Interview with Dr. Quentin Angus

March 2026

18 min read

A conversation with Dr. Quentin Angus on his podcast Good Company. Below are edited excerpts.

In our conversation, I share:

Pickup Music today

Welcome to Good Company. Each episode I speak to a world leader within the music industry. Today I'm joined by the CEO and founder of Pickup Music, Sam Blakelock. Sam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

For the listeners, the way the show works is I start with some long-form questions and then close it out with some short-form questions. I always like to start with something recent — Sam, I'm wondering if you could give the listeners a summary of where Pickup Music is today. How many employees, how many members — just give them a sense of the size of the company, and then we'll use the interview to lead back up to this present moment.

Great to be here, Quentin. I've been enjoying your interviews with Cecil Alexander and Molly Miller and the other fantastic guitarists, so as someone who thinks about music more than plays it these days, it's an honor to be here.

Pickup Music helps people learn music — guitar, bass, and soon piano. We're based here in LA.

The Til acquisition

I know you very recently acquired Til. Is there anything you want to share about that? What were the decisions that led to it?

Til is a fantastic marketplace for one-on-one online music instruction. Many of our peers — and some of my favorite guitar players — teach on Til, and I've been aware of them for a while. They started during the pandemic when people were learning a lot at home as a substitute for in-person lessons.

For us, there's a lot of synergy because the Pickup Music approach is long-form asynchronous learning — large courses that take months to progress through. We do have a live component through group lessons and feedback videos, but real-time instruction is a crucial piece of helping people develop, and Til does that really well.

Rather than building that from scratch ourselves, we thought we'd work with Til and find ways to integrate it into our membership to complement what we already do — giving students the best of both worlds: learn at your own pace, but also, if you want, book a session with someone like Molly Miller for that individual lesson.

In a nutshell, it's a modality thing — and rather than inventing it yourself, you're integrating it.

Exactly. A lot of people will work through one of our courses but then have questions or want to go deeper. The opportunity to have that individual lesson for a more handcrafted learning experience is something a lot of people want. And there's also the accountability factor — knowing you have a lesson with your teacher each week motivates you to do the work.

Growing up in New Zealand

Let's talk about early Sam. I know you grew up in New Zealand, but that's basically all I know. Where did you grow up? When did you start playing guitar? When did you decide music was going to be your thing?

I grew up in New Zealand — probably fairly similar to growing up in Australia, like yourself, just not as hot. I actually started quite late and always felt like I was catching up. I wasn't a 12-year-old prodigy by any means. I started taking guitar seriously towards the end of high school, and began learning to read music, understanding theory, and studying piano in those last two years. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do, and I think that's actually helped me on the education side — I understand students who are starting later in life.

From there, I was very fortunate to study music at university in Christchurch, New Zealand, which had a fantastic jazz program with really great teachers. There were a lot of live venues, collaboration, and real opportunities to develop my craft. Christchurch had an earthquake a little later on which disrupted a lot of the live music scene, but it's since been developing again.

After that, I came to the US to do my master's at the City University of New York — Queens College, Aaron Copland School of Music. Some really fantastic faculty there.

Did you study with Paul Bollenback? Was he there?

Yes, Paul Bollenback was my primary guitar teacher during my master's. I learned a lot from him, particularly around technique. I also got the opportunity to learn from Paul's teacher — a classical guitar teacher who taught at Columbia, Michael Lorimer. I went up to his apartment — very New York experience. He had studied with a master classical guitarist, and his approach to technique and touch really stayed with me. The lightness and classical approach was probably one of the biggest takeaways, both from learning with Michael directly and through Paul, who was also drawing on that same tradition.

Why jazz?

Why did you choose jazz? Was there a specific lightbulb moment, or was it more like my experience — the university I went to only offered classical or jazz, so I chose jazz?

It's an interesting question. Often it really is just a case of what's offered — classical or jazz — though more and more institutions now offer modern music, production, and songwriting. For me, it was partly that.

There's also this myth that jazz is so complex that if you can learn it, you can play everything. I'm not sure I fully agree with that anymore — if you only keep learning jazz, you can lose sight of other music. But I do think there's real truth in developing technical facility, understanding theory and musicianship, and learning how to play with other musicians. Jazz is great for all of that, and it has a formalized curriculum in a way that makes it accessible to study seriously. So it was a bit of both.

Skills that compound

I want to ask about experiences that specifically equipped you for your current role — a bit like how Brian Carter, the jazz drummer turned Broadway orchestrator, developed all these seemingly unrelated skills that eventually led him to where he is. Are there experiences from your formative years that you think specifically prepared you for Pickup Music?

