The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 8 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Daniel Ek: Spotify tolerates mistakes, but fails without warning are intolerable
“In Spotify's case, I like to believe that smart people will make mistakes, and if you're pushing the envelope, that's going to happen, and I will tolerate that. What I don't tolerate, however, and that's very clear from everyone who works with me, are two thin…”
Daniel Ek: New hires require reprogramming around openness to failure
“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.”
Ek: Modeled Spotify CEO leadership on traditional industry rather than startups
“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.”
Ek: Prima Materia is a holding company, not a venture fund
“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 technic…”
Ek: Spotify direct listing included no share lockups for employees
“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.”
Daniel Ek Charged $5,000 for His First Website Before Knowing HTML
“I kind of said, hey, 5000 dollars, and the other person said, done, and I was like, oh, shit, now I gotta learn how to actually do this. So I taught myself Photoshop, I learned more than the basics in HTML and, like, how to do this, and kind of built it from t…”
Daniel Ek Recruited Classmates to Scale Early Web Design Operation
“I learned more than the basics in HTML and, like, how to do this, and kind of built it from there, and fast forward, I had, like, basically an illegal sweatshop in school with all the kids who were good at math. I taught HTML and all the kids that were good at…”
Ek spent six years trying to recruit Shakil Khan back to Spotify
“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.”