Appleが殺せなかった会社——Spotify共同CEOグスタフ・セーデルストローム

Daniel's very big on preparing. You know, Daniel, he's not very rationous decisions. And so, this was one of those decisions as well that I think grew with him for a long time. So already about three years ago, he asked me and Alex Nordstrom to step up and become co-presidents and sort of start to run the the day-to-day of Spotify for him. He was still the CEO and so he's been gradually like giving us more and more rope to to run the the business day to week to week and then monthto month. So when it actually came to sort of taking over CEOs, we already knew that part like by heart and we had ran it for 3 years, the full the full PNA and balance sheet and so forth. And then there was still a lot of new stuff to learn. You know, all the stuff that that was Daniel's responsibility alone, like, you know, PR, government, being the public face of the company. But we were very well prepared for taking over the business. I think that's unique with Daniel. I worked for Daniel for almost 18 years. And um I don't think I'll work for anyone except Daniel again. I've had both great bosses and not so great bosses. Daniel is the is the great one. and uh he's incredibly uh delegating you know already from the start. I remember when I joined Spotify was back in 2008 2009 and then we were going to go to the US and um Daniel uh knew u suck that meta then Facebook and we wanted to do this pretty deep integration with him and yeah I was new on the job at Spotify and Daniel just said like can you just go there and like talk to Zuck and met them like over Facebook at the time and like set this up. I'm like that's a lot of trust for someone who's new. So he's always been like super delegating and [snorts] that is also I think why I've stuck around for almost 18 years because you get you get so much respons responsibility. It's like you get a new job almost every year. And so this like coco or or co-president partnership that he started 3 years ago was one of those journeys where you know Alex and I got to step up and try taking on the full business. We actually changed completely how we run the company from the way Daniel runs it.

You know when it comes to organizational models in themselves I this is not something I came up with. I think you know Steven Sowski said this a bunch of you just can't win. There's no organizational model you know there are many and they all work like Amazon is is organized in a certain way trillion dollar company. Apple in another way also trillion. Elon does his thing you know also produces trillion dollar companies. So there is no right way. You just have to pick one that fits your personality. So I actually think organizations are quite based on personalities. And Daniel has a very specific personality. I think he is not the typical sort of um I mean you know him well but he's not the typical sort of alpha male founder which I think uh is one of the reasons why it's so successful in this type of business because if you think about what Spotify is yes it's a it's a technology company doing sort of hardcore technology innovation but it's also a media company working in an industry with a bunch of of uh you know first music labels and then book publishers and and you know podcast publishers, some of these very very big personalities in the media business as you can imagine. So he needed to be able to both rally a team and build world-class technology, but also get all of these people with the big personalities to work together and get to do something that they didn't want to do individually and not as a group. And I still don't understand exactly how he managed to get all of these people to do sort of what he wanted, but it certainly wasn't through like alpha male force. It was through not being threatening, being very logical. Uh he's very humble, but I think uh maybe most, you know, Americans specifically can mistake humbleness for weakness. It's the opposite. He's insanely tenacious. Insanely tenacious. Just never gives up. So, so he has a very specific leadership style and and that shaped the company. And as I said, there are a bunch of incredible advantages to his leadership style. One thing that I think uh you know that I do choose to do differently is Daniel loves to to talk in a star pattern one-on-one with many people. So he would talk to me about something separate meeting then with Alex Nordstrom about something the same thing but from you know the business angle and then maybe with PR and finance he just talked in star patent he doesn't like to have meetings everyone in the room and that can be frustrating at time you know it's like he says something to me something to Alex and then Alex and I meet I'm like this is what we're going to do and Alex is like not quite that's not what he said to me and so then you know we go back and we call him out on it you know uh but he likes that star pattern Alex and I chose to do something very different. We chose to synchronize the whole company. And so you can think about Spotify as sort of a two function or. I run product and technology by and large. Alex runs sort of business and content by and large, but instead of sort of doing the divide and conquer, which is a good idea, you divide and conquer because it's more effective. Uh but it has the cost that you're you're unsynchronized. So instead of doing the divide and conquer in separate swim lanes, uh we do this thing which I've I've called synchronous synchronized swimming where we kind of swim together which is much harder to do than than competitive swimming. And when you mess it up, it is ugly to look at, but when you do it well, it's a beautiful thing to look at. So we decided to instead of having our the usual sort of you know I meet with my director reports and we talk about product and technology he meets with his and talks about business and content and then our people meet in the org somewhere and they fight it out which is how most companies work. We chose to say we're not going to have our own leadership meetings. We have a single one with all of our uh SVPs. So we have a single meeting every Tuesday called the E team for three hours with all the SVPs of of all the internal functions like you know marketing ads subs but also you know all the product and technology functions in the same meeting.

It's about 14 people.

What happens is we meet every week to talk through the entire company. So we talk through you know machine learning problems that are blocking on someone experience problem problems where you know we want to ship this music video feature and so forth but often that music video feature is blocked maybe on a licensing discussion that sits in Alex's org. So the whole the whole reason for the ET meeting was that previously actually under Daniel's sort of tenure we were in so many meetings where someone said like well I'm blocked on that person in that or that person is not in the meeting. So, so, so people said, "Let's take it offline." And, and we got so tired of hearing this phrase, "Let's take it offline that we did meeting and we said, you're never allowed to say, let's take it offline again. Everyone that represents all functions should be in this one meeting so that when you say like I'm locked on licensing, well, licensing is right there across the table. Now, let's talk it out in real time." So, we changed how the company operates and we have this this um synchronized operating model that is expensive in time. you have, you know, 14 15 people times three hours per week. That's a lot of leadership time and the conversations are not relevant for everyone at some at every time. Sometimes we talk a lot about content that may be not that relevant or or ad strategy that may not be that relevant to someone in the personalization or but the cool thing is we talk about everything. We talk about P&Ls and balance sheets and we talk about machine learning um problems in there. So you have now 14 people that have the full CO perspective.

Yeah.

It's just a question of time scale. So this thing about, you know, the the person in experience understanding a lot about the ad stack, it won't seem that relevant right then, but then like the fact that this person understands how we make money is going to affect their product decisions in the future when they build a product because guess what? There are ads in the product. So now they're not going to make decisions that go against our monetization strategy.

Elon says this right

Yeah. And because we have a single experience strategy, our strategy is literally a super app. We try to build first music, then podcast 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 set everyone just run in parallel, I think it will feel very good for about 6 months. Then the experience will just start crumbling because you're externalizing all that complexity to the user instead of taking the fight internally and coming up with like a single experience. So in terms of organizational models, you have all you know you have functional orgs where has the benefit of clear leadership, clear ownership but supposedly hard to cooperate when you want two functions to work together. You have the matrix or which has the benefit that it optimizes for sort of the use case but it's unclear even who you're reporting to. Then you have sort of the division based or like a riot games. You know you organize by game and you break out the technology platform it's into its own org. Amazon is actually kind of a gaming org like divisional with a strong platform underneath. And so on that scale, I've chosen to be actually very close to Apple because I think they cracked the problem of building something that is very very complex underneath the surface like insanely complex and it still feels like it was built sort of by a single person for a single person. So that's what

At where?

And what I thought I didn't learn anything there, but I learned a lot about what not to do. It [laughter] was a completely messed up company back then as well. I think I had four cos in like two and a half years or something. But all the EVPs and SD, they fought each other to the death and try to hide information from each other. So supposedly on paper I think Apple should not be very well positioned to be able to build that kind of product. I always marvel that why aren't those functional leads just fighting each other? That's what usually happens. 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 at the senior leadership which means that these functional leads have found a way to work together to synchronize. So sometimes it's it's the hardware function that innovates and takes the lead and then you know software and services follow and sometimes it's a software function that takes the lead and they follow. That only works if you have super high trust in the leadership which which I think stems all the way back from from Steve Jobs and they managed to to keep that but in theory I think functional orgs tend to dissolve into politics

I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, RAMP. I have been reading a lot about [music] SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable private businesses in the world and one of the main themes in the history [music] of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. [music] And we see that in the ramp data too. The median company running on ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on ramp. I [music] run my business on RAMP and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how it can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. This speaks to your previous statement that there's not one right way to do it. There's multiple different ways. I just had this conversation with Mr. Beast and we talked about this and cuz you know I was like very curious especially in media like your top creative talent is so hard to to manage and to integrate to keep. I was like do you have a lot of turnover on I'm not talking about like the people on the production. I mean your actual your top five most talented people. There's a lot of turnover there. And um he's a huge fan of founders. And so we talk about entrepreneur history every time we we we speak. And I was like what's interesting to me is you take Larry Ellison who he believed that one of the secrets of success Oracle is the fact that they kept I think he said the core kernel of the product team together for like two decades or something like that or maybe decade and a half. And you take Elon Musk who again Larry mentored. Elon says that you know one of the few people he goes to for advice is actually Larry Ellison who says the opposite. He's like I want fresh blood. I want to keep turning through people as possible. It's like, oh, it's like Oracle's super successful. Elon is super successful.

I think this is the whole thing. You can't you can't win. You can only not lose as much. So the way I think about it, you have a bunch of organizational principles and as I said as I joined Spotify and had to like when I was at Yahoo, I said I never want to work in a big or

I joined Spotify when I was like 30 something. I never expected it to get to thousands. Eventually I had to do the big or thing. And then I try to read a lot about organizational principles and models and and I think at the time and I read a lot of Steven Senowski.

And and his I think the thesis is you can't win. There is no right org. And companies they sit with one type of org and then you're going to be good at something and terrible at something. People look at the terrible thing and say like well if we flipped to like a matrix or we' be great at this. They flip now they're great at this and terrible at the old thing. You just you just have to choose dimensions. So what we did at Spotify was we said you have we have to choose like the best outcome is that you're optimized for the thing that is important for the company and you suck at the thing that is not as important.

So like figure out what's important then optimize for that and just accept that you're going to be average at the others. And so one thing we chose to optimize for was the single experience. We're really good at building a single experience that actually does a billion different things and most people don't even realize that on the back end it's even more complicated because you have a music business that is a royalty pool like so it's percentages out of a fixed pool music business that has a very different structure podcast business that has ads. So when you click something in Spotify it triggers all kinds of different business models like on the back end it is insanely complicated.

Yeah it's a very complicated model on the back end

Exactly.

And I feel I don't know if you guys do this internally, but

If you look at what we focus on and what we optimize for, you have a strategic lens, then you have sort of a a business lens, and then an emotional lens. So the strategic lens is really that we saw a long time ago that the biggest challenge in the world is going to be distribution. You know when when the iPhone came out, it felt like distribution was free. People went to the app store every day and looked for like you know what's the top charting free and paid app that stopped working. There was a lot of distribution through Facebook with all the install ads. That all went away. So from a strategic point of view when we were going into podcast which was like the first second product we did we looked at that and said okay there again it's all a trade-off we could do a separate app would be easier for us as an org because we can divide the org and people can run in parallel and so forth but is that the biggest problem to design the experience or is the biggest problem actually getting distribution and then we looked at in the app store and I think there was maybe um it's probably probably 10, but at least seven really good podcast apps in there like Overcast and all these apps. And when we looked at their usage, I think Apple podcast was still like 98 and a half percent.

you saying we prioritize the user over ourselves is super important. So, a few months ago, we were racing cars together in Sweden. We and then we took a break from racing cars and we had lunch. It was me, you, Daniel, and Pia, who works at Prima Material. One, I know you're super competitive. How did you feel about losing racing to a girl, by the way,

She's It was very well deserved.

you we talked at lunch. You knew there's there's dark engagement patterns and you can put into Spotify right now

Yeah. So, so this is our our guiding principle like what does it mean to to care about the user? um you can care about the user experience, but if you really care about the user in some deeper way, h it would be how they feel about what you do. And [snorts] what happened with Spotify is you can say that we lucked into it because we started in music. Music is by most people considered almost an unequivocal good. Maybe there's bad music somewhere, but you know, very few people feel that music is a bad thing for the world. And and it also happens to have a very large town. There is almost no one that doesn't listen to music. It's like bigger than social networking, right? Not everyone does social networking, but everyone does music.

and I think that was a deliberate decision from Daniel. He was passionate about music. He wanted to do something was meaningful. I don't think it was luck because if you look at the things he's doing now, it's in that same space of being good for the for for the world and you know for Europe etc. rather than just more money.

Did you articulate it as a strategy internally though?

I think time, you know, it's like that's a low bar. [laughter] Uh but we've said it again and again like is this really no regrets? What that comes from is interesting. We surveyed our users uh through a third party anonymously. We do that all the time. Someone comes and asks you what do you think of these media service without seeing who they represent. So you get the truth. That's how we understand how we're doing versus competitors and so forth. So we had them survey across all the big media platforms. Uh and this is where the no regret come from. We asked the question like how do you feel about the time you spent

But then we also asked the opposite question. How much of your time did you regret afterwards? And what was interesting was when we got that survey back, there were two things that surprised me. One didn't surprise me so much. We were actually the lowest regret content sort of on the internet in terms of the the the platforms we asked for. Or if you flip it around, some of the time most well spent on the internet with, you know, Gen C saying that they they value almost uh n almost 90% of the time they spend, they feel very good about it afterwards. So that was good. But what surprised me was the the opposite without naming which ones on many of the big platforms people people regretted almost 60% of the time they spent or more. And these were young people, you know. And what shocked me was before I saw that survey, I knew that these were insanely high engagement platforms, but I kind of mistakenly thought that they were there because they wanted to be there. I'm like, they're probably enjoying it. Turns out when you ask them, they're like, "No, I'm trapped. I feel horrible about the time I spend."

What do you mean you're talking about fitness?

What would that look like? My partner Rob was running through Central Park this morning listening to Spotify. So, he was exercising while using your app.

at at Investor Day. Um I'm a runner. I'm passionate about running and we see a lot of people running with Spotify and they make their own playlists. One of the things I want to be possible that's going to be possible very soon is that you go into Spotify, you just tell Spotify, this is one of the good use cases of AI. I think you say to Spotify, you know, I want um running playlist for like an 8 minute mile and I want it to be in my taste, but I want it to be on the down beat either on my on both my feet or just one of my feet, right? Uh and I want you to update it weekly. It's a pretty complicated task. So then what what we want to be able to do is to first calculate like an 8 minute mile. What does that mean? Well, roughly if your average height maybe 165 steps per minute or something like that. Okay. Now we got to go and find music in in either 160 or half of that 80. So it's either in every downstep or every other downstep. Okay. You're going to find some music there but not a lot. So now you want to look a bit broader. And then you actually want to speed them up or slow them down to exactly 160 or exactly 80. And then you actually want to mix them together with perfect beat match transitions, right? And then you actually want to overlay commentary on top of it saying like now you're going to go into the interval part. And now you're going to slow down and so forth. So these are the kinds of experience that that we're building. This is what I mean with going deeper into fitness. That's one of those no regrets area or or time.

No. come out and feel like, "Oh my god, I regret 70% of that." [laughter]

So, so it's been our our um guiding principle. And what I think is interesting about it is, you know, I'm 50. I've done a lot of interesting things in my life. You got to figure out what you actually want to spend your life on, right? And I want to spend my life on on doing something that I feel good about personally and that I kind of feel proud of. you feel good, but you know, like the way a human is going to feel good is if what they're doing is actually in service of other people. This is a I know you're into philosophy. This is a humans for yourself thousands of years ago. This is not a new idea. It's something that was true thousand years ago. It's true today. It will be true now. Me and uh Milan, who's sitting over there, I was talking to uh he works at Spotify right before you came. I was talking to him about this cuz he's like, "You have two p two different podcasts on the business charts right now." And I was like, "Listen, this new show, I'm addicted to doing it. I can't sleep. I get wired from these conversations. I'm doing it selfishly. It's another form of education. But I really feel that like Founders Podcast is like my life's work. And the way I feel like when I put that out, I know it's good for the world. I know these conversations are good for the world. I was like, I'm not going to make … podcast slop. It's not I'm not trying I want it to be entertaining, but at the core, it's like I want you to be inspired and educated by these people that have accomplished great things. And then the the point was just like that knowing that like you can do it, too.

That is good for the world. I feel good doing that and it's not like a I like a I need to make certain it's it's not tied to anything else other than like it's not like oh I wouldn't do this if unless I can make X dollars like I don't give a … about that. I care the money will take care of itself. I care about putting out good things to the world.

It took me 32 years to find my path and another five and a half of … struggling until it actually like could sustain me. And then now I wake up every day like I have no doubts about what I'm doing. I was like I'm going to build again. I'm mining these old books of somebody did something amazing for ideas and insights that we can push down to the next generation of entrepreneurs. And I'm having conversations like this where we talked before I was like everybody's like oh you know you you asked this perfect question for your audience like I'm having these conversations selfishly cuz I just know there's there's 10 million Davids listening to this that have the same interest that want to know what is in you. You you said you're 50. You've been working at you sold your first startup then you work you have such a singular life experience is what me and Daniel were talking about earlier like who the hell sells their startup works at a big company for 18 years then become CEO

I want to talk about AI uh because

what I think is interesting with this time well spent is

Yeah.

But like listen, no disrespect. One of my favorite movies is The Godfather. And one of my favorite scenes is where Slazzo goes to meet Marlon Brando and he's like, and Marlin's like, "Hey, it's none of my business how another man makes his living, but I can't get involved in that because, you know, you're dealing drugs to kids and it's not interesting to me." And so I feel the same way. It's like I mind, one of my principles I teach my kids is like number one, rule number two is like mind your own business. But I had somebody pitch me. They're like, "We want to partner, do a deep partnership as one of the prediction markets." And I'm on the phone with them and I didn't know anything about them, but the way they describe themselves, they're like, "We're building a maximum truth seeeking machine." And I pull up on my phone. I go to I'm not going to say the company. I type it in and I go, "Dude, the first thing on I see on your website is who's going to win the coin flip for the New York for the New England Patriots game." If you're just saying we want to … gamble and make a ton of money, I respect that. But don't give me this other … there. You're building maximum truth seeeking machines.

The only reason I do videos cuz you guys harassed me.

That's what I was going to ask you. There's no way you could have predicted that when you chose a subscription model but it had to be subscription model based on your very first product which is music.

People like you and I will probably want more control but like you have 700 million users like what percentage of them do you actually think I I feel like people just want you to do it for them.

and they can benefit from the other.

The analogy I had cuz everybody's like, "Oh, you know, everybody's going to be building everything they want." I was like, "I don't think

there's this famous one 90 right 1% creates 9% curates and 90% consumes okay

and then allows you to do it for them which I think is what most humans want.

something like that over a couple of years came out there long time ago

but you have entire episodes I think from 20 2021 or 2022 dedicated to how you're using Spotify, you know, people have been talking about AI for 60 years, but even back then way less people were talking about that now. Tell me the difference of how you view AI back then in 2021, 2022 to Spotify to today.

and it looked like a toy back then like everything does but I was I was so pilled already on on like the the idea of how do we actually work as humans from a philosophical point of view and I didn't have a good answer no one did but I had this this idea that maybe it is maybe it is computational because it was the model of the artificial neuron but it was hard to believe in the in the '9s with these like deep new networks from from Dennis and the and David Silver and the the whole deep mind team. H you could see the scaling of like it's it's handling more and more complex problems. So I got very deep into that. I went home and I started coding again and I did my own sort of recurrent neural networks and LSTM and GRUs and stuff just for fun, you know, during my vacations and evenings and nights and we kept doing our recommendations problem which was sort of old school AI which was called ML machine learning. But then when the the what is called the transformer paper came out in I think June of 2017. It was a paper called attention is all you need. I think I read it like in the first few days and I was completely blown away by it and I started talking to anyone who wanted to listen. So I was just primed for that and you know happening. So then we started investing quite aggressively towards this. I think you know if you extrapolate it out if you really believe in that exponential curve which I've tested a few times then eventually you know computers would be able to start talking to you and reason and you would be able to talk to computers. We started preparing for that quite [snorts] early. We bought this company called sonantic to be able to produce um voice. I mean you you can buy voice anywhere on the internet today but it's quite expensive per minute. So if you want to serve 700 million users with like a few minutes of voice per day, you're going to go bankrupt. So we bought this company producing voice very very cheaply with the different technology even before the LLMs were smart enough to produce the script for that voice because we just bet on you know intercepting that curve instead of waiting for it and then then building for it. So I think it comes from a personal interest of in AI and then a bit of luck being at a place like Spotify that had access to lots of data and then when you see it just you know have have to bet on it and and I think the interest is is a personal interest. Spotify is sort of my excuse to get as close as possible to to uh the philosophical side of AI sort of what it means to be a human. Mhm. two decades ago you built a neural network like a few nodes and it slowed to crawl and it was unimpressive and you're like no that can't be it Yes. Yeah. It's a good excuse to get to spend all my day thinking about learning about these things, working with the best people in the business. You know, I get I have the fortune of meeting all of these people that that are changing the world. I get to meet them and talk to them and ask my interesting stupid questions about, you know, things. So, it's just a fortunate position to be in to get to do something that you're passionate about. But I feel very lucky because I can do that, but I can do it in an area where I think it's still good for the world and I can have impact on I can steer this towards what I think is a good outcome of AI like giving back user control for example. I don't want to skip over that because I truly believe we've had enough private conversations and I know you talked to all the other like people designing products at all the big companies. We talked about this privately in the past and it's just like yet some of them, you know, have made decisions where they know, they have optimized. They're like, "Hey, we ran this test. This is great for engagement. It's terrible for the mental health." And they're like, "Push it." That's insane to me. That is insane. And this is what we were talking about before we started recording was like I told you it's like it sounds silly but like I deeply desire a world in which Steve Jobs is still alive because I obviously love technology but I I want the people building the technology that we all use on the scale that we all use it at to like build tool tools and that's all technology is that enhance humanity instead of trying to replace it or to make you dumber or fatter or just you know sucked into your phone and depressed which I feel a is a lot of what's going on now. Which is I think what you said earlier was like well podcast we have this thing growing massively that's good for the world assuming you were listening to the right podcast and you should be listening to David Sun and founders of course at the same time when these people are like destroying their brains in 15 20 second you know 5-second 1 second scrolling and it reminded me when you said that earlier I was like oh that you go back and read Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters he talks about why he invented the Kindle. He said the Kindle was an anecdote to short attention spans. He was worried that people weren't going to read anymore. Explain the the business model innovation on the Kindle. Well, normally you would have to pay for data if you know the if if you would have been lazy, which they weren't. You would have said like here's a here's a Kindle now go and buy a mobile subscription monthly for that for the books to update. Then what they did was they signed deals with these carriers. They calculated the average book size and they made a fixed cost deal where all the data sort of forever was included in the price of the hardware. They bought this thing for onetime cost and it just magically updates. At the time that was magic those good business model innovation on top of all the product innovation which is something I'm very passionate about. I believe that technology is necessary ingredient for change but not sufficient. I think you can cause havoc with technology like piracy but when things really change is when you take a new technology and marry it with a new often contrarian business model. This is the Spotify story of access versus versus ownership for example. Uh, 