YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Ek

lines on the record: 215
first: 2025-09-28
most recent: 2025-09-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Happen any other way. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great one. That's a great way to end it. Daniel, I'm thankful for your time, thankful for your friendship. You're one of the people I most admire. And I really appreciate you doing this.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Um... I don't think too much anymore. I used to think a lot about how other people saw me or see me. I don't do that anymore. So I would choose more of a self-reflective one. And I wish only one thing on my tombstone, future one feels absurd talking about it, but would be that he lived.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So hopefully you don't 100 years from now when you do have a tombstone, if there was only going to be one word on that tombstone, what would you want it to be?”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll read the family histories because I do think you can learn a lot from human nature in fiction. And my job and my obsession requires me to 99% of my reading is nonfiction and I don't, I want to read more fiction. And I came across something recently because I'm going through Jeff Bezos shareholder. Where two brothers are fighting in this war. One of the brothers was pulled into the war that did not want to be there, and he made the sacrifice because it was for the good of his family. He wind up dying in the war that he didn't want to To fight in the first place, and his brother, Stessa, survived. God has remains, buried him, and then put him in a grave with only one word on his tombstone. And that one word was loyal.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it goes back to impacts are doing impact to happiness. This is what, so I think I text this to you, but one of the roles you play, and I'm very grateful that you allowed us to like record this conversation because essentially what I texture is like you seem to have no self-imposed ceiling on what you can learn or achieve and that spending time with you then transfers that belief to other people. And so like every single time, you know, obviously like I take notes of like what I learned from the conversation we have after the fact and I interpret it as like obviously not verbatim. I'm saying like, what did I just learn from Daniel? What does apply to me? He's like, oh, you have all these, you think you don't, I thought like I was ambitious and I like I didn't even realize till you kind of pulled the scales off my eyes like you have this like limiting belief that you have no limits. There is no limits in life. And so like you're hell of inspiring. One other question for you. I'm obsessed with Game of Thrones to an unhealthy degree. I re-watched the series all the time. I've read all the books. I read the encyclopedia.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many things that tells me is to sort of downshift gear into an easier gear because life would be a lot more comfortable that way. This is not a comfortable thing. No, go back to one of us are doing”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has always been there and has always been these things. And like you said, you kind of look back at yourself a few years back when you started off and say, wow, how did I do this? And you're amazed at that. I can feel the same way about young Danielle. I can feel myself about the young Daniel that worked every weekend, you know, non-stop 24-7 sacrificed so many things, so many summer or so many other things. You know, I had a blast doing so, but I didn't have a normal upbringing just because I was so obsessed about learning, so obsessed about making it put me in the position of where I am today. And 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.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think yes and no. So I feel different in the same way a 40 year old would feel different than a 10-year-old would do. I feel different in I'm a product of all the experiences of my life and obviously I've been incredibly fortunate to I was counting the other day I've been to like 130 countries or something in my life. I've seen so many cultures, so many people. I have friends all over the world. All of that has shaped me into who I am. I don't feel different because innately many of the things that drive the long-termness, the obsession, This sort of willingness on the paradox of winning on the one hand, but then also trying to truly find a win-win and work with people to try to find a win-win, which is really important to me.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But like you grow up, you have a great mom, you know, single family, not a lot of money, but and then now what I'm curious about is like your lived experience is so, there's so few people alive that can actually empathize with that as because they also had it. So I'm very curious, do you feel different? And what I mean by that is as you've grown from a kid in the projects. Even if you had early success to now being one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet, which I know don't do the face. But it's an undeniable fact. Like, do you feel different?”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have two more questions that I'm personally curious about. One is going to be a very weird question, but the first one is, do you feel different? Okay. So like most of the people watching this are listening to this, like so few people are going to be born in the projects in a tiny little, we didn't even, we'll have to do like this every year if you're fine with it because like the idea that you even like come from this tiny little island, which I was like, you know like got to visit and then you like competing with the biggest companies in the world and you win it's just doesn't like we we didn't even get there”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's really a work product. I wish there was more recorded stuff on myself when I was like. I was not great. I was quite terrible. And so I've just learned that it's a superpower and something I have to work on is getting my message across to other people to believe what I'm believing and see what I'm seeing in order to get them to want to come and join. Whatever thing we were trying to will into this world.