Acquired

Season 2, Episode 6: Spotify’s Direct Listing

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal 1h 51m 97 months ago

Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them.

Website

Show Notes

Acquired wraps up a big few weeks of coverage with not an IPO or an M&A or a fundraising round, but what’s still the largest tech exit in recent memory: Spotify’s $30B direct public listing. We dive into what it all means and how we got here: from Napster to iTunes to Facebook (and even some Justin Timberlake thrown in for good measure). Acquired FM is on the scene and spinning all the hits from this new wave music industry titan!

Note: We incorrectly described Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s ownership stake in Spotify as 25%+; that is actually his voting control. His economic ownership is 9.3%, and cofounder Martin Lorentzon’s is 12.4%. We apologize for the error!

Sponsors:

WorkOS: https://bit.ly/workos25

Intapp: https://bit.ly/intappceleste

Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry

Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25

More Acquired!

Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes

Join the Slack

Subscribe to ACQ2

Merch Store!

Links:

Internet History Podcast on the Napster Story with Jordan Ritter