YouSaid · the spoken record

Maya Prohovnik

lines on the record: 80
first: 2023-09-28
most recent: 2023-09-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Listen to your podcast on Spotify and then send me your feedback. I would love to know either as a podcast creator or as a podcast listener, always happy to hear what Spotify can be doing more of or better to help you out.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm on threads, I guess, and I'm on LinkedIn. I'm Maya Fish on most social media. And then I'm on LinkedIn. And then second one, how can people be useful to me?”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that much. So we let them free range. We have a pretty big yard, but I think their actual, so there's like their little coop, and then they've got a run that's fenced in. The run is maybe like, I don't know, five feet by eight feet or something, but you can go a lot smaller. If you go to Home Depot, they actually sell like pre-made coups and runs. I think if you have a decent-sized backyard, they'll be fine. I've known people with pretty small yards and you just let your chickens out and they're happy to just, they'll find worms in a few yards, you know?”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every for chickens. Yes, it's Love Every for Chickens. And every month they send me like chicken treats, but also fun little things for crazy chicken people. So it's like clothes or like a sticker or like something funny. It's like I'm very into the whole chicken thing. So yeah.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lacking in our modern lives, that like connection to nature, when I feel stressed at work and I go outside and I hang out with my chickens, I go, I like pet them and I give them treats and we talk to each other. It's like nothing makes me happier and feel more grounded than hanging out with my chickens. So I think everyone should have chickens. I would say they're pretty low maintenance. So if you're thinking about it, I would recommend it. And if you get chickens, my favorite thing that I did for them, I got this monthly subscription box for chickens called, I think it's called coop crate.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my god. Well, we should have started with this because I can talk about this for an hour and a half, but I love my chickens. I have eight of them. We've got one rooster and seven hens. I am just, I think that all of us should be a little bit closer to nature, to the, I was going to say the food that we're eating. I'm not going to eat my chickens, but they make eggs for me. But I just think there is something very...”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mom always told me that my generosity would be rewarded, so anytime that I was like nice or thought of someone else before me, she always made sure that I got like some little reward or got to go out for ice cream or something. I think that really worked on me.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only a fool wishes time away Even if you're having a bad day, even if you're doing something boring or you're stressed because you have to do public speaking, that's still your life and you should enjoy it.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, very unsexy answer, but I love 1-800 contacts. They have, I'm like so impressed with their product team. If you need new contacts, even if you need a new prescription, you can do the whole thing online in like five minutes and it's so well thought out and so thoughtful. I just, I love them. And then the one other one I'll give a shout out to since becoming a parent love every. Do you subscribe to them?”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have one. It is if you could make a podcast about anything, what would it be? And it is the best. Honestly, you should ask people that even if you don't work in podcasting, because it tells you so much about candidates. And one thing that I feel very strongly is that the most important thing is that you're hiring passionate people, not people who are passionate necessarily, but the thing that you're doing, but about anything. If they can't think of anything, I would, that's a red flag for me.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TV show. I'll just say, I guess poker face was the last one that really blew my mind. Movies, I mean, Barbie was so good. And then I'll just give you like a lesser known one. I just watched this crazy movie from the 80s that was made the same year Home Alone was. This just got featured on a podcast. So I think everybody's talking about it now, but it's a horror movie about a kid who's home alone and then he has to fight Santa Claus in like a home invasion situation situation. It is so good. It's called, it has a bunch of different names. But if you look up either GameOver or it's like Code Per Noel something, it's like an old French horror movie. So good.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Children of time, and I guess I would say it by Stephen King. I recommend a lot of Stephen King books, but that's my all-time favorite.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the things that I talked about at Streamon for anyone who saw that this year I think are still very much our strategy. So I think for us in general, Spotify is really focused on making sure that we can, we have a massive audience, we have 500 million, more than 500 million monthly active listeners. We want to help podcast creators reach that global audience. And so it's really important to us. I always tell my team the biggest problem that I want to solve for podcasters is discovery and audience growth. And I really think we can be the ones to do it. So I'm really excited about that. So discovery, monetization, we're really focused on making sure that creators of all shapes and sizes can make a living off of their work. And then I think in general, we're working on so many cool things at Spotify to make podcasts.