Interview with Roneil Rumburg (Audius)

Crypto-Powered Music Streaming

Lisa Xu
1 min readMay 24, 2022

I recently had the chance to interview Roneil Rumburg, Co-founder and CEO of Audius. Audius is a decentralized music streaming platform that is democratizing the music industry by giving more control and ownership back to artists and their communities.

Audius launched in 2019 and has since grown to 7M+ users and 250K+ artists, making it one of the most widely adopted Web3 projects in the world. The company has also raised venture capital from top investors, including Pantera, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Multicoin.

We had a fun conversation discussing:

  • how Audius is different from other music streaming platforms
  • how Audius got their first few artists onto the platform through cold emailing
  • the many use cases of Audius’s native token AUDIO
  • the developer ecosystem building on top of Audius’s protocol
  • the future of the music industry

Watch our fireside chat (part of our Crypto Driven interview series) below.

Crypto Driven is a global community and interview series run by FirstMark Capital that dives into the latest trends, emerging platforms, and top companies across the crypto & web3 ecosystem. Crypto Driven is hosted by me (@lisamxu) and my FirstMark colleagues Matt Turck (@mattturck) and Jack Cohen (@itsjackcohen) .

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Lisa Xu
Lisa Xu

Written by Lisa Xu

VC @FirstMark investing in early stage startups | former homes: Handy, Peloton, Bain & Company, Wharton