Daniel Ek
32 statements across 3 episodes · 9 bullish · 4 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Sep 28, 2025 by Daniel Ek · said 95 times in 21 episodes since 2025 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Daniel Ek's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by David Senra (75), Torsten Reil (10), Gustav Söderström (4), Patrick O'Shaughnessy (2), Michael Ovitz (2), Scott Wu (1), Jimmy Iovine (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 86 mentions in 16 episodes 5 per episode
- The Company Apple Couldn't Kill | Spotify Co-CEO Gustav Söderström
- Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing
- Jimmy Iovine: Building Interscope Records & Beats by Dre
- John Mackey: The Dropout Who Changed How America Eats
- Brian Armstrong: When Washington Tried to Kill Coinbase
- Tobi Lütke: 21 Years of Building Shopify
- The Future of Software & AI | Cognition’s Scott Wu
- Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: Building a Multi-Billion Dollar Company
- 8 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about Daniel Ek, oldest first
Sep 28, 2025
Ek: Investing is primarily about personal temperament rather than specific actions
“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.”
Sep 28, 2025 bullish
Ek: The greatest financial winners concentrate in one to three assets
“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…”
Sep 28, 2025
Ek: Lack of trust is the primary driver of organizational bureaucracy
“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.”
Sep 28, 2025 positive
Ek shadowed Mark Zuckerberg for a week, attending all his meetings
“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…”
Sep 28, 2025 neutral
Sep 28, 2025 neutral
Ek: 7 Powers identifies existing strategic advantages but not how to build them
“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.”
Sep 28, 2025
Sep 28, 2025
Ek: I Refuse to Downshift Gears Because I Owe My Younger Self
“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…”
Sep 28, 2025 positive
Ek: Video game preferences reveal innate career and problem-solving inclinations
“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…”
Sep 28, 2025
Sep 28, 2025 negative
Ek: Trying to imitate Jobs, Bezos, and Gates failed for me
“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…”
Sep 28, 2025
Sep 28, 2025
Sep 28, 2025 neutral
Sep 28, 2025
Ek: Trust compounds slowly, but one bad interaction ruins all of it
“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…”
Sep 28, 2025 positive
Sep 28, 2025 negative
Ek: Attempting polyphasic sleep was his worst productivity experiment
“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 …”
Sep 28, 2025 neutral
Sep 28, 2025 negative
Ek: Wealth makes founders comfortable, distracted, and off their A game
“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.”
Sep 28, 2025
Sep 28, 2025
Ek: Spotify would have sold early if an acquirer shared its mission
“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.”
Sep 28, 2025 positive
Sep 28, 2025 positive
Ek: True breakthrough ideas require deep passion for technology's underlying rules
“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…”
Sep 28, 2025 positive
Ek: Gustav Söderström runs product at Spotify better than I do
“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…”
Sep 28, 2025 positive
Sep 28, 2025 negative
Sep 28, 2025 neutral
May 17, 2026
Jun 7, 2026
Jun 7, 2026
Söderström: Spotify operates via a weekly 3-hour executive meeting of 14 SVPs
“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…”
Jun 7, 2026 positive
Jun 7, 2026
Söderström: Daniel Ek prepared Co-CEOs for three years before succession
“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…”