Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
All right, today's guest is the founder and president of Pledge Music, an online music platform that allows artists to pre sell, market, and distribute recordings, music, videos and concerts directly to their audience.
He's an independent musician from London who's been making his own Record since 1999.
He founded Pledge Music in 2009 as a way to engage directly with music super fans who drive the bulk of spending in the music industry.
And he came up with the idea for Plague Music while lying on an air mattress in his mother's spare bedroom almost six years later.
The company has over 50 employees and has offices strategically around the world to support artists and fans.
In 2013, he was recognized on Billboard's 40 under 40 power players list.
And in 2014 at Musexpo International Music Awards, he won Digital Executive of the year.
So today I'd like to welcome Benji Rogers.
Benji, welcome to the show.
Benji Rogers (01:28.330)
Thank you for having me.
And thank you for a beautiful description of Pledge Music as well.
Omer (01:32.410)
Great.
Now we're both from London.
I'm in the Seattle area, and you're over in New York.
When did you decide to move over
Benji Rogers (01:41.290)
to the US So I've actually ping ponged back and forth.
My mother's in New York and my father's English, so I can get cranky at both Americans and English people, which is a ride I enjoy.
And I can get, you know, I'm involved in both politics if I choose to, which I tend to not these days.
But yeah, no, I decided to move here when I was 15.
I moved to Los Angeles and then I moved back to London, then I moved to New York, then back to London, then to Boston for a while.
I went to college at Berklee College of Music in Boston briefly.
And then my wife and I have been here for the last five years now.
I basically launched, started Pledge in London in a basement of a big office building next to a rehearsal room.
And we decided that it was, you know, I was going to kind of launch US side of operations.
So I was for a while briefly commuting between London and New York and then London and Los Angeles.
And that really wasn't going to be sustainable.
So we moved out here.
And now I have a daughter who was born in Brooklyn.
So, yeah, I have a Brooklyn girl now.
Cool.
Omer (02:52.610)
Now I like to Start off by asking my guests for a success quote or just simply what gets them out of bed and drives them to do what they do.
So is there a favorite quote that you have?
Or if not, just what gets you out of bed.
Benji Rogers (03:11.730)
It's an interesting one.
There isn't really a quote so much as.
I guess one of the first things I do when I get up in the morning is I'll meditate.
And in that meditation, it'll be these things surface.
And I meditated for about two years now, and it was because the brain gets pretty clouded.
I consider myself still fundamentally an artist in some way, shape or form.
When I was a musician, I would wake up with a burning idea for a song.
When I kind of shut down that side of things, it started to come up with products or ideas or new features for pledge or new features for new apps that I was building.
And so I think that you end up painting on a new canvas, whether it's a software, whether it's a product, whether it's a piece of code, whether it's a new marketing idea, it just becomes a different thing.
But the quote that, when you ask the question, the quote that came to me was good enough never is.
And I don't know why it popped in when you asked the question, but.
But there was this wonderful thing where I was talking with our team about innovation in the company and it was like, should we use Slack over Hipchat?
Should we use Asana?
Or should we just go back to using email?
What would work?
And one of them was like, well, why do we have to try all these things?
And I kept saying, well, because, okay, we can use email, it's good enough, it will work.
But is that really what you want?
Do you want us to not try the new things?
Should we continuously innovate?
So that's not the one that wakes me up every day, but that's the one that, when you asked the question, popped into mind.
Good enough never is.
I think it's from the An Elegant Solution, the book about Toyota, ironically, you
Omer (04:57.960)
know, I'm surprised, I've been surprised by the number of founders and entrepreneurs that I've come across who meditate every day.
Yeah, it's really surprising and it's something that I've been doing for a couple of years now as well, and wouldn't start my day any other way.
But why did you get into it?
Benji Rogers (05:21.950)
I'll tell you what it is.
I think it's that there's a massive thought endlessly continuing through life.
Right.
And you Basically toil on an idea for hours, months.
I mean, the idea for pledge was honestly, I was lying there exhausted, and all of a sudden it was just like it was there.
And.
And I've had a thousand ideas that I never wrote down, or I was at a bar partying, and then you forget them.
But when you actually go towards executing ideas, they become fascinating.
And what I find is that if you can come into it with a clear mind in some way, shape and form.
