Summary

The Offline Network Episode 38: Savings & Fintech (aired 2025-11-26). Guests: Ashish Lath from SaveSage. Jacob: "Very briefly, I mean, I started coding when I was a teenager, quit high school, actually started an agency when I was 18, kind of been building on the web since it became the web." Jacob: "I think a few things, that was the first thing when I took over, it was like, the Blinkit had, I don't know if you guys remember, but when it launched, it was the hottest thing and it expanded massively." Topics: venture capital and funding, AI and LLMs, B2B/SaaS, health tech. The Offline Network is India's live show on startups, tech, and venture — streaming M/W/F at 4 PM IST on YouTube.

Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: Hi listeners, welcome to a Monday stream of TUN. I hope you've had a good weekend. Today I'm sitting here with Jacob Singh, who's a close friend and almost like a rock star now. Look at his rockstar look on a Monday. So, so much to cover with him. His title and bio of companies is just insane. Like he's worked at some of the hottest startups, the hottest funds in the country, and now he's building his own venture. So over the next 30 minutes, we'll unpack a bunch of things. If you have any questions for us, post them in the live chat. Jacob, let's start with your time at Blinkit, CTU at Blinkit, that company is everywhere now, right? We use it almost on a daily basis. How was that journey? Actually, just tell us all the companies that you worked at, and then we'll dive deeper into the role at Blinkit.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): You see all this gray hair, it might take, we might use up the whole, we might use up the whole half hour. Very briefly, I mean, I started coding when I was a teenager, quit high school, actually started an agency when I was 18, kind of been building on the web since it became the web. So a lot of different stuff. I guess the big highlights were I sold a big project to Amnesty International, the big international NGO, when I was in my 20s. And through that, I developed an idea for a product to make enterprise search really accessible to small website owners. And I built a service for that called SolarFlare. And that was acquired by a company called Acquia. Acquia was the company behind Drupal, which is an extremely popular open source content management system. And spent eight years there, that company did quite well, started from pre-revenue, and the company exited to Vista Partners for a billion, sort of powered many of the Fortune 500, the web properties, media companies, Pharma, White House, you've got a lot of different people. Four years that I ran the India team, so I built up a team here from zero and ignored here. And then post that, I sort of tried to poach the head of engineering or DevOps at Grophers, Vedha Kapoor, and he kind of reverse poached me and made me his boss, this funny little trick. And so became the CTO there, kind of accidentally. Tried to not have a job, but tried to consult. I was like, I don't want to, six months I just was consulting, but I got so attached. They're like, dude, you're working six days a week and we're only paying you for three. Why don't you just take the damn job? So I was like, all right, fine. So I took the job, that turned out to be a good decision. And so obviously that happened. And then I don't know if you want to hear the rest, but that's how I got to Blinkit.

Utsav Somani: But in Blinkit, the business grew from 40 million to 600 million in two and a half years, you took the team from 50 to 220. I'm reading some numbers from your LinkedIn. And the highlight that stood out for me was engineering attrition reduced from 80% to less than 5%. What happened there?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Just lock the doors. Don't let them leave. I think a few things, that was the first thing when I took over, it was like, the Blinkit had, I don't know if you guys remember, but when it launched, it was the hottest thing and it expanded massively. And then it kind of collapsed and almost went out of business. We had to rescind offers from IITs. We were in the news for all the bad reasons. Grover's almost died many times, many times, even when I was there. But before that, it was really close to a near death experience. And so reputation wasn't very good. We didn't have a lot of clarity of strategy and tech was generally mistrusted by management and was also kind of, and vice versa, did a lack of sort of alignment of what we were doing. And so, you know, when I first joined, I got all my senior team together and we waited for a couple of days and we took out a big whiteboard and we wrote every problem that everyone faces on the team. Why are people demotivated? Why are they not innovating? Why is it not working? And we wrote everything down and we said, okay, now we said, let's take another one. We said, what is our goal? And it's innovation at pace. Like how can we have everybody innovating at a faster pace all over the organization so we can figure out the next thing to do? Because we don't have PMFs. You need to innovate faster. And then we kind of drew lines between what sources of demotivate are going to impede our goal of innovating quicker. And we kind of came up, we came out of that with one like mantra that we're going to execute, which was everybody in the team should understand what the company strategy is and understand how they contribute to it. And everybody on the team should be able to influence the company strategy. It doesn't mean that a QA intern sits on the board, but they should have a way to get a message up to the board. And if we can't solve that problem, we're failing as leaders. And so it was really around like setting up all the systems and processes required. A lot of those are like OKRs and one-on-ones and sort of keeping people socialized by each other's goals, including management into sprint reviews, getting anyone execs, giving a lot of transparency in tech, doing a lot of things to iterate faster and give maximum transparency, which kind of gave people more accountability, but also more visibility to leadership and understand that their work mattered. I think at the end of the day, that was really the main thing. I think that's what most people are looking for.

