Spotify CTO Gustav Söderström: TikTok's Music; How Olivia Rodrigo Gamed the Algo | 20VC #936

1. 0:00 – 3:25

   Gustav’s Background

   1. HSHarry Stebbings0:00

      Gustav, this is an incredibly challenging show for me to do with, like, a serious face because I know you socially. Uh, I think the world of you socially, and so now I get to put on a professional face and welcome you to 20VC. So thank you so much for joining me today.

   2. GSGustav Söderström0:13

      Thank you for having me. It's an, it's an honor and likewise.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings0:17

      That is, that is very kind. I've also been stalking the shit out of you for the last few days professionally, uh, and so this has been great fun. But I want to start with a little bit on you, Gustav. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups and then come to lead the product org at, you know, one of the generational defining companies of our time with Spotify?

   4. GSGustav Söderström0:34

      So I'll try to do the, the brief version of the history of my life. Could be a few hours here, but I'll try to do it in a few minutes.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings0:40

      You've got three to four minutes, so just take your time. (laughs)

   6. GSGustav Söderström0:42

      (laughs) And then we cut. So I'm, I'm sort of actually this, uh, involuntary entrepreneur. I graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, sort of, uh, electrical engineering, computer science, and then, uh, that was the tail end of the IT crash, so there were literally no jobs to be had. And so I found a group of friends. I wanted to work at one of these big boring Swedish companies, like Ericsson or something.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings1:07

      (laughs)

   8. GSGustav Söderström1:08

      But I couldn't get a job, so I decided with a bunch of friends to start a company because all these investments had been made during the IT era in, you know, 3G and smartphones and so forth. It was all there, but no one believed in it. So we started this company where you could send text messages over data instead of SMS. And, and already back then, even though you paid per kilobyte, it was still 1/1000 the cost of sending the same, uh, you know, 160 characters over, over text message. And it turns out that people love cheap communication. So that took off in a, in a little bit in, in, uh, Sweden and in the Nordics. The problem was that the carriers back then controlled the world, and they were selling SMS bundles. They didn't like that. So we ended up selling this company to Yahoo! and... because they had the biggest messenger application in the world, but it was desktop only, and they wanted to go big in, in mobile because mobile was starting to happen here, and they had all these relationships with the global carriers. So I ended up working at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale for, for a bit, and I can tell you it was a troubled company already back then.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings2:13

      (laughs)

   10. GSGustav Söderström2:13

       So fast-forward about two and a half, three years later, and I think four or five CEOs later, I was back in Stockholm trying to figure out what to do, and through a mutual friend I met, uh, Daniel Ek, the founder and CEO, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify. And he showed me this amazing application because Spotify already existed as an ap- application on desktop, and it was simply amazing. But what he wanted, he wanted someone to head up what Spotify mobile was going to be. Because this was 2008, and the iPhone had just come out, but there was no app store yet, and it didn't really have any market share. So the, the world was mostly, you know, Symbian, Sony Ericsson, these, these things. And so I happened to be... you know, I got lucky. I had a moment in time where I knew something, how to develop for lots of different mobile phones that many other people didn't know. So that's how I came into Spotify, starting to head up, uh, product development for mobile.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings3:08

       Now, I'm gonna interrupt.

   12. GSGustav Söderström3:08

       And since then-

   13. HSHarry Stebbings3:09

       Can, can I interrupt you there? Because there's just two things I want to pick up on first. Number one is, like, Shach actually told me about your entrepreneurial early days, and, uh, one thing I've very much seen in the best product leaders is really kind of the founder mindset and that accountability and ownership mindset that they

2. 3:25 – 4:15

   How does being a previous founder make you a better product leader?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings3:25

      bring to product. How do you think being a previous founder makes you a better product owner and product leader?

   2. GSGustav Söderström3:32

      Well, I do think it is the, the ownership aspect. I, I can't help but think as a CEO, even when I'm at Spotify, which can be annoying for, maybe for the CEO, for my peers-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings3:46

      (laughs)

   4. GSGustav Söderström3:46

      ... because you think about everyone else's shit as well. But I think it's important to have an, a holistic perspective. You know, I kind of have to believe in the whole thing.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings3:55

      Mm-hmm.

   6. GSGustav Söderström3:55

      If I don't feel I understand why Spotify should succeed, I can't help myself but asking, like, "Why are we doing it this way?" So I, I kind of have that mindset, and I think it's more, more helpful than not. But I can't really help it.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings4:09

      The other question I have is, you know, I, I know Daniel for the last few years, but Daniel 2008.

3. 4:15 – 6:24

   Why Gustav Joined Spotify

   1. HSHarry Stebbings4:15

      Can you just take me back? What was it about Daniel and Spotify that convinced you that this was going to be, you know, what was now a 14-year journey that you were going to commit to? Like, what specifically was it?

   2. GSGustav Söderström4:29

      It was two factors. It was the people, Daniel and many of the engineers who worked at, at Spotify and had built this amazing product. It really was the product. When I tried it, like everyone else, I just couldn't believe that it was, that it was true. I thought it was a fake. I thought they had a file server standing somewhere nearby-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings4:48

      (laughs)

   4. GSGustav Söderström4:48

      ... because it was too fast. So it's obviously the product-

   5. HSHarry Stebbings4:50

      Chat was, chat, chat was running in the background with CD-ROMs. (laughs)

   6. GSGustav Söderström4:52

      Exactly.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings4:53

      (laughs)

   8. GSGustav Söderström4:54

      And then, and then it was, um, it was the people and Daniel. It was a very technology-centric and sort of meritocratic idea-based culture. It was like fierce debating, and the best idea won out. And, and I really liked that. So, so those were two of the factors, and Daniel was very humble. I say "was." He actually still is a very humble person. He, he claims himself that he's an introvert, even though I think he's, he's actually very skilled these days. But just a very mellow, mellow person, the kind of personality I really like. You know, non-hierarchical. You can debate, you can debate intensely with him. So those were some of the factors. The other factor was simply naivete. You know how they say that being, you know, ignorance is bliss. I had no idea about the music industry.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings5:39

      (laughs)

   10. GSGustav Söderström5:39

       If someone had told me, there's no chance I would have started. Sti- statistically, it would have made no sense to join a music startup. But luckily for me...... I had no idea, so I joined anyway.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings5:49

       You're clearly not a VC because there's no such thing as naivety, it's just insight and wisdom that made you choose Spotify to write something.

   12. GSGustav Söderström5:56

       (laughs) All right.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings5:57

       Um, um-

   14. GSGustav Söderström5:57

       I forgot to phrase it the correct way.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings5:59

       (laughs) I wa- I want to split the show today into two, kind of, separate parts. One is, you know, you have this incredible podcast series, and there's a couple of cool themes there that I love and I want to unpack. And then, the second is really unpacking lessons from the Spotify journey. If we start with your amazing podcast series, which I love, um, I- I actually listen to it on my runs, uh, which is- I wish it was, uh, shorter because I'm getting less and less fit. Um, but (laughs) my question to you

4. 6:24 – 9:35

   What are “Macro Winds”?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings6:24

      is, you say in it, "Never fight a macro wind. You will lose." Can I ask, what did you mean by this, and can you explain that to me?

   2. GSGustav Söderström6:33

      Sure. So macro winds are these big societal changes that are sort of bigger than any one individual or- or any one company. And, uh, even though I think everyone understands that you can't stop one of these ch- so what- what is a macro wind? Typical macro wind would be, you know, uh, cheap broadband.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings6:53

      Mm-hmm.

   4. GSGustav Söderström6:53

      It's- it's happening. You're not going to stop it. It's going to disrupt things, so you should just accept it. Another one was smartphones, machine learning is another such macro wind. These things happen, and I still see a lot of companies and product people who try to fight these things, as if you can stop them. And this has been- this has been true for us as well. We've lived through some of these. I've literally had to learn this lesson. And what you should do instead of fighting it is obviously to rethink your position, try to reposition yourself so that instead of having this wind blow in your face and slowing you down, you somehow get it at your back. And, you know, I've been fortunate enough to be through a few of these. They're kind of scary. But the- the lesson is that the sooner or the quicker you accept it and reposition, the better. You're just not going to stop these things.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings7:44

      Can I ask, can you give me an example of a macro wind that you went in the face of and then pivoted and decided that it was better to have it behind your back? Just so I get a feeling for it.

   6. GSGustav Söderström7:54

      Of course. Um, an- an example for us, there are two good examples. One is when I joined Spotify, we had what was then a very profitable business model, which was you give the application away for free on desktop computers because people didn't think they wanted to pay for music. So then they start investing in music, playlisting, and building libraries. And then, they realized they'd actually wanted to listen to those playlists on the go on their mobile phones, so we charged for the mobile application.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings8:22

      Mm-hmm.

