Ola Sars

speaker

162 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Ola Sars’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Business Daily · Founders: Ola Sars from Beats Music to the soundtrack of hospitality · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

Back then, you could more or less start producing music.

Everyone takes it for granted today, obviously 20 years later, but that was a new phenomenon.

And then distribution of music as well was going digital, meaning that smartphones were showing up and music was moving from analog to digital to files that could be shared online.

over the internet.

And then at the same time, consumption was going digital, meaning like people started using their smartphones as a music device.

So how do we build a company, a technology around helping people find the right music for the right place at the right time that make them feel wonderful?

And that's where we started.

Tonium was the name of the company and the product was Pacemaker.

It was a full DJ setup, packet into the size of an iPod, if you remember back then.

But the product kind of invited every consumer to be creative with their music and contributing to the creative process of music.

We won like six, seven prizes at CES, which is the world's biggest kind of consumer electronics event.

trade show in Las Vegas.

We were on the midsection of Wired Magazine, which was a big deal back then.

We raised $20 million in venture capital funding, which was a lot of money for a European startup in 2006.

So the idea was the right idea, but it was too early and too hard.

So we ended up crashing the company.

So I decided to try to continue but focus on the software side of it and the music recommendation place, which was a website or a web community where the DJs or pacemakers actually uploaded all their DJ mixes and consumers can come in and kind of consume and subscribe.

And that was a separate company that I spun out.

I continued with the second iteration, which was called Let's Mix.

So that was my second opportunity.

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