Utsav Somani: Do you think that sort of laid the foundation for what became QuickCommerce, the 10-minute delivery? Do you think the tech teams were closely working with the business teams and some of this discussion might have... I know it's very far-fetched to say that the tech team would have influenced the decision, but...

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): No, it's not. It's not, actually. I think it's true. We made a lot of bad decisions at that time, strategically. We went after social commerce in a big way. Pinduoduo blew up in China. We all tried to copy that. And in retrospect, that doesn't really work in the Indian ecosystem, given the constraints of our market. But we built an innovation engine, which was able to move really quickly. And I think that allowed us to churn through a lot of things that didn't work, to find something that didn't work. If we were working on long, random plans that took a long time to release, big bang releases, as opposed to being agile and releasing regularly, we probably wouldn't have gotten to that point. I think that is part of it.

Utsav Somani: Nice. And what other things do you think work in China and haven't worked in India? What are the other experiments you've done? Interesting. Good question.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): I'm guessing China doesn't work as well in India.

Utsav Somani: Like a WeChat maybe. I think that's one of them, right? Super apps.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Yeah, super apps have struggled. I think that's, I don't know if that's China or it's so much timing. It's like WeChat came out at a time where there weren't a lot of apps for things, right? So they just kind of captured the zeitgeist. Just like, you know, Facebook may have come out at a time where they're able to sort of usurp a lot of attention. You know, a lot of that is timing. I think by the time Hike tried to do their thing in India, there was already so many foreign players and already so many options and the cost of acquiring customers had gone up. It was kind of hard to do that. It's a good question. I don't have a quick answer for you, to be honest. I'm not really sure. But in e-commerce, I think one of the big things is just like in China, their logistics is way cheaper. They can ship something across the country for 80 cents, where it costs us like $3.

Utsav Somani: Even in India. That for me, I think is surprising.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Yeah, yeah. Their cost of delivery is much cheaper. Intercity, intercity, both. And that allows a lot of different flexible models that we can't really do.

Utsav Somani: Wow. And you spent some time in Sequoia, India, as well, now known as Peak15, CTO and residents. What was that all about?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): You know, after Growfurs, I just sort of, I wanted to take some time off during COVID and I was doing some consulting. I did some work with Danzo. I'm wearing the Kabir, shout out to Kabir and Mukund, wearing their sweatshirt. And I wasn't sure what to do.

Utsav Somani: Mukund is crushing it with the new venture emerging.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Yeah, we were just talking last night, actually, late last night. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. I didn't know what to do next. I was like, I'm not really sure. Maybe we should do a startup, maybe do whatever. COVID, the world's all weird. And then Sequoia calls me up and says, you want to do this thing? I said, Sequoia, the capital is like the top floor of capitalism. So I just said, as they called me, I was like, hey, come help me with this. I said, all right, let's see. So I said, OK, I came on as a consultant and yeah, I mean, that was kind of it. I was curious. Met some amazing founders. I mean, just the search program is awesome. It does a great job there and met a lot of really interesting folks and built some really solid relationships, which still to this day continue to be valuable. A lot of people that I know and.

Utsav Somani: You must be getting offers to get poached by most of their portfolio companies, right? In that role?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Well, I mean, I was working with search, so they were like mostly pretty early. I don't think I would have probably wanted to join those ones. But like, I guess for me, like one thing which I kind of hold as my central mantra is just like help whoever asks for help. So I think it's been awesome to build community that way, not join people, but just help them with whatever they need along the years. And now that I'm doing my own thing, that's kind of coming back to me. And it's very gratifying and feels really nice to see how many people have stepped up to help me. Amazing.

Utsav Somani: And I was going through your LinkedIn yesterday and there are, I mean, these interesting tidbits. It's actually quite honest. Like in 2016, you mentioned dad, friend, and student. You took a year off to dedicate time to family, friends, and fitness and fatherhood. I think that's beautiful that you mentioned it online.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Why is that?

