John Flynn

I’m John Flynn, Sonantic co-founder, past Björk collaborator, Spotify ML Director, Harry Potter film dailies editor and some other things including Irish.

Here are some written reflections on startups, AI, voice synthesis, music, music production, work, life. I will try to group things into sections so you don’t have to read about skateboarding if you’re looking for C++. I’ll also try to make it mildly entertaining.

Thank you for taking a look around.

AI, music & music production

Can AI bridge the content demand gap?

If you (only) build it, they won’t come

Startups, leadership & work more generally

Start with like-minded people

To lead is to ask questions

Hire nice people (then teach them this)

Work is hard work

Life

Self worth and skateboards

School dances, strengths and weaknesses

We become soft, then we die

Code

Dall E Adventure

Here’s a small game I put together with my child. It’s a text-based adventure game with images generated automatically by OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and the prompts are read out by gTTS.

You can write the story scenes with a child and there is a nice pen-and-paper element to help remember the right directions to choose through the map. Have a go writing the scripts and generating some pretty wild images!