Tech lead, Co-founder at Outcome
Sveinn Kristjansson
Spent 7 years at Spotify helping them win the streaming wars against Apple and YouTube, where I led the creation of our company-wide Knowledge Graph and transformed Search with LLMs while our systems scaled to billions of lookups per second. I'm a repeat founder who's been coding for 20 years (and still love it), and I've got a knack for attracting extraordinary talent and building teams that deliver.
Questions & Answers
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
Think big, start small. First build a product that one person loves.
What problem or opportunity inspired you to start your company, and how has your vision evolved since then?
There was a big crisis at Spotify when Apple, Google and Amazon were all successfully copying our product. Our success came down to our ability to consistently innovate faster than all of them, and continue to do so as we tripled the size of the company. There is day and night between teams that are empowered to innovate vs. teams that drown in the tarpit of org complexity. Initially we decided to tackle helping people navigate the organization by finding the right teams to talk to based on up-to-date team information. But mapping out a messy organization doesn't help people solve problems. Using data to shine a light on the actual problems that slow teams down is the single most powerful weapon to drive bottom-up change. So let's arm the people on the ground with the insights and skills to drive real change.
