Spotify Founder: “Spotify Was A Stupid Idea!” How A 23 Year Old Shy, Underdog, Introvert, Built A $31 Billion Business! - Daniel Ek

29:46And I think it's not so much about sort of the monetary thing or the status thing. Although I would probably say status whether or not you should really seek it, I think is one of those things that we all have to go through. I think everyone can talk about it, don't seek attention, don't seek fame, don't seek all these things. But we're human beings, we want to be well -liked by other people. And so I think that is probably one of them. But in general, I think the further away it is from anything you know and can relate to, I think we have to experience parts of it. So you know, one of the most amazing things that I get to do these days for my friends is from like back when I take them on these crazy experiences.

30:34Right, you know, I'm fortunate enough that I get to see some of the coolest people in the world, whether it's musicians but athletes and so on, that they're able to get a glimpse of my life. And I love it because you know, they're looking at it with this kind of shy like imagination and wonder about some things that I'm going through. But I also see the other side when they're like, is it really that much work? Wow, I would never want to do this. And it's quite helpful. Because as we started out saying they have this idea of what the life is. So I kind of like bringing them along on the journey where they get to see it.

31:17And then you can see that there are aspects of it that they like and then other aspects that they would never ever want to get into. So, you know, I think it might be possible to kind of simulate that experience. But I think you have to experience it very much up close. Certainly when you're talking about wealth and if you come from having none, I think almost everyone then would instantly need to experience a little bit of it to at least kind of understand whether that's important or not. Especially if you get it like we both did probably in our 20s and so on. And I had I worked up until my 40s and may have kind of realized, hey, this isn't life.

32:00I'm having children and I'm having my wife. This is amazing. I got this experience being a single guy trying to chase girls. And all I'd seen was on MTV, all of the rappers were throwing around money and having 20 or 30 girls at the nightclub and, you know, hey, I wanted that too. One thing I'm really interested in is you said you got to nine months and you were depressed, nine months after this. There are so many people now. And this is why I asked about what the symptoms of that work. It's hard to know when we're drifting down the wrong path because it creeps up on us like a frog and a frying pan.

32:36I remember a time working seven days a week and this feeling in my chest, I would describe it as like a subtle growing emptiness. And that was for me in hindsight, I was lonely. And I didn't know I was. So those symptoms that you encountered at nine months in, in a way that someone might relate to them. What were those feelings? I think my entire life, as I mentioned, I've been struggling to fit in. And I think it's something we probably share and have in common. And I somehow thought that this would help. And when the situation was new, it did feel like I found my new tribe. And it did feel like they, you know, this early excitement everyone's calling you.

33:25Everyone wants you to be part of something that you before may not have been able to enjoy and may not get those phone calls and may not get into the hottest night clubs and the club promoters, like putting you on the list plus 10 and all that stuff, the social currency. So it was thrilling. It was absolutely amazing. And it truly was this kind of like, wow, I've made it kind of feeling. But after you experienced the tenth time, and I somehow had this idea that it would translate into this continuous feeling of that thing or translate into something more meaningful. I sort of realized that no, wait a minute, it's the same experience again, but it's lost a little bit of a charm.

34:15And I started now getting the hangar rounds that were trying to get in with me because, you know, they realized that maybe I would buy the bottles. I was seeing people at the table come up and grab a glass and then run away. All of that kind of thing. And I, it's slowly sort of dawn upon me that you could replace me by just anyone else that had the money and the connection that I had at that time, thereby the status. And it really would matter.

34:52And, you know, I was listening to, I think his name is Morgan Haustle, the author who talks about psychology and money. And he kind of talked about it, the Ferrari syndrome. And he basically describes that everyone who aspires to buy a Ferrari thinks of themselves and say, oh, one day when I'm in this Ferrari everyone's going to look at this Ferrari and they're going to be amazed with me. Yet what we all do is we look at the Ferrari and we want to sit there. We actually don't care about the individual that's currently sitting in there. So this kind of, you know, paradox, so to speak. And that's very much how I felt about my life.

35:31And as you're right, right, you push that to a side and say, well, surely this, you know, this is fun. And you have all these other people coming out and then you kind of bury it. And then it keeps coming up. And then it comes up again. And then it comes up more and more and more. And I didn't realize what it was at first because I was like, surely I'm just being foolish. This is life. And everyone was rewarding me on the outside to say, well, I didn't life. You live this amazing. How cool is not to be retired and just not having to do anything. But I wasn't learning and I wasn't forming general connections with people.

