Daniel Ek: prediction

Transcript context

…They use OpenAI, too. Exactly, to do that. That means that your AI model has to be a lot more sophisticated, and that still adds costs. I think the best case scenario, I was looking at this very old data. What I believe at the time of Facebook's IPO, it was something like the cost for Facebook to onboard a user was a dollar a user or something like that in hardware cost and all that stuff, basically, to have lifetime value of a customer. At that time, obviously, the monetization wasn't as advanced. That was what was burning cash for quite a while. Eventually, their growth rate probably slowed down enough where their monetization started kicking in and scaled up enough. Those two effects took out each other and they became very profitable. If you look at it now, I don't know what the cost would be. If I were to start a social media company today, the cost may be an order of magnitude more because of all the other things you now have to do. The ad platforms are way more sophisticated that you have to build. The moderation tools are way more sophisticated. The good news is, you may then come back to this and say, well, was that a mistake then? We knew a lot about that going in, and we weren't entirely new. It wasn't like we were starting an ad business from scratch. You weren't with Facebook for a long time.…

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