Season 2, Episode 6: Spotify’s Direct Listing

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2018

⏱️ 108 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Links:

Carve Outs:

Ben: Black Panther (and soundtrack on Spotify!)
David: “Silicon Ballet” panel at San Francisco Ballet on Saturday, April 28

Transcript

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0:00.0	Did you read the mission statement on Spotify's F1?
0:04.4	No.
0:05.9	So, whereas last week, Dropbox's mission is to unleash the world's creative energy.
0:12.1	Spotify is to unlock the potential of human creativity.
0:16.0	You definitely should get some digs in on them.
0:18.8	It's an unrestrained hippie world out there.
0:23.0	I don't know. Welcome to season 2 episode 6 of acquired the podcast about technology acquisitions and
0:41.1	I'm Ben Gilbert I'm I P. O's. I'm David Rosenthal and we are your hosts.
0:46.0	Today we are covering a company making history the week it makes history
0:51.0	Spotify and their direct listing which is not an IPO.
0:55.0	But if it were an IPO, this would be the largest IPO listing, whatever you want to call
1:02.2	it,
1:02.7	from Europe ever, and the seventh biggest of all time,
1:07.8	debuting at about roughly a $30 billion market cap. Wow, and Trent almost. Wow.
1:13.0	And trend, almost a billion, a billion dollars worth of shares on the first day traded.
1:20.0	Yeah, trading hands.
1:21.0	Big company, big shakeup in the industry over the last few years with the rise of streaming and a big
1:28.3	change to the way that the companies go public.
1:31.4	So David, I'm excited to dig in and help understand myself
1:35.7	exactly why they did a direct listing what a direct listing is and it probably more
1:41.1	importantly excited to hear from you more about the history of the company itself.
1:46.3	Oh, there's always a story then.
	...

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