The Anti-Startup Startup
By Rafi Mercer
The word “startup” has always sat uneasily with me, and my reason is deep, a few of you will know why, but for the rest of you, an explanation.
It suggests velocity without direction, growth without texture, a sprint designed to impress the scoreboard before the substance has even been built.
Most of the world’s digital platforms — and most of their eventual failures — were born with that impulse.
Build quick, raise quicker, chase the multiple, scale at all costs.
Tracks & Tales was never meant to live in that air.
It was not founded in a pitch deck, nor in a room of investors waiting to be dazzled by a hockey-stick graph.
It was started in the quiet — one page, then ten, then a hundred, until now hundreds, a relentless drive for simplicity at scale.
No team, no capital, no media blitz.
Just one mind, one set of hands, and the sound of records being placed on turntables around the world, everywhere and anywhere, at anytime, 24/7/365.
If I was awake, so was the sounds, the listening bars, life.
I just had to guide.
That is why I think of Tracks & Tales as the anti-startup startup.
Not in opposition to ambition, but in opposition to haste.
Where most startups prize speed, we prize permanence. Where they chase users, we cultivate members. Where they sell to advertisers, we seek patrons.
Where they flood the feed, we shape an atlas.
The anti-startup startup refuses the clichés: the ping-pong tables, the “fail fast” slogans, the half-baked app launches. It operates more like a vintner or a printmaker: small batches, considered details, a product that improves with age.
The first thirty days have not been about noise but about foundation — 600 pages of mapped sound, each one a stone in the base of a structure that will stand for years, not quarters.
And here is the paradox: by rejecting the conventional startup script, by slowing down where others rush, by whispering where others shout, Tracks & Tales grows faster.
In a month we have reached fifty-plus countries, hundreds of cities, tens of thousands of impressions.
It is the sort of traction most funded startups would envy — and it has been achieved not by gaming the system but by tending to it.
The anti-startup startup is not the absence of growth; it is growth with a different time signature.
Less like a pitch deck, more like a Miles Davis recording: space between the notes, rhythm in restraint, meaning in what is left unsaid.
That is the choice at the heart of Tracks & Tales.
To build slowly, but to build globally.
To reject the noise and embrace the signal. To become, in time, not just another media venture scrabbling for clicks, but a cultural reference point that outlasts the cycle.
And if that means we are the anti-startup startup, so be it.
I would rather be judged by the resonance of a single room — a single listening bar in Tokyo or London — than by the vanity of a growth chart.
Because it is resonance, not revenue, that makes things endure.
See you soon.
Rafi
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
