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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“I think most of us you can't even describe why you're doing what you're doing at the time. And what I mean by that is like you hinted on this earlier. It's like, it's so easy to kill new ideas, right? The arrow on the side of no, we can't do this. It's amazing to me how many times this comes up in all these biographies where it's just like, this is a skill you have to learn. And a lot of it is like being comfortable with the messiness of the creative product process. But it's also a traders by definition impatient. They have this what looks like a paradox where they want shit done now. I love Jeff Bezos says about this step by step ferociously I'm willing to”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it doesn't come form, and it doesn't scale, and it doesn't behave in any of these other things. And then you have this other side, which is all about scale, which is all about conforming and sort of navigating that sort of dynamism between these two things and polarities between these two things is very few people that I think can do and is really, really well classed at doing it.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entrepreneurship is we talked about this Google example of trying to earn different colors. You can't do that early on. That is the amazing thing. Every decision you make is life or death. And that makes sort of the stakes even higher because you may literally try one thing and then you run out of money. And so you got to make sure that is the right thing. And it's just such a fascinating process. But it comes back. It's a process of creativity. It's a process of trying things out. And I'm more and more enamored and more and more in love with this idea that creativity itself is this really, really powerful thing. Maybe the thing that makes us unique as humans relative to everything else that exists in this world and kind of going deeper and deeper into creativity itself. And”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is someone willing? What do they need, even if they can't articulate it themselves? And then have this entire field of amazing brilliance engineers and scientists and mathematicians and all these groups of people that are doing various things. And then sort of figure out the intersection. And then you actually have to make it viable too, which is you have to have some sort of business model. Because if you don't have that, eventually this thing won't be sustainable. So, you know, it's sort of the trifect of those three things. And that makes it even more interesting because now we're talking about a really complex equation trying to get these things together with multiple unknowns and you're trying to configure these things by locking down constraints on one side and then you're trying another side. And the amazing thing about early”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think you have to love technology in order to go through the depth of understanding what's possible. And because it's oftentimes like the greatest ideas is truly innately understanding something and truly innately breaking constraints around that something by understanding the rules and knowing when you can like what are the greatest entrepreneurs really well the greatest founders are the people that kind of have this one idea of like what the they can almost internalize the consumer”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, I like technology for technology's sake. Yeah, what does that mean? I like the process of science. I like the process of discovery. I like the process of understanding how things work. You know, I've been wired this way all my life. I've been pulling apart computers. I've been trying to understand why a semiconductor works the way it works, all these things. And I'm intrigued about that. This thing about understanding everything, understanding life, understand where we come from, understanding all these different things. But I'm equally interested in solving problems. And when you're curious about both of those two angles, you can end up finding these sort of connection points where those two things meet, where it's obvious that there is something over there that no one's really kind of applied in this way before. And maybe there's not one idea, but two ideas over there. It's quite interesting.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe eight sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use eight sleep. I would recommend getting the pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress, and it is next level sleep tech. It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night, independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to eight sleep. com forward slash centra and use the code centra to get three hundred fifty dollars off you can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it but i'm confident you will love it i will never let anyone take my eight sleep from me”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night. And as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is eight sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of eight sleep Mateo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using eight sleep, I randomly ran into Mateo at a restaurant and I was with some friends. So I go over and say, hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, who was I talking to? And I said, that's Mateo, the founder of Aight Sleep. And my friend replied, he looks like he gets good sleep. Mateo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an eight sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my eight sleep.