   8. GSGustav Söderström8:23

      So simply put, we charged for mobility. And that worked beautifully for several years. And, you know, w- we loved it, VCs loved it. They invested a lot of money. But then all of a sudden, it turned out that this macro wind was blowing called smartphones, and we started seeing people that not only used their mobile phones more than their desktop and were mobile first but many users that were mobile only. There was no desktop. So we didn't have a free tier at all for these users. So our- our business model broke. Now, we were not incentivized to want to see that in the short term, and we could see our user growth actually starting to slow down. But when we accepted this, and we took the pain and the risk of repositioning all of Spotify, figuring out a way to give away the mobile experience for free, even though that was what we were charging for, so we literally changed the entire business model, we instead got this wind at our back, and we started growing exponentially, literally exponentially actually. And so it- it was a very clear example. If you look at the growth curve, you can see the macro wind blowing in our faces, then you can see when we figured it out, and we got it at our backs.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings9:33

      Can I ask, how did you... Take me inside

5. 9:35 – 11:10

   Fear of Cannibalizing a Business Model that Works

   1. HSHarry Stebbings9:35

      the- the room there. How did you get over the fear of the cannibalization of an existing business model that was also working? You make it free, you could have a lot of the premium users, uh, you know, churn and just be ad-supported users, but free, um, and actually, you saw the cannibalization of existing user bases. How did you get over that concern, and what did the internal discussions look like there?

   2. GSGustav Söderström9:57

      So we actually used a lot of data. It was, uh, Mary Meeker, uh, I know precisely when we realized this. It was a deck from Mary Meeker that showed the projections of smartphone growth overtaking desktop growth, and we looked at that, and we said, "Holy crap," you know? In- in 2012, it was almost like a date, "This is going to blow up." So we discussed that a lot. We kind of found the confidence ourselves to do this. But the big problem we had was actually that we had other stakeholders in the labels.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings10:27

      Hmm.

   4. GSGustav Söderström10:28

      And the labels didn't see it. They were not looking at Mary Meeker's slides.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings10:31

      (laughs)

   6. GSGustav Söderström10:32

      And they were not so keen to risk the entire business model that they had just figured out after, you know, the- the whole i- you know, uh, piracy era and so forth. So that was actually the bigger problem, and we had to wait all until- all up until we had stopped growing and actually started losing users before they agreed to give us the licenses we wanted. But by then, we had, um, prototyped and researched and A/B tested a bunch of different concepts, so when we got the licenses, we actually knew what we wanted to do and had already built the experience, and we launched it almost overnight when we signed the- the contracts.

6. 11:10 – 15:36

   Sustainable vs. Unsustainable Consumer Behaviors

   1. GSGustav Söderström11:10

   2. HSHarry Stebbings11:10

      I- I- I do just want to ask one final one before we move onto the next lesson, which is how do you know whether it's a sustainable fundamental shift that you're fighting against or a unsustainable one? Uh, point being that a lot of, like, consumer behaviors were changed in COVID that have now come back, and actually, we've gone back to original behavior patterns. How much data do you need to know whether something is ongoing and continuous versus actually time-bounded and temporary?

   3. GSGustav Söderström11:36

      It's a great question, and I think COVID is the perfect example.... because you, you knew, or you couldn't be certain but you were quite certain that this would actually end. The question was, was this a, a fundamental shift in behavior or a temporary shift? And we had exactly this discussion when COVID started. It was much easier with something like the shift to mobile.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings11:58

      Yeah.

   5. GSGustav Söderström11:58

      There was no real model where you saw people going back to desktop computers and now this, like, macro shift is, you know, from curation to recommendation-

   6. HSHarry Stebbings12:06

      Mm-hmm.

   7. GSGustav Söderström12:06

      ... or as Mike Mignano puts it, from social media to recommendation media. That's not gonna reverse, so those are quite easy. But COVID was hard, so we literally had the discussion, should we model this as a temporary anomaly, keep investing, for example, in the car, even though we saw car usage dip completely during COVID? Or should we just say no one is ever gonna drive again, let's reposition for, for the home use case? We chose the former. We said that we're gonna model this as an anomaly and we kept investing in the world going back to normal, and I can tell you that that was incredibly painful 'cause we thought it would be over in six months, then in 12 months and, like, 18 months later, it didn't look like it was gonna go back. It's actually only now, in the last few months, that we clearly see it going back to the normal behaviors, you know, home usage going down, car usage and mobile usage going up. So i- it's hard but we, we had that discussion. In general, we try to model the world and, you know, make predictions about how the world is gonna work. I, I love models basically, it's, you know, it's a structured way of thinking that gives you both, um, predictability, explainability but also shareability. If you explain your models, then o- others can use the same model and you can sort of distribute the way you think about the world.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings13:25

      What, what I love doing about these shows is the flexibility you have with the schedules. (laughs) I'm, I'm with you, I love models too, but I'm also aware that, you know, y- you can't predict markets and sometimes your model is wrong, and don't try and be smarter than the market. I guess my question to you is, like, how do you know when your model is wrong and you actually just need to change 12 months into your investing in the, "Hey, post-COVID, we will go back to normal"? Should you wait six months more? I mean, especially as a public company, it's even tougher. How do you know when your model is broken and how do you know when to change?

   9. GSGustav Söderström13:59

      Yeah, very tricky question. Uh, f- so first of all, regarding models, there is this famous saying that by definition all models are wrong, that's why they're called models. If they weren't wrong, they're, they're actually reality, but the whole point with a model is it simplifies reality 'cause reality's too complex, so they are wrong. And, and one trick... So you're always taking a risk, you know, in sort of data machine learning terms, you're doing dimensionality reduction. Reality has infinite dimensions and you're reducing it to maybe five, and if you pick the wrong dimensions, you know, you didn't model the, the spread of a disease, it's gonna be wrong, right? 'Cause that was not a dimension you had and the real world is multidimensional, so that's the risk. One way to try to avoid it, uh, that, you know, comes from sort of, um, Berkshire Hat- Hathaway and, uh, how they think about the world is you should use at least three models with different dimensions. If they all agree, chances that you're completely wrong are much lower. By using one model, and I've done this mistake, y- early in my career, y- you think you figure out how something works, you're like, "That's how it works," and then you just do the same thing again and again and you're using a single model and you're mistaking the world for being simple. It's just that you manage the model like a small moment in time and then it breaks completely. So I've gotten better at using multiple models, but there is no, there is no- no way to catch all of it. So COVID is, I don't think many people's model, many people's models cat- you know, predicted COVID happening.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings15:30

       I, I am totally with you (laughs) , I think, uh, if you did, you are now retired in Ibiza. Uh, but,

7. 15:36 – 19:18

   Why is the button for Spotify Radio so buried in the app?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings15:36

      um, uh, m- my question to you is, and, uh, I'm sorry again for going completely off schedule, but I was chatting to Mignano about this and he said, "I don't know, speak to Gustav," and I probably should. Um, and remember, this is said from a place of love, um, one of my favorite features in Spotify is the Go To Radio. It is also buried, like, three clicks in and I didn't know about it until someone told me about it on Twitter, and when I think about the shift from curation to recommendation being so central to the, like, future of content discovery and content platforms, why is it so buried, and is that a product mistake? I would love to say that's someone else's question but it's mine, so (laughs) forgive me.

   2. GSGustav Söderström16:14

      It's a perfect question for me. So one answer is, stay tuned, you will be happy. Uh, another more telling answer is, the way to think about it, we kind of had to... We made choices between what the main paradigm is. The main paradigm of Spotify was playlisting, that's what Spotify was and what we grew up around, you know, user curation, and then, you know, we started playlisting for you and we, we had to decide should we have the radio channel as the analogy or should we have the personalized playlist as the analogy? And they kind of do the same job. A personalized playlist-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings16:54

      Mm-hmm.

   4. GSGustav Söderström16:55

      ... within a, you know, a certain genre like chill, it is very similar to starting a chill radio. Literally, you will get the same songs actually. So we've struggled a little bit with which user paradigm to use and as you can imagine, older people, they like, uh, radio paradigms, and younger people, maybe not so much. I'm not calling you old here, Harry, but, you know.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings17:17

      No, it's, i- it's fine, it's fine. I'm wearing a Panama hat and, uh, you know, I fit in-

   6. GSGustav Söderström17:21

      You are wearing a Panama hat-

   7. HSHarry Stebbings17:22

      ... and so, like I-

   8. GSGustav Söderström17:23

      ... and listening to radio.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings17:24

      I fit in this category as well.

   10. GSGustav Söderström17:25

       You're a very old young person.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings17:28

       Yeah, okay.

   12. GSGustav Söderström17:29

       So, uh, so we're t- we're trying to figure out how we can, um, combine these things in a neat way, but fundamentally, it's a problem of many parts of the application sort of performing the same job for the user, if that makes sense.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings17:44

       Mm-hmm.Is that not a product mistake?

   14. GSGustav Söderström17:47

       I think it's a product mistake to make, because it's easier, it's very easy to add features.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings17:53

       Hmm.

   16. GSGustav Söderström17:53

       And everyone is gonna ask for many features. It is incredibly hard to remove features.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings17:58

       Mm-hmm.

   18. GSGustav Söderström17:58

       And, you know, this is, like, scientifically proven by, I think, uh, Daniel Kahneman and Adam Tversky where they gave, you know, Harvard students a, a cup. Uh, first they asked what th- they would pay for the cup, and then to the other half of the class they gave the cup and asked what they would sell it for, and it turns out people value something they owned 1.5 times as much as they value never having had it. And that, that, I think, is a good product lesson. Like, it's gonna be 1.5 times more painful to remove something than it was, uh, valuable to give it in the first place. So we're very careful with that, and that's the reason why we, we have many of those features in the app that kind of duplicate the same use case, and we're always trying to streamline it and simplify it, because there is this invisible cost of the application becoming more and more complex. As, as you said, it's really hard to find that feature. That's because even though it works really well for some people, that's because it competes with the other features, and if we put that on front we would get another cost somewhere else. So this is the trick of, like, uh, serving enough use cases but not over-complicating the, the experience.

   19. HSHarry Stebbings19:01

       Uh, uh, so, uh, we're gonna move on to competition after this final question, I promise. Um, uh, the hard thing with, you know, uh, products like Spotify, like Twitter, where users love it and it is such a part of their daily life, is you have very visceral feedback and opinions, as you said, that

8. 19:18 – 20:48

   How do you determine which customer feedback to listen to?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings19:18

      people request a lot. How do you determine between the customer data that you listen to and engage with in, in ingested into product roadmaps versus those where you say, "I get it, Harry's moaning from London about not, you know, Go To Radio being a couple of layers deep, but it's not a priority"? How do you determine between the two?

   2. GSGustav Söderström19:37

      There are a couple of common tricks. One is you separate new users from existing users. You're going to get very different metrics. Existing users will have a habit, your metrics may go down for a feature, and then if you try it on new users who never had that habit, you may see that if you're not taught the old paradigm, this is actually better, it's just that you train your user base on another paradigm. So that's one trick to figure out sort of some, um, what the truth is, if it's actually, um, better in some global sense, and then you can make the choice, should we take the pain of retraining the existing audience? Because we know that if you just change the behavior, you will be more happy, 'cause if you never knew this old behavior, we can see that. That's one trick. The other way is to, back to radio, to try to figure out what it is you want to achieve. Do you really want a radio, or are you looking for a session that you can tune more easily that can go across genre? What is it that you really want to do? And see if you can, if you can present that in a way that, uh, doesn't complicate the application by just adding more features.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings20:44

      I, I totally get you and I find that fascinating between new and existing users. I, I do

9. 20:48 – 23:00

   Why it’s Better to do the Opposite of your Competition

   1. HSHarry Stebbings20:48

      wanna touch on competition. We spoke about kind of product decision-making there. Um, sometimes, in many cases, often for startups, uh, competition's roadmap drives a lot of their roadmap. Uh, you've said before in, in your show, which is look at the competition and then do something completely different. Uh, always love a contrarian opinion, so this is great. Um, but why do you believe this, and, like, can you explain it to me a little bit on why it's better to do something completely different?

   2. GSGustav Söderström21:15

      So, I think this is especially important for a smaller company going up against a bigger company. If you, if you assume that the people in the bigger company are smart and competent people, which I think you should assume, then what they're doing, their strategy probably makes a lot of sense to them. They're doing it because it plays to their strengths. Maybe they're leveraging their distribution, their hardware, their user base, their, um, payment method, something like that, right? And so if you think about it, should you as a smaller player go up and try to do their strategy with less people, less budget, and less assets? You're just going to become a lesser version. I mean, that's a likely outcome. So especially as a smaller player, I think you should do the opposite. Try to figure out if there is a position where that bigger player doesn't, uh, isn't playing right now, and ideally doesn't even want to play because it's contrary to their business model. The- there, you know, there's some sort of collateral damage or what in strategy terms is called a counter-position. There is, there are exceptions to this. If you're a bigger player, there, there is a, you know, it's, it's a credible strategy to say, "We see some new behavior, feature, user interface really working. Let's implement it and give it to our user base before they find it in this other user base." And you've seen this play out in, in the world. That's a, that's a reasonable strategy if you're a much, much bigger player. But Spotify has always been and still is a much smaller player than our competitors, so we tend to try to think about contrarian strategies.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings22:51

      Can you walk me through an example where you decided to do something completely different as Spotify to your competitors where it worked or didn't work, but where

10. 23:00 – 25:10

    When Spotify did the Opposite of YouTube

    1. HSHarry Stebbings23:00

       you chose to do something completely different with this mindset?

    2. GSGustav Söderström23:02

       So, back to, um, mobile. Um, I described earlier when this, uh, macro wind of smartphones started really blowing hard and we needed to figure out a free tier for the mobile phone. It was paid only at the time. If you looked around then and you said, "Who are our biggest competitors on mobile free music listening?" It wa- it was, and still is, YouTube.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings23:27

       Mm-hmm.

    4. GSGustav Söderström23:27

       And so what was the YouTube experience? They, they, they... You know, music was and is one of the biggest use cases for, for YouTube, and, uh, they have a fantastic experience. That experience is foreground, on-demand playing with video, right? That's what you can do on YouTube. So it is amazing for discovering new music. You can see the artists that you're listening to. You can play things on-demand and so forth.... but then when you put the phone in your pocket, the free application doesn't background, so it stops playing. So we, we looked at this and, and one strategy would be that is what the market wants, that's the biggest player, we should go and get those same foreground on-demand video licenses that YouTube has. But the contrarian approach which we chose in this case was to say, "What if we did the complete opposite?" So what if we had, what if we licensed a functionality that would work exactly where YouTube stops working? So we actually did the opposite. We licensed a forgr- a background shuffle tier, where you can play any playlist you want in shuffle mode in the background forever, but you actually can't play on-demand in the foreground.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings24:40

       Hmm.

    6. GSGustav Söderström24:40

       So it turns out that Spotify Mobile works exactly where YouTube Mobile doesn't work, and vice versa. So we kind of said, "Okay, let them keep the foreground discovery, w- that they're really good at, as long as we get all the background listening." And for us, that's been very effective because it turns out that most of the listening is actually in the background. So that was an example of trying to be as contrarian as, as possible.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings25:06

       Can I ask you a bold question? How does that thinking change

11. 25:10 – 27:23

    Spotify Video

    1. HSHarry Stebbings25:10

       when Spotify now has video? You know, I listen to all of my podcasts on Spotify, I love it as a podcast player now, but actually there's now video and like o- often I'm listening to it, like, walking, and I'm kind of looking at it and I'm in London and I'm kind of about to get run over and, you know, that would worry Shaq, uh (laughs) , um, Mother less so but Shaq more so. Um, uh, you know, how does that change your product paradigm thinking when suddenly you do actually have to worry about, like, user engagement and video, not just background play?

    2. GSGustav Söderström25:41

       So back to the contrarian sort of view. Spotify is, you know, the vast majority background application and so that's what we optimize our music licenses for. First of all, in podcasts, we don't have to license, so we are allowed to play video on-demand in the foreground as well.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings26:00

       Mm-hmm.

    4. GSGustav Söderström26:01

       But if you look at what use cases we're going after, because we're mostly a background application, the use cases we're going after are these long, mostly backgrounded sessions, right? Podcasts typically. We're not going after the foreground sort of silent jujitsu videos that make no sense when you background them-

    5. HSHarry Stebbings26:19

       (laughs)

    6. GSGustav Söderström26:19

       ... 'cause it's just a lot of panting, right?

    7. HSHarry Stebbings26:21

       (laughs)

    8. GSGustav Söderström26:21

       We're going after the traditional podcasts.

    9. HSHarry Stebbings26:23

       (laughs) .

    10. GSGustav Söderström26:23

        And so what we did, starting actually with, with, uh, Joe Rogan podcast was we built video into Spotify. We didn't know what the usage would look like. Maybe it would be that no one actually ever brought up and watched the video. But without, uh, saying exact, exact metrics, what happened was exactly what you said. People consume the vast majority of these shows in the... not the vast major- the majority of these shows in the background, but they do bring it up every now and then to see what they are talking about, who is talking. So we are using video mostly for the sort of talking heads, um, format, if that makes sense. There are these famous moments of, you know, Elon Musk smoking weed, for example, on Joe Rogan podcast.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings27:08

        (laughs) .

    12. GSGustav Söderström27:08

        So it turned out to fit very well with this.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings27:10

        You, you disappointed me. I thought we could do the same. You've got some nice, you know, garden plants in the background (laughs) .

    14. GSGustav Söderström27:16

        I'm in Sweden, Harry. It doesn't work that way.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings27:18

        I'm in London. It doesn't work that way either (laughs) .

    16. GSGustav Söderström27:20

        I know (laughs) .

    17. HSHarry Stebbings27:21

        But no, I get you totally.

12. 27:23 – 29:30

    Was there a time when you wished you’d copied the competition?

    1. HSHarry Stebbings27:23

       Uh, 'cause, I'm sorry to interrupt. Can I ask that, is there a time when actually you sat round the table and you went, "Oh, shit. We should have copied them."? I- it could be YouTube, it could be any of the other competitors where actually doing the different didn't work out.

    2. GSGustav Söderström27:40

       Well, I would say this. There are certainly tons of things which should have been faster. You know, I think lyrics is an example, uh, o- of that, which, which we now have, it's very engaging. That was obvious. So we've certainly been super slow for various reasons on these things. In that case, it wasn't really because we had a contrarian view. It was actually, which is often the case, 'cause of th- how the music industry works. So, if you work normally at, at Twitter or Google or Facebook or something, you're, you're... as a product person, what you do is you try to figure out what the best possible thing is that you could build and then you try to build that. What you do when you work in the music industry is you try to figure out what the best possible thing is, then you go to the labels and you try to license the lowest common denominator of what is licensable, and that often means that you can't build the best possible product. You have to build with much, much narrower constraints.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings28:37

       Mm-hmm.

