The Exchanges

Q I mean, this is Super Bowl worthy for sure. You mentioned Europe there, and kind of reaching its kind of potential and that realization of it. Often there's the feeling that Europe's been left behind, European founders don't have the grit, and they sell too early. How do you feel when you hear these statements, I guess, and what do you think fundamentally needs to change?

A I think all of that was true. I'm not so sure it is true anymore. I started talking more to founders maybe two years ago again, and I thought I would have to convince them to stay with their companies and take it all the way, and what I found in many cases was that there was actually a huge willingness to go all the way. Some of them cited Spotify, which was incredibly honoring, as one of the reasons for thinking that they could go all the way. Some of them just In and on themselves realize that, no, I, I don't necessarily know that I think Silicon Valley is all that much better from the European ecosystem that we have. We can build something on our own. So I think everyone has started gravitating towards that. So I do think we're actually heading in the right direction from a European standpoint, like in your field, capital now is more and more readily available in Europe. There's still a gap compared to the U S for sure. But I have no doubt that if you fast forward five years, There won't be much of a delta between the two, so that's not going to be the problem. The raw talent is not going to be the problem either. We have it in Europe in spades, so that's not the issue, and the ambition you talked about, that was a problem a while ago, but you have a lot of companies now coming through that are showing that you can do this. You have UiPath, you have Farfetch, you have Klarna…

AI assessment note: “I think all of that was true. I'm not so sure it is true anymore.”

Q On empathy, it's always Shaq who tells me everyone's fighting a battle you know nothing about, and I always think about that, like, pretty much every day, actually. We spoke about the element of children there. How did having kids change your operating mentality?

A I think in two distinct ways. So, first and foremost, I think it really contributed more empathy for me, because before having children, I honestly didn't understand all too much about why people walked from work at five p.m. I thought they were kind of lazy in just all honesty, and having children yourself, you realize that all of a sudden that's the most important thing in your life, and the second skill I learned was becoming even better at prioritizing, and this seems maybe counterintuitive for those that don't have kids, but I reflect back now to my life before having kids, and I don't know what I did with all those hours. So when you have a priority that's now your number one in life, ahead of even your own company, and your startup, and the success of that, you're going to prioritize so that you, no matter what, in my case, I will never ever miss one of their birthdays, I will never ever miss anything that's truly important in their life. There are lots of sort of ordinary day moments where I'm not going to be as present as a father, but I will never ever sacrifice those things. And so you're forced to prioritize and plan Very differently than I did before, so that's certainly skill sets that I've learned.

AI assessment note: “I think in two distinct ways. So, first and foremost, I think it really contributed”

Q to discuss, but it's just, is it okay if in the transition, and it's a little bit deep and personal, but is it okay if you change who you are as a person, if you move from becoming introvert to extrovert, and that extends to your private life as well, to your friends, and you actually change as a person? Is that ok? Or should you still retain the core?

A My view is I don't think you can ultimately change anything about yourself unless you're happy about that change. So I don't think if you are an introvert and you're actually comfortable being an introvert that you can become an extrovert. I'm not an extrovert by any stretch of the imagination today, and every single person that works with me would tell you that. But I've found a way To function where I'm mostly still who I am, an introvert, but I'm a somewhat well-functioning leader in the sense that I can be approachable. I have found ways to share. I am not the one who will kind of stand on the top of the mountain and say, we're going to move the earth over in that direction. That's just not going to be me. But I have found as an example that I like writing things. I like talking in podcasts more than I do newspaper interviews. So as an example, I don't really do a lot of interviews Anymore for that reason, because I found like this is a much better way to get my entire personality, the good and the bad across in this type of format than I do in a sort of written word format where someone just throws a single question to me and I can't elaborate the answer because I don't do well in those types of circumstances. So I think it's about like, you need to understand what the needs are of the organization and not model yourself with someone else, but to think about how you can br…

AI assessment note: “I don't think you can ultimately change anything about yourself unless you're happy about that change.”

Q kind of learn how to do this now. I've had that before, and like, I struggle often with self-doubt in terms of knowing whether I can actually do something and fulfill that. How do you deal with self-doubt, and how, I guess, For you, having been through so many incredible experiences, how would you advise me to deal with that self-doubt when you don't know that you can do something?

A I don't think I necessarily ever knew that I couldn't do it. I think that's the naivety part of me is I just look at it as a challenge, and you know how you talk about the journey, it's not the destination that matters. That's very true for me. I've always been more focused on the journey itself, and liking the pressure of having a lot of people that expect you to come through, that expect you to pull a rabbit out of a hat, And so for me, knowing that and the reward when you're learning those things and coming through, it's really, for me, one of the driving forces of even taking on new things at this stage. So I would just encourage you to go back and try to enjoy the process more than the outcome. I think that's the most important thing.

AI assessment note: “I would just encourage you to go back and try to enjoy the process”

Q You said about kind of the rate of growth in particular within individuals. I think one transition within individuals, which Which is really hard, and we've actually touched on it before, is that transition from founder to CEO, and it's not always the most, like, obvious or natural transitions for anyone to make. I'd love to hear, how do you think about this fundamental transition from founder to CEO?

A Yeah, I think it's one that we should actually pay a lot more attention to, first and foremost, because I think that the common belief at the moment in, especially Silicon Valley lore, is that the founder should always be the CEO. And I don't agree with that at all. I don't think that that should be the case. When it works, it's incredibly powerful, for sure. So don't get me wrong on that. But in more cases than not, it doesn't actually work. And instead, we have a lot of founders who are hanging on to be CEOs because they think that's what's expected of them. And you have a lot of VCs who kind of pump them up and try to say you can do it because you should do it. Because that's the right thing to do instead of realizing that there's a lot of people who are good, maybe at the zero to one, but not in the one to many or in the more mature stage when you're actually trying to build out a serious business. So I think it's something we should pay more attention to. And I think generally as a sort of tech landscape, we pattern matched on way too few samples and thought that's the way it should be looking. I don't think that's necessarily has to be the case. So I think that to answer your question, the most important thing I think is that you take it Seriously, because you're actually changing role. You're going from trying to be a good product market fit to maybe early scaling person…

AI assessment note: “the most important thing I think is that you take it Seriously, because you're actually changing role”

Q Can I ask, I had Dev, the CEO of MongoDB on the show recently, and he said the trouble with bad news is it travels so much slower than good news, and it's always worse than it actually is. And the trouble with good news is It travels so fast, and it's always better. Is that something that you can relate to, and that you've experienced?

A Yeah, for sure. I think the natural instinct in people are obvious to try to not talk about the bad things, but to promote the good things. So that's true, and that's true in Spotify too. I just think it's the natural instinct, but you need to create an environment where not only should you feel safe to do that, but where you know that everyone's got your best Interest at heart when we're looking at these things. It's not about gotcha kind of pointing fingers. It is about how can we actually become better, and by becoming better, we as a team are all becoming better, and we're all helping and supporting each other in a much better way. So it's about how you actually form those kind of team dynamics for enabling that kind of trust between team members. But I'm not going to say we're perfect at it. We're far from, and in fact, I feel like it's almost a reprogramming for every person that we bring into the company because they sort of Intuitively struggle with this kind of notion about being open with failure and being open with mistakes too. So it's definitely something that we're trying to learn and iterate on as well.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, for sure. I think the natural instinct in people are obvious”

Q To delegate effectively, you have to create this kind of environment of safety where people can take risks, where they can be ambitious, but it's really hard to do. How do you think about creating that environment of safety, especially at the scale that, say, a Spotify is, where people can be free to do their very best work without the fear or the insane levels of pressure and accountability?

A Yeah, so we're touching now on culture, and I think that there's a couple of sub-components, like if you want to be a delegating CEO, you have to have, in my opinion, a very trusting culture like you talk about, but also a culture of transparency, because ultimately, if you're moving more and more of your decisions to the edges, having the edges know as much as possible about all of the things that are going on will make them be able to make much better decisions than if They're somehow scrambling to figure out what's important and what's not. So you have to actually spend a lot of time educating the organization even before you're getting to a point where you can delegate things to them. And that's educating how decisions get made, what good decision making process looks like, what bad decision making process looks like. And you can actually, to that point, then qualify that. So rather than looking at outputs, which a lot of people end up doing, like if something went wrong or didn't go wrong, It's way better to think about the input and the process of how that person made the decision, and then kind of do post mortems if the process screwed up rather than if the outcome screwed up. So those are the kind of mechanics, and then the culture in itself is you have to decide what kind of culture you want. In Spotify's case, I like to believe that smart people will make mistakes, an…

AI assessment note: “better to think about the input and the process of how that person made”

Q kind of in retirement, Harry, I'm doing yoga, and I was like, wow, Shaq's got it figured out, and then, uh, you managed to get Shaq out of retirement with Prima Materia, and so I want to start high level, and say, like, it's not another fund, and so when you think about, you know, Prima today. How do you describe what it is, and what makes it fundamentally different?

