"How we opened a panel for startups in the music tech space"

Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. Startup Grind is powered by Google for Entrepreneurs. They host monthly events in more than 600 cities in 150 countries featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators, and investors who share personal stories and lessons learned on the road to building great companies.

For the first Music Tech Startup Grind we were asked to write a track and perform it live. The aim was to kick off the event with an impressive introduction to the panel topic. Since Startup Grind has no acoustic branding, we agreed with the client on a musical style and developed a concept for the composition. We were inspired by the German band Kraftwerk. The main musical motif is a vocal sample that announces the name of the event. This vocal was generated by an AI software to create a link to the subject of the event and panelists. The minimalistic beat and electronic sounds rounded the track off and developed a nice harmonic impression.

During the performance, however, it was important for us to demonstrate that the music was handmade. That means that all individual tracks, except the beat programming, were created in front of the eyes of the audience. This allowed us to combine the idea of a man-machine with the concept of the event in a target oriented way. The demonstration was received with great enthusiasm.