    4. GSGustav Söderström28:37

       And often actually the cost is a constraint because the, the job of a music label is to take a piece of IP and try to sell it to you as many times as possible. You know, foreground rights, background rights, video rights, sync rights, all of these rights. So you can see that as, as very annoying as a pr- person or you can do what I do and see it as constraints are what makes the world interesting. You know, can you do something really good even within these narrower constraints? So that's actually been the biggest problem and I would say for that reason also, if you think about it, there hasn't been that much innovation in music listening.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings29:11

       Mm-hmm.

    6. GSGustav Söderström29:12

       It is search playlisting and so forth. I mean, we're trying. We're working really hard. But it's not like other mediums where, you know, things change completely. I think the biggest innovation clearly in the last six, seven years has been TikTok who found, like, a new format of using music for something completely

13. 29:30 – 30:59

    How TikTok Reinvented Music

    1. GSGustav Söderström29:30

       different.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings29:31

       How do you think TikTok did that? Sorry, help me understand that. We're, w- surprisingly, I, I'm showing my age here, a bit so down on the goods, we're very big in TikTok, um, but in venture capital startup TikTok (laughs) . Like how did, sorry, how did TikTok kind of reinvent a new medium format of music?

    3. GSGustav Söderström29:48

       So it started in 2014 as Musical.ly and there was a lot of, uh, trial and error. I've spoken to, to, uh, both the founders and there was a lot of trial and error, um-... and they sort of happened on this use case, and it didn't start by going and licensing stuff. You know, there is a, there is a beauty in being small-

    4. HSHarry Stebbings30:09

       Correct.

    5. GSGustav Söderström30:09

       ... small enough that people don't care, and that's actually the problem with being big. We can't really just try things. We have to license them first, which means we take the cost up front. Uh, so back then, they were small enough to try this, and they tried to do something different actually, but they found product market fit. You know, they, they kind of saw in the data what people were actually doing with these clips was recording dance videos, and they leaned into that. And then later, they started licensing, and then they got acquired by ByteDance and, and got more distribution and so forth.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings30:35

       I totally get you. Um, final, final thing o- on your shows I want to touch on before we dive into basically a free-for-all from Daniel Shak, Alex Nordstrom, who finally actually responds. Takes days for this man.

    7. GSGustav Söderström30:46

       Thank you, Alex.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings30:47

       Um, thanks Alex. Um, uh, is, uh, (laughs) a crucial one, but it's, it's better to be lower on a taller mountain than higher on a smaller mountain. It sounds wonderfully

14. 30:59 – 33:07

    Better Lower on a Taller Mountain

    1. HSHarry Stebbings30:59

       poetic. What did you mean by this? And why is that?

    2. GSGustav Söderström31:03

       So, uh, what I mean is basically that when you work with something for, you know, a very long time, whether it's a certain type of machine learning algorithm or maybe a certain user interface or, or a business model, by definition, it's going to be very well optimized, right? Because you spent so much time on it, it's going to be very efficient, but that also means that there isn't that much potential left in it because you've optimized it. You're close to the summit of that mountain, and so that's a problem, and most companies get there. If they're, if they're good, they get there. So, when you're at that peak, the, the problem is to get somewhere, you have to sort of change something fundamental, which in this analogy is you have to jump to different mountain, and that may sound... You know, a mountain that has a higher summit has more potential. The problem with that is when you jump from the peak of that first mountain, you're actually very likely to, to land somewhere at the base of the new mountain. So, you're actually gonna lose altitude, which means in, in product terms, your core metrics may go down, and in many cases, you might end up spending millions of dollars in a year just to get to where you were in the old paradigm. And as you can imagine, this is tricky in a public company with Wall Street pressure and, you know, many employees and boards and so forth. I've literally had this problem where, you know, or this challenge speaking to C-levels and, and boards where you explain that we spent millions of dollars in a year to get to exactly where we were 12 months ago, and people ask, "So exactly why is that a success?" Right? (laughs) But then 12 months later, you may have lowered your churn by 30% or something, but because you've iterated for another month. So, this, this notion of having enough patience to... You know, first having the guts to move from one mountain to another and then having the patience to iterate your way back up to even control is, is very tricky. But it happens inevitably, and it is- you can't avoid it

15. 33:07 – 34:18

    The Introduction of Podcasts to Spotify

    1. GSGustav Söderström33:07

       because you're gonna die if you don't.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings33:08

       Can I ask, was this the case with the introduction of podcasts? Obviously, we made the shift purely away from just music to obviously, you know, podcasts and then also kind of video podcasts as well. Was that the case where actually it took a year to invest to reach feature parity with podcast players? I'm intrigued on that one.

    3. GSGustav Söderström33:26

       For sure. Actually, podcast was mostly additional, so we didn't go down in metrics. Those, those cases have been when we changed our user interface, for example, completely-

    4. HSHarry Stebbings33:36

       Correct.

    5. GSGustav Söderström33:36

       ... or you change to different, uh, recommendation algorithm or you change something fundamental, your metrics may go down. Podcast was different because it was mostly additional, but it is true that it took a long time before Spotify was sort of... Our, our internal goal was, you know, get the podcast catalog on the service and build a, uh, best in class podcast player, you know, feature parity. That was the first stage. And then, obviously, the idea was to pull away. But to your point, that took over a year before we had everything in place that people, like, even expected from a podcast player. It was painful to spend that time, but it wasn't the problem of actually, you know, losing altitude in the meantime.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings34:14

       Yeah. Uh, no, I, I, I totally get you on that one. I wa- I was intrigued.

16. 34:18 – 37:30

    Where has Spotify lost altitude?

    1. HSHarry Stebbings34:18

       Wh- oh, sorry. Before we do, like, you as a leader, where did you lose altitude? If you think back, where was it like, "Oh, God, we're back at the bottom of this mountain. Fuck." (laughs)

    2. GSGustav Söderström34:27

       So, a typical example was, um, there's... Uh, actually, let's, let's take the same example that we discussed, uh, because there's context around it. When we finally launched this mobile free tier that was, you know, contrarian to YouTube and that risked our business model, what happened was l- leading up to that, because fewer and fewer people used the desktop free tier, actually, from the outside, what happened was our conversion metrics looked better and better, looked like a larger and larger percentage were becoming premium-

    3. HSHarry Stebbings34:59

       Hmm.

    4. GSGustav Söderström34:59

       ... but that's not because more were converting. That's because the free user intake was going down, right? So, from the industry point of view, the conversion was at an all-time high, you know, and what do you think happened when we launched this massive, massive free tier? It just dropped. Everyone downloaded the free app. No one converted for months, right? So, the, the MAU metrics, the growth was very inspiring. That was an exponential curve. But premium conversion was (laughs) an exponential curve in the other direction. And as you can imagine, many people, labels and investors were wondering if that was gonna catch up or if this was... if we were down to, like, single percentage points premium conversion instead of like 30, 40%. It did catch up. Uh, first, you know, we, we also needed to invest in ads monetization. So basically, the, the analogy here is user metrics went up, but monetization, both free ad monetization and paid conversion, you know, that dropped severely in altitude.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings35:59

       Can I ask, are you shitting yourself in this moment? You have your board p- like, putting pressure on you. You see single digits conversion. Your investors are putting pressure on you.... are you nervous as a product leader?

    6. GSGustav Söderström36:12

       I think you should always be somewhat nervous and paranoid. And, and yes, I would say this. Maybe not s- I had a lot of faith that conversion would go up because we had seen so many years that the core correlation was the more you use the free product, the more likely you are to convert to paid. We call it the more you play, the more you pay, which always made sense to me. Like, you're going to start paying for a product you use and love.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings36:36

       Yeah.

    8. GSGustav Söderström36:36

       You're not gonna pay for something you s- you don't use, right? So getting it to use it more means you're gonna not want the ads. You're going to want offline, you're going to want speak site. I was pretty certain of that. That wasn't my worry. The worry when we launched this free tier was if it was actually good enough. This contrarian hypothes- hypothesis that we had, it could have been BS. It turned out to be true, but that we couldn't test at scale, really. So I was very nervous about that. I think investors and labels were much more nervous about the conversion metrics and the ads metrics. Um, and, and also, to be quite honest, I wasn't responsible for the conversion of the ad metrics. (laughs)

    9. HSHarry Stebbings37:15

       (laughs)

    10. GSGustav Söderström37:15

        So maybe other people were very nervous.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings37:17

        It's wonderful.

    12. GSGustav Söderström37:18

        But they did a great job and they caught up.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings37:19

        It's, it's wonderful when you don't have responsibility for certain things in the pressure zone. Um, it's funny, I, speaking of kind of other people within the org, uh, I, I spoke to Daniel before the show, and, uh, the number one

17. 37:30 – 42:18

    Talk is Cheap

    1. HSHarry Stebbings37:30

       thing that he said that I had to ask you, was he said, "Ask him about talk is cheap." And so I want, I want to dive into this. What, what, what is talk is cheap? What do you mean by this? And how does that come out in how you communicate, lead, are?

