What Taking Over a Company Nobody Expected to Survive Actually Teaches You

In May 2022, Napster was acquired by Hivemind and Algorand, alongside an investor consortium, and I became interim CEO. I had been Chief Strategy Officer, so I knew the business well. What I didn't know much about was blockchain and Web3.

The new owners came from that world, so I suddenly had access to a wide group of people who understood the technology far better than I did. They were some of the most interesting and smartest people I had ever worked with, and I learned fast.

What I did know was music, technology and what happens when a business has been built around a product and a set of assumptions that no longer make much sense. The Napster I inherited wasn't going to survive by carrying on as it was. The product was old, the cost base needed attention and the business needed a reason to exist beyond its history. Something fairly fundamental had to change.

At the same time, there was something interesting happening between blockchain technology and the music industry. Web3 was moving incredibly quickly and attracting plenty of skepticism. It was under-regulated, misunderstood and often associated in the public imagination with criminality and speculation. But underneath all of that was technology with some potentially useful applications for music, particularly around transparency, ownership and reducing the number of complicated steps between different parts of the ecosystem.

That interested me because the music industry had spent decades becoming more technologically sophisticated without fundamentally changing some of the structures underneath it. Blockchain was coming at the problem from the other direction. It was trying to create a digital record that could provide evidence of what had happened, while music was still carrying a surprising amount of historical complexity.

There was a real collision of two worlds there, and Napster sat somewhere in the middle of it.

The first job was to work out what was actually worth keeping. I restructured the business to make it leaner, but I didn't believe in throwing away everything that had come before simply because we were changing direction. We retained technology expertise that was still useful to the new product team, while reducing or removing parts of the organisation that no longer made sense for where the company was going.

That distinction was important. A pivot doesn't mean every piece of the previous business is suddenly worthless. Sometimes the knowledge and people you already have are exactly what you need to make the next version work. We also had to rebuild the product itself. The previous version was very old, so this wasn't a matter of putting a new coat of paint on it. We relaunched the Napster brand across 33 territories, opened new markets, made sure the business was correctly licensed and got a completely new product live with the capabilities to build on.

There was a fair amount of unglamorous operational work behind that. We reduced overheads, closed offices and dealt with the legacy obligations that come with a business that has been operating for years.

The objective wasn't simply to make Napster look busy again. It was to leave the business in a position where a permanent CEO could come in and build the next phase rather than spending their first year clearing up the previous one. The strategic part of the job was just as important.

I became even more ruthless about asking why. Why are we doing this? Why does this process exist? Why do we believe this is true? Is it still true? What problem are we actually trying to solve? Not because asking why is particularly revolutionary, but because businesses accumulate assumptions. Some are still useful. Others survive simply because nobody has questioned them for years.

The best thinking often came from people who disagreed with each other. Conflicting opinions forced us to examine things properly rather than accepting the first answer that sounded plausible. It also meant staying open to ideas that initially seemed unfamiliar or uncomfortable, particularly when we were operating in a technology environment that was moving so quickly.

That is particularly important when you are trying to change a business quickly. It is very easy to fix the problems you can see because they are easier to fix. The harder job is working out whether you are fixing the right problem. I also learned a lot about taking people through a transformation. The new owners needed to understand the history of Napster and why certain things had happened before they could decide what should change. The existing team needed a clear reason to believe in a very different future.

You can't ask people to change direction simply because the strategy has changed on a PowerPoint slide. They need to understand where the business is going, why it matters and what their part in getting there looks like.

I went into Napster knowing music inside out and blockchain very little. I left with a much better understanding of both, a completely different view of what the business could become and a fairly simple conviction that has stayed with me.

When a business is in trouble, you don't save it by protecting everything that already exists.

You work out what still has value, what needs to go, what needs to be rebuilt and what the business needs to become viable again. And you need enough curiosity to let other people change your mind along the way.