Daniel Ek
Appearances
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So one of the things you obviously have done is, you know, added video to the format. And this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. But what do you think is next for the show when it comes to that? Like, what do you see the big innovation of Acquired will be in the future?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Well, I mean, I think it starts with your audience, right, and knowing your audience. So, like, for instance, we launched audiobooks about a year ago, but the sort of untold story about that audiobooks launch is what happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audiobooks to the service. So they started hacking the system for all these other things.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And when they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts. So podcasts turned out to be the easier medium for us to start with, but eventually we added sort of audio books too. So I think most amazing things tend to start with people kind of suggesting things or maybe even doing things.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So it'd be interesting to kind of like figure out what people are doing in and around Acquired already. And that will probably be your sort of adjacency.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know, to be honest. I think this is probably the biggest thing that surprised me is that the world just keeps evolving constantly. So you talked about video and on Spotify, it's been a huge growth thing. I would have said to you as well, people probably mostly, why would you want to watch any video?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But I think younger consumers, especially, they don't know what the difference is. They just want to feel closer presence to the person. And, I mean, we saw it already with the bloopers, right? It's like, this is fun, what you guys are doing, and people have a relationship to you guys too, hence why so many people are showing up here tonight.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And I think video is just a way to express that, whether or not they're watching the full four hours, or whether they're diving in and out over a particular type of segment. I think just giving the consumer the choice is sort of one of the big things. And that's kind of what we're leaning into as well, is just allowing the creator and the consumer to more directly interact in more novel ways.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, I mean, I think it starts like so many other things. I think Mark and I, we just struck this sort of friendship and we started talking about, you know, the little told story is, if I remember this correctly, I think Mark even pre-Facebook was trying to do a music startup. And then he was like, yeah, this feels like a difficult thing. Wirehug? Yeah, exactly.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And so I think he's like, I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the Valley tried to do a music startup. And so he was definitely passionate about it. And then his idea obviously was a social music product. And, you know, we started talking about it. In the beginning, it started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And I kind of said, well, I don't know that that's... Do you remember how you got introduced?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, well, I got introduced to Mark through Sean Parker. And so Sean kind of said to Suck, like, hey, you got to meet this entrepreneur from Sweden. And I remember Suck at the time was living in a very small house and we went for a barbecue at his house. This is probably... I don't know, 2008 or 9, like one of those things.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And then we kind of struck a friendship and we started jamming on various ideas around how to make music more social. And you weren't even live in the US yet, I don't think. We definitely weren't live. So the sort of secret of Spotify was we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to kind of like it. And I think Sean in particular, he kind of used it as a social currency.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So everyone came to him to kind of try to get. Oh, the invites.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, it was a big, big thing for quite a few years before we launched where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't. Anyway, he got Mark on it, and I think Mark kind of wrote this status update, like, Spotify is so good. And then, you know, everyone's like, how did you get this? This was kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And, yeah, then we started jamming around, like, what a social music product ought to be. And we had this sort of idea, wouldn't it be cool, sort of like with... You know, ICQ at the time where you had these status updates, like, wouldn't it be cool to be able to check out what your friends were listening to?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And we kind of got to work together, built that product, and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Exactly right. So you could see all your friends. It actually still exists in Spotify product on desktop. So you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time. It's one of our more popular legacy features that's been around now for like 13 years.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It's still there. Okay.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Well, I still think Social is hugely important. And for instance, we have we have a product now called jam which allows you to Be with your friends and actually alter what you're listening to at the same time and it's growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world and So it's something that I think very much is a social product.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this notion that just seeing what all of your friends are listening to may not be the right social product. But if you instead say, I want to work together with my friends and I want to have a shared listening, whether we're in the same place or not, that turns out to be a pretty amazing thing.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So you see people do it at parties where you can literally join someone's jam and you can sort of all queue up songs together instead of taking my phone or your phone, we could all be sort of working together on something.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But what we saw during the pandemic and that's like where jam sort of started was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having sort of this shared, you know, consistent music listening where we're all listening to the same thing at the same time. even though we were sort of apart. It's like the best of linear TV brought to music. Yeah.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So I think we're still sort of, you know, definitely playing with the social concepts and trying to get that right. But I think, you know, Facebook kind of moved off of this sort of presence-based social aspect for all things. So it wasn't just music, actually. People were doing it for games back then, too. So it was like, you know, I've created another Farmville. Oh, yeah.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Many things. And I've learned so much from him and the rest of the team at Meta as well. But I think specifically from him, he's probably the best learner I've ever seen. You can have a conversation with him about a topic. He may not know very much about it. And then the next time, he would know more than, I would say, most experts about the subject.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And it's really remarkable just how tenacious he is sort of about learning and staying curious about things. So that's definitely been a super inspiring thing for me. And I think that this sort of shines through with how he runs the company too. He has a very sort of clear idea, but he also takes a lot of feedback and sort of iterates things.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
on that and it's everything from, one of the cool things for me has been seeing how he runs meetings. For instance, I kind of like having relatively small meetings with people. Mark, the average meeting he has is like 15 to 20 people in the room. And how you make a product review or discussion productive with 15 and 20 people, still get people to be heard. He's very, very good at that stuff.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And that's just a few of the things that I've learned, which has helped me as a leader as well.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Well, I mean, the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with him because I know it'll end badly for both of us. So, you know, as you know, Mark likes sports. So one of the things I don't do with Mark is play sports for exactly this reason. You know, what was the last time he sort of tore his ACL when someone, you know, rather than giving up. So...
