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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And the other thing I've tried to push as a thesis is that I'm a big fan of Socratic debate. I'm amazed, like many other people, how far The Greeks and the Romans came with just discussion, even though they didn't have science, just reasoning. Strong reasoning is very useful. So I try to push this provocative line of talk is cheap, so we should do a lot of it.
That's a counter to like moving fast and breaking things. It's so cheap to talk, so we should actually do a bit more of it. It took the Greeks to the concept of the atom. So we do a lot of talking and ideation that is quite structured. And I do that with my leadership team and often the leadership team sort of plus one. which means the VP layer and sort of the director plus.
And I have a lot of time just for discussing concepts. Back to one of my heroes in life, David Deutsch, his book, The Beginning of Infinity and the Fabric of Reality shaped me quite a lot. And he talks about something called good explanations. And he has a list of what a good explanation is. It obviously needs to be falsifiable and so forth. But it also needs to have reach. It needs to scale.
An OK explanation explains this phenomenon, but it doesn't scale to other phenomenon. It doesn't scale up and down. Really good explanation scales from explaining how the Earth works to the solar system to the planets. But it's also very hard to vary, which I think is often underestimated. If you have an explanation, you can switch it out for another explanation that explains the same thing.
If you explain the weather using gods, you can switch out this god for that god. It's probably not a good explanation. It needs to be very hard to vary. If you vary it, it doesn't explain it anymore. The last thing he says is that explanations should not just be predictive. That's not an explanation. That's a model. An explanation needs to explain why. So I try to push my teams.
Even if something works in an A-B test, I tend to say, I don't want to launch it until you have a good theory of why it works. Because if you figure out the why, it's the difference between pattern recognition and actually understanding something. Pattern recognition is useful. That's called seniority. I love people with good pattern recognition.
But if they can explain why it works, it scales to the entire org. Other people can use that knowledge. It's much, much more valuable. So those are some of the concepts that I've tried to put into the org over time. So I think that's important because that shapes the culture. Then we have the structured process, which is we execute for six months at a time.
We have something called a bets process, where All the VPs, which is about 14. So one of the benefits of Spotify is they're so small that all the VPs, the entire company can fit in one room. And we meet three hours every Tuesday. So the company is completely synchronized for good and bad. And we can talk about that later.
But so every six months, these VPs, they pitch, literally pitch, as if we were a VC and they were a startup. The bets that they think the company should do and why. It's very much like a startup process. You don't get to use the fact that Gustav or Alex or Daniel may like you. This is like a VC meeting. You have to convince us. So they pitch.
Then me and the other co-president, Alex Nordstrom, we decide based on these pitches, a global stack rank. This time we have 44 bets. That's usually between 30 and maybe 50. We stack rank them from one to 44 and we go out to the org and say, now try to resource this. And they start from the top and then maybe they get to 30 and say, this is what we can do in the next six months.
And then they commit to those things and we start executing. And it's a good mix of bottoms up innovation where you leverage not just Daniel, not just me and Alex, but all the VPs and the layers below to come up with good ideas because they're closest to the user. But then there is global synchronization. We stack rank them, make sure that they fit a single strategy.
Then it's back to the org and they commit. As I think you know, you're going to be much better at delivering something if you were the one who said, I can do this. If your boss said, you can do this. So that's the process. But leading up to that, we have something called a prototyping phase. So the previous six months, we prototype everything.
in the combination of Figma and increasingly Gen AI tools, what Spotify should look like after the next six months or could look like. And this prototype also helps synchronize the entire company. What I found previously was that when people submitted these bets, everyone had in their mind what their great feature would be.
You start building and then down the line, you realize that you are not actually aligned. And then you get a lot of fighting towards the end of the cycle. where this thing doesn't work with that thing, and things don't work out so well. What I've tried to do now, together with Alex Nordstrom, we synchronize the entire company. Alex and I don't have our direct reports team.
We meet as a single team three hours every Tuesday. And we try to use the fact that we're small as an advantage instead of as a disadvantage versus our competitors, who are very, very large companies. And so we prototype everything upfront. So all the so-called, quote unquote, fighting
happens before you actually commit to doing something and you have something you can hold in your hand say this is what spotify would look like if we pull this off so that's a combination of cultural input and then a very structured process for actually making it work
I have so many questions about process. The first is how that three-hour meeting on Tuesday works. What is the structure of that meeting?
It's called the E-team, execution team. So it's very focused on execution of the company. And the idea is that if you have five-day working weeks, there's never on average more than two and a half days before you, if you're blocked on something, can escalate to me, Alex, and all the other VPs. So the idea is you should never be blocked more than max two and a half days.
Because we run this synchronized ship, If you're blocked, it gets very expensive because everyone else is downstream of you. So if you're running a synchronized operation the way we're doing, escalation processes are very important and resolution is very important. So a big part of that meeting is people say, we're off track here.
I'm dependent on this man or woman over there who hasn't done what they said. And the beautiful thing about being able to have all the VPs in the same room is So many meetings that I'm sure you've been in, people say, okay, we'll take that offline. I'll talk later. And what we said is you're not allowed to say the word offline or later because that person is in the room.
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