Gustav Söderström
Co-CEO, Spotify. On 6 shows, 6 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounderinvestorhost@GustavS ↗LinkedIn ↗spotify.com ↗
Gustav Söderström co-leads Spotify as Co-CEO, having spent over a decade guiding its global product, technology, design, and AI strategy. Before Spotify, he founded Kenet Works and co-founded augmented reality startup 13th Lab.
6shows
6appearances
160statements
24resolved
17supported
3contradicted
71%fully supported
106said about them ↓ Everything Gustav Söderström said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Söderström: Apple's aging senior leadership missed the shift to AI
“Maybe this is one of the challenges that Apple had with machine learning and AI. So on average, they were slightly too old to see that probably people in their org knew all about it. We're all over it. It was too late to see it. They should have, like, gotten …”
Competing streaming services report higher per-stream payouts because their engagement is lower
“So these other companies have higher per stream because they have a worse product.”
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: Spotify's biggest product risk is shipping its org chart to users
“Because we have a single experience strategy, our strategy is literally a super app. We try to build first music, then podcasts, and books, and more things into a single product. I think our biggest risk is to ship the org chart. So if we divide it and say, ev…”
Söderström: Functional orgs dissolve into politics without long-tenured executive trust
“The only answer I've come to as I've spoken to people there is that it actually has to do with tenure of leadership, which is one of the principles I've also tried to internalize Spotify. So they have very long tenure at the senior leadership, which means that…”
Söderström: Internal surveys show users regret 60% of time on rival platforms
“Without naming which ones on many of the big platforms, people, people regretted almost 60% of the time they spent or more.”
Söderström: Steve Jobs tried to kill Spotify many times
“This is the Spotify story of access versus, versus ownership, for example, which is, by the way, why I would also love Steve Jobs to be around, but also not because, you know, he tried to kill us many times.”
Söderström: Apple internally gave Spotify six months to survive Beats acquisition
“That's what they literally said in their internal meetings. They gave us six months.”
Most consumer products will become conversational interfaces within five to ten years
“And I think if you fast forward five to 10 years, almost all big consumer products are going to be a conversation to some extent, rather than this service that you use.”
AI's impact on non-coding engineering tasks will exceed code generation
“But then the really interesting side is these other seven hours, what a developer does, which is a lot of communication, planning, working with designers, prototyping meetings. Those things I think will actually have as big or even more impact than the coding …”
Spotify adopted the Chinese super-app model to combat declining app store installs
“Our entire strategy is basically, we decided this many years ago before it was popular, but you saw the Chinese app, the Chinese starting to build super apps, whereas the Western world built one app per use case. We kind of adopted the Chinese super app idea a…”
Enterprise AI adoption primarily requires traditional API engineering, not AI engineering
“And actually, so actually my biggest job to enable AI is not AI engineering. It's old school engineering, exposing all this, these, this data that we have so that you can have a reasoning engine reason for you as a product person, or actually for me as a consu…”
AI currently delivers only a disappointing 7% developer speedup in big tech
“I've seen studies from other big companies that if you actually measure out of a developer's time, this, the speed up is like seven percent or something, which sounds very disappointing because of all these things, like the net new coding is a small part, net …”
Spotify paid out 70% of revenue and remained unprofitable for 15 years
“This year, Is sort of the first year of profitability for Spotify since its founding. People say that, you know, there's a lot of talk about Spotify sharing enough of the revenue. You know, we share about 70%, but the truth is the other 30% we haven't kept. We…”
Spotify boasts twice the engagement and half the churn of rival services
“We've learned from the labels that we have twice the engagement and half the churn of competing services. So that's sort of a curse where the per stream model, just the better we are as a product, the lower the per stream is going to look.”
The undervalued music industry will eventually reach billions of paying subscribers
“And if you just look at the numbers, you just have to keep going and it's going to get to billions of users paying and then several billions. Then the music industry is absolutely massive. I just think the music industry It's like undervalued. Terminally is go…”
Spotify's initial strategy of pursuing exclusive podcast deals was a bad bet
“So we tried exclusivity in podcasts as a way to differentiate the surface service, but I think it was ultimately a bad bet because the macro trend for the whole thing with podcasts was that the production cost was so low.”
Söderström: Many major artists are already using AI in song production
“But the truth is that much of music being made per day made today is a combination. I think many of the big artists are using AI for parts of their songs or parts of the track or the drums, et cetera.”
Söderström: AI will not replace human artists like Taylor Swift
“I do think the human need for having someone to believe in an actual artist that you care about, I don't think Taylor Swift will be Replace by an AI, not because the music couldn't sound similar, but because the whole point is Taylor Swift and belonging to som…”
Söderström: Superstars will grow bigger despite an explosion of niche AI content
“I also think you're going to see the same thing as we see in music. The superstars will actually also get bigger.”
