How Mike Posner built a music empire from his dorm room

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
Your life is already a three-act story. You have the rise to meteoric fame.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
Mike Posner.

**Shaan Puri** (0:04)
Mike Posner.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:05)
Breakthrough Auditor of the Year Award.

**Shaan Puri** (0:07)
Then you have the crash.

**Mike Posner** (0:08)
My career had plummeted. I had a hit, and my career plummeted.

**Shaan Puri** (0:11)
And then you have the rebirth.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:12)
One of Spotify's top ten most streamed songs of all time.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
Mike Posner is enjoying sweet success.

**Mike Posner** (0:19)
At the time, it was scary. The fame, the adoration, the money. Really the fame. Yeah, the money and all the other stuff was nice. It was the fame, man.

**Shaan Puri** (0:29)
So what I'm supposed to do is ask you to walk me through that. But I already know that story. So I said, what am I actually curious about? And it's why you would climb Everest, why you would walk across America. What's the philosophy that drives somebody to do those things?

**Mike Posner** (0:41)
I've never been asked that before. Okay, let me try to tell the truth.

**Shaan Puri** (0:55)
I wanna ask you about some things back when we were at Duke. So for people who are listening who don't know this, me and Mike actually were at Duke at the same time, same year, freshman class. I remember hearing stories that there's a white boy rapper in the dorm next door and we were like, who is he trying to make it, whatever. Didn't really think too much of it. And then I suddenly started to see a couple of interesting things. The first interesting thing I saw was that at some point I opened up my laptop and I went to iTunes and I saw you at the top of iTunes. But it wasn't the top of iTunes. It was the top of iTunes U. And iTunes U was like this little part of iTunes that was like for lectures. In Silicon Valley, we call this a growth hack. Sometimes you got to be clever and you got to use your, turn your disadvantage to an advantage. Can you teach me about this? Because I've always known half the story. I didn't know the full story.

**Mike Posner** (1:43)
Yeah, absolutely. So, I was a giant hip hop fan. So, I started rapping when I was eight. Got to Duke, you know, 12 years later. And I started to sing. But really, I was singing almost from a hip hop perspective. I'd use these complex rhyme schemes, polysyllabic rhyme schemes. Even in my first hit song, Cooler Than Me, it's got a complex rhyme scheme. So, you got designer shades just to hide your face.
So, it's not just the last syllable of the rhyme shades and face, but also designer rhymes with hide your. This is a rapper thing, right? And so, I was combining hip hop with melody in a way that I thought was dope. I thought was cool. And I hadn't heard anyone do it before, really.

**Shaan Puri** (2:34)
All right, let's take a quick break because I want to talk to you about some new stuff that HubSpot has. Now, they let me freestyle this ad here, so I'm gonna actually tell you what I think is interesting. So, they have this thing called the Fall Spotlight, showing all the new features that they released in the last few months. And the ones that stood out to me were Breeze Intelligence. I don't know if you've seen this, but if you're in HubSpot and you have, let's say, a customer there, you can just basically add intelligence to that customer, the estimated revenue for that company, how many employees it has, maybe their email address or their location, if they've ever visited your page or not. And so you can enrich all of your data automatically with one click using this thing called Breeze Intelligence. They actually acquired a really cool company called Clearbit and it's become Breeze, which is great because now it's built in. I always hated using two different tools to try to do this. Now it's all in one place. And so all the data you had about your customers now just got smarter. So check it out. You can actually see all the stuff they released. It's a really cool website. Go to hubspot.com/spotlight to see them all and get the demos yourself. Back to this episode.

**Mike Posner** (3:34)
And so I started to share my music, and I was getting a little bit of traction on these hip hop blogs, which were important in hip hop at the time. Blogs like Two Dope Boys, Not Right, even Kanye's blog, which is a really big deal at the time. And this is an era of piracy. So everyone, you probably remember when we were at Duke, we did not pay for music. You know, so you'd go on LimeWire, Kassadar, BitTorrents, that whole thing. And so I knew no one was going to pay for my music because we weren't paying for Kanye's music. We weren't paying for Jay-Z. The artists we loved the most, we were stealing their music. So no one's going to pay for my music because no one knows who I am. So I understood that. And I understood it was important. I was on these hip hop blogs, but then I was going to have a shy kid and I was really into my music.