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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“So naturally, what you end up having is more and more capitalism, public markets, all these things drives you towards one thing, optimize what you're doing to the point where it's the most efficient thing that it can possibly be. But that is not how conducive to how you get the best ideas. And what I'm greatly satisfied and happy with, and I've been fortunate enough as I don't anymore run Spotify as much day-to-day as I used to, I'm still very involved, but I'm not involved in all the team meetings and doing all the things that I used to do. So I was like 90% internally focused on just.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The temperature And I believe that one of the, and this is, by the way, something that I intend to focus a lot more on in the next decade. I'm very reflective at the moment because I am in my 19th year. And I think it's interesting you sort of talked about big companies because I used to think before I sort of ran a big company myself, I just used to think they're bad, period. And what I've sort of revised my view, and now I think they're really good at doing what they're already doing and doing it better. So back to that point, like a large scale corporation, what they do is they just get better and better and better at doing what they already do. And the way to do that is obviously minimize mistakes. So, you know, that also means minimize brilliance, minimize waste, minimize all these other things.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I actually think LLMs and the latest advancement in AI kind of have created an excellent framing on this. And to talk about this sort of high temperature notion. So in LLMs, you can basically tune up the temperature. And if you tune up the temperature, it basically starts hallucinating. The bad thing with the hallucination, of course, is you have no idea what's true or not. There is spurs of vocational brilliance that comes out of there. And the truly new ideas that come out of there, so the criticism of the current generation LLMs is they're not very creative. And that's ultimately because we've kind of turned down the temperature on them and we've safety trained them to the point where we keep them within the guardrails. So there is a way when you train these things to be highly creative, but batch it crazy. And that's just turning up.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out of there You embrace that the way you put it to me when we were talking about this is like. High temperature people And like training AI.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you explain how you develop this tolerance? Because most people, like especially as companies age too. Know you're built usually, you have a lot of variants in the beginning And then they get more successful, and they kind of make the corporations make the mistake of like, no, we need all the edges. We need the high and the low”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they said something very similar. They're like, it doesn't matter. He's like, if there's a single good idea in your pile of force manure, like, he'll find it. He will go through. Yeah. All he cares about is the very best ideas. He will be willing to go through 99. Shitty ideas to get the very best because you understand how powerful those are.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hilarious about this. I think this is tied to something also that is very fascinating with you have a high, and most people, again, like the, I think the more control you have over your life, the more success you have. People make the mistake of eliminating any people telling me truth, any inconvenience. You become like really brittle. You have an insane high tolerance for crazy people Somebody told me, somebody works closely with you, that you judge people on their best idea, not their worst And I just finished rereading Jim Simons, founder of Red Inc. Technologies. Really, creator of a magic money machine is really think about the guy.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entrepreneurs don't want to be told what to do. I've never met an entrepreneur. It's like, give me a list It's a profession for people that don't take direction very well.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I love this criticism because it's like, oh, you just got to find a different show, or you got to find a different thing.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They all went bankrupt. It's crazy. What he realized is like he has to spend just as much, if not more time, developing and nurturing the communities that are springing up around it.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the criticism of founders and the podcast and the books. But he's not telling me what to do. This was not a podcast for people that want to be told what to do. It's here's how this guy or this woman thought about their company. This is what they experienced. You pull out these ideas. I love how you say you kept saying don't take it literally. I've told you this before. Like I drive people crazy because I tend to turn everything in an abstraction. So like when I hear you, I've sent this message to you where you're like, you kind of remind me of James J. Hill, which is might be the only person that's ever texted you this. And James J. Hill was the most successful railroad baron of all time. And I just thought the way you just said the way he built, he essentially was laying railroad tracks, right? And he was the goal of the company was obviously we're going to have goods and people on the tracks. Right. But this alone is how do I make what I'm doing more valuable? And he's the only railroad founder ever in American history to not go bankrupt.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is how do you do that? Like, how do you consistently find lighting in a bottle? Like, you know, and it's also theoretical at the point of any strategy book talking about how you do it, or even when you go behind, I was the other day I was with the guy Hamilton Hemmer who wrote Seven Powers book. Which is amazing book on strategy, by the way. But one of the most interesting ideas that I learned after sort of again overfitting the concepts 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.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, like the last stage, you're not even, you can't even do that. So the job is much more subtly to just be there when they need you. And I'm somewhat simplifying it, but I think that with everything, don't take it literally, but sort of the core of the gist of the idea is certainly a larger company becomes more and more and an older company becomes more and more of that. And so much of what I do today is literally that. I try to be there for people when they need me in various fields, which happens, but it's not as often as everyday all the time. And what I deeply care about today, and I do spend a lot of my time on, is this notion around this. First seed of a new idea and protecting that idea. And I think it's probably the most underreported, talked about.