Thanksgiving in Stockholm

October 11, 2019·39 min

Spotify is done just studying podcasts. Around October 2018, Daniel Ek tells the team that podcasting will matter more to the business, and he wants an acquisition target before Christmas. It is a tight clock. Ek talks about needing to go deep and move fast, even though acquisition work usually hates being rushed. Back at Gimlet, the mood is changing too. The host ties Spotify's urgency to a late-summer slowdown inside the company he and Matt Lieber built. Christina Sullivan spots it first. She is handling finance work and ad operations when July and August bring a huge dry spell in incoming ad contracts. At first, it feels like a break. She is buried, so fewer sales orders mean fewer ads to traffic and less daily mess at her desk. Then the finance brain kicks in. The quiet inbox that gives her room to breathe also says the business is falling badly behind. After vacation, she comes back to a wave of sold emails. By October, ads are still selling and episode downloads keep growing. The story stays close to the office. Spotify has the boardroom clock, corporate development, and the year-end target. Gimlet has old tape, memory, and that weird elevator moment. Matt thought he was supposed to get a private pull-aside after a Spotify meeting, then found himself waiting with nothing happening. Sheila remembers no strange behavior. The mismatch keeps the earlier rumor floating while the later acquisition timeline starts to look less random. The host lets the awkwardness sit there. The episode lives in the gap between how business deals feel while they are happening and how neat they can look later. By the end, the sale question is personal. If Spotify made an offer, Gimlet would have to decide whether the company they built should belong to someone else.

As heard by us

A grounded look at Gimlet's sale pressure as Spotify moves from podcast research to acquisition mode.

Thanksgiving in Stockholm follows the Gimlet-Spotify sale story through a useful business lens: how little a seller may know while a buyer is already moving.

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Why you'd press play

Follow the awkward trail from a missed pull-aside to Spotify's Gimlet hunt.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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