36:09I was just being and yes, I got status. But I realized I never did anything for status. And I actually didn't care in the end from being status. I cared about belonging. But not in that group. I wanted to be in another group to care about me for being me. And you must have learned a lot now in hindsight about what the core components of you being sufficiently happy are. You've used a few of them there. Learning was one of them belonging. What are the other core components of you think for someone? Just let me just talk about ourselves here for you to be stable.

36:52I realized that I also need to be allowed to be by myself. So I used to, in prior relationships before meeting my wife, I used to think, you know, your relationship, you constantly need to do something with the other party and it was raining me. And I used to think it was something wrong with me because I wanted to be by myself for most of the time. And being comfortable with that I am that way, that I thrive on loneliness, not all the time, because I can feel lonely. But for quite a lot of time, perhaps more so than most normal people like being lonely. I'm just finding myself in that place where I just pursue whatever is top of mind for me.

37:53I am sort of in my own thoughts, wandering, dreaming, scheming. You know, that's been very important too because I used to think there was something wrong with that. And then my wife, luckily, she's kind of the same. She does her thing and I do mine thing and we love that we can do stuff with each other, but we're also perfectly happy doing things on our own. And that kind of taught me also quite a lot about myself in that because again, we are social animals. And I am too, by the way, I love hanging out with my friends, but I also love being by myself. So I think having a positive impact, not just on myself, I have to feel good about what I'm doing and know that it helps someone.

38:42Being able to learn, being able to have fun while doing it, and then being an environment where I can be lonely and then come back without that being sort of socially awkward. Like one of my favorite things that I can do with my close friends is I can literally, let's say I would host a dinner. I can host the dinner and I get an idea. It's very uncommon, but I get an idea and I'll walk away and disappear for an hour and I'll come back. And that's like something that's kind of socially unacceptable in most situations. I do realize that. So I try to not do that if I'm with strangers because they won't understand.

39:28But my real friends, they know that about me and they're totally cool. So they just hang out. And then when I come back, I love that they're there and I love that they're hanging out with my kids or hanging out with my wife and doing other stuff and just being comfortable in that that for me is like a perfect dinner. I would be social, I would get an idea, walk away, think about it for a moment, collect my thoughts, get energy, write it down and come back, filled with energy from that. And then continue the conversation. That's a great example of something I love to do. So that's actually happened where you've been at a dinner party with friends and then you've had an idea and you've left and then you've my thing there is if I left.

40:15So the first thing is that I'm not sure my girlfriend would be very happy. She understands that I'm like that. She understands that I love being alone. She understands that I get ideas at predictable times. And that idea might suck me away. She probably would be that happy about it. Probably need to have a conversation about that. But also, if I went away, I would need to start working on the idea because I'd get so energized about the thing that I then spend all night like, sorry guys. Yeah. That happens, by the way, it happens that I like finish halfway through the dinner and just disappear and don't come back to I will say my friends usually even my friends are like, hey, we came to hang out with you.

40:54Not like to see a for half an hour and then you disappearing. But it happens. But I can obviously equally be there for all the dinner too. And yeah, I mean, it is one of the social audities. I think that I do with my close friends. And again, I know it's highly socially unacceptable in most situations. But if you really think about it as an introvert, as I said, I usually thrive on I need social elements, but I get most of my energy being by myself. Alright, and so then from an energy balance perspective, being with people, it gives me a lot of ideas. It's great, but it also empties my energy reserve then going away, filling them up again, coming back.

41:45It is probably the ideal way for me. If you asked me like, what would a perfect night look like? It would probably be that. How do you then balance romance and relationships? And my partner, I think her attachment style and her love language is like quality time. So I often violate that love language because of what you've just described. We could be sat at a park and then I think about something or get an email. And then I'm off away on my own little world. Yeah, I mean, that's certainly the risk. Again, I'm fortunate enough that my wife is kind of very similar to me in that regard. So she two leaves dinners and has her ideas and and you know, do that.

42:29So I think we're more similar. We try to make sure that one of us stays because it gets very awkward otherwise. But if you're both like that, you have to have rules though for when you do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. That's that's actually the harder thing for us is finding that quality time. So I mean, there's two parts you can either have. I like defaults. So you can have like the default this we spend time together or the default this we're in a relationship, but we don't spend time together. And so you have to make time where you're actively finding something you both are interested in and you want to spend time on together.