Utsav Somani: Most people will probably make up some stuff that, hey, they were working on something like India is generally, I think they want to portray this thing where they're not actually telling you the truth because just because it's such a hyper.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): I'm not a human. I'm just a working. I'm just a robot who loves to work.

Utsav Somani: I want you to think like, I mean, honestly, like if you were giving a junior interview, a lot of people would actually, I mean, the HR person would probably be like, hey, what were you doing this year off? Like for them, it's an alien concept. For most people, like I would say 90% of India works that way. And then in 22, you did a personal goal pursuit entry on your LinkedIn as well. So talk to us. What did you learn?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Okay. So I mean, in both these, the first one was like, honestly, well, I guess I'll say this. When I do a job, I get emotionally attached to it. Like, like a lot of people have been able to achieve something, whatever. It's like, I don't just do a job and go home. Like I get, if I pick something, I go hardcore, it takes over my life. It takes over my feelings, it takes over my friendship, it takes over my health. Like it's, I have to guard, I have to guard against myself to make sure I don't go too hardcore into something. And so I don't just like job hop. I've never said, hey, I'm doing this job. Let me hop to the next job. It's always, okay. I don't want to do that anymore. Now I'm going to rest and I'm going to figure out the next thing is. Cause it's important to me that I choose something. I am not desperate to pick something that I don't really care about or people I don't want to work with. And that's a point of privilege. Like a lot of people can't afford to do that. But I think for me it makes sense. And it makes me more effective and more creative.

Utsav Somani: I would also say this, actually, I think the best performers should be like athletes, right? Where you sprint and then you take rest. Like I think you can't expect to have that same level of consistency if you're just going constantly at it. Like I think sometimes you have to step back, recharge yourself and then like get back in the arena again.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Yeah, that's right. I think there's, I mean, there's all kinds of people who operate different ways and are really important and effective. Like some people are kind of more consistent. They're like, they're grazing, you know, some people are more like they hunt and then they rest. A little bit more of the latter.

Utsav Somani: Talk to us about your time at Alpha Wave. That's going one level up in terms of like hedge fund, be all like, I mean, the full stack basically from early stage to late stage and to IPO as well. How was that?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Well, I mean, to be honest, like I didn't, I wasn't really planning on doing BC gig and during that time in between, I was actually looking for startups to do. I was angel investing, you know, I was doing a lot of writing and I was planning to do that. But due to some personal situations, family situations, I wasn't able to do a startup at that time. And then Alpha Wave had appreciated some consulting I had done. And then they asked me to join the firm. They wanted someone to advise them on deals from a tech standpoint. And then they asked me to take over the early stage tech investing portfolio. So I actually was a proper VC and managed a portfolio and ran deals and kind of learned about that stuff. I'm very grateful. You know, it's a big vehicle. It's a $20 billion fund. You had to meet a lot of folks from all different, you know, size of companies, CEOs of massive billion dollar companies, as well as early stage founders, as well as other investors. Broadened my horizons a lot. I learned about a ton of different business models, how people work, etc. So it was great.

Utsav Somani: You mean some of the CTO stuff there as well?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Did I do some of the CTO stuff there as well? Yeah, there's a lot of advising on like due diligence on deals or working with portfolio companies, helping them uncover a tech strategy or hire new talent or, you know, make partnerships with large tech companies and our startups and stuff like that.

Utsav Somani: Were you involved in the Haldiram deal as well? Haha, being the CTO slash investor on that deal, like how do you like?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): A little bit, not too much. Most of my colleagues did that one. You know, they did have me go meet the Mr. Haldiram also. They have great snacks in the office. I had to wait for like an hour and a half, but they have great snacks in the office. So I didn't mind.

Utsav Somani: Let's talk a little bit more broadly to our audience as well. Like, I mean, CTO and residents, you had that theme across the last few of your roles as well. When do you think a founder needs a CTO and what do you think should be the characteristics that they should look for? Like when they're just starting out, like it shouldn't be just a title or something that they're looking to build their cap table on and just get a technical co-founder. Like how do you think about these things for like founders looking to get into the arena at the very early stages?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Yeah, I think at the early stages, titles are meaningless. They're helpful to the outside world sometimes to be like, this guy needs tech, this one needs marketing. Other than that, you don't really need, is it a VP engineering? Is it a CTO? Is it a staff engineer? It hardly matters at the early stage. But you're asking like, when should you have a tech leader and what should they look like?

