Spotify

“I remember we were investing in Warby Parker and Harry's and a whole bunch of other ones. He invested in Spotify, and I'd sit with him on the investment committee for the first couple of funds, and it was just extraordinary.”

“Even if something works in an A-B test, I tend to say, like, I don't want to launch it until you have a good theory of why it works.”

“So these other companies have higher per stream because they have a worse product.”

“And then when smartphones took off, we faced an existential crisis where there started to be consumers who didn't have a desktop. They only had a phone, so they had no free experience and our entire model died. So, so that was one of those moments. We had to r…”

“But the problem with the free trial is even if, you know Nokia, I think Nokia comes with music. They tried a year long free trial. But even then the user knew that if I start investing in playlist now, a year from now, my playlist investment is going to disapp…”

“What happens when you say like these three things are equally important, but they're not really, they never are. You're going to have to choose is you just push the decision down the org. And this VPU is on the hook for that thing. It's going to start fighting…”

“What we did there was we looked at our data and saw that 50% of premium users were listening in shuffle mode. So we said, what if we take shuffle as a feature, give that away for free. It should be 50% of premium consumptions are very valuable, but it's not go…”

“Turns out back then it was like nine percent or something. So you have 91% of the use case being in the background.”

“So we went with this shuffle tier and this is what made growth explode. And to this day, that's our differentiation against the other services.”

“And we built this. It was called moments. The UI we used edit editors on the backend, which is did not work at all. So the idea was like far, far ahead of where the technology was and it costed a lot of money. We actually announced it. There's a video of like …”

“The promise of generative AI is really a deep, ongoing, qualitative user research with almost seven hundred million users all the time.”

“So I think you're going to see many more people using Cursor than just developers.”

“Every six months, these VPs, they pitch, literally pitch as if we were a VC and they were a startup. the bets that they think the company should do and why. And it's very much like a startup process. You know, you don't get to use the fact that, you know Gust…”

“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…”

“And, you know, we execute for six months. In order for the overhead to not get too big, but we can't go to a year, then you can't react. A quarter is too short. It's too much planning overhead versus execution.”

“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…”

“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.”

“That's why startups are ahead. They don't have to rebuild. They don't have 15 years of data. So they're probably in the future, which is why they feel like, no, no. Good stuff is wrong. The impact is really big already, and I think it is for a startup. I think…”

“You know, this year we paid out over ten billion, and that's, you know, up from one billion, I think, in You know almost 10 years ago, it's like just steadily increased.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“We didn't know before we started. If podcasting and later audio books would be cannibalistic to the other media types or not, but it turns out it's not.”

“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.”

“We price raised a few times, Which is part of why we're profitable now. But that's because we had such user surplus in value.”

“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…”

“I think it is the right description, at least in the longer term. I think it is AI or die, just like it was a smartphone or die. And before that, internet or die, computer or die. This is one of those shifts that, you know, it's not your choice whether you ado…”

“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 could never do that because we could go bankrupt overnight. So we always had to worry about monetization and the balance between free tier and pay tier conversion and free term monetization.”

“So far generative AI encoding has had the most impact when you write net new code, which is a lot of what you do as a startup and a tiny bit of what you do as a big company. Most of it is just refactoring, et cetera.”

“My team, the, R and D team and all of Spotify, we are the R and D department of the music industry. And first people were like, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, look at it. It's an entire industry that doesn't have an R and D department. Like, you know, m…”

“We will hold, you know, our private investments as they go public, the best ones for a long period of time. That's an economically driven decision. You know, we may take one times our money out, but the best companies over time, like Netflix, Spotify, et ceter…”

“We have a European waterfall structure. So once we return all the limited partner capital, then we start getting our carried interest. And once we do that, we're, you know, and we're distributing stock, we can choose to obtain the Spotify or Netflix shares you…”

“If they had been forward-thinking and accepted that they would have created Spotify, we wouldn't be paying an extra 30% to a DSP.”

“The stars of, the new stars of dance right now, that are doing like, blowing out Madison Square Gardens, or doing the basically festival sized crowds for their own shows, If you looked at them on their Spotify monthly listeners, like we were talking about earl…”

“Now, like, on Spotify, when we, like, started, there was, like, 10,000 songs uploaded every Friday. Now there's like a 190,000 or something like that.”

“And I imagine that like in a few years it'll be a million, you know what I mean?”

“And that came up with, it was a convertible debt instrument. It had a cap. I think the cap was at twenty five billion dollars. It had some, a current yield component.”

“The music on Spotify is no different than Apple music or Amazon music, right? It's, theoretically, it's a pure commodity. What makes Spotify have pricing power? What makes it differentiated? Why would people, you know, be incredibly upset if you said, like, yo…”