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…ng internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform, where I was able to slice and dice data by device types, country, user stage. Eppo does all that and more delivering results quickly, avoiding knowing prolonged analytic cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your north star metrics like activation, retention, subscription, and payments. Eppo supports test on front end, on the backend, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Eppo at getE-P-P-O.com. That's geteppo.com. And 10X, your experiment velocity. Gustav, welcome to the podcast. Gustav Söderström Thanks for having me, Lenny. Pleasure to be here. It's my pleasure to have you on. So at this point, you've been at Spotify for over 14 years, which is a rare feat in the tech world, and you've held a lot of different roles while you've been at Spotify. Can you just start off by giving us a sense of what these various roles and what you've done over the years at Spotify and then just what are you up to these days? What are you responsible for now? Gustav Söderström So I came into Spotify in early 2009, late 2008. And my job then, I had been an entrepreneur, started some of my own companies in the, back then, very, very early feature phone, smartphone space. So I had a bunch of knowledge there. I had sold the company to Yahoo in the mobile space. I worked there for a while. I came back to Sweden and then I met through a mutual friend, Daniel Ek, the CEO and co-founder of Spotify. And they had built the desktop product already, the free streaming desktop product, and it was amazing and I could try it, but they needed someone to figure out what to do with mobile. And because I had been an entrepreneur in that space, I got that job. Gustav Söderström So my job was to head up mobile for Spotify and figure out what the mobile offering would be, which was a challenge because, obviously, Spotify desktop was a free on-demand streaming application and back then, specifically with edge networks, you couldn't really stream at all in real time. The performance wasn't there and also you couldn't fund that with an ads model. So it was a product and business model innovation that was a lot of fun. So that's how I started. Then after a few years, I took on all of product development for Spotify. And then a few years later, I actually took on the technology responsibility, the CTO role for Spotify as well. And recently, my official title is co-president of Spotify together with Alex Nordstrom. So we run half of the company each. I run the product and technology side and he runs for the business and content side. So that's the super fast version. Gustav Söderström Aside from getting more responsibilities taking on the technology department, it has been the same job by title. I've always reported to Daniel, but because Spotify's grown so much every six to 12 months, it's been starting at a new company. First, it was sort of a Swedish Nordic challenge and then it was a European challenge and then it was getting into the US and then we became a public company. So it's as if I had jumped around between a lot of jobs actually, even though it was largely the same title and role. Your story makes me think of the classic be careful what you're good at because you end up taking on more and more. And clearly, you've been given more and more responsibility over the years and so clearly things are going well and you're doing well. Shifting a little bit. So you're on my podcast currently. You actually have your own podcast, which was this limited series on the product story of Spotify, which I listened to and loved, and it's surreal to listen to your voice in real time because I've been listening to that recently in preparation for this conversation. Two questions, just what made you decide to launch your own podcast knowing you had a full-time job and a lot going on and the production value for your podcast was very high for what I could tell? And then two, just what did you learn from that experience in terms of the product you ended up a building and just empathizing with the podcast creator side of?…

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