San Francisco | January 31, 2013
All too often, tech startup founders feel like they have to move their headquarters to an industry hub such as the San Francisco Bay Area in order to really be successful. But while it’s good to be in touch with the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley or New York City, there can also be big benefits to building your startup outside of these typical tech epicenters. A great example of this is SoundCloud, the popular audio distribution platform that has scaled up quite nicely while maintaining its home base in Berlin, Germany.
SoundCloud was recognized at the 6th annual Crunchies last week as the “best international startup” of the year, so we pulled aside co-founder and CEO Alex Ljung after he came offstage for a brief talk about how the company has grown. Watch the video embedded above to hear about how SoundCloud kept its international roots even after raising funds from Silicon Valley and New York City investors, what his advice is to other international founders looking to grow, what his favorite things on SoundCloud are right now, and more.
We also talked to Ljung before the show started, when SoundCloud was just a Crunchie nominee and not yet a winner — and that was a pretty enlightening conversation too. Watch that in the video embedded below to hear about the perks of building a company in Berlin, what SoundCloud’s official language is, and what’s up next for the company.
SoundCloud is the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere. Recording and uploading sounds to SoundCloud lets people easily share them privately with their friends or publicly to blogs, sites and social networks. It takes just a click to share sounds to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Foursquare. SoundCloud can be accessed anywhere using the official iPhone and Android apps, as well as hundreds of creation and sharing apps built on the SoundCloud platform. SoundCloud offers free...
Alexander Ljung is founder and CEO of SoundCloud, the audio platform that enables anybody to upload, record, promote and share their sounds on the web. Since its launch in 2008, Alexander has been responsible for all aspects of the site’s strategic vision and business development. Under his leadership, SoundCloud has quickly gained a reputation for being the number one platform available for audio creators to share, broadcast, track and promote their sounds.
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