>legal/purchasing dept for music rights

I would imagine this is where the majority of their staff are. Spotify’s catalog is huge, and record labels are constantly renegotiating extremely granular contracts with the streaming services (i.e. at the individual song level). For example, I’ve seen particular songs on albums disappear for a few weeks (the rest of the album can still be played), then mysteriously return (or not), all because of some cryptic licensing shift from the record label. There is no easy way to automate this; each time a weird licensing shift requires a particular song to be removed requires a real human interaction between the label and the streaming service. Given the size of Spotify’s catalog, there are probably thousands of such licensing changes each day.

Pretty sure the DRM process in YouTube is heavily automated - why wouldn't Spotify do the same? Give the labels an API, then they can dynamically maintain all that crap themselves.

If your goal is maintenance mode for the company, milk profits for 10 years, and to be eventually replaced by competitors then I think you can run a company very slim. The other question would be, if you have captured a large market share (100s of M/yr to Billions in revenue), how many employees do you need to prevent an upstart from overtaking you through improved tech, product, or strategy?

For example, if FB never invested in ML they would have had even larger margins (fewer GPUs and ML engineers), but now that investment may pay off by fending off tiktok through copycat products and also rebuilding ad attribution after ATT. To complicate matters, before it happens, you don't know in what area your competitor will arise (ML? Product? Paradigm shift?). Similar examples with Google vs. OpenAI, ~2010s Kubernetes wars between cloud providers, Snap vs. FB/Twitter, etc.

If you compete with startups with tens of employees - shouldn't you use tens of employees to counter their strategies too?

Do you need endless hanger ons in HR, PR, all kinds of non-producing departments?

Crappy CEOs, which is not the same as a crappy founder, have grown companies without any sense and purpose. Daniel is a great founder and rode great luck. But, he should have been replaced with a Eric Schmidt operator figure a while ago.

I think the founder clings to company forever is coming to an end, in most cases going public should mean a new CEO.

I would be surprised if there tech team was larger than 2000 people. Majority of those people will be marketing, sales, legal, talent/content, etc.

The majority of saas business is like this: Numerous engineers trying to invent new unnecessary features or sitting idle through irrelevant projects and meetings or doing continuous refactoring and ‘let’s use the new x tool/process/language/whatever’ every x months, numerous managers ‘managing’ them and managing these managers and fighting about headcount and other irrelevant metrics and so on, numerous product managers having no clue and just copy-pasting features from different saas, ux designers iterating on the designs every year and so on, founders keep founding the same saas with another tens of competitors building the same thing snd so on.

We are really privileged to be in such an industry, gaining so much money (depending on location) compared to other professions and doing so meaningless job. IMO the majority of saas business would operate decently with at least half of their staff or they shouldn’t exist at all. Most of them just facilitate invented features for other saas anyway.