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, look, there's clearly kind of like three distinct stages of parenthood, right? And the first one is you're literally the person that keeps them alive, right? And you're 100% there. And you pretty much make every decision for them because they can't make it themselves. And then gradually the next stage is you're there.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's just like, well, you know, year one or two. It is me. It's like the same way you have a two year old, anybody knows this. But now there's characteristics that emerge from within the company that are separate from the founder”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then now she's like, she's got traits that I don't even have 100% her own decisions and like doing things maybe I would do or I would not do. And you're like, it's kind of the same for the company. And you had this idea where like, I think at the time Spotify was 19 years old or it's 19 or 20 years old. Yeah.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I heard him say that, that was a few months after you had beautifully like articulated this idea. It's just like, well, I think there's a lot of you're going to say better than I did. But essentially, like there is a very rather clear analogy between the way your child when they're first born, essentially like a product of you. They're going to mimic their parents, their environment that they're in. But as they grow older and older, I just went through this and I have a 13 year old. You know, when she was much smaller, she's much like me and her mom. Yeah, right.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is a good opportunity to talk about another one of your very unique ideas that I also, there was excellent, I just did this episode on Jeff Bezos because he doesn't give them any interviews. And so I would take a transcript of his interviews and you treat it like a book and just go through it. And he said something like from day one, he knew like he wanted to build a company that could outlast him. He still loves it, he'll love it forever. And it was very reminiscent of what we're trying to do as parents, where it's like you're shaping your kid, but you're only successful if they can survive without you.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say The first 10 years was the zero to one journey. And the last ten has been that journey where we're not zero to one anymore as a company holistically, but there are elements of the company where we're zero to one where I'm absolutely 100% involved.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that became value add because, again, that's a very different thing. That's an outward facing thing. You actually have to sit down and meet with creators. It is so much more about innately understanding their needs and talking to them and understanding not just how they use the product, but their business, what problems are they facing that's not just sort of how they leverage the product, but actually holistically around them. And so that was just one of those things. And then subsequently, what ended up happening is I got this guy called Alex, and he's now doing that part better than me too. And so I was like, okay, well, now I need to find a different way to add value. And now it turns out that my value add is the sort of in between the two, where business or creators meets consumers and where there's maybe a third stakeholder we have to consider in all of this.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And spending more time with the content people, etc. And so my product feedback ended up being, you know, and this is the dynamics that's quite unique to Spotify in that we have these two stakeholders. We have consumers on the one end and we have creators. And so I just made it my effort to understand and know the creator way better than anyone else in the company. And so my product feedback to them comes from that lens.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the product team was much happier. He was making more of the decisions without me. I wasn't meddling in. There wasn't two different people deciding what worked, but it was really him. And ever since that moment, I don't really run product anymore in nutrition. I'm involved in the product and he solicits feedback from me all the time, but I don't run the product meetings. And I say that because what happened for me was a real setback. not just in sort of that moment, but it also sort of like, oh, wait a minute. So what am I really, you know, what's my value add then in this company? And it took me a while and I realized that all of a sudden, hmm, actually, you know what, that won't be it, but maybe I can add value in this place. And I sort of oscillated to this different place in the company, which was much closer to understanding the”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, I wasn't fully convinced that this was true, but I sort of went back and said, okay, well, you know what? I'm going to give you three months where I don't do the product reviews. And then we evaluate how this worked. And lo and behold, he actually did a great job.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And not surprisingly, my first instinct was to be really pissed off. I sort of went home. I was like, man, I'm going to have to fire this guy. It's like horrible. Like, how could he say that this? But I also realized that that was an emotional response”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was sort of running it, but I wanted to run it. So I kind of interjected myself over him. But I didn't have the time to really spend all this time. So he was sort of like running it for me, but I still insisted on having product reviews. And sort of talking again about the importance of having people who give you candid feedback, he took me aside after one of these product sessions and he's like, you know, you're not really that good in doing these things and you're not really that helpful. So most of the time, me and the team were kind of like looking and we're trying to basically, you know, appease you in the meeting, but you're not really adding as much value as you think.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What a lot of people don't talk about is the fact that there isn't one stage of this journey. It's like you're oscillating between zero to one, one to 100, and then the last stage was more like optimization stage. And you have to like constantly do that. And you're going to need different skills at different places. And this is why, by the way, I believe it's so important for entrepreneurs to realize when to apply what tools in this journey. 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've now met and he runs product. And he's actually way better than me at doing it. And so speaking about sort of being truthful, what ended up happening many years ago was I was running these product meetings.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, plenty, plenty. And this may be a little bit unique, but coming back to it. I ended up. Having, you know, so the typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person, right? By the way, it's 100% true. I totally believe that. I think it's the most important thing in the zero to one stage.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations. Unless you have HubSpot, HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more, and that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com. Are there any product updates?”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you need to get to a point where you start incorporating some feedback mechanism. So like for me, taste 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. And so it's really a question for me about just sort of allowing for as much feedback as humanly possible so that you can yourself or a small team to some level of taste.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, yep, that's the way. That's the way, right? And so I feel like that's truly the case. I think the realization is you tend to over gravitate to one or the other. And certainly in Spotify's case, we did the same. We were early on, very much so. I mean, the first user interface was pretty much designed by myself and this guy called Rasmus. So much of that you could describe was my taste. But sooner or later, what ends up happening is you get into a space where you don't even know anymore because your current feedback loop of where the world is and the customer you're designing for starts becoming a little bit different.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, please don't do that. There can't be that. And you're like, this is a terrible. And they kept meeting after meeting. He's like, Steve, this name sucks. And they give him a bunch of lists. And then the first time he hears IMAC, he's like, don't like it at all. Yeah. And then they're like, we like it. So like we'll put in the next group. And then we'll put like the third one down. And then he goes, now I don't hate it. And then one day he's walking in the hall. He's like, I came up with the name, it's iMac. Yeah, and of course, yep.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then go back. They describe this as like sonar, how dolphins throw things out and they, it might be a crazy idea. And then it reflects back to them and they use it as like a form of education. But the hilarious one is they couldn't figure out what they were going to call what turns into the iMac. He was obsessed with the KO Marine and Sony. He goes, I have the name for this computer. It's going to be the Macman because the Walkman and people around”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't believe for a second that Apple was 100% in the camp where Steve Jobs just had universally the answer to everything. He didn't listen to anyone else's opinions. He didn't try things out. Sometimes maybe trying it out by testing his ideas on multiple people inside and outside, et cetera. But of course he did that, right? And I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant and that don't get talked about. He actually called up journalists sometimes and tested ideas on them. And like, we might do this kind of thing. And then here the journalists react to it. And it's like, okay, that was a bad idea. And then go back.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the most important thing that you described is it's a spectrum. It's not 100% one way or the other way. Because again, sort of like I remember early on people talking about that sort of dichotomy of how Google Dusting and how Apple does thing. And many founders then tended to gravitate when Apple was at sort of peak Steve Jobs to, no, I run the product review. It's only my opinion that matters and it's my taste. And I've got this articulation, all these things. And lo and behold, like some terrible decisions ended up coming out of this, et cetera. And I think where people sort of break down on almost all issues is they take it literally.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They create the iMac, but like the big fat bubble one. And it was the first time there was going to be all these like crazy colors and everything else. And Johnny tells the story. It's like, you know how we.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the guy's like, hey, Google, we have to decide between blue and light blue. And we run like 200 tests of all the different shades in between that. And Johnny's like, we would never.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But at the end, like he was, it was kind of like I'm making all the decisions. There's actually actually an interesting story. I'm curious how you think about this. How do you balance the decisions you make specifically on like product, right? With your own personal taste and intuition versus like being metrics driven. There's this hilarious story. It's in two different books. One's in this book called Creative Selection, which is excellent. It's read three times. It's about this guy from this guy named Ken Cosienda, who was a programmer. He demoed to Steve many, many times. And like when they were building their best products, right? And then there's another one story in Johnny Ives' biography. And they talked to it, they were comparing and contrasting the way Google would make products versus how Apple did when Steve Jobs was in charge.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're dead right about this. The way I would think about your archetype is I think you nailed it with like coach and then you'll hear people inside Spotify say it's like very you have a very collaborative like management style where I don't think anybody is going to describe Steve Jobs as collaborative. Now he was able to collaborate.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Group team meeting work. And there were lots of other things which I shamelessly copied from, for instance, that experience. And it just turned out for me to be an amazing way to learn by seeing the culture up front that enables the certain practices to work. It almost comes back to kind of this two things we talked about already, which is this mirror of reflecting it back. And then the sort of second notion, I think, which is it's got to be true to you. So, you know, 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. I think you're dead.