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, if you're nervous, you can put your hands above your head. That'll help the blood. I don't know. It helps it go into your head or something.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can stand it, which I can't record yourself or watch yourself in a mirror, I just like it messes me up more. But I think for a lot of people, that can be really helpful to figure out where your sort of issues are. I think the biggest thing for me, honestly, is that the unfair advantage I have is if you really give a shit about what you're talking about, you are going to be such a better presenter because people are going to tell that they're going to be able to tell that you care. And so I think even at a larger Spotify event where it's like, I'm reading off a teleprompter and I'm reading sort of, you know, I'm marketing, but I'm helping write those words. And then the way that I'm saying them matters because I'm like, I'm talking to podcasters and I'm like, my mission in life is to make things better for you. Not everyone gets that benefit, I guess. Sometimes you have to do public speaking about things that you're not very passionate about. But I certainly think that that helps. And I think leaning into that. So like when you can telling personal stories, letting the audience get to know you. I like to work some humor.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Times all the way through once the speaker notes are final, and it's like you can practice your exact delivery, you can practice where you're going to put jokes in, you can figure out what doesn't feel natural or where you're going to trip it up, and then you can change the words that you're using. And so I like to get to the point where I can remember or ad lib at least half of the notes that I have in there. And that way I know I'm going to feel confident, like coming off script. I make a lot of eye contact with the audience, which I think makes them think that I'm not reading speaker notes. So I think that's really important.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This anxiety before they have to perform or they go on stage, reframing that anxiety to understand that the thing your body is doing is surging you with adrenaline to help you. And so letting that feeling wash over you instead of fighting it, I think has been so effective for me because otherwise it can feel like a panic attack. And so I think you have to be like, cool, my body's getting ready. We're excited. We're going to go do this on stage. That has been really helpful. I practice like a million times anytime I have to do public speaking. So I think everybody has different memorization tactics, different ways of doing speaker notes that work for them. And so I think part of it is you have to do a bunch of public speaking to see what works for you. So some people work best with no notes. Some people, I almost read like complete sentences because I'm a good, like I can enunciate things while I'm reading. So that works best for me. Some people like bullets and then they go a little bit off the script. But I think once you figure out what method of speaker notes works for you, I rehearse probably like at least 10.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think with public speaking, for me, the first thing that I had to do was decide that I didn't hate public speaking because I think it's just, I think it's human nature. Like it is, it makes sense that we do not want to be in front of a crowd and we don't want to be performing and we don't like it's just sort of an unnatural thing that humans, I think, make ourselves do. I remember I actually, when I was in high school, I had to give a presentation and I was like, I had so much anxiety like I couldn't sleep the night before and I remember I was getting ready for school that morning and I was like I'm just not going to hate public speaking like I just can't get through my life feeling this way. And so I just got up there and I had fun with it and it was it felt so much better to not feel worried about it. So I think ever since then I've been okay at it. And then I have gotten lots of opportunities to do like big, scary public speaking things for Spotify. And so I think I've had to get even better. I think my tips would be my biggest one is probably reframing, you know, it's like everyone has.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, thank you for saying I'm awesome at so many things. This is my favorite podcast I've ever been on because you're just complimenting me the whole time. So I'll take it”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that's huge. And I also think if you're in any sort of job, I think most PMs have this where it's like so much of your job is actually like deep thinking and problem solving, I just cannot get that done if I'm like running through my to-do list in my head. So I think that was a big unlock for me when I realized that I just needed to like, anytime I'm stressed, honestly, if I just sit and make a list of all the things I have to do, I'm like, oh, it's like four things. I can get those done. It's okay.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to doist. I think you can use any, but it's the one that works best for me. I love using paper, but then I really like then if I don't have it with me, then I can't remember anything I have to do. So I've had to go digital.