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Gustav Söderström

👤 Speaker
588 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

Music was also a la carte and quite niche. And once we made it an access model with no marginal cost, it got way larger. And that's what we think about audiobooks as well. So we've seen a few of those and managed to adopt them. To your question, is AI going to do that? Do we need to change the business model? I'm not sure.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

Music was also a la carte and quite niche. And once we made it an access model with no marginal cost, it got way larger. And that's what we think about audiobooks as well. So we've seen a few of those and managed to adopt them. To your question, is AI going to do that? Do we need to change the business model? I'm not sure.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

I think there is one glaring thing that is different, which is the previous VC model coming all the way back from chips and silicon was you make a big upfront investment and then you amortize and you get to almost zero marginal cost. That's how software worked. It's not how AI worked. The marginal cost is high and you need to cover it.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

I think there is one glaring thing that is different, which is the previous VC model coming all the way back from chips and silicon was you make a big upfront investment and then you amortize and you get to almost zero marginal cost. That's how software worked. It's not how AI worked. The marginal cost is high and you need to cover it.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

So you could say that that should change everyone's business model. You're going to need to somehow either monetize very effectively through ads or charge users. And you see OpenAI being a subscription product. And I think you're going to see more of those. So the marginal cost is a net new thing.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

So you could say that that should change everyone's business model. You're going to need to somehow either monetize very effectively through ads or charge users. And you see OpenAI being a subscription product. And I think you're going to see more of those. So the marginal cost is a net new thing.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

For Spotify, it's interesting because we're like the one technology company that always had a marginal cost. One more stream... was a marginal cost to labels. So we grew up in a world where if we were too successful on the free tier, we could go bankrupt overnight, which was never true for Twitter or Facebook, which is why VC said, just go crazy, worry about monetization later.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

For Spotify, it's interesting because we're like the one technology company that always had a marginal cost. One more stream... was a marginal cost to labels. So we grew up in a world where if we were too successful on the free tier, we could go bankrupt overnight, which was never true for Twitter or Facebook, which is why VC said, just go crazy, worry about monetization later.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

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 tier monetization. So the good thing for us is we're fairly used to marginal cost in our business model. I think you're going to see those things.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

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 tier monetization. So the good thing for us is we're fairly used to marginal cost in our business model. I think you're going to see those things.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

It's very likely that some consumers are going to want tons and tons of inference. And because that's a marginal cost, you're probably going to have to pay somehow for that as a consumer. So I think you're going to see more tiering of consumer products based on how much inference you want. But for us, that's not that new. We've had several tiers already.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

It's very likely that some consumers are going to want tons and tons of inference. And because that's a marginal cost, you're probably going to have to pay somehow for that as a consumer. So I think you're going to see more tiering of consumer products based on how much inference you want. But for us, that's not that new. We've had several tiers already.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

I'm curious because I'm an investor in a company called Etch that's going to be one of these companies that pushes down that inference cost. Like the history of compute, you're going to see this incredible consumer surplus and consumer benefit that comes from cheaper and cheaper unit by unit inference cost.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

I'm curious because I'm an investor in a company called Etch that's going to be one of these companies that pushes down that inference cost. Like the history of compute, you're going to see this incredible consumer surplus and consumer benefit that comes from cheaper and cheaper unit by unit inference cost.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

But the countervailing force is that we would just use more of it, more reasoning tokens, more whatever. So it makes me wonder how much more you can imagine better models being useful to you. It seems like if we just froze

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

But the countervailing force is that we would just use more of it, more reasoning tokens, more whatever. So it makes me wonder how much more you can imagine better models being useful to you. It seems like if we just froze

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

reasoning and model capabilities today, we probably still have decade plus of digestion to do of how we could use these models to make better products, better features, whatever. Can you imagine another couple orders of magnitude better models opening up lots of features that you can't currently do? Is that a thing?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

reasoning and model capabilities today, we probably still have decade plus of digestion to do of how we could use these models to make better products, better features, whatever. Can you imagine another couple orders of magnitude better models opening up lots of features that you can't currently do? Is that a thing?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

Or do you think we have what we need and therefore inference we could expect to be really cheap?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Gustav Söderström - How Spotify Thinks - [Invest Like the Best, EP.424]

Or do you think we have what we need and therefore inference we could expect to be really cheap?