Söderström: Eliminating user effort harms apps by destroying vital feedback signals
“Going to zero user investment seems good in the short term, but I don't think it's good in the long term because you actually lose signal from that user. And at the end, I think they feel less participatory in the experience.”
The other half of the tape: Gustav Söderström's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 105 times in 44 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 67Daniel Ek 11Jag Duggal 5David Senra 5Alex Kantrowitz 4Lenny Rachitsky 3Max Junestrand 2Hugo Barra 2
Statements about Gustav Söderström, by other people (1)
Ek: Gustav Söderström runs product at Spotify better than I do
“So what happened with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom and wealth, which is I don't really run product anymore. Because what happened was I got this guy called Gustav that you now met and he runs product. And he's actually way better than me at…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 81
David Senra 16
Lenny's Podcast 4
Big Technology 4
2026 10 mentions in 7 episodes 1 per episode
- Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Legora CEO, Max Junestrand: $7M ARR in a Day | Harvey vs Legora: Is a Legal AI Winner Takes All? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Raising $400M for 20VC: Fundraising Lessons | Getting Marc Benioff Through 53 Cold Emails: How to Master Cold Outbound | 7 Lessons from 101 Decacorn Founders with Harry Stebbings (Simon Squibb Edition)
- DHH: How to Build a Profitable Company Without Losing Control
- The $44 Billion Company Automating Your Company's Finances
- Anthropic vs The Pentagon: Who Wins? | OpenAI's $110BN Mega Round | Cursor Hits $2BN in ARR · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tobi Lütke: 21 Years of Building Shopify
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 23 mentions in 10 episodes 2 per episode
- Daniel Ek, Spotify | David Senra
- Michael Dell, Dell Technologies | David Senra
- Brian Tolkin, Head of Product @Opendoor: How to Hire the Best Product Teams | E1257 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dan Gill, CPO @Carvana: The Most Wild Story in Public Markets | E1243 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20Product: Should We Kill the PM Role Entirely | How Does Product Design Change Most in a World of AI | How Do Monzo Build Product Today: What Works, What Does Not | Why Most Product Sucks and What Makes Truly Great Product
- 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo
- Duolingo Co-Founder, Severin Hacker: How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 17 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Is Generative AI Plateauing?, Booming Bluesky, Apple’s Smart Glasses Play
- Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Reid Hoffman: The Future of TikTok and The Inflection AI Deal | E1163 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Janie Lee: Three Core Skills that Make the Best PMs | E1165 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Antoine Le Nel, CGO @Revolut: How Revolut Launch and Grow Products & Why CAC is a BS Metric | E1216 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Maria Angelidou:Product Lessons Leading Facebook App Monetisation Team to Billions in Revenue |E1210 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Cameron Adams: How Canva Builds Products: Lessons Learned, What Works? What Flopped? | E1179 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 23 mentions in 13 episodes 2 per episode
- Kevin Niparko: Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams | E1066 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Jag Duggal: How We Scaled Nubank to 80M Users; Google's Brutal Hiring Practices | E995 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)
- Geoff Charles: How To Hire Product Teams & Increase Product Velocity | E1091 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- David Meyer: Why You Should Hire People Who Aren’t In Product Already | E1076 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Head of Podcast Product)
- Christian Kleinerman: Do OpenAI and Anthropic Have a Sustaining Moat? Who Wins the AI Wars? | E1063 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 24 mentions in 4 episodes 6 per episode
- Hugo Barra: How I Built Hardware for Android, Xiaomi, and Oculus | 20VC #947 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Marty Cagan: Product Lessons from Steve Jobs and Elon Musk; Why do we idolize engineers? | 20VC #957 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Barry McCarthy: From Netflix CFO to Peloton CEO; How Netflix Beat Blockbuster | 20VC #962 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Michael Mignano: How I Founded Anchor; Why TikTok could be a $2 TRILLION Company | 20VC #923 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: Spotify Founder Daniel Ek on Optimising Decision-Making, Structuring Effective Learning Processes, The Trials and Tribulations in The Transition From Founder To CEO & The Future of Building Prima Materia with Shakil Khan
- 20VC: Eugene Wei on "Status as a Service", Why Networks Grow and Stop Growing, The Worst Design Choices Social Media Incumbents Have Made & The Next 10 Years of Media and the Metaverse
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Gustav's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-CEO, Spotify | 2 | 47 | 75% 6/8 | full record on 20VC → |
 INVEST LIKE THE BESTLEDGER | Co-CEO, Spotify | 1 | 36 | 83% 5/6 | full record on Invest Like the Best → |
| DAVID SENRALEDGER | Co-CEO, Spotify | 1 | 31 | 57% 4/7 | full record on David Senra → |
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Co-CEO, Spotify | 1 | 22 | 67% 2/3 | full record on Big Technology → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-CEO, Spotify | 1 | 21 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Co-CEO, Spotify | 0 +1 | 3 | — | full record on Masters of Scale → |