And for me, or a lot of people who don't meditate, what they'll often think to themselves is, I'll never get my mind still.
And it's a process.
It's not a fixed thing.
You don't sit down and all of a sudden your mind goes blank and you're happy.
It isn't like that.
It's really.
You wrestle demons inside.
And I've found that I've maximized outcomes for things I'm working on in that space.
And it's a cumulative effect.
So as you say, when you wake up in the morning, you just go, okay, time to go.
Get into that zone.
And sometimes it's great, sometimes it's a miserable thing.
I found horrible meditations this morning.
I was like trying to relax on something I'm working on and I just couldn't.
It wasn't coming okay.
But then you learn to be okay with that and move on.
And with other co founders or other people that I've advised, I'll say to them, you should meditate.
And they're like, no, no, there isn't enough time.
And I'm like, that's exactly why you should meditate, because you will find a different path through.
And I think that solutions will often come at your least active moments.
A lot of the new features, ideas, or a couple of the new products that I've been working on come when I'm in the shower because I'm literally my physical labor there is to wash my hair and myself, and then that's basically done right.
And so in that process, your mind is totally not in its usual zone.
It's out of cycle with kind of thinking about things.
And so I wanted to create more instances of that happening.
Meditation is a huge one for me.
There's.
And then also listening to audiobooks, particularly by business people I admire or I read a lot of biographies as well.
I found that reading biographies is an amazing way to sum up an entire person's life decisions.
And particularly when you know that when they're young, what they do and when they're old what they do.
And you can get a scope of how wisdom is built through a biography, which is, you know, business books tend to be pretty tight focused.
But you read the biography of Abraham Lincoln or John Adams or, you know, you go into someone who had unimaginable choices to make and an unimaginable set of circumstances conspiring against them, who still had to get on with life and, you know, brush their teeth or what was left of their teeth and, you know, kind of move forward.
So I think that meditation gives you a space in which to do that.
And it's a way of contextualizing all of the myriad of thoughts that you have during the day, and you come out of it clearer.
And I always said to some of my team will remark that I'm remarkably calm most of the time.
And they'll say, even when shit's going down, they'll say, why are you so calm?
And I just say to them, well, I'm not going to make a better decision if I'm freaking out.
I'm not going to make any.
I'm not going to be any better for anyone in this room if I'm panicking.
So.
And I believe that panic is a choice.
It's an option.
And so you have to.
The journey of building a business, and then when it gets to a business of more than, let's say, five people, it becomes incredibly complex.
And coming into it, I often put it to one entrepreneur this way.
I said, if you meditate for 10 minutes a day and it didn't do anything, it's still not going to be a problem for you, but I guarantee you it will do something.
And if you can get to 20 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day, you will feel the effects.
And what's the worst thing that could happen?
That you relax for 30 minutes.
There's no downside to it, right?
But people are afraid of the mind.
I think quite often they're afraid of what will come up.
And you have to recontextualize those thoughts.
The brain, it is designed to ponder on things and fix them.
I refer to it sometimes it's like a Rubik's Cube being solved in your mind when you can't sleep, you're just sitting there pushing different combinations.
How will this work?
How will this work?
And meditation is a way to short circuit that and say, relax now.
And then what I find is after meditation, maybe 30 minutes, 40 minutes later is when the answer will come.
And it comes in a beautiful linear order.
If you allow the brain space to do it.
Otherwise you're just working, I think, harder and not smarter.
I think meditation is part of a way to work smarter.
Omer (10:29.810)
Yeah, that's.
That's really, really good advice.
So let's go back to that night that you had that moment of insight and came up with this idea for Pledge Music.
What did you do?
Did you decide to take action right away?
And how did you know that of all the ideas that you've had, this was the one that you really wanted to act upon?
Benji Rogers (10:51.970)
Yeah, so.
So it's, It's.
It's an odd one.
And I think about this quite often.
We're about to turn six years, and so it's kind of like, you know, it always gets in my mind that I go through the old photos of, you know, like, crude drawings that I'd done.
And I'll tell you what it is.
I was lying in bed and I was kind of pondering.
I was sleeping and I woke up and I was sort of like, what if an artist could offer their fan the experience of the making of an album in real time through the Internet?
And it was like, whoa, that would solve a huge number of problems.
And then a part of me was like, I'll get to that tomorrow.