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I feel like it'd end pretty badly. I like playing when I know I'll win, so I think it's a pretty good thing to not do that.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
That's pretty much spot on, to be honest. One of the things we talk about a lot that I don't say that much, but Gustav, who's backstage here, who's our product officer and CTO, is we say talk is sheep. Most people talk about execution, speed of execution, let's move, let's go. We actually spend a lot of time just discussing and talking.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So the internal saying at Spotify is talk is sheep because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Exactly right. It's more expensive to build than most people think. And so we actually spend a lot of time discussing, and people get really confused when they enter our culture. They're like, but why don't we just execute? And we're still sitting and debating and game theorizing how this will play out and getting all the things right. working in a certain way.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And we have our sort of ways of doing that now that we've sort of codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point. But a part of that is also because, so to set the stage is because we had to, because remember everything, unlike many other products, when you're building a company, you can kind of sort of iterate and do stuff. We had to get the entire industry with us.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So if we wanted to do something, we had to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do. And in many cases, even making relatively simple changes could take one or two years for us to get licensed. So you better be sure that you're right when you're doing it. And this has kind of now become a thing in how we're doing stuff.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
We're probably not going to be the fastest in moving fast and breaking things. That's it. But we are going to be very deliberate, and we're probably going to be more right when we actually do something.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we won't be the fastest, no.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Oh, I think it sort of depends on which markets you're kind of looking at it. But we were pretty much, it started happening in quite a few markets already 2020 and 2021. And in 2022, we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world. So three years. Yeah. From launch.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
We don't always know how fast this will be, but I think we had a pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way, sort of hill climb from the mountain we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But I think the contrarian bet we did, unlike many others did, was, you know, at the time when we launched, it was sort of viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything, right? Like you had to have a separate podcasting app, and podcasting and music were very different. And for us, it's just listening.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people and today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff. And it turns out that like what we saw all the time, it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to podcasts. So why not use this experience and also recommend them great other stuff?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And we went from there and then a year ago we also added audio books because that turned out to be another way to increase people's listening and that they were also spending time doing.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, of course, you're right. Obviously, just because you have the distribution advantage doesn't mean it'll work. But I think going back to it, what's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something deliberate, sort of top-down, it's sort of failed.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And most of the time, actually, what we see is the inklings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there. So I mentioned this at the beginning, but... Germany was sort of an early indicator for a lot of things for us, both in podcasting and in books.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And what I realized even before we launched books, for instance, was around 2018, we started seeing books showing up on the top list in Germany of the most sort of listen to music tracks, right? It wasn't music, it was clearly books, but it sort of made it all the way up to the top list.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And shortly thereafter, we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country, but we weren't even trying. And it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify. So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you kind of know you've got something.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So that was the sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Hi.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Wow, this is pretty insane, guys. I think this probably ought to be the biggest recording of a podcast in the world.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah. You guys should use this as the studio every time, I think.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Here you are.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
All right. Well, love that. Love that. And it's really amazing for me to be here and just see this and all of you guys' success. I remember listening to you guys. as a fan, I think starting 2019 and see that we're now five years later from a small base going to something like this, it's pretty remarkable to see.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And I don't know about you guys, but I thought maybe to commemorate this moment, it'd be pretty fun I know you don't want to tout your success, so I thought maybe I could do that for you. So maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And on Spotify alone, you guys have now done over 5 million hours, and it tripled in the last year. Pretty remarkable, right? Yeah, big round of applause. So...
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
2012, 13?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, is the Nintendo one the longest one you guys have done? I think Microsoft Volume 2 was our longest.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, but what's really cool for me, too, is just seeing the fandom of the show. So one thing is, you know, obviously seeing the sort of total numbers, but also seeing the fandoms. And you guys added more than 250,000 followers, and that tripled last year, too. So it's over 250,000 followers on Spotify alone now on The Quiet Show, which, again, is pretty remarkable to see that kind of growth.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, yeah.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Well, it's word of mouth in a new way. But the other part that was really cool to me as I was looking through the data, I kind of expected this to be sort of an English language thing only, maybe the US, maybe UK, that kind of thing. But you guys have truly grown worldwide. So, you know, look at some of this stuff. Like you have Mexico growing five times, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Acquired is global. So it's amazing to see here in San Francisco that we got 6,000 people in one place, but I'm pretty sure you guys should take this on the road and we'll see if we can make it in other places too.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah. Could be, could be. Well, you know, it's maybe a timing question. You guys should be like the new rock stars that tour around. That would be the great thing to do. And, you know, it's... I want to really kind of maybe take the moment here and ask you guys how all of this happened.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And by way of context, just to put this in perspective, in 2019, when we got into podcasts, the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people listening to this. And you mentioned this, but our goal was to sort of broaden
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
this whole medium, and today there's over 150 million people listening to podcasts on Spotify, and obviously your show is a huge success, and something that attracts people to the medium because it's both pretty broad these days, but also very, very deep. What do you think contributed to that success?