Month: October 2023

Acquired has interviewed Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and with very quotable opinions about business and other things. Available on Spotify and YouTube.

DI Digital writes, in Swedish, about Lifesum and the journey of the last year.

Svenska Dagbladet has launched a new, good podcast called SvD Tech brief (in Swedish). The first two episodes have, in less than 30 minutes, covered a few subjects each of the type slightly more mainstream, but still quite nerdy, tech/business topics. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc.

In 2021 Google paid $26.3 billion to different partners, mainly to Apple, to the default search engine on iOS, Safari, Firefox and other search engines.

The biggest companies are built with the best product and very aggressive distribution/sales. Google is no exception.

It’s impressive how Meta increased net profit with 164 % year-over-year to $11.6 billion while still having a $3.7 billion loss in Q3 alone in Reality Labs (VR/AR)

Interesting to see that more moderated revenue growth, and with AWS seemingly quite a bit slower than Azure, at Amazon resulted in significantly higher operating profit. Even the international segment was almost profitable, which I rarely seen.

Product-driven B2B startups do two main things: build product and sell product. Good interview by Lenny on building a sales pitch with April Dunford, who has a new book out called Sales Pitch: How to craft a story to stand out and win. I like April’s previous work on positioning.

Today Spotify released Q3’23 financial results. The company reached 574 million MAU and 226 million subscribers in Q3 and expects to pass 600 million (!) MAU in Q4. Combined with 13 % lower operational costs y-o-y Spotify ended up with an operating profit and operational cashflow was back to the ca €200 million per quarter it had before Q4’22..

In Q3 Spotify had 9,241 employees (FTEs or full-time equivalents), down from 9 % from Q4’23 when it had 10,151 and roughly in-line with announced layoffs.

With gross profit of €885 million in Q3, that gives about €383,000 in annualized gross profit per employee. At that level it makes sense that Spotify is expecting to be profitable going forward as that is basically the $400,000 in revenue per employee that can be used as rule of thumb for profitability for a SaaS company.

Dagens Industri writes, based on reports in the FT, that Northvolt is eying an IPO in Stockholm at a $20 billion valuation. Possibly already next year if the stock market develops well over the next 6-9 months.