Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. I think it'll even outdo Discover Weekly. It is really cool, but we had to be super intentional about it because we knew that it was an area where we had to think through the consequences of this because it will be highly scrutinized. As you can imagine, one of the benefits of choosing to do it for music and not for podcasting was obviously that it would have been horrible if we somehow summarized or said something based on a podcast that wasn't safe or culturally attuned to say. Yet with music, it's the primary candidate, plus it's the one where we have a huge audience listening in the background every day. They really want more context. My point being is, understanding when to do which and understanding that both of these cultures are perfectly fine, but just being very intentful about when you're choosing to do what, having the right mental models, and not becoming half-assed in everything, but actually becoming really good at what makes you you. I would say, the probably other thing that's been hugely important and that I wish more people talked about, is there are not many of us, but there are a few companies like Spotify, which, in a way, has been heavily influenced by Silicon Valley, but we are not Silicon Valley first. That notion of being on the side, watching, and iterating in a corner, Spotify is definitely not the overnight success. It's been asleep for many, many years. When you started the common wisdom was, anybody who's starting an online music thing, it will die. I think you sought advice from hundreds of people who all told you, don't do this, this category is toxic. You're exactly right. But also, because we were doing this in Europe for the first few years, we started getting some real first learnings. I think this is really key because if you think about the ones we talked about as iconic companies—the Apples, the Amazons of the world—we all tend to forget a few things. One is that many of them are quite old at this point. They're 20-plus years old, so they've had time to refine their cultures and get that right. The other thing is they almost started in empty ecosystems. Amazon, sure, there was Microsoft, but they started an internet company in Seattle, where there was a software company that was really big, but it's not the same culture. They didn't start it in Silicon Valley. I like to believe that that culture became very distinct also by having to figure out its own things from first principles and from learning, rather than just being able to gather through osmosis. That might have been going slower in the beginning to then go faster, but I think has been hugely important for Spotify journey. I feel like we're just right now getting into our own of, what is our culture in a very unique way? That is probably the most exciting thing for me at the moment, still, being here at Spotify for 17 years.…

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