Spotify

“How I ended up on the board of Spotify was Daniel and I kicking out on bundling theory, which is like a super weird hobby”

“When you do recall, you want the dense UI. With many items on screen, because you know what it is you're looking for, so you don't need a lot of real estate. When you're doing discovery of new things, you want a lot of user interface, a lot of pixels, and you …”

“And I think what we're entering now is we're going from your curation to recommendation to generation. And I suspect it will be as big of a shift that you will eventually have to rethink your products.”

“The quality of your machine learning, if you're going to have a single play button needs to be literally a hundred percent or zero prediction error. And that's never the case, right? So let's say that you have, you know, a one in five hits, four out of five th…”

“As you grow the company, scaling in increments of seven engineers just creates a ton of overhead. So obviously our teams now tend to be much bigger, maybe, maybe two, three times that at least per like manager to maybe have like 14 or something instead of seve…”

“The podcast did well and no, we did not give it our own sort of promotion. I had to compete as everyone else”

“The hardest thing about this is if you're trying something completely new, The MVP needs to be very big so you can build a new UI, but if you didn't do algorithms for a single item feed, you can't tell if it was the right idea, but poor machine learning, right…”

“And for the AI DJ specifically, Another principle is to try to avoid this urge of just wanting to show off the technology and have this voice, like talk and talk and talk and talk. You have to remember that people came there for the music. So the principle for…”

“What would actually happen after piracy is that the music industry got bigger than ever, not, not just as big, but bigger than ever. And I think that could happen with this technology as well, but we're right in the beginning.”

“The saying is that's like peeing in your pants in, you know, in, in cold weather. It feels really warm and nice to begin with. And then after a while you start to regret it. It's about being, being short term, basically.”

“There are two fundamentally different types of product development. One is designing a new feature. It is hard to make it, but it's voluntary for people to use. So you do the AI DJ. Some people love it. That's fine. If you don't like it didn't make it worse fo…”

“It's become a little bit of a cost to us because people still think that we organize that way. And it's not a very efficient way of being organized at this scale, or maybe even if you started over right now, because we've learned more.”

“If you look at what people do on Spotify's homepage, the current one, It is almost 90% what we call recall. So it is either getting to a session that you're already in or a specific playlist that you know you want to get to, or at least a specific use case. S…”

“You get the benefit of speed. But you get the drawback of kind of shipping your org chart and shipping complexity to the end user.”

“So we've chosen more of the central centralized model. Where these different sort of vertical businesses, if you think about it, the music business, podcasts, audiobooks business, they have to go through a single recommendation organization, because that's ano…”

“If you put autonomy very far towards the leaves of the organization, and then also if you combine that with having a very junior organization, which we did back then, there's a fair chance that you're just going to produce heat. You're going to have a hundred …”

“We talked about it mostly for music, music discovery, but the same problem, it's the same problem and even harder for podcasts. So we're still focused very heavily on helping spot, on helping podcast creators find more audience. This is, like I said, it's even…”

“We work in, in sort of six month increment. So we try to spend two weeks planning and are roughly successful.”

“The autonomy level in Spotify now tends to be quite high at the VP level. And then lower around those levels.”

“I don't think that's gonna quite be possible anytime soon, but I think like Spotify heading towards that north star, you end up developing, I hope a lot of really compelling projects for instance along the way.”

“So one of the ones that most mature is merch which is funny to say because most people probably don't realize that you can purchase merch on Spotify. That's one that's been around for a bit of time. And my team's recently been working on making it more promine…”

“And then other things we've been looking at have been listening parties. We ran a few of those over the past year.”

“I think we are now officially over a third of global market share of podcast listening, which is pretty insane.”

“What I've seen happen in a lot of acquisitions is you have sort of an idea of what you're getting acquired for and you get excited and really attached to that vision. And then when that vision doesn't end up fitting into the, you know, the company strategy, th…”

“I would think of your gut actually as a type of data. And I think it's a totally valid one. And it's just, I think you need to be clear that that's what you're working with. But then it should be taken as seriously as any other data point.”

“Building tools for creators is similar to building a B to B product where you really have to understand it's someone's business, it's their livelihood. And so I think if you're just looking at a list of feature requests, you're not necessarily going to priorit…”

“Once you figure out what method of speaker notes works for you, I rehearse probably like at least 10 times all the way through once the speaker notes are final.”

“So I think at this point it's more than 75% of all new shows on Spotify are hosted with Spotify for podcasters, which used to be Anchor.”

“And Daniel said to us, not, not only do I want you to not move slower, like that's part of why we're acquiring you so that you can like move quickly. But he said, I also want you to help me teach the rest of Spotify how to move more quickly.”

“And Spotify's definition of small was something like a quarter. And I was like, we've never built anything that took more than three months.”

“When we were acquired by Spotify, I think Anchor had already gotten to like 40% of all new podcasts or something crazy.”

“We have five hundred million, more than five hundred million monthly active listeners.”

“I don't think we had a data scientist until we were part of Spotify.”

“I think that people who get acquired, especially founders actually go through a relatively deep sort of like Depression and existential crisis after getting acquired.”

“Anchor was like, 20 people when we got acquired by Spotify”

“The advertising supported sort of radio market was Thirty billion dollar category and recorded music with eight billion dollars. And so we had this idea that we're going to reinvent radio and Spotify and RDO and Apple music and like the 14 other Rhapsody, whic…”

“The message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in twenty-twenty-four said, we still have too many teams doing work around the work and supporting work rather than focusing on opportunities with real impact.”

“All the metrics. Exactly. Like all the metrics, all the success metrics of the feature was going down. So they quickly realized that actually what users really liked in the Discover Weekly was not the fact that it was completely new, but this familiarity that …”