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, I've listened to all your episodes or all your interviews, and I did this before we were friends, and every time something comes out, I was like, oh, I got to watch that. You're not giving yourself enough credit. Like you are a very clear communicator.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because, like, you know, not only do you stand out quite a lot as an entrepreneur, and my interests were widely different than my social circuit growing up and all these things. But the second thing is I'm an introvert. So, you know, that doesn't help. So most people like being around a lot of people. And they get energy from it. I didn't. So that obviously naturally gets you to question yourself. And against many others as an entrepreneur, I'm not the most eloquent person. I'm not the smartest.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like many others don't have any idea obviously what will happen, but I think they're really important. So I've always been a searcher. And I think that naturally sort of like led me to sort of also be a searcher about myself too and trying to find sort of who I am. But the older I've gotten and the more and more things have started clicking about myself and the more unapologetic I am about.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm more comfortable with who I am than I was 20 years ago. I was still very much, my whole life, I've been a searcher. I've been, you know, when I was really young in my teens, I went to every possible religious meetup you could be. I went to everything. I went to Hare Krishna centers. I went to... Jewish centers, you know, mosques, I went everything, and I tried to learn as much as possible because I truly believe not enough people are like, I've always been surprised why more people aren't interested in where we come from and what the purposes of life. For me, those are sort of some of the greatest questions that.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And for me, realizing that. It's just been eye-opening, right? It's another one that's on my wall because I feel like. Quite often, when I'm talking to people. And they're talking and trying to get life advice. They're not playing their game. They're playing someone else's game. They're certainly not playing the game they want to be playing. But they somehow think that life is just one game where actually so much is about choosing the right game for you. And so... Yeah, I keep coming back to that, like energy management is the same thing. You gotta create the environment around you that you want to do. You got to choose your game. And when you do that and you start understanding that.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll read it. It's in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game. The challenge is to figure out what game.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, that's probably going to be enough. And it doesn't feel like enough at that moment because I ruined my body. But 20 minutes later, I understand it. And so I'm just trying to sort of, again, convey this sort of thing about understanding who you are, choosing the game you're playing, and realizing that life is not one game, but it's a thousand games. And there's this brilliant quote by this guy called Kwame Appia that there's another one of those things. I just circled it. Perfect.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our innate personality, understanding hunger, like I can tell you someone I've gained in periods of my life like 40 pounds in my worst negotiations, et cetera. And one of the problems I have now is that I literally don't know when I'm hungry because I ruined that sort of natural feeling in my body of understanding when I'm hungry and when I'm not hungry. huge part of losing weight for me over the past few years was just really kind of innately starting to listening to my body again and like starting to figure out what satiation means because for me for instance i don't feel it until 20 minutes after so like if if i didn't like sort of eye what i should eat i would just keep eating way more than i should um and so much of me has just been portion sizing of like under”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes it could be six hours or sometimes it could be 12 hours. So it used to be the sleepless actually in two periods. So you didn't sleep one consecutive thing. You sort of had three, four hours sleep. And then you woke up and then you had another three, four hours sleep again. And so much of that was based on light. And maybe it was driven by other things that were happening in our life too. And for Nordic people, what it actually meant, going back as late as the 18th century, before we started having electric lights and candles and all these things, is we actually slept a lot less on the summers and we slept a lot more in the winters, guided by lights. So we keep thinking it's the static thing, but it's actually, again, driven by the environment around us. And so much of this sort of innate knowledge about listening to ourselves, understanding.