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.
) 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.
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.