43:06And I think we're more that. And I think most people probably with kids would recognize that because the kids come first in the relationship anyway. So your relationship to your significant other is probably, you know, the second priority in that relationship and your wants to kids are the first. So I don't think that's uncommon, but I think changing that default could be really important. And again, if it's something that's really important to my wife, of course, I'm going to be present. She's really into horse riding. I'm not, but I know it's matters to her greatly. So not only will I try to speak to her every morning when she wants to talk about that, but I also show up for her competitions or I show up for important practices that she has as well.

43:54And there are aspects of the forcing thing where we can bond and have great quality time as well. As it is, she loves hearing about my entrepreneurial endeavors as well. And we find quality time through that. And then we have date nights like most couples do. And yeah, I mean, if you're at the restaurant, you just really walk up and get away. Of course, you're going to spend that quality time as well. Starting Spotify, when I heard the Spotify story, I really wanted to meet you because I consider myself to be ambitious, but there are some challenges that I would just viewers impossible. And at the time when you consider how the music industry was, that it's ran by these big record labels, predominantly, and they own the music to be a young kid from Sweden.

44:52And believe that you could change that for me is a special type of delusion. It's just an impossible task. It's what I just would have thought, okay, some things are the way they are. They're removable objects. That is one of them. Yeah. Why didn't you think that was a impossible task? Well, I think for several reasons, but I think that is the beautiful narrative of an entrepreneur as well. Right. We moved mountains. Sure. Elon was, you know, even more insurmountable thing, electric cars and hadn't been a successful car companies for, I think, a century or something. Or at least, you know, many, many decades in the US.

45:36And he managed to do that. So I think it's part illusion delusion. Sorry. But, but the other part, I think, also is that what I realized is before even committing to this idea, so that the why not part, I probably spend 500 hours learning about this problem. And the scarce resource we have in the world today by far is time. And when you have high quality people that spend thousands of hours on a problem, you find new solutions. And so the biggest thing for humanity, I believe is simply that. I believe we're capable of doing practically anything. But there aren't that many people that can see these multi -dimensional things with that right experience that happens to me at that right time.

46:34They're spending thousands of hours of trying to needle in a haystack, see that opportunity through that very, very tiny prism. And even today, when I think about some of my other businesses, it kind of worked the same way. So I started a healthcare business about five years ago. But I was spending, I think the first interview when I mentioned it was in 2009. And I started the company five years ago, 2018. So I probably spent a decade thinking about this problem. And I couldn't figure out a solution. 2008. Yeah. You started the company in 2008. No, no, no, I started the company, the healthcare company in 2018.

47:22But I started thinking about it 2008. Oh, OK. So I have a notebook with all my crazy ideas. Most of them amount to nothing quite often. Someone else comes along and dust them. And I'm happy. And it's amazing. But every now and then, nothing happens for a great period of time. And I kind of feel that it's to maybe make a difference myself. And I say that because like the realization there was, I had spent up until that point thousands of hours understanding the healthcare system, why it is for the way it is, the incentive schemes and the what the NHS is doing and what someone else is doing and the public healthcare system insurance business direct to consumer things, the long, and the curves of human beings, the disease groups, the costs curves, like all of those aspects about it similar to how you're describing looking at rockets.

48:17But you know, imagine you're spending a thousand hours of rocket, not just kind of casually researching it. I'm sure you will find novel ways of how to attack the problem. It may not be because, you know, if you're not a physicist, you may not come up with the next rocket engine. But you may find another twist to on how to attack this problem. And I don't really think it comes down to that. And so in the space of music, I don't know anything about the music industry going into it. But I would argue a few years into it, I was probably one of the most foremost experts on copyright in the world, around like the DMCA and what the US copyright regime looked like and what other regimes looked like and how, you know, performance rights society, label rights and what kind of rights, mechanical rights, performing rights, all of those different aspects, the all the different code, RCE numbers, ISBN numbers and how they related and so on and so forth.

49:22And, you know, I find like people either get too modeled in on the details and don't see the bigger picture or they stay too top level picture to really see the nuance. And the question is how do you dive deep enough where you see it and figure out which problems to solve in what order. And I was at that point by probably 2007 having spent a year on Spotify, but the team was super small, so it really wasn't a big commit at that time. And I wasn't sure at that time, but then I realized that hey, this is actually possible because we built the product that showcased the technology of what we're doing.

