Daniel Ek

“So already about three years ago, He asked me and Alex Nordstrom to step up and become co-presidents and sort of start to run the day to day of Spotify for him. He was still the CEO. And so he's been gradually like giving us more and more rope to run the busin…”

“I worked for Daniel for almost 18 years, and I don't think I'll work for anyone except Daniel again.”

“We actually changed completely how we run the company from the way Daniel runs it.”

“We chose to say, we're not going to have our own leadership meetings. We have a single one with all of our SVPs. So we have a single meeting every Tuesday called the E-Team for three hours. With all the SVPs of all the internal functions, like, you know, marke…”

“Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify and I are working on this project to try to outline all the different founder archetypes. We might even like commission a book on this because it's so important.”

“Daniel might well get there with one of his companies, you know, Spotify, Helsing. I think those are two good options.”

“Daniel Eck, founder of Spotify, told me this, Kareem, founder of Ramp, told me this, that they hire for spikes.”

“One of the best designers that Spotify ever had, and this is the early days of Spotify, it's, like, he was bipolar and also an alcoholic, but also the world's best designer, and if the CEO and the founder didn't sit next to him while he designed, if Daniel got…”

“And what Daniel's realizing, and it's been very helpful cause he definitely shapes my thinking on a lot of things. Is he's like, I just think I'm a better player than coach or excuse me, better coach than player. And Steve's a player. Elon's a player. He says,…”

“People think about, like, founder market fit And he actually thinks the more interesting idea is founder problem fit. And knowing your archetype and then knowing other archetypes of other entrepreneurs that came before you and that match your archetype would b…”

“What I told you when I saw that list is really excellent advice that I got from Daniel Ek, which was, he's like, you're really easy to understand. He was talking to me. It's like, you're really easy to understand. So therefore you're really easy to help.”

“I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact.”

“Actually that sort of drive, that intensity is, is actually something that can be taught. It's not entirely innate”

“The conversation started with us talking about Uber and I said, I recommended you to the job.”

“I figured to myself I worked really hard. I could get there when I was 40. I was 22 when I got there.”

“It's probably the most depressed I've been in my life, to be honest, because, you know, I knew from a very young age what I wanted to do.”

“The value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.”

“Which problems am I passionate about solving? And which problems can I spend the next decade of my life fixing? Because if I'm not interested enough in it to spend a decade fixing it, it's probably not worth pursuing.”

“If I truly believed that, that there would have been a company that Could further our mission and cared about what we cared about as much as we did. I probably would have sold. But I never found that. And because I didn't find that I, we just kept going.”

“I do believe that Focusing all your time and effort on this one thing and obsess about it, and almost to the point where you're not even aware of the rest of the world that goes on is what creates greatness.”

“That's how Spotify came to be. I literally couldn't care about anything else for at the very least the first 15 years.”

“I certainly tried to mimic Steve Jobs. I certainly tried to mimic Bezos and Gates, and all of the great ones you know, the very charismatic ones, like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and, you know, I've learned from all of them, and in a way I've tried to imitate…”

“It's the number one thing why most organizations break down and why you need processes and all the other bureaucracies ultimately because there's no trust. If you had a hundred percent trust, you wouldn't need any of this stuff, and you would move much faster.”

“Trust is the, this notion that you'll keep doing actions that will ladder up over time. It really compounds, but you're going to add maybe one percent of trust for each positive interaction you're going to do, but it takes one interaction that's bad to ruin al…”

“I asked him, hey can I come and learn from you? And he was incredibly gracious and we've obviously been friends for a long time, and he said sure. And so I spent the better part of what I believe the first time was like a week literally in pretty much all of h…”

“There are many things where you can copy a specific way. For instance, Elon does things. But if it's not truly innate to you and your personality, I promise you it will not have the same impact as when Elon does things.”

“So like for me, taste is, is sort of judgment plus curiosity. And the more you can sort of like extend the curiosity branch that improves your judgment, which then builds your taste.”

“So what happened with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom and wealth, which is I don't really run product anymore. Because what happened was I got this guy called Gustav that you now met and he runs product. And he's actually way better than me at…”

“One of the most interesting ideas that I learned after sort of, again, overfitting the concepts in, in the book and sort of teaching people about it is you can only tell that you have power when it's there. It doesn't tell you how to get there.”

“When you make a lot of money, you tend to make life more comfortable. So you tend to spend more time golfing. You spend some time doing all these other things. But the reality is you become distracted, and you're not gonna be on your A game anymore.”

“A lot of entrepreneurs seem to be obsessed about time. I'm really not. I'm more obsessed about energy management.”

“The worst productivity thing I did was I was at one point doing these 15 minute naps. I don't know if you've heard about this exercise. It's a really bad idea by the way. So don't try this, but I sort of learned that you can like Daisy Shane sleep together by …”

“I actually think what kind of video games you like is a pretty good revealer of your things too. Like, I wasn't playing any kind of first person shooter games or any of that, some of it, but not much. Most of what I was playing was strategy games. You know, ci…”

“I think you have to love technology in order to go to the depth of understanding what's possible. And because it's off, oftentimes like the greatest ideas is truly innately understanding something and truly innately breaking constraints around that something b…”

“Investing is, is actually more about learning about your temperament than it is about the specific action that you're doing. Your temperament, actually, it's more about being in line with your temperament than not, or which game you're picking.”

“The truly greatest people financially, if that's the only yardstick you use, typically do completely the opposite of that, which is they have oftentimes only one assets. Maybe they'll have two or three, but they certainly don't have more than that. And they ju…”

“I've gained in periods of my life, like 40 pounds in my worst negotiations, et cetera.”

“I actually feel like I owe that guy to keep pushing myself, right? Because there's so many things, there's so many demands of my time, so many things that tells me to sort of downshift gear into an easier gear, because life would be a lot more comfortable that…”

“The message that Daniel Ek from Spotify sent out with their layoffs in twenty-twenty-four said, we still have too many teams doing work around the work and supporting work rather than focusing on opportunities with real impact.”

“Spotify actually looks at queries that people have run that they don't have good answers for, where there's, you know, somebody searches for, I don't know, I want a disco song about like how fun it is to dance with your dog, right? I don't know. And if somebod…”

“There are musicians who take this list and they actually write songs based on what people are looking for. And that, that they make tens of millions of dollars a year doing just exactly that.”

“As a founder, the Investors you choose are so important. So of course it makes a huge difference. You know, if you're the founder of Helsing and you choose Daniel Eck, because Daniel Eck understands what long-term business building means, you know, and you don…”

“So yeah, Spotify founder Daniel Eck is leading a six hundred million dollar funding round into the German defense tech startup Helsing. This is the, this is kind of more of an annual equivalent over in Europe valuing that four year old company at twelve billio…”

“I think it was, I really think that was part of the reason why you look at why Sweden is punching above its weights in terms of kind of unicorn companies is part of that is because a lot of those founders, if you look at”

“They're like in the investment memo, it's like in 20, 25, we'll have three hundred million DAUs and they got it within like 10% or something. It was like a 20 year projection and they nailed it.”

“And then his subscriber count over the few weeks went up. He added two million new subscribers”

“You have a founder and CEO who's been running the company for 18 years, right? It's over, it's worth over a hundred billion dollars. He's only 41 or something like that. He, and yet he's still Somehow underrated.”

“So the seed was eight and a half million euros, but then we were lucky to have Daniel Ek and Prima Materia invest a hundred million euros about four months later or so.”

“Crazy persistence and patience. Things at least two levels more profound than others. It's very logical and it's always a very friendly and well-rounded character. Yeah. And he has uncompromising ethics in everything he does.”

“That the pay, the sum of what the US spends on heart diseases and medication, all that kind of stuff in the US is, is in the vicinity of Apple's revenue worldwide.”

“In 2019 you know, when we got into podcasts the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people listening to this.”

“And today there's over a hundred and fifty million people listening to podcast on Spotify.”

“While I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this sort of notion that just seeing sort of what all of your friends are listening to may not be the sort of right social product. But if you instead sort of say like, I wa…”

“Specifically from him you know, he's the, probably the best learner I've ever seen. You know, you can have a conversation with him about a topic, he may not know very much about it, and then the next time, he would know more than, I would say, most experts abo…”

“So the internal saying that Spotify is talk is cheap. Because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it.”

“In his spare time when he was still a high school student, he built the back end in, in a matter of weeks.”

“Overall, I mean, I think he was a great CEO, like, definitely, you know, up there, like, generational CEO, at least for, like, Swedish startups.”

“Charlie and Margaret was by far our biggest episode ever. Jensen was bigger than any previous season episode. Dara and Daniel were right around the ballpark of what our season episodes were doing at that point in time when we had interviewed them.”

“I had a drink with actually Daniel Ek at Spotify, And Daniel asked me, have they called you about this thing? Because I recommended you for the job.”

“I think that too much cash too early Has a net negative impact on 99.9% of companies unless you are an exceptional allocator of capital like he is, like Daniel Ek is, like very, very few generational founders are.”