I was Spotify’s first analytics lead. Here is what VCs get wrong about data

What happens to the way we work when the tools get good? Long before the AI boom, we asked the same question at Spotify, where I was the first-ever VP of Analytics. 

I led Spotify’s data strategy under Daniel Ek at a time when music streaming was barely mainstream, and we hadn’t launched in America yet. My job was to move away from static Excel spreadsheets and toward a more dynamic way of tracking data for the first time – a far cry from the AI-powered analytics we see today, but back then we were inventing the wheel from first principles. 

The wheel was called Hadoop, software with a yellow stuffed elephant logo that haunts data analysts to this day. If you had a question about your data, you wrote a query, then waited hours for the system to tell you whether your query made sense in the first place. 

For the first time, we could track where users clicked, where they lingered, and use it to make better decisions. Learning how to do that was hard – it took us years to integrate this sudden influx of raw data into decision-making – but before we knew it, the platform surpassed 20 million subscribers with a level of precision that guesswork alone could never have gotten us to.

When I carried that muscle into venture capital half a decade later, it was clear that data, or an interest in it, had barely touched the........

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