50:05And it felt like if you had all the words music on your hard drive. So then the real problem ended up being can we get the music industry to accept this and to that I had no idea, but I felt like this is so obviously if this came out in the marketplace, what consumers would ask for. Now the only question is, is the music industry going to allow this and that took me another year and a half, 18 months to learn the answer. And it was completely binary. We almost died probably four times in that process and ran out of money and record companies saying no, this is never going to happen until eventually one day, stars aligned and we were able to launch.

50:49But that was not a given, but it felt like the right bet to make because you know, it was a binary outcome either we fail the price wasn't all too bad. If we would succeed, it was clearly so that at least this would resonate very well with consumers. Was there any moments where you thought that it wasn't going to happen, are you conversations you had with record labels where someone very high ups is absolutely no way. Many times, I would say probably once every month or two over two year period, I thought that this probably won't pan out. And it was incredibly demoralizing. I usually joke, but like in the beginning of that process, I had hair and then in the end of it, I lost all of the hair.

51:33I probably gained 30 pounds in weight during that period of time. It was awful, but through it, my co -founder, Martin, probably a factor of just who he is as an individual, but also probably because he didn't participate in these meetings, kept being really upbeat, kept being, you know, amazing support. And said, don't worry about it. You're going to figure it out. And he just kept believing in me. And then he also said a few times, you know, when that was in your life, he said, don't worry about it. We'll figure out something else if this doesn't work out. It felt to me like I always had a safety net.

52:12It was just the amount the push that I needed to do this. And again, talking about not giving advice, but to the advice that I do give to other people is to share the burden with someone. It is so important. And I know I get most of the credits for Spotify, but it is really a team effort from the Gustavs and Alex and all those people. But then also in the early days from Martin in believing in me and knowing this kind of supernatural ability that I'm going to pull it off somehow. I must have told you a story which I guess has stayed with you about perseverance and the power of perseverance. The double -edged sword to that is sometimes it's right to quit as well.

52:59And knowing when to persevere and knowing when you're just wasting your time, which is as you said, the most important currency of all. Yeah. You know, that's where art meets science. There is no scientific answer because it depends. It's an art to know when something is futile and when something is worth doing. But I call it that sort of binary outcome, but with uneven distribution. Right. So if you think about it as a curve, even if it's 50 -50, whether you succeed, but on the upside, you can win a lot more than you can lose. And all you can really lose is one time and the upside may be 100.

53:38It's probably worth persuading. Obviously, that's the science part. The art thing is, OK, well, is it really 100 times is a 10 times and and have already lost, but I'm just not aware of it. That's the art. And also in that, I hear an optimism bias from two co -founders. The constant, I will figure it out. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. How important do you think that is, especially you know, you hire a lot of people. Is that something you're like looking for in the people that you work with that biased towards? We'll figure it out. I think again, it depends on the road you're hiring for.

54:11You need a team. I think it's really important that you just don't surround yourself with just yes people or optimists. You need the naysayer in the room as well. You need the people who will balance it out and be the one who says, I'm not sure this is going to work out. And so often, I think that's the important part. We keep talking about the CFO or sales people, but again, you can have a deal making CFO and salesperson that's happy, go lucky. It may not be a great combo. You may want the CFO to be skeptical about the sales pipeline and a happy, a lucky salesperson or the inverse. Maybe like really diligent that and the CFO that maybe sort of like don't worry about it.

54:59We will sort it out. But I think so much about that is the subtleties. We don't have a perfect model of the world. And the more experience I have is it's a cheesy thing to say, but the lesser realize that I actually know. And so much of this are actually down in the nuances and most people are above the nuances don't really understand the issues well enough or to bog down in the details to understand the bigger picture. And going that sort of up and down that's sort of super detail oriented. But also being able to go up and see the big pictures. That is and simplifying very complex concepts. I think some of the most amazing entrepreneurs in the world are experts at.

55:45And that is a superpower. And that is certainly one that I'm trying to hone and work on. But when you see it like a Steve Jobs when it's a very complex thing. So people say he didn't understand engineering and technical problems. It's not true. Yes, he may not have been an engineer. He may not have known how to write code, but he certainly could empathize with what made an amazing engineer tick empathize with different technical solutions will have different inputs and outputs. And he understood it. And he was brilliant in taking very complex ideas and understanding how to make that resonate for the every day person.

