Maya Prohovnik: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think that the downside of Daniel's advice, so one of the things he said to us, he was literally say no to all the meetings. You're going to get invited to all these off sites and meetings and everyone's going to want to meet you guys and they're going to want you to come to all of these events and whatever. And he was like, just keep being Anchor. Just keep doing what you're doing for at least the next year. Don't worry about what Spotify's doing. And on the one hand, of course, we loved that as startup people we're like, cool, we're going to get to stay us within this larger organization. But the downside that we didn't really realize until a year later was that we weren't really able to build relationships. We had some culture problems where our team started to feel like because they weren't part of Spotify, they had some existential, they didn't feel attached to the work that we were doing. And so for a year we operated on our own. We moved really quickly, we were able to get a lot done, but then I think our next phase had to be really deeply incorporating into Spotify. And so we stopped calling our team Anchor internally, we started collaborating more with other teams. And I think that is the necessary trade-off is the more deeply you're embedded, the slower things are going to go. But I think that has been really amazing for making sure that our team actually felt like a part of the larger mission that Spotify was doing. And the one other thing I'll say that I found pretty striking. So, Spotify, as you know, did a lot of podcast acquisitions soon after the Anchor one. And so I got to know a lot of the other founders and early employees who have been acquired by Spotify and something that I've found with them and just with other acquired founders who I've talked to since, I don't know, I feel like people don't talk about this enough publicly. Maybe people are somewhere and I just haven't seen it. I think that people who get acquired, especially founders, actually go through a relatively deep depression and existential crisis after getting acquired. And I never would've thought, when you're talking to people about getting acquired, it sounds like such an obvious positive. Like you said, it's like this amazing positive exit and it was objectively so good for our team and for us and for our users, and I think for the industry. And I personally did not expect to go through that. Because I was like of course you want an exit, that's what you're working towards that whole time that you're a startup. And I've talked to a lot of these founders and I think it is a process I think that everyone has to go through because either you decide I'm going to stay here and I'm going to do this for a long time and I can make this work for me. Or you're like, I'm just a startup founder and this doesn't really work for me and I'm going to go do my next thing. stay here and I'm going to do this for a long time and I can make this work for me. Or you're like, I'm just a startup founder and this doesn't really work for me and I'm going to go do my next thing. And so I think to some extent some of the things we were talking about, I think do help shake out whether people actually want to make those investments and figure out how to make things work at a big company. But I think the other thing that I've found is just I think there isn't enough support for that transition. And I think that for me, I've definitely landed on the side of, I love working at Spotify. I now am so excited to be part of a large organization and building things at this scale, but I really would've loved to been able to talk to someone about it or understand that there were other people going through that kind of thing. So I don't know if you want an example of how it's not all rainbows and sunshine, I definitely think there were some dark times there and I've since learned everyone goes through that just because I think just by definition, all the reasons that you start a company, that means your personality is someone who wants to be having that direct impact and having your own ownership and being able to make things move quickly, and that is just so different once you join a large organization. Yeah, and those are amazing examples. I think what's interesting with startup life is eventually if things work out well, you'll either end up working for a larger company, that's a likely scenario if things tip go great or you're running a public company, which is also extremely painful and stressful.…

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