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 47 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
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…”
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: AI is the product; UI merely captures signal for it
“Now AI is the product and the UI is there to help the AI to capture better signal.”
Söderström: TikTok succeeded through UI design, not novel recommendation algorithms
“It wasn't really the algorithm of TikTok. It was the UI that maximized what was, you know, pretty traditional export export algorithm, like since the day so hot or not.”
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…”
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: Enterprise AI adoption will outpace the historical shift to cloud
“But I also agree with Scott that I think it's going to go much faster than moving to cloud. It wasn't really possible. I know we actually were on-prem companies that old. It wasn't possible to just also be on the cloud and try a little bit. It was incredibly h…”
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: Music tech is constrained to record labels' lowest common denominator
“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 p…”
Söderström: TikTok is the biggest music innovation of the last seven years
“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 different.”
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.”
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…”
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: Technology leaders must deeply master technical shifts themselves
“If you're going to be a technology leader, you need to understand it deeply. Otherwise you can't evaluate what you should do.”
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…”
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 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…”
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: 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: Music formats have barely innovated in a century
“I think that's the reason why music has actually had very little innovation. The track is sort of still three minutes and, you know, an intro and two courses a hundred years later, almost.”
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: 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: 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: Disruptive tech innovation requires changing product and business model
“The greatest innovations are when you find a new technology and you change not just the product and how you use it, but you change the business model. Those are always the most disruptive changes.”
Söderström: Crypto will succeed as infrastructure rather than consumer products
“I have a feeling that just like AI and other things, it will take quite a long while, but it's going to be, there is a chance that it becomes a fundamental part of the infrastructure just further down that it actually powers a lot of things and is very valuabl…”
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: Companies will embed entire user histories into single AI models
“I think the world is going to go towards you embed your entire user history, everything they did into one space.”
Söderström: Neural hardware progress will follow a Moore's law trajectory
“I think it will. You know, some people say Moore's law is, is starting to come to an end in terms of just more transistors, but we barely started on neural hardware. So I'm sure we're going to see the same effect, even if it's not more transistors per square i…”
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”
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: The shift from social media to recommendation media is permanent
“Macro shift is, you know, from curation to recommendation. Or as Mike Mignano puts it from social media to recommendation media. That's not going to reverse.”
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: Evaluating decisions across three distinct models reduces strategic error
“One way to try to avoid it that, you know, comes from sort of Berkshire Hathaway and 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.”
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.”
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: Digital music services required a free tier to succeed early on
“Nokia comes with music and stuff who try 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.”
Söderström: There is no GitHub equivalent for music collaboration
“There isn't anything like that in music. There is no GitHub for music.”
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 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.”
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.”
Söderström: Early mobile data messaging cost 1/1000th of SMS
“So we started this company where you could send text messages over data instead of SMS. And already back then, even though you paid per kilobit, it was still one month thousand the cost of sending the same, you know, 160 characters over, over text message.”