56:27These tales are here of you sort of being outside record labels and waiting for the CEO to come out so that you could catch them or trying to. Of course, I don't know the assistant outside and asking when the CEO was coming outside so that you could get a meeting with them. Yeah, these tales true. As with many, they're probably exaggerated a little bit. Where is the truth? Well, the truth is that certainly happened, but it wasn't, you know, I've heard people recounted us that I slept outside of the record labels kind of in a sleep in bag. That didn't happen. That happened another time in my career, but it wasn't.

57:02It didn't happen there, but it certainly happened that I book a week flight to New York with no meeting book with basically an open calendar and about 20 phone calls a day just trying to figure out a time to get on the schedule of a scene with VP or a CEO, et cetera. That certainly happened. And that taught me another thing too, which is that these assistants like you better befriend them because they are the keys to the kingdom. And most people don't care about them at all, but they're very influential. They're very powerful.

57:41And that was hard in the beginning, but then I realized that they got to see me as an individual. I saw them as an individual and eventually, you know, this is not we tend to believe the world is more logical than what it is, but a lot of it is based on relationships. So eventually some of them started taking liking to me. And so when there was the opportunity and they could prioritize 10 other things for that CEO to do. But I was there. I was friendly and easy to work with show up at no moments notice, even if it was 20 minutes before finding out about it, I would show up. And so I was I was easy to deal with.

58:19So take away all that complexity in order to achieve the outcome that I wanted to do. And sometimes that is as simple as it is, just be consistent. Be the easiest person to deal with and you'd be surprised how many problems it solves. Did you invest your personal capital into starting Spotify? Because I read again that you'd spend pretty much all of your personal wealth to start the company. Yeah, I did. So I invested not all of it, but quite substantial amounts of it. And my co funder invested even more, but he obviously had a much larger sum of money from the beginning. So all in all, I think we invested about 10 million dollars into this by ourselves, which was also crazy because you know back then today 10 million into a startup just wasn't a big number.

59:09Many startups that have done that before, but doing that on a seed stage back in 2007 that just was unheard of. It was usually 500 K seed check sums, etc. What if it hadn't worked out? What would have been the personal implications for you financially? The personal implications that I went from not having to have a job to then probably having to go back to having a job. So I basically took that security that I built up that 22 I'm set for life. And I gave that up in a moment's notice. And yeah, I mean, I don't know what to say. I think from a purely logical point of view, it was probably terrible decision.

59:55But betting on myself and betting on yourself would probably be again, I say I should give advice, but it is probably the best advice I could give many people is, you know, because especially those that want to invest in very startups, etc. But they may not have a lot of money. And then I always say, well, why don't you just bet on yourself instead? Why don't you just try to like work for one of these startups? Like you said, and maybe take a little bit more equity and a little bit less pay and take out of your cash instead. Because that way you increase the likelihood, hopefully if you know you're good of the company being a success.

1:00:35And it just feels like the more prudent thing to do is I had a sneaky feeling that that was the right thing to do. But investing as much probably wasn't as smart as Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learned just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is net suite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. Net suite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place.

1:01:11Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with net suite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business head to net suite dot com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning that's net suite dot com slash Bartlett. Spotify goes on to be I mean success is probably an understatement.

1:01:47And I know the journey to that success had multiple near death experiences to get there. One of the key things key moments I reflect on as a Spotify customer is when Apple launched their competing product Apple music in 2015. I believe it was and there was lots of articles saying that this would be the death of Spotify. Yeah, I think I was even concerned as a very loyal Spotify user. I thought fact you know they have all the phones. Yeah, they have they come like the mafia. Yeah, they could just squash you. Yeah, most companies when Apple comes into their territory. Shaking their boots. Yeah. What was it like in your office that day when Apple music launched a competing product?

1:02:25You know, when you live in the thick of the fire, you're not concerned about the things that everyone else is concerned about. I usually say public perception lacks about six to 12 months. What's actually going on. And so in our case, we had known that Apple's going to launch something for probably the better part of a year because they had the beats acquisition beforehand. And we were hearing all sorts of rumors, et cetera, about what it was. So absolutely you have to be worried when one of the greatest companies on the earth, the slides to compete with you. So we were concerned about it. And we were kind of doubling down on what our positioning was going to be.

1:03:03So you kind of like double and triple check whether or not, you know, you were diluting yourself into believing things to be true. And so for instance, in our case, one of the big things, we had some strategic pillars that we were focusing on. One of them we call ubiquity because we always knew this would eventually be the case. We thought that consumers would value the ability to work across all devices and all ecosystem. And our bet would be that any competitor we might have had would actually focus on reinforcing their own ecosystem and not care about all the other stuff. So the primary reason they were into a music service would be to make their own devices better, not to make the world's best music service.

