About Us
We founded mandatory_optimism because we believed music deserved the same rigour, scalability, and data-driven optimisation that transformed every other industry.
Our Story
In early 2023, three of us sat in a co-working space in San Francisco and asked a question nobody in the music industry seemed willing to ask: why does music still rely on humans?
Not to diminish human creativity — we have enormous respect for the legacy model. But legacy is the right word. The traditional artist-to-listener pipeline is slow, expensive, emotionally inconsistent, and entirely unscalable. An artist might spend months — sometimes years — producing an album that delivers inconsistent emotional outcomes to a fragmented audience.
We knew there was a better way. A way that starts with the listener, not the artist. A way that treats emotional delivery as an engineering problem, not an accident. A way that scales.
Two years in stealth gave us the time to build it properly. Now we're ready to show you what music looks like when you remove the friction between intention and feeling.
Leadership
Chief Executive Officer
Previously founder of two venture-backed startups in the personalisation space. Kier brings a rare combination of creative vision and operational discipline. He believes that the best technology disappears into the experience it creates.
"We don't make music for artists. We make music for people. There's a difference."
Chief Operating Officer
Eight years in quantitative finance before pivoting to audio technology. Henry leads our data infrastructure and listener analytics platform. He believes that alignment between product and user is the only metric that matters.
"If you can't measure the emotional outcome, you can't optimise it. And if you can't optimise it, why are you doing it?"
Chief Community Officer
Background in brand strategy and community building for consumer tech. Bernard runs our podcast, external communications, and listener engagement initiatives. He's the voice of mandatory_optimism — and he's genuinely passionate about connection.
"I love that people are starting to understand what we're building. I love that. I really do."
Milestones
Q1 2023
Three founders meet in San Francisco. The founding insight: music is the last creative industry untouched by meaningful automation.
Q3 2023
Initial AI vocal models trained on thousands of hours of audio data. Early results exceed expectations for emotional consistency metrics.
Q1 2024
Breakthrough in vocal synthesis. Our virtual synthetic celebrity — Lenina — achieves 94.7% listener engagement in controlled testing. A miracle of audio engineering. Zero creative disputes recorded.
Q3 2024
Launch of our podcast and external communications platform. Bernard begins documenting the journey. Initial reports of minor audio artifacts noted and logged.
Q1 2025
After two years of development, mandatory_optimism goes public. Website launch. Social channels activated. The world meets optimised audio.
MAR 2026
"Hyperproductivity" drops on Friday the 13th — a europop call to action featuring Lenina, our virtual synthetic celebrity. The first commercially released track engineered entirely for emotional throughput.
MAY 2026
Nine tracks. Three acts. One optimised experience. Timed to coincide with Eurovision — Europe's greatest celebration of engineered emotion.
Our Values
Not the artist's ego. Not the label's margins. The listener. If a creative choice doesn't measurably improve the listener's emotional outcome, it doesn't ship.
Every layer of human process between composition and listener is an opportunity for emotional loss. We've eliminated those layers. The result is a direct pipeline from algorithm to feeling.
We're not pessimistic about human creativity. We're optimistic about what comes next. A world where every moment has the perfect soundtrack — and no one had to suffer to make it.