Henrik Berggren was a developer of the growing SoundCloud site (working on the API) and now works at Doberman in Sweden.

Henrik Berggren

SoundCloud

T: One thing everyone wants to know about is SoundCloud..Could you describe your involvement, how you came into the project, how did this project start, who funded the development, how is it doing now?

H: Well I was first involved with it..first of all it’s founded by two Swedish guys, Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung. They are both old schoolmates of mine, we went to the same University and I met them a few years back. They were interested in the web and they have been doing development for the web for some time, and so had I, so it was really a good match from the beginning. We started discussing how frustrated we were with MySpace - I was DJing a lot at the time, Eric is an old producer, and Alex has done a lot of film music and stuff. They had this idea of creating Flickr for music, basically. A place where can share music easily, MySpace was really bad, and there were some other projects but none of them were as good as Flickr is for photos.

SoundCloud

They started the company in Stockholm but after a while they moved to Berlin. At that point I decided to stay in Stockholm because I was a year behind them in school. So I decided to stay on and finish my Computer Science degree but then ended up going down next summer and wound up staying 9 or 10 month instead, working on their API. I lived in Berlin for 9 or 10 months basically and moved back to Stockholm a year ago almost. But interesting stuff has happened since then.

They have grown a lot, they were funded from the beginning by some business angels in Berlin and then I think last spring they raised a big round of funding from a British VC firm called..I can’t remember then name...I think it was 2.5M Euros or something like that. They are doing really really well and I stayed on..I’m not employed with them anymore but I am in close contact with Eric and Alex and another guy named Henrik who is now the chief of their API because I have developed a lot of services on top of their platform. I have always considered their platform to be the most interesting thing about the site because I’m not a musician or DJ anymore, I’m kind of an Internet guy and think there’s a lot of stuff you can do with a musical platform as good as SoundCloud is.

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Pedro’s 629, originally uploaded by Shameel Arafin.

Cuban sandwich!

Those of you who’ve been following our tweets (@signalfive) know that in mid-December, we moved to a new office. Our old building is being converted to luxury condos, so everyone had to move out. Fortunately, we secured a spot in 55 Washington Street. So, we’ve moved one block up the street to the commercial hub of DUMBO, home to Etsy and various other tech startups. The address and map can be found on our contact page.

For a while, it looked like we might have to leave DUMBO. We looked at spaces elsewhere in Brooklyn, and found one in Bushwick that seemed promising. However, the prospect of Shameel living three blocks from the office was too much to bear. (Especially for Shameel). It turned out to be a blessing when the Bushwick deal fell through, and the 55 Washington deal came up.

We moved in, and set up shop in the new space. It has been recently constructed, along with a dozen or so other spaces on the floor. New walls, new floors. The sunlight is blazing in the mornings and afternoons — that special winter light streaming in through 7′ windows.

DUMBO is great, we’re able to participate in events such as Digital Dumbo at Galapagos Art space, other startup-type events. We hope to be even more productive in the new space. Swing by to say hi, or check us out on Google Maps for that ‘virtual tour’. Happy New Year everyone.