And I remember just kind of rolling over and I'm living on an air mattress at my mom's house.
My wife was a receptionist supporting us at the time because I was being a musician.
And I just remember going, this.
The idea wouldn't leave, but it was crystallized.
I could see an interface in my head in which this would happen.
And there were details that were fuzzy, but I could literally.
I just.
It was like, wow, this is something.
And it also solved an immediate problem I had, but also an immediate problem for millions of people.
So I got up and I went down to the kitchen table and I pulled up my old MacBook, one of the big black fat ones, about three inches deep.
And I was like, I want to build this thing.
And I pulled up iWeb at the time and I started to basically put in, in blocks and modules for where it would look.
And it was about 2:30, maybe 3:00 clock in the morning when I had the idea.
And about 9am, my mom's boyfriend came down and he says, what are you working on?
And I said, it's called Pledge Music.
And then I went and bought the domain right there and then, and it literally all popped in.
And what were the odds that Pledge Music would have been available at that time?
But I spent that £7 was pretty much the last money I had, it was pretty bare.
And something in the idea propelled itself beyond if I'd wanted to stop it or not.
That was really what it was.
It was this idea that the making of things for a certain type of fan is more interesting to them than the buying of things which have already been made.
And as someone who would dig through record crates to find unreleased versions and go buy bootlegs and scour Limewire or Cazawa to look for this unreleased stuff, like, it was really important to me and the idea burned.
And so when over the next kind of few days I kept coming back to this house to be made and it wouldn't allow me to put it down.
Whereas other ideas had been like, that would be kind of cool, this one would not let me go.
It was like literally like it had me by the throat as much as I had it.
And then what I found was when I started to share it with a few people that I really admired, the same thing happened to them.
I drop it to the first guy, the lawyer that I told it about, John, one of the co founders.
I told him about it in a bar one night and I didn't know him very well and he's like, this idea is incredible.
Don't tell anyone about this idea.
I want you to sign an NDA unless they sign an NDA.
And I didn't even know what an NDA was and I had no business experience at all.
The fact that he got so ignited on it and it wouldn't let him go really led me to believe that it did.
Then I would take it to just really smart people that I thought were like successful business when you've done this and it gathered its own steam and it was still me propelling it, it was still on my shoulders.
And I was reading through some of the founding emails a couple weeks ago and it's really interesting because people were trying to poke holes in it, but I could answer every question.
And the bit that we.
There were certainly bits that we got very, very wrong in the whole thing from ideation to creation.
But once it started to kind of move, there was no stopping that one particular idea.
What I found is that there's a fear I had when I was songwriting that I've written my last great song, that was it.
I'll never write another one that good.
But you always kind of do.
But those ideas, those kind of life changing ideas.
Similarly, there are other ideas that I've had since then, that burn in my brain today that I have to build so it's.
It's an amazing thing to watch.
But there are certain ideas that will grab you, and I think you have to run with them because you'll never be satisfied if you just let it go.
There were two ideas recently that I saw, which were ideas that I'd had that have just been executed.
And I was just like, oh, man.
And I emailed the people that I told about them for the first time, like, well, there it is.
Dropbox just built it.
Great.
You know, but I love ideas.
They're adventurous.
And I think that if you were to, again, if you were to stay up 6 hours, 7 hours, hours every night and going to work, tired the next day because you were brainstorming or whiteboarding an idea, it's never going to be a waste.
Even if someone's already built it, can you build a better one?
It was a persistence.
It was also a huge amount of luck that rolled in towards the idea itself.
I found that just.
I would share it with entrepreneurs.
I would say to them, listen, you should be CEO, you should build this.
I'm going to be a musician.
And they kept saying, nope, only you can build it.
Only you can pull this off.
And it was really an amazing thing to watch it come into being because it gathered its own steam on the idea.
And artists will routinely email me and say, I remember that day that we sat on the south bank having a beer and you told us that plan.
And I was like, yeah, and we released 1,000 albums last year.
It's amazing.
So why did I say why did
Omer (16:49.810)
you think people say that?
No, you're the only one who can go and build this because you didn't have any business or entrepreneurial experience.
So what was it?
Was it the clarity of this vision that you had that had people saying this to you?
Benji Rogers (17:08.370)
Yeah, I wrestle with this quite often because there are certain founders that will come up with ideas to me, and.
And it's very hard to.
If they don't emote well, if they don't speak well, they can often hamstring themselves in that type of presentation.
They'll come off too overconfident or they'll come off too underconfident.
What I found was, is that the idea itself was compelling.
And a lot of people were kind of watching from the sidelines saying, will he do it?
Will he not?
But when I would say, when I would pitch it to an entrepreneur that could be the CEO, they would always come back to me with, it sounds great, I love it, but you have to build it.
The Head of cd, baby.
I was like, you should do this, Derek.
You'd be amazing at this.
And he wrote back saying, build it.
I did.
I'll tell you, the founders of a company can be.
Are crucial at certain levels.
And there's a skill set to being able to just cobble together whatever will work.
The other thing I'd say is the idea was going into a business that is resistant to change, unlike any I've ever seen.
There was a saying in the music industry, which is that the music industry is technologically about as in step with modern technology as the Amish.
And a friend of mine said, that's an insult to the Amish because at least they use wheels, right?
And I think that they knew that it had to be someone who comes from an industry background, a musician who understands what musicians want.
And they also just kind of, looking back, it makes sense.
When I couldn't get a record deal, I made my own CDs.
Sounds like normal now, but back then, no one made their own CDs.
It didn't happen, right?
So I.
Or a CD burner.
I used to publish my own books and I couldn't get a publisher.
I always just went and did it and I remained restless.
So when these people were saying, you've got to do it.
A founder doesn't need to be that qualified.
You just have to be A, very lucky.
But B, you have to ask.
I'll give you an example.
When I first came into.
When John the lawyer said to me, no one should look at this unless they've signed an NDA, I didn't say, oh, yeah, you're right.
I said, what's an NDA?
Everything in me wanted to say, oh, yeah, totally, we should do that.
Not knowing what it was.
Google it.
But I didn't know what a Gantt Chart is.
So I'm like, what's a Gantt Chart?
I don't know what you know.
I didn't know how to do projections or anything.
And I remember when I sat with our first CFO and the accountant, and I basically said, look, Karen, Mike, I'm not leaving this room until I understand what's on this page.
So you're going to have to bear with me.
And what I found was, is when you ask fundamental questions of people, they want to answer you.
They like to do so.
And they were so kind and gave me so much of their time, as have many entrepreneurs since.
And I basically would just ask.
I would ask endless questions, and I found that people would answer them.
And when you go through the hard times in the business, that's when you should be asking as well.
When the questions stop, it's worrying.
When you feel like you know it all, I think it's worrying.
And to this day I'm just stunned by new innovation as it comes through.
But, you know, I don't think anyone else could have built pledge in the way that was.
And that may be a good or bad thing.
I don't know.
When passing off the CEO ship to somebody else, that's a very strange, hard thing to do.
But ultimately, the skill of, you know, creating something from nothing versus the skill of running something that's been created are very, very different.
And you know, I never had the intention to remain sort of the head of the whole thing.
It wasn't really.
I didn't, you know, I think every third or fourth board meeting I'd be like, so should we get a CEO actually knows what we're doing now?
You know, I would be the reluctant CEO.
And that wasn't because I didn't want to.
It was because it was like it's a different skill set.
And I recognized that there's a technical side of being a CEO that's very important.
There's also a brutal side, sometimes that needs to be there.
And there's also just a command of facts and processes beyond what you require for 5, 10 people in a room.
That said, there are not many people that can take a few hundred thousand dollars.
When I was doing this, this was Pre sort of iOS and full on iOS and pre kind of lean startup.
MVP wasn't even really used that much back then.
Whereas now a lot of business plans will come to me with like, here's a business plan and here's the MVP and TestFlight, go for it.
That really wasn't how we did things when I was starting anyway.
Go ahead.
Omer (22:08.500)
Yeah, you had this idea which you just couldn't let go of.
And the.
When you shared this idea with people, you had a lot of positive feedback and that must have driven you to, to keep going forward.
But you also faced a lot of no's and rejections along the way.
So can you, can you give me one example of that just maybe one moment where maybe you questioned whether this was the right idea?
Benji Rogers (22:39.860)
Sure.
There was a moment.
The first no came when I opened a bank.
Well, first of all, I couldn't open a bank account.
That was just a hilarious series of things where I went into HSBC in London and I said, an investor is putting money in.
