Gustav Söderström
speaker
294 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Gustav Söderström’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We also betted a lot on celebrities and they are celebrities, but they're not always good podcast hosts. And the podcast hosts that were really good, they grew up through this organic system. So there are two ways to always be right. One is to always guess right. The other is to just change your mind whenever you're wrong.
So we decided to change our mind and say, this looks like the age of syndication. Creators actually want to be everywhere. They create a video or they create music. They want to be everywhere. Okay. Let's embrace that. In music, we were always a platform. We never played with exclusivity. We said we want the maximum catalog. Books, we're doing maximum catalog.
Let's just embrace that in podcasts as well. So we pivoted strategy, saved us a lot of cost, which is part of why we're doing well. And it's also improved the catalog greatly. And now we're on a really good track. trajectory with our podcast viewing. So it was an example of bad strategy. And I think the important thing is to admit it and change your mind.
The real cost is when you try to defend your past decisions.
What things do you do outside of Spotify in your life that most prepare you or make you capable to do the best job that you can in Spotify?
I think the world is moving very fast. So a lot of my time is just trying to keep up with what is happening. I was on a vacation in Lisbon with my family recently, and I spent a lot of time with them, seeing Lisbon, which is a beautiful city. But then I asked them for one day off from work and off from the family to just indulge myself.
This time I was going back to trying to code a bit, use all these new tools, stay on top of what's happening. Sometimes it's reading physics or math or something. It's a combination of keeping up with what is happening, which is hard. because it's moving so fast, but also stimulate myself mentally. I have to have something that I'm excited about at any point in time.
And it can be new things like AI and what it would mean, but it can be age-old things that I just didn't know, like learning more about physics or math or something. I've read a lot of philosophy for a while because it's just an interesting area. You think through all the big questions of intelligence and consciousness and all of those things.
And you can spend 10 years there just reading all of that. And now I feel capped out a little bit. When you start reading, you're like, yeah, I'm going to crack this. And then it turns out I didn't crack it. People have been trying to crack consciousness for a while. But it's so deeply interesting. It kept me excited about life for a very long time. I was never a big math person in school.
I was okay, but not great. But I found myself getting very... Excited about math the older I got. As you start reading a bit of philosophy, you get into things like Goethe's incompleteness theorem and constructive mathematics and these things that they're loosely related to work. But they keep you energized. But they keep me energized.
And it actually turns out that a lot of my product people and engineers are deeply interested in these things. So I just have something very interesting to talk to people around me about. And then I do sports. I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu with my kids, which is very rewarding. What has that taught you? humbleness.
You come in and you think you do something and you get absolutely smashed by someone half your size and they're not even sweating. And you're like, okay, technique matters. It's technique. It's leverage. Yeah. The beautiful thing about Brazilian jiu-jitsu is that the bad thing is real. There's a long story behind it, but the net is that Japanese person bought jiu-jitsu to a who fought a lot.
There was one brother that was just underdeveloped versus the others. He was just not very strong, so he could not beat his brothers. So he started taking Japanese jiu-jitsu and figuring out how he could just use physics, just leverage. And slowly, slowly, he started beating all his brothers, and that became Brazilian jiu-jitsu. So it was literally, he had to solve the problem.
He could not use power. I didn't know that. And then this family put up all these competitions. I like it from an evolutionary product point of view. They said, okay, anyone come here. Karate, kickboxing, just try it. Open. They fought in these basements, just evolving the sport, proving that it was real. A lot of martial arts, it's magic and secret, and they never test their skills.
It works very well in practice. The other thing I like about it is that I've done a lot of other martial arts, boxing and Thai boxing and stuff. Those things are great as exercise, but for self-protection, it's not very good. You cannot punch someone in the face. You're going to get sued as protection. The beautiful thing about martial arts, which is called the gentle sport, is you control people.
You constrain them. And you can adapt the level of violence. This is why police use jujitsu and not Thai boxing. Because you can regulate the violence to the other person. You can control them without hurting them. So that's why I think everyone should use it and practice it. It's good both for self-discipline because you get humble.
It's also actually useful and you can use it without harming other people.
People probably don't know this because how would they? But Spotify, you and Daniel especially, have been probably the most influential people and certainly the company on me and how I've thought about building our businesses over time. And a lot of that comes back to the stuff that you don't see.
I purposefully talked about a bunch of it today with you, the bets board, the complexity that's hidden behind a beautiful consumer experience. You were the first person years ago to describe the bets board concept to me. And we've used that very effectively. And so many lessons from Daniel on how to think about what matters to users.
And I think Spotify is not only an incredible product, but it's also one where the product is a reflection of the company behind it.
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