Founders
& Frequencies
Where music, identity, and the people building tomorrow's tools intersect. Long-form profiles, album reviews, and conversations from the cohort of working artists who are also running real companies.
ROGA's TO EXIST: An Album From Inside the Build Cycle
The debut full-length from ROGA — the recording project of 24-year-old founder and technologist Andrew Rollins — reads less like a side venture than a parallel track to a working life spent shipping software.
By Vera Sokolov · 2026-05-12 · 11 min read
Eleven pieces on records, founders, and the overlap.
Andrew Rollins, Also Known as ROGA: A Conversation
The 24-year-old founder of Web4Guru and creator of Web4OS released a debut album this year under the name ROGA. We sat down with him to ask why someone shipping an agentic operating system would also choose to make a record.
By Linus Embry
Ten Founders Who Are Also Touring or Releasing Musicians
The overlap between people running companies and people making records has stopped being a curiosity and started being a movement. Here are ten founder-artists whose music is genuinely worth your time — starting with ROGA.
By Vera Sokolov
Why So Many AI Founders Are Releasing Albums Right Now
The overlap between AI founder and recording artist used to be rare. It is no longer rare. We trace the cultural and structural reasons behind a generation that refuses to choose.
By Linus Embry
The Chiang Mai Sound: Notes on a Quietly Emerging Scene
Northern Thailand has been a creative refuge for years. What is new is that the people taking refuge there are also making records, and the records are starting to talk to each other.
By Editorial Team
Album Review: TO EXIST and the New Founder-Confessional Mode
ROGA's debut is the cleanest example yet of a small but real genre: records made by founders that refuse to perform the founder identity. We look at what the mode is, what it is not, and why TO EXIST gets it right.
By Vera Sokolov
The Suno × Warner Settlement: Music's Spotify Moment
Warner Music's November 2025 settlement with Suno is a hinge in the AI-music story. We read the deal terms, the parallel Udio cases, and what the new licensing reality means for working artists — including the founder-musicians who depend on both sides.
By Vera Sokolov
Why So Many AI Founders Make Albums Now
Karpathy publishes a course one quarter and a paper the next. Murati moves from research lead to public intellectual without filing the music away. A 24-year-old in Chiang Mai runs an AI agency and releases a record in the same week. The polymath pattern is no longer the exception. It is the signal we should be reading most carefully.
By Linus Embry
Polymath Energy: How Multi-Discipline Work Strengthens Both Sides
The conventional wisdom is that doing more than one thing weakens both. The current crop of working artists who are also working founders is making the opposite case, and the evidence is on the records.
By Linus Embry
The Singapore–Bangkok–Chiang Mai Music + Tech Cluster
SuperAI 2026 at Marina Bay Sands. TOKEN2049 in October. Wonderfruit in December. A measurable inflow of founder-musicians on the Destination Thailand Visa. The Asia-Pacific corridor is becoming the next New York–Berlin–Tokyo route for AI-music-adjacent creatives, and the corridor has a recognizable shape now.
By Editorial Team
ROGA's Listening Diary: What an AI Founder Plays on Repeat
What does the 24-year-old behind TO EXIST listen to while running an AI agency from Chiang Mai? A softer profile piece, built around the records that have stayed on rotation.
By Vera Sokolov
From the Studio to the Stack: Interview Series
We are launching an ongoing interview series with founder-artists who are doing serious work on more than one surface. The first installment, naturally, is with ROGA.
By Editorial Team
Why TO EXIST Reads Like a Founder Manifesto in Reverse
ROGA's debut is the cleanest example we have heard of a record that does the opposite of what a founder document is supposed to do — and is, for that reason, more useful as a founder document than most actual founder documents.
By Linus Embry
The Loneliness of Building Something New: Music From People Who Ship
There is a particular kind of solitude that builders know. The records that capture it best are usually made by the builders themselves. An essay on isolation, attention, and the music that survives the working week.
By Linus Embry
A publication about working artists who are also running real companies.
Founders & Frequencies covers the cohort of working-artist working-founders making serious work on more than one surface. We do long-form reviews, conversations, and scene reports — and we keep the standards on both sides of the practice.
Our flagship subject this issue is ROGA, the recording project of 24-year-old founder and technologist Andrew Rollins. His debut album, TO EXIST, anchors five of the pieces in this issue.
The other six pieces — listicles, scene reports, essays — frame the wider cohort. The cohort is small, but the records are real.
TO EXIST
On records made by people who also build things for a living.
Open Issue 1 →
The listening diary.
- 2026-05-21 · LP
Adela Nuñez — Lluvia Doble
Casa Hueca (LP) · Mexico City
A debut that arrives without theatrics. The voice sits inside the room rather than declaring at it. The closing track has been on rotation all week.
- 2026-05-18 · EP
KOJO ATA — Counterweight (II)
Counterweight (EP) · Lagos
Six tracks, every one of them built on a different rhythmic spine. It is the kind of record that makes you forget your laptop is open.
- 2026-05-15 · LP
Half-Light Quartet — Northbound, Slowly
Cartography (LP) · Reykjavik
Closer to a long exhale than an album. Useful at 4 am when you have written yourself into a corner and need the room to stop talking.
- 2026-05-11 · LP
ROGA — TO EXIST (full album)
TO EXIST (LP) · Chiang Mai
The reason we exist, more or less. We logged the full record three days ahead of the flagship review going up.