Lukas Pauka

Lukas Pauka is a product leader, AI-native builder and electronic music artist based in Amsterdam. Across 15+ years he has built consumer, marketplace and advertising products at four companies that defined their category in Europe — Hyves, eBay Classifieds / Marktplaats, Talpa’s JUKE and SoundCloud — a path that runs from social graphs to two-sided marketplaces to music streaming to programmatic ad tech.

As Principal Product Manager for Ads at SoundCloud he owned AI-driven contextual targeting and programmatic monetisation across web, mobile and connected devices: teaching systems to understand what a track actually is, so that 300M+ tracks and the audiences around them could be matched at machine speed. At JUKE (Talpa) he led product and UX for a national music streaming service, working the recommendation and discovery surfaces where catalogue meets listener. At Marktplaats / eBay Classifieds he worked on the liquidity problem every marketplace lives or dies by — matching supply to demand at national scale. At Hyves, he was inside the Netherlands’ dominant social network as the shift to mobile and the modern creator internet began.

Discovery, matching, monetisation, music. He has now spent his career building every component of the problem he is solving.

He is currently building growyour.music, an AI-native growth platform for independent electronic music artists, on the conviction that the hardest problem in music today isn’t distribution — it’s being found. AI-native is meant literally: AI runs in the product (an agentic assistant for artists, label-matching, submission analytics), in the growth engine (an automated content, video and SEO pipeline), and in how the company is built — a solo founder operating a fleet of coding agents, with models routed by task from local inference to frontier reasoning. It ships daily with a team of one.

Alongside it he releases deep house records as Raw Underground, charted on Traxsource and Beatport, and promotes house music events in Amsterdam. growyour.music is a finalist in the Reeperbahn Festival Startup Contest.

He speaks about AI in the creator economy, the economics of independent artist growth, and what happens when the person building the tool is also the one using it.