, um, you know, apple and, um, Spotify, you know, a couple of times and, you know, the biggest, I would say, innovation that happened, I think it's now, yeah, when the iPod came and, you know, the way the licensing and the way people can get access legally to music was the big moment.

So. Let me know from your perspective, um, do we have, or do you see [00:11:00] any inefficiencies in music licensing, um, that you are able to solve through the technology? I. 

Jeremy: Yeah, we, uh, it's great question. There's, uh, I'll give you two answers to that. One is, and what I truly love about Merlin, we don't speak about it that often, which is why I was, uh, excited to come here today, is our entire company is fueled by five different bespoke platforms.

We've built all in-house, and we have our internal CMS, which manages all of our rights. We have an external CMS for our members. We built our own, you know, ETL system for royalty processing. So all these really massive files that come in from the services that we have to process. Uh, we built a data warehouse, uh, on behalf of our members so that we can deliver actionable insights.

Mm-hmm. And then, and this gets to your [00:12:00] second, the question you're asking. We built something called Merlin Bridge. And this is about solving for, for one of those gaps and inefficiencies in the marketplace, uh, which is how can we better engage startups and scale up scale ups across the digital ecosystem and what bridge does it solves for?

Any number of challenges on an operational level. Uh, but before we even get to that, what we're really trying to solve for. Is startups, particularly startups who don't, aren't in the music space. Mm-hmm. But no music can be powerful. They say, God, I look at music and I know it has this emotional connection.

This, it brings this cultural cachet. I see it. It's ubiquitous everywhere. I have no idea how to license it. Mm-hmm. I don't know who to call. Uh, [00:13:00] I don't know, even if I knew who to call, I don't know who to talk to. I don't know really how to talk to them. Uh, it's, it's hard to get their attention even if I wanted to.

The rights are really complex. There's so many different rights across, across this, and then operationally it's really, uh, complicated as well. That's where bridge this technology we had invented to, uh, deal with gaps and inefficiencies became the foundation for our initiative called Connect and Connect.

Uh, it's a little bit on the nose the name, but the idea is how do we connect music that brings all of those, uh, emotions and cachet and really can power a startup? And how do we bridge that gap to them to bring that I. And make that easier for them, uh, from a licensing perspective, from an operational perspective, just across the boards.

Mehmet: Cool. Now I'm gonna maybe [00:14:00] ask a question, which is kind of a, um, cliche, let me call it this way, in a industry which is kind of have a lot of legacy systems and contracts, right? How. How is it possible to be innovative? And I know I'm asking this question because I know Marilyn was chosen, you know, by fast company as you know, the fastest innovative company.

So what. Does it take to truly innovate in such, you know, people might look at it. Yeah. Like it's, it's like all legacy contracts. You know, what, what, what can be new here? So what does it take to be innovative in that space? Jeremy? 

Jeremy: Uh, first it just takes the, you know, everything looks impossible until suddenly it isn't.

And. One of, one of the ways we love to approach, [00:15:00] uh, our company is coming at things backwards. So, for example, uh, I love to run bad idea days. Mm-hmm. Today we have this problem and we're gonna, everyone's going to try to solve it the worst way possible. 

Mehmet: Yeah. 

Jeremy: Suddenly you're thinking locks in totally different ways.

And the history of the music industry is exactly what you just said, which is, it's inaccessible, it's legacy, it's old, these are dinosaurs. Uh, it can't evolve. And sometimes the more you hear that or think that way, it just becomes this self-fulfilling truth. And so the first way that you approach this is simply to say, we are innovative.

That's the mindset. And then you take it from there. They say, great, how are we gonna innovate? And in fact, that's the way we did a brainstorming session that way. We said, let's come the worst ideas of how to innovate as a company. Mm-hmm. And [00:16:00] suddenly you're just unlocking mindsets. And, and so we then took that and said, okay, where are these gaps?

