Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
evaluation 10belief 7commitment 4preference 3prediction 2recommendation 1uncertainty 1
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The useful parts, with receipts.
28 published records
“Gustav Söderström Okay. This is why I try to squeeze in seven into two and three. So if we start on product, I think it's well known, but one that I would recommend product people to read is 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer, and Netflix has used a lot. We use a lot. It's just if you're starting out, it's great to have a strategy framework. No strategy framework is right, but having one is better than none. Gustav Söderström Another in the space of mental models and frameworks, I think, is The Complete Investor by Charlie Munger. So, yes, it's about investment, but really it's a bunch of mental models that he uses. And I think the key takeaway is you have a problem, you should always apply three different models to it because what models do is they simplify and reduce dimensionality. The world has probably infinite dimensions and they reduces to maybe three or four. And the risk with that is you happen to get rid of a really important dimension, maybe pandemic diseases or something. But if you use three models that have different dimensions and was reduced in different ways, statistically, and it comes to the same conclusion, even the second model you apply vastly increases your chances that you're right. So that was a good book to read. Gustav Söderström Then I think if we go outside of product, I'm very interested in just science and mathematics. So a few quick ones. The Mystery of the Aleph, an amazing book. Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli on the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality by David Deutch. The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman on the evolution versus truth and that evolution doesn't optimize for seeing the truth, just for fitness. Gödel's Proof, I think, is an amazing book on his incompleteness theorem, that in any axiomatic systems, there will be true statements that can never be proven, which is a weird thing to think about. And then maybe one of my favorites is The Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies that, I think, is lesser known on how information is really just entropy and this concept of information engines, that you can power something by just information and exhaust is also information. That was not a quick list.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“The other really favorite is something you've written about and talked about, which is Duolingo, which I think is both very impressive from a product point of view, the execution and what they've done.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Gustav Söderström I don't know if it's like a Swedish analogy because I thought it was more widely known.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“The important thing is that the underlying hypothesis of, can we help you break out of your taste bubble actually works and then you update the acquisition funnels into that experience. But I think the problem is that you need to get so many things in place to be able to say, "You might get a false negative," just because you didn't do it well or not.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I think maybe one thing that I've tried to do back to clarity and so forth is this thing I mentioned about I'm trying to push a lot for what I call Socratic debate, where the idea is obviously that the best idea wins, not the most senior idea and so forth.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“There's a lot of, I think, paid brand positioning from a Swedish brand named Fjällräven, which I think means arctic fox, which is actually a very popular outdoor brand in Sweden.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Gustav Söderström This is a concept that I think Shishir has used for a long time ever since he worked at YouTube. And the idea is that, roughly, you shouldn't be spending more than 10% of your time planning versus executing or building, which means that if you're working quarterly 10 weeks, you should spend one week planning as we work in six-month increment.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Gustav Söderström So we talked about Succession and it is a recent favorite. So I'll just frivolously take something that isn't recent but is an absolute favorite, which is Halt and Catch Fire, which I think is on FX.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Gustav Söderström Yes, I think Swedish people do it for some reason, apparently others don't.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“It's not telling you what the weather is and what happened in the news and going on and on and on about this band. It is trying to get you to the music and I think that's why it's working because it is working very well for us.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“The thing that didn't work as we intended was when users asked us for this again and again, we took the sum of these things and we put it on Home because people ask so much about discovery and we can see clearly how correlated discoveries with retention on Spotify and so forth.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“The team structure is more traditional, larger teams, less overhead. And we've been specifically working with where in the org do we put the autonomy because the extremes are at the leaves and we were there.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“There was a lot of negative feedback on Twitter on some of that. So let me actually dig into some detail because I think for product people listening to this, this is an interesting lesson that I think few companies talk about because you want talk about everything that went exactly as you thought they would and you don't want to talk about the things that didn't go exactly as you thought they would.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Gustav Söderström So it's almost like you punish yourself, very painful, but also the most exciting things. And I think any product person knows that the easiest, the most straightforward thing to do is to iterate around where you are.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Gustav Söderström But what I told my teams when we went into this, because I've done this a few times, agree to signing, I think there are two fundamentally different types of product development.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Because we have done recall pretty well, people got, I think, reasonably upset when they couldn't do the recall anymore.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Gustav Söderström I think so. In almost all industries, you have this smiling curve concept, where you want to be at the extremes on the smiling curve, and that's where big business opportunities are but not in the middle.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“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.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Gustav Söderström And I think what we're entering now is we're going from your curation to recommendation to generation.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I really like that philosophy. Essentially, it's the idea of strong opinions loosely held.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“No, I was just going to say you've set the record for the most number of books, but it also shows how you've become so insightful and wise just reading books like these. And so I think if people are looking to get to a place that you're at now, I think there's the lesson.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I love this distinction between recommendation and generation. And this begs the question of, there's this trend that I imagine you're seeing of people autogenerating music using artists catalog.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Absolutely. And I think a lot of people are worried about not understanding what's going on there.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“I imagine also with a big launch like this, you can't actually A/B test it ahead of time because of the press season.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Yeah, I love learning that we're doing some really well that we didn't really realize necessarily and maybe we should lead into that more.”
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- Lenny's Podcast
“Spotify is, at this point, the biggest podcasting platform for me specifically and I think globally, and I love using it.”
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- Lenny's Podcast