1:03:52And so that's why we made such an effort of integrating into cars, integrating into all sorts of weird devices, smart fridges, whatever you might think. And so it was kind of like reiterating that, but I felt pretty good about that position and going back. And then there's always this sort of like, what if they figured out something that we just wouldn't have thought about. And I remember we were constantly talking to the product teams about this. And like, what if they come up with this and we're literally trying this game theorizing every possible angle on it. But I think at the end of the day, we kind of went through the thousand scenarios kind of thing.

1:04:36We knew we had prepared as well as we could.

1:04:41We participated a certain type of product. There was this kind of 1 % or 10 % chance, whatever you want to quantify it as, where we would just be wrong. And they'd come up with something that widely superseded any of our expectations. But that very day, remember we'd been preparing for that day for so long. So the first reaction was kind of them announcing it, which we expected them to do. And then seeing the walkthrough of the product and realizing that, okay, well, we prepared for this. We thought about this, etc. And so we're really not as the rest of the world kind of like gasped for air. We were thinking about it, okay, well, this was what we expected.

1:05:23And back to the point, distribution was the amazing thing. They hadn't come up with something on the product side that we just didn't anticipate. But it was really just about distribution. And there was nothing we could do to guard ourselves against it. But we felt like we had a superior experience on the personalization side. If you have a Windows machine and an iPhone, Spotify would work, but Apple Music wouldn't at that time. So there were many of those things that we, I thought, had a better positioning than they had. I've long thought that. I've tried both. I mean, I tried it when it came out and I couldn't stick to it.

1:06:04And I think me and my friends who are in my music group, we all concluded that the personalization, how Spotify understands me, is really the thing. It's hard to know why you do what you do as a consumer. But from analyzing it a bit more deeply, it just felt like I built, there was a lot of investment I'd done to my playlists and all those things. But Spotify just knew me better. It seems to have much more data than data on me and understands me and is more of a bespoke solution to me than Apple was. And also the user experience is not great. And I just can't get past that. I just, so I tried it and I bounced.

1:06:38I just stuck with Spotify. Apple are, I use the word Matthew early on. A lot of people don't know this, but they take 30 % revenues on pretty much every new app in a store. They've rejected your audio book app multiple times. There's a rumor going around that they even delay how quickly you can release new updates of your app and delay how that reaches phones. What's your opinion on Apple and what they do and how they conduct themselves? Well, it's as a consumer, let's start off with Apple is a fantastic company and they make amazing products. I really do believe that. I've been a Mac user since I can't even remember probably late 90s when I could first afford one all the way to now and obviously use the iPhone and Apple watches and all that.

1:07:29So let's start with that. And I think that's hard to square than that there's this other company that's fiercely focused on just itself and constantly trying to do things by itself and not working well with others.

1:07:49And those are perhaps two different sides of the same coin. But the way that manifests itself, I think that it's a company in many cases that still sees itself as an underdog but don't realize that they become good lieth. And so many of the tactics that made it the rebel kind of thing are now stifling innovation and it's really hard in consumers to great extent with the 30 % you talked about with the fact that you know a Spotify can't or any developer if you don't pay the 30 % you can't even speak to your consumers. It is kind of absurd. So you know there's a ruthlessness on the business side of Apple and perhaps it's always been so I don't know I never got the opportunity to meet Steve Jobs but where just from an ethos point of view it's just not me.

1:08:51And I have a hard time squaring that with me as the consumer and me as the business leader and needless to say I do believe that Apple can and should play fair and I think it would be way better for the world if they did. And I think that it would actually help them in many regards to switch their tactics and realize that they are the glider at this point did not David. And so yeah. One of the things I want to close on is your philosophy so I guess it's the same answer because Spotify's philosophy towards what's made it successful will probably be in many respects a reflection of your philosophies towards business and more broadly towards life.

1:09:37But when I sit here and I think a lot of people will sit here and say there's clearly something unique about you about the way you approach problem solving problems life business all of those things that has been. That has defined you and set you apart are you aware of what that is what those principles are. No, I don't think so, but I think you're right in that you know the way I would describe Spotify to people you're right that it is scary sometimes watching Spotify trying to watch it from a distance and not just be in it's because sometimes it's doing things where I'm like how did how did people know that we were supposed to do it this way.

1:10:22And it would be how I would approach solving a problem and it's kind of how you know we've internalized certain things. But the best way is it's 17 years old now and it is a teenager that's liberating itself. So it's not 100 % me. In fact, it is this much broader different being there are aspects of it that hasn't taken after me at all in product development you know Gustav is a formidable product leader as an example and Alex is a formidable business leader and the two of them are now leading more of the day today and they're certainly instilling their personal values and their personal perspective of the company too.

1:11:06Which I think they're totally entitled to doing having been with the company for 12 plus years both of them. But it is interesting seeing it because we're approaching things now in a way I wouldn't always do it's not inconsistent with important principles of mine but it's certainly not directed and the other part is I started as a 23 year old and the 23 year old Daniel while many parts are the same. The 40 year old Daniel with two kids having seen that have changed perspectives as well. I have a different feeling about work and and the importance of that in my life still very important but may not be the sole of most important thing that I do just to mention one and so it has similarities but there's differences to me as an individual too.

1:11:58But I think if you compare me to 23 year old Daniel the 30 year old Daniel the 40 year old Daniel I've evolved too and I'm candlely I'm in that period at the moment where I'm perhaps trying to figure out who the 40 year old Daniel really is because it's a different one than the 30 year old one. Maybe it's subtleties but I think in quite a big way also and just thinking about something like culture the 23 year old Daniel culture was having a ping pong table 30 year old Daniel would have said yeah culture is important but didn't really understand why and the 40 year old Daniel would be in a 30 year old Daniel would be more strategy than culture actually.

1:12:47And the 40 year old Daniel is all about culture almost to the point where strategy is secondary if not even tertiary to that. 40 year old Daniel is all about culture. Yeah way more so. What is the culture? Well and that's the amazing thing because it is the most scalable thing done right of a company and it's the hardest thing right because it is everything and nothing. There's every positive action that's happening in the company is every negative action company every person that's joining every person is leaving is impacting culture. And so in its essence I believe culture is about rewarding positive behaviors who want to see in the company and obviously dissuade the negative.

1:13:33Where are the positive behaviors you want to see? Well one of them is taking risks in failing and how do you do that when you have eight or 9000 people inside of a company responsibly how do you when the common status quo is we don't like failure. You don't get promoted based on failure you get promoted based on being successful. Any do cast this thinking in bets she talks about I love that is thinking about poker ships on the table and she said one time when when we spoke she said to me is like a company is like everyone has ships at the table we just don't know how many we have. So the people that have been successful have way more so they have leniency and allow and see the culture of any organizations to do more than someone who just started and perhaps have a lesser less or once and if you failed enough times what's not actually going to happen is that you won't have the same agency in a large organization impact things too.

1:14:34So then the counter point to that would be well how do you then create an environment with people are allowed to take risks and then balance that with say a Spotify at this point where we have a huge amount of responsibility to we have tens of millions of creators that have their livelihood of the platform we can just experiment with how we're paying out and so on and so forth right and five hundred fifty million consumers. We have to be responsible with their data we can't you know put new things in front of them without testing them and so on and so forth and so. There's this constant tension between being innovative taking risks and you know at the same time obviously being responsible and and that's hard but that's all about culture.

1:15:29I'm absolutely obsessed with the subject of culture because I really think it's an under under appreciated factor in in why businesses either way they are I think you could basically take a person off the street and the culture you drop them into the behavior you'll get from them yeah and so and having sat here and interviewed like Sir Alex Ferguson's ex teammates yeah you just come to learn that Sir Alex Ferguson's greatness wasn't strategy right they all say to me I remember producing ever said to me that he walked in on a we were playing our snows. Yeah on a Sunday in London yeah and he walked in and just said that's listen beautiful weather outside don't fuck up my Sunday because his thing was my management he just had this culture the thing they said to me which is always day with me is reordered and said to me how many times you think he came into the training ground dressing room yeah in 26 years I got a good they said twice really didn't need to come in there the culture was in there yeah and it was self policing when it's strong right yeah but you're right sports teams the ones that do really well I was being told an arsenal story that probably can't share but you could see bits and pieces of me kell you know how he's pushing that team culture at the moment too which seems very fascinating with some of the almost antics seems to be doing this all or nothing season that was I think last season as well.