A Yeah, so technically it's a holding company, not a fund, and what we're trying to do is we're trying to really find some of the hardest and most difficult problems that society is facing today, and find technical solutions that we can hopefully accelerate those technical solutions and bring into the world to make society better. It's as simple as it sounds, But as difficult as it is, of course, knowing all the intricate details on all the things you have to do in the end to get there. But I think for the listeners who probably know VC and that industry, I would say the primary difference is essentially that there is no timeline here. We're trying to do things that can impact not in the next five or 10 years, but has a major impact in 20 or 30 years. And so normal kind of, you know, hey, is this a viable solution in the next Two or three years because I need to raise my second round of funding or minimum viable product. Like, all of those things are thrown out the window, and instead we're saying, well, are we truly solving the right problem? Like, is this a big and large enough problem that if you do solve this problem, it's going to be a worthwhile problem for society to be solved? And then secondly is, is there technology today that we, with a very high degree of certainty, could say it will actually work, but we just don't know when? And if those two things are true, It's a …

AI assessment note: “technically it's a holding company, not a fund”

Q kind of learn how to do this now. I've had that before, and like, I struggle often with self-doubt in terms of knowing whether I can actually do something and fulfill that. How do you deal with self-doubt, and how, I guess, For you, having been through so many incredible experiences, how would you advise me to deal with that self-doubt when you don't know that you can do something?

A I don't think I necessarily ever knew that I couldn't do it. I think that's the naivety part of me is I just look at it as a challenge, and you know how you talk about the journey, it's not the destination that matters. That's very true for me. I've always been more focused on the journey itself, and liking the pressure of having a lot of people that expect you to come through, that expect you to pull a rabbit out of a hat, And so for me, knowing that and the reward when you're learning those things and coming through, it's really, for me, one of the driving forces of even taking on new things at this stage. So I would just encourage you to go back and try to enjoy the process more than the outcome. I think that's the most important thing.

AI assessment note: “I would just encourage you to go back and try to enjoy the process”

Q Totally with you in terms of kind of that transition from discomfort to It actually goes to something which a lot of founders feel, which is like, how do I hire incredible people in roles where I don't know what incredible looks like? How do you think about that? Is it the same process?

A Yeah, very much. In fact, I think this is one of the hardest things for a founder, which is, how do you know how to hire world-class people if you have never seen world-class? And the truth of the matter is, sure, you can read yourself to a certain amount about the subjects, but I don't find that that's a good distinctive Skill that you then would know what someone who's pretty good versus world class looks like. There might be personality traits you might optimize for, that the person is curious, et cetera, as well. But I think the very, very key is a lot of people just don't spend enough time trying to understand what the role that they're asking the person to fulfill. They think about the function, but not the actual task at hand that the person's supposed to fill. Then trying to figure out what world class looks like for that Function might be totally different than something else. So take the role of the CFO. Are you looking for an operational CFO? Are you looking for a financial driven CFO? Are you looking for a strategic level CFO? The truth of the matters, we're going to say all of it, of course, but it's not necessarily what's important in your organization at that particular moment. And if you're thinking about the difference between an operational CFO and a Financial, strategic type CFO, they couldn't be further apart. And so what's world class, even in those two dif…

AI assessment note: “think more about what success looks like for the candidate after a year or two”

Q Can I ask, I had Dev, the CEO of MongoDB on the show recently, and he said the trouble with bad news is it travels so much slower than good news, and it's always worse than it actually is. And the trouble with good news is It travels so fast, and it's always better. Is that something that you can relate to, and that you've experienced?

A Yeah, for sure. I think the natural instinct in people are obvious to try to not talk about the bad things, but to promote the good things. So that's true, and that's true in Spotify too. I just think it's the natural instinct, but you need to create an environment where not only should you feel safe to do that, but where you know that everyone's got your best Interest at heart when we're looking at these things. It's not about gotcha kind of pointing fingers. It is about how can we actually become better, and by becoming better, we as a team are all becoming better, and we're all helping and supporting each other in a much better way. So it's about how you actually form those kind of team dynamics for enabling that kind of trust between team members. But I'm not going to say we're perfect at it. We're far from, and in fact, I feel like it's almost a reprogramming for every person that we bring into the company because they sort of Intuitively struggle with this kind of notion about being open with failure and being open with mistakes too. So it's definitely something that we're trying to learn and iterate on as well.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, for sure. I think the natural instinct in people are obvious to try to”

Q You said about kind of the rate of growth in particular within individuals. I think one transition within individuals, which Which is really hard, and we've actually touched on it before, is that transition from founder to CEO, and it's not always the most, like, obvious or natural transitions for anyone to make. I'd love to hear, how do you think about this fundamental transition from founder to CEO?