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. [laughter] Yeah. and then you just smoked them. cuz he was a legend. And he still is. He's a killer. He's a I mean, dude, But imagine that you're a fairly small Swedish startup and you think you're good at product and then the biggest most respected product company in the world and the person you see up look up to the most Steve Jobs says they're coming after you but not only that goes and buys beats music and brings in Dr. Draian Jimmy I like we're going to kill you. That's what they literally said in their internal meetings. They give us 6 months. It was uh those were hard times. we worked very hard [laughter] There's a great line though about this because if you think about Jimmy's experience in the the music industry is just fascinating. They tell the story that obviously documentary you know starting out sweeping the floor in the rec in the um the record plant and then uh you know becoming an engineer and then a producer and then one of the most successful creators of a a new record company and then building products like the guy the reason I I recommend you know people sending his stories cuz like the people that can succeed in so many different domains over multiple decades that's not luck there's something going on that they know Yeah, So, it had to be terrifying from from your end. But the the one thing I think of this great maximum from Game of Thrones, which I'm obsessed with, and it says those on the margins often come to control the center. And if you think about it, couldn't have been more marginal than these these group of Swedish guys in this tiny country trying to take over and build the company you guys built. What do you think they were? Well, I think the content side of the business was incredibly worried because because if it was if it was only about content and you know only about musicians, you had you know hip-hop which is the the you know has the largest appeal in the US and all these powerful people. But there were some structural reasons. One is when we created our strategy we bet on three things and they were all basically counter positions to Apple deliberately. One was premium. We believe that Apple would if they even did a product free product they would struggle to do advertising. They tried the IAD but they wanted so much control it didn't work. where I think to your point I don't know what prior Apple music was at the time but it was not more important than the iPhone for [laughter] sure. So this is something we're working on at uh at Spotify and we released this just a few weeks ago something called save to Spotify. when you sit in your your cloud code or codeex or something, you can just, you know, you can ask uh these agents to go out and look at information for you, write your podcast script and then generate a podcast and then we allow you to upload that to Spotify, but privately, right? Because you may put private information in there. Maybe you want to maybe you want to prep for your interview as I did today. I don't want that to be all over Spotify. So, we now support private podcast or personal podcasts. And so what I do is I use these agents and I take a combination of my personal information. So you know documents I have and things I want to prep for and then what I'm interested in based you know across my my different uh services all my interest Spotify knows my interest pretty well from all my listening goes out and looks at what hap what's happening in the world and then it gives me this this update that is deeply personal about what's happening in the world that I might be interested in. So, it's kind of like a personal algorithm that filters out a lot of of the noise and the the crazy that I don't want to hear and just gives me the stuff that I want to hear. This is the kind of user control that I would like to give every user, but it's the kind of user control that you can have now if you're prepared to to put in the work. And what's interesting is I didn't expect this, but um I found so much music and podcast through this. Then it's filtered to the people that I'm interested in that I that I follow on different social media and so forth. So it's the thing that is being talked about among the people I care about. So for example, your episode with Evan Spiegel came up again and again with lots of commentary in my personal podcast saying like this stuff this is really interesting for you. You should listen to this because there are product wisdoms in there and so forth. I listened to the whole episode which I really like by the way. I'm thinking about stealing his framing of like you know we used to have all the ideas but limited resources. Now we have all the ideas and all the resources. I really like that. He invented several of them, right? The disappearing image stories, like all of these. Of course. No, I I I like him. Maybe it's because I'm a product guy. He's a design guy, so close, but I I like him for sure. They shoot into cars and kill kids like Yeah. Premeditated Yeah. Something that just popped to mind when when you were uh speaking just now. I'm very curious like who influenced So, we're talking like essentially your information diet, right? And what you're letting into your mind, you talked about we literally are our thoughts. Like you're crazy to like let people get into your brain and affect you. And uh I was talking to Mr. beast about this yesterday where he's just like I don't think people should have Instagram cuz it's like it's just making all these young kids like comparison is the thief of joy and all they're doing all day long is comparing you know somebody else's highlight reel to them and it's just like very very bad for to let that into your brain. One of my favorite things, I think Daniel said it on this podcast last year where, you know, I I'm always curious when I get to meet people, especially in successful people, is like they who tells you the truth is a question I always ask cuz it's like very few. A lot of them kind of have like this almost like cloud of sycopants around them that are like filtering their knowledge that's getting into them. And what they'll do is like they'll seek out people they can trust and