Gustav Söderström, Spotify

**David Senra** (0:02)
So, I texted Daniel Eck this morning. I was like, hey, I'm recording with Gustav. You've known him for two decades. Tell me what I should ask him. And he was asking to tell you how he prepared for the CEO role. We did something quite unusual. Can you describe what happened?

**Gustav Söderström** (0:17)
Daniel's very big on preparing. You know Daniel, he's not very rational in his decisions. And so, this was one of those decisions as well that I think grew with him for a long time. So, already about three years ago, he asked me and Alex Norström to step up and become co-presidents and sort of start to run the day-to-day of Spotify for him. He was still the CEO. And so, he's been gradually giving us more and more rope to run the business day-to-day and week-to-week and month-to-month. So, when it actually came to sort of taking over CEO's, we already knew that part by heart. And we had run it for three years, the full P&A and balance sheet and so forth. And then, there was still a lot of new stuff to learn. You know, all the stuff that was Daniel's responsibility alone. You know, PR, government, being the public face of the company. But we were very well prepared for taking over the business. I think that's unique with Daniel. I worked for Daniel for almost 18 years.
And I don't think I'll work for anyone except Daniel again. I've had both great bosses and not so great bosses. Daniel is the great one. And he's incredibly delegating. You know, already from the start, I remember when I joined Spotify, was back in 2008, 2009
And then we were going to go to the US and Daniel knew Suck at Meta, then Facebook. And we wanted to do this pretty deep integration with them.
And yeah, I was new on the job at Spotify.
And Daniel just said like, can you just go there and like talk to Suck and Meta and like, or Facebook at the time, and like set this up. I'm like, that's a lot of trust for someone who's new. He's always been like super delegating. And that is also, I think, why I've stuck around for almost 18 years, because you get so much responsibility. Like you get a new job almost every year. And so this like co-CEO or co-president partnership that he started three years ago was one of those journeys. Where Alex and I got to step up and try taking on the full business. We actually changed completely how we run the company from the way Daniel runs it.

**David Senra** (2:27)
Say more about that.

**Gustav Söderström** (2:28)
When it comes to organization models in themselves, this is not something I came up with. I think Stephen Sinovsky said this a bunch of you just can't win. There is no organizational model.
There are many and they all work. Like Amazon is organized in a certain way, trillion dollar company, Apple in another way, also trillion. Elon does his thing, also produces trillion dollar companies. There is no right way. You just have to pick one that fits your personality. I actually think organizations are quite based on personalities. Daniel has a very specific personality, I think.
He is not the typical, I mean, you know him well, but he's not the typical alpha male founder, which I think is one of the reasons why he's so successful in this type of business. Because if you think about what Spotify is, yes, it's a technology company doing sort of hardcore technology innovation, but it's also a media company working in an industry with a bunch of first music labels and then book publishers and podcast publishers, some of these very, very big personalities in the media business as you can imagine. So he needed to be able to both rally a team and build world-class technology, but also get all of these people with the big personalities to work together and get to do something that they didn't want to do individually and not as a group. And I still don't understand exactly how we managed to get all of these people to do sort of what he wanted. But it certainly wasn't through like alpha male force. It was through not being threatening, being very logical.
He's very humble, but I think maybe most Americans specifically can mistake humbleness for weakness. It's the opposite. He's insanely tenacious, insanely tenacious. He just never gives up.
So he has a very specific leadership style and that shaped the company. And as I said, there are a bunch of incredible advantages to his leadership style. One thing that I think, you know, that I choose to do differently is Daniel loves to talk in a star pattern, one-on-one with many people. So he would talk to me about something, separate meeting them with Alex Norström about something, the same thing, but from the business angle. And then maybe with PR and finance, he just talked in a star pattern. He doesn't like to have meetings, everyone in the room.