Biography|Gustav Söderström — The Humlegårdsgatan Front He Joined After Yahoo

People treat Spotify's product chief as someone who walked into a finished headquarters on Regeringsgatan.

He walked into this brick front instead.

In 2009 Gustav Söderström left Yahoo Mobile and took the job of getting a desktop streamer onto phones.

Ny Teknik's English report on his 2025 CTO of the Year prize sets the order: he had sold Kenet Works to Yahoo, spent several years in Silicon Valley, met Daniel Ek in Stockholm after the service had launched on desktop, and joined that year.

Kenet Works was founded in Stockholm in 2003 by Söderström and six co-founders.

Swedish Wikipedia, citing Ny Teknik, dates the Yahoo purchase to 2006 and puts the reported price near 150 million kronor.

The first Spotify rooms were not this address.

Företagskällan and Stockholmskällan both place the original office at Riddargatan 20 on Östermalm, where engineers hired out of KTH assembled the platform from 2006.

Rasmus Andersson, on the staff then, wrote on 26 June 2007 that the company had just moved from Riddargatan to Humlegårdsgatan, into about 800 square metres.

A French company-register extract for Spotify AB lists Humlegårdsgatan 20, Stockholm 114 46, on an establishment opened 1 February 2009.

The pin is that street number, a house-level OpenStreetMap node at 59.3368854, 18.0747907.

The building is a working block south of Humlegården, not a private house.

Söderström is a living executive.

The photograph is the façade with the Spotify letters already mounted, taken on 13 September 2007 by Erik Stattin.

The company later left this front.

From 2018 it printed Regeringsgatan 19 as the public Stockholm headquarters.

Photo: Erik Stattin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons