Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…Gustav Söderström Exactly. You have to expose your technology to others. You have to maintain those APIs and they have to be very structured because otherwise the whole thing would collapse as everyone's supposed to compete because there are no incentives. You have to centrally force that. And interestingly, even though theoretically then they're the worst position to have a structured platform, I think, because they forced it so hard, they were the ones who did Amazon Web Services because they had such hard defined APIs because of this rule that it was easier for them to turn it inside out and expose it the rest of the world. Whereas if you look at someone like Google, I think they struggled more with externalizing their APIs maybe because it is so friendly and soft. So they didn't need as hard APIs on the inside because there was no competition. People could just go into each other's code. Gustav Söderström So it's interesting anecdote around it, but the main point is you're faster there, but it's going to be hard to corporate. And so you will see something like maybe exaggerating a bit. Sometimes you'll see multiple search boxes on the same page from different teams. And this has been true in Spotify, by the way, as well. You've seen multiple toasters on the Now Playing view coming up from different teams because they're working. When we were in the autonomous mode, everyone running. And then ... So you get the benefit of speed, but you get the drawback of shipping your org chart and shipping complexity to the end user. But clearly, that's been the right choice for Amazon because they're a trillion-dollar company. But then on the other spectrum, you have something like Apple who's also a trillion-dollar company. So clearly, both models work, where you would never see two search boxes from the same team popping up on an iPhone. That is centrally organized by something that is close to single individual. Gustav Söderström So they are instead in what is probably the world's biggest largest functional org, they're doing as much. If you think about what goes into the Apple, I mean, they certainly do everything we do. They have music service, podcast service, audiobooks, and they have a billion other services. So it's not like they have an easier problem. And yet they build something that feels more like it was built by a single developer for a single user. So they centralize and they have this bottlenecking function that everything has to go through and be decided how it fits with everything else. And so that has the benefit of the user experience being simpler and not shipping the org chart and increasing complexity. But it also has the drawback of speed without having facts on it. I've heard people working at Apple have said, "Yeah, it took seven years to get that thing to market," because you just had to wait in the pipeline. Gustav Söderström So you have these extremes. And I think the most interesting example, I think, "Yeah, it took seven years to get that thing to market," because you just had to wait in the pipeline. Gustav Söderström So you have these extremes. And I think the most interesting example, I think, to think about is when you double click the power button on an iPhone, the Apple Pay comes up. That decision, how did that happen? You can imagine that all the services team would like to pop up when you double click that button. And so someone had to decide, should music come up, should payments come up, should something else come up? And so they have a different structure there. And on that spectrum of centralized versus decentralized, because of our strategy, which is we're a single application, trying to add or not trying to, we have added multiple types of content with actually very different business models on the backend, rev shares and royalties and book deals and so forth into single user experience. That is our strategy. We think the user experience in keeping that simple is the most important thing. Gustav Söderström So we've chosen more of the centralized model, where these different vertical businesses, if you think about it, the music business, podcast, audiobooks business, they have it to go through a single recommendation organization because that's another problem. Which one do you recommend to which user? Should be a book or podcast or music? And how do you weigh them against each other? And also the user interface could easily get incredibly complicated if everyone built their own UI. The music team built their UI and then someone added features on top. So that's how we chose to optimize. But it is based on our strategy and I think both models work. This episode is brought to you by Eco. Last month, Eco users earned an average of $84 in cashback rewards. How? With Eco, the future of personal finance. Eco is the update to a misaligned financial system. Providing an app that works just like your bank but removes almost all of the middleman, helping even the best money optimizers optimize in less time automatically. What if you earn rewards for paying your rent or got rewarded for ordering food and shopping online or even earn rewards for saving each month? And then imagine if you got rewarded again just for getting rewarded. With Eco, you can spend at some of your favorite merchants and automatically get 5% cashback, plus Eco's APY rewards look more like $80, not 80 cents. And then there are Eco points, the world's first open reward system. You earn them whenever you do almost anything in the Eco app. Eco is working to make these points the most rewarding points ever. So it pays to be early. Sound too good to be true? Go to eco.com/lenny, sign up for an onboarding and find out why it isn't. Lenny's Podcast listeners who attend an Eco welcome session will get an exclusive 4% APY on deposits over $1,000. Learn more at eco.com/lenny, that's E-C-O.com/lenny. It's interesting these two examples you gave, Apple and Amazon, they're two of the biggest companies in the world and they're like at the extremes of these two into the spectrum. And it's interesting, most companies are somewhere in the middle. I wonder if there's just a benefit to being in an extreme and that ends up being really important.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.