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, where does that come from? I think I am sort of OCD. I think I'm an overachiever. I don't know. It's really important to me. I think when my team says that I'm very productive, the feedback I hear from them is they're impressed that they send me a doc and then I always read it. Like I think that's more about kind of prioritizing my team and making sure that they're unblocked, which I take very seriously. I don't know. Other tips that I would give people, I write everything down because I think I'm one of those people I remember things best when they're written down. And then I obsessively put things on my to-do list like anything that anyone asked me to do goes on there. And then I have that method for organizing it later in the day.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do. I just use, I tried using the grid view and it didn't work for me for some reason, so I just use a to do list and then I don't let myself finish working until I've gone through anything I didn't get through that day and then I know what I have to do the next day.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only other one, I'm not a huge framework person. I think this goes back to my gut thing. But the one other thing that I refer to often is I love the Eisenhower matrix, which is also known as the 4Ds. So it's like, do, defer, delegate, delete. Like you have also quadrants. Maybe my brain just works in quadrants. I don't know. But I totally subscribe to that. And that's how I do everything where it's like I write everything down at the end of every day. I go through and I either do delegate, defer, delete. And it really helps you clear a lot of stuff out of your brain.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm giving up on you. See you later. You're saying I'm committed to helping you throughout your whole career. And like, let's help you find the next step, even if that isn't on my team or at this company.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That makes it clear that you care about them and want them to be able to reach their goals. I think it makes them stronger, makes your relationship stronger. And I also think the one other big thing I took away from radical candor was when it comes to people underperforming, it really reframed how I think about that because it's like people are not generally inherently bad or lazy or ineffective. It's almost always because the role they're in is the wrong fit. And so being able to approach the conversation in that way means that you can like come at it in a caring way that lets them know you actually want them to be successful. And what I found is when you have the conversation in that way, they're much more receptive to it. And then you're able to either actually resolve the issues or you're able to help them figure out what the right fit is for them, which I think as a manager is so inspiring to me because that means that you get to keep mentoring them beyond like you're not just sort of saying this isn't work.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like my all time favorite book, and I think it just really shifted for me how I, honestly, like how I relate to people in general, but I think especially with managing, giving feedback, being able to collaborate and sort of like, you know, push back in a direct way, direct and constructive way on peers and that sort of thing. So I make all of my managers on my team read it. We talk about it constantly in our team. And I think that the general concepts for anyone who's not familiar is you need to care personally and challenge directly. And if you're only doing one of those things, you're not giving feedback in an effective way. And the book just talks so much about the importance of feedback and how feedback is a gift, which I have now come to completely agree with. It's like anytime I've given someone effective feedback, it's always well received, even if it's tough to hear. People want to get better and they want to know, they want to know how they can improve. And so I think anytime that you can give them specific feedback in a way.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big one for me is radical candor. And I'm just. I know my team watching this is going to laugh at me because I talk about this every day. They're tired of hearing it.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was a little bit the fear of being sort of like a cog in a wheel, which is not actually how I feel now that I work at Spotify. And I think the other was like, We were doing great. Like, we already were killing it at podcast hosting. And it was just so fun. You know, like I really valued that like small company, everyone knows each other. We're like doing really hard work, but we're also having so much fun. And I think it felt like I couldn't translate that to a large organization where I was like, okay, now I have to do things how they do. And then I think what actually ended up happening is like, I actually love how Spotify runs their company. And I'm still able to run my team the way that works for me. And so I think it just goes back to like knowing what you care about sort of like being really solidly attached to your own core values and being able to take that with you.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. It's like, who am I? And I think that the thing that I think for me, and it sounds similar to you, like I think I didn't realize how much value I put in the actual day-to-day of like survival that comes with being part of a startup, like that becomes almost your like your reason for being is like I got to make this work and I got to keep the team motivated and you're just like going going going and then when everything is suddenly stable, you're like, wait, what? Like, what is my job now?”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone goes through that just because I think just by definition, all the reasons that you start a company are like that means your personality is someone who wants to be like having that direct impact and doing your own ownership and being able to make things move quickly. And that is just so different once you join a large organization”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founder, and I this doesn't really work for me, and I'm going to go do my next thing. And so I think to some extent, that does sort of some of the things we were talking about, I think, do help shake out like whether people actually want to make those investments and figure out how to make things work at a big company. But I think the other thing that I found is just like, I think there isn't enough support for that transition. And I think that for me, like, I've definitely landed on the side of I love working at Spotify. I now am like so excited to be part of a large organization and building things at this scale, but I really would have loved to have been able to talk to someone about it or understand that there were other people going through that kind of thing. So I don't know if you want an example of how it's not all rainbows and sunshine. I definitely think there were.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And something that I found with them and just with other acquired founders who I've talked to since I don't know, I feel like people don't talk about this enough publicly. Maybe people are somewhere and I just haven't seen it. I think that people who get acquired, especially founders, actually go through a relatively deep sort of like depression and existential crisis after getting acquired. And I never would have thought like, you know, when you're talking to people about getting acquired, it sounds like such an obvious positive. Like you said, it's like this amazing positive exit. And it was like it was objectively so good for our team and for us and for our users and for, I think, for the industry. And I personally did not expect to go through that because I, you know, it's like, of course, you want an exit. That's what you're working towards that whole time that you're a startup. And I've talked to a lot of these founders. And I think it is sort of a process. I think that everyone has to go through because either you decide I'm going to stay here and I'm going to do this for a long time and I can make this work for me or you're like, I'm just a startup.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We stopped calling our team anchor internally. We started collaborating more with other teams. And I think that is the necessary trade-off is like the more deeply you're embedded, the slower things are going to go. But I think that has been really amazing for making sure that our team actually felt like a part of the larger mission that Spotify was doing. And the one other thing I'll say that I found pretty striking. So Spotify, as you know, did a lot of podcast acquisitions soon after the Anchor one. And so I got to know a lot of the other founders and early employees who have been acquired by Spotify.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the downside of Daniel's advice, so one of the things he said to us, he was literally like say no to all the meetings. Like, you're going to get invited to all these off-sites and meetings and everyone's going to want to meet you guys and they're going to want you to come to all of these events and whatever. And he was like, just keep being angry. Like, just keep doing what you're doing for like at least the next year. Don't worry about what Spotify is doing. And on the one hand, of course, we loved that as startup people where we're like, cool, we're going to get to stay us within this larger organization. But the downside that we didn't really realize until like a year later was that we didn't really, we weren't really able to like build relationships. We had some culture problems where our team started to feel like because they weren't part of Spotify, they had sort of some existential, like they didn't feel attached to the work that we were doing. And so for like a year, we operated on our own. We moved really quickly. We were able to get a lot done. But then I think our next phase had to be like really deeply incorporating into Spotify. And so like.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I found that so motivating because I think I definitely had that feeling going from startup to larger organization where I was like, I had this fear that it was just going to be bureaucracy and things moving so slowly. And I really loved that that was one of his goals was that he was like, I want to make sure, you know, Spotify also grew really quickly. And he was trying to figure out how to help them keep moving as quickly as they used to. And so I think that's something that I really took to heart and that I've continued to remind my team of even to this day where I'm like, that's, I think of that as part of my job here to help people think about how we can move quickly and what really matters. And I think at any large organization, there's obviously a lot more complexities. There's a lot more stakeholders. So to some extent, it's necessary to like slow down and be thoughtful. But I think the things that I always try to push people on is like the unnecessary things that slow you down. So I think that's what we spend a lot of time on both within our team and when we're collaborating with other teams at Spotify, because we work with basically everyone.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of why we're acquiring you so that you can move quickly. But he said, I also want you to help me teach the rest of Spotify how to move more quickly.