Gustav Söderström

KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s 2019 alumni profile gives his education as a Master of Science at the school in electrical engineering, with data communications as his field, from August 1997 to February 2003. SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry’s annual report likewise states that he holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from KTH.⁠[1][2]

He recalled being interested in artificial intelligence from childhood and then becoming an engineer; at university in the late 1990s neural networks already existed, but computers were not powerful enough, and a network of only a few nodes slowed to a crawl and gave unimpressive results.⁠[3][3]

On an MIT Technology Review podcast he said that during his years as an engineering student in Stockholm he favored heavier synthesizer music such as Front 242.⁠[4]

KTH’s alumni profile says he graduated in the aftermath of the dot-com crash, when, in his words, it was impossible to get a permanent job; he had not intended to become an entrepreneur and wanted to be an engineer, and he later called the experience a “blessing in disguise.”⁠[1]

The same profile says that while working at Telia Research in 2003 he created a technology that it describes as a predecessor of Snapchat and WhatsApp, and that a hiring freeze that year led him to start his own business. His LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry profile separately lists a period as a master’s-thesis student at TeliaSonera.⁠[1][5]

He founded Kenet Works with a group of friends and KTH students. A KTH news item about the company says it started in 2003 through the school’s then incubator service and was founded by seven Master of Science engineers, most of them from KTH, with Söderström as managing director; Spotify’s annual report says he founded the company, which developed community software for mobile phones, in 2003 and was its chief executive until it was acquired.⁠[1][6][2]

He said smartphones were only beginning at the time while the industry had lost heart after the IT crash and shelved many projects; his idea was to build applications directly into phones, independent of the operators. He also said that the downturn made jobs hard to find but was good timing for realizing a vision, because many talented people were available to join start-ups.⁠[1]

The KTH item says Kenet Works offered mobile community services, including technology that let website visitors chat by mobile phone and “push-to-talk” functions, counted the youth website Playahead as a customer and ran joint projects with the mobile operators 3 and Tele2; its technology had won several awards. The item, which carries no date, adds that Söderström had been named Entrepreneur of the Year by Internetworld “last spring.”⁠[6]

Yahoo! acquired Kenet Works in 2006. The KTH item quotes Söderström as saying that Kenet’s activities would stay in Sweden as a business unit under Yahoo and that the acquisition would let the company pursue its ideas on a much larger scale.⁠[2][6]

Spotify’s annual report states that he was Director of Product and Business Development for Yahoo! Mobile from 2006 to 2009. His LinkedIn profile lists the period as two positions, Director of Product Management and Director of Business Development.⁠[2][5]

Recalling his years at Yahoo, he said that what he mainly learned there was what not to do: by his account the company had four chief executives in about two and a half years, and the senior executives fought one another and withheld information from each other; he concluded then that he never wanted to work in a large organization again.⁠[3][3][7]

Spotify’s annual report states that he joined the company in 2009. KTH’s alumni profile says Spotify had 35 employees when he moved there from Yahoo, while his LinkedIn profile describes the early Spotify as a 30-person Swedish operation. He said he was in his thirties when he joined and never expected the company to grow to thousands of people.⁠[2][1][5][3]

The first Spotify position listed on his LinkedIn profile is Director of portable solutions, followed by VP Products and Chief Product Officer.⁠[5]

He recalled that soon after he joined, Spotify was preparing to enter the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and wanted a deep integration with Facebook; Daniel EkDaniel EkDaniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a co-founder of Spotify, and has served as Spotify’s executive chairman since January 2026. He also co-founded Neko Health with Hjalmar Nilsonne and helped found the investment firm Prima Materia.Open the full entry knew “Zuck” (Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry) at Facebook and simply sent the newcomer there to talk to him and set the partnership up. He cites this as an example of how fully Ek delegated from the start, and said that it has felt like getting a new job almost every year, which is why he has stayed.⁠[3][3][7]

He said that when he arrived in 2009 Spotify already had a large data set of playlists and Erik BernhardssonErik BernhardssonFounder and CEO of Modal.Open the full entry was doing collaborative filtering on what he called the world’s largest Hadoop clusters at the time, which rekindled his interest in machine learning.⁠[3][7]

On mobile, he said that around 2008 a song streamed over a cellular network took about 20 seconds to start and would stutter, and that Spotify then offered its free tier only on computers; the team responded by devising offline sync and other models suited to phones.⁠[3][3]

