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

How to go from the Swedish housing projects to billionaire CEO of Spotify. In this new episode Steven sits down with the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek. Daniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur who started his first company in 1997 at just 14 years old. He eventually dropped out of college and founded the online marketing firm, Advertigo, which he sold in 2006 to the Swedish company Tradedoubler at 23 years old. Coming out of early retirement, Daniel founded Spotify alongside Martin Lorentzon in 2006. In this conversation Daniel and Steven discuss topics, such as: His childhood in a single parent household The importance of his mother in his success Growing up in the Swedish projects Coming from a musical family Overcoming being an introvert His ability to adapt to changing situations Not fitting in when he was growing up How his difference helped in his later success Starting his first company while at school How people worry more about failing then succeeding Why effort can’t always beat talent People not understanding what it’s actually like to be a billionaire How spare time is now his most important currency Why the idea of success through University is outdated What football taught him about business Retiring at 23 years old Why he found being rich and successful depressing How the idea of ‘why-not’ helped to create Spotify Realising that he had approached his career in the wrong way How Spotify nearly collapsed 4 times The importance of culture in organisations Why you should take the risk of betting on yourself Follow Daniel: Twitter: https://bit.ly/465g8WM Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm an introvert, not amazing academically. Didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. Average at best.

• 0:05Steven Bartlett?

  And yet you created Spotify?

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:09Speaker 02

  Daniel X.

• 0:10Speaker 03

  Spotify founder and CEO.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  He's not only saved the music industry, he's created a $50 billion company, and he himself is worth more than $4 billion.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  I flunked high school and started my first company. That later got acquired.

• 0:22Steven Bartlett?

  And you retired at 23?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. First month was fun. Nightclubs, sports car. 20 or 30 girls throwing around money. Six months in, I realized that this thing I thought I wanted, I just didn't want at all. I was just empty. Just thinking, am I ever gonna get out of this depression? And what to do in life? What if you can work on something you actually care about? What would you pick? Music. But the industry's going down the drain. I honestly did not think we would succeed. But if we succeed, I knew it was gonna be a big thing.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Spotify is here, a one-stop shop for music. Pickings you use Spotify? I love it.

• 0:56Steven Bartlett?

  I read the journey to that success had multiple near-death experiences.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  It was awful. Ran out of money. I lost all of the hair. Gained 30 pounds. And the problem was I modeled myself on the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world, run every meeting, be the best product person. It just wasn't me. Share the burden with someone. It is so important. We tend to believe the world is more logical than what it is, but it's based on relationships. Be the easiest person to deal with, and you'd be surprised how many problems it solves.

• 1:23Steven Bartlett?

  One of those problems was Apple. What's your opinion on Apple?

• 1:39Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel, what is the most important context that I need to know about you to understand the man that sits in front of me today? And when I ask about context, I wanna go right back to where you come from and that earliest environment that... I almost see it like an oven. I see our earliest context as like an oven that baked us into who we are today. What is that context?

• 2:01Speaker 00

  I'm a product of a very, very strong, single mom.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  A woman that probably had a chip on her shoulder.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Against her sibling, her brother, her older brother, who kind of said, you can't do this. You can't raise a child to be productive. And I think she kind of just well hell bent on making a point of showing that, you know, I was going to be successful in her definition. And successful meant well educated, well read, and be able to handle almost anything thrown at me. And just to give you an example of that, while I was brought up in the suburb of Stockholm, very much a working class, rough neighborhood.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  One of the big things that my mother did was she had me doing a pentathlon. And the pentathlon was like the classic pentathlon. So that means fencing, horseback riding, shooting, running and swimming. Doesn't sound like what someone basically from the projects in Stockholm would do. But she thought that would be a good sort of wide education for me. And, and pretty much my entire life has been around that. I, I was kind of clumsy as a kid. My, my fine motor skills was pretty good. My rough motor skills wasn't very good. So she enrolled me in like an all female gymnastics group.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  You know, I'm an introvert, so she enrolled me in a theater group to have me, you know, learn how to express myself. And, and so an eclectic childhood, but one where she heavily influenced me, brought me along in almost every context with adults, with professors like at a very early age and just had me sit, sit along. Or with just the person from next door who's struggling getting to the next paycheck. And, and I really saw all of those contracts in, in life from a very young age.

• 4:23Steven Bartlett?

  Did she have any desire for you to become any specific thing? Cause.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  I I I'm honestly not sure, but I think she wanted me to be broad, just in general. So, and and I think in many families, you kind of have this maybe educational pressure where you have to be a doctor, you have to be a lawyer. None of that mattered to my mom. The only thing that mattered, and she kept repeating this, was that you need to become a good human being. And for her, if I wanted to study, sure. She thought education mattered and was important, but not like in other families. And the only thing, in fact, you know, probably influenced Spotify later on was I very much come from a music family. My my grandfather was an opera singer.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  My grandmother was an actress in theater, but also jazz pianist. So like music education was weirdly not like the the premier education that was focused on for me. And then all the other stuff, she was basically only important that I showed effort. I I had a pretty easy time in school and so she constantly kept pushing me because she felt that I wasn't I wasn't making enough of an effort, no matter what. So it wasn't about the grade. I could come home with a straight A. She would still be like, well, did you really make an effort? I don't think so.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  And and and so for her, it was kind of always that thing about like just pushing and making the real effort.

• 6:03Steven Bartlett?

  So she cared more about, less about the outcome and more about how much of your potential you were realizing?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, very much so.

• 6:12Steven Bartlett?

  So on school then, you you referenced that she kind of identified you were an introvert early on, but then I think you said you had a good, you had an easy time in school. Typically, people that are introverted, that are an only child at the time that they go off to school.

• 6:27Steven Bartlett?

  Often they struggle a little bit.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:29Steven Bartlett?

  Because, you know, finding friends and fitting into social groups. And I read somewhere else that you don't love small talk. You tend to gravitate towards the people that you know.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:37Steven Bartlett?

  What was school like for someone, for a kid like that?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think, you know, um, I think there are many types of introverts. Let's begin with that and I can switch it on when I have to. Uh, and certainly I think the theater helped me. Um, you know, I can be very, project a lot of things if I like to. Uh, and be a force of nature, but it doesn't come easy. That requires tons of energy, whereas others get energy from like the room and they're like very excited. It's just not me. For me, anything with anyone I'm not comfortable with is really taking a lot of energy.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Um, but it, but I think the easy time in school was just, uh, I love learning. I've always loved learning. So, um, you know, you put, be putting in an environment where you're constantly being forced to learn new things. Wasn't a very hard thing for me. And, um, I have a very good, um, I used to have a very good memory. I don't have it anymore, but I was able to memorize very easily the concepts and the things that we talked about in school. And so, um, I think in that end, it was very easy for me. And then again, because my mother tried to make me very broad. The positive and the negative of that aspect is I could kind of be in any social group. I could be with the athletes.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  I wasn't the best athlete by any stretch of the imagination, but it worked. Uh, I could be in the musicians group as well with any of the people really good at arts. Um, and I, you know, I probably wasn't the best at any of that stuff either, but it was pretty decent. But I could also be in the math group. I probably wasn't the best at math, but I was pretty decent. And, um, that, to be honest, is kind of the story of my life. Um, you can kind of plug me in anywhere. I won't excel at practically anything, but I'll hold my fort.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  And that's, I think, both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is in is that it's very easy for people to for me to be able to relate to other people enough where I'm accepted in the group. But it's hard in the sense, the downside with that is that I never really belong anywhere. Because I'm not that one sided as an individual. You know, I'm not an artist, I'm not a technologist. I'm not a business person. I'm all of that and probably a few other things as well. And and you can see that very clearly with my friend group too. You'll have artists on the one side and you have entrepreneurs on the other end.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  And it's very hard for them to speak to each other most times. But I love it. I love seeing very creative people. I love, you know, business people and scientists mixed together. Whereas a scientist gets very, you know, have a hard time, I found, of speaking to an artist. And quite often they're talking past each other. For me, it's just, I love it. And and that's the blessing and curse.

• 9:48Steven Bartlett?

  When I speak to people that know you and work with you, they describe you as ambitious. Now, ambition and being ambitious is an interesting word. Because it's often loaded with this presumption that someone has a desire for a certain outcome.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:03Steven Bartlett?

  Like they're trying to, they're ambitious because they want to be really successful or they want gazillion pounds. Are you ambitious and what does that actually mean to you?

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm ambitious. But I probably am ambitious in the the way my mother taught me to be ambitious, which is the inputs, right? Which is, you know, if I see someone with incredible potential that squanders that potential,

• 10:32Speaker 00

  I I ask myself, why? Why are you doing this and why not strive for the great thing? And in so many cases in life, I've found that the difference between, you know, aiming super high versus. Aiming just a little bit higher than where you are. From an effort perspective, it's about the same effort. So you might just as well aim higher, you know, this saying of you shoot for the stars and you land on the moon. That is very much kind of my life philosophy. Why not try to do it bigger? Why not try to do it even more interesting? And maybe you have to settle for something less. But isn't it more interesting and more fun to try to do the really big hairy audacious thing?

• 11:15Steven Bartlett?

  Not for everyone.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Maybe, maybe not, but.

• 11:19Steven Bartlett?

  You'll know that because you'll work with so many people that maybe don't lean into ambition.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true, but I also wonder if that's true. Or whether they're just worried about really testing themselves and understanding where their limits are. So many people are more afraid of failure than they are of success. And that stops them from even beginning to try. Right? And, and I find that so many times, like the amount of people I'm sure came to you. It's like, oh, it's really good for you, but I had the same idea. It's like, okay, well, why didn't you do anything about it? And, and oftentimes it's like, well, for this and that and that reason. And, and they talk themselves out of it.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  But at the very core, I believe it comes down to that they're actually more worried about failing than they are about the prospects of succeeding.

• 12:14Steven Bartlett?

  Your kids then, what would you advise them to do? If they were, say they wanted to follow in your footsteps, in particular, a startup business. At that juncture where we kind of leave high school.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:23Steven Bartlett?

  And we can either go into like work or university. Would you, do you think the, the university system is a little bit outdated?

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. But as with many things, you know, I, I don't think it's bad. I don't think it's good either. I think it depends. There are certain people that do well in that structure and, and need that kind of rigor of that sort of path to go down. And do incredibly well against, you know, the essays and the ASIT and they're really good. And really good with the lectures and then taking the notes and just have that sort of discipline in that area of their life where they do well in that circumstance. And then that education then sets them up for greater things. So I think it depends. I mean, if your dream is to become a lawyer, then I think you have to go through that path, right?

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Because it's impossible otherwise. I think if you want to be an entrepreneur, the single best thing you can do is to probably study as many businesses you can and get as much business exposure in that. So what do I mean by that? Well, it can come in by working for businesses that are great, but more importantly, probably working for great individuals and learning from them, right? So if you are fortunate enough to be able to do, you know, we're talking about this, but your behind the scenes version. And and and being able to like work for you in that and see you up up close, it's gonna be invaluable

• 13:57Speaker 00

  for that individual that get to do that, because you get to see entrepreneurship from the first row. You get to see what it's like, what business aspect, what's, you know, how do you do that? How much admin do you need to carry? And even if you're just a fly on the wall, you're gonna learn so many skills that are quite diverse. And and that's the, I think, the biggest trick about entrepreneurship is like the the for me, everyone, when they think about the word innovation, they think that it's something entirely novel. Yet, for me, innovation, I don't know of a single thing that just someone came up with that had no prior grounds.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Everything is about putting two or more things in together in a new context. So studying many different things, understanding a little bit about business, understanding a little bit about product and how to make that product, understanding whatever it is that are drivers from that, I think is important. And that's not to say that university can't do that and it can't be. Helpful to learning sales and the theory of it, et cetera. Um. But I think that there is many other paths you could take uh that may even if you're um.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  You know, if you have enough grit and kind of like are able to put yourself in a situation where you can uh get in front of the right person and start working for them. Um. So much is in life is around people believing in you and and giving you the right place to grow. Um. And and and it is really serendipitous, to be honest. Um. And and and I'm certainly a product of all that. So I I I think it is not right or wrong. It's just. I I dislike how we're talking about it as it is the way or um, you know, it's not the way. And it's like, no, I think it's more like it works sometimes for certain individuals. And then for other individuals, it is not the best use of their time. And there are other paths you can take.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  But educating yourself, even if that's outside of a university and getting a degree concept. That I think is invaluable and it's the most important thing you can be doing as a young individual about anything you're interested in.

• 16:18Steven Bartlett?

  Think that's one of the big misconceptions people have about me when they hear I dropped out of university. They think I don't like education. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:24Steven Bartlett?

  I spend all day like an all all night till two AM learning about rockets and AI and all that stuff. I'm a self educator, but the institution of education that is university. For me, I just couldn't stay awake.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:36Steven Bartlett?

  In that experience.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Same same here. But for another person, it is exactly what they they need because they may not even know what they're interested in. And they feel like I want to have a foundation that gives me a broad base. So again, if a master's of science degree, if if you know you want to be an engineer, but you're not entirely sure. What type of engineer, it's a very broad foundation that will teach you elemental skills that um. You probably will use at some point in time. Uh. I'm not saying you can't go outside of that realm too, but it's great stuff. Um. And if you're wired that way, you do well in that type of environment, uh, great. Um. And there's certain types of people that do that.

• 17:20Steven Bartlett?

  When young people come up to me and ask me this question about what I should be doing with my life at that early stage, the advice I've started to give, and I want to check how you how you would change or add or alter this advice, is to try and go and join a startup. So just for context, I'm talking about people that want to be entrepreneurs here.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:38Steven Bartlett?

  To try and go and join a startup that's doing something at the very cutting edge of the world, or a wave that's currently coming into shore. So I would say to young kids, like, go and join an AI startup.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 17:49Steven Bartlett?

  And the reason I say startup is because you're going to be closer to the decision making, you're going to learn more, you can have more exposure than like if you went and worked at, I don't know, a Google or something.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 17:59Steven Bartlett?

  And also, it's the cheapest way to fail when you're young, right?

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:02Steven Bartlett?

  Like, you can observe the company fall into the graveyard.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:05Steven Bartlett?

  Without there being a huge cost to you.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. I would agree. I mean, I think that is a tremendous

• 18:14Speaker 00

  opportunity to do that. But again, I've seen other paths work too. I've seen people join bigger companies and move around inside of that company and get super valuable skills and then eventually kind of break out as an entrepreneur as well. And maybe you wanted to save up some money. And obviously, if you join a little bit of a bigger company, you're able to do that and prioritize doing both. And then, you know, once you have that kind of nest egg of sorts, you can then break out. And so I don't know, it's like the, I used to think, and you and I, we were talking about this before, I used

• 18:58Speaker 00

  to think that, you know, hey, I've got all this advice, I'm just going to give it. And the more and more, on a personal basis, I'm not sure I'm in a great position to give advice on many things. And so I try to stay away from it. I can't help myself when I feel like people are doing it, but I try to not do it as much as I do. And it's actually something I'm deeply conscious about, because I don't think that there's one path in life. I think that there are many paths in life. And of course, there are really bad ones. But but some some of the more amazing life stories aren't the obvious ones. It is not the people even doing the sort of, hey, I joined a startup or I did this and that.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  It may be the person who spent entire life in a lab to only get so frustrated in the end that they end up breaking out and then forming a company because no one else wanted to do the idea that they had in mind. Or it may be the person who was the least likely to solve that problem, but had really been spending all this time thinking about it and developed this really odd skill while doing their normal day job that then turned out to be really useful to solving this particular problem.

• 20:16Steven Bartlett?

  And going back to that first company that was acquired at Vertigo. After that was acquired, I read that you retired at twenty three.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:27Steven Bartlett?

  I'm guessing that made you enough money to retire.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 20:31Steven Bartlett?

  And you're twenty three, which is in two thousand and six, and you're a retired man living what one can only describe as any twenty three year old's dream.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:42Steven Bartlett?

  Lots of money, guessing there was some champagne there. I think there was a red Ferrari. How was that for you?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  It was amazing.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  No, all jokes aside, I grew up and as I said, I was kind of like always socially accepted, but didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. And I I never had an easy time with girls. Not a bad time, just not as as good as if I was widely successful in music or widely successful in sports or any of that stuff. And I kind of had odd interests because I kept, as I said, kind of moving from group to group. And so I had this idea in my head that I wanted to, you know, be financially independent.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  I wanted, I thought that once I got to that point, I would start living life. And I thought that, um, you know, um, I would be more socially accepted and I would find my tribe. Uh, and it's embarrassing to talk about it now, um, but, um, you know, that was really what I thought. So. Uh, I thought that, uh, if I was lucky and worked really hard, I might be able to retire in my forties. If I worked really hard, but, you know, fifties for sure. And, and, um, so, you know, getting to that point. When I was twenty two, actually, not twenty three, it, it was just mind boggling to me. And, um.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  I had that financial target in mind, um, and I thought, well, once I hit that, I'm just gonna like, you know, do something else. And, and so as you said, I kind of like started frequenting all the nightclubs, uh, bought a sports car. Um, tried to get the girls I could never get before, realizing that, yes, I could get them. Um, but for all the wrong reasons and they didn't really care about me. Um, and it was kind of a hollowing thing because it was this kind of, oh, was this what I worked for? For such a long period of time. And then, um, only to find out that, um, you know, it was quite depressing, honestly.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  I had all these new friends that weren't really great friends at all. Um, luckily I was able to keep my old friends as well. Um, but I realized that this thing I thought I wanted, uh, I just didn't want at all. And, um.

• 23:07Steven Bartlett?

  What was the symptom? When we say realize, there's typically symptoms, psychological symptoms or?

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Um, no, I, I realized it because I, I, um, you know, I started getting all these phone calls from people. Um, asking me to come out on Friday evenings and Saturday evenings. Uh, and I just. I was just empty. I just had no energy to do that. Um, and I thought to myself, oh, this is odd. Because the old me thought this was what life was all about. And I had, I had girls call me and like, hey, you should really come out. We miss you, all of that stuff. And I realized that I just didn't care. And had, um, I thought that that was, you know. This magical moment.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  And in fact, you know, putting on my computer or playing my guitar was kind of, yeah, this is more me. And so something on the back of my head started forming around like, who am I? What do I care about? And it's it's actually in that process I met my co-founder because he was the founder of TradeDoubler. And who bought my company? And he too, it kind of, the company had IPOed. He got kicked out of the company. He he was like a hundred times more wealthier than I was like. He had like the biggest success in tech Sweden at the time. And had everything going for him, but he didn't know what to do with life.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  And so that was kind of how we bonded. And, you know, we were watching like old Godfather movies, eating crisps and talking about what to do in life. And and that was like a real friendship moment, a real turning point. And he saw the same thing that I saw. And, you know, that was when I realized that I've been approaching this all wrong. In fact, I always loved working. It was never about money. I always liked learning and I would pay to go learn for someone rather than getting paid for it. And but at the same time, I thought work should be hard.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  That was the thing that I had programmed into me. So work has to be clearly something you not don't enjoy doing. So I thought, well, what if you change all of these parameters? What if you create an environment where you can come in and learn from really smart people all the time? What if you can work on something you actually care about, opposed to something that makes money? What if you could have a lot of fun while doing it and not take it too serious? And we started talking and we were bouncing ideas. And Martin, my co-founder, was like asking me like, well, if you really could pick anything like, what, what, what would you pick?

• 25:59Speaker 00

  And I I'm I said to him, well, um, you know, uh, I'd probably pick music, but that's a terrible idea. And he said, well, why is that a terrible idea? And I said, well, it's a terrible idea because, you know, the industry is going down the drains. It just doesn't work. It's piracy. It's all of these reasons. And he said, okay, um, but but if one would fix it, how would one do? Well, it can kind of stupid. They're trying to regulate it. Clearly, you need to build a better product. That's the only thing that's gonna work. Cause he said, okay, well, how are you gonna do that? And it's like, well, I don't know, but maybe you could do this or that. Okay, well, how would that work? So, well, I don't know, but maybe you could do this and that. And how would you make money?

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Well, I I think maybe you could pay out based on how much people were listening. I don't know. And then literally, after going through why not, uh, a hundred times, I started realizing that, yeah, why not? And why not give this a shot? And I told him from the beginning, you know, uh, that, um, hey, this is probably gonna lose us a lot of money. I have a hard time seeing this ever being a sustainable business. But I'm in, let's do this. And he said, great, let's do it. And while I was hesitating for some reason, he wasn't. So he was like, this seems fun, let's do it. And that gave me enough confidence where I kind of had found a new purpose again.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  And instantly I stopped responding to all the people who were trying to get me out in the evenings. And I said, well, I got something to do. And then I went back to work again. And it was like, pretty much a week from that moment where I felt like I'm happy again. I haven't felt this happy for, you know, the better part of a year. Because it was about a year when I was going through this transition of of just having fun, being retired.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  First month was fun, six months in depressing, uh, nine months in, am I ever gonna get out of this depression? To then kind of a year in finding something else that I truly look forward to. That felt crazy. And I honestly did not think we would succeed, but if we succeed, I knew it was gonna be a big thing.

• 28:17Steven Bartlett?

  Something really interesting there that I could relate to a lot was this idea that you had a hypothesis about your happiness that had to fail you to know that it was not a valid hypothesis about happiness. And there's so many people, obviously, I mean, there's, I'd assume it's more than half the population are currently pursuing a hypothesis they have about what will make them happy, that probably, and this is the thing I always wonder is, does it have to fail them for them to know that that's not the right pursuit? In my case, it did. It had to fail me.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:48Steven Bartlett?

  I had to fill the anticlimax and then I had to go and buy the, the big house and then was there for nine months and got out of it as quick as I could and bought the car and then got rid of the car and then just moved as close to the office as I could in a one bedroom studio apartment.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:01Steven Bartlett?

  But for a lot of people, I'm like, is there a way for them not, for it, for them not to have to go all that way and have it fail them?

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think that there's certain life experiences that you can't learn from other people. You just have to live, live, live it. And I think it's not 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, I think everyone can talk about it. Don't seek attention. Don't seek fame. Don't seek all of these things. But we're, we're human beings. We want to be well liked by other people. And so I think that is probably one of them. But, but in general, I think the further away it is from anything you know and can relate to, I think

• 29:49Speaker 00

  we have to experience parts of it. So, you know, one, one of the most amazing thing that I get to do these days for my friends is from like back when, is I take them on these crazy experiences, right? You know, I'm, I'm fortunate enough that I get to see some of the coolest people in the world, whether it's musicians, but athletes and, 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, 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?

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Wow, I would never want to do this. And it's it's quite helpful.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  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. And 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 twenties and so on.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Had I had I worked up until my forties, I may have kind of realized, hey, this isn't life. I'm having children, 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, how all of the rappers were throwing around money and having twenty or thirty girls at the nightclub and, you know, hey, I wanted that too.

• 31:51Steven Bartlett?

  One thing I'm really interested in is you said you got to nine months and you were depressed, nine months after the sale. There are so many people now, and this is why I asked about what the symptoms of that were. It's hard to know when we're drifting down the wrong path because it creeps up on us like a frog in a frying pan. I I remember a time working seven days a week and this feeling in my chest of I would describe it as like a subtle growing emptiness.

• 32:15Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 32:29Speaker 00

  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, everyone 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 nightclubs and the club promoters like putting you on the list plus 10 and all that stuff. The social currency. So it was thrilling.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  It was absolutely amazing and it truly was this kind of like, wow, I've made it kind of feeling.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  But after you experienced the 10th 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. And I started now getting the hangarounds 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 dawned upon me that you could replace me by just anyone else

• 34:10Speaker 00

  that had the money and the connection that I had at that time, thereby the status, and it really wouldn't matter. You know, and, and, you know, I was, I was listening to, I think it's, his name is Morgan Houseold, the author who talks about psychology of money. And he kind of talked about it, the Ferrari syndrome. And he basically describes that everyone.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Who aspires to buy a Ferrari thinks of themselves and saying, oh, well, one day when I'm in this Ferrari, everyone's gonna look at this Ferrari and they're gonna be amazed with me. Yet, what we all do is we look at the Ferrari and we wanna 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. And as you're right, you push that to aside 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.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  This is, this is life. And everyone was rewarding me on the outside too, saying, wow, in 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 genuine connections with people. I 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 that cared about me for being me.

• 36:00Steven Bartlett?

  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, like learning was one of them, belonging. What are, what are the other core components of, you think, for someone, just, it's easy to just talk about ourselves here, for you to be stable?

• 36:22Speaker 00

  I realized that I also need to be by, be allowed to be by myself. Right? 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 draining me. And I used to think it was something wrong. Wrong with me because I wanted to be by myself for most of the time. And um and being comfortable with that I am that way. That I thrive on loneliness, not all the time, because I can feel lonely.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  But for quite a lot of time, perhaps more so than most normal people like being lonely. I'm I'm just finding myself in that.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Place where I just pursue whatever is top of mind for me. I am sort of in my own thoughts. Wandering, dreaming, scheming, you know.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  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 my 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.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Being able to learn, being able to have fun while doing it and. Then be in an environment where I can be lonely and then can 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 could host the dinner. And I get an idea, it's very uncommon, but I'll 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 I'm with, you know, strangers because. They wouldn't understand. They won't.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  But my real friends, they know that about me and they're like 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 in that that for me is like a perfect dinner. Is one where I would be social, I would get an idea, walk away, think about it for a moment, get, collect my thoughts, get energy, write it down and come back filled with energy from that. And then, you know, continue the conversation. That's a great example of something I love to do.

• 39:38Steven Bartlett?

  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'd left, so 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 unpredictable times and that idea might suck me away. She probably wouldn't 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

• 40:07Steven Bartlett?

  that I'd then spend all night like, sorry guys.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  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 close friends are like, hey, we came to hang out with you, not like to see you for half an hour and then you disappearing. But it happens.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  But I can obviously equally be there for all the dinner too. And, and yeah, I mean, it is one of the social oddities, I think, that I do with my close friends.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  And again, I know it's highly socially unacceptable in most situations. But, but if you really think about it as an introvert, as I said, I'd usually thrive on, I need social elements, but I get most of my energy being by myself, right? And, 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, it is probably the ideal way for me. If you ask me like, what would a perfect night look like? It would probably be that.

• 41:23Steven Bartlett?

  How do you then balance romance and relationships? And my partner, her, 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.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:37Steven Bartlett?

  We could be Saturday in a park and then I think about something or get an email.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:41Steven Bartlett?

  And then I'm off away on my own little world.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  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 too leaves dinners and has her ideas and, and, you know, do that. So I think we're more similar. We try to make sure that one of us stay because it gets very awkward otherwise.

• 42:07Steven Bartlett?

  But if you're both like that, do you have to have rules though for when you do bond?

• 42:11Speaker 00

  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 is we spend time together or the default is 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. And 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.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  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 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. And there are aspects of the horsing thing where we can bond and have great quality time.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Time as well. As it is, she loves hearing about my entrepreneurial endeavors as well. And 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 don't just really walk up and get away. Of course, you're gonna spend that quality time as well.

• 43:53Steven Bartlett?

  Starting Spotify. When I heard the Spotify story, I I really wanted to meet you because I consider myself to be ambitious, but there are some challenges that I would just view as 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 and believe that you could change that, for me is a special type of delusion. Like it's like, it's just an impossible task. It's what I just would have thought, okay, some things are the way they are. They're immovable objects. That is one of them.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:35Steven Bartlett?

  Why didn't you think that was a impossible task?

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Well, I I think for several reasons, but I I think that is the beautiful naivety of an entrepreneur as well, right? We move mountains. I'm 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. And he managed to do that. So I think it's 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 the the why not part,

• 45:23Speaker 00

  I probably spent five hundred hours learning about this problem. And the scariest 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.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  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 coming in at that right time. They're spending thousands of hours of trying to, you know, needle in a haystack, see that opportunity through that very, very tiny prism. And, and, um, um, e- even, even today, when I think about it, some of my other businesses, it kind of worked the same way. So I started a healthcare business about five years ago.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  But I, I was spending, um, I think the first interview when I mentioned it was in two thousand and nine. And I started the company five years ago, uh, two thousand and eighteen. So I, I probably spent a decade thinking about this problem. And I couldn't figure out a solution. Two thousand and eight. Yeah, yeah. You started the company in two thousand and eight. No, no, I started the company, the healthcare company in two thousand and eighteen. Eighteen. But I started thinking about it two thousand and eight. Oh, okay. 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, uh, and I'm happy and it's amazing.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  But every now and then, um, nothing happens for a great period of time. And I kind of feel that itch to maybe make a difference myself. And I, and I say that because like the realization there was, um, 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, uh, business, direct to consumer things, the, the longevity curves of human beings, the disease growth, the costs curves, like all of those aspects, um, about it, similar to how you're describing, looking at rockets.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  But, you know, imagine you spending a thousand hours on a rocket, not just kind of casually researching it. I am 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, uh, too, 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

• 48:26Speaker 00

  in the world around like the DMCA and what the US copyright regime looked like and what what other regimes looked like and how, you know, performance rights, societies, label rights and what kind of rights, mechanical rights, performing rights, all of those different aspects, all the different code, IRC numbers, ISBN numbers and how they're related and so on and so forth. And, and, you know, I find like people either get too muddled 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

• 49:09Speaker 00

  problems to solve in what order? And, 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'd built the product that showcased the technology of what we're doing. And it felt like if you had all the world's 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?

• 49:53Speaker 00

  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 gonna happen, until eventually, one day, the stars aligned and we were able to launch. But that was not a given, but it felt like the right bet to make, because, you know, it was a binary outcome. Either we'd 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.

• 50:37Steven Bartlett?

  Was there any moments where you thought that it wasn't going to happen? I e conversations you had with record labels where someone very high up says absolutely no way?

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Many times. I would say probably once every month or two over a 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. I probably gained 30 pounds in weight during that period of time. It was awful, but throughout 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,

• 51:23Speaker 00

  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 wasn't enough, 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 and it was just the amount of push that I needed to do this. And again, talking about not giving advice, but 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 credit for Spotify, but it is really a team effort from the Gustavs and Alex and all those people.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:18Steven Bartlett?

  That 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.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:29Steven Bartlett?

  And knowing when to persevere and knowing when you're just wasting your time, which is, as you said, the most important currency of all.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:35Steven Bartlett?

  You know?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  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 fifty fifty, 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, but the upside may be a hundred. It's probably worth persuading. Obviously, that's the science part. The art thing is, OK, well, is it really a hundred times? Is it ten times? And have I already lost, but I'm just not aware of it?

• 53:21Speaker 00

  That's the art.

• 53:23Steven Bartlett?

  And also in that, I hear an optimism bias from two co-founders. The constant, oh, we'll 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 bias towards we'll figure it out?

• 53:38Speaker 00

  I think, again, it depends on the role you're hiring for. You 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, hmm, I'm not sure this is going to work out. And so often, I think that's the important part. We keep talking about it with CFO or salespeople. But again, you can have a deal making CFO and a 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 go lucky salesperson.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Or the inverse, maybe like really diligent that and the CFO that maybe sort of like, don't worry about it. We 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, it's a cheesy thing to say, but the less I 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 too bogged down in the details to understand the bigger picture. And 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.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  That is and simplifying very complex concepts. I think some of the most amazing entrepreneurs in the world are experts at. And that is a superpower. And that is certainly one that I'm trying to hone.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  And work on. But when you see it like Steve Jobs, when you think very complex things and 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 everyday person.

• 55:57Steven Bartlett?

  These tales I hear 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 accost, I don't know, the assistant outside and asking when the CEO was coming outside. So that you could get a meeting with them.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:10Steven Bartlett?

  Are these tales true?

• 56:12Speaker 00

  As with many, they're probably exaggerated a little bit.

• 56:15Steven Bartlett?

  Where is the truth?

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Well, the the truth is that certainly happened, but it wasn't, you know, I've heard people recounted as that I slept outside of the the record labels kind of in a sleeping bag. That that didn't happen. That happened another time in my career, but it wasn't. It it didn't happen there, but but it certainly happened that I'd book a week, fly to New York with no meeting booked. With basically an open calendar and about twenty phone calls a day, just trying to figure out a time to get on the the schedule of a senior VP or a CEO, et cetera. That certainly happened. And that taught me another thing too, which is that these assistants.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  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. And and and, you know, 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, 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 moment's notice, even if

• 57:41Speaker 00

  it was 20 minutes before finding out about it, I would show up. And so I was, I was easy to deal with. So 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.

• 58:03Steven Bartlett?

  Did you invest your personal capital into starting Spotify? Because I, I read again that you'd spent pretty much all of your personal wealth to start the company.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did. So I invested not all of it, but quite substantial amounts of it. And my co-founder invested even more, but he obviously had a much larger sum of money from the beginning. Yeah. So all in all, I think we invested about $10 million into this by ourselves, which was also crazy because, you know, back then, today, 10 million into a startup just was, it isn't a big number. There are many startups that have done that before. But doing that on a seed stage back in 2007, that just was unheard of. It was usually 500K seed check sums, et cetera.

• 58:52Steven Bartlett?

  What if it hadn't worked out? What would have been the personal implications for you financially?

• 58:56Speaker 00

  Uh. The personal implications, I went from not having to have a job to then probably having to go back to having a job. Um. So I basically took that security uh that I'd built up uh that twenty two I'm set for life and I gave that up um in a moment's notice. Um. And um, yeah, I mean, um, I I don't know what to say. I think uh it from a purely logical point of view, it was probably a terrible decision. Uh. But betting on myself and betting on yourself would probably be, again, uh, I say I shouldn't give advice, but it is probably the the best advice I could give many people is is, you know, because especially those that want to invest in various startups, et cetera,

• 59:41Speaker 00

  and I all but they may not have a lot of money. And then I always say, well, why 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 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. And it just feels like the more prudent thing to do. And so I had a sneaky feeling that that was the right thing to do. Uh. But investing as much probably wasn't the smartest thing to do.

• 1:00:15Steven Bartlett?

  Spotify goes on to be, I mean, success is probably an understatement. I know the journey to that success had multiple um near-death experiences to get there. One of the key things, key moments I reflect on as a Spotify customer, um, is when Apple launched their competing product, Apple Music, in two thousand and fifteen, I believe it was.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:37Steven Bartlett?

  And there was lots of articles saying that this would be the death of Spotify.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Steven Bartlett?

  I think I was even concerned. As a very loyal Spotify user,

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Steven Bartlett?

  I thought, fuck, you know, they have all the phones.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Steven Bartlett?

  They have, they're kind of like the mafia.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Steven Bartlett?

  They could just squash you.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Steven Bartlett?

  Most companies, when Apple comes into their territory, Shaking their boots.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Steven Bartlett?

  What was it like in your office that day when Apple Music launched a competing product?

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  You 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'd known that Apple was 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 decides 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. So you kind of like double and triple check whether or not, you know, you were deluding yourself into believing things to be true.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  And so, you know, 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 the 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

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  scenarios kind of thing. We knew we had prepared as well as we could. We anticipated 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, et cetera. And so weirdly enough, as the rest of the world kind of like gasped for

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  air, we were thinking about it. Okay, well, this was what we expected. And 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, the fact that, you know, 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.

• 1:04:33Steven Bartlett?

  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. And 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. I just stuck with Spotify. Apple, I used the word mafia earlier on. A

• 1:05:17Steven Bartlett?

  lot of people don't know this, but they take 30% revenues on pretty much every new app in the store. They've rejected your audiobook 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?

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  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. So let's start with that. And I think that's hard to square then, 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

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  others. And those are perhaps two different sides of the same coin. But, you know, 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've become Goliath. And so many of the tactics That made it the rebel kind of thing are now stifling innovation and it's really hurting consumers to great extent. With the thirty percent you talked about with the fact that, you know, Spotify can't. Or any developer, if you don't pay the thirty percent, you can't even speak to your consumers.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  Where, just from an ethos point of view, it's just not me. And 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 Goliath at this point and not David. And so, yeah.

• 1:07:53Steven Bartlett?

  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. But when I sit here, and I think a lot of people will sit here and say.

• 1:08:15Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  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 because sometimes it's doing things where I'm like. How did people know that we were supposed to do it this way? And 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 seventeen years old now. And it is a teenager that's liberating itself. So it's not a hundred percent me. In fact, it is this much broader, different being.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  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 to day. And they're certainly instilling their personal values and their personal perspective of the company too. Which I think they're totally entitled to doing, having been with the company for twelve 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 but it's certainly not directed. And the other part is I started as a twenty-three-year-old.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  And the twenty-three-year-old Daniel, while many parts are the same, the forty-year-old Daniel with two kids, having seen that have changed perspectives as well. I have a different feeling about work and the importance of that in my life. Still very important, but may not be the sole 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. But I think if you compare me to twenty-three-year-old Daniel, to thirty-year-old Daniel, to forty-year-old Daniel,

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  I've evolved too. And candidly, I'm in that period at the moment where I'm perhaps trying to figure out who the forty-year-old Daniel really is. Because it's a different one than the thirty-year-old one. Maybe it's subtleties, but I think in quite a big way also, and just thinking about something like culture.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  The twenty three year old Daniel, um, culture was having a ping pong table. Uh, thirty year old Daniel, uh, would have said, yeah, culture is important, but didn't really understand why. And the forty year old Daniel, uh, would be, um, you know, the thirty year old Daniel would be more strategy than culture, actually. And the forty year old Daniel is all about culture, almost to the point where strategy is, um, secondary, if not even tertiary to that.

• 1:11:31Steven Bartlett?

  Forty year old Daniel is all about culture.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, way more so.

• 1:11:35Steven Bartlett?

  What is the culture?

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  Well, and that's the amazing thing, because it is the most scalable thing done right, uh, of a company. Um, and it's the hardest thing, right? Because it is everything and nothing. There's every positive action that's happening in the company, it's every negative action of company, every person that's joining, every person that's leaving is impacting culture. And so, um, in its essence, I believe culture is about rewarding the positive behaviors you wanna see in the company. And obviously dissuade the negative.

• 1:12:06Steven Bartlett?

  What are the positive behaviors you wanna see?

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Well, one of them is taking risks, um, failing. And how do you do that when you have eight or nine thousand people inside of a company responsibly? How do you, uh, when the common status quo is, we don't like failure. Um, you don't get promoted based on failure, you get promoted based on being successful. Um, Annie Duke has this thinking in bets, she talks about, I love that, is thinking about poker, ships on the table. And, and she said one time, when, when we spoke, she said to me, it's like, um, a company is like, um, uh, everyone has ships at the table, we just don't know how many we have. And so the people that have been successful have way more, so they have leniency and allowancy in the culture

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  of any organizations to do more than someone who just started, um, and perhaps have a less lesser ones. And if you failed enough times, what's naturally going to happen is that you won't have the same agency in a large organization to impact things too. So then the, the counterpoint to that would be, well, how, how do you then? Create an environment where 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 too. We have tens of millions of creators that have their livelihood of the platform. So we can't just experiment with how we're paying out and so on and so forth.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  Right. And 550 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.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  And, you know, at the same time, obviously being responsible. And, and that's hard, but that's all about culture.

• 1:14:02Steven Bartlett?

  I'm absolutely obsessed with the subject of culture because I really think it's an under, underappreciated factor in, in why businesses are the way they are. I think you could basically take a person off the street and the culture you drop them in determines the behavior you'll get from them.

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18Steven Bartlett?

  And so, and having sat here and interviewed like Sir Alex Ferguson's ex teammates.

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Steven Bartlett?

  You just come to learn that Sir Alex Ferguson's greatness wasn't a strategy.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:27Steven Bartlett?

  They all say to me, I remember Patrice and Evra said to me that he walked in on a, we were playing Arsenal.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Steven Bartlett?

  On a Sunday in London.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Steven Bartlett?

  And he walked in and just said, lads, listen, beautiful weather outside. Don't fuck up my Sunday and walked out because his thing was about management. He just had this culture. The other thing they said to me, which has always stayed with me is Rio Ferdinand said to me, how many times do you think he came into the training ground dressing room?

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Steven Bartlett?

  In 26 years, like, I don't know, he said twice.

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:14:50Steven Bartlett?

  Didn't need to come in there, the culture was in there.

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Steven Bartlett?

  And it was self policing when it's strong, right?

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you're right. Sports teams, the ones that do really well, I was being told an Arsenal story that I probably can't share, but you could see bits and pieces of Mikel, 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. So you can see that and I love studying that with sports teams because, you know, it's 11 players on the pitch. How do, how do you make these people gel together and form a team? Hugely important thing. So I agree, but, but also like, imagine if you had 11 new players.

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  You know, can, yeah, can you even form a Chelsea these days too, 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 and 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 trivial, but to, to kind of have the same culture. And I think many founders make that mistake when they over hire. They don't understand the implication of the culture. They just look at sort of more warm bodies.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  But it's all these other subtle things that starts breaking.

• 1:16:27Steven Bartlett?

  Daniel, 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 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?

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  I, um.

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  I think we, 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 her and not particularly good at anything. So I used to think, for instance, that I had this brilliant, you know, I modeled myself on the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world of like, I need to run every product meeting. I need to be the best product person in the world.

• 1:17:41Speaker 00

  It just wasn't me and it took me a while to realize that and be comfortable saying that. Right? But.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  I I have realized that I do like a lot of different things. I love learning about new things and perhaps that is my 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 but somehow be more introspective and listen to myself.

• 1:18:31Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's really one of the things I I take away from you, said very eloquently, is that you're proof that entrepreneurs can buck a number of different trends, you know, and still be wildly successful. And 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. And it really, from what you've just said there, the most surefire way of becoming a successful entrepreneur is actually looking inward versus looking outwards at like, oh, how does Elon do it? Or how does Mark 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

• 1:19:15Steven Bartlett?

  things that I think I've been, yeah, I've been limiting myself on. Daniel, thank you so much.

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:19:24Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you for building such a great business and building a business that that is,

• 1:19:30Steven Bartlett?

  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 you probably don't like this word, but I don't know 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. And they're like really nice people that are very open books. It doesn't feel like a big corporate to me. It's very humble in its in its in its approach, but it's also very ambitious. And it strikes that balance really wonderfully well. And it's a company and a brand that I deeply resonate with for that reason. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I think. You know, you talked about wanting to do work that brings good to the world.

• 1:20:12Steven Bartlett?

  The good to the world that Spotify has done, in my view, is inquantifiable because, I mean, music is a wonderful thing, but what you're doing now in podcasting as well and how you've really owned and driven that industry forward for people like me to have these longer form, more contextual conversations, I think it's hard to measure the good that's done to the world, but it's certainly an important one.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Thank 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 hand in hand. And so I think you capture the essence of what we like Spotify to be at its best, which is super ambitious, but yet humble with all of its past success, all of that stuff that we're still learning.

• 1:20:54Steven Bartlett?

  Super curious. I've never told this story before, but when 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.

• 1:21:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:06Steven Bartlett?

  And I was there with Shaquille as well, who's a good friend and colleague of yours and has been for a long time.

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:11Steven Bartlett?

  And they sat me down at a table for about 30 minutes or an hour.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:16Steven Bartlett?

  And said, you're a podcaster, Steve.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:19Steven Bartlett?

  Tell us everything we need to know about podcasting.

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:22Steven Bartlett?

  How can we make Spotify better for you 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, having listened to you. It's not something that a big corporate that was arrogant or very sure of themselves or had 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 and 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.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  Well, 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 amazing to see that you're able to do that. Amazing to bring these conversations to the world and we all get the benefit. 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.