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel that. I feel like so much of our life just rips us apart from this thing and tries to get us on a scheduled per se. And it's not like I don't have a schedule. Of course I do have one. But I feel so much of it should be more guided by trying to understand ourselves more intimately, right? So I don't know if you've heard of this, but going back to sleep, there's been this kind of thing around more recently, which I was surprised one of my 10-year-old daughter told me about this is around that actually, you know, she sort of said like, we have this idea that of eight hours, and she actually mentioned instead that the real notion is that we kind of did it almost like fasting, like Ramadan is, you know, how it's based on the sun.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you mean energy is like you just let that guide you It's like, hey, if I need a break right now, if I need to go for a walk or if I need to go spend time with my wife and kids or like.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is amazing, right? But some songs are the ones you like work on it. You put it in a drawer and six months later, totally unbeknownst to you clicks. You're not even working on that thing. It just sort of like, oh, that's it. And they go back and they do the song and it's like the greatest song ever. There's not one path to greatness. There's many. And I feel like That's why I'm so obsessively focused on energy.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I do feel the same thing, of course, but I'm back to sort of time versus energy management. And I don't know about you, but I feel like the greatest ideas I've had comes from the most weird and wonderful places where I expected nothing out of it. So quite often when I do take some time off, I come back with like two or three new insights that just wouldn't have come if I just kept grinding that thing by just changing a scenery, being in a different frame of mind, passing, giving, you know, it's in the creative process. The greatest artists talk about some of the greatest songs literally take five minutes to write.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I just cannot believe that I did that. And I'm just like, that's the thing I'm most proud of than anything else. Just like I had to do this. I was willing to like drive Uber if I had to 10 bar, do literally whatever. I was like, just. Give me enough time, I'll figure it out now. I didn't think it was going to take. A decade to figure out you have a ton of stories Spotify with that. There is no line, I feel, between your work and your life, like they're one and the same. Yeah. The issue that I'm having now and in general is that I feel a lot of pressure because like I'm trying to change not just my life, but like the trajectory of like my entire family. And I feel very guilty when I don't work to the point where like. I just got back from a crazy trip that people would love to go on. I just felt guilty for not taking time.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now I look back, I was like, there's no way I would do that today. But somehow that person who I now greatly appreciated, it feels like a different person. I cannot believe that is like what I'm most proud of is not like trying to make something that's great, which I think is a selfish thing for us. It's like, yes, when you release it to the world, you release Spotify, you do all these things. It's an act of service to other people, but you're also doing it because you have to. It has to come out.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I talk on the podcast or everything I say on social media, it's like reminders to my Read, reread past highlights because, like, we forget that we forget, and so I need a reminder. And it just came across one. It's just like I have them presented to me in a random order. So it's like, I never know what I'm going to read that day. And it said it was buffet. It's like a difference between successful people and really successful people. It's really successful people say no to everything. And this is exactly the constant thing where, like, I do have a question for you. One, going back to that, it's like, I can't even explain why I did what I did because I had closely no traction for five and a half.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Competition for your time. There was none, so you could probably sit for six hours or eight hours, etc. But today It's much harder Because there's many other things, there's people like myself and other. And you're like, oh, wait a minute, maybe this is a good idea to meet this person. Or there's a A business opportunity that shows up. And maybe people are asking maybe you should invest and maybe you're tempted about it even. But this is the thing that happens all the time. And this is how greatness gets evaporated is you lose focus. That's a great line. Greatness gets evaporated. Lot of the stuff”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being not even 1%, but like 0.1% or 0.1% in something And I think feel like you sort of asked about AI and all these things. We can talk about art too, but For me Is going to be even rarer. Like average is going to be possible to do, even better than average is going to be possible to do with AI. But that sort of Thing about this guy doing this for 30 years just becoming the very, very best about what they do or Even what I find incredibly inspiring by you is just the relentlessness. Every single day towards the long term. It's like, as you say, it's the paradox. About the long term. Mindedness, but the obsession on the daily basis. And against conventional odds, against all these other things, because I would imagine, I don't know, but I would imagine like when you started.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only thing we've learned, we keep debating all these things about the universe, but the only thing we know is it's not static. It moves. You cannot by definition be like this one thing. It's just constantly expanding or contrasting or it's moving. So perfection just doesn't exist. But the aspiration towards perfection is a remarkable thing. I mean, I love Japan for this reason, right? Like you find these amazing individuals that literally spend their entire life. I was in Japan maybe 10 days ago or something, and I was in one of these temples with a team master who literally all he's done for the past. I've asked them for the past 34 years is perfecting how to make tea. Nothing else And yes, the tea is amazing. It's not just that, it's just seeing that obsession about quality, seeing that obsession about”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Versus the rest is so important and it's so important to understand. And I think we again take it literally. We know about it because we can explain it in hindsight, but we don't know when it's happening. So what is that qualitative process? What defines quality as it's happening before you can see it objectively from the outside? Those things are interesting. And I'm more and more drawn towards that it is For me at least very much looking at the people in it and looking at how they build judgment over time, the sort of feedback loop they create the curiosity they have about this and the obsession they have about trying to achieve the impossible and for me the impossible is something that's perfect it's never going to exist the whole universe is this thing where”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. But I think you're all into something important, which is this notion around just innately focusing and solving problems day by day builds quality. And so quality for me is less quality for me is focus, quality for me is improving day by day. All of these things build quality and quality is rare. Quality in people is rare. Quality in ideas is rare. And we tend to make these things binary. And we talked about it with people. Like, I'd rather have that person that has one good idea in an entire hour and the rest is crap than someone who has 10 decent ideas. But nothing is amazing. So that sort of differential equation between the 1%.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a friend's boat in the marina there. And there's like the boat bigger than anything else around there. It's like, and you can Google who owns it. It was like, it was Sam Walton's brother's daughter.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I sold Disney. So that's why I was like, oh, the best financial decisions are not financial decisions at all. You're doing it for another reason, which is exactly what you said. It's like all Sam had to do was just keep doing Walmart is exactly what he did. I remember obviously living in Miami.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're having this conversation in the 1970s, and the leadership of the financial firm is like, how do we avoid not doing this? That one, they said, if we just held that, it would have the gain would have been more than all the assets we have in our management. Like, we can't do this. That same year Sold Walmart. They have Walmart in the 1970s So they made the same mist And Buffett, obviously greatest investor of all time. He met Walt Disney. He went and talked to Walt Disney in like the 60s. And then I think he bought the stock at like 62 cents or something. And he had like a 2x or 4x game.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Michael Dell's like, you have to understand like 1987 for me to yell out to my dad. He's like, what do you want to do for a living? He's like, I want to compete with IBM. I'm a 19-year-old in my dorm room with a thousand dollars. Like, what kind of grandiose ambition do you have? I witnessed her. She's like, why is this so crazy? And I started, it was the most valuable company in the world by MarketCap at the time. It was the first company to go over $100 billion in market cap, right? And this little 19-year-old kid's like, no, I think I can like have a go with them. But Nick's sleep talks about. He came into this firm and he's reading how they talk about their investments. And like, we made a massive mistake. We owned IBM in the 1950s and we sold.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's just like, I'm doing it because I love to do it and spending time doing anything else would be an absolute distraction. And Nick Sleep talks about this because he's a capital allocator. He's not building a product, but he's making capital allocation decisions. Like, do I need to sell this stock, put into another one? I'm weighing my opportunity costs. And he was haunted almost. This idea, if you look at financial history, it's like he talked about a financial firm one day where they're like, okay, we owned IBM in the 1950s. And I didn't know until I read Michael Dell's autobiography, right? Because IBM was like, they're the most powerful and wealthiest company in the world with me and you”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Nick Sleep talks about this as like, and in other books, it's like, if Sam Walton didn't give away Know you have one of the largest fortunes by a single person ever for their ownership, the concentration of ownership in Walmart. And Sam talks about this. He's like, I didn't really do investing in anything but Walmart, right? And it's like he wasn't waking up saying, I need to diversify my portfolio. I need to worry about capital allocation. He's just like, I believe in what I'm doing. I'm going to keep doing it. I'm going to throw all my money in there”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a realization you have, right? Because I read something, you read a line, and you're like, okay, let me filter that through how I would say it. So I do this all the time where like I'll take notes on all the books that I read and then I'll reread them. I'll just jot the town. It's like, what's occurring there? Can I put it into one sentence? And one thing I stumbled upon about this was that sometimes Nick Sleep has this great quote where he's like the best investors are not investors at all. They're entrepreneurs never sold. And me and you have talked about this the fact that there's a lot of people that have sold way too early and they're like lauded and it's like if you just didn't do that everything else you did like you if you just didn't sell”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything about it, but what sort of got me deeper curious about it is I realized that investing 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 temperaments than not or which game you're picking needs to be suited to you and your circumstances and how you want to play this than anything else. And so again, we come back to philosophy. And so one of the concepts is obviously around that manger talks about coming back to Munger reference again is diversification, right? And he calls it somewhat simplified diversification because the common wisdom, of course, is in theory diversification is the best thing you can do. But 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 asset.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focusing distilling, getting to the essence. We can even talk about quality in communication. It's often trimming things down and saying less things, right? Why is it, for instance, that when we're talking about very hard things, most people's instant reaction is just to try to add more complexity to the issue instead of just simplifying it, to just trying to be courageous and just trying to say the thing right out loud. The older I get, the more my instinct is towards turning towards that. And I'm reminded even if we go back to investing, because like part of why I sort of liked investing has nothing to do with money. It started with honestly this fact that all of a sudden I had more money than I knew what to do with. And I sort of didn't want to just hand it off to a bank without understanding.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really is about sort of ultimately this very simplistic tribe thing, less is more. And the older again, I feel more and more. You know, we talked about it with friends. I think most people start out thinking having more friends is better. But I think more people are happier with fewer but better friends than many friends. I think qualities ultimately this sort of notion around”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's so many strands of quality, right? It is both sort of the distinction of taste, whether taste is subjective or objective. You can go so many ways with this question. But the way I think about quality is I think so much of your early life, certainly my case was the formulation of just trying to go for more The further I've gotten, I've realized, and it's about everything, right? You mass more stuff, you mass, you try to, you know, more things at the same time. You try to do all of these things at the same time. And the further you go, you realize that”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's obviously very important to you. Like, we can't talk about quality. So, like, do you want to just pick up where that quote leaves off?”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now you have more resources, you can be patient. Like, you couldn't have done NECO 20 when you were 23. But you have this great quote that I know is important to you, and it says, quality is never an accident. It is always a result of intelligent effort. We haven't talked about quality at all, even though Spotify is the highest, like if you compare your competitors, like it's just in a class by itself.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's the new technology today that enables me to solve this problem that didn't exist a few years ago? So you have this patience, right? You have this desire to solve problems. It's almost like it sounded like to me, and maybe you could disagree with me like you're sounding like you see a giant puzzle. You're trying to figure out”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you mentioned that, I thought of like, you know, James Dyson is one of my entrepreneur heroes. And what I love about one of the hidden things that people don't know is he wrote a book called The History of Great Inventions. It's such kind of a bland read. God bless his heart. But like, it's just him going through like little Wikipedia pages or like his version of like Wikipedia pages about like what this inventor did, how he did it, and what the result was. And then you see him take these ideas from like 1700 or whatever. And it's like, oh, I'll just take like that little piece out here and I'll combine it with this piece. And then what's.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's like, okay. That's an insane love. That's an understanding, like we're tackling one something that's. Like what you just said, like what innovation and creativity is actually a combination of things that occurred before. We're com”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To plan, you know, to take two decades or three decades to solve the problem that I'm trying to go after. Maybe in some cases stuff that he's working on might even outlive his lifetime. But it doesn't mean I'm like dilly dialing on a day-to-day basis. I heard you say something one time. You're like, I promise you, I don't think I'm the smartest. I don't think I'm the most talented. If I have one superpower, it's like I just have super patience. I think Neko is like an example of this. I met your co founder on it And I got to see this too. And I was like, oh, like this is cool. Like, who made the machines? We did And then I didn't know it was like I don't know if stealth is the right word From the idea to the first time the customer happened, it was like six years or something, or four years”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT