They are very passionate and they know the space.Ĭompared to Google’s user base, Songza’s user base is small. Why did Google want Songza?ĪR: Part of it is the team. And you have that feeling like “Good for you! I’m really pleased for you.”īI: Can you give me any insight into this deal. He’s very dear to you and now he just got married to the most wonderful girl. Imagine having a cousin, and he lived with you for a while and he goes off to college. I use it every day!” And I’m like, “Yeah, I guess I did do that.” So people will come up to me and say, “You made Songza. What could he possibly do to top that? It was: just ignore it. Growing up, my father had this phrase: ‘You are only as good as your next thing.’ That was his way of living in the world where he had made the Macintosh. And eventually that became the Songza that we know today.Īnd then the very first song I ever played on Songza, I’m embarrassed to admit it, was Green Day’s “When September Ends.”Īnd the first week we had over 1 million songs played.īI: What does it feel like to see this project you did take on a life of its own and be acquired by Google?ĪR: I have success amnesia. We indexed the web to find music … the real value came in curation and finding music. You could listen on your iPod, but I’d be sitting in this Starbucks in Chicago and I wanted to share a song with someone and there wasn’t a way of doing that, so I made it. I realized that music wasn’t particularly social. When Green Day came on the radio, I would say, “turn that off.”īut then one day I was like, “What is that Green Day thing anyway?” I traveled around the world playing music in an orchestra. In high school I was a complete classical music snob. What inspired you to create it?Īza Raskin: I was 22 or 23 at the time. We caught up with Raskin to ask him what it felt like to see his project get bought by Google.īusiness Insider: Tells us about Songza. I’m not the smartest mathematician, or physicist,” he says but it is that combination of these fields that makes him come up with “unique” ideas. “So if you want to have great ideas, learn lots of fields and then combine. “Great ideas are almost always great ideas in hindsight,” Aza Raskin tells us. He’s also the son of Apple Macintosh creator Jef Raskin. Raskin’s creativity could be in his genes. He later launched health app startup “Massive Health” acquired by Jawbone in 2013 and now he’s the VP of Innovation at Jawbone.Īlong the way he wrote the first “geolocation” spec for the web (mapping locations of objects), created a new way to prevent certain types of phishing attacks, and founded Bloxes, a startup that builds cool things out of cardboard.Īnd he did all that as a high school dropout, skipping straight to college, where he studied mathematics and physics.
At Mozilla, he was the creative lead on the Firefox browser he worked on the mobile browser and other projects. That led to a startup called Humanized, bought by Mozilla in 2008. When he was 20, he built a human interface for computers similar to Siri and used by typing your question or command, not speaking it. He sold it back in 2008 to Amazon-backed Amie Street.īut he had been creating cool things long before that. Raskin wasn’t involved in Songza at the time. At age 23, he invented song-sharing site Songza, bought by Google last month for an undisclosed sum.
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