    2. GSGustav Söderström37:44

       So it's sort of play on words. Uh, I believe deeply in this notion of Socratic debate. And I love debating with smart people, and I fundamentally believe that if we pay these high salaries that we pay in the tech industry for what are supposedly the best brains in the world, we should really maximize the value of that sort of rented brain power, right? And yet, I find that most, specifically most US companies, they're quite hierarchical, and very smart people often don't really understand what they're doing or why, and they're under-utilized. And if you think about it, that means they're actually overpaid for what they're doing. Not because they're not smart e- enough, but because they're not leveraged enough. So in the tech world, there's always been, the, for a long time, there's been this notion of talk is cheap and that code decides arguments. So what I decided in order to sort of poke fun at that is to say talk is cheap, so we should do much more of it. Because, in fact, just talking and debating with really smart people who are not afraid of you importantly, which I think is also sort of a Swedish societal trait that you're not so afraid of authority, is way cheaper than writing code. Writing code is one of the most expensive things you can do. So this thing of code decides argument, I never really bought. That you should only do when you're quite sure. You know, writing and shipping code to millions of people and waiting weeks for A/B test is not cheap. And my favorite example of this is, you know, the, the Greeks, and I guess it was Democritus that basically reasoned his way into the atom in 5th century BC. That shows how far you can get with just reasoning and debate. So it's very powerful, and I think if you do it right in structured ways with the right people, sometimes you can sort of reason your way all the way to the end of something and, and literally save years by not doing something. And, uh, tha- so that's what I mean with talk is cheap. I try to, instead of having only one-on-ones with my teams, I tend to have a lot of, um, quite long meetings with the entire team where we debate something. Even if it's like, you know, s- one person, quote-unquote, owns it, I think the input and the pushback from the rest of the team makes that person and that idea much better. And this is not new. This is what NASA has done forever, but for some reason, it's not that practiced, I, I feel. People talk more about the opposite, you know, separate swim lanes rather than how to work together.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings40:11

       So, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna dive in here and, uh, you know, put my size 10s in, and you're gonna tell me I'm a moron. I think talk is very expensive, especially in early stage companies. It's about speed of execution, it's about getting shit done. And, you know, I've invested in a couple of companies where, "Oh, we want to talk, we want to debate. Yes, let's, let's theorize on the future of, you know, privacy." Fuck, no. Just ship. Ship, ship, ship. Learn, iterate, go, go, go. This is your only advantage. Um, why am I wrong?

    4. GSGustav Söderström40:42

       Well, I think the way to think about it is, there's a difference between being fast and being right. You can, you can get... you can go very fast to nowhere. You know, you can ship code every day. But if you're fundamentally wrong, you're just gonna get to nowhere extremely efficiently and fast. And so I've found, especially if you're doing more complex thing, and, and maybe this is actually because I come from the music industry where building product had to be licensed as the lowest common denominator between, you know, three, four majors, what, you know, the impact of being wrong being three, four years, 'cause that's the term of one of these licenses. So I, and maybe we've been trained as a company to be more careful because the cost of being wrong was incredibly high.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings41:29

       Yeah.

    6. GSGustav Söderström41:30

       But I actually think that that cost of being wrong forced us to model the world slightly better and longer, um, maybe because we were afraid of mistakes, but I actually think that grew into skill at Spotify. Now, of course, you can, you can debate endlessly. You need ownership, you need to make decisions. And Spotify has certainly been guilty of being too unclear in, in, you know, who owns something. And it can slow the organization down. Uh, but fundamentally, I think now we have a really good balance where quite a lot of people actually have a fundamental strategic view of what we're doing and why. And, uh, this debate builds a lot of alignment that actually makes you faster, especially if you need to do something that is bigger than your own team.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings42:16

       C- so, uh, okay, I

18. 42:18 – 48:45

    How to Structure Debate in the Workplace

    1. HSHarry Stebbings42:18

       get you. I'm a startup founder listening. How do I set up these debates for success? Do w- do you, you know, head of product and all-round OG in life, say, "Harry, you know, this is the topic. Lead the discussion for an hour?" D- is there multiple discussion topics? How do you like to structure them to get the best outcomes?

    2. GSGustav Söderström42:36

       So I think if I were a startup, uh, founder again, uh, first of all, I would obviously try to hire people that are very smart. So I would debate a lot of my team, and that's what I've done in the, in the two startups that I've, uh, founded. And that has been very fruitful. We managed to discuss our way to insights that, that were actually quite novel, I think, that saved us a lot of time and managed to create good outcomes, just through talking through, you know, what if, what if, what if, with smart people. The other trick, if you're a smaller company, is you use other people. You call Harry and you say, like, "I want to debate with you. What do you think of this?" And, uh, I think, you know, you can time box it. I actually have pretty long discussions, like one or two hours for a topic, to really empty it out. My personal experience is, you know, one to two hours may save you months of building the wrong thing. So I, I think it's worth it.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings43:31

       My final one on this is, I, I, I l- I, I, I do like it in many ways, especially for larger companies. Often, more junior people, or even middle-tier people, will not feel the security to express their true opinions against Gustav. You say something and you say it with energy and charisma and conviction. It takes quite a lot if you're new or junior to say, "Gustav, I totally disagree with you." How do you think about creating environments of safety where more junior people can have debate and disagreement in a productive way?

    4. GSGustav Söderström44:02

       Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question, and I saw that shift pretty clearly when we started hiring more in the US.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings44:09

       Hmm.

    6. GSGustav Söderström44:09

       US people are just used to hierarchy.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings44:11

       Yeah.

    8. GSGustav Söderström44:12

       And, uh, I could find people ... There, there were a lot of misunderstandings between Swedish people and, and, and, uh, Americans in, in many ways. Uh, you know, Swedish people are better at some things, but they're much worse at other things. (laughs)

    9. HSHarry Stebbings44:29

       (laughs)

    10. GSGustav Söderström44:29

        You know, they do this, Swedes do this form of silent disagreement-

    11. HSHarry Stebbings44:32

        (laughs)

    12. GSGustav Söderström44:33

        ... that Americans, uh, interpret as, as, um, actual agreement, but it's not. You're just silent and you disagree. (laughs) So lots of cultural challenges there. But I think the way to do it is to model the behavior. I think back to, you know, what I liked about Daniel, is he models that behavior. So in his team, you can debate quite fiercely. You can tell the CEO in a pretty heated voice that you disagree and you don't like that, and you're not gonna get fired. I think it starts there.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings44:59

        Hmm.

    14. GSGustav Söderström45:00

        And then I try to do the same thing, uh, having h- you know, sometimes heated debates with my direct reports, often in front of their direct reports, and sometimes it's a little bit shocking maybe for them. They figure, like, "Oh, now my boss is gonna get fired."

    15. HSHarry Stebbings45:16

        (laughs)

    16. GSGustav Söderström45:17

        And then he, he or she isn't, and it's fine, and then they learn that, okay, it's apparently okay to disagree. That doesn't mean, to your point of efficiency, that you don't need to make decisions. You know, like everyone else, you need to sometimes disagree and commit. Uh, but I think it's important. I try to call people out in a positive way in the meeting and say, like, "What do- what do you think about this?" And obviously, the first time, someone might be nervous. Uh, but if the rest of the people in the room said what they actually think, other people tend to as well.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings45:48

        Final, final one on this, I promise. Does Zoom and COVID change the way that you do these sessions and these, like, you know, debates, and, and do you feel that there is a change in the quality of the debates in a virtual versus a in-person world?

    18. GSGustav Söderström46:04

        It's, it's interesting because I think, uh, I've been trying to figure this out. I actually think some of them have gotten better, because the, the notion of seeing everyone on screen and having to sort of mute, it's given a bit more structure, 'cause you have the obvious problem that some people would dominate a discussion-

    19. HSHarry Stebbings46:21

        Yeah.

    20. GSGustav Söderström46:21

        ... when it's live. And, uh, I have actually seen less of that, uh, problem over Zoom. The other thing I've done which is interesting during COVID is, um, I've simply put my AirPods in and then had, like, you know, remote walk-and-talks with individuals or with groups of people-

    21. HSHarry Stebbings46:40

        Hmm.

    22. GSGustav Söderström46:40

        ... where you walk for a few hours and sort of group talk. That's actually been very, very fruitful. So I thought when COVID happened that what would really suffer was strategy discussions and that kind of ideation, but for some reason, it, it hasn't. So I, I would say, o- one of the things I, I also tell my teams that I think is quite different from what many other companies do is I find that a lot of, um, executives, they look at their org and they try to split it as much as possible. You know, they try to divide and conquer and, uh, desynchronize and find swim lanes and divide problems. They, they try to, to sh- sort of cut up the org in as many independent units as possible for the purposes of sort of parallelization. And that makes sense from a point of view, but we've actually chosen back to sort of trying to be contrarian. I've chosen to do the complete opposite in my organization because even if I have a really big o- organization with thousands of people, at the end of the day, it's just one user who is going to use this application. They're not gonna care if it was, you know, Eva or Stan or Magnus or whoever built this, you know. They don't care about who the library team is or who the search team is. It's just one user, and it needs to be ... The experience needs to feel as if it was built by a single developer for a single user. So, when people come and talk to me about swim lanes and, you know, how they want more independence and so forth, I, I tend to tell them that they're doing the wrong sport. We're not doing competitive swimming. We're doing synchronized swimming. It's much harder, but it's also much more beautiful to watch- (laughs)

    23. HSHarry Stebbings48:19

        (laughs)

    24. GSGustav Söderström48:19

        ... when you look at it. And, you know, that's-

    25. HSHarry Stebbings48:21

        What-

    26. GSGustav Söderström48:21

        ... that's what we want the product to look like. And that ...... means that it's quite different to work at Spotify than many other companies. You're going to have more debate, because I'm always trying to synchronize my leadership team instead of trying to divide them and find clear divisions where they can run fast. Basically, what I believe in is this old maxim of, you know, you want to go fast, you go alone, you want to go far, you go together. And certainly Spotify

19. 48:45 – 50:53

    Synchronizing Leadership

    1. GSGustav Söderström48:45

       wants to go far, so we overemphasize on that.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings48:48

       In terms of synchronizing leadership, I'm too interested. What have you done that has worked and what has not worked that you've disregarded?

    3. GSGustav Söderström48:56

       So, I think if we start with what has not worked, the naive, th- th- the mistake you can do in this, not having swim lanes, is it's very unclear who's responsible for s- for anything. Everyone is responsible for e- everything and no one makes decisions, um, because they're often, in Spotify, because they're too nice. That's actually a bigger problem than being, than people being, um, too aggressive. In o- in other companies you may have the opposite, that if it's unclear people are gonna power grab. I've seen the opposite. It's like people don't want to step on other people's toes so they don't make decisions. So that's a problem with this model. So you still need to make it clear where the ultimate decision a- or responsibility and accountability lies, and that's a balance. If you go, if you go too far, um, you're gonna create a swim lane and this person's gonna run away and do something, uh, and think that everyone else in the company is a moron, and everyone else is gonna think everyone else is a moron. So, I, the ba- the tricky thing with this is finding the balance of, of, um, accountability and, uh, and ownership so you feel agency, um, but s- uh, still having a single strategy and having alignment. So I'm kind of forcing... I'm saying that even if you own something, uh, let's say you own what the end user experience looks like, you actually have to take your strategy, bring it up in this forum, debate it and defend it. It may be that other people disagree and they have to disagree and commit, but your respon- your responsibility is to be able to explain your strategies and answer these questions. And if you're there and you can't answer any of these questions, you're, you're probably gonna adapt. If you're there and you can answer all these questions, then it's fine. So it's sort of self-regulating, but what I'm doing is I'm forcing people to sort of bring up their ideas and have them, um, not critiqued, uh, because it's, it's a very positive forum,

20. 50:53 – 55:05

    How to Reinvent Yourself in a Scaling Business

    1. GSGustav Söderström50:53

       but have them debated.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings50:55

       Can I ask, um, leadership, y- we've mentioned like hierarchies there, um, often with scaling companies, um, bluntly, leadership changes are very normal and they happen, and they have happened at Spotify as they do in every company. You and Alex, I believe, are, you know, the only ones (laughs) who survived multiple layers of leadership transitions. Um, obviously with Daniel. My question to you is, um, a question from Shaq, is, you know, bluntly, how did you have to reinvent yourself with each stage and what moments did you have to develop the most?

    3. GSGustav Söderström51:30

       So it sounds like, uh, it's a, you know, an episode of Hunger Games-

    4. HSHarry Stebbings51:34

       (laughs)

    5. GSGustav Söderström51:34

       ... and we're the only ones to survive (laughs) .

    6. HSHarry Stebbings51:36

       You're cut. There's n- the only ones left. You're gone.

    7. GSGustav Söderström51:39

       Uh-

    8. HSHarry Stebbings51:39

       Cake or death. Uh, cake please.

    9. GSGustav Söderström51:41

       (laughs) So I think there are two pretty distinct moments that come to mind. One is in the early days coming into Spotify and having done my own startups. Th- those startups were s- small. When, when, uh, when I sold them, they were, uh, 20 people or something like that. So I had a very distinct leadership style, which I sort of learned in the army, which is leading by example. Very simple, but very effective. If you want people to do something, you just have to do it yourself first, right? So if you want your team to work weekends to hit a release, you just bring your sleeping bag and you sleep on the floor next to your team. And if you, you know, if you can't code, then you go and buy pizza for the team or something. It's, it's incredibly effective. And so for small teams, I still recommend that, and I think people underestimate it. But I came to this point at Spotify where it didn't scale. (laughs) You c- you can't sleep in that many different rooms at the same time, and I just had to change. A- and that was quite painful, so I had to change from this sort of leading by example. It was painful in two ways. I ran out of time, too many teams, and also you can't really be that deep on everything.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings52:52

        Mm-hmm.

    11. GSGustav Söderström52:53

        Um, so I had to change my, my leadership style and instead s- start to coach other leaders to lead teams. And that was a painful, um, a painful moment for me to fig- to figure that out, 'cause I didn't really have any coaching or anything like that. I just had to sort of reason with myself what, what is it that's happening? Why am I constantly running out of time? Um, and you know, when you do something that works, you're likely to just keep doing it and keep doing it. Um, so that was one, one challenge. Another challenge was when, when deep learning really happened, um, this was, you know, around 20... 2014, 2015, it's, you know, something like that when it started happening, and I had been out of university for quite a long time so I didn't really code anymore and, uh, I wasn't that famili- I'd read a little bit about this at, uh, university, but I didn't know it deeply, and I felt that, you know, I, I, I wasn't deep enough in this to credibly lead this change because it was very clear to me that it was a fundamental change. So I basically had to go back to school and start, start from the basics, start, you know, reading, uh, reading the math, coding, doing all the examples bottoms up, and implementing all the code and then teach myself. And this took a long time, you know, until I could start reading scientific papers and sort of educate myself on this. That was hard because it cost so much time for me and for my family (laughs) .

    12. HSHarry Stebbings54:26

        Uh-huh.

    13. GSGustav Söderström54:28

        ... but I think it was incredibly important and it certainly paid off for me and hopefully for the company. But that was tough because this was a tough time for Spotify as well, to sort of find, find all that time to, to reeducate yourself on something rather complex. So, I think those were the two toughest moments, and, and they happen every now and then. You know, when, when something like crypto comes along, if you're going to be a technology leader, you need to understand it deeply, otherwise you can't evaluate what you should do. So, that was another moment of, "Okay, it's back to school again." You have to start coding, you have to read, you have to start reading papers. It's hard to keep up with. It's easy to slip

21. 55:05 – 55:46

    Going Back to School for Machine Learning

    1. GSGustav Söderström55:05

       into, like, "I'm just a manager now."

    2. HSHarry Stebbings55:07

       Two questions. Uh, totally agree, it's hard. You could have hired in. You could recruit a head of ML, you could bring those skills in-house and remain in the same position that you are. Why did you decide to integrate vertically yourself (laughs) versus add on with an existing talent?

    3. GSGustav Söderström55:24

       I, I mean, I'm an engineer at heart. I hate working for people who don't know what I'm talking about, so I imagine that people would think the same of me. If you talk to your boss and you're like, "This g- this guy or this girl doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about," you know, I, I, I have a hard time respecting them. So, that's how I feel. I feel like an imposter if I don't understand what I'm supposed

22. 55:46 – 58:05

    How to Communicate the Value of your Work to your Family

    1. GSGustav Söderström55:46

       to be responsible for.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings55:47

       Second thing, whether it's sleeping in the office with your team, whether it's the late nights running to get the pizza, whether it's the going back to school to learn ML, uh, your family, respectfully, are the ones at home without you. How do you communicate the, the value of what you're doing to them where they see the importance of why Dad's not there?

    3. GSGustav Söderström56:10

       Uh, I ask them to listen to the podcasts.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings56:13

       (laughs)

    5. GSGustav Söderström56:14

       (laughs)

    6. HSHarry Stebbings56:14

       (laughs)

    7. GSGustav Söderström56:14

       No, it i- it is a great question. So, it's, it's, uh... And this is something that I think many people... I've heard many people talk about this. I've certainly felt, felt it myself. You're so engulfed by your work, and you get a lot of feed- positive feedback from work as long as, at least as long as the company's going well. But then at ho-... And, you know, you try yourself to be, uh, try your best to be a good leader and inspiring and so forth, and then at home, you're actually not inspiring at all. You kind of suck. And so, uh, my, my wife, who you know, she, she is the one who said this, like, "I need to come and see you at work every now and then so I understand what it is you're actually good at."

    8. HSHarry Stebbings56:57

       (laughs)

    9. GSGustav Söderström56:58

       (laughs) Because at home I don't see it. Like... And, and I think she has a, a really good point there, in like, you need to be impressed by each other.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings57:06

        Mm-hmm.

    11. GSGustav Söderström57:06

        Right? You know, and, and remember that, because when you see yourself day-to-day, you mostly see the, the not-so-impressive sides of, of, of, of each other. So, we, we try to do that. You know, I try to make sure I see her doing the stuff that she's really good at. And, and she's made sure that she sees and cares about some of the stuff I do. And then you find this, like, you know, uh, love and respect for each other, and, and you refind it.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings57:30

        Yeah.

    13. GSGustav Söderström57:30

        That's the best way I've found. And I, you know, I try to do the same with my kids every now and then, bring them along and see what I do.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings57:36

        Thank you.

    15. GSGustav Söderström57:37

        And, and that helps.

    16. HSHarry Stebbings57:39

        Right.

    17. GSGustav Söderström57:39

        But there's no cure for like, you know, you want to spend time with your family, and I am quite religious about that.

