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David Senra: Gustav Söderström, Spotify

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Gustav Söderström is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Spotify, the world's largest streaming platform, with more than 760 million users across 180 countries. He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, founded Kenet Works in 2003 — a mobile community software company acquired by Yahoo! in 2006 — and later co-founded 13th Lab, an augmented reality startup acquired by Facebook's Oculus division. He joined Spotify in 2009 and spent the next 18 years building the product and technology organization from the inside, rising from Chief Product and Technology Officer to Co-President before becoming Co-CEO alongside Alex Norström at the start of 2026. Spotify survived an existential challenge from Apple, which launched Apple Music in 2015 and told its teams internally they would kill Spotify within six months. Spotify's answer was a three-part strategy: a stronger free tier, superior personalization, and ubiquity across non-Apple hardware. All three bets paid out. The throughline in everything both Söderström and Spotify build is a conviction that media should be time well spent. Spotify surveyed users anonymously across major platforms

David Senra: So I texted Daniel Ek this morning. I was like, "Hey, I'm recording with Gustav. You've known him for two decades. Tell me what I should ask him." And he goes, "Ask him to tell you how he prepared for the CEO role. We did something quite unusual." Can you describe what happened? Gustav Söderström: Daniel is very big on preparing. You know Daniel, he's not very rash in his decisions, and so this was one of those decisions as well that I think grew with him for a long time. So, already about three years ago, he asked me and Alex Norström to step up and become co-presidents and…

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