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
Motschwiller: Series A rounds for top consumer decacorns occurred pre-2012
“You look at the series A Funding times of the consumer decacorns that are out there, the Ubers, the Lyfts, the Airbnbs, the Snaps, the Pinterest, the Spotifys, those series A's were all done pre-二零 12.”
Hassabis: Spotify and Helsing are contenders for Europe's first trillion-dollar company
“Daniel might well get there with one of his companies, you know, Spotify, Helsing. I think those are two good options.”
G Squared made 8-10x on Spotify and 6-7x on Bolt
“Spotify, early investment that he trusted our business model in, let's say eight to 10 X. Bolt, you have to be determined, but let's just assume it's somewhere between, you know, 50% and face value of what Sequoia paid. It's, you know, six, seven X.”
G Squared raised $700 million in Spotify co-investment vehicles
“And in that you take a lot of concentration in Spotify, but on top of the concentration we had, we did another seven hundred million in co-invest.”
Hinrikus: Repeat Founders Target Bigger Goals, Yielding Larger Potential Outcomes
“So repeat founders, they typically go for a much bigger goal. You know, Torsten did a gaming company, then he went into defense. And we can talk about Danny Alecke as the first company was e-commerce. And then he took on a massive challenge of building Spotify…”
Gupta: Kraken, Spotify, and Google achieved initial growth without marketing
“The first phase of growth was purely product-led, where marketing did not exist? And this is true for Kraken, true for Spotify, true for Google, because the first phase of growth was either reality, network effects, or just a brilliant product in a category an…”
Shulman: YouTube is More Engaging Than Spotify Based on Ad ARPU
“Like YouTube is more engaging than Spotify as measured by the amount of, you know, the ARPU for ads, for example, right?”
Söderström: Product designers must understand GPT-4 as deeply as user needs
“Something that designers need to get good at in this world. They need to understand GPT-IV as well as they understand the user.”
Söderström: Hiring AI technical talent is getting easier for Spotify
“Initially, it was very hard to find talent on the technology side. That's now getting easier.”
Söderström: Spotify ran an internal bet called 'AI is the product'
“We literally had, have had, we have a bets board where we kind of stack crank what we're doing. We literally had a bet called AI is the product. For like two years to really emphasize the shift, getting people in that mindset”
Braun Invested in Spotify Early and Has Never Sold a Share
“I invested in Spotify a long time ago. I've never sold a share. You know, I'm a long, I'm a full believer.”
Coates: Platform ecosystems fail if third-party apps cannot match first-party quality
“One is you need you need an app platform that allows apps to be built that are of equal quality to the core features of the platform. That is absolutely critical. And like, look at iOS. IOS is like a great example of this. Like when I open up a first party app…”
Aloe Blacc: Wake Me Up became Spotify's most streamed track
“And it ended up becoming the most streamed song in Spotify history for that time, right?”
Spotify's financial model was a mess with low-hanging fruit when McCarthy joined
“And I would say the business model from a financial perspective was sort of a mess when I walked into, well, there was a lot of low hanging fruit. Let me put it that way. When I got involved in, in Spotify.”
Spotify held a dominant cultural advantage over Pandora by owning 'cool'
“And from my experience on the board of Pandora, Spotify owned cool.”
Spotify treated COVID-19 consumer behavior as an anomaly and maintained car investments
“We chose the former. We said that we're going to model this as an anomaly, and we kept investing in The world going back to normal”
Söderström: Companies Must Early-Accept Unstoppable Macro Shifts and Reposition
“What you should do instead of fighting 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 b…”
Söderström: I do not make most product decisions at Spotify
“And so I actually don't make a lot of the product decisions at Spotify.”
Söderström: Spotify's major music label licensing agreements lasted 3 to 4 years
“Had to be licensed as the lowest common denominator between, you know, three, four majors with, you know, the impact of being wrong being three, four years. Cause that's a term of one of these licenses.”
Söderström: Most video podcast consumption on Spotify occurs in background
“People consume the vast majority of these shows in the, not the vast majority, 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.”
Mignano: Spotify leads competitors in recommendation media due to early ML adoption
“I think Spotify is sort of ahead of the curve of this recommendation media thing that they've sort of been doing it for a really long time.”
De Rycker: Accel backed Spotify at $70M revenue and 1.5M subscribers
“When we invested, it was sort of seventy-ish million in gross revenue. I mean, it's ten billion now. And It was about a million and a half paying users”
Daniel Ek: Founders evaluate generic functions over specific job tasks
“A lot of people just don't spend enough time trying to understand what the role that they're asking the person to fulfill. They think about the function, but not the actual task at hand that the person's supposed to fill.”
Daniel Ek: True domain mastery requires arguing both sides effectively
“When you can argue both sides of the argument you're trying to make, then you're at the point where you truly understand the problem.”
Daniel Ek: New hires require reprogramming around openness to failure
“In fact, I feel like it's almost a reprogramming for every person that we bring into the company because they sort of Intuitively struggle with this kind of notion about being open with failure and being open with mistakes too.”
Ek: Modeled Spotify CEO leadership on traditional industry rather than startups
“And I try to model myself not on necessarily other startup CEOs, but actually going to traditional industry, learning about accounting, learning about P and L's and how to look at that.”
Ek: Spotify direct listing included no share lockups for employees
“It was also important to me to not have any lockups, but actually let my employees have the same ability to trade their shares that any other investor would have, because that felt like the right thing to do.”
Ek: Spotify direct listing was brainchild of former CFO Barry McCarthy
“So first off, I think the person who deserves the most amount of credit for it is not me. It's Barry McCarthy, my former CFO. It's really his brainchild, so I don't want to take credit.”
Ek: Decentralized decision-making requires radical organizational transparency
“If you want to be a delegating CEO, you have to have, in my opinion, a very trusting culture like you talk about, but also a culture of transparency, because ultimately, if you're moving more and more of your decisions to the edges, having the edges know as mu…”
Restricting VC investments to driveable Silicon Valley startups is outdated
“I think it's pretty obvious now, whether it's companies like Spotify or Supercell or Atlassian or other companies of that form, that that is now an outdated view.”
Seton-Rogers is hugely bullish on European music tech opportunities
“Europe is producing the bulk of them. So think about it. So Spotify, Shazam, SoundCloud, Deezer, Songkick, I mean, these are all UK, European businesses that are leading the way. So I'm hugely bullish about what can take place in the music space.”
Freise: KKR Met Spotify Early but Lacked a Fund to Invest
“I was the first institutional investor through the door. I just didn't have the fun to invest.”
Sweden had 25% Spotify penetration when G Squared invested in 2014
“At that time, the penetration of the usership in, in, in Sweden was like, 25% of the population used it. I mean, that's amazing. 25% of the population used the product.”
Hommels: Spotify's Daniel Ek Thinks Deeper Than Others and Holds Uncompromising Ethics
“Crazy persistence and patience. Things at least two levels more profound than others. It's very logical and it's always a very friendly and well-rounded character. Yeah. And he has uncompromising ethics in everything he does.”
Söderström: Spotify builds most technology in-house primarily to control operating costs
“From Spotify's point of view most of the stuff we've built in-house, to Tamara's point, is actually mostly about cost.”
Söderström: Spotify's mobile transition forced a business model overhaul threatening survival
“We experienced the shift to mobile. It was very scary. Our business model had to change, could have disrupted the company.”
Braun Begged Daniel Ek for a Year to Invest in Spotify
“And him and Shaq didn't let me invest in damn Spotify for another year. I was like begging Shaq and him, like constantly. I love those guys. And I'm very grateful I got in.”
Spotify took over a year to achieve feature parity in podcasting
“But to your point, that took over a year before we had everything in place that people 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.”
Ek spent six years trying to recruit Shakil Khan back to Spotify
“I've been trying to convince him to come out of retirement for about five or six years, and I've been trying various different constellations of trying to get him to do it. Everything from rejoining me at Spotify to doing all of those things.”
Daniel Ek: Define success multi-year out before setting hiring skills
“Founders need to think more about what success looks like for the candidate after a year or two, and be able to articulate that, and then learn, go backwards to then saying, okay, well, what kind of skills does that mean that person needs to have?”
Kutcher discovered and invested in Spotify before its US launch
“Spotify is actually one of the, it wasn't even in the United States yet when we found it.”
Marshall praises Spotify CEO Daniel Ek for vision and long-term focus
“You know, I'll mention Daniel Ek just because it's one that's top of mind for me, but, you know, his clarity of vision, the long game focus, I think is impressive, and we don't spend time talking about, you know, just the here and now. It's where are we going.”
DST launched in 2009 with Facebook and expanded globally in 2011
“At that time, when, even before I had joined, you know, Yuri already had the vision of being global, which was a crazy idea at the time, and so we got started with DST only in, like, mid-二-thousand-nine or so, with a Facebook investment, and then we truly went…”
Zink: Northzone backed Spotify at bull peak and Avito in bear market
“And if I look at our current biggest winners Spotify and Avito, we invested in the A-round and Spotify just before the party finished in, in September of when the bull market was still very strong. And Avito reinvested in, in the deep bear market.”
Spotify was an early client of Waldekranz's agency at 12 employees
“One of our first customers was this tiny startup at the time, 12 people, small, called Spotify.”
Söderström: Statistically, joining a music startup in 2008 made no sense
“If someone had told me there's no chance I would have started statistically, it would have made no sense to join a music startup.”