It’s fascinating. It’s just a constant growing process. You’re constantly learning. You’re constantly changing your style. You’re constantly bringing in new team members and learning how to manage them. The phases of the business are so different, and it requires you to be open to change, open to listening, and open to new challenges.

It was a good thing for Steve Martocci that the band Phish broke up in 2004. Otherwise, who knows? He might still be traveling around the country catching their live acts.

And that would have robbed artists of the opportunity to use Splice, the music creation and collaboration platform co-invented by Martocci that now numbers four million users.

Splice essentially treats music like open-source code — or as Martocci has often said, think of it as the musical equivalent to GitHub, an open software platform used by millions of programmers and software developers to share programming tools and code. Using Splice, musicians can preview millions of samples of loops and then can use these snippets of audio without worrying about royalties. The platform charges $7.99 a month for unlimited access and then splits the revenue with the creators of the sounds. So far, Splice, which started in 2013, has paid out over $25 million to creators.

Splice is Martocci’s second big hit. In 2010, he and a buddy built a messaging app in just 24 hours at a hackathon — and then sold it to Skype a year later for a reported $80 million.

We caught up with Martocci, who was sheltering in place in Manhattan, to talk about the intersection of music creation and software development and his extraordinary path from being an out-of-work, deep in debt programmer to a transformative entrepreneur.

Q: You’re a Manhasset boy. What was it like growing up on the North Shore of Long Island?

Even though it was a very insulated place, I ran in a lot of different circles. From the jock group to the magic group to the card playing group, to being in a chorus — it was all over the place, driven by my interests.

Q: How did you get into computers?

My Mom bought me a 25Mhz computer and it kept breaking and getting viruses. Eventually, she couldn’t afford to have it fixed anymore. I had to learn how to fix the computer myself. Buying that first computer for me was a game changer. I really found that I loved software, and I wanted to create code.

Q: And your talent for tinkering, I think we can say, also landed you in hot water in high school.

There were like four days left in the school year and I decided it would be cool to change the background images on all the computers across the school. These were the early days of having a computer lab and they had security software to restrict access, but I had been a tester. I had a lot of technical curiosity and I was getting special privileges. I guess I just went a little too far.

Q: No harm, no foul, I guess. But it also spoke to something you once said that I thought was revealing about the direction that your interests and talent were pulling you — that code was your canvas.

Yeah, ever since I started with computers in school, software was just fascinating to me. I found something magical about the process of building software and creating code, and I really fell in love with programming.

Q: But after graduating from Carnegie-Mellon, you didn’t directly jump into the industry. Instead, you followed the band Phish around the country.

I think that I must have seen more than 150 Phish shows.

Q: I suppose their breakup was probably a good thing in that you could finally get your career going.

Yeah, when Phish broke up in 2004, I finally went and got a job as a programmer.

Q: But two or three days into it, you nearly triggered an international crisis. What happened?

I still so badly want to understand what happened because it doesn’t make any sense. I ran what was supposed to be a select statement and somehow it touched every single record and database that was synced between the US and the country of Moldova for managing the records of their domain names. They thought we were trying to steal their whole domain. That was a crazy one. To this day, I still don’t know what happened, but luckily, I didn’t get fired.

Q: That also gave you more time to develop your technical chops.

I had two years to go through these cycles of learning and executing, learning and executing, learning and executing. That was my first experience of being in production code and working with others.

Q: Eventually, you reached the point where you were ready to take the leap and do your own thing. What motivated you to do that?

I don’t think I’m a very good employee. I think I need to be deeply passionate about what I’m doing. I also don’t know that I was definitely ready, but I did it anyway. I had this feeling that I could write enough code and I had an idea that I thought was worth going after. Also, I was privileged to have the support of my family — they viewed it as if I was getting a master’s degree or as an investment in my career in a way. I gave it my all and I learned a lot — I also learned that timing is so important, both in terms of a product coming to market as well as in your career. I was just too early.

Q: So, after four years, you ran out of money, with $60,000 in debt and you got a job at Gilt Groupe, the online shopping site that Kevin Ryan founded.

I got a basic engineering job there and it was the most amazing learning experience in my life.

Q: Where you also built a ticketing app for the Grateful Dead.

That was one of my side projects, which was awesome. But Gilt was the best learning environment ever because every day you needed to handle Amazon-level traffic, but you only had to do it for 15 minutes. So basically, you went into the ring, you fought your fight, and then you had the whole next day to figure out how to do it better than the day before. So, from a learning perspective, it was one of the coolest things. You had to think about scale. You had to think about a bunch of stuff in real time, but then you also had the downtime to learn and react and take a critical look at things. It was an amazing experience.

Q: What’s really amazing is that you and Jared Hecht then came up with another side project — a mobile messaging app that you demoed at a hackathon and turned into GroupMe, a company you sold to Skype a year later for around $80 million. You were 29, but you didn’t take time to kick back. Can you talk about the startup bug that bit you and the thinking behind what became Splice?

I had a list of things I wanted to potentially do. And I know the music industry is crazy and no one should ever start a company in it. It’s crowded and oversaturated and full of rights licensing issues. But before selling GroupMe, I was talking with one of my good friends, Jon Gutwillig, who’s a guitarist in the band Disco Biscuits. He asked, “if we have all these awesome tools for creating software, why aren’t they helping the music industry?” Something like a GitHub for musicians. Meanwhile, I had connected with Matt Aimonetti when we were both at a conference in Columbia, and I found out he’d been an audio engineer for half of his life. So, we decided to work together. I think that any programmer who’s into music thinks of making Splice at some point.

Q: You obviously love music. Why is it important for you to do this?

My canvas is the code. I like to say that my version of being an artist is that I’m a creative problem solver really at my core. And I like to be a creative problem solver for those who are creative, artistic “expressers,” and so that’s where Splice gets to be so rewarding.

Q: A lot of techies also have this passion for music. How do you explain this attraction?

It’s a great point. I think a lot of people are attracted to music. Programmers just tend to come at it from a different angle.

Q: How does that unfold in practice?

A lot of programmers are so in love with the magic and the beauty that is the software development ecosystem — the open community, the amount of resources available online, the collaborative nature, and the way these tools get built on top of it. And programmers are doers and creators. They really create. And so, I think there are similarities. Music is very complicated. There’s a lot of layers to it. The journey can get frustrating both in programming and in music. You’re at the beginning of the coding process and you’re like, ‘Why do I need a semicolon here?’ And then in music, there are a million things that can drive you crazy when it comes to getting the right sound and you can’t seem to get it right.

Q: Let’s switch gears. You’ve been in the CEO role for quite some time. Have you had time to think about how you manage your leadership style?

It’s fascinating. It’s just a constant growing process. You’re constantly learning. You’re constantly changing your style. You’re constantly bringing in new team members and learning how to manage them. The phases of the business are so different, and it requires you to be open to change, open to listening, and open to new challenges.

Q: What’s different about how you have to operate day-to-day?

In the beginning, it was me and Matt writing code. It was just what’s in your head. The big insight for me was when I realized that the context in my head was not necessarily in other peoples’ heads anymore. There were too many people in the company to do one-on-one conversations to catch everybody up. The next phase has been very much about sharing context and sharing plans. We’ve always had this really great, high-level vision for Splice and that’s never changed. We just have had to get better at articulating it so that people have a North Star to pull them forward. I’m helping us build that bridge to the future now that we’re pretty clear about what we want to be.

Q: Along the way, have you needed to unlearn any old habits that you might’ve picked up to become better at what you do as the company changes?

I’m constantly trying to unlearn old habits. In the beginning, I had the “I can do it myself problem” where you think you can fix things by yourself. But if that’s the case, it means something’s really broken. And I need to articulate better.

Q: You’re a member of a younger cohort of tech leaders. How do you see the traditional role of CEO changing?

I’d love for every employee to feel that this is an authentic company that cares, that has a mission, that is doing more than just making money but also is building an artist community that wants to do good in a big way. As I think about our community, our brands, our social impact; we have a long-term goal of building a model company for the future. I really believe so much in our company’s mission; software gives you a lot of leverage. You can serve a ton of people and as we grow in scale, our ability to make positive change grows.

Q: Time for the getaway questions. What’s your favorite book?

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.

Q: Is there a motto that you use as a touchstone as you go about your daily routine?

You can’t refund inspiration. I think about that one a lot in terms of the way we design products

Q: Give me the name of the one person you most admire?

Kevin Ryan. What he’s done in New York as an entrepreneur is just amazing. He’s an incredible entrepreneur.