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we were a startup, like one of the first things we did when we were only a few people, we decided what our core values were going to be. And I think they like maybe very trivially have changed over the years, but we essentially still have the same four core values that we decided on seven or eight years ago now. And when we got acquired, we had a conversation with our team where we said, you know, we're going to, of course, embrace Spotify's culture and Spotify's core values, but we're not going to forget who we are as a team. And I think part of what really, and one of our core values, by the way, is move fast. So that's something that's like very deep within our DNA. But I think one of the things that helped with that is Daniel Eck, when we got acquired, came and talked to our team, which was so cool and like so motivational. And one of the things he said to us was, you know, we had a reputation at the time for moving very quickly, even compared to other startups. Like we were shipping a new feature every two weeks. It was sort of insane. And Daniel said to us, not only do I want you to not move slower, like that's part.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've definitely slowed down a little, I will say. I'm always joking about when we first got acquired, I remember we had to do this spreadsheet outlining our roadmap and estimate our things like small, extra large, whatever. And Spotify's definition of small was something like a quarter. And I was like, we've never built anything that took more than three months. And now it's like now we build lots of things take more than three months. The first thing that comes to mind.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were very vocal about everything that we were doing. Like, we did lots of internal marketing and made sure people were excited. We built a lot of really strong relationships. Like we made sure that every team at Spotify knew about us and what we were doing. We were constantly asking how we could help other teams and when the strategy shifted, which it has, you know, dozens of times since we've gotten acquired almost five years ago, we were not like we just sort of blindly followed, but we were always like willing to get excited about whatever the next thing was and willing to be helpful and figure out how to make that work. And I think it actually goes back to the like, you know, sticking to the mission in the first place where, you know, Spotify and We want to like, we want podcasting to be able to be a huge business for the industry. Like we think it's been held back by a lot of things for a long time. And so we've had various hypotheses about how we can get there and we try things. And if something doesn't work, we go onto the next thing. But that goal hasn't really changed.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same place, then you're still stuck with the limitations of RSS feeds. And so I think we were both coming at the acquisition with the same frustration just from two different angles. And so both of us really saw that benefit in joining up. And so I think one of the big ways we were lucky is that what I've seen happen in a lot of acquisitions is you have sort of an idea of what you're getting acquired for and you get excited and really attached to that vision. And then when that vision doesn't end up fitting into the company's strategy, there's nowhere else to go. And I think in a lot of ways, Anchor did really well fit into Spotify's culture and their roadmap, but there were many things that changed around that initial vision. And I think we were really good at making sure that we stayed valuable to Spotify. Like that was one of our goals when we got acquired, where we were like, you know, we're tiny startup people and we're like, we're not going to get, you know, lost in this big C when we came in. It was like.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's sort of a combination of luck and hard work because Spotify is genuinely an amazing. I mean, you've met now a bunch of people who I work with at Spotify, including my boss Gustav. It really is, it's an incredible company. They're Swedish. So like just their mindset about everything in the first place is kind of amazing, but they're also like, I have been so impressed that they are the type of company that can still move quickly and make really big strategic decisions and strategic shifts. Like it never feels like they're slowing down. And so I think our way of working sort of worked with them. And then I think the other thing that we had to our benefit was they really saw the same vision that we had. So it was like they also wanted to change podcasting and make it more democratized and make it more two-way and bring it into the future. And it was so interesting because when we started talking to them, we had, you know, both of us had this like chicken or egg marketplace problem where we had this critical mass of creators. They had a critical mass at that point of consumers. But if you don't have both on the same”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know. I think they must be. And for the record, we paid them very well. These were not unpaid interns, just to be clear. But no, I think it is amazing. And I think it was also such a cool opportunity. Like one of those interns actually is still a PM on my team today. She ended up converting to full-time after she graduated. And I think it's, I remember, you know, like I had a lot of cool college internships and it's such a cool way to get exposure to industries that you otherwise wouldn't get to. So I would definitely recommend that college kids start with like, you know, it's okay if your first job is sort of like a repetitive, not very exciting thing because if you do a good job, it will lead to something very exciting maybe.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of why we got so much hosting market share so quickly because it was such an insane benefit over the other platforms, which otherwise had been sort of commoditized at that point. So it's funny now to think back on that. But I think it's also related to we were so good at being willing to humor what seemed like stupid ideas and try them. And so that is something that I definitely recommend to product people is like, you know, like let yourself have the silly ideas We always talked about yes and like when someone has an idea like how can you build on it and think about how it might work instead of saying no that can't work because and so we had a number of those things where it was like nobody understood how we were doing things so differently and it was just because we weren't afraid to do the silly unscalable thing for a while”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many people know this. I think people think that we had some secret door, like backdoor deal with Apple for distribution, but we just had college students making Apple podcast accounts and then submitting like hundreds of thousands of podcasts through these accounts. And that resulted in lots of interesting technical and relationship situations. It was a really interesting thing. And eventually, that didn't scale. Eventually, we stopped doing that, obviously. But I think that is such a cool example of the importance of how you're packaging what you're offering to people where if we had said like you request distribution and we'll have one of our team members get back to you in three days and let you know when you're on Apple podcast that doesn't feel very magical or like it's really saving you any time if all you see as a user is you're hitting a button and then 24 hours later you're somehow magically on Apple podcast like that was so much easier than manual distribution was at the time and I think that was a really big part”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's all of these different podcast platforms. You have to manually distribute to all of them. Apple podcasts in particular can be really difficult for people who aren't tech savvy because there's this whole like you have to prove that you own your RSS feed. You have to know what an RSS feed is. You have to sometimes deal with 301 redirects. Like there's just all this stuff that's like deeply technical in a way that we were just like, it doesn't need to be. And so one of the steps there was to submit your podcast to Apple Podcasts. You had to have an Apple ID. And there are a lot of people in the world who don't have iPhones. And so, you know, we're building for everybody. So we were like, how can we reduce that friction? We were obsessed with reducing friction. This was like our constant battle. And so we had this idea to, we hired a couple of college interns and we brought them in and we were like, people are going to push this magical one button in the anchor app and they're going to say, I want to distribute my podcast. And your job is going to be to do all that same manual stuff manually, but to them, it's going to feel magical and like it happened automatically. I still don't know how.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of our principles from the very early days of anchor was build things that don't scale, where we were like, you know, we're a ridiculously tiny team. We're trying to do this really big thing. We had raised very little money. And so we were always just trying to figure out like, how can we sort of hack into whatever like growth we're trying to make happen? So when it turned out that people wanted to distribute their podcast everywhere, it's gotten a little bit easier, but at the time, I'm sure you remember what podcast distribution”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And you also, like, you never know which of those tiny product changes are going to end up being this existential moment for your business. Like you really have to kind of keep your eyes open and be ready for that to happen anytime, especially when you're still trying to figure out where your place is going to be.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you have to stay willing to be flexible and take in new information and new data points as your product matures and as your user base changes, there's going to be new things that you learn that are going to change how you think about it. And I think, again, like the one thing that was unwavering for us was our mission and everything else was kind of mutable for us where we were like, whatever we need to do to get there will work. And I do think looking back, it's kind of astonishing how brave we were that like we kept sort of finding some product market fit and being like, nope, that's not enough. And then moving to the next thing. And I think that obviously, yeah, worked out really well for us and meant that we were able to do what we set out to do and really democratize the medium and make things a lot easier for a lot more people.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we decided, you know, I think we started with like, oh, we'll do a little test and let people export as podcasts and see what happens. And when we look back at our data, that's the moment when we saw the beginning of that hockey stick growth where it's like we had been growing, we had been doing well. And then you zoom out and you're like, okay, that was very clearly the thing we were missing. Yet again, we had to sort of like stop what we were doing. We rebuilt the entire app. We built it around RSS and podcasting and being able to export. And we actually did some really cool things to make it really easy for people to publish their podcast everywhere. And yeah, so I think that was really the moment that it took off. And I think it's so interesting putting those two things together because it was kind of the opposite thing the second time that we had to give up on a piece of what we had thought was so inherently true about our business. And so I don't know, I don't know what lesson to tell people to take away from that other than like, I think you have to just stay, especially in a startup mentality.”
2023-09-28 · Lenny's Podcast · Building Anchor, selling to Spotify, and lessons learned | Maya Prohovnik (Spotify’s Head of Podcast Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source