A Yeah, I think it's one that we should actually pay a lot more attention to, first and foremost, because I think that the common belief at the moment in, especially Silicon Valley lore, is that the founder should always be the CEO. And I don't agree with that at all. I don't think that that should be the case. When it works, it's incredibly powerful, for sure. So don't get me wrong on that. But in more cases than not, it doesn't actually work. And instead, we have a lot of founders who are hanging on to be CEOs because they think that's what's expected of them. And you have a lot of VCs who kind of pump them up and try to say you can do it because you should do it. Because that's the right thing to do instead of realizing that there's a lot of people who are good, maybe at the zero to one, but not in the one to many or in the more mature stage when you're actually trying to build out a serious business. So I think it's something we should pay more attention to. And I think generally as a sort of tech landscape, we pattern matched on way too few samples and thought that's the way it should be looking. I don't think that's necessarily has to be the case. So I think that to answer your question, the most important thing I think is that you take it Seriously, because you're actually changing role. You're going from trying to be a good product market fit to maybe early scaling person…

AI assessment note: “you take it Seriously, because you're actually changing role.”

Q for you, bluntly, in the way that you carry yourself today as a leader, as a person. When we look back both on the, like, pros and the challenges, if we were to say the pros first, I'm a positive person, what's allowed you to make the transition so effectively, do you think, when you look back, where you're like, that was a moment that was really impactful? Or important.

A First and foremost, I don't think it was ever that smooth, as many could, could say that worked with me during that time, but I think the positives of this is I've always been more motivated than anything else by the journey and by learning, and so there's something appealing about trying to learn, going from a founder to a CEO to begin with, a good one, and then trying to go from a good CEO to great CEO to then going from being a great Small company CEO to a slightly larger CEO to then becoming a public market CEO, which I guess is the sort of pinnacle of the crown of what you should strive to if this was a career path in itself. And so I was motivated by that journey. Antonio, who was the CMO of Facebook, said it brilliantly to me. It's like, you got to learn the rules in order to change the rules. And so I think about that quote a lot. So for me, the most important thing was actually to think about this It's a job and trying to learn the skill sets of just being a CEO. And I try to model myself not on necessarily other startup CEOs, but actually going to traditional industry, learning about accounting, learning about P and L's and how to look at that. And what is capital allocation? What is resource allocation? How should one think about strategic planning? How should one think about business planning? Like all of those different things. And just to try to understand How the…

AI assessment note: “I've always been more motivated than anything else by the journey and by learning”

Q to discuss, but it's just, is it okay if in the transition, and it's a little bit deep and personal, but is it okay if you change who you are as a person, if you move from becoming introvert to extrovert, and that extends to your private life as well, to your friends, and you actually change as a person? Is that ok? Or should you still retain the core?

A My view is I don't think you can ultimately change anything about yourself unless you're happy about that change. So I don't think if you are an introvert and you're actually comfortable being an introvert that you can become an extrovert. I'm not an extrovert by any stretch of the imagination today, and every single person that works with me would tell you that. But I've found a way To function where I'm mostly still who I am, an introvert, but I'm a somewhat well-functioning leader in the sense that I can be approachable. I have found ways to share. I am not the one who will kind of stand on the top of the mountain and say, we're going to move the earth over in that direction. That's just not going to be me. But I have found as an example that I like writing things. I like talking in podcasts more than I do newspaper interviews. So as an example, I don't really do a lot of interviews Anymore for that reason, because I found like this is a much better way to get my entire personality, the good and the bad across in this type of format than I do in a sort of written word format where someone just throws a single question to me and I can't elaborate the answer because I don't do well in those types of circumstances. So I think it's about like, you need to understand what the needs are of the organization and not model yourself with someone else, but to think about how you can br…

AI assessment note: “I don't think you can ultimately change anything about yourself unless you're happy about that change.”

Q of mine for, like, five or six years now, he knew me back when I was young, I say. But I want to ask you, I always think he's world-class at, like, detecting incredible talent and then nurture Nick at some point is an example of that, and many others. But like, for you, having known him so long and so well, what do you think Shaq is world-class at?

A So I think definitely primarily what you said. He has an insane ability to find talent, and to help nurture that talent, and see things in others that they may not even themselves realize yet exist. And that's an incredibly rare set of skills. The other thing, as I'm sure you know by now, is like, his network is insane. I usually say, um, you know, the sixth degree of separation, I say I've got two, I've got Shaq, and then the rest of the world that I need to know, and one of my favorite stories is I landed in Dubai a few years ago, this is well before Spotify was a big thing, and it literally took 10:15 minutes, I don't know how we came about it, but he was like, so do you know Shaq? And this is a random cab driver that picked me up in Dubai, and then talking to Shaq about it, he's like, yeah, yeah, you know, I met him maybe nine years ago, and this is a guy that, like, Then immediately knows Shaq's name and are able to pick it up. And in the end of the things, I'm a very logical person. I like to draw things down to the frameworks, the principles, you know, argue the things. And Shaq is, I guess, the complete opposite. He's more art than science to it. He's more relationships than hard facts about it. And for me, I've seen it firsthand so many times, the value add he brings. Just amazing value. People network, they're all kind of helping each other, and everyone's kind of hel…

AI assessment note: “He has an insane ability to find talent, and to help nurture that talent”

Q What's the hardest element of your role with Spotify today?

A I think the hardest element is it's easy to think about Spotify as one thing, but it's at this .1000 of people who are all coming from all walks of life, and how do I tell a story that touches them in a way where they are inspired to do the best work in their career, and how do I do that without Sort of sounding like it's all platitudes, but reach out to each and every one of them. So distill the story, connect with them, despite them being from all walks of life, all different types of backgrounds, different types of skillsets, et cetera. Because if you can harness that energy of all of your employees and get them to feel that this is the most important mission in the world to try to solve, get them to feel that they can contribute in a major way to that, you will see mountains being moved. And that is the hardest thing to try to do that Every single day with all of the staff that I have around me.

AI assessment note: “how do I tell a story that touches them in a way where they are inspired”

Q Christina Stenbeck, she said, and I quote her here, Daniel has more hunger to learn than anyone I've ever worked with. And so when you think about, like, that transition to Becoming a chief of X officer in a new field. I guess if we've touched on your decision-making framework around delegation, how do you think about your learning process for when you choose to adopt a new of X?

A Well, first off, I think that's all too kind of Christina, but yeah, I mean, it kind of relates back to the point we made earlier. It's about enjoying the process, and what I like to think about is I like to constrain a problem by better understanding its outer edges. The perfect Point to which I feel like I understand the problem well enough would be when I can argue the counterpoint to why something works and why something doesn't work. When you can argue both sides of the argument you're trying to make, then you're at the point where you truly understand the problem. So I always get to that point, and the outcome would be when I can argue both sides of it, and I have a strong point of view that still, this is more right than wrong. And then I like the visual analogy of You're kind of in an airplane, and you're looking down, and you're seeing the contour of a city, but you don't see all the aspects of that city. So you're just slowly, slowly going to move down in altitude, and as you're moving down in altitude, you increase the resolution, and you see more and more things. But even if you think about that visual metaphor, you're starting to see that there are blocks of the city. So you start seeing the elements that make up that city. You start to see the nuances much, much further. But if you can truly start grasping Bing. And try to get to the part where you start seeing th…

AI assessment note: “I like to constrain a problem by better understanding its outer edges.”

Q No, I totally agree with you in terms of that. Many, many of Shaq's skills, and I didn't know that in terms of Dubai. Can I ask what did that, like, early conversations look like in terms of you and Shaq and Prima, and how you came to the decision to partner together on it?

A Yeah, so I've been trying to convince him to come out of retirement for about five or six years, and I've been trying various different constellations of trying to get him to do it. Everything from rejoining me at Spotify to doing all of those things. And not much had actually had an impact on him. He was kind of content sitting there on the sidelines. And then as my own ideas around Prima and what it could be started materializing, I started bouncing those ideas off of Shaq as I've done many times before. And I think part In his own journey, he was starting to kind of open up. He had started getting bored, doing nothing, and then part, I think, the ambition of these things. It's not about making more money. This is about impact. Like, can we move Europe forward from where it is now? Can we, in our way, have a small dent on the European ecosystem and hopefully create an ecosystem of many more companies around these types of companies that we're going after that advances Europe's position and gives Europe a shot I think, to compete on the world stage, and I think that's the thing. I don't think Shaq thought anything else was sort of Super Bowl worthy until this, because the ambition is truly insane when you think about it.

AI assessment note: “as my own ideas around Prima and what it could be started materializing, I started bouncing”

Q I've wanted to do this one for such a long time, so, uh, really is a pleasure for me. I do want to start there, Daniel. You've listened to, you know, many shows before. You know the drill here. How did you make your way into the world of startups, and what was the founding moment for you with Spotify?

A Yeah, I didn't think about entrepreneurship a whole lot, I have to say. I'm brought up in a suburb in Stockholm with a mom who worked as a daycare teacher and a dad who was a car mechanic. No one around me was an entrepreneur, no one I knew was an entrepreneur, so that was not part of my dreams at all. In fact, I only had two hobbies growing up, music and technology. Started playing music when I was four, come from a family that loves music, cares about music deeply. And ended up getting a computer at a very early age. And I just loved tinkering with either my guitar or tinkering with computers and really all throughout my sort of upbringing, playing around with both and sort of accidentally came into it in this sort of late nineties when people wanted webpages and people were trying to, I think a webpage at the time was costing like 50,000 dollars or something equivalent by these big firm consultancy companies, but everyone thought they needed a webpage. And so, here's this kid who knows how to program and knows computers, so surely he should be able to figure it out, and I didn't want to do it. I didn't think it sounded technically enough interesting, so I kind of turned them down at first, said no, and they kept asking, and I didn't know what to say, so I figured I'd just say an absurd high amount that I would do it for, and little did I know, I kind of said, hey, 5000 dolla…

AI assessment note: “accidentally came into it in this sort of late nineties when people wanted webpages”

Q Why was the direct listing an important route for you?

A So first off, I think the person who deserves the most amount of credit for it is not me. It's Barry McCarthy, my former CFO. It's really his brainchild, so I don't want to take credit. But as I heard about the idea compared to the normal process, it just resonated with me from a sort of core values perspective. Because the direct listing, if you really think about it, it's all about Fairness and transparency. It's fairness in the sense that the old process favored the existing investors and favored the institutional buyers that the banks had relationships with. And the direct listing basically enables everyone to find their own role. The equilibrium, let the market speak. And then besides that, I may want to add to that. I do believe in the market. I don't believe that the average person is stupid. I do believe that they're very smart if you give them the right type of information. So Being able to share broadly to all the investors in the world what our vision was instead of just to a few people in the room was important to me. It was also important to me to not have any lockups, but actually let my employees have the same ability to trade their shares that any other investor would have, because that felt like the right thing to do.

AI assessment note: “it just resonated with me from a sort of core values perspective”

Q Christina Stenbeck, she said, and I quote her here, Daniel has more hunger to learn than anyone I've ever worked with. And so when you think about, like, that transition to Becoming a chief of X officer in a new field. I guess if we've touched on your decision-making framework around delegation, how do you think about your learning process for when you choose to adopt a new of X?

A Well, first off, I think that's all too kind of Christina, but yeah, I mean, it kind of relates back to the point we made earlier. It's about enjoying the process, and what I like to think about is I like to constrain a problem by better understanding its outer edges. The perfect Point to which I feel like I understand the problem well enough would be when I can argue the counterpoint to why something works and why something doesn't work. When you can argue both sides of the argument you're trying to make, then you're at the point where you truly understand the problem. So I always get to that point, and the outcome would be when I can argue both sides of it, and I have a strong point of view that still, this is more right than wrong. And then I like the visual analogy of You're kind of in an airplane, and you're looking down, and you're seeing the contour of a city, but you don't see all the aspects of that city. So you're just slowly, slowly going to move down in altitude, and as you're moving down in altitude, you increase the resolution, and you see more and more things. But even if you think about that visual metaphor, you're starting to see that there are blocks of the city. So you start seeing the elements that make up that city. You start to see the nuances much, much further. But if you can truly start grasping Bing. And try to get to the part where you start seeing th…

AI assessment note: “when I can argue the counterpoint to why something works and why something doesn't work”

Q of mine for, like, five or six years now, he knew me back when I was young, I say. But I want to ask you, I always think he's world-class at, like, detecting incredible talent and then nurture Nick at some point is an example of that, and many others. But like, for you, having known him so long and so well, what do you think Shaq is world-class at?

