The very same person who just cashed off his shares to take advantage of the jump in price following the layoffs announcement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38557283

Isn't that extremely illegal?

Only if they took advantage of non-public info. Cashing out after a price jump due to a public announcement is fine.

Maybe he forgot to remove himself from the excel file with all employees doing a =RAND() to determine who's out.

this is the most logical answer

And who made the decision to go big on podcasts? And audio books? How are those efforts paying off? Obviously, the CFO has responsibilities, but they also don't act alone.

Podcasts and audio books make sense for Spotify to pursue, but it feels like they have been totally half-assing those things.

I left Spotify as a paying customer due to podcasts.

The way they implemented podcasts wasn’t great.

Previously Spotify was very good suggesting music that I liked. I’d go to the home screen and see lots of relevant suggested music and just click play. When podcasts came I found it harder to use Spotify for music as music felt like a second class citizen, more clicks to find and get to as the home screen was now podcast biased, heavily promoting podcasts on to users as they invested big in to podcasts.

For me it would have been easier if they had two distinct tabs, music home and podcast home, treating them completely separate rather than trying to unify the views as one home screen.

I switched to Apple Music.

The music suggestions and playlists are not as good as Spotify but when I search in Apple Music I only get music back and I also get lossless audio.

> totally half-assing those things.

It's unreal. Tons of podcasts have the wrong feed address on Spotify and so aren't getting updated episodes. Their support doesn't care. No support for private feeds so you can't work around the issue. Horrible UX, constantly starts playing on its own as Bluetooth devices go in and out or range. Search is marginal at best.

I have had zero problems with Apple Podcasts that just seem to work. Spotify is just kind of a mess.

Apple Music still needs work but it’s ok for the price

I actually really liked Google podcasts. It had a rough start but after a few years of polish the only complaint I have is there's no episode search capability within a series.

Ah that explains why when I get a call during an online meeting, on the phone and I reject the call, Spotify immediately starts playing.

This is driving me up a fucking wall. Im so ready to be done with spotify...

I contacted support about it, they didn't even respond. It's been like that for years.

Another fun thing it does... If you're casting to another device like a Chromecast, then pause, as soon as you leave range of the wifi network the Chromecast was on it'll start playing on your phone even though it likely wasn't playing there in the first place. It was the daily leave for work ritual to back out of the driveway, wait for Spotify to start blasting, then pause it again.

I can't believe that anyone who works on that app ever uses it. It's that bad.

Few times, it's made me have those weird panic moments when presenting a screen to a large group of people. Immediately mute myself, close the video and be like "sorry guys, something weird happened, I'll brb.'

Pursue? Sure. But pay Harry & Meg what they did? That's going too big. And that wasn't the only over-bid, eh.

But now that these things didn't pan out the CFO gets cut? Feels like Spotify should invest in a mirror.

> as the company doubles down on margin over growth

Is this a strategy more companies should be looking at?

This is a brand new strategy that’s never been tried before and isn’t a strategy that many companies use today. /s

The more I read about Spotify and its woes, the more I feel that it’s really the hot-headed CEO/founder that needs to be fired. Has he tried taking any responsibility yet?

Wonder if this will help right the ship with Spotify. Any thoughts?

Nope their CEO is really opinionated and not often right.

CFOs oversee the company's books. Maybe the CEO expected a warning of some sort that sending $200m to Rogan and $25m to Harry and Meghan was a bad idea.