About

‘As Spotify has grown, so has the need for corporate legal support, and I have built up the corporate legal team at Spotify from scratch. Today, I’m responsible for nine lawyers, based in Stockholm and New York, with global responsibility for all corporate, real estate, and employment law matters at Spotify. I like to think that our group shares the same DNA as the company itself: innovative, responsive, business-minded, and strong partners in growing the company in a thoughtful and responsible fashion’ says Peter Grandelius, Spotify’s associate general counsel and head of corporate legal. One of the world’s fastest growing tech companies, Spotify has undergone a transformation since its foundation in 2006 – from a small start-up to having 170 million monthly active users today. Peter Grandelius first joined in January 2013, and after accruing a background working on various corporate matters, was promoted to his current role as head of the corporate team in 2015. Summarising this time – which he calls ‘an incredibly intense journey’ – Grandelius has been a direct part of the company’s growth that has seen Spotify’s headcount grow from less than 800 employees to over 3,500, revenue generation grow from €400m to €4bn, as well as the transition from being a privately held company to being listed on the New York Stock Exchange in ‘one of the biggest tech [company] listings of recent years’. Regarding the latter, Grandelius explains how the sizeable listing (Spotify’s market value is currently just above $30 billion), also saw ‘the first company of substance to do a “direct listing”, which in brief means a listing on the NYSE without a conventional public offering and without using an underwriter’. The challenges involved in this included a ‘steep learning curve’ and the ‘requirement to be creative’ as the first company of its class to take this route, close scrutiny and dialogue with both the SEC and the NYSE, and significantly enhanced need for educating management, employees and existing shareholders on relevant issues. As the senior in-house lawyer responsible for leading this ground-breaking process, Grandelius notes the ‘great deal of attention in the press [and] the investment banking community generally’. Far from being the only project in this vein, Grandelius also highlights his involvement in Spotify’s equity transactions with Tencent, during which he led legal support on the two equity transactions, dealing with one of the leading tech companies in China, which gave him ‘great insights into the Chinese market, culture and how business is conducted in China’. Another example of him furthering the company’s commercial aims is through his contribution to over $2bn in capital raised, thanks to his role as the lead in-house lawyer on a number of ‘private placements, issuances of convertible bonds, and debt – to my knowledge a record for any privately held Nordic company (all these transactions were concluded before we listed on the NYSE), and possibly for any European company of recent vintage’. He observes: ‘These past years at Spotify have been the experience of a lifetime. There have been very few, if any, breakout companies of this magnitude in the Nordic region in recent decades, and although I haven’t always gotten quite as much sleep as I would have liked, I wouldn’t trade it for anything’.