Spotify’s Direct Listing

“Martin shouts something, uh, and Daniel mishears it as Spotify and uh immediately googles it, realizes that the domain name is available and thus Spotify.”

“They later, they later try and justify it as like, well, it's a mashup of spot and identify, but no, that's that's not what happened.”

“it's a terrible freaking business. They're always the suppliers have all the leverage.”

“there's a most favored nations clause in the uh in their um agreements where uh basically for Spotify to get a better rate, they have…”

“it's kind of hard for me to believe that Spotify is worth 30 billion dollars.”

“you are assuming, you know, so much growth that you're willing to pay a hundred times the cash flow”

“The the biggest difference is the company doesn't take any dilution.”

“With a DPO, a company doesn't take any dilution and they don't raise any money.”

“From the earliest days, they had an incredibly well converting freemium model.”

“originally it was free uh to listen on desktop, uh, and then you had to pay to go mobile.”

“Discover Weekly playlist, uh machine learning generated, uh algorithmically generated playlist, unique to each user with new songs that they think you'll like”

“It was just one of the playlists available to you, like 70s, 80s, 90s, Discover Weekly.”

“So in 1984, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield needed funds for their ice cream business.”

“raising only 750,000 from 1800 ice cream loving Vermonters.”

“Napster, uh founded in 1999 by the Seans, Sean Fanning and Sean Parker.”

“I'm gonna start coding up a front-end client um for trading files peer-to-peer on the internet. He decides to call it Napster.”

“Sean Parker swore that when he was getting involved with Facebook, they would never go and and give Sequoia a piece of this.”

“They were working on both Facebook, the social network, and Wirehog, the music sharing network, and were going to deploy Wirehog to everyone who had…”

“Daniel, as we said, he started his first uh company in 1996 uh at the age of 13.”

“So after a couple of years, Daniel's making like $50,000 a month and has 25 employees.”

“Ever since Napster, I've dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify.”

“You should build this capability directly into the client using Facebook to connect to authenticate and then leveraging the viral communication channels to spread Spotify…”

“Your margin is my opportunity, even if your margin is very small.”

“Amazon Music Unlimited, which is what you pay for, is cheaper than Apple and Spotify, just as good.”

“are we gonna see more direct listings? Because, you know, if this can be a shift away from the sort of um walled garden of…”

“You have to be known amongst the institutional investor community.”

“During the keynote, Zuckerberg invites Daniel Eck up on stage and announces a major partnership between Facebook and Spotify.”

“So basically overnight, like I mean, literally in 24 hours, they get a million signups uh from this.”

“Uh sure seems like a great call. I mean, they they couldn't do nothing. They had to they had to get liquidity.”

“Hey, and if it does, like Barry McCarthy, the CFO is gonna be hailed as a genius.”