I need to open a bank.
Account for the business.
And he says, someone will see you in two weeks.
Omer (23:03.780)
What?
Benji Rogers (23:04.580)
I said, I don't understand.
I want to put money in, not take it out, because I want to start this business.
So can I just do this?
Yeah, I'm sorry, sir, it doesn't work that way.
In order to open a business account, you have to be with one of our people.
Someone will be here.
So in two weeks time, we can do that.
And I was just left stunned, like, whoa, okay.
And then I went to the accountants that I'd met and I said, I can't open a bank account.
I went to the bank and they wouldn't let me open one.
And he says, yeah, yeah, I'll take care of that for you.
So that was my first.
No was, can you open a bank account?
Actually, it wasn't no.
It was a not now.
Then when we got the bank account open with the bank, who coutts in the uk, who I love and who are amazing in every way.
When we got it open, I remember saying, okay, so now I need an acquiring account into which to receive money.
Oh, yeah, we can't do that.
Doesn't work.
I was like, no, no, I need to open an account so we can take money in.
No, yeah, we can't do that.
Okay.
There was no real precedence for crowdfunding at the time, and there was no real precedence for reference transactions other than hotels and holidays type thing.
It just wasn't there.
Kickstarter had launched in the UK about maybe a couple weeks in, so we knew it was possible.
And I'd seen companies doing what we did in other verticals, but this idea that you could capture a card and charge it later did not exist in 99% of Banks universes.
So for three months as we were coding the site, we didn't have a way to do these transactions.
And every single credit card company, bank processor, payment processor.
I called up everyone daily said, no.
Then it became, we're going to launch in a month and we don't have a payment product.
It won't work endlessly.
I was told no.
I was told no in different languages in different ways to go.
And there was a point at which we actually were like, look, we may not be able to do this in this way.
And so if we can't do that, do we just call it quits now and send money back to the investor?
I mean, how do we proceed?
It was right at the end of no where I remember having a conversation with our accountant and I was like, mike.
And I said, Mike, I don't know if we're going to do this.
And he's like, I got a mate who runs a processing credit card processing company and called them up and sure enough, two days later and I've got it framed on my wall.
The emails of the first reference transactions going through.
The subject of the email just said, this is what success looks like.
And then there was that.
And then I would say on a daily basis, I've been told, no, that's not how this works.
No, there isn't enough time.
No, there isn't enough money.
No, Benj, you don't understand.
This is how it works in the big world or whatever it is.
Daily I hear it, I hear startups saying, tell me what their problems are like, if only I could do this.
And the nos, you listen to them, they're not illogical, they're not saying no, just arbitrarily quite often.
But you want to take that as there's a no that says I should listen to that because it's really solid, or a no that says that's because you don't understand it.
And then you find your path and look, it's a battle.
I mean, the music business in particular has been a battle.
And it's a series of no's.
If you want to start a new streaming service, get ready.
The nos will come so thick and fast, you won't know what's going on.
Right.
And we were told no by every major record label, every major management company.
Most of the artists we were told no by, and now we work with them all.
So it's quite often a question of just hanging in there and resilience.
Because no is a great thing to hear at times because it will either make you move on or it'll stiffen your resolve.
Omer (27:02.600)
Okay, so you've been at this business for almost six years now, and along the way you've also started to take on the role as an advisor for a number of other startups.
How did that come about?
And what type of companies are you working with these days?
Benji Rogers (27:26.840)
Sure.
So it started to happen a couple of years ago.
Basically once we got to about three years, four years in, it was sort of.
I remember my friend Glenn from Billboard saying to me, you've made it to five years, that's like 50 years in music tech, startup world.
And I would come across people who would ask me for just advice and it would be like, I'm launching this product, what do you think?
And I would give them just kind of off the cuff answers as I would see it and that it seemed to be more helpful than it wasn't.
I think a lot of times it's moral support.
There's a lady that I'm advising right now, she's got a startup in the travel space, a very great idea, very difficult space to get into.
And at the moments where she's like, I got a no from this vc, I got a no from this accelerator.
I got no.
I keep.
Part of it is, do you want to talk about the number of no's I got?
Do you want to hear about the number of people that said no to the Beatles or no to Ed Sheeran or no to.
All these people did not sign Adele, people did not sign the Rolling Stones, et cetera?
So there's a thought.
