Spotify’s Challenges w. Company Culture

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The insight of this snip is that it is important for companies to be intentional and diligent about the culture they create. Many different cultures can be successful, but each cultural expression has trade-offs. It is common for younger entrepreneurs to be unintentional about their company culture and frequently flip-flop between different cultural expressions. The speaker gives examples of cultural expressions from companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tesla. The speaker emphasizes the importance of thinking through and being diligent about the culture being created. They acknowledge that Spotify was a victim of not being intentional and ended up with a mishmash of different cultural elements from other companies. It is important to lean into the culture being created and iterate and improve upon it over time. The speaker also highlights that Spotify is willing to release products or features that are not initially great, but they have a culture of iterating and improving. This is different from the expectation that everything released by Spotify should be perfect from the start.

We sit down with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek live in Stockholm at Spotify’s amazing HQ studio (check out the video version of this episode — which plays natively on Spotify!). This was an incredibly special and timely conversation: for those who haven’t been paying attention over the past few years, after revolutionizing music Spotify has now ALSO completely transformed our own industry in podcasting. Starting from way behind with ~zero market share in 2018, Spotify has now aggregated the listener market and amazingly surpassed Apple as the world’s largest podcast platform — including close to home with the Acquired audience, where it has 60%+ market share among you all!

We discuss the origins of this “second act” strategy with Daniel, the vision to move from a music company to an audio company, and what’s coming next with Spotify’s entry into Audiobooks. And of course we relive some key moments from the Acquired canon that Daniel was involved in, including his pivotal conversations with Taylor Swift and her team convincing her to come back to streaming following the release of 1984. Tune in!

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