Oskar Stål Appointed New Spotify CTO
Spotify blog has a post out that they have appointed a new CTO, Oskar Stål. He comes to Spotify from mBlox, a mobile transaction company he helped grow to a $100M business from a five-man team. The experience from mBlox is the main reason behind hiring Stål. Andres Sehr from Spotify writes that his experience in the art of building high performing technology teams and producing scalable, robust services in a fast growing environment is a significant advantage.
Coming from mBlox, Stål naturally has a deep understanding of mobile platforms and how they are used. TechCrunch rightly states that it is clear that Spotify sees mobile as a key element in its distribution strategy. Spotify has also seen strong growth in its mobile usage since they launched the S60 service to the Symbian platform.
The former CTO Andreas Ehn left Spotify in October to pursue his own startup plans. We haven't heard of him anything since, although he is seen to tweet about visiting the Spotify offices every now and then.
Stål also has a very strong background in hacking and tweaking platforms such as the Commodore 64. Coming from Finland where the gaming ecosystem has been formed from people hacking away their machines I have to say that I'm looking forwards to his accomplishments at Spotify.
Personally, I think that Stål was specifically recruited for his experience with mBlox's mobile billing technology. This could really be a shift for Spotify to realize that the subscription service on iPhone (for example) isn't nearly as appealing of a value propisition as a premium "day pass" on a symbian phone. On demand is where it's at!
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[...] seems like everybody got new jobs this week. Spotify announced their new CTO, Oskar Stål, and took the fun out of guessing what their mobile strategy is (can you say, “transactional [...]
Congrats to the new job!