The world is littered with those.
But really what it was was there were certain amounts of I've done it.
So when someone says that seems really hard or difficult, I'm like, no, it's not.
Or, yes, it is really hard, but it's worth doing.
Because whether it's like.
One of the companies I advise is called Dubset.
They're going into an amazing space right now, and they've built to me the underlying architecture for the most advanced music clearing system out there for the dance music space, which is a risky, strange field, but they built it.
And so part of my advice to them is, yes, I think this is a good idea, or you should meet people.
A lot of times the advising is for contacts.
I'm asked to advise more companies than I'm able to because I can't devote time.
But it also teaches me a huge amount the questions that are being asked.
Remaining on top of technology as it's coming out, whether it's.
And in particular, my expertise is now in the music space.
It keeps me on top of my game as well.
But also it's a way of giving back because so many people help me along on this path.
And I really do view as one entrepreneur in particular, a chap named Andrew Bentley.
He just gave of his time so willingly, and there would not be a pledge of music without him.
And when things got rough, I would call him up and he would just say, no, yep, this is what it looks like.
This is just hard.
It just sucks.
Get through it, you know, and knowing when to kind of abandon certain things that you love dearly because they're just not going to work.
And quite often it takes an advisor or a mentor to say to you, okay, enough now, cut it.
It's done.
Omer (30:32.660)
What are some of the Common mistakes that you see entrepreneurs or founders making.
As you've kind of gone and advised these different companies, what are some of the common themes that you see?
Benji Rogers (30:45.660)
Sure.
The common thing I've seen is I've got this great idea, but I don't have any money to build it.
And my answer to that is, normally, build it.
Find a way.
If you can't find someone or I don't know a good developer who will do X, Y and Z unless I pay them.
Okay, well, if you built the next great thing and you think it is truly, or if you've got in your head the next best thing, then why don't you try working with a developer for equity rather than cash?
Are they motivated by that?
If they're not, then they might be super interested, but then it may not happen.
What I found is that there's this kind of get to MVP if you can, and if you can't get there, I'm very suspicious of a lot of that, particularly these days with the types of apps that are being built and shown to me.
There's a guy I met at a conference and he said to me, I've got this great idea.
I said, great, I'd love to see it.
Two weeks later he sent me a fully functioning app with an amazing presentation and I was like, wow, that's possible.
Whereas someone else has said to me, I've had this great idea and a year later they'll be like, yeah, I was still having trouble getting a couple hundred thousand dollars to get an MVP off the ground.
And I'm like, why?
Ask yourself why that's happening.
So I think that there's this I need money in order.
Two happens or it becomes like, I built the mvp, it's not going, so we need to just pump more money in it to turn the gas on.
Then you also got co founders who quit.
How do you handle that moving forward?
A lot of that happens.
One startup I'm working with have got this phenomenal idea and I wanted to show it to some people to potentially fund it.
But it was so good, I wanted them to get a patent on it, or at least a provisional patent on it, because I was like, I don't want to show this to anyone.
It's too amazing.
It has to have protection in there.
And then quite often it's just those sort of like, what would you do in this scenario?
Type thing.
But to get to an MVP right now is much easier than it ever was.
And show the world what you've got and don't Be afraid of it being out there.
I'm learning this firsthand with something that I developed, and it's an experiment.
I don't know if it will work, but at the same time, it's not done.
Because it's out in the world doesn't mean it's finished.
I mean, we release albums or projects on pledge that have not been recorded yet.
So you watch that as it happens, and I think that there's a real excitement to that.
Being a part of the first MVP is exciting.
Saying I was there back then, so it doesn't need to be finished as well as the entrepreneurs of the world.
It just needs to be great and people will come along and get on board with something that is truly great.
If they're not, if they'll only do it for $200,000 a year, well, do they think it's great or do they think that it's got a shot?
And your side projects and your fun stuff that you do can often turn into something.
So never let those go away.
I've learned more from the side things I do, and it brings and informs more to me and my main business.
From knowing what's out there, it's a huge way to go.
Omer (34:13.390)
So it sounds like it's been an amazing journey over the last six years, from that night lying on that air mattress to where you are today.
I know that you have hired a CEO now and sort of stepped back from that role.
And I bet when you started on this journey, you probably didn't see yourself as being an advisor for a number of startups.
But when you look back over those last six years, what was one of the hardest things about building this business that you wish you had known when you started out?
Benji Rogers (34:53.449)
Yeah, it's a great question.
I didn't think it would take this long, and I underestimated how resistant to change the incumbent industry was.
You're still seeing it today.
Six years ago, we approached our first bands and managers and labels and we said to them, your current business model is not going to be effective in the future.
We've got a system that will make you, instead of $9.99 per transaction, $55, which is better?
The industry basically said, well, well, the way that we do things is for a reason.
And this is while meanwhile, piracy was at 70% and there was craziness.
And you would sit in the room with really smart people and say to them, this is a new thing that you could do.
And they look at you like you're from another planet.
So I Didn't think it would be that hard to convince people and to convince them that change was not terrifying and wasn't going to ruin their business or destroy anything, but they were really resistant to it.
And Blockchain is experiencing the same thing right now.
The incumbents are the banks and they're going to be disrupted.
Or Uber is doing the same thing with taxis.
And the music space halved in size in the last 15 years in terms of its financial input.
And that's.
Meanwhile, consumption has quintupled or whatever it is.
And so when back then six years ago, I was like, right, well, I've solved it.
Let's just get this out there and problem game over.
And then five years in, you're like, okay, I'm still explaining to you how this works.
That's phenomenal.
But it's because it was radical at the time.
It was a radical thing to do.
And it still is quite radical.
We'll have conversations like, yes, I like this idea, but I want it to live on my website.
It lives on your website.
It's not in the community, so fewer people will see it.
You'll make less money.
Yeah, but I really want it to live on my website.
Okay, we can do that if that's what you want.
There are some radical forces at work in the music space in particular right now, which are going to alter the economics considerably.
Definitely in favor of what Pledge does and what we built.
But that's the thing I would say is if I'd say to myself six years ago, don't assume that it's going to be as quick as you think, because it's a battle when you've got people fighting for something that they just know.
Not that they know that it's better, they just know it.
It's like, I release records in this way.
We put music out in this way, and then streaming comes along and knocks it sideways or direct to fan comes along and knocks it sideways.
And you got to really remain resilient to that because you will be told no a thousand times.
So, yeah, I'd say to myself six years ago, it will take six years.
I don't know if I would have done it.
Is the other thing another idea that I'm working on and hatching in my brain?
I'm like, I'm going to have to go through this again in a certain way.
But you got to do it because it's the ride of a lifetime.
It's the ride of a lifetime to build something.
And as I said before, if we're all into tomorrow.
What a ride.
What a ride it's been.
Yeah.
Omer (38:15.830)
I think that also underscores the point of really getting into something that you're passionate about because you may be, well, working on this thing for the next five or 10 years, and if it's something that you're just pursuing to make money but you're not really passionate about it, then I think it's going to be really hard to keep going for that long.
Benji Rogers (38:37.600)
Well, it's because if your motivation isn't for beyond just the money, I mean, look, there's nothing wrong with making money, but ideally, excellence and what drives you should become, its end result should be money.
Unless you're doing a financial service, obviously, but the people that were developing the blockchain and the bitcoin protocol, there was potentially lots of money in the end.
But right now we're doing it for love and there's huge amounts of money invested in it and the space, but it's going to have to break the back of a massive incumbent service.
And I think it will do it.
But again, six, maybe seven years ago, this was put into place and it's now taking this amount of time.
Humans are very resistant to change.
It's very not in most people's DNA to go, you know what, today I'm going to convert all my money into bitcoins, but guess what?
And there's risk to it as well.
But I think that, you know, when you're starting something up, if you can see it clearly in your head and if it just scratches that itch, if it's just, you know, you've got to do it, you have to go do it.
One of our team, you know, she wants to go to a startup and I'm like, you've got to do it.
You have to go build your dream.
You got to do it.
You know, if it falls apart, that doesn't matter.
Go do what you knew, otherwise it will obsess you and haunt you because the best ideas do.
Omer (40:08.350)
Yeah, you know, I gave up my, you know, corporate job to pursue and do my own thing.
And a lot of it was driven by something I heard from Jeff Bezos, talking about what he called a regret minimization framework, which is kind of a really geeky way, but it's just a simple way of saying, you know, when you're 80 years old, you don't want to look back and have regrets, so it's better to, to pursue those dreams and even fail.