Utsav Somani: I think if you're building a software company, I think that should be ground zero, right? I mean, have a tech leader. Unless like, yeah, you're willing to like fail in so many different ways. And all right, so let's jump to Sing One Song. Spend the next two or three minutes explaining the product to us and then we'll dive deep into it.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Sure. Sing One Song is like Duolingo for singing. So we're starting with voice, but we're going to expand to all other instruments at some point. So what is Duolingo? It's sort of Duolingo filled in a gap that existed in the market where a lot of people want to learn languages, but to learn a language is this laborious process which might involve going to classes, studying for a long time, getting instructors, spending money, spending a lot of time without seeing any real benefit from it for a long time. So it didn't really attract the adult learner or the casual learner, right? You'd be very serious about it. And Duolingo did something which is like, hey, I can do this in my spare time. I can do it for fun. I can spend a little bit of time on it and I'll improve and I enjoy the experience of doing it. And so we're building something similar for music education.

Utsav Somani: What are the characteristics of Duolingo that you're carrying into this business? Yeah.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): So right now there's this kind of like serious, like music education generally is a $20 billion business. It's quite large. A lot of people learn music.

Utsav Somani: Instruments as well. Like, I mean, if you're learning a piano.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Instruments, vocals, whatever. Right. Yeah. And so like some people get instructors and they pay them by the hour and some people use apps and some people self-teach from YouTube and different things. It's very hard to self-teach and stay disciplined. Right. And it's especially for singing. It's kind of hard. You can't hear yourself. The apps are very boring. And so people think they want to learn and they do good business, but they're basically like, think they're competing with offline instructors, but they're actually competing with TikTok and video games because nobody does anything boring on an app. They just won't. It's the same reason why people don't take free classes at Harvard, even though you can on Coursera or whatever, because no one wants to watch a two hour video of astrophysics on YouTube. And so we're kind of leading to that, that people aren't going to do that kind of stuff, but there's generally a lot of interest. So how do you find something for the casual person? Who's overlooked in terms of how do they engage with it and learn? And the things we learned from Duolingo that they do really well. And I met people at Duolingo who've kind of explained this to me, who have tried to learn music online. And Duolingo does a couple of things really well. One is they make it really short and fun. So every exercise is like a little snippet that you enjoy the experience of. The second thing is that they ensure that the user is getting things right by 80% of the time. So I don't want to burst anyone's bubble here, but Duolingo personalizes your experience to ensure that you're getting the question right for this at the time, which I thought was a fascinating insight.

Utsav Somani: I mean, that's reinforcing, right? I mean, you need these, I mean, intent and motivation, I think, are the two biggest hurdles when you have to learn something new, right? And I think Duolingo solves it by gamifying it as well, I guess, and giving you that winning streak.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): That's right. Gamifying the winning streak. But the exercise itself, it's like a video game, right? They took ideas straight from video games. Like if you're playing a video game, you play level one, you're going to win 80% of the time. Level five is way harder than level one. But you still win about 80% of the time, maybe 70%, right? And that's because you're better at it, your character is stronger, etc. So they ramp difficulty to ensure that you always stay in what psychologists call a zone of competence, which is where you're getting most of the things right, and you occasionally get some wrong, so you feel a little friction. And this gets people kind of in the flow state and they want to continue it. And so I think translating that over to music learning, most of it feels very boring and evaluative, and you feel like you're getting things wrong all the time when you're starting out. And with AI now, we're able to do a few things which are different. So one thing is we can take a song that you actually want to sing, as opposed to boring exercises, you can pick your own song. And we can generate exercises that go from where you are at in your skill level to learning that song, making sure that you stay in the zone of competence. Does that make sense?

Utsav Somani: Interesting. And Duolingo's share price took a beating when I mean, cash equity was an outlet thing and this thing. So I mean, the market assumed that people will, I mean, sort of have developed this intent or like just do it with chatbot. With, I think, your venture, they cannot. So I think that's pretty unique. But what's the secret sauce behind all of this? Like, what is one?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Well, I think one thing I'll say is Duolingo's revenue up by 40% last year. They do $1.2 billion in revenue. So they're not hurting. And the point about Duolingo is, what is it? It's just a flashcard. It's just a flashcard, nothing complicated about it. The difference between Duolingo and a normal flashcard is that they have a little cartoon that smiles at you and you get the question right. That's really it. So I think it's not about the technology that never really was. It's about guiding people in the user experience and the user psychology of a learner and understanding it. In our case, we're doing something a little different. So we're actually creating video games which are controlled by your instrument, starting by your voice. So you pick a song you want to sing and then we work backwards from there. And we've already created a couple, but they're sort of micro games, casual games, which are using the same skills you need to learn. But you can, for instance, the higher you pitch, an archer will aim the bow further back, or you sustain the note and they'll pull it and try to hit targets. Or we can take the score of a song and we can generate a terrain which you beatbox across with Prince of Persia-style mechanics, like a platformer. And so we're approaching it from a perspective of, look, nothing works on the internet unless it's at least 80% as entertaining as TikTok. Nothing will work. So we want to make something that people can do for two, three minutes a day and enjoy and keep their attention, which will kind of have the side benefit of them learning things and feeling good about themselves after.