they'll tell them the truth. And I think he told the story of you being one of those people for him, for Daniel, because you pulled him aside, you're like, "Hey, you're running product." And you you're like not good at it. You're kind of … this up. And his response was he went home. I think he told his wife, he's like, "Oh my god, I have to fire this guy." [laughter] It was you. And then he goes then he thought about it. He goes, "Oh, he's right." It's like he just did me a service. Yes. And so I think this is really important. So who does that for you? So I I do a version of the same thing. This is the this is back to the thing of long tenure. So I have people who are long tenured but like huge disagreements with them. Um and they've realized that when they um when they talk back to me, they get upset with me, there are no consequences, right? But that takes that comfort takes a long while to build. You can't expect someone to come in, especially if they come from corporate America, and expect them to like stand up to you because usually there are consequences. You just get fired. So, No, no, no, no. I'm a blue belt. There's many people who could choke me out. So, that's a risky risky path to take. Okay. So we we talked about tenure at the very beginning of this conversation where I never finished a thought when I was asking Mr. Beast about turnover on his talent uh like the the most talented people in there and he's just like there's a value here because the guy that runs his operations has been there. He used to live together. They he's like I've spent not 10,000 hours talking to this guy, 30,000 hours where they walks on set and since he's running his operations, they're running like 10 at a time. Mr. Beast can walk on set and he like before he'll look up and he the guy his name's Tyler. He's like, I already know about this and this is why I made this decision and we're doing this and oh, you may not like this shot, but we're doing this shot because that allows us to shoot from this angle and then literally does nothing has even come out. It's like they're they're what's the from thing from Star Trek with the Vulcan mind mel. So that's what happened. He go and he said the greatest thing he goes you don't get that in 100 hours. The group of old people you have to be very very careful with. Think about like the the most talented people that uh Walt Disney had. It was like these nine guys there's animators. I think they used to call them the old men after Walt died. And I just talked to Ed Camel, the founder of Pixar, and they're going in there as a he's a young technologist trying to pitch them here's a new way to animate. And Walt's dead, these guys are old. There's no fresh blood. They're like the computers will never be able to do the stuff that you're talking about. It's like they reject. It's very inhuman is to reject these new ideas. It took Gustaf 18 years to get to CEO. Well, how do you get new talent then? Like what are you guys doing literally at Spotify? Cuz I know you you have the same idea. You guys have the same idea that um Toby from Shopify talked to me about and my friend Kareem from Ramp did. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's the best. Um but that you guys are fine hiring for spikes. So how do you like today? How are you getting in? your huge platform business around I think just celebrated 20 year anniversary right exactly how are you getting new young talent then how do you think about that one of the challenges that Apple had with machine learning and AI. It was too late to see it. What's the thing that keeps you up at night? Like what do you think the weakest spot for for Spotify is right now? I think the thing that keeps me up at night not surprising what what AI truly means in the limit. I'm pretty sure that media habits are going to change because of AI. And so I don't think it's an option to just sit still. But the way I think about it is the world moves in microwaves. You get some new technology. It often causes a bunch of havoc. Then there's some new business model that emerges and then things change, right? This was the original Spotify. We kind of rode on the microwave of cheap broadband and PCs, right? And then all of a sudden they were so ubiquitous and the the broadband was so fast, you didn't actually need to own files anymore. You could just stream them, right? We realized that we built a business model around it that became very disruptive to the to the download industry and so forth. And then you wait a few years, everything looked great. Then the smartphone came along and now everything changes again. You have people that don't have a computer. We only had a free tier on the computers. We had no free tier. Turns out that while the PC and the internet, the desktop was had such low latency you could stream it. If you try to stream a song over cellular back in 2008, it wouldn't even start. It was 20 seconds to start. It would chop. So like everything changed again. And then we had to adapt to that. And we managed to we came up with the offline sync business model and the mobile model and so forth. But then you get these periods of stability. So if I was an analyst and I try to predict the world between 2015 to 2025 those 10 years just you know what will the world be like? I would have done really well to just extrapolate more mobile subscription more ads just more of everything and you would have gotten really close to what happened. But if you would have shifted that 10 years earlier, 2005 to 2015, you would have extrapolated PCs and internet. You would have missed the smartphone. You would have missed everything. We missed Uber. We would have missed the entire world. So the question is which era are we in? Are we in the comaters of extrapolation or in the macro change? I think we're in one of these where everything changes. So I can't tell you what's going to change, but I'm pretty sure that things are going to change. But the way we think of it as a company is the scariest periods are the periods of change. Guess when Spotify grew the most? That's a perfect place to end. Gustaf, thanks for doing this, man. Always good to talk to you. Appreciate it, man.