He described this period on an MIT Technology Review podcast episode published on July 13, 2022: around 2010 he discussed Spotify’s next steps with Daniel Ek and Oskar Stål, and the team then considered recommendations non-core because it felt the product already handled discovery; they later realized that many users wanted to put less effort into finding music.⁠[4]

He said that by 2011 users had created hundreds of millions of playlists and Spotify hired two machine-learning engineers who spent most of a year on collaborative filtering; collaborative filtering alone produced odd results, and combining it with genre data from The Echo Nest improved the recommendations markedly.⁠[4]

Recalling in 2026 why Spotify bought The Echo Nest, he said he had felt the company was not strong enough in deep learning and knew only older methods such as matrix factorization, so it acquired the Boston-based company to be close to MIT and to gain talent in the field.⁠[3][7]

He said early designs such as a Discover page drew little usage, while a personalized weekly playlist proposed during an internal hack week worked better; in the summer of 2015 Spotify launched Discover Weekly, its first fully algorithmic playlist for each user, which reached a billion streams in 10 weeks.⁠[4]

Spotify’s annual report for fiscal 2018 describes him as a startup seed investor who had been an advisor to Tictail since 2013 and was formerly an advisor to 13th Lab. KTH wrote in 2019 that over the previous ten years he had invested in and advised several start-ups alongside his work at Spotify.⁠[8][1]

13th Lab was a computer-vision company. The page of its investor Creandum states that it was founded in Stockholm in 2009 by Oskar Linde, Anders Bond, Petter Ivmark and Johan Gertell, that Creandum backed it in 2012 and that it was acquired in 2014 by Oculus, a Facebook company.⁠[9]

Accounts of his role at 13th Lab differ: Spotify’s annual report for fiscal 2018 calls him a former advisor; KTH’s alumni profile of May 2019 lists 13th Lab among the start-ups he invested in and advised; the Spotify Engineering podcast page, whose episodes are dated March to May 2022, says he “co-founded” it; Spotify’s annual report for fiscal 2025 calls him “founder”; the episode page on the website of David SenraDavid SenraDavid Senra is the founder and host of the Founders podcast, on which he reads biographies of entrepreneurs to discuss starting and running businesses and making personal decisions. He began producing the show in 2016, partnered with Colossus in 2022, and in 2025 launched David Senra, a long-form interview show under his own name.Open the full entry, dated June 7, 2026, says he “co-founded” it; and his LinkedIn profile, as read in November 2026, lists him as Founding Investor.⁠[8][1][10][2][7][5]

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote on December 11, 2014 that Oculus had disclosed its acquisition of 13th Lab and that the financial terms were not disclosed.⁠[11]

AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry launched Apple Music in 2015. Söderström recalled that Apple bought Beats Music and brought in Dr. Dre and Jimmy IovineJimmy IovineJimmy Iovine is a record producer who began as a recording engineer, a record executive and an entrepreneur; he co-founded Interscope Records and, with Dr. Dre, Beats, with which he moved to Apple, where he helped launch Apple Music. He and Dr. Dre also endowed an academy bearing their names at the University of Southern California, and he is an inductee of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Open the full entry; he said people inside Apple were then saying they would finish Spotify off within six months, and that those were hard times in which the team worked very hard.⁠[7][3]

He said Spotify’s strategy then rested on three bets, each a deliberate counter-position to Apple: freemium, on the view that Apple would not do an advertising-supported free tier well; personalization, on the view that Apple, which did not prize data at the time, would struggle with recommendations; and ubiquity, on the view that Apple would favor its own hardware and do poorly on other makers’ televisions and phones. In his view all three bets panned out.⁠[3][3][12]

He also said that Steve JobsSteve JobsSteve Jobs (1955–2011) was a technology entrepreneur, Apple co-founder, NeXT founder, and investor and former CEO of Pixar. His career spanned personal computing, digital music, smartphones and animated films, with an emphasis on product design, user experience and multidisciplinary teams.Open the full entry was the person he looked up to most, and that he both wished Jobs were still alive and remembered that Jobs had tried to finish Spotify off many times.⁠[3][3]

He recalled that DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry used deep reinforcement learning to build the Deep Q-Network, which began beating Atari games; naming Demis HassabisDemis HassabisDemis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur, co-founder of DeepMind and its CEO and that of Google DeepMind from 2010 to 2026, and since then Chair of Google DeepMind, Chief Scientist of Alphabet and CEO of Isomorphic Labs; a former chess prodigy and game designer, he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction, and has appeared twice on the Lex Fridman Podcast.Open the full entry, David SilverDavid SilverDavid Silver is a computer scientist who led reinforcement learning research at DeepMind for many years, heading the AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero projects and co-leading AlphaStar. A professor at University College London and Fellow of the Royal Society, he left Google DeepMind in 2026 to focus on Ineffable Intelligence, the company he founded.Open the full entry and the whole DeepMind team, he said one could see such networks handling more and more complex problems. Struck by this, he went home and began coding again, implementing recurrent neural networks, LSTMs and GRUs for himself during vacations and in the evenings, while Spotify’s recommendation work was still what was then called machine learning.⁠[3][3][7]

He recalled that the Transformer paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” came out, as he remembered it, in June 2017, that he read it within the first few days, was blown away by it and talked about it to anyone who would listen; Spotify then began investing fairly aggressively in that direction.⁠[3][7]

He said the team extrapolated that exponential curve, concluded that computers would eventually be able to talk with people and prepared early: before large language models were good enough to write the script, Spotify bought Sonantic, a company that could synthesize voice very cheaply, because generating a few minutes of voice a day for hundreds of millions of users at market prices would have bankrupted it.⁠[3][3][7]

He said his interest in AI is personal and that Spotify is his excuse to get as close as possible to the philosophical side of AI, to “what it means to be a human.”⁠[3]

Spotify’s annual report for fiscal 2018 lists Söderström as Chief Research & Development Officer, gives his age as 42 and describes him as overseeing the product, design, data and engineering teams and responsible for product strategy.⁠[8]

The report discloses total compensation of $5,424,253 for 2018, made up of salary of $332,963, option awards of $5,000,341 and other compensation of $90,949, of which $88,729 was contributions to a Swedish retirement plan.⁠[8]

Looking back in 2026, he said that at Spotify’s first Investor Day in 2018 investors asked how the company could win against rivals with walled gardens and distribution advantages, and how it could win when every service licenses the same catalog; he described the strategy of the time as counterpositioning, and his answer was to use freemium to reach global scale and then to out-innovate on the product.⁠[12]

KTH named him its Alumnus of the Year 2019. The school’s profile, published on May 13, 2019, gives his age as 42 and his family as a wife and two children, and notes that Spotify by then had more than 3,500 employees.⁠[13][1]

In the profile he said his interest in technology keeps him learning: on weekends and evenings he takes free online courses from universities around the world, and he studied machine learning through MIT and StanfordStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry lectures and lab sessions on YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

The fact box lists running and martial arts as his brain training; he said research had proved that running for 45 minutes three times a week has the same effect as taking antidepressants, and that martial arts train the brain in the same way as playing chess.⁠[1]

On technology and society, he said people are overconfident that technology can solve every problem and that it also creates problems, such as social networks that make people feel unwell; he regards screen-time limits as a tool and has set them for his own children, while holding that screens also carry much constructive content and that people should be “techno optimists.”⁠[1]

He also said that job security is drummed into people but has proved not entirely dependable even at large companies, and that running one’s own business allows a person to make their own decisions and can be combined with an ordinary job. The profile also links to a lecture he gave at MIT, “A brief history of Spotify.”⁠[1]

The show’s page on Spotify Engineering states that the podcast “Spotify: A Product Story” is hosted by Gustav Söderström, who talks with guests from music, business and technology about product strategy and product development, drawing on lessons from Spotify. The page lists 10 episodes numbered 00 to 09, dated on the page from March 11 to May 5, 2022, on subjects including competing with piracy, how to charge, human versus machine, hardware, the bet on podcasts and when to build or buy.⁠[10]

The Stockholm School of Economics’ events calendar lists a tech talk on November 10, 2022 in the form of a Q&A with him; the page gives his title as Spotify Chief R&D Officer (CPO/CTO).⁠[14]

On January 23, 2023, Daniel Ek announced an organizational change in a note to all employees: Söderström would take the role of Chief Product Officer, overseeing most engineering and product work; Alex Norström would become Chief Business Officer, overseeing the business areas and taking over content, advertising and licensing work; and the two would serve as co-presidents, helping Ek run the company day to day. The same note announced a reduction of about 6% of the workforce and the departure of Dawn Ostroff.⁠[15]