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But at the end of it, the most interesting thing was obviously trying to distill down what surprised me about the culture. It wasn't really around like meta and what was then Facebook is a world-class company. It wasn't like, you know, I miraculously thought I could do a lot of things different or better. But there were things that surprised me around how he managed the company. And seeing that and hearing that from another founder, hopefully one that he respects too may sort of lead to insights and breakthroughs. And during that week, it's not just that I follow people around. I actually meet with their entire executive team and interview them too. So sit down and try to learn from them to really, truly internalize the culture and try to understand it. And so all of a sudden, you do realize, for instance, how you can make a large group.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That he runs every week. And for me, it sounded absolutely awful. Like, how did he get anything done in that meeting? And so lo and behold, I asked him, hey, can I come and learn from you? And he was incredibly gracious. 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 his meetings from start to finish. And the big question, obviously, for me, it's like, okay, well, what does he get out of it? And can I make myself useful while doing it? So hence, I took meeting notes. If I could get him coffee, I would.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a certain thing around reading it and internalizing it and seeing the culture up front. And what I realized was building Spotify. Obviously, it's the biggest company I've ever built. So I'm learning on the job. And I don't know what I don't know because I've never really worked in a company. And so in a way, what I realized as we hired people from these other companies is that there were all these things that they were doing that they kept telling us about. And I didn't really understand. like how it worked. So I'll mention like one, for instance, I do really well in these like one-on-one situations. I might even do well in like three or four person groups and maybe six, but 10 person group, like I don't have the personality where I command the room. It just doesn't work. And then you have someone like a Mark Zuckerberg who literally has this thing called large group where he has 20 to 20.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, look, I just realized it sort of started from this thing, right, where you and I have both read all the books. And actually many of the entrepreneurs have read not as many. About as you have around all the greatest entrepreneurs, but they've read the big ones, certainly of their time, the basis, the Steve Jobs, the Elon Musk's biographies and all that kind of stuff.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just set the table for this real quick. The way you put it to me, like, I'll go get them their coffee. I don't care. I'm there to learn from them. If I need to go get their coffee, I'll go get their coffee Understand that's an insane, like, I think that's the right Mindset But I don't think anybody would believe somebody running a hundred billion dollar company and has done the things that you've done. Like, yeah, no, I'm fine. Like, I'll shout out this guy and like, I'll do whatever I need to do.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have extreme levels of intellectual humility. I don't even know if many people know this, but like you would like go in shadow and spend time. I don't know if you have a term for this. You just like call up somebody that's running a company and say, What I'm going to come and sit on every single one of your meetings? Yeah.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is scary to me. And then they kind of Interact with you as if you're an asset. And once I suck that ass to like get everything out of the acid, then you will be disposed. And I feel the same people that do that have almost no intellectual humility, right? Where I always say it's like every single person I read about is smarter and more productive than I am. The way I look at this, the world in general is very much in the same way like Thomas Edison has this great quote. He's like, we know one 100th of anything That's the way I feel is because every day I learn something new I was so stupid back then.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as long as you make those choices correctly, you know, again, like I can't think of a single person I feel is in my life that doesn't want the best for me. Yeah. Yet, I still have this, oh, like, I'll just do it all myself. Very related to this, another thing that you said that really surprised me is when people ask me, they're like, obviously know who Daniel is. I use Spotify, I know everything going on. But like, Why do you talk about them so much? And I like mention you on the podcast, and I was like, oh, because I've learned a lot from you. You're very, very careful what you want in life. Like, and I get to meet pretty crazy people. Most of the times, like it's great, but then you see there's like a lot of negativity to them. One, there's a shocking amount that have very few, if no friends.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The sad part about this, I can't think of anybody that's like betrayed me in like two decades. Yeah. So it's like I'm just making up this problem, this imaginary problem that maybe used to exist, but certainly doesn't exist now. And this is where I think it's really like helpful to, again, I don't need a bunch, you know, I don't, I don't believe there's a great quote from the founder of Red Bull, who I came slightly obsessed with. And I'm really proud of the episode I made on him because we had to literally translate. There was no biographies in English. And we had translated biography from German. And his point was just like, I don't need 50 friends. Like, I believe in much fewer and better and deeper.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the real thing for me will be the friendships that I built, you know, the trust that other people placed in me to allow me to help them on this journey, help me on my journey, and us do we get together. And I've just seen it so many times. I've been burned by it for sure. Sometimes when people have broken that trust that I put in them, but I will honestly say that's been like one or two percent negative experience relative to all the positive things that come out of it.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I just keep focus on doing that. And for me, the ultimate impact at this point, why I said, you know, I like to be the best coach there ever was, the best entrepreneur coach, maybe that's my archetype. Than a player because I've come to see that these people that I've done Spotify with for the past 15 years as an example seeing their success, seeing their impact, seeing their growth is the thing that gave me the most amount of pride at this point. It really isn't anything else. Like, you know, financially, I couldn't care. Not that important. It's great to have a lot of money to have as a currency to then have more impact. It's more ships on the table to do new, more cool, interesting stuff.”
2025-09-28 · Founders · My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT