In March 2018, a few weeks before its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, Spotify hosted its inaugural Investor Day event. The company was rounding out a decade of exponential growth, with more than 150 million monthly active users and about 70 million paying subscribers. By these metrics, the Sweden-based Spotify was the largest subscription music streaming service in the world. At the time of its listing that April, the company’s market value stood around $26 billion. 1 Achievements like this are rare among startups, and even rarer in Europe, where cities like London, Berlin, and Stockholm have produced far fewer billion-dollar technology companies than Silicon Valley. Behind the scenes, though, Spotify was bleeding cash. Having burned through $458 million in operating expenses in the first quarter of 2018 alone, on top of the billions it had spent in previous years, the company needed to chart a new course, one that would appease current investors and appeal to new ones.…