He recalled that Ek asked him and Norström to step up as co-presidents and take over the day-to-day running of Spotify while Ek remained chief executive and gradually let go; over the next three years the two ran the company’s full profit-and-loss statement and balance sheet week by week and month by month.⁠[3][3]

The show hosted by Lenny Rachitsky published an interview with him on May 21, 2023; its page gives his title as Co-President, CPO, and CTO at Spotify. The topics listed include his background and the roles he has held at Spotify, why he launched a podcast, how product teams should think about AI and AI-generated music, how Spotify organizes its product teams and why it uses a centralized model, the big bet of redesigning the app’s interface and what was learned, his “10% planning time” method, and what is next for Spotify’s podcasting.⁠[16]

On September 30, 2025, Spotify announced that Söderström, then co-President and Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Alex Norström, co-President and Chief Business Officer, would become co-CEOs effective January 1, 2026, reporting to Daniel Ek, who would become Executive Chairman; the two would also join the Board of Directors, subject to shareholder approval. The company said the change formalized the way it had operated since 2023, with the co-presidents largely leading strategic development and operational execution.⁠[17]

In a letter to employees the same day, Ek wrote that he had full confidence in Gustav and Alex, who had proved themselves repeatedly and were ready to lead the company into its next stage. Woody Marshall, the lead independent director, said in the announcement that the Board had worked with Ek on the leadership structure for several years and that each of the two had more than 15 years with the company.⁠[18][17]

In a joint statement in the announcement the two said they had worked together for a long time; when they became co-presidents nearly three years earlier they had charged their teams with building “the best and most valuable experience available anywhere,” and that ambition had not changed; they bring different experiences and perspectives, they said, but share a strong bias to action.⁠[17]

Music Business Worldwide’s account of the question-and-answer call with analysts that day has Söderström calling AI a “macro wind” and saying his top priority was to make it a tailwind that accelerates Spotify; he expected AI to improve recommendations and personalization and eventually to bring new product form factors, compared it with the earlier shift to mobile and said it was probably the most exciting time for product work in 15 to 20 years.⁠[19]

On December 10, 2025, writing under his own name on Spotify’s newsroom as Co-President, CPO, and CTO, he introduced a beta feature, Prompted Playlist: users describe in text the music they want and set rules, and the system builds a playlist from their full listening history since the account was opened; the playlist can refresh daily or weekly, and each song carries an explanation of why it was recommended. The feature opened first to Premium listeners in New Zealand from December 11.⁠[20]

He wrote that this was the first time Spotify had let users steer the algorithm themselves and that the company was moving from learning passively from users to responding to instructions given in their own words; he held that human curation remains central, noting that listeners had created nearly 9 billion playlists, and gave Spotify’s audience as 713 million listeners.⁠[20]

Spotify’s annual report for fiscal 2025 discloses total compensation of $13,897,864 for 2025, made up of salary of $355,000, option awards of $7,188,176, stock awards of $6,250,254 and other compensation of $104,434; $18,733,869 for 2024, including salary of $271,000, a one-time retention bonus of $1,664,000 paid in March 2024 and option awards of $16,718,457; and $14,669,043 for 2023, including salary of $300,000 and option awards of $14,291,007. His salary is paid in Swedish krona, and the 2025 dollar amounts are translated at SEK 9.20 to the dollar.⁠[2]

On May 1, 2025, he was granted 31,133 options with an exercise price of $602.26 and 10,378 restricted stock units. The report shows that during 2025 he exercised 52,031 options, realizing $19,953,251 in value, and that 1,514 restricted stock units vested, worth $972,898.⁠[2]

As of December 31, 2025, he owned 10,394 ordinary shares, less than 1% of the total, and held outstanding options from five grants and 8,864 unvested restricted stock units.⁠[2]

His employment agreement, amended for his promotion to co-CEO, has an indefinite term with a three-month notice period; on termination without cause he is entitled, subject to signing a release, to severance equal to six months of base salary, and on termination within 12 months after a change in control to a lump sum of 12 months of salary; the agreement also contains a nine-month post-termination non-compete. He participates in the Swedish occupational pension plan.⁠[2]