It's a really good question. I think many creative people feel like their path is winding — different skills, different jobs, different styles of music — and early on it can feel like there's no clear direction. But as I've gotten older, I've realized those skills do join up. My job at Pickup Music brings together not just music, but also my noodling around with software, design, audio production, and video. All of that has come together. And now we're at a stage where I can hire a proper director of photography or a world-class music producer, so students don't have to deal with my three-out-of-ten versions anymore.

Life after music school

Let's talk about careers in music post-college. I know you played on a cruise ship — can you talk about some of the work experiences you had before Pickup?

If you're a music student wondering what to do next, there are a lot of more traditional paths that have been around for a long time. There's going into teaching at an institution. There's theater and Broadway — a friend of mine got better and better at music theater, moved to Las Vegas, built his way up, and is now with Cirque du Soleil.

Cruise ship work is a bit like theater work but, honestly, a level below in terms of musicianship, opportunity, and pay. That said, there's a lot of it. All these ships floating around have musicians on them — jazz players, classical players, band musicians. We'd have guest performers fly in for a week, hand us charts, we'd have one rehearsal, and then do a few shows. It gave me a taste of being a session musician — getting a chart, shedding it quickly, and performing it. I'd recommend it as a way to develop your reading and your skills, play every day, and get paid. It just wasn't the right long-term path for me. I like being on land and sleeping in my own bed.

Building an audience first

I want to talk about building an audience. In my business class, I talk about two types of careers: the employee path with a specific job to do, and the entrepreneurial "create your own career" path. With the latter, it seems like the first thing you need is an audience — online or in person. For you, do you think that's true? And can you talk about the early days of Pickup, because I know building the audience came first?

You're exactly right. For many informational products, the first step is building an audience. It takes time — you have to post every day, understand your audience, understand the trends, and provide value. Things have changed — it was Instagram when I started, now it's also TikTok — but there's a real opportunity for students to build an audience organically without putting money into ads, which is what established companies tend to do.

Then you have people to sell additional value to. The challenge is that a lot of creators stop there and don't think deeply enough about what people will actually pay for. With Pickup, what we focus on now is developing detailed, long-form educational experiences — we go very deep.

Going full-time

At what point did you realize this was going to be your full-time job? What were the turning points in the early stages?

When you're starting out and working for yourself, it's always good to start generating income before you dive in the deep end. I had a part-time job and was working on Pickup on the side, and once it felt consistent and stable enough, I took the leap. I was probably working full-time hours on Pickup in addition to having a part-time job. But once I was working for myself full-time, that gave me the freedom to live where I wanted — closer to artists, which brought me to LA.

Wearing many hats

You mentioned having skills across a wide variety of things — video, audio, etc. Do you think that's been a key part of Pickup's success?

A lot of musicians who are doing well wear many hats. The YouTubers who have good audiences and products know how to write a marketing sequence, write a landing page, film and edit videos, understand social media, and maybe run some ads. Over the years I've dabbled in all of those.

It's hard to be a ten out of ten at everything, but you can probably get to three or five out of ten at many skills — especially using AI these days, which lets you speed-run understanding a particular area of running a business. For me specifically, understanding content, knowing how to create and edit it, and writing — I wasn't a good writer in high school, but learning to write clear messages for students, whether that's a script, a landing page, or an email, is very important. And the software side too — even just poking around in WordPress or customizing your website — all of that helps. More and more, it's becoming easier to develop these skills and do a lot more as a solo creator or small business than would have been possible ten years ago.

Building a team

Now you're in LA, it's your full-time job, and you start hiring people. What has it been like building a team and learning to lead?

It's been a learning experience. I didn't study how to hire or how to run a business, so it's been really helpful having my co-founder Cam, who has much more experience in that area. I'd definitely recommend having someone to collaborate with — it's hard to find, but it's a bit like making music: you could play every instrument and produce and sing everything yourself, or you could work with a great singer and producer and have someone mix and master it. You might end up with a smaller cut, but you'll have a better product and probably more success.

Building and developing a team is challenging, but I enjoy it and think of it as a creative challenge. I treat it like learning music — a creative problem to work through.

Finding Pickup's purpose

Did it take a while to land on exactly what the purpose of the company was, or was it reasonably clear from the start?

For us, it started broad and then we focused in. Initially it was: here's this community of musicians — what do they want? We explored live events, online community, insights into social media, and also guitar education. We tried many things, and the education component performed well because you're providing real, meaningful value to people. So we doubled down on that and started figuring out the best way to help people learn guitar online — not in bite-sized chunks but in long-form curriculum. Once we figured that out, we broadened to different styles and levels of guitar, and now to different instruments, including bass and piano.

Is it fair to say the pattern has been: start specific, broaden, hone in, then expand again? You started with jazz guitar content, expanded to all guitar, then all music — and now you're adding piano and bass again?

That's a good insight, and it definitely didn't feel as clean as you just explained it — it was much messier. But yes, the organic audience was always broader — music and musicianship, not just jazz guitar. For the membership itself, we quickly broadened beyond jazz and neo-soul because that's a fairly small niche, and now with bass and piano we're aligning what the company offers with that initial broader audience. Hopefully there are piano players who've been waiting ten years and are excited when we launch it later this year.

Tools of the trade

Are there any technologies you think are super important — either when starting out or when building a robust business like yours?

My general approach is to find one good generalist tool rather than ten individual ones. For everyday productivity, Google Docs and Sheets are great. Apple Notes — I love it. Grocery list, daily to-do, notes — it sits between my computer and my phone, and it's just fantastic.

For AI, ChatGPT and Claude are my go-tos in the browser and on my phone, with a little Gemini occasionally. On the music production side, I'm moving more towards Ableton — I think it has a better interface. For video editing, a lot of people who are better at it than me are using DaVinci Resolve now rather than Premiere Pro. We haven't transitioned yet, but we're exploring it — and you can get out of the Adobe subscription ecosystem, which is expensive for a solo creator or small business.

Any additional AI tools beyond Claude and ChatGPT?

One worth mentioning is Neural DSP — their plugins and hardware use machine learning for guitar and bass tone modeling, and they're fantastic. We've had a chance to work with the company a bit. They don't brand themselves as AI, but there's definitely some serious engineering under the hood.

Beyond that, for specific use cases, I use Moises for stem splitting, although Logic now does that too. And there's Photo Room for removing backgrounds from photos — very good, though it's one of those things you might only need once every few months. For the most part, I don't sign up for something new unless it's a very specific use case that the foundational models can't handle.

AI and the future of music education

How do you think AI will influence the future of Pickup and music education more broadly?

Net positive for us, for now — I don't see it as a big existential risk. A lot of that comes down to the fact that guitar, bass, and piano are mechanical instruments that you physically play. It's a very analog hobby, and most of our members are hobbyists. There's something almost counter to AI about spending time away from a screen, practicing a physical instrument — and I think that's going to become more valuable, not less, in the same way we increasingly appreciate going to the gym, going for a run, or going out to dinner. Those analog experiences matter.

Short-term, it's mostly a productivity boost — we can do more with less. I can dream up an idea, understand who the user is, and execute it much faster through these tools. It's changing week to week, which is exciting.

Failing fast (but not too fast)

I also want to touch on challenges. I know there was an app you started that didn't work out. Can you talk about dealing with failure and having the drive to keep going?

The best advice is to fail fast — but there's nuance there. You don't want to give something a day or two and conclude it failed before you really tried. It's about building an intuition for spending a good amount of time on a given thing, giving it your best shot, going all out, but finding the answer quickly about whether it's working. And sometimes you need to keep failing again and again to find the real answer.

My approach now is to keep trying new things, because you need reps, and not everything is going to be a success. You need to fail at least 50% of the time to find the winners. What matters is that you saw the idea through — that it didn't fail because you didn't give it your all — because "this didn't work" is valuable information. It frees you to focus on something else.

And I'll add: the ability to study music for years, to fail at a recital, or to spend years studying and then decide to do something else — that's a privilege not everyone has. The opportunity to even try to make a living from music is a bit crazy when you think about it, and having that support or good fortune is worth recognizing.

Rapid fire

Who is your favorite jazz guitar player?

Grant Green. Fantastic lines, very easy to absorb, beautiful to transcribe, fits naturally on the fingers.

Favorite non-jazz guitar player?

Two all-time favorites — Maria from CHON, and Tim Henson from Polyphia.

Hardest year and best year running the business?

Every year has hard bits and good bits. It's a balance of doing something really hard and finding the reward in getting through it. So every year is a blend of both — but ultimately each one has been rewarding.

Of all the people you've worked with, what's one thing successful people have in common?

I'll give you two: being excellent at their craft, and being enjoyable to work with — contributing to the culture and the vibe. Every truly talented artist or team member I've known has both.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to 19-year-old Sam?

Success is based on being lucky, being fortunate, and trying really hard. I try not to give too much advice because at the end of the day, there's a lot of luck involved.

People often don't talk about that. Thank you, Sam.