1:16:47So you can see that and I love studying that with sports teams because you know it's 11 players on the pitch how do you make these people gel together and form a team hugely important things so I agree but also like imagine if you had 11 new players you know can't yeah can you even form or Chelsea these days right can you even create a culture that way or is it something that should be done intentional I mean if you're growing a company growing the number of employees by 50 % two years in a row most of your employees probably won't have been here even for a year it will change things whereas if you make something where it's more of a gradual change it will it's easier I'm not saying it's through trivial but to kind of have the same culture and I think many founders make that mistake when they override they don't understand the implication of culture they just look at sort of more warm bodies but it's all these other subtle things that starts breaking.

1:17:53Daniel we've got a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest and I love this question because you don't like giving advice so yeah this is a perfect one for you. What is the advice that someone could have but didn't give you at 21 years old that would have made you more successful at the thing you now do.

1:18:25I think we spoke about it I've gone through iterations of trying to learn from other people the model that a huge part of that has been kind of optimizing for my strengths and not covering my weaknesses and I wish that I realized much earlier on that perhaps my superpower is that I'm pretty good all around and not particularly good at anything. So I used to think for instance that I had this brilliant model myself on the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world of like I need to run every product meeting I need to be the best product person in the world which was a knee and it took me a while to realize that and be comfortable saying that.

1:19:15But I have realized that I do like a lot of different things I love learning about new things and perhaps that is by superpower to realize that the person who's doing PR that's quite an interesting thing to learn about. There are interesting things about employment law how that came to be and trying to understand that and the list goes on and on and on and I love that and I wish I would have probably understood that earlier about myself because that would have allowed myself to not model so much on other people but somehow be more introspective and listen to myself. And I think that's really one of the things I take away from you said very eloquently is that you'll prove that entrepreneurs can buck a number of different trends you know and still be wildly successful in that evidence means to someone like me that there's no such thing as a entrepreneur in terms of how they operate what they're interested in and that there's many ways to be a successful entrepreneur.

1:20:25And it really from what you've just said there the most sure fire way of becoming a successful entrepreneur is actually looking inward versus looking outwards like oh how does Elon do it or how does Daniel do it. Which stays with me a lot because it's really changed my thinking on a few really important things that I think have been. Yeah I've been limited I've been limiting myself on. Daniel thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for building such a great business and building a business that's really important. That is I guess even though you're number one still embodies the kind of first principle underdog mentality there's something about Spotify which is it feels I know people you don't like this word about it if you do but it feels more like a family because I've met a lot of the people there I know a lot of them yeah and they're like really nice people that are very open books it doesn't feel like a big corporate to me.

1:21:20It's very humble in its approach but it's also very ambitious and it strikes that balance really wonderfully well in it's a company in a brand that I deeply resonate with for that reason it's a wonderful thing and I think you know what you talked about wanting to do work that brings good to the world. The good to the world that Spotify has done in my view is in quantifiable because I mean music is a is a wonderful thing but what you're doing now and podcasting as well and how you've really owned and driven that industry forward for people like me to have these longer for more context or conversations I think it's hard to measure the good that's done to the world but it's certainly an important one.

1:21:58Thank you that means a lot to me and you're right you know it's about being humble while doing it but you know ambition and humbleness may not seem like they go ahead and I think it's a great deal. I think you can't hand and hand and so I think you capture the essence of what we like Spotify to be at its best which is super ambition but yet humble humble with all of its past success all of that stuff that we're still learning super curious I never told the story before but when I went I went on a trip to Sweden and I was there with some of your colleagues so Gustav who's head of product right and Alex who's head of business everything that makes money and I was there with Shaqil as well who's a good friend and colleague of yours and has been for a long time.

1:22:38Yep and they sat me down at a table for about 30 minutes or an hour and said you're a podcast to Steve tell us everything we need to know about podcasting. Yep. How can we make Spotify better few as a podcaster and for the very people at the top of Spotify to sit and listen so intently to me and then to act upon what I said and then give me feedback weeks later and say okay we're now you know working on this have a listen to you it's not something that a big corporate that was arrogant or very sure of themselves or lost that mentality would ever do that stayed with me because it's hard to do that when you get big to really be curious and humble and that's exactly what Spotify is so I wish you all the luck in the world that I'm sure you won't need it because you've got a wonderful culture of people and great people around you but just wanted to say thank you for that.

1:23:25Well no thank you and I mean again yes we listen but it's also because you are innovating on your side and with all the aspects even seeing your studio here today it's kind of like bringing it to the next level so that's that's amazing to see that you're able to do that amazing to bring these conversations to the world and we all get the benefits to learn from them as well without maybe having the opportunity like you have to meet all these individuals too and that's going to bring a lot of growth journeys for a lot of people too so thank you.

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