Since January 1, 2026, Gustav Söderström has been Co-Chief Executive Officer and a director of Spotify.⁠[2]

On December 10, 2025, an extraordinary general meeting of Spotify elected him and Alex Norström as B Directors, effective January 1, 2026, for a term ending at the general meeting approving the accounts for fiscal 2025; the annual general meeting of April 15, 2026 elected him a B Director for the period ending at the general meeting approving the accounts for fiscal 2026. The annual report for fiscal 2025 states that as Co-Chief Executive Officer he is responsible for executing the company’s mission and strategy and for co-leading the management team, and gives his age as 49. It also states that after January 1, 2026 the two co-CEOs review the performance of the other executives and make pay recommendations to the people experience and compensation committee, while that committee reviews the co-CEOs’ own performance and recommends their total compensation to the board of directors for approval.⁠[21][22][2][2]

On January 12, 2026, the two co-CEOs published a joint message calling the new jobs a continuation of their more than 15 years at Spotify and setting four priorities for the year: “No Regrets,” a product that leaves people feeling better after each session; using AI to give listeners more control; serving as a research-and-development arm for the creative ecosystem; and “One Team.”⁠[23]

He said the two changed how the company operates after taking over. Ek prefers to talk with many people one-on-one, which he called a “star pattern”; he and Norström chose instead to synchronize the whole company: he broadly runs product and technology and Norström broadly runs business and content, but rather than dividing the work into separate lanes they practice what he calls “synchronized swimming.”⁠[3][3][3]

In practice the two no longer hold separate leadership meetings; instead there is a single meeting every Tuesday lasting about three hours with all of roughly 14 senior vice presidents, in which marketing, advertising, subscriptions and the product and technology functions go through the whole company together, and in which nobody may say “let’s take it offline.” He acknowledged that this is expensive in leadership time but said the benefit is that all of these people share the full chief-executive perspective.⁠[3][3][3][3]

He said that once he had to run a large organization he read a great deal about organizational principles, including Steven Sinofsky, whose thesis as he put it is “you can’t win”; he listed three types, the functional organization, the matrix and the divisional organization, such as Riot Games, which is organized by game. Among organizational models, he said, his choice is closest to Apple’s functional organization, because Spotify builds music, podcasts, audiobooks and more into a single app and its greatest risk is shipping its org chart; in his view a functional organization works only on the trust that comes from long tenure in the leadership, and many of the people reporting to him have worked for him for 14 or 15 years, with an average of perhaps seven or eight.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][7]

He said that by the time of the handover the two knew the business thoroughly and that what remained to be learned was what had been Ek’s responsibility alone, such as public relations, government affairs and being the public face of the company.⁠[3]

Spotify announced on March 3, 2026 that, as part of its 20th-anniversary program, he would hold a conversation on building for the long run at SXSW in Austin on March 13 with the country singer Lainey Wilson and the podcast host David Friedberg.⁠[24]

A Spotify article of March 25, 2026 says that he and Alex Norström welcomed NAVERNAVERNAVER is a South Korean internet company founded by Lee Hae-jin in 1999. It expanded from Korean-language search and portal services into advertising, commerce, digital content, fintech, cloud computing and AI. Its group incubated LINE in Japan and participated in the integration that produced LY Corporation.Open the full entry’s chief executive, Sooyeon Choi, to Spotify’s Stockholm headquarters that week, where the two sides reviewed the early progress of their partnership and set shared priorities for its next phase; he said strong partnerships depend not only on shared ambition but also on how the platforms connect and evolve together.⁠[25]

On May 21, 2026, Spotify held its third Investor Day in New York City, in the company’s 20th-anniversary year and the first led by Söderström and Norström as co-CEOs. In opening the day the two set out four big ideas: monetizing the power-law distribution of users, a shift to multiplayer and interactive experiences, AI and the era of generation, and “Time Well Spent.” Chief Financial Officer Christian Luiga presented targets for 2030 of mid-teens compound annual revenue growth, a gross margin of 35% to 40% and an operating margin above 20%.⁠[26][12]

The scale figures he gave in his remarks were that Spotify operates in 184 markets and has 761 million active users, nearly 300 million of them subscribers; that users have created more than 10 billion playlists; and that the global user base generates 3.4 trillion events and taste signals a day.⁠[12]

