From six to 60
10:44
WBJ: Where was Spotify when you joined its team? How many markets was it present in at the time?
Axel Bard Bringéus: Spotify was a promising European startup that had just raised a huge Series D round in order to embark on further expansion. We were about 200 FTEs and present in six markets. The business model was far from proven and those markets had just been turned on without much thought or investment behind them.
What was your road map for expansion? Why did you choose this route?
We didn’t just expand for the sake of growth. The expansion was strategic as it was important to reach scale in order for the underlying business model to work and stave off competition. Hence, our ambition was to launch the whole world in a few years. We stack ranked markets in terms of opportunity and slated them out across a timeline, our roadmap, in terms of feasibility, choosing and learning from easier markets first and strategic importance. We fast-tracked markets due to reasons of competition or otherwise.
How quickly were you launching your services in new countries? Would you do anything differently if you were to do it again?
When we had our machinery up and running, which took a few years, we launched on average two markets a month. This was in 2013 and 2014. I would pay more attention to the organization structure we built in the different markets and think about how to operate the company in an “end game” scenario. We were too focused on just launching markets and realized too late that we’d built a complex multinational organization, which had become quite slow.
What is your philosophy for running a rapidly expanding start-up? Which is more important during rapid growth: independence of individual teams or perfect coordination?
You need to be action-biased and not too theoretical but also learn from your mistakes and experiences. For the first markets we launched, we didn’t do much planning. We just threw spaghetti against the wall to see what stuck. For the later launches, we used those earlier learnings and so on. Centralization early on is good but as companies and people grow, it’s important to provide independence. If you don’t understand your processes and have a lot to learn, you’ll create chaos with too much autonomy in new, unknown markets.
In markets such as streaming services, how difficult is it for start-ups to compete against tech giants? What are the biggest threats?
Competition should obviously be taken seriously and is both a great motivator and benchmark. But it should also not be overestimated. Large companies have different agendas, internal politics and structural difficulties competing against startups. Spotify succeeded in the light of Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google all wanting to get into and succeed in streaming. You need to be tactical and play the game to your advantage and, for example, not get into a money race with large, well-capitalized companies. If you do this, you’ll lose.
Growing a company requires a lot of communication and exchange between country teams. Do you think that current global travel restrictions are a big challenge for companies that are expanding into new markets?
It doesn’t have to be. In this day and age, there are so many tools and best practices for communicating with remote teams and younger employees are less dependent on having to work from and continuously touch base with a headquarters. This is a big opportunity for companies to learn how to launch and operate remote markets in a leaner and faster way.
EQT Ventures’ in-house international expansion expert, Axel Bard Bringéus’s joined Spotify as director of international growth in 2011. In this role, Bringéus built and managed the international expansion team, taking on the responsibility for strategy and execution of Spotify’s expansion into new markets across the world. Going from six to 60 markets over the course of six years, he oversaw Spotify’s transition into the global powerhouse that it is today.
Infoshare 2020 Online - A Virtual Festival Powered by Technology!
The latest technological trends, startups, innovations, business challenges in times of a pandemic. All this during Infoshare 2020. The biggest online tech conference in Central and Eastern Europe, broadcasted worldwide from Gdańsk, will last 6 days and will be held on 23-25 and 28-30 September. 9 thematic scenes with live lectures and unprecedented networking opportunities await participants.
