Kaur: I think it’s not so much a challenge as it is quite a lot of fun. Steimle: What are some of the challenges that come up marketing to different cultures? It’s safe, it’s legal, it’s free and it’s quick so there is an alternative that makes sense. Now when we go we talk to someone about stopping downloading music illegally, we can tell them to move on to Spotify. With Spotify – in December we actually made a really big business decision where we announced Spotify free across all devices – that was a big part of our story. But the positive is that record labels are always excited about having Spotify into a country because it’s very easy to tell somebody “stop downloading music illegally” but you’re not giving them an alternative. In a startup you ask yourself what is your competition? And here it’s not another company, it’s piracy. Piracy in this part of the world is rife, to say the least.
Kaur: With a company like Spotify the fact that we’re all about music and we’re a streaming service, piracy is number one. Steimle: What are some of the specific challenges you’re facing in Asia? Whereas in the US you’ve got 50 states but it is essentially the same culture and language, you come to Asia and even in just one country like India, for example, it’s almost like having 28 different countries within one because you have such different cultures, such different languages, everything. Kaur: The one main takeaway was understanding how different Asia is from the rest of the world. Steimle: How did Facebook prepare you for your current role at Spotify? I believe in its business model, and Spotify is Facebook’s music partner so we had already done quite a lot of work with them before. Also motivating me to move was the chance to work for an up and coming company like Spotify.
Then the office grew to a hundred people by the time I left. When we started there were just seven of us in what we affectionately called the “man cave” because there were six men and me. Number one was I missed that whole startup, right at the beginning when you’re all squeezed into a service office feel, which is always the best time of any company.
In May of last year the opportunity with Spotify came up and Facebook was well into almost its teenage years and there were two things that made me want to move. I stayed with them for three years and we grew really quickly. When Facebook set up their Asia Pacific operations in Singapore there was a small handful of us in a little tiny serviced office-you would never in a million years have guessed that was Facebook’s Asia office. Facebook was my first taste of a startup and I loved it.
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