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get to listen to problems all around me all the time, and I try to distill and figure out, okay, well, this person said this thing, but what if you actually articulate the problem like this instead? Okay, well, what does that mean? What does that unlock? And that for me is just, it's so much fun. And I couldn't imagine not spending every single day doing this. And we started this journey by telling my story that I didn't have to work. And that's why I started Spotify, because I love music and I wanted to figure out a way where consumers got what they wanted and creators were able to get paid by doing what they loved to do. And that's really the genesis of the story. But even today, you know, I'm thinking about this. And I said, even if you remove all the money, even from the beginning, even in the middle and even now, there's no way I wouldn't do this.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of earth shatteringly different. It's everything around life extension to just walking into a store and you see things you don't like in the store. Well, those are problems. If you could do those things better, you could probably build a business. And so the biggest thing, however, is that people have this misconception about what innovation is. And they somehow think that they got to try to figure out something entirely new. But the history of the world is we build on other people's ideas. So an innovation is actually taking two or more things that were already well known and putting it together in a new way. It's really what it is. And so for me, the most interesting thing is like laying a puzzle or anything else is like I get to.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into the world 100%. But I think it comes from solving problems. And so, yeah, I mean, I get excited today. You sort of ask about the other stuff that I get focused on. I don't focus so much about the solution. I focus on the problem. I try to find really interesting problems and figuring out even if there's like five or ten percent chance of solving that problem, and I know that would be huge for humanity or society if we figure it out, then it's amazing. Like that gets me fired up. And the intricacies of solving that problem, because it's oftentimes very, very complex because it's not like other people don't know that this problem exists. There's probably even a lot of people that would agree that if we could figure it out, that would be really valuable. But, you know, I find this all the time. And you said it yourself. It's like sometimes they're really small, these problems. Sometimes they're gigantic.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make other people's lives better. I make the company more valuable. And then you also have to feel good about what you're”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this guy named Henry Kaiser, who was as famous in his day as maybe like an Elon is today. And he built 100 companies. One of them still exists. Kaiser Percente. He built a Hoover Dam. He built the Liberty ships in World War II. And he has this great maxim that people would come to him and they'd be all depressed and he'd be excited. And they're like, what the hell is going on here? Henry. And he goes, Problems are just opportunities and workloads. A great way to think about it. It's like if I can solve this problem for other people”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he's like, Oh, great. Like, we had a problem we didn't even know if we solved this, our company gets even more valuable.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I keep saying you think like Bezos. So there's a great line. Same thing where he says I'm reading his shareholder letters for the fourth time. And it's like, these are so good and so clear and concise. I should read them every year. And I was like, I feel like I just read them. And I looked it up. I haven't read them since end of 2022. These stories in Bezos' early career were people in Amazon would come to him with a huge problem. They thought maybe they get fired. And he got excited”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so these are two different ideas, but sort of closely related. So it was actually my co-founder who sort of said the value of a company is the sum of all problems solved. And if you really think about it, it is exactly what it is. So, like, I tell this to the team because when we face very difficult problems, it is great because, again, if we solve these problems, we will create a lot of value.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What did you say earlier too? You're like, I forgot how to how you phrase it, but in my mind when I interpret it, what you said, it's this idea of not being a go-getter, but being a go-giver, saying something like the more problems you solve. More comes back to you. Was that”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the world for God's sake That's 100% how I think about it. Then I think this is the beauty of capitalism, right? Because ultimately at the end there has to be someone willing to pay for what you're doing. And the reason for them to pay is obviously solving a problem for them. And the better you're solving that problem or the bigger the problem is that you're solving for people, the more valuable it becomes.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he's just like, I want to build a car for the everyman You said something very in the early days of Spotify. He was like, I have this goal of this celestial jukebox or whatever the case is. And you said at the very, I don't know how I'm going to do it. He said the same thing, but I learned how to do it. He's like, oh, well. Can I make a car cheaper? Sure as hell can't put by hand. So we've got to learn how to mass produce something we don't know how to do yet. That took them, you know, a decade and a half of failure or whatever. And then what happens is Didn't start the company to make money, but he made millions of people's lives better. He changed the geography of the world for God's sake. And as a result, money came naturally as a result of service.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of one of the most valuable companies in the world, and he didn't do it to start a company. He had one idea. I've read 10 books on this guy and people have known him forever. He's like, one idea. It's kind of weird that we're putting together cars. They're really expensive. He was obsessed with machinery and essentially outsourcing human labor to machines, started on the farm.