I spent much of my career building and investing in tech companies. I started two successful businesses, one venture-backed and one self-financed, and had my share of failures along the way. Those experiences taught me what it takes to turn an idea into a business: resilience when things go sideways, and the patience to build a business one customer at a time.

While technology shaped my career, music has always been my passion. I spent years playing jazz guitar and have long been fascinated by the creative process, how an artist takes a feeling or a fragment of sound and turns it into a finished song. That fascination eventually led me to Berklee College of Music, where I earned a degree in Music Production, and then began helping artist entrepreneurs achieve their goals.

As I began working with early-stage artists, I was surprised by how different their world is from that of an early-stage tech founder. Tech founders have incubators, investors, advisors, and mentors, an entire ecosystem built to help promising ideas become real businesses. Most aspiring artists have nothing comparable. They're expected to figure it out on their own, often with enormous talent but no roadmap and no access to early capital.

That gap is why we created STRTST. We pair a practical curriculum, the Artist Breakout Method, with early-stage investment to give artist entrepreneurs the guidance and backing they need to share their music with more people, on whatever terms success looks like for them.

- Tom Burns, Co-Founder & CEO of ST★RTST