Our Team
STRTST stands with artists the industry has written off and challenges the system that failed them.
We’re not a gentle mentor, a neutral educator, or another "solution provider.
We picked a side. And it's the artist’s.
Zach Pascaud
Zach Pascaud. Indie artist who's lived the whole climb from zero to traction, using his background as an entrepreneur to craft creative, lean and cost-effective growth strategies. Now producing millions of streams; selling out small clubs; and committed to helping artist peers grow using similar techniques.
Co-Founder
Rachel Alina
Rachel Alina. Award-winning mix engineer, Berklee faculty member, and CEO of New Music Engineering, with records for artists including P!nk, Katy Perry, Stephen Marley, Helado Negro, and Gabriel Garzon-Montano- over a billion streams of work. Trained under Shelly Yakus.
Co-Founder
Tom Burns. Spent his career building and backing tech startups. Co-founded Object Video, a VC-backed startup that sold 50+ video-tech patents for $80M, then co-founded a self-financed advanced sensing company later acquired by a Fortune 500 leader. Now brings that startup growth model to music artists.
Co-FounderTom Burns
Our Story
Right now, there is genuinely excellent music sitting on hard drives and streaming platforms, unheard. Not because it isn't good. Because the person who made it uploaded it and waited for the world to notice.
The world isn't waiting. It's overwhelmed. People aren't starved for music, they're drowning in it. Something like a hundred thousand songs go up every single day. And into that ocean, you release the best thing you've ever made… and it gets 200 plays, mostly people you already know.
Then you do the math. And the math is brutal. Not because you're afraid of working hard, you've never been afraid of that. Because you're afraid you're working this hard at nothing.
We built this because we've been there. We come at this from three different corners of music, and we all hit the same wall.
One of us, Zach, is an artist who’s written the song, recorded it, mixed it, put it out, and realized everything he believed about making a career in music was outdated, and he had no idea what to do next. So he put his entrepreneur hat on and set about building his own strategy..
One of us, Rachel, is a mix engineer and Berklee professor who's worked on records you know, and spent years watching it happen from the other side of the glass: artist after artist making genuinely great music, pouring everything into how it sounds, and still watching it disappear the second it's released.
One of us, Tom, came up building companies in tech, in a world where if you have a vision and the guts to chase it, there's a whole system waiting to back you: mentors, a playbook, people who've done it and want to help. And when we looked at music, that system just… wasn't there.
Builders in tech get backed. Artists get doubted.
The music industry only shows up after you have traction, and that means the hardest stretch of your career, going from zero to traction, is the exact stretch where you're on your own. Everyone says "get big first." Nobody says how.
That's the question this course exists to answer.
Here's what we figured out: the artists who break through aren't the most talented. Talent is the price of entry, not the path to discovery. They're the ones who treat every release, every post, every idea like a small, affordable experiment: test before they invest, read the room, double down on what works.
It's not luck. It's a system: the same kind of system that quietly built the things you use every day. And we're going to hand it to you, without changing your music or asking you to sell out.
One more thing. When we see this system start working for an artist inside our world, we don't just cheer from the sidelines. STRTST makes small investments directly in artists who prove the model is working for them. That's not a guarantee, and it's not why you join. But it's real.
Because a good song deserves to be heard. And it's wrong that great artists disappear just because no one handed them the map.
You already did the hard part. Let's go get you heard.