Mixcloud is a music streaming and marketplace platform that I built for more than a decade alongside Nikhil Shah, Nico Perez, Mat Clayton, Sam Cooke, and many more extremely talented people.

Mixcloud is an ecosystem for lean-in music fans and creators to connect, interact and transact with one another. It is built for and by people who truly give a shit about music.

It’s hard to overstate the impact that Mixcloud has had on its corner of the world. The platform is used by tens of millions of people a month. Billions of minutes of music are streamed each year. Its music catalogue holds more than 20 million pieces of unique content. More than two million musicians have published on it. Hundreds of thousands of transactions are made between creators and their fans on its marketplaces. Millions of dollars have been paid to musicians.

Mixcloud has transformed countless peoples’ lives for the better. And that includes us — the people who built it.

In the earliest days, when I first joined the team in 2010, we were first-time entrepreneurs working from a bedroom in a warehouse in North Wembley. We had zero funding and no revenue. Everything that was accomplished was accomplished from scratch. Everything we built we taught ourselves how to build. We learnt through trial and error, thousands of hours of reading, and by somehow convincing incredibly smart mentors to work with us.

Collectively, we learnt an incredible amount along the way. How to design and build products. How to innovate. How to set and meet objectives. How to measure success and failure. How to price. How to run web infrastructure at global scale. How to build apps. How to go-to-market. How to go from zero to one. And from one to 100. How to make impact when there’s no money. How to work when there’s nobody telling you to. How to sell. How to budget. How to write financial models. How to pitch. How to close. How to raise capital. How to deploy capital. How to run a board. How to read and write contracts. How to create a brand. How to rebrand. How to market a product. How to write copy. How to hire inclusively, set targets, motivate, compensate and organise 100+ people. How to run an office. How to run a remote team. How to work with advertisers. How to run research. How to run a sales team. How to run an ad stack. How to negotiate licences with giant second parties. And hundreds of other lessons on top.

But as much as we learnt what to do, we also learnt what not to do by making mistakes and learning from them.

So Nikhil, Nico, Mat and Sam: thank you for the journey. Thank you for believing in me enough to have me along for the ride. We did ourselves proud.

More importantly, thank you to the team: everyone that worked on Mixcloud from the first day to now, to the years to come.

Big up yourselves.