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All-In · 2 min · Sep 28, 2026

Spotify supports open podcast feeds alongside platform features

Daniel Ek says Spotify builds platform-specific podcast tools while also distributing shows to other services through open standards. That lets it add features without abandoning broad distribution.

Daniel Ek

Daniel Ek is a Spotify cofounder and executive chairman; Neko Health cofounder.

Co-founded Spotify in 2006 and now guides its long-term strategy as executive chairman.

  • Chamath Palihapitiya, Host · Founder & CEO, Social Capital

    Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.

  • Jason Calacanis, Host · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH

    Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.

  • David Sacks, Host · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures

    PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.

  • David Friedberg, Host · CEO, Ohalo

    Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.

About this segment

Daniel Ek says Spotify builds platform-specific podcast tools while also distributing shows to other services through open standards. That lets it add features without abandoning broad distribution.

From “Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential”, Sep 28, 2026. Watch the full episode

“we also, through our platform, aggregate and distribute podcasts onto a lot of the other podcasting platforms.”
Daniel Ekat 45:57 · All-In45:57

Takeaways

  1. Spotify distributes podcasts to other platforms through open standards.
  2. Platform-specific tools can coexist with open distribution.
  3. Changing a shared standard can slow product innovation.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:58Spotify secured label deals by guaranteeing their near-term budgets4:02
  2. 27:22Short insurer tenures discourage investment in preventionPro pick 4:05
  3. 19:37Longitudinal scans can track changes across hundreds of moles2:38
  4. 39:24Ek sees compute as one signal of AI capability3:18
  5. 17:30Neko detects serious undiagnosed conditions in about 1% of members2:10
  6. 47:31Stardoll cut page loads from four minutes to under a second2:29

  7. 44:26Spotify supports open podcast feeds alongside platform features2:06

Up next · Sabrina Halper ShowWiz followed customer pain instead of its original ideaPro pick 5:17

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 44:28

    What's the strategy and how does Spotify look at something we care about deeply, podcasting, which is built on open standards and you guys have become a major player in it. Open standards are kind of moving one direction and Spotify has got a lot of proprietary stuff. I've talked to you about this and some of your team members are like, hey, can we keep supporting the open source port? And then the second piece, people don't know this, but there was this incredible company, Stardoll.

  2. 44:54

    It was one of the first companies in Stockholm, Sweden, to ever get funding from American VCs. You were the CTO, if I remember, or the intern for a couple of years? Well, I was the intern CTO, whatever. It was probably one of those. People don't know. This was an incredibly innovative company in terms of many variables, like digital goods and subscriptions, all that stuff. So maybe take us through either both of those questions, because that's just, you know, two personal things that I would love to hear about if we were at dinner.

  3. 45:23

    Yeah, I mean, look, again, as I said, I think the open and closed are going to be two things that are going to exist side by side. So the interesting thing about Spotify today is like, on the one hand, of course, we're a huge platform in podcasting and we have a destination. There are certain things that we're doing that general podcasts may or may not be doing. You know, one of those will be how we're handling comments and so on that are specific to the platform.

  4. 45:54

    But we actually do have tools. So what a lot of people don't know is that we also, through our platform, aggregate and distribute podcasts onto a lot of the other podcasting platforms. So there's a bunch of podcasters that are using our tools to then distribute to some of the other platforms too. And we're obviously doing that through OpenStandard. So I don't think the answer for us is like one way or the other.

  5. 46:19

    We think both can coexist. But obviously, if you want to innovate within a standard, then the key is to have other people agree to that standard. And that can sometimes take you longer, so it might be harder to innovate.