    18. HSHarry Stebbings57:44

        I mean, uh, Esther Perel, who obviously, uh, spoke at Brilliant Minds and, uh, you know, I'm sure you know her well, but she says, you know, you're most attracted to your partner when they are in their element. You know, when your wife sees-

    19. GSGustav Söderström57:54

        Exactly.

    20. HSHarry Stebbings57:54

        ... you leading a product review, she's like, "Oof, Gustaf, baby." Uh (laughs) , I'm sure. Um, and likewise-

    21. GSGustav Söderström58:02

        I hope so.

    22. HSHarry Stebbings58:02

        ... vice versa. Uh, c- uh, f- final one on, on actually

23. 58:05 – 1:00:10

    Relationship Advice

    1. HSHarry Stebbings58:05

       just you, and then we're gonna do a near-death experience and then wrap up with a fur- quick-fire. Do you have any other... You know, I've seen you and your, your wife, and it's this beautiful marriage and relationship. Do you have any, like, genuine relationship advice for me on what it takes to have such a strong and loving marriage and relationship?

    2. GSGustav Söderström58:23

       Hmm. Tricky question. I mean, I actually met my wife when I was 20, 21. She was 19.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings58:32

       Wow.

    4. GSGustav Söderström58:32

       And we didn't marry for, you know, m- many years (laughs) . So, we had a very long sort of trial period. It's like a freemium model, right? (laughs)

    5. HSHarry Stebbings58:43

       (laughs)

    6. GSGustav Söderström58:43

       So, when we married, we were pretty sure. Uh, so I don't know what a good, what good advice might be there. We, we... So, we worked together for a long time before we married. Um, I was working quite hard. I was, um, traveling the world before I started working very hard. Uh, she studied and traveled. We lived in different places. So, we had a lot of freedom and had known each other for quite a long time before we actually started living together. So, I think that was important. N- n- neither one of us felt the need to, like, you know, "I need to go explore" and "I feel like I'm missing out." We had done many of those things, even though we met earlier. I would also say that, you know, my wife and I, we're certainly different in many ways but we are very similar in, in values.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings59:35

       Yeah.

    8. GSGustav Söderström59:36

       That helps quite a, quite a lot. We never... We almost never have disagreement on sort of values, what we, what we think about things. Then, then we are very different in terms of our skills, completely different, and I think that's a benefit. You know, she's fantastic at the things I'm really bad at, so we complement each other really, really well.

    9. HSHarry Stebbings59:57

       And we, we all share a, a common dislike of, like, loud music and parties. I remember congregating-

    10. GSGustav Söderström1:00:02

        (laughs)

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:02

        ... with you in a corner. Uh (laughs) , but, uh, no, I, I totally get you and I- and I appreciate that. Final one on just the leadership, I do have to ask you, you come across

24. 1:00:10 – 1:01:54

    Where Gustav Could Improve as a Product Leader

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:10

       as so self-assured, confident with conviction. When you review your leadership today, Gustaf, is there any elements where you're like, "I could be better here. That is a weakness of my leadership"?

    2. GSGustav Söderström1:00:21

       Of course. I think everyone has imposter syndrome. And, and certainly when you work in a... When you're fortunate enough to work in a company that grows this much, even if you have the same title, I've been sort of CPO, CTO for-... for several years. It changes every year, because first you're a CPO of a tiny Swedish company, then you're CPO of a Scandinavian company, then of a global company, then of a, you know, listed New York company. It's, the job changes all the time and every time you feel like there's- there's no way I can be that person, you know. You're- you're an imposter all the way, I think. So I- I certainly feel like that, um, and I know, I think I've grown to understand my weak spots, uh, better with age. I already told you one, which is, um, I sort of have this global CEO perspective, which is helpful and I think it's one of the reasons why, um, Daniel likes having me around.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:20

       (laughs)

    4. GSGustav Söderström1:01:20

       Because he feels like I care about the- the- the outcome of the company. But it is also tricky when you get in other people's shit. Tha- that's- that's always tricky, and I have to, like, f- balance, you know, how I- how I do that in a diplomatic way. So I have- I have all kinds of- of flaws.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:42

       I would also say elegance of communication. It's tricky when (laughs) you get in other people's shit.

    6. GSGustav Söderström1:01:47

       (laughs)

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:47

       Gustav, wonderfully put. I mean, so, uh, just beautifully elegant. Um (laughs) , uh, th- the final element that I do have to

25. 1:01:54 – 1:06:14

    Spotify’s Near Death Experience

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:54

       touch on before our quickfire, I spoke to Minyona before the show and he said, "There are many, like, near-death experiences that are kind of wonderfully entertaining slash, you know, uh, you know, uh, educating to hear." Uh, if you were to choose your kind of favorite near-death experience to tell, what- what comes to mind for you?

    2. GSGustav Söderström1:02:14

       Well, like, uh, Mike said, there are actually a few. Um, I've- I've seen Spotify have negative growth, actually losing users and contracting at least twice, and I- I, you know, I'd speak to people in the industry, it's- it's very rare. People have seen that, but the company never survived to talk about it, right?

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:32

       (laughs)

    4. GSGustav Söderström1:02:32

       It's very rare to actually see it and survive and do it twice. But I think the favorite, um, near-death experience story, uh, that I don't think is widely known is, quite early on when, you know, we- we have a really, you know, we- we talk about the- the labels and negotiation with the labels as sort of being frustrating, but- but it's not in- in a sense, because it is their job to represent these artists and try to maximize the value of their IP, right? And I actually think they're doing a good job of it. It can be frustrating as a product person, but we've developed this really good relationship with the music industry and- and these labels. But early on, it was different. You know, I don't know that they actually believed that Spotify would work. Maybe they, uh, felt that, you know, this, you could get access to cheap VC money here, expecting us to sort of, you know, belly-flop over. And, uh, so it was more a tenuous relationship, and they certainly didn't understand the model, right? And so they were very, very scared of the free tier, the desktop, uh, free tier. And their notion was that if you just make the free experience worse, more people are gonna convert. And I was of the opposite notion, as I said. I think the more you play, the more you're gonna pay. That's what the data showed. Uh, but one of the labels, uh, sort of put a gun to our head and said, "You know, you can't have a free tier anymore. Uh, in that case, we're gonna pull our catalog, from- from free and premium." And so for us, we decided that was, uh, existential and we decided to fight it, so we- we, uh, built this thing called the switch, a switch that you could pull that would basically remove like, you know, I don't know, quarter or a third of the music catalog. It would break everyone's playlists, it would basically be a horrible experience for both free and premium users, while our competitors would have full catalog, so probably catastrophic. But we decided to- to- to, um, we decided to fight it and say, you know, "This is important enough that we have to take that risk." So we built this, and I remember sort of (laughs) being responsible for the one who should pull the switch, and, uh, we had a team, I think they were maybe in the... I don't know if they were in the UK or the US negotiating the licenses, and some were, you know, we were supposed to pull the switch at midnight-

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:53

       Be sure to reply to...

    6. GSGustav Söderström1:04:55

       Oh. That was Siri.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:57

       (laughs)

    8. GSGustav Söderström1:04:58

       So- so we were supposed to pull the switch at midnight and basically take off this catalog, and, you know, millions of users would get this message like, "Your- your music is gone." And somewhere around, uh, half past 11 at night, we were sort of starting to say our goodbyes to each other (laughs)

    9. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:16

       (laughs)

    10. GSGustav Söderström1:05:16

        ... and then-

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:17

        Titanic.

    12. GSGustav Söderström1:05:18

        Yeah.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:18

        (laughs) Lifeboat's coming.

    14. GSGustav Söderström1:05:20

        And- and that was a pretty scary moment. And then the call came in, not long before midnight, that they had backed down and we could keep this catalog. And so for- for me that was sort of our Cuba crisis. I think we were very close to total annihilation-

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:37

        Phew.

    16. GSGustav Söderström1:05:37

        ... in that moment.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:05:39

        God, that is pretty terrifying. Phew. Why did you decide to fight?

    18. GSGustav Söderström1:05:44

        Because I don't think we had a choice. We believed in the strategy we have, we believed that this was the model. At least for us, freemium was the only model. We had seen other players, I think it was like Nokia comes with music and stuff, who tried to go straight to premium, and it didn't work. People didn't think they wanted to pay for music at the time. You needed a free tier. So for us, we had to make sure that this was a credible threat that we were actually prepared to go down, and- and we were, we would have. I don't know what would have happened, but-

26. 1:06:14 – 1:07:43

    What would you do if Spotify controlled the record labels?

    1. GSGustav Söderström1:06:14

       but we were.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings1:06:15

       Final one before the quickfire. Well, you mentioned the constraints that labels bring and that licensing brings. If labels and licensing were entirely Spotify's, entirely integrated just in a hypothetical world, what would you do from a product perspective, with the removal of constraints, what would you do in an ideal world?

    3. GSGustav Söderström1:06:35

       So, I think what I would do is I would try to make the music experience much more interactive. I think this is what you see with TikTok as well. I think users want to participate in the music. They want to use the music. Today, they can use it to make dance videos, but I think, you know, there are so many talented musicians out there who sit at home and play their piano or their guitar and they sing and they create music. But the licensing world means that, you know, they, they can't use a beat from, from the song that they love. I- if you think about coding as an analogy, when you want to learn to code, what you do is you go to GitHub, and then you have this vast library of, of open source code that you can use and that you can look at and that you can start prototyping from and building and learn f- ... There isn't anything like that in music. There is no GitHub for music. That's probably what I would change. I would try to ... And I think that's the reason why music has actually had very little innovation. That track is sort of still three minutes and, you know, an intro and two choruses 100 years later almost. So I, that's probably what I would try to do. Just innovate on the formats. That's not true. Other media formats have changed drastically

27. 1:07:43 – 1:09:25

    Did Olivia Rodrigo change her music to adapt to the Spotify algorithm?

