Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava thinks AI emails are killing conversations

Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the sample platform countless producers rely on for one-shots and melodic loops. Samples pulled from the service have found their way into massive hits like Lisa’s “Money” and “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter. (The original samples are here and here, for the curious.)

Before that, Kakul held executive roles at Flickr, Yahoo, GitHub, and Adobe. Throughout her career, Kakul has found herself at the intersection of Silicon Valley and creatives. That’s been especially true at Splice, where she’s not just expanded the platform’s footprint by acquiring Spitfire Audio, but also overseen its forays into the world of generative AI.

Last year, she was very outspoken on an episode of Decoder about avoiding the sort of “push-button, get-song” AI that has made companies like Suno so controversial. And based on her answers to our questionnaire, it doesn’t seem like her skepticism has waned. When it comes to Splice, the company has made a point of trying to offer AI products that still keep the human at the center of the creative process. And when it comes to communicating with colleagues, Kakul sees the same need to keep AI at bay.

What is your most indispensable tool?

A well-written document and a real conversation about it.

Splice is remote-first, so we don’t have a hallway. What we have instead is somebody sitting down and actually thinking something through, and then a bunch of people arguing with it. Almost everything good that’s happened here started that way.

Which is why I’m careful about AI-written documents. Once you can’t tell whether there’s a person behind the words, the conversation you have about it becomes a different conversation, and a worse one. And you can’t really go back from that. I think the same thing is true of music.

What is your happy place online?

Instagram, which I know is not the fashionable answer. My feed has turned into almost entirely people making music in ways I would never have thought of. There’s gothic western, which I did not know was a thing. There’s a woman in Russia who organizes street dancing. There’s a guy playing modern hits on a hammered dulcimer. The Indian chai-wala rapping. I could watch it all, all day.

What game do you have the fondest memories of?

Antakshari. It’s an Indian game — you sing a bit of a song, and whatever letter the line ends on is the letter the next person has to start their song with. You play it on long car rides, at weddings, any time a group of people is stuck somewhere together.

I love that the whole game is made out of music and none of the players are musicians. You just have to remember, and you have to be willing to sing in front of your family, which for most people is the harder part. And then when you watch people’s faces get soft when the song really hits — even when it’s sung badly. That’s the power of music.

What’s the most disappointing gadget you’ve owned?

A cup warmer. It warms the cup. It does not warm the coffee. I want to be clear that it works exactly as designed.

What creation are you most proud of?

I can’t not say my kids. Watching a person go from nothing to a fully formed human with opinions you did not give them is the most amazing thing I have been anywhere near. And the strange part is that it isn’t rare. It’s happening in every house on the street. We all just watch it happen and then go about our day.

Which are you least proud of?

I was on the early team at Tiny Speck, the company that later became Slack. Before Slack, we made a game called Glitch — a massively multiplayer open world — and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever worked on. The art, the sound, the writing, the way the world actually worked. Some of the most talented people I’ve ever been around.

It failed, and it failed for reasons that were sitting right there in front of us. It was built on Flash, and Adobe had already stopped investing in Flash. It was a PC experience at the exact moment the whole world was moving to playing games on a phone. Two enormous tectonic trends, and we didn’t account for either one in time to do anything about them. I feel like I let down the creativity of the people who built something beautiful.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Say the thing, then explain it. Don’t lay all your proof out first, hoping it earns you the right to make your point. Nobody is listening to the proof yet. They’re listening for whether you sound like you believe it. The confidence you say it with is what makes room for the explanation.

What is your current obsession?

Cooking my mother’s food. She died before I learned most of it from her, so I’ve been reconstructing her recipes off YouTube — strangers in their own kitchens, making the thing the way their mothers made it. It takes a lot of tries. I got one of them right last year, and the taste put me straight back to being eight years old with my mom by my side.

This is what I think about when people ask me what technology is for. Some guy uploaded a video of his family’s recipe and gave me my mother’s cooking back. He will never know that.

What do you think is worth splurging on?

Live jazz. There is nothing else like being in a room where people are making decisions in real time and can’t take them back. I travel a lot for work, and if there’s any way to get to a show in whatever city I’m in, I’ll do it, even when it means I’m useless the next morning.

What would the tagline for your biopic be?

A heist movie where nothing gets stolen and everybody gets paid.

What’s the last GIF or meme you used?