Image via WikipediaThe Spotify CTO Talk
Spotify is in the same building as
Google. I show up and there is Melissa. She is with Barnes & Noble. They are also in the same building. I did not know. I met her at a
NY Tech
MeetUp after party a few months back.
Free pizza is a great start to an event, I think. Good thing I don't drink beer. Otherwise they had plenty of those too.
The CTO Oskar Stal - who I got to talk to at great length after the formal event was over - started the talks. It was amazing to me how he was obsessed with
company culture. He wanted Spotify's engineers to feel like there were many small team startups inside of Spotify. That seemed to be his number one concern.
Later I asked during the question answer session: "Should you not have the Chief Culture Officer title instead?" He said he did culture and many other things.
Henrik Landren gave a great talk - replete with great slides - on all the immense data Spotify collects. I got to see a side of Spotify I had not seen before. Artists get to see where their fans are. That would really help them plan their tours. Magic.
Hadoop came in handy.
That made me think. Otherwise I told Oskar, I feel like Spotify is a finished product. What is there to add except more songs and more countries? He is like, oh no no no. There is so much to do.