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not like sports where like. You can get better with time. You can solve problems, you can build your own world. If you think about what we were doing in the computer at Sim City, it's like, oh, look, I'll put a highway there. We're world builders. You get to control like. Who's around you? What are the rules in the world that happens What's the outcome of the people in the world? And you get to make, and hopefully you're doing it for like benevolent and good reasons, where I do think like one of my favorite quotes from Maxims from the History of Entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford, where he's like, money comes naturally as a result of service. And the crazy thing about Henry Ford is by 1919, he owned 100% because he bought out his investors.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what I would say about entrepreneurs, the best job in the world. I don't understand the people that give it up. I hate even saying this because I... Like rule number two in the center family, right? Is what I teach my kids mind your own business. So it's like, I don't, I think you're very similar. It's like, I don't have any suggestions on how you should live your life. Like if we're friends, we can talk and go back and forth. I was like, I just mind my own business. Yeah. But sometimes, like, I just don't have any other way, like I meet so many entrepreneurs and they're like, I sold my company. I'm like, sorry to hear that. They're like, what?”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's it. That's all. So, if you look at the video games, I actually think what kind of video games you like is a pretty good revealer of your things too. I wasn't playing any kind of first person shooter games or anything. Some of it, but not much. Most of what I was playing was strategy games. Civilization business strategy game. I played every tycoon game of how to run businesses better.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is why I think these conversations are important to have because, like, you are the personality type that I've read about. It's just like now instead of reading about you when you're 80 or dead, you're like in the middle of it. So it's very fascinating to me because I'm like trying to bounce my understanding of this through reading with like an actual person where it's just like most of the people, they're not like, I'm starting a company for some company's sake. Just say what you said. I like solving problems. Yeah.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back to that, like sort of these two concepts we talked about. My whole journey is one of self-mastery and finding out how it can become the best version of myself. And meanwhile, what gives me energy is solving problems. And as you say, I think this is revealed early. Like I loved, I didn't know it was companies, but I loved like sorting out problems for other people. I've been doing my entire life, whether it's a relationship advice, whether it's all these other things.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think if I thought of anybody else I know that personifies that, it's like you. It's like I'm not just like listening to this podcast for shits and giggles. I'm not reading this book. Even if you find it enjoyable. Like I'm looking to like apply this. Yeah.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never even thought about it until 2018. You said the funniest thing and go, How did you learn about it? He goes, I started listening to Patrick's podcast. And then I'd hear an idea like, that's a good idea. I would try that. Oh, I don't like that idea. And then I start reading books. And then you're just literally taught yourself. You weren't interested at all. And now you're essentially world class at it in a very short amount of time. And this is just the face again. You just did the same face. Like explain. How do you think about this, where it's like I always say learning is not memorizing information, learning is changing your behavior.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we're talking about this. And I'm like, were you because usually true interest is revealed early? So, if we go and look at your life story, just like people are like, oh, what hobbies do you have? I'm like, I like to read. Like, what else To read it, and it's like I was like that when I was five. I wasn't like five years old. What's a good hobby for my future self-development? It's like, no, I just like reading. I like books better than people in general. And so you see that in your early life, like you're starting companies and you don't even know those companies, just like trying to do something. So I was like, oh, you must be like, like, you must have been interested in investing forever. And you're like”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this was actually related to a conversation that we had at your house, which was fascinating because, again, I know you don't like public adulation. I'm still going to do it because I think it's fascinating where it's like everybody focuses on Spotify, which is marvelous achievement that very few people on the planet are able to experience. And yet also, because it's not really talked about, it's like all this other success that you're having outside of this too, because you have this. Like you're very curious about things And now you have a network and knowledge and resources that you can actually impact and try to make the world a better place. And you're not going after easy shit by any means, which I also admire about you. It goes back to the impact over happiness thing.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he's a good mirror too because it's almost like a therapy session. Like he'll be very quiet, doesn't like tension on himself, and yet he'll hit you with a question. Like, I didn't even think about that. And he has this great way to describe you. Because my guess is that I don't even guess. I'm pretty, I think you're obsessive, like learning and understanding the world around you and that drives like a huge part of what you're doing in this exploration and you can build companies around the stuff you're interested in. And that's kind of like this. Interested in that's kind of like this compounding learning machine. He goes out of everyone I know, Daniel has the ability to apply what he learns the fastest at the highest level.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's giving? I know hanging out with crazy people gives you energy, yeah, right? Yeah. You know, there's actually something. So I text the mutual friend of ours, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and I was like, I'm talking to Daniel. And Patrick, I think, asked the best questions in the world. And so obviously I need to like use like phone a friend.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it really isn't. And so, I mean, look, you just got to find that thing, right? But when you realize that, so if you start with that as the basic thing, like all the things you and I have been talking about for this time now, the reality is it's like it's about knowing yourself, which is really hard, and you get to know more, and it's about building a system that works for you.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I'm reading James Lyson's first autobiography. And you're like, I made one of the most successful companies in all time. He's still doing it, 76 years old. And he goes, I need a hell of a lot of sleep. 10 hours a night, or my entire next day is ruined. I'm like, wait a minute, this guy built, he's a single shareholder of a multi-multi, multi-billion dollar company, built some of the best products in the world. And he's sleeping 10 hours a day. You just said there are no rules.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can have a superpower, I always say, like, I would like to fly the first thing, I don't want to fly like Superman If I can't do that, I just want sustained high energy levels 24 7 because I need a ton of sleep and I felt bad about this because the same exact reason you're describing. It's like people are like, no, you got to get before 30 or you got to. Sleep less or sleep faster. Arnold Trump would say you got to sleep fas”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's about sort of finding that energy management for yourself. I think certainly there's common wisdom around sort of what an average good sleep should look like, et cetera. But the reality is there are some people that will work on six hours of sleep and they'll do just fine and may even be more productive that way. I wish.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the basic gist is you're supposed to be able to last on four hours of sleep. I know. And I was like, oh, this is great. So I did that. And actually, the interesting side part is it worked for about three weeks. And then I missed one of these. 15 minute increments. And holy shit, I was like completely suicidal for like weeks afterwards. It was like not a great thing at all. But the point being is.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That gives me energy. It's what's going to sustain the rest of my day. I used to not do workouts at all because I thought I don't have time. There's no productivity. I used to go for 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. No. It's a really bad idea, by the way. So don't try this. But I sort of learned that you can like daisy shame, sleep together by doing like these 50.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's about finding out what gives you energy, right, to begin with and what drains energy. It's about finding out which time during the day you're most productive. And it's, again, innately about understanding yourself. And what the whole world tries to do is get you to conform to their schedule. Oh, we have an 8 a.m. morning meeting because that's when you get into the office or you're supposed to do this and that and all these other things, again, in a big corporation. And it's about conformity to like the average or to an okay standard instead of going for excellence and what truly truly is unique. And I think the truly truly unique thing is you've got to just figure out what works for you and you got to do more of that. And that's more about energy management, I believe. And it's so much more about like even before this thing, I think both of you and I, we went and worked out.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obsessed about time. I'm really not. I'm more obsessed about energy management. Wait, wait. Yeah, let's get to now. What do you mean? Well, I mean, you know, you constantly hear this thing about all these, you know, you're supposed to wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning and you're supposed to do all these things, et cetera. It's like, first and foremost, there's no rule. Like I know a lot of successful people, as I'm sure you do too. It's like some of them wake up at noon, some of them wake up at 4 a.m. You can do a lot of different things. The obsession with morning rituals is stupid. Yeah. But the other thing is about sort of you're supposed to pack every like, you're supposed to have meetings every 15 minutes. And like a 15 minute increment is better than the 30 minute increments and so on and so forth. Look, it might work for you. And for some people, it might be like the absolute best thing. I've become more obsessed about sort of managing my energy.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say, you know, I'm not proud of her steaking out sometimes on that. But look, I mean, at the end of the day, I think that that's less about sort of being protecting my time and more sort of about protecting unique and novel ideas and how rare they are. And by the way, we'll hopefully get into that, but I think less about sort of.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started going like this sucks. I don't remember one time it was in a private room and they shut the doors and within like five minutes I knew I was like I got to get out of here. I was like don't worry. I'm gonna pretend to go to the bathroom and just you know never go back I was like so I stand and I go where's the restroom like it's right in the room like oh no and what I did which I wouldn't do today is I sat down and I wasted an hour and a half of my time instead of just being the unreasonable man”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You told me a funny story one time about how committed you are to your work and your friends know this about you, that sometimes you'll be in the middle of a dinner and then some like an idea comes to mind or something you need to pursue and they just know, oh, he's gone and he's not coming. Yeah, yeah. That is an unreasonable You know, people are like, oh, I can't do that social etiquette. Like, I even sometimes find myself to do this because We're both introverts. We've talked about this before, but like I kept getting invited to group dinners and I just felt like, oh, this is like a prestigious group dinner. This person's really successful. People would love this opportunity. And so at the beginning, when I first started doing this,”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Haven't painted on my wall at home. Yeah, and I'm just reminded of that because I think the reality is it is really, really tough to not conform, to not be part of a group. And it's so easy. And there's so many temptations in life that draws us back to that conformity, right? Money is another one 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 going to be on your A game anymore. And so the hard thing then is to keep going and keep improving and keep doing these things. But you're going to have to sacrifice a lot in doing so. You're going to sacrifice people's birthdays, social commitments. You're not going to show up. For a lot of things.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me read the full quote because it's an excellent quote too. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They go from like default optimistic default risk taking to any new idea? No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Like, no, we're not doing that. That's too risky. Like, you can't build a car. Like we're a tiny little, you know, island. And he goes, Daniel gives me the same exact device where he will say something. I will say no. And he goes, but did you even try? And I go, and then he goes, It's related to his ability if you actually analyze his willingness to go into all these different industries where he doesn't know anything about the industry.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is related. One of your oldest friends texted me the other day, and it was a screenshot of this episode I did with Cheng Juyong, who's the founder of Hyundai. And it's probably the most, I think it is the most inspiring autobiography I read because the guy writes the book when he's like 90. And he grows up the son of a poor farmer. You know, they had to eat tree bark to survive. He dies the richest person in South Korea, builds this huge conglomerate. I thought I was going to read a book about a guy making cars. I didn't realize that was like nothing. He was building, did all the construction, built some of the biggest ships in the world. Like he was just, his nickname was the bulldozer. And the reason he sent me a screenshot in a specific part of the podcast, he's like, this is just like Daniel. And one thing that Chung would talk about is as the more you progress in your career, the bigger the company gets, the more like rigid it gets.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It may be 55 minutes of that conversation that honestly was completely worthless, not that interesting for me. But then there's a spur of the moment, two, three minutes of brilliance, which I never heard before, which will deeply and profoundly impact my life. Those are my people. That's what I'm interested in. And I've come to learn that most people don't like to be around those people, but I love it. And I think it's, you know. Such a rewarding and interesting thing, and I've I'm looking forward to spending more time with those people in the coming decade. And it's sort of one of those things that I've sort of wanted to do more of and learn more from.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Context or whatever sort of context you're judging it on, but certainly in a business context, it's conformity. So you want to sort of put people about this person is good. And they're always good. But what I'm more interested in these days is I'm interested in this idea I never heard about before. And I find it with some people that even in an hours-long conversation with the best people in the world where I've learned the most.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Filmmakers, like athletes, 100%, yeah, 100%. And so this point then is that what I truly believe the very best musicians do and the most creative people do is. They are not afraid of throwing out ideas, even terrible ones. And it's even the most terrible one, there may be a nugget. You and I, we talked about this over breakfast where, you know, there was a person who sort of gave some bad advice to you. But sometimes even the inside behind the advice, sort of the question behind the question can lead to some really interesting things. And so what I've come to do realize is most people want conformity. And they value sort of a reliable consistency of giving X amount of impact per seconds or minute or truthfulness over X percent. They have some sort of heuristics for what is valuable person from a business.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that I've been more and more able not just to have the free time to think, but I've been more able to meet more people. And part of the beauty of that is that it brought me back to music again. And it brought me back to the creative process of music again. And it is something remarkable in a studio where you have a bunch of people just throwing ideas at each other. And musicians actually in many ways know more about the entrepreneurial process than most people give them credit. I think it's the same.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT