Wrestling with issues of growth and profitability at a musical enterprise, Jake is the CEO of Instinctiv, a free app that facilitates music management on both desktop and mobile devices.
Instead of requiring a library of digital music to be kept and managed from a single location, Instinctiv offers SyncStream technology, which brings an individual’s entire music library to any device, allowing the user to play any song in the collection on multiple mobile and desktop devices through an available Internet connection. One Instinctiv feature, among several, analyzes the user’s preferences and then organizes the music library to make songs easier to find, while another allows for the easy identification (and purchase) of songs heard anywhere.
And just as people enjoy sharing photographs, Instinctiv enables users to share music with their friends. “Music is a social experience,” Jake says. “Before this technology, you would make a mix tape for a friend. We’ve tried to bring that idea in by incorporating social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can post the song title and the artist that you’re listening to, making it easy to share. It’s just a modern mix tape.”
While the idea for Instinctiv was forming in 2006, Jake was still at an equity trading desk with Merrill Lynch, where he had worked since finishing his economics degree at Dartmouth. While Instinctiv was being established as a company in 2008, Jake was starting business school at Cornell, following his interest in technology, media, and entertainment, and looking for companies that were innovative and competitive. “It became clear that I should be working for a start-up after graduate school,” he says. “Having that kind of operating experience at a small company would be helpful before trying to start my own.”
Finding a good fit with Instinctiv in 2010, Jake began working as the vice president of business development. Over the course of “a whirlwind year,” he has become the CEO, managing the internal team of 13 employees as well as the company’s external relationships with its partners.
In the fast-paced and ever-changing music business – and with 350,000 very active and loyal Instinctiv users – Jake has plenty to do, even as he thinks about founding his own venture one day.
“I’m interested in staying around technology,” Jake says of his future plans. “As I look forward, I’d like to solve an everyday problem for people by bringing in technology to simplify it for them.”
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