Asked whether AI is a tailwind or a headwind, he answered that it is a tailwind: Spotify does not plan to build its own general-purpose frontier large language model, on the view that general reasoning such as coding and mathematics will remain available on the open market and that buying it will stay the most cost-efficient course; the company’s advantage lies in applying general intelligence to its own data on users’ taste, for which it is training what it calls the Large Taste Model, previously the Large Personalization Model.⁠[12]

He divided Spotify’s history into three eras: curation, when users organized music into playlists; recommendation, typified by Discover Weekly; and generation, in which the experience is shaped in real time around each person’s taste, context and intent. He cited Save to Spotify as an example: with agents such as Claude Code, OpenClawOpenClawOpenClaw is open-source personal AI assistant software created by Peter Steinberger: users run its gateway on their own computer and give instructions to an AI agent through chat apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord, and the agent calls tools to carry out tasks. The project was released in November 2025 under the name Warelay, was later renamed Clawdbot and then Moltbot, settled on the name OpenClaw in January 2026 and quickly went viral, while drawing criticism over security risks such as public exposure, malicious plugins, and prompt injection; as of October 2026 it is stewarded by the nonprofit OpenClaw Foundation and open-sourced under the MIT License.Open the full entry or Codex, users turn their own notes, articles and files into individualized content, which he said needs a trusted, private space; he said there is as yet no media player for both public and private content and that he believes Spotify will become one.⁠[12]

On multiplayer features, he said more than half a billion people subscribe to someone else’s playlist, that Jam, which lets people listen together in real time, and collaborative playlists are each used by nearly 50 million people, and that the aim is real-life connection rather than collecting followers or meeting strangers.⁠[12]

He also recalled that at the second Investor Day, in 2022, investors asked whether Spotify could become a good business with solid margins and expand beyond music, and that the answer then was what he called the “Spotify Machine”: extending existing capabilities into new verticals and a new business model, with music, podcasts and audiobooks in one experience.⁠[12]

The recap says that he presented the AI segment with Niklas Gustavsson, VP of Engineering, and lists early results: 9% growth in song saves from Autoplay, a 9% improvement in podcast discovery from Home and nearly 20% more interaction with DJ messages; in that segment he argued that AI is a monetization opportunity and not simply a cost layer, one that can support a tiered pricing model with premium AI-powered experiences and add-ons. The recap adds that 99% of Spotify’s engineers use AI weekly and that more than 73% of code contributions are AI-assisted.⁠[26]

On June 7, 2026, David Senra published a conversation with Söderström on his YouTube channel. Senra opened by saying he had texted Daniel Ek that morning to ask what he should ask, and that Ek suggested having Söderström explain how he prepared for the chief-executive role. The conversation went on, in order, to the co-president years and how the two co-CEOs operate, organizational models and Apple’s functional organization, the “time well spent” product principle and the user survey behind it, fitness and running features, the decision to let users turn video off, and the subscription model.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

Later topics were giving users back control of the algorithm with generative AI, the origins of his interest in AI, his view that a person is their thoughts, the business-model innovation of the Kindle, the earlier competition with Apple Music, the information-filtering agent he built for himself, the trust and efficiency that come with long tenure, how Spotify develops and brings in talent, and what worries him most.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

He said he had worked for Ek for almost 18 years, had had both great bosses and not-so-great ones and counted Ek among the great, and did not think he would work for anyone but Ek again. He described Ek as unlike the typical forceful founder: humble and logical, yet extremely tenacious.⁠[3][3][3]

Senra retold a story of Ek’s: Söderström once took Ek aside and said plainly that Ek, who was then running product himself, was not doing it well; Ek went home thinking he would have to fire him and then decided he was right. Söderström replied that very few people are strong enough to take that kind of feedback. He said he too has long-tenured colleagues who feel free to say to his face that he is wrong.⁠[3][3][3]

He said he is deeply impressed by the Kindle as a product, above all by its business-model innovation: he pointed to WhisperSync, which updates silently in the background, and said its makers struck fixed-cost deals with carriers so that the mobile data needed to download books was included once and for all in the price of the hardware and users did not have to buy a separate plan.⁠[3][3][7]

To offset the drawbacks of long tenure, he said, Spotify runs what he called a “rising stars” program: each year managers nominate some 20 to 30 people, who spend 12 months learning about the problems of different markets such as India, the United States and Germany and sitting down with Norström and with him, which he likened to an internal MBA program; for entirely new skills the company makes acquisitions or hires at a senior level.⁠[3][3][3]

