Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava Says AI Emails Are Killing Conversations

Srivastava leads the sample platform Splice, whose samples have appeared in hits including Lisa's 'Money' and Sabrina Carpenter's 'Espresso.' Before Splice, she held executive roles at Flickr, Yahoo, GitHub and Adobe. At Splice, she has expanded the platform by acquiring Spitfire Audio and overseen its forays into generative AI.

In the interview, Srivastava said her most indispensable tool is 'a well-written document and a real conversation about it.' Because Splice is remote-first, she said, the company does not have a hallway. Instead, work develops when someone thinks something through and others argue with it. 'Almost everything good that's happened here started that way,' she said.

She said that is why she is 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,' she said. 'And you can't really go back from that. I think the same thing is true of music.'

The comments echo her position from a Decoder episode last year, when she spoke out against the kind of 'push-button, get-song' AI that has made companies like Suno controversial. According to her answers in the questionnaire, her skepticism has not faded. Splice has sought to offer AI products that keep humans at the center of the creative process, she said, and she sees a similar need to keep AI at bay in communication with colleagues.

The interview also touched on her personal tastes and career. Her happy place online is Instagram, where her feed has become filled with people making music in unexpected ways, including gothic western, street dancing in Russia, modern hits on a hammered dulcimer and an Indian chai-wala rapping. She cited Antakshari, an Indian singing game, as her fondest game memory. As for disappointing gadgets, she named a cup warmer: 'It warms the cup. It does not warm the coffee. I want to be clear that it works exactly as designed.'

Srivastava said her children are the creation she is most proud of. Her least proud work was on Glitch, the massively multiplayer open world game made by Tiny Speck, the company that later became Slack. She said Glitch failed for reasons that were visible: it was built on Flash after Adobe had stopped investing in Flash, and it was a PC experience as the world moved to mobile gaming. 'I feel like I let down the creativity of the people who built something beautiful,' she said.

She also shared the best advice she has received: 'Say the thing, then explain it.' She said people listen first for whether you sound like you believe it, and confidence makes room for the explanation.