Sound Ventures General Partner Guy Oseary sees identifying entrepreneurs as the same job as identifying musicians: signing quickly before anyone knows them, then helping them reach their audience.

His exact words are that listening to a startup pitch is like listening to a song, an album, or an artist, judging whether "this person is talented, a rock star, just needs the world to know." He claims to have been doing this since he was a teenager—discovering talent and helping them find an audience. In earlier interviews, he referred to engineers and founders as "today's rock stars": they have vision, they have a voice, and their job is to recognize that magic, then build the narrative, create channels, and establish a fan base. He compares product launches to the first single and the second single.

His background pins this metaphor to real transactions. Oseary entered the music industry as a teenager, later became the chairman of Maverick, which has sold over 100 million records, and has long managed Madonna, as well as worked with U2 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In 2010, he co-founded A-Grade with Ashton Kutcher, and in 2015, co-founded Sound Ventures, with an investment portfolio that includes Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and more. Publicly, it is stated that the portfolio has dozens of exits and over twenty IPOs. The company also raised about $240 million to bet on foundational AI, emphasizing a technological inflection point at the platform level.

At the NMPA annual meeting, he applied the same A&R intuition to technology: whether the founder has magic when they walk in, and whether the idea can become a shareable narrative. Sound Ventures positions itself not just as a source of funding but also as a partner in writing stories, creating exposure, and connecting clients; the entertainment networks of Kutcher and Oseary are used to enhance distribution for consumer brands. He also warned that startups in music generation that only provide prompts like "like a certain artist" without binding to real creators will hit copyright walls.

In market mechanics, this is about attention allocation, not buying and selling stock prices on the day. The buyers are the funds and channels that can package founders into shareable symbols; the sellers are early talents that have not yet been priced. The beneficiaries are the founders he identifies as "rock stars" who gain entertainment distribution; the pressured ones are teams that only have technical solutions and cannot articulate their first single. Funds flow from the signing rights of entertainment agencies to the same "first look at people, then expand the audience" venture capital ledger.

Supplementary structure: His division of labor with Kutcher is described as one who understands engineering intuition and one who understands A&R; Sound Ventures treats platform migration as a theme, with the AI fund betting on foundational models rather than single-point applications.

Source: Public Information