Asked what keeps him up at night, he answered that it is what AI truly means in the limit: he is sure that media habits will change because of AI and that standing still is not an option. He described Spotify’s history as a series of technology waves, first cheap broadband and personal computers, which let streaming displace downloads, then the smartphone; in his view 2015 to 2025 was a stable period that could be extrapolated, the present is again a time when everything changes, and such periods of change are when Spotify has grown the most. He said nobody knows where the change will end up, that this era will have its own Ubers and Airbnbs, and that they may be OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry and Anthropic, or may not be, or may not have appeared yet.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][7]

He said Spotify has long had an internal strategy called “no regrets,” which it only recently began to describe publicly as “time well spent.” It comes from a survey run anonymously through a third party in which users were asked how much of the time they spend on each of the big media platforms they regret afterwards: Spotify had among the lowest regret of the platforms asked about, with Gen Z users feeling good about almost 90% of their time on it, while on several large platforms that he did not name young users regretted close to 60% of their time or more. He said he had assumed that the heavy use of those platforms reflected enjoyment and was shocked by the result.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][7]

He gave an example of paying a price for the principle: after podcasts moved to video, some users, parents in particular, felt video lowered the quality of their time, and Spotify decided to let anyone turn video off and just listen, even though that could reduce engagement. He considers this good business all the same, because almost 90% of the company’s revenue comes from subscriptions and what users pay for each month is the value they feel, whereas a purely advertising-based model is driven to maximize time spent at any cost.⁠[3][3][3][3]

He said Spotify could be said to have lucked into starting with music, which most people regard as an almost unequivocal good and which nearly everyone listens to, a wider audience than social networking; he added that he did not think it was an accident, and that the company came to realize it was bringing people a lot of joy.⁠[3][3][3]

On expanding into new categories, he said Spotify built podcasts into the same app instead of a separate one because it judged that the hardest problem was distribution and not the product experience: there were already a number of very good podcast apps, yet Apple Podcasts still had about 98.5% of usage. He added that podcasts and audiobooks were both a business opportunity and long-form content he considers good for the world, and that the size of the audiobook market in Sweden gave the company more conviction.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

He said almost 70% of Spotify’s users work out with it and that the company is investing more in fitness; as an example, he wants a user to be able simply to give Spotify the pace they want to run at and have the system find music in their taste at the matching tempo, adjust its speed, mix it into a playlist and overlay coaching commentary.⁠[3][3][3][3]

He said generative AI could become the most addictive algorithm ever built but is a dual-use technology, and that Spotify has chosen to use it to hand control back to users: the system uses large language models to summarize what it believes a user’s taste to be, and the user can correct it in plain words. He summed up generative AI as computers finally understanding English, so that where only about a million developers on GitHub could once talk to computers, everyone now can, and described his present mission as giving consumers back control over these algorithms.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

On whether most users really want such control, his answer was that everything follows a power law: about 1% of people create, 9% curate and 90% consume, and the curating work of the few benefits everyone else, just as Spotify’s recommendations were first built on playlists that users had carefully put together.⁠[3][3][3]

He said Spotify had launched Save to Spotify a few weeks before the interview and now supports personal podcasts that only the user can hear. He uses agents himself to combine his own documents, the things he needs to prepare for and his interests across services into a personal audio briefing on what is happening in the world, and has the agent filter out “rage bait,” “clickbait” and politics. He called this practice of deciding ahead of time what to consume “premeditated media,” and said he gets captured by what is in front of him like anyone else: his own weakness is road-rage videos, which he can watch for hours.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

He said his personal briefing kept recommending David Senra’s episode with Evan SpiegelEvan SpiegelEvan Spiegel is an American entrepreneur who, while a student at Stanford University in 2011, developed the disappearing-photo app Snapchat with Bobby Murphy and others, and has served since 2012 as Chief Executive Officer of its parent company, Snap Inc. Snap went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017 with non-voting shares; he has made a long-running bet on the augmented reality glasses Spectacles and Specs.Open the full entry, that he listened to all of it and that he was thinking of borrowing one of its framings: there used to be all the ideas but limited resources, and now there are all the ideas and all the resources.⁠[3][7]

He described being a child who thought a great deal about problems: after hearing that nearly all the atoms in the body are replaced about every seven years, he reasoned that a person is neither their atoms nor merely the structure of those atoms, since thinking itself reshapes the brain, and concluded that a person is their thoughts, a pattern of information processing. He said the idea unsettled him at first and later comforted him, because thoughts can be passed on to one’s children, mentioning also the idea he tied to Ray KurzweilRay KurzweilRay Kurzweil is an American inventor, author and futurist and a principal researcher at Google. He was the principal inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, omni-font optical character recognition and the CCD flatbed scanner, and is known for Kurzweil synthesizers and speech recognition systems; in books such as The Singularity Is Near he predicted that artificial intelligence would reach human level by 2029 and that humans would merge with machine intelligence around 2045 (the “Singularity”), making him a leading figure of techno-optimism and transhumanism, while his predictions have also long drawn criticism.Open the full entry that thoughts transferred to a computer would let a person live forever, and that this is what first drew him to AI.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][7]

In the interview he said he was 50 and had done many interesting things in his life, and that a person has to work out what to spend their life on: he wants to do something he feels good about and proud of, and in his view people feel that way only when what they do is truly in service of others.⁠[3][3]

When Senra called him a brown belt, he corrected him that he is a blue belt and added that there are many people who could choke him out.⁠[3]

He said he listens mostly to EDM, has tried to get back into classical music and would like even more biographies; he described himself as very passionate about books and about running.⁠[3][3][3]

Senra mentioned in the conversation that a few months earlier the two had raced cars in Sweden with Daniel Ek and others and had lunch together during a break; Söderström said he was happy to have lost to a woman in the group who was an excellent driver.⁠[3]

There is no single right organizational model, and each is good at some things and poor at others; work out what matters most to the company, optimize for that and accept being average at the rest (video at 15:30).⁠[3]

Information that seems irrelevant to one’s own job becomes relevant over a longer time scale: having product people understand how the company makes money is an investment (video at 8:25).⁠[3]

Principles cost something: having set them, a company has to live by them and accept their consequences (video at 32:29).⁠[3]

Technology is a necessary ingredient of change but not a sufficient one; things really change when a new technology is married to a new and often contrarian business model (video at 50:34).⁠[3]

For colleagues to disagree with a leader openly they must be sure there will be no consequences, and that trust can only be built over a long time of working together (video at 1:04:49).⁠[3]

Having optimized for one thing, mitigate its side effects: an organization that prizes long tenure has to guard against a lack of new people and a slow career ladder (video at 1:06:59).⁠[3]

The world will change, and periods of change carry risk but are also when market share moves; his principle is always to be first and to adopt the change first (video at 1:12:30).⁠[3]

Spotify announced its third-quarter results on October 22, 2026: 788 million monthly active users, 306 million subscribers, total revenue of €5.0 billion and operating income of €672 million. Söderström, as co-CEO, said in the release that Spotify is in one of the few categories that stand to thrive in the agentic age: agents excel at taking care of things people would rather not do, whereas entertainment is the opposite, since nobody asks an agent to “summarize a song” for them, and the point of getting rid of chores is to free up more time for the things people enjoy.⁠[27]

As of November 2026, 20VC’s team page lists Gustav Söderström in its 20Product Partners group, and his card there reads “Co-President, CPO & CTO” and “Spotify.”⁠[28]

As of November 2026, his LinkedIn profile gives his current position as Co-CEO, CPO & CTO at Spotify and his location as Sweden. In the profile’s summary he calls Spotify his life’s mission and says he took part in its growth from a small Swedish company challenging the download model into the global leader in streaming; he also writes that he is passionate about start-ups and early-stage company building, has been a chief executive from founding through acquisition and is an early-stage investor.⁠[5]

He writes there that after his family, technology is his true love and science his religion, and that when he is not with his children he spends his free time on computer vision, machine learning, modern philosophy, running and martial arts.⁠[5]

Spotify: Official website: https://www.spotify.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][23]

20VC: Official website: https://20vc.fund/ (opens in a new window).⁠[28]

X: Public account: https://x.com/GustavS (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gustavsoderstrom/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

“Spotify: A Product Story”: Podcast page: https://engineering.atspotify.com/podcasts/spotify-a-product-story (opens in a new window).⁠[10]