But at least to have known that you didn't Exactly.
You don't have that lingering feeling all your life in terms of, oh my God, I didn't even try to do that.
Benji Rogers (40:47.910)
Yeah, it's funny, I have a three and a half year old daughter and she's kind of.
And that's recontextualized a lot for me and for a lot of people listening may not have kids or maybe thinking about it, but you become instantly aware that this world's going to spin around only X number of times with you on it.
Right.
And do you want to wake up every morning going at something that is difficult yet ultimately pleasurable when it happens, or do you want to just kind of carry on and say, well, you know, I worked a lot in that life, you know, in this life, I did a lot of work.
It's not really what you'd be thinking of.
And so what's funny is I often put myself in the shoes of what I built here at Pledge or the albums I made before.
None of those albums did not sell millions and millions of copies.
And I didn't.
I wasn't made famous by them, but I love them.
I love what I created.
I love Pledge.
I love Radiary, the app I've built.
I love the companies I'm advising because I'm a part in some tiny way of that journey.
And if my life were to end tomorrow, I would be a satisfied person for all the successes and the failures because it really is building something unique or being a part of that, because there are vital pieces to this.
Zach, who coded the first iteration of the site, Rob, who works on it.
Jace, my co founder, Rupert, my co founder, Malcolm.
It's a journey unlike any other.
And there are heartbreaking moments, but there are also moments where you are crying with laughter at how fun and absurd the whole thing is as well.
And so I could die happy knowing that that was there, but it's so if it burns in you, you got to go do it.
You just have to go do it.
There's not enough time to not do that, I think, in life.
And I found that when I've needed people or resource or whatever it is, they tend to show up in amazing ways.
And you have to trust that and stay lucky and focused and do it for love, because it's a great, great journey.
Omer (43:01.770)
That is great advice.
Okay, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you just to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Benji Rogers (43:11.850)
Yep.
Ready.
Omer (43:12.730)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received.
Benji Rogers (43:17.450)
Don't quit.
Omer (43:20.490)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Benji Rogers (43:25.790)
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
The latest version, the last translation that was done because he has a fantastic way of contextualizing the span of time involved and your place in it.
Omer (43:42.190)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Benji Rogers (43:47.790)
Restlessness.
This never ending quest to find the better tool, the better way, the better path.
Always, never being satisfied with what is restlessness.
Omer (44:01.370)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Benji Rogers (44:09.290)
It's going to be.
I've gone through all of them.
Wunderlist as my to do list is my 1.
And checking it off and getting it done every day.
Omer (44:19.670)
What's a new business idea?
One of those crazy ideas that you have in your head that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time.
Benji Rogers (44:29.830)
It's in the music streaming space and I can't say more because you're probably doing something with it, but it's terrifying.
Omer (44:38.790)
Okay, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Benji Rogers (44:46.240)
I don't know.
I was going to say the meditation part.
Fun fact.
I used to be really into Middle east politics.
I went to the Middle east for a month, wrote some blogs about it, and now I don't get into politics ever again.
Maybe there's that.
Omer (45:02.640)
That was enough, right?
Benji Rogers (45:04.160)
Yeah.
Omer (45:05.120)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Benji Rogers (45:10.650)
My daughter.
My daughter and my family have provided more love and support even though she's three and she's obsessed with dinosaurs and all that kind of stuff.
That's really what ticks every box right now.
And the work I do is for them.
Just to give you some context on it.
My daughter said to me yesterday, when I'm older, I want to be able to spend more time with you at the office.
So, you know.
Omer (45:39.220)
Yeah, that's cool.
Benji Rogers (45:40.420)
Yeah.
Great.
Omer (45:41.700)
Benji, it's been a pleasure.
I kind of feel like we could just go on talking for hours here quite happily, but unfortunately we've got to wrap up now.
If folks want to find out more about pledge music, they can go to PledgeMusic.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best
Benji Rogers (45:59.900)
way for them to do that is Twitter, actually.
N gkrogers B E N J I K R O G E R S and be prepared, you will see tweets about vinyl, ice hockey, my daughter, space exploration and bitcoin.
Omer (46:16.080)
Great, Benji, thanks again and I wish you all the best.
Benji Rogers (46:18.800)
Thank you very much.
Omer (46:19.760)
Cheers.