Where are these inefficiencies? And that's how we, we started to throw ourselves at it. We started from a licensing perspective. Licensing's really complicated. There's so many different rights. So the first thing we said is, can we package all these rights together? And instinctually the music industry said, oh, you can't do that.

You can't do that. And we said, no. How do we do it? The, the last slide of the deck is, we have packaged all the rights together. Okay, now let's work way backwards. How do we get there? And so that's what we did from a rights perspective. And then we did the same concept from a technology perspective. Which is despite everyone thinking maybe that digital is really easy in the music ecosystem, music's actually really challenging in digital.

Uh, what I [00:17:00] would say to the audience, for those who still remember, CDs, uh, uh, CDs were really easy. You went and you printed a CD or press, uh, you printed a cd, you put it in one of those little plastic jewel cases. You slipped a little insert in there and threw some shrink wrap around it and put it on a truck, because that's the whole history of humanity is building physical products and taking it from one place to another.

And then you get to digital. It's like shockly. Really complicated. Because you're delivering these really complex rights formulations with lots of different data and binary assets, and I don't know why Every single time I look at it, I say, this should be easy and it's not. And so this is what we did. We simplified everything we just said.

Our goal is to make this as seamless and easy on a startup as possible. They need to invest their capital and resources into building their company, growing their um, uh, uh, opening their funnel for, uh, customer [00:18:00] acquisition, probably pivoting their company and what their product is five different times.

So figuring out how to take assets from music companies is not their priority. So we. Used to have these really complex integrations with platforms, which we still do for mature platforms. Mm-hmm. But we said that's not what they should do. They should just have an a simple A-B-A-P-I pull. So instead of a push, we now have a pull.

So simple. It's, it's just, but it's flipping. Its on its head. And that's why I always say you gotta like, start with like what are you trying to achieve? So we have an API pull instead of a push, and suddenly all they need to be able to do is manage web hooks. Almost any startup can do that. And if they can't do that, they probably shouldn't be starting up their own company in the first place.

Yeah. So we removed any sort of integration they have to do, and then the sec, so that was number one. And then number two is we normalize everything. So all this data comes in, and you would [00:19:00] think it would all be in the same format, in the delivered, in the same files with the same information, and it's not.

And so this is what Bridge does before it gets to connect. Is it comes into us and we built all the validation rules to normalize all this content. So when they, when they a scale up or a startup comes in and they've been licensed and we give them their, you know, token, it all looks the same to them.

Mm-hmm. They have all the data they need to be able to access it in the ways they need to. And so that's what we've done is. On the member side, we've created this really great validation system and easy delivery system for them to get content to us. And then on the licensed startup side, it looks super simple and normalized to them.

And that's sort of the, it's, it's so simple, but it's so innovative, just does not exist really within our industry. 

Mehmet: Yeah, really innovative Jeremy. Like, when I'm okay, I come from technical [00:20:00] background and Yeah. Absolutely. And, uh, digital is, uh, as you said, it's really, really challenging. Um, it's not easy. And this is gonna kind of, I gotta bridge to, to the next question.

And it's good. The conversation is flowing this way now. I can ask in one question, but I don't want to load the question. So in the age of reels and tiktoks, right? So how. More complex or more hard it become when doing the licensing. I'm not asking AI yet, I'm keeping the question for another question.

Let's focus on what happens in the, in, in, in this social media platform. And I've seen, I remember, I've seen like a lot of, uh, you know. Artists, I would say, and even sometime podcasters like, Hey, you're taking my content. You're using it in your read and in your TikTok. And so how, [00:21:00] how that is handled or do you have a solution for that?

Jeremy: Yeah, so I'll, I'll approach it in two ways. I'll talk about the, I'll talk about what our initiative and then I'll talk about the industry generally. 'cause I'm sure mm-hmm. It sounds like people are interested. Uh, so for what we are doing. We're not trying to deliver 10 million, 50 million, 120 million tracks.

I mean, I've lost track of the number of tracks that are out there of music. What we're trying to do is deliver a curated catalog of really interesting and engaging and quality music. There is an age in which, yes, you need a full catalog. If you're a streaming service, a music streaming service, you're going to want to mostly a full catalog.

If you are not necessarily in the music space, you don't need a full catalog. You need a limited catalog of good music, curated music, and that's what Connect's [00:22:00] trying to deliver. So the, those, the issues you're describing are not going to exist within Connect because we are specifically curating, uh, you know, our goal is to be able to provide everything a startup needs to be their exclusive provider.

And I'd love them to get to the next level. So they succeed and they want to expand who they partner with. Uh, but the issues that you're, you're referring to don't exist right now within what we do. And even it was going to, once again, what we're doing at the, uh, at that, uh, connect level between the two, between the members and the startups is by normalizing all that data, it helps them to have clarity about rights, who controls and owns what's rights in the larger industry.

This is a, this is a big problem, especially for these larger platforms that don't build, uh, A CMS, where that allows for rights management within the platform. Mm-hmm. And that's so important and critical, especially within these social [00:23:00] platforms, to build that very early and to build a mature platform very quickly.

Because otherwise you get exactly what you've seen and you're referring to, you get a wild west. And it, it may not even be that that's what they intended, but the lack of investment means that's what they get. Because if they don't provide clarity around what you can deliver, if they're not vetting content is coming in, if they don't have a means of better controlling who's claiming what, then you have the exact problems that you reference.

And when you're dealing with, you know. A hundred plus million tracks of music, split rights, right. In the music industry, you can have split rights. Someone can manage and control rights in one country and a different entity can control 'em in another country. So that gets complicated as well. Uh, and then when you have, it's one thing when you have, say a Instagram stories mm-hmm.

Right? Instagram stories. It's Instagram [00:24:00] itself. Who's making that music available to the user to add into their stories? Right. But when it's uploaded with the music already embedded, it starts to get more complicated. Uh, and this is where you need sophisticated systems to identify what the music is, identify who owns or controls it.

And then the third layer is some sort of CMS that allows for people to dispute rights and to, to figure out a resolution around that. 

Mehmet: Yeah, to your point, it's a wild west. Yeah. But, but yeah, it is what it is. But now this is, I'm, I'm more curious about this one ai, and I gotta ask the question in two, in two parts.

So first of all, I know there's a lot of debate from both, you know, art perspective and technology perspective. Do we consider a music generated by an AI model, [00:25:00] whatever. A piece that can be copyrighted. Right? The second thing is how musicians and artists are looking. You know, like, are they worried about AI generating music and you know.

Saying like, okay, if, if an AI can do it, what's the point for me to, I don't know, to, to, to go for, uh, uh, you know, a company like Merlin or whatever. So what's your point of view on this?

Jeremy: Two good questions. So, on the first question, uh, there's a lot of open debate right now. So, for example, uh, here in the US just, uh, a couple weeks ago, uh, uh, uh, the US Copyright Office came out with a preliminary opinion, um, that. About the training of music. Mm-hmm. And whether, um, [00:26:00] um, that requires, uh, a license to use.

The UK is having this debate about it, uh, in South Korea. Uh, they're having this debate about in Japan there's been opinions. So what you see right now is that there's all sorts of views around this. Around whether this is represents true music, whether this is copyrightable, whether it requires a license to create these LLMs and these models.

Uh, so, uh, what I would say is that, uh, number one is most importantly if you want to create some sort of model, train, some sort of model on music. Copyright materials. People have invested their, their experience, their emotion, their intuition, their humanity into it. That requires a license point blank. You need to pay for that.

We know that within this space, there are plenty of folks out there training models on production music, [00:27:00] uh, which is, you know, sort of more what I would, for lack of a better way of describing more generic music. Mm-hmm. Uh, the models. Materially better when you use quality music, when you use music from well-known, established artists.

Uh, and we also know that when you use music from independent artists, the model is even better. And the reason why is because independent artists have always looked around the corners, right? The ways that they express themselves through music is more unique. The labels who represent them typically are more open to them exploring different types of genres, different ways of using music to express different languages.