Utsav Somani: And this is the kind of work across languages. Right now it's only singing, but works across all languages, Hindi, English, Spanish, everything.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Right now we're focused on Western music, not for any other reason than that's probably where we'll make money. But we would probably launch an Indian version. If you guys, if I get a thousand signups today from India, I'll consider launching a Bollywood version.

Utsav Somani: Yeah, I think it'll do well. Like, I think it'll do well. I will sign up as well. Dude, like, I mean, world has changed. Like, I mean, companies like Seeko and all of these companies, which UPI, Autopay, I think, which has become an increasingly hot trend in India, they're doing multi-million dollar ARRs just from that. I don't know, some people call it dark patents as well. Have you studied that?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): I mean, I don't want to comment on other people's businesses, but I think, I mean, they've done amazing work and they've gotten a lot of people interested. Being a groper, I was a groper before it became Blinkit. We were very focused on mass market, like building a DMart for online, right? For like the massive India who is not, you know, making 10 lakhs and above or whatever. And the fact is, it's just not a very good market to sell to. There's very, there's just not a lot of money to be made there. So I'm a little skeptical that the fundamental liquidity is changing.

Utsav Somani: I think it's changing for sure. I mean, not probably at a countrywide level, but maybe I think there are some pockets which are willing to pay now, even at the middle, I mean, India two, India three level as well. So, yeah, I might be wrong, but yeah. So talk to me a little bit about the tech as well. YSEA is increasingly, increasingly hot, like Whisperflow, this guy from my school, DPS Archipuram, he's crushed it. There's, I mean, all sorts of tools like Granola and like 11labs, I think is doing exceptionally well. Cartesia as well. Are you using some of them to build this product out?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Yeah, I mean, we've, so our first thing we built is actually, you can try it out. It's at singonesong.com. Click the link there. You can try it out. It's a, it's like a vocal DNA test. So you give a high note, a low note, you sing a little phrase, it's a fun little onboarding. And then we will tell you which artists you sound like, what songs you should cover will suit your voice. All of that is a custom model that we've trained based on 10,000 songs. And it, it actually looks at the, not just the pitch of your voice, the range, but actually the timbre, like the quality of your voice, who you sound like. That was really fun. We've been using a lot of models that have been coming out, a lot of them in China, a lot of the groundbreaking work is there. A lot of the labs from Sony and Dolby have been put in producing open source models, which are pretty fantastic. I think there's just a general tailwind in terms of this stuff across music AI and voice AI with companies like Suno, absolutely crushing it, doing 200 mil in revenue. And like, what's interesting about that is that 130, 140 mil of that are amateur musicians. It's not studios. It's not YouTube creators. It's just people messing around making music. So I think we'll continue to see a lot of this, you know, blowing up.

Utsav Somani: And the mobile app for your company is like already?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Mobile apps, not live. We have a few, we have a couple of demos on the web. You can try. Okay. We're just building our team right now. So if you're interested in working with us, we're hiring team in Bangalore, a small team full of artistic, creative engineers and designers.

Utsav Somani: Right. Good to you and team. Leave it in your comments. We'll connect you with Jacob as well. But man, one thing that'll really work, like when Spotify rap really, I mean, comes out, drops every year, like people just love, I mean, we were speaking about it on the last show as well. People just love sharing stuff about themselves. They're obsessed with themselves. So, I mean, when you said that, what kind of celebrity you sound like, if you're able to get that on a mobile app and let people share it on their Instagram stories, I think you guys will go viral for sure.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): That's the, that's the idea. Well, you can, you can start the wave of itself. You're a big dealer. You share it. You share that. You sound like pretty horrible.

