The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 97 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Junestrand: Klarna and Spotify product leaders lack incentives to be curious
“There's so many product directors at Klarna or at Spotify or these companies that have made it, that they're not incentivized to be curious. In a way, they're kind of incentivized to keep the company on the track it is.”
Söderström: Spotify has experienced negative growth and lost users at least twice
“I've seen Spotify have negative growth, actually losing users and contracting at least twice.”
Söderström: Product management is 100% science and 0% art
“I actually think product is a hundred percent science and zero percent art, which I know is going to upset some people.”
Söderström: Debating strategy with smart teams is far cheaper than writing code
“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 e…”
Lemkin predicts Apple Music will be a miss for Apple and Spotify
“I think that it's gonna be tough to really materially impact Spotify, and it's hard to have a material impact on Apple's bottom line, so no matter what, it's a miss.”
Weitzman: AirPods made more revenue than Spotify and audio competitors combined
“And by the way, AirPods made more money Then Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years.”
Siemiatkowski: Adyen winning Spotify forced Klarna to pivot from checkout wars
“We have been trying to compete with Stripe and Adyen for five years, and we were like losing it. Like they were just, you know, crushing us. And we were like, this is it. And Adyen had just signed with Daniel X, Spotify, my neighbor. And I was like, this is ov…”
O'Driscoll: Spotify won by starting in Europe to avoid US label litigation
“All the other music startups based in the U.S. Got strangled at birth by lawyers, right, because it was all about IP property rights, and little old Spotify got going in a bunch of European countries that, let's be frank, your average Big Five record label did…”
G Squared agreed to a $150M Spotify deal with a $125M fund
“Before we left the meeting, they were like, do you think you could buy a hundred and fifty million dollars worth of stock? And I said, sure. And I didn't have the money, because we were in the process of raising the fund, and I think we had like closed on a hu…”
Omaze's Subscriber Retention Rates Rival Netflix and Spotify
“It's right up there with the top consumer subscription companies in the world. I mean, it's comparable to Netflix, Spotify.”
Levchin: Explosive statements fade quickly, but rational people retain long memories
“Superficial statements, even explosive or Incendiary even, fall off the news line faster than you would expect them to. I think people's reputations recover and get managed and manipulated, and maybe it's true for companies too, but I think rational people hav…”
Shulman: Hit songs succeed via algorithms and promotion, not quality alone
“I think that they probably reverse the causality. Things break on TikTok, and then they become famous on Spotify, but that is a function of both algorithms and people pushing music, and not necessarily only a function of the quality of the music.”
Hommels: Spotify had no music rights when he evaluated investing
“So you could say when the time I was looking at Spotify, it was, I'm not sure, I wouldn't say it's illegal, but we had music and we didn't have the rights.”
Founders Fund sold Spotify at $8B to double down on Airbnb
“It was Peter and Brian Zingerman and Napoleon that took what did they take? I think they sold Spotify at the eight billion dollar price, pissed off, what's his name? Daniel. Daniel Ek, and rolled it all into Airbnb at the two and a half billion.”
Söderström: AI has not yet enabled new business models beyond sustaining innovation
“I actually think that in general, you know, we've seen the first wave of AI now where the technology is very impressive. It's starting to do useful things. But we still, usually the big changes come when that technology enables a new business model somehow. An…”
Söderström: Proprietary user data will matter more long term than model size
“My hunch would be though that In the longer term, you're going to be able to do most of what you want with reasonable size models and like having a much bigger model doesn't have that much. So I would still bet that having lots of user data and lots of high fi…”
Braun Predicts Spotify Will Grow 10% to 12% Annually for Ten Years
“I think a company like Spotify is gonna grow 10% to 12% year over year for the next 10 years.”
Daniel Ek intentionally delays decisions to allow Swedish culture to build consensus
“The decision-making process in a Swedish culture and at Spotify can at times to an American feel a little bit like watching them paint dry. I mean, the amount of time that Daniel invests in allowing the organization to work its way through the decision-making …”
Daniel Ek's pattern recognition skills match Reed Hastings as a generational talent
“Daniel was using my pattern recognition skills as exceptional in his own way as Reed was exceptional in his way. Kind of, you know, one in twenty-five million.”
Söderström: Overly polite employees are Spotify's biggest organizational hurdle
“Because they're often in Spotify because they're too nice. That's actually a bigger problem than being, than people being too aggressive. In other companies, you may have the opposite, that if it's unclear, people are gonna power grab. I've seen the opposite. …”
Söderström: Spotify R&D is structured to feel built by one developer
“I've chosen to do the complete opposite in my organization, because even if I have a really big 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 going to care if it was, you know…”
Record labels only granted Spotify's free mobile tier after growth stalled
“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.”
Söderström: Rapid execution while fundamentally wrong just leads efficiently to nowhere
“There's a difference between being fast and being right. You can get, you can go very fast to nowhere, you know, ship code every day, but if you fundamentally wrong, you're just going to get to nowhere extremely efficiently and fast.”
Ian Lee: NFT-Powered Spotify and YouTube Alternatives Will Emerge by 2024
“So good example of this is that I think that like NFT powered commerce in Web three, NFT powered digital media and various kind of social media platforms. That I knew or believed were gonna happen in 10 years or so, I think are now possible in the next two to …”
Elad Gil: Spotify invented direct listings to bypass private equity terms
“I think even Spotify, I think, invested the direct listing to get around some structure that a PE firm went in around an IPO, and that's why they didn't do an IPO. They invented direct listings to get around a structure, as far as I know.”
Mignot: Index passed on Spotify multiple times due to music industry bias
“The example we always use at Index is, is Spotify. And to your point, it wasn't because of a bad investment, it was because of a mediocre investment, which is different. You know, we had just invested in Last.fm, which was a, you know, a totally reasonable out…”
G Squared bought Spotify secondary stock at a 50% discount
“We bought it like a 50% discount to the current financing round. And we just kept buying it there for the next two years.”
G Squared generated $1 billion in LP returns from Spotify
“We then went on to become a top 10 global shareholder of Spotify. We went as far as to putting up signs in their break room. We'll buy your shares, buying all these odd lot transactions along the way and built a huge position. And it ended up being like a bill…”
Gupta: Active listeners preferred Spotify's dark UI over white backgrounds
“The black background of Spotify actually resonated a lot more with users, with listeners who are active listeners. They wanted to discover, you know, they want, they had the X factor, and that mattered a lot more. It created an experience That gave them a sens…”
Gupta: Scaling companies must thrive in healthy chaos over rigid structure
“You don't try to tame chaos, create a culture environment where you are thriving amidst healthy chaos, where you are running at a hundred miles an hour, even when you can see 10 meters ahead.”
Index Ventures missed investing in Spotify, Snap, Airbnb, and LinkedIn
“One is Spotify, another one is Snap, another one's Airbnb, another one's LinkedIn. Those are the four that we had real opportunity in some fashion or another to manufacture the opportunity for Index to be in the round, and we failed for different reasons.”
Stephens: Every Big Founders Fund Win Had a $100B Advocate
“If you look at any of the big outcomes across our portfolio, whether it's you know, Spotify, Stripe, Airbnb, Palantir, SpaceX, Andrel stem centric. So if you look at all of these big outcomes for us, every single one of them, there was someone on the team bang…”
Söderström: Spotify will not build general frontier AI models to compete
“So that's why, you know, there's no point in trying to compete with them for us because we don't even have the same goal. So we're trying to build exactly the things that we don't think they will build. And we would buy the things that they will build or someo…”
Söderström: Spotify's streaming business model took Apple eight years to copy
“I think for Spotify, for example, when we started, it was the business model of streaming. That was the disruptive thing. The technology was you know, a bit of peer to peer and stuff, but it was a business model that took Apple eight years of collateral damage…”
Dash: Dubsmash dance challenges directly drove rap song virality on Spotify
“We started to see rap songs starting to become actually viral on, on Spotify as a result of this.”
Pittman: 70-80% of streaming users discover music via FM radio
“By the way, 70, 80% of Spotify, Pandora, et cetera, listeners, the main way they discover new music is FM radio.”
Pittman: iHeartMedia radio reaches 90% of Americans monthly
“Our radio group alone reaches 90% of Americans every month. Only two companies come close to that, and they don't surpass it. It's Facebook and Google. Everybody else, the biggest TV network in the US reaches about 35% of Americans. Biggest cable network reach…”
Söderström: Audio TAM will match social media at 2-3 billion plus users
“I think it is at least as large as social networking, you know, two, three billion plus. 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 sort of time in, in, you k…”
Söderström: Test new product paradigms on new users to bypass habit bias
“One is you separate new users from existing users. You're going to get very different metrics. Existing users have a habit. Your metrics may go down for a feature, and then if you tried on new users and never had that habit, you may see that if you're not taug…”
Söderström: Spotify drastically rebuilt its app to prioritize machine learning recommendations
“So we actually made a bet on the shift from curation to recommendation or social media to recommendation media. Four or five years ago and rebuilt the application quite drastically. And today we, I would say we are a recommendations based company much more tha…”
Söderström: Artists are shifting choruses earlier to grab streaming listeners
“Because people now have shorter attention spans. You can see the chorus moving closer and closer to the beginning of the song, right? Everyone is trying to optimize for the first few seconds”
Söderström: Increased free usage directly drives conversion to paid subscriptions
“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 se…”
Söderström: Spotify cannot test features without paying upfront music licensing costs
“And that's actually a 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.”
Söderström: Spotify designed its free mobile tier to counter-position YouTube
“We licensed a foreground, a background shuffled here 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. So it turns out that Spotify mobile Works exactly where YouTube mo…”
Mignano: Podcast listening habits are sticky and users rarely switch platforms
“The thing that we saw in the early days of anchor and still saw, you know, up until when I recently left Spotify was listening habits of podcasts are very, very hard to break. If you are an apple podcast listener, you're almost definitely never going to switch…”
Ek: Spotify aims to enable one million artists to earn a living
“I think the most important part of that mission is to try to see if we can have so that a million creative artists can live off of their art. That is a pretty ambitious target. I'm seriously set on trying to achieve that”
Daniel Ek: Spotify tolerates mistakes, but fails without warning are intolerable
“In Spotify's case, I like to believe that smart people will make mistakes, and if you're pushing the envelope, that's going to happen, and I will tolerate that. What I don't tolerate, however, and that's very clear from everyone who works with me, are two thin…”