A So I think definitely primarily what you said. He has an insane ability to find talent, and to help nurture that talent, and see things in others that they may not even themselves realize yet exist. And that's an incredibly rare set of skills. The other thing, as I'm sure you know by now, is like, his network is insane. I usually say, um, you know, the sixth degree of separation, I say I've got two, I've got Shaq, and then the rest of the world that I need to know, and one of my favorite stories is I landed in Dubai a few years ago, this is well before Spotify was a big thing, and it literally took 10:15 minutes, I don't know how we came about it, but he was like, so do you know Shaq? And this is a random cab driver that picked me up in Dubai, and then talking to Shaq about it, he's like, yeah, yeah, you know, I met him maybe nine years ago, and this is a guy that, like, Then immediately knows Shaq's name and are able to pick it up. And in the end of the things, I'm a very logical person. I like to draw things down to the frameworks, the principles, you know, argue the things. And Shaq is, I guess, the complete opposite. He's more art than science to it. He's more relationships than hard facts about it. And for me, I've seen it firsthand so many times, the value add he brings. Just amazing value. People network, they're all kind of helping each other, and everyone's kind of hel…

AI assessment note: “He has an insane ability to find talent, and to help nurture that talent”

Q as a hero there. I do want to finish, though, on probably the most exciting, which is the forward-looking, and it's like, what do you think the next, not five, I normally ask five, I didn't forget that, given our long stance that we have, like, what are the next 1520 years hold for you, and I guess, really also, what does success really look like for you with Prima?

A So first and foremost, I'm still very much occupied with Spotify's mission, and I think the most important part of that mission is to try to see if we can have so that a million creative artists can live off of their art. That is a pretty ambitious target. I'm seriously set on trying to achieve that, and I think if we can create that environment, you can just imagine what the world will look like if we had a million artists that can live off of their art. You're gonna see some amazing things in the world, and I like to believe that that will bring Even more, greater moments, greater music, greater parties, greater movies, greater, all of these things that will become just greater with a great soundtrack to it. So that's still very much my day job. And then on Prima, which is almost better to imagine it as kind of my way of trying to give back to the community, I think the most important thing we can accomplish in the next 10 or 15 years is if we can have some sort of impact in solving some of those Really, really large problems that society is battling, such as with climate change, such as with health. I don't have a distinct sort of way of measuring it yet, because we're so early on our journey, but I would feel very pleased if one of these things had the impact of something that was really material to society. That's the most important thing.

AI assessment note: “most important thing we can accomplish in the next 10 or 15 years”

Q I've wanted to do this one for such a long time, so, uh, really is a pleasure for me. I do want to start there, Daniel. You've listened to, you know, many shows before. You know the drill here. How did you make your way into the world of startups, and what was the founding moment for you with Spotify?

A Yeah, I didn't think about entrepreneurship a whole lot, I have to say. I'm brought up in a suburb in Stockholm with a mom who worked as a daycare teacher and a dad who was a car mechanic. No one around me was an entrepreneur, no one I knew was an entrepreneur, so that was not part of my dreams at all. In fact, I only had two hobbies growing up, music and technology. Started playing music when I was four, come from a family that loves music, cares about music deeply. And ended up getting a computer at a very early age. And I just loved tinkering with either my guitar or tinkering with computers and really all throughout my sort of upbringing, playing around with both and sort of accidentally came into it in this sort of late nineties when people wanted webpages and people were trying to, I think a webpage at the time was costing like 50,000 dollars or something equivalent by these big firm consultancy companies, but everyone thought they needed a webpage. And so, here's this kid who knows how to program and knows computers, so surely he should be able to figure it out, and I didn't want to do it. I didn't think it sounded technically enough interesting, so I kind of turned them down at first, said no, and they kept asking, and I didn't know what to say, so I figured I'd just say an absurd high amount that I would do it for, and little did I know, I kind of said, hey, 5000 dolla…

AI assessment note: “accidentally came into it in this sort of late nineties when people wanted webpages”

Q something's not working. I spoke to Gustav before the show, and he said that another of your kind of incredible traits is your patience. And he asked in particular, when you think about kind of your patience, how do you think about the question of, do I give something more time, or do I cut it and intervene? How do you distinguish between Let it run or stop it now.