And so my view around that is that, uh, the models require a license because the value is [00:28:00] tremendous that they're getting from it to create these. And then the question of whether the outputs, uh, should be. Copyrightable is a challenging one. And, and I'll just give this sort of ex the, the two sides of this sort of binary, uh, excuse me, two sides of this, um, this line.

So on one side of this, you have what I would call just the simple prompt produce music. I go in, I say, create me a new jazz track that sounds really cool. And a second later produces a track. I, I don't find that to be particularly creative. Uh, I don't find that to be establishing any level of expression that copyright law was intended to protect.

That's one extreme, right? Someone could do that and, and pump out thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of tracks, uh, every day. [00:29:00] On the other side, you have someone who is using AI as a tool and they're saying, well, I want to create this interesting track, but I can't decide if I want a symbol, if I want a horn sound, if I want, and they want to scroll through a hundred different types of sounds really quickly in a format that they just devised.

In that way, it's more like a advanced Ableton or garage band or band lab, right? Just the ability to explore different sounds really quickly or to crab a sample to drop into, uh, a song they're creating. I don't know, maybe there's some, but I can't imagine anyone having a, a problem with that and having a song that has some level of ai, AI produced samples.

Or backtracks that are within a song between those two extremes on this line somewhere they cross [00:30:00] over and people start to feel better or worse about what's happening. And you know, the, the, the second question you then asked was how do artists feel about it? Uh, there's, there's really, there's two views about this, which is.

Really expressing those two extremes. One is on a tooling perspective, many are quite excited and they see the value of it no different than any tools that have ever been developed within the music space to allow them to better express who they are as musicians. And then on the flip side, there is deep anxiety also about being displaced.

And this is where you get to a question around. At a cultural level, the importance of music or any cultural output, writings, art, anything within these, this realm has always driven humanity and civilization forward. It's always allowed different groups to express themselves in ways, [00:31:00] and that kind of strikes at an area of, of what do we want as a civilization.

And then you come to the final point, which is. Absolu Absolutism can't rule in the same way that artists and the folks who represent them, whether labels or companies like Merlin, this is not going away. AI is foundational in the same way the internet is. This is not Web3. This is not NFTs. Uh, this is like a, a middleware layer that's just going to exist, and that has to be acknowledged and recognized at the same time.

AI companies and folks in this space need to recognize that this requires consent. Uh, this requires, uh, uh, attribution. This requires compensation. And so we as an industry, as a music industry, and as a tech industry, have to find a way to bridge our positions to find [00:32:00] a symbiosis between those two. And I always just kind of lead with, you know, music is the best expression of humanity.

We cannot lose that. That is really, really important for us. And so how do we, how do we bridge the gaps between positions? 

Mehmet: Absolutely. This is like exactly what I wanted to, to, uh, to, to say like, music is one of the things that actually the, the people who makes music, like they make it out of some feelings they have.

Right? Maybe they are happy, maybe they are sad. Maybe they are in love. I don't know. Maybe they're angry. And it, you know, whether it's the lyrics or the music itself. Right. So it's like both sides. I'm talking about songs in usual. Yeah. It might be music alone. Um, if you ask me, do you want to listen to a music made by ai, I would say maybe it would depends if maybe it's something like a track for lo-fi, I don't mind maybe.

Right. But if it's, you know, something [00:33:00] like. Like, I like classical music. Uh, no, I want to hear it from someone who actually did it and felt this. Right. So, or maybe a pop song like, yeah, I, I, I don't want, um, Chad GPT written song. Right. So, and someone made music out of it. So yeah. As, as I think as you said, Jeremy, it's, it's like, uh, it's a responsibility of both industries to, you know, and again, the consumer would, would, uh, would judge at the end.

We've seen it like people who didn't like also the R generated by ai, which is very possible today. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, movies, I know like there's a lot of debate, like Yeah. People in Hollywood, they're gonna lose their jobs if you ask me. I don't think so. As you said, I like, you know, when you said. AI is a tool, and this is what we repeat across all industries, like AI is just a tool that can give us some power.

But yeah, uh, anything that is, [00:34:00] um, artistic and, you know, has some in, uh, music is, is also innovation, right? So you, you, you're just creating something that didn't exist before or maybe you are like just adding different flavors and coming with something new. So Absolutely, to your point, I agree with you, Jeremy, on this now.

If I want to ask you about, um, because you mentioned tech and culture and what's happening in other industries, what kind of like similar parallels you see between what you are doing at Merlin in, in the music and what other industries are doing? Like, for example, in, in Media or maybe, I don't know, like, uh, deep FinTech, uh, SaaS.

Do, you know, to, you know, shifting towards like platform-based enablement? What, what you're seeing in that space, because also, like you, you have the experience. Uh, Jeremy, 

Jeremy: uh, okay, that's a, a broad question, but let me see if I can tackle it a little bit. Uh, [00:35:00] the best answer I can give, and this applies to technology companies as well, is that we're all dealing with disruption and upheaval.

And whatever worked yesterday, may work tomorrow or it may not. And uh, I always, I always get asked, uh, how do you plan for five years from now? It's like, first of all, five years is over. It's now, we're now talking about three years. Uh, but the second is I couldn't tell you what's going to be next. Uh, if I did, I would be investing my money, which I don't.

So that's, that's a sign that I don't know what's, what's next. What I do know is that the most successful companies do two things. One is they recognize that as much as things are changing, there's plenty of things that are not changing. And so if you go back to first principles and you just always start to ask yourself what is not going to change?

We just did this [00:36:00] exercise. My company, uh, I did an exercise at my five year mark. He said, what has changed in the five years? Since I've been here and what has not changed, and it's very illuminative about what you need to be doing from investing your resources and your time at your company. So that's, that's the first way that I approach, uh, approach this.

And I think tech companies should approach this as well. The second is, if you acknowledge that you're not quite sure what's gonna come next, then you're trying to build a culture and a mindset. That can manage whatever comes next, right? How do we adopt these very flexible ways of working, right? How do we create process and automation?

How do we create more efficiencies to free up our, our time to spend it more around thinking versus doing? Mm-hmm. And that's so much of how I've approached Merlin for the last five and a half years is building that [00:37:00] space. To be more proactive, empowering people from at all levels, right? How do you eliminate bureaucracy?

Really? That's what I mean. It's not the great greatest, but that's really what it is, right? I wanna remove approval levels. I wanna allow people to just operate and make decisions, and I want them to know what matters. What are our cultural values? What is our mission? What are our company goals? So that when they're making all these micro decisions every day.

They're making 'em with the right perspective against them. And so anytime you look at any industry that's being disrupted, and that includes tech, right? Whatever tech company comes along today that disrupts, you know, the entertainment company of old, they're just as likely to be disrupted themselves because if they can do it, someone else can do it to them.

And that's where these sort of two approaches have played, I think play more [00:38:00] value. Trying to prepare yourself for the future as opposed to trying to predict what's next. Uh, that is not my for, that's not my forte. I'm very jealous of people who can do that. Uh, I'm not the Notre Damas, uh, of the music industry.

Mehmet: No. So, yeah, let me tell you something, Jeremy, uh, when I started the podcast and, you know, having guests from different industries, you know, the traditional question that usually used to come at the end, oh, like what do you think, uh, the trends that would be there in the next. 10 years I stopped asking this question for the same reason you said, because there's no 10 years, there is no five years to your point, like, I don't know what would happen in, in three months from now.

Right. So, um, and, and we've, I think at least I've been, you know, uh, old enough to, to witness that I never saw something going so fast as the times we are living now. You, you talk about something today, three [00:39:00] after three months, as no one talks about it anymore, it's obsolete. Although some people will tell you, Hey, like this is the next big thing, and they disappear and all vice versa.