Utsav Somani: Like, I think I need some audio. Why music? What's your personal story here?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): I mean, I love music. I played guitar since I was a kid. Were you part of a band? No, I was never really part of a band. I wasn't that good. I wasn't that confident. I don't think I still am. I don't think I have an ear for music. I, I would have said I was tone deaf until I learned that very, almost nobody's tone deaf. It's just untrained. It's not that hard to learn to sing actually. It's kind of a myth that people have because they don't know how to teach themselves, which is what we originally set out to solve. Because I learned to sing great late in life. And once I got a coach, I realized, oh, this is kind of being kept. Like anybody can learn to sing. You just need somebody to give you feedback. And so we set out to say, that's great. Yeah, I have a vocal coach. And that's what we're, that's what we're doing.

Utsav Somani: For me to start sounding like Eminem, like how much time would it take?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Oh, dude, that's nothing. Just, just.

Utsav Somani: No, but like, honestly, like if I come to the app with the expectation that, hey, I want to sound like XYZ person, like I want to sound like, I don't know, the lead singer of One Republic, like.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Well, that's, that's actually the thing, which is the problem. So that's why we created this first thing is that when, when a new singer, when a beginner singer starts to sing, they don't know how to sing. So actually what they're doing is they're doing an impression of the artist. Do you think it's important that what they should sing as well? Maybe like, yeah, why something else is extremely, because that was my problem is I always tried to sing the songs I like, like I, like, I like Queen. I like Freddie Mercury. I'll try to sing Freddie Mercury. It ain't going to happen for an untrained person with a very low voice. I have a very low voice. I didn't even realize that now that I tell people they're like, well, yeah, you sound like a fucking frog with a bronchitis. But I didn't realize that when I was younger. And then I started singing Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen and all these like lower vocalists, these bases. And it was just like easy for me. So we created this first thing to help people understand their vocal type and what songs would work for them. Because that's actually kind of the low hanging fruit. How could you sound like X singer? You might not be able to, maybe you could with a lot of training, but it's probably better that you pick someone who's like a better target for you.

Utsav Somani: To start with, you were saying the guitar band. So you were not part of a band, but you love playing the guitar.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Yeah, I've played forever. I like playing guitar. I picked it up when I was 13 thinking that might make girls like me. You know, being a shy computer nerd did not work. But while girls were not liking me, I was taking out my frustration on my Honda Flying V in my bedroom, playing 12 bar blues and stuff.

Utsav Somani: And yeah, whenever you started out there, music purists, I mean, artists are, I mean, purists, right? I mean, they should be ideally. What is their take on like, the music world, which is going to be affected by a world of AI, like with all these AI tools that are coming up, like a music is probably going to be synthetic at some point as well. And most of it probably already is like electronic music and stuff. I mean, what's the view that they have?

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): I talked to a lot of folks. I mean, I went to Music Tectonics. That was a big theme there. I met folks at Zuno and Oudio and all these kind of companies are at the forefront of that. And my friend Mansoor is at Beat Oven, you know, from Indian sort of Zuno. And they've tried to take a much more musician friendly approach of being fully licensed and, you know, attributed and paying artists and stuff. There's a lot of different opinions about it. My personal take, the music industry is already quite terrible. You know, people, musicians have a hard time making any money professionally. It's like almost impossible. You have to sell merch, you have to do a few things. Only a few people make any money as it is. And what's also really interesting is that 85% of the new Billboard 100 artists came out at TikTok last year. So record labels are in this strange position also, what is their relevance? They don't find the latest artists anymore. The internet finds them. So there's hundreds of thousands of people making music in their bedrooms who are putting it up online and then some of them will get famous. And we're trying to tap into that also with our thing. But I believe that like with email marketing, all the tools to generate and run campaigns kind of killed the channel because there's too much saturation. I think the same is true for A.I. art generally. If we saturate all the channels, no one cares anymore. And, you know, it's like if there's 500 new singles coming out that the record company is trying to push all the time, how do you filter? There's already more music than I can listen to. Why do I need A.I. music? Is it going to be better? I'm not really sure. So in that sense, I feel like artists with a story, with lyrics, with something about who they are, are going to become much more relevant because it's been a slop of pretty content out there.

Utsav Somani: I don't know how the meta A.I. slop app is doing, where we just have this feed of like, I mean, videos that people have generated. They're probably just burning electricity and energy and just like putting it up there. But Jacob, this has been super, super fun. Thank you so much. We'll find you on singonesong.com.

Jacob Singh (Sing One Song): Awesome. Great. Thanks.

Utsav Somani: Thanks for tuning in. Cheers. All the best. All right, listeners, hope you've had a good Monday with us. We'll see you on Wednesday at four o'clock. Bye bye.