    1. GSGustav Söderström1:07:43

       over the years, but music hasn't so much.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings1:07:45

       A final, final one, I promise. I, I read somewhere about Olivia Rodrigo and how she has changed the structure of her, like, actual songs to accommodate the changing algorithms of music, whereby choruses are much more brought forward. Um, is that true and is this a new create- like, music creation process to fit technology?

    3. GSGustav Söderström1:08:07

       I think that's absolutely true. We've seen small versions of that as well. So when you move from the, the download world to the streaming world, there is no, in a, in a financial sense, no marginal cost to try another track, right? Which means you're gonna start exploring more, which we think is great, so it gives more artists an opportunity. You're also going to start to listen to, to a lot of new music, like sleep music and focus music, whereas if you paid, you know, a dollar per three minutes, you probably wouldn't soundtrack your sleep.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings1:08:39

       No.

    5. GSGustav Söderström1:08:39

       So that, you know ... So entire industries popped up because the business model changed and they adapted the music, but you also see it, because people now have short attention spans, you can see the chorus moving closer and closer to the beginning of the song, right? Um, everyone is trying to optimize for the first few seconds. And I don't know if I think that's good or bad, but it is what it is. Like, incentives and systems drives behavior, for sure.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:05

       Yeah. No, I, I totally agree. Uh, we see it on TikTok. You know, TikTok, uh, it's all about grabbing the attention in the first second and a half.

    7. GSGustav Söderström1:09:13

       Exactly.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:13

       Which is absolutely knackering when you get to my age, Gustav, and you have-

    9. GSGustav Söderström1:09:17

       (laughs)

    10. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:17

        ... to be in front of the camera. Um, but anyway-

    11. GSGustav Söderström1:09:18

        That's why you have a hat.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:19

        That's why I have a hat, you know? Um, uh, but, uh, I want to dive into a quick-fire. I could talk to you all day. So I say a short

28. 1:09:25 – 1:10:12

    What is the future of podcasts in audio?

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:25

       statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

    2. GSGustav Söderström1:09:28

       That sounds good.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:09:29

       This one was actually from Daniel, which is, "What is the future of podcast and audio?" And he added, "Will Future Harry have a job?" (laughs) Which was an unnerving addition.

    4. GSGustav Söderström1:09:39

       So, I can't say exactly what it is. That's a secret. But what I can say is that I think it is at least as large as, as social networking. You know, two, three billion plus. The, the way I think about it is, I think music and actually podcasting is a sort of a core human behavior, like communication, and that means that the, the sort of TAM in, in, uh, you know, finance or product-speak, total addressable market, should be the same. So, that's the reason that I keep working here. I think we're far from,

29. 1:10:12 – 1:11:40

    Social Graphs vs. Recommendation Engines

    1. GSGustav Söderström1:10:12

       from scale at this business.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings1:10:15

       Not on schedule, but I'm intrigued. Do you agree with Mike Mignano's suggestion of the, uh, disregard of the social graph and the movement into the media recommendation engine of the future?

    3. GSGustav Söderström1:10:27

       For sure. I mean, Spotify went through this journey, and this is one of the macro winds that we saw quite early, and, you know, that, that, uh, and Mike and I have discussed this at length. We s- Spotify started as a, uh, I wouldn't call it social media, I would call it curation media. It's a different version of the same thing, which means the internet started with you taking something offline, friends, books, music, and then asking yours- users to curate it into graphs, playlist, friend graphs. That was what, that was the pattern, right? And that's where Spotify grew up. And then it shifted from curation to recommendation, where users weren't prepared to put in all of that work to soundtrack themselves. We actually had an in-between which was editorial, where we had editors, so professional playlisters that helped curate for you. But the natural extension of that is to start combining the editors with, with machine learning, right? And now we have many

    4. NANarrator1:11:20

       Hm.

    5. GSGustav Söderström1:11:20

       ... pure mach- machine learning set. So we actually made a bet on the shift from curation to recommendation or social media to recommendation media four, five years ago and rebuilt the application quite drastically. And today, we, I would say we are a, a recommendations-based company much more than a curation-based company.

30. 1:11:40 – 1:14:42

    Which competitor do you most respect?

    1. GSGustav Söderström1:11:41

    2. HSHarry Stebbings1:11:41

       Completely unfair again, but, you know, joys of it being my show. Um, which competitor do you most respect and why?

    3. GSGustav Söderström1:11:49

       I have a great deal of respect for, for all of these sort of big tech companies, the usual suspects, the, the Google and YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and so forth. But, but what I think is interesting specifically and impressive about this set of companies that I think is different from the previous set of companies is that ... They're, I think there's a reason we call them technology companies. A- and some people say that makes no sense, like, car companies were also technology companies at the time. Everything was a technology company until it became old. But I do think these companies are a bit different 'cause I do think they think of technology itself as the strategy. What do I mean b- by that? I mean that...... people try to label them. They try to label Amazon as a book company, and then as a book and diapers company, and as a, as an everything store. But then they started doing AWS, and like, people can't like pin these companies down. Same with Google. They were a page on the internet, search page, then they became the start page of the browser, and then they became the start page of a browser of an OS, and then they did email, and then they did photos and so forth. Same with Apple. You know, computer company, music company, phone company. These companies, they, they refuse to be categorized as what they are, and they keep changing all the time. And I think it's because they think of technology itself as a strategy. So technology is this gift that is going to present opportunities to you every five years. There's going to be a broadband, a smartphone, an AI, a crypto, or something. And the job of this company is not to say like, "No. We're a car company. We're gonna do cars." They're saying like, "No. We're a technology company. We're supposed to understand and master these technologies very quickly and then figure out how we can change our business model to leverage these things." And that's why they keep changing. And so I think there is some chance that these companies will be around longer, because they refuse to, to answer to the question, "What are you?" They just say like, "I don't know. Ask me tomorrow." They keep changing. And that's how I want to think about Spotify as well. It's one of the reasons we went from music to podcasts and now to audiobooks. And people sort of wanted to keep us in the, "No, no, no. You're a music company. You shouldn't be doing this." And then it's like, now you're, okay, I guess you're an audio company, but you definitely shouldn't be doing video. (laughs) Like people want to sort of keep us back. But I don't think there is any stopping. I think you always need to like ladder up. And so I think of us as a technology company in that sense. My job is to understand technology and how we need to repossession ourselves all the time to leverage this new technology. Like it's not gonna ... there's no reason what, that we would be at the end of history right now in terms of technology.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:29

       It's one of the biggest lessons that Shaq taught me, which is like, you know, f- people always want to put you in a box, number one. And two, you have to earn the right to do the next thing. But what's got you to where you are won't necessarily be what gets you to the next thing.

31. 1:14:42 – 1:17:10

    Which product leader outside Spotify do you most respect?

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:42

       And actually-

    2. GSGustav Söderström1:14:42

       Exactly.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:14:42

       ... you have to change and adapt. And it's one of the biggest transformations that I've had, again, thanks to Shaq. Which product leader outside of Spotify do you most respect and admire?

    4. GSGustav Söderström1:14:53

       So there, I thought about this a bit, 'cause I get that asked, I get that question asked quite a lot. I admire a ton of people for, for different things. But I would say, you know, it's always, because people answer mostly the same things, and so I also admire the same people that everyone else does. But to say something maybe unexpected, there is a product that I, I've specifically fallen in love with over the last year. Uh, I actually don't know the name of the product leader. But I've been trying to learn, yeah, I try to learn new stuff every now and then.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:15:26

       Mm-hmm.

    6. GSGustav Söderström1:15:26

       Um, and, uh, after machine learning, I took a break, and then now I'm trying to learn a few new things, and one of them is, uh, playing the piano. It feels like when you're, (laughs) when you're working at a music company, you should probably be able to play the piano. So I've been using this application called, uh, Simply Piano, which you hook up to your, to your, uh, piano over MIDI. And I really like it, because it is, um, so for two reasons. First, it's a really good application. You know, what you want to do when you start to play piano is you don't want to s- you don't want to start with these child songs. You want to start right away with the rock songs. And so what they've done is, they've painstakingly, and I have a lot of empathy for this, 'cause I work in the music is, they've painstakingly, painstakingly licensed like all the popular music. So you literally get your Taylor Swift or whatever it is that you want to play, and then they've staged it so that you start playing, and you're actually only filling in a few notes here and there. But it sounds amazing. You think you're a, you're a full bleed piano rock star from day one. So you're having a lot of fun. And then it's like a competition. You get scores for hitting the right notes at the right time and so forth. So, so the, it's like a little game, and it takes like maybe five minutes to, to master a song, and then it gets progressively harder. And at the end, and I know, because I am at the end, I got this sort of end of year note from them where it said I was the top 1% of their user base, as I've gone to the very end. At the end, you're actually playing the full songs, you know, and with, with, uh, all the chords and, and, you know, accompaniments and so forth. So that's actually my favorite, uh, application right now.

Episode duration: 1:27:34