People say, no, this will not work. Like people will not, uh, embrace it. People will not adopt it. And we see the opposite happening. So to your point, even myself, I stopped asking my guest about this, but at least, you know, I started to call it seeing patterns. More than predicting futures and probably saying, okay, the logic says this might happen.

It's not like, would happen. So, and thank you for, for mentioning this also, Jeremy, like, it's, it's like really, um, you know, I would say insightful. Now if, you know, as we're coming almost to, to, to the end of our conversation, what do you think, um. Tech leaders, founders, uh, especially in in the tech industry, um, they [00:40:00] need to do, uh, to be able, especially if they are all, you know, targeting creators, right?

Mm-hmm. So what do they need to do differently today to make sure that they succeed seat? 

Jeremy: Oh, I feel like you just slipped in a question about the future there. Uh, but that's okay. I like that. That's a good question because. Uh, I just wanna riff on something you said earlier about pattern recognition. Uh, people expect that they should be intuitive from the get go, but in fact, intuition is built from experience, which leads to pattern recognition, which then leads to intuition.

And people always start the reverse thinking they should be intuitive and, and no, don't trust your intuition at first. You don't have enough experience. To know enough yet. And so one of, um, one of the, one of the great things that many [00:41:00] tech companies do and do well is that they ab they spin things up quickly.

They test, they try to get signal quickly, and then they move on. If they don't, I think it's incredibly powerful. Here's what's missed from that is that if you're just looking at quantitative KPI data. You may miss the signal. And if I was a, you know, so many, uh, tech founders, uh, come from an engineering background or maybe were, uh, product managers at one time, and so much of what they're told is find the data, find the data.

And yes, of course, if no one's using a a feature, that's pretty good signal. You don't need much more else from that. But so much of the most successful I. Tech entrepreneurs are ones who look at some preliminary data and see a slimmer, a glimmer of [00:42:00] a, uh, of a signal, and they realize that it's not that the feature or the product doesn't have fit.

We have not rolled it out the right way. We have not invested enough resources into it. And so what I would say to tech leaders is spend more time building that experience to get that pattern of recognition, to get an intuition, because otherwise you're gonna ab test yourself out of a job. 

Mehmet: Great. Um. It's a good advice and you know, it's not about the future really.

It's about like sharing the experience. And I think Jeremy, you know, you already shared a lot of wisdom with, with the audience today. Um, you know, the traditional, now it's a traditional fine question. Where can people, you know, find out more and get in touch? 

Jeremy: Yeah, you can find us, uh, everywhere. We're Merlin network.

That's with two Ns and we're on LinkedIn, we're on Instagram. [00:43:00] Uh, we're still on X. Uh, you can find us on the web@merlinnetwork.org. Uh, I'm, I'm findable across the web everywhere. Uh, people are welcome to get in touch with me. I am quite responsive, in fact. 

Mehmet: Great. I'll make sure that the links are in the show notes, uh, if you are listening on any of your favorite podcasting apps.

So you'll find that in the show notes. Jeremy, really, I enjoyed the conversation. Uh, I learned something new also from you about, you know, this specific area, which I didn't touch. On my podcast before, so that was very good. Uh, also for me, a great chance to learn and I'm sure you know, the audience will, will, uh, benefit a lot from it.

And usually this is the way I end my episode. So this is for the audience. If you just discovered this podcast by luck, thank you for passing by. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, so please give me a favor, subscribe and share it with your friends and colleagues. And if you are one of the people who keeps coming back.

Thank you so much for your support. I [00:44:00] really appreciate it. I appreciate all your feedbacks. I appreciate all your questions you ask me sometime. I'm really humbled because what you're doing for the podcast this year, 2025, is really big for me at least, and it cannot happen without first my guest and second you the audience because we are getting in the top 200 charts of the Apple Podcast across multiple countries, which is make.

Me, like very, very, very grateful for all the, you know, audience. It cannot happen without you. So thank you very much for this, and as I say, always stay tuned. We'll be again in a new episode very soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.