A Like many CEOs, I would say that my worst mistakes were usually around letting things linger for way too long, and I was dragging the decision forward before acting on it. So it's definitely something that I've been trying to improve from a skill perspective in the last few years, just being able to make the tough decisions faster. Because I've noticed every single time when I've done that, you know, I've never actually encountered any fallback. I've never once regretted it because So you're usually at the point where you've already kind of made up your mind, but you're just dragging it out with a stretch of time. So it's definitely one of the things that I tend to spend time on. But I think what Gusteau's talking about is the inverse, where I actually probably give things more time than most people do, and it actually works. So in that instance, one should ask, okay, well, what are the things that are worth having patience over, rather than what are the things we should kind of intervene? Because I think it's easier to figure out the things you should intervene and just say, this isn't working anymore. But I usually find with people is most people think they're static. And my experience is that's not the case. And so someone that used to be a talent may not be a talent today. And someone who, for whatever reason, wasn't acing their previous job may be acing that job today too.…

AI assessment note: “it's the rate of growth that you're trying to measure and to get a sense for”

Q Can I ask, again, so that's the pros, and when you think of where you've done well, if there were like a particular segment where you're like, actually, that was a real challenge, and got over it, but I did struggle in that phase. Is there a phase which particularly comes to mind?

A Yeah. So first and foremost, I think the hardest thing that founders don't realize about becoming a CEO is that you have to change along the path. And it's as much of a journey of learning skills as it is a personal growth journey of becoming a great leader. And I think the scary thing about looking at an organization like Spotify today is that it's my personality interwoven in it. I see it. I see the awkward things about my personality that the organization itself Showcases. It's scary. It's like, I have my own kids now, but I have this kid too that's a teenager, and they're kind of awkward because it's doing some of the things that I wanted to do, but then every now and then it's doing things that I don't want it to do. But since it is a teenager at this point, I have to realize that I can no longer dictate what they do, because again, the teenager would have its own will and its own way of doing things, and you can influence it, but you cannot, you know, like you talk to a two-year-old saying, nope, you're not Going to be able to do that. You have to think very differently about your style, so you have to evolve along that journey, and for me, specifically, I've had to change so many things about my own personality. I'm not talking about the things that are core, but every single element of my personality has been challenged along the way. I'm a huge introvert, as an example…

AI assessment note: “since it is a teenager at this point, I have to realize that I can no longer dictate”

Q something's not working. I spoke to Gustav before the show, and he said that another of your kind of incredible traits is your patience. And he asked in particular, when you think about kind of your patience, how do you think about the question of, do I give something more time, or do I cut it and intervene? How do you distinguish between Let it run or stop it now.

A Like many CEOs, I would say that my worst mistakes were usually around letting things linger for way too long, and I was dragging the decision forward before acting on it. So it's definitely something that I've been trying to improve from a skill perspective in the last few years, just being able to make the tough decisions faster. Because I've noticed every single time when I've done that, you know, I've never actually encountered any fallback. I've never once regretted it because So you're usually at the point where you've already kind of made up your mind, but you're just dragging it out with a stretch of time. So it's definitely one of the things that I tend to spend time on. But I think what Gusteau's talking about is the inverse, where I actually probably give things more time than most people do, and it actually works. So in that instance, one should ask, okay, well, what are the things that are worth having patience over, rather than what are the things we should kind of intervene? Because I think it's easier to figure out the things you should intervene and just say, this isn't working anymore. But I usually find with people is most people think they're static. And my experience is that's not the case. And so someone that used to be a talent may not be a talent today. And someone who, for whatever reason, wasn't acing their previous job may be acing that job today too.…

AI assessment note: “in my point of view, it's the rate of growth that you're trying to measure”

Q Can I ask, again, so that's the pros, and when you think of where you've done well, if there were like a particular segment where you're like, actually, that was a real challenge, and got over it, but I did struggle in that phase. Is there a phase which particularly comes to mind?

A Yeah. So first and foremost, I think the hardest thing that founders don't realize about becoming a CEO is that you have to change along the path. And it's as much of a journey of learning skills as it is a personal growth journey of becoming a great leader. And I think the scary thing about looking at an organization like Spotify today is that it's my personality interwoven in it. I see it. I see the awkward things about my personality that the organization itself Showcases. It's scary. It's like, I have my own kids now, but I have this kid too that's a teenager, and they're kind of awkward because it's doing some of the things that I wanted to do, but then every now and then it's doing things that I don't want it to do. But since it is a teenager at this point, I have to realize that I can no longer dictate what they do, because again, the teenager would have its own will and its own way of doing things, and you can influence it, but you cannot, you know, like you talk to a two-year-old saying, nope, you're not Going to be able to do that. You have to think very differently about your style, so you have to evolve along that journey, and for me, specifically, I've had to change so many things about my own personality. I'm not talking about the things that are core, but every single element of my personality has been challenged along the way. I'm a huge introvert, as an example…

AI assessment note: “for me, specifically, I've had to change so many things about my own personality.”