Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]
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Something I speak about frequently on Invest Like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for maniacs on a mission. This is the basis for our investment firm, Positive Sum, and it's the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders, Kareem and Eric, life's work level founders, certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work by streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My
guest today is Gustave Soderstrom. Gustave is the co president, chief product officer, and chief technology officer at Spotify. Gustave lets us behind the scenes on how Spotify thinks about the future of audio and video and what leadership lessons he's learned from making mistakes and taking risks in a rapidly changing technology landscape. He shares fascinating insights on their synchronized team structure and how they position themselves as the r and d department for the entire music industry. We discussed their integration of AI, their unique BetSport process for allocating resources, and h
It's a great question. I think it's the right description. At least in the longer term, I think it is AI or die. Just like it was smartphone or die. And before that, Internet or die, computer or die. This is one of those shifts that it's not your choice whether you adopt it or not, it's going to happen to you. It's the epitome of a macro window. And usually when these macro winds come, we have a saying internally that you can have the macro window in your face. It's not gonna change its direction. So you basically need to reposition yourself, so you get the wind at your back and you can surf t
I wanna start with this downlink, uplink part. What have you learned about consumers' willingness to put a lot of effort into the uplink? It seems like the chat interfaces, the GPTs of the world, we know that people are willing to do a lot of back and forth because it's the native interface. You're going there expecting to write a lot of stuff. You're copy pasting prompts from Twitter or whatever. In an app like Spotify, how willing are people to get not lazy and really descriptive about what they actually want? What have you learned about the nature of people's laziness versus willing to put
Yeah. So that's probably the most exciting thing for us of this generative AIH and the dual uplink paradigm. So previously, we mostly relied on some explicit input when you playlist. That's high value information. You are sitting there thinking this song goes really well with this song and that song. So if you think about it as labeling, even though you're playlisting for yourself, you're sort of labeling these tracks, at least in relation to each other. And you're putting a lot of effort in it. And that was and is our big advantage in music recommendations, even though generative recommendati
of what it is. It's interesting how many different ways you could take the product with this new technology. I would be really curious to know the apparatus inside of Spotify, the
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