DAVID SENRA: Daniel Ek, Spotify

Andrew Huberman: I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, I'm excited to share the launch of a new podcast that I've helped create and produce. This new podcast is hosted by David Senra. For those of you not familiar with David Senra, he is the expert in all things greatness. He studies greatness, and he understands it, mostly in the domain of business, but also creatives, athletes, and other world-class performers. In this new show, David sits down with the best of the best business founders and extreme winners to understand their drive, their process of creation, how they overcome failures, their lessons in leadership, and other tools for achieving success.

This first episode of the podcast is with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify. It's an absolutely spectacular conversation that I'm certain you'll enjoy. If you'd like to listen to future episodes of this new podcast, please be sure to subscribe to it. It's simply called David Senra, and links to it are in the show notes for this episode. Again, the podcast is called David Senra. Episode two of David Senra will be with the founder of Dell Technologies, Michael Dell. So again, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening now. And now, episode one of David Senra with the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek.

David Senra: I want to consider this conversation like a continuation of the conversation we had last year in New York. It was by far the most impactful conversation I had the entire year. It is in large part the reason we're sitting down and actually recording this conversation. What I loved was I thought about how the advice you gave and the stories you told really fundamentally changed my approach to my work and also my philosophy of how I'm living my life.

Because it's very rare. This year I'm going to hit over 400 biographies read for the podcast. Somebody asked me recently, "Do you ever uncover new ideas?" It's like, no, I feel like I'm telling the same story, the same personality type over and over again. You'll get a new idea or a novel idea every once in a while, but certainly not all the time. But you shared something at the dinner that was a truly novel idea. Then a few months later I read this interview and I was like, oh, I'm not the only one that Daniel's advice changed the career.

So I'm going to read something. There was an interview given by the CEO of Uber, who's a friend of yours, Dara. I'm going to read this excerpt, which was absolutely perfect. He was talking about contemplating, should I take this job or not? Like this is a huge opportunity, but also kind of scary. And this is tied to your idea that you should optimize for impact over happiness. I haven't heard anybody else articulate that.

Dara says: "I was reading about all the issues happening with Uber in the news, the various challenges that were coming up there. So when I first got the call to be the CEO, I said, heck no, I'm not crazy. I'm not up for this. But I had one particular conversation that really shifted me, which was with Daniel Ek, who's a good friend. I still remember I was talking to him about my career at Expedia and how happy I was. And he looks at me, and he did this to me too. And he looks at me and he goes, 'Since when is life about happiness? It's about impact. You can have an impact on Uber, which is a really important company in the world that's shaping the future of cities.' And I thought to myself, my God, this is so obvious. I've got to take a shot. I knew it was going to be uncomfortable."

Can you just explain how you think about optimizing for impact or happiness and why?

Daniel Ek: Well, first off, it's incredibly kind of Dara to say that. I think about this. I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact. You can feel happiness in small bursts, in small moments, and you can have a lot of variance in your life. So you can choose to have that part, which is the ups and downs of life. I'm not saying you can't have happiness, but I think truly sustained happiness comes from impact. And impact is something that's deeply personal to you. Only you can define what impact means for you. So I think it means different things for different people. But I do think it's a trailing indicator.

The way I would put it in this case is, what was obvious for me with someone like Dara was he was content, he wasn't happy. He had gone through a phase knowing him for a while where he had a lot of ups and downs with Expedia and all that stuff. He kind of mostly figured it out. So he was content. In his case, where he was at his life, it was such an obvious thing that he didn't even realize that he'd just grown content. For me, Uber is a very special company. To even be asked to be the CEO of that and the impact I knew he could have on that company just felt to me like an obvious thing. So I sort of advised him, hey, you should go for this. That's a far greater thing, and that's going to lead to much more happiness, not just for you, but also for other people.

David Senra: Did somebody do that for you? Did somebody tell you to optimize for impact over happiness, or is this just the way you work?

Daniel Ek: I think I self-motivate myself that way.

David Senra: Okay.

Daniel Ek: To do the hard things. Like many other people, I'm quite lazy by nature. I try to take the simple road out often enough. But what I've learned that has given me the greatest joys is overcoming the biggest adversities. Overcoming the biggest adversities usually has been solving a problem of some kind for someone or something that no one else had been able to figure out. For me, that's my definition of impact. It's not right there at the moment that I feel that. In many cases, I feel it much longer, but it's when I go back and I reflect on accomplishments or moments of impact, then I feel true happiness. I've just grown to kind of self-motivate myself constantly.

I think this kind of comes from a much deeper thing. I came from pretty much what was the project in Sweden, and I was not the normal kid. I was probably a middle of the pack kind of kid, but I certainly stood out. I didn't belong to any social group. There was no social cohesion.

David Senra: So you felt like an outsider even at that age?

Daniel Ek: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: You still today?

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Every moment of my life. Even among other fellow entrepreneurs, I sometimes feel like an outsider. Right now, for instance, you and I were in Silicon Valley. I'm not American. So there's an element of myself where I don't belong to the club. I've always felt that way. Because I've always felt that way, I can't take lessons from other people 100% because some of my story, some of my conditions, some of the ways, the structures, even how to structure a company. You have to structure differently if you're a European company versus an American company. So you have to go back to first principles and find this sort of principled answer to anything and what works for you. I've had to self-motivate myself for most of my life.

Only in the last maybe five years, I've come to realize that in a way, I may be a better coach than I am a player. I've understood more and more that that sort of drive, that intensity, is actually something that can be taught. It's not entirely innate. It's about almost letting people know that that's okay. So much of that comes from those types of conversations. It's about reflecting back. It's not about me projecting onto other people what I think they should do. But in listening to Dara, it was just so obvious to me when he explained. The conversation started with us talking about Uber. I said, "I recommended you for the job." And he said, "Oh, really? Yeah, I just didn't take the call even." I was like, "Well, why not?" He was like, "Well, I'm really happy about this thing." I was listening, and I actually just let him keep talking. The more he spoke, the more obvious it became he was content. He was running on the downshifted, down to the easy gear. Life was good. It was really easy. But there was an element of him, and you could hear it in his voice, where he's sort of like, okay, well, you've always been running on a higher gear. Do you want to gear up even more to an extreme level? Why aren't you going to go for greatness? Why aren't you going to test yourself? Because if you succeed, this could be huge. You really don't get many of these chances in your life. So much of the conversation was really around that.

But with another person, I might have given a totally different piece of advice. So I don't think it's a universal truth, but I do think the universal truth is that happiness trails impact. Impact is something that's highly unique. It could be something innate in you. It could be having impact on other people. It could be having impact by being a great father around your kids. I don't pretend to know that there's one game to play or one universal truth to life. I certainly believe from entrepreneurial types that are probably more like myself, that this is one of those key things: really consider impact.

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David Senra: You mentioned you thought some people don't go for impact because they're content. When was the last time? You're definitely not content now.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: I've gotten to know you once. We've talked for hours and hours and hours. This is why I wanted you to be the first person I had this conversation with. I was curious if you could say that. No, I know you have this inner burning desire and fire inside of you. To me, your outside is very calm, very articulate, and very polite. But you have that same thing I read in these books all the time. It's just like this person had a burning desire to achieve mission success, is the way I think about it.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Were you content after you sold your first company? You were like 22, 23.

Daniel Ek: Well, content is the right word. I wasn't happy. So I was content for a moment of time. I was 22. I never had much success with women because I was a computer geek. Back then, computers was not the coolest thing in the world. I was like, okay, well, now I've got all this money. This was my worldview. I can go out in nightclubs and I'm going to be the cool guy. I had fun for a while, I'll tell you that. But it also was incredibly hollowing because I realized that these girls weren't with me because of me. They were with me because I had status. I was able to use money to buy status and be a cool guy for a small moment of time. That taught me a lot.

I kind of walked away for over a year not doing anything at all. Just deeply reflecting on life, what I wanted to do. For me, I had a magic number, which was 10 million. If I got that number, I would retire. That was the goal.

David Senra: How old were you when you came up with that number?

Daniel Ek: Probably 15. Someone gave me this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I think. I read it. I think everybody gets it the same age. It was really seminal for me. I kind of made that number. I figured to myself I worked really hard. I could get there when I was 40. I was 22 when I got there. That wasn't really part of the plan. I kind of like, okay, well, what's next? What am I going to do? Because I didn't have to work for money.

David Senra: Were you depressed? When you don't have your company anymore, you sold it. You have the number you thought it was going to take you four decades to reach. You reach it now. You're going to the clubs. You're realizing these people aren't my friends. They don't care about me at all.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: There's no impact I'm making on the world. I'm just consuming. I'm not producing anything. This is something I talk about all the time. I think sometimes we have a sick culture where people, especially on social media, they glorify consumption. It's like, I don't care what you consume. I care what you produce. You should be proud not that you have money to buy an expensive thing. What did you make? The way I think about this all the time, which is always fascinating, how many times this comes up in the biographies for hundreds of years. People constantly think like, oh, we've reached the end. There's no more opportunity. Every single time humans keep saying, we can't, this is going to be the last company. This is going to be the last technological shift. This is going to be the last invention.

The best description of a business I've ever heard came from Richard Branson. He said, "All a business is, is an idea that makes somebody else's life better." If you look at it like that, then you have infinite possibilities and opportunities all the time because there's infinite small and large ways to make other people's lives better. You weren't at that time making anybody else's life better. You were just kind of consuming. Would you consider yourself depressed? What would you consider yourself?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, it's probably the most depressed I've been in my life, to be honest. I knew from a very young age what I wanted to do. Unlike most other people that I grew up with, I just knew I wanted to build things.

David Senra: You were doing that when you were like 14, right?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, but it started even earlier than that. I just didn't know it was called a company. I had no idea what finances were or VC or any of these things. I was just building things. I knew I loved computers. I knew I wanted to do that. I knew I would make a living doing that somehow.

David Senra: This is another thing that drives me insane because I hear other people's advice to entrepreneurs, which I hate. I think it's terrible. We shouldn't have an entrepreneurial ecosystem, especially because most of the media that entrepreneurs are consuming are actually from investors. You have wildly different incentive structures and everything else. It just conflicts with a lot of stuff that's in the biographies. I'll just go with those guys or anybody else. They're always just like, "My belief is something that I repeat." I'm really going to dismaxim that. Belief comes before ability. It's in these stories every single time. You have somebody like, I just reread the autobiography of the founder of Sony. Akio at the time, we're going to start this company in 1946 in Tokyo that's occupied by the Americans, that is completely firebombed. He's passing burnt-out rubble. Millions of homes of Japanese. More than half the population has left the city. They start what turns out to be Sony, one of the most successful and influential companies of all time, in a burned-out department store. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is they need to have umbrellas on their desks because when it rains, it comes through the roof. Yet in his book, he says, "I don't have a problem saying, even then, I knew I had potential and I could be great and I could do great things." He had the belief before the ability.

You said, "I don't even know it was called entrepreneurship. I'm starting to build things." This is the question I have for you. When did you know you were good?

Daniel Ek: I don't know that I'm good. I know I'm different. I have this sort of insane belief that I can get good if I try hard enough. I still feel that way. The comparative set has changed. It was from everyone in my school in the early days, to everyone in Stockholm somewhat later, to everyone in Europe at some point. Now it's the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time that I'm constantly comparing myself to. Obviously, I don't believe that I'm as good as them. But I believe I am slightly different than them in some ways. I believe that if I work really, really hard on something, I can make something really great. That's the sort of bar that I keep for myself.

It really stems from this notion back to what you were talking about, about the realization that through computers, Steve Jobs has the saying, "It's the bicycle of our mind." That was really how I felt about computers growing up. It's just this magic tool that allows me to solve so many other things and create things.

David Senra: That's how I feel about podcasts.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. I knew I wanted to do that. I also knew that my co-founder, Martin, he has this thing he keeps saying: "The value of a company is the sum of all problems solved." What I keep doing is essentially I've got this toolbox called a computer, and I got all these problems around the world. Which problems am I passionate about solving? Which problems can I spend the next decade of my life fixing? Because if I'm not interested enough in it to spend a decade fixing it, it's probably not worth pursuing.

David Senra: This is something I'm super passionate about. If you really think about it, they don't write biographies about people that start, scale, sell a company and do it for like five years. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in your startup. I'm interested in your last company. I'm interested in something you're going to do for the rest of your life. This is what I draw inspiration off of. Going back to what you said earlier about impact and contentment and how you're willing to go into an area where it's difficult. I love what Jeff Bezos said on this. He used to tell people at Amazon at the very beginning, "We're trying to build something that we can be proud of, something that we can tell our grandkids about. Anything that you're going to be proud to tell your grandkids about is not going to be easy. So we're going into this with a 30% chance of success." I think at the beginning of Spotify, you guys were like, "Hey, I might have to get a job after this, but I have to do this." It is inside of me.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: There's a bunch of people that say the reason they joined Spotify in the early days is because Daniel would teach us and tell us that he's building for the long term.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: So there had to be acquisition offers early on.

Daniel Ek: Sure.

David Senra: Did you ever consider them?

Daniel Ek: Well, I considered them, but not for money. I considered them because I already had the money that I thought I needed in my life. That was an incredibly powerful position to be in. It was freeing me of a lot of constraints. For me, as we got approached, it was always about, can this thing further our mission? If I truly believed that there would have been a company that could further our mission and cared about what we cared about as much as we did, I probably would have sold. But I never found that. Because I didn't find that, we just kept going.

It wasn't obvious to me that this would be something I would do for 20 years. I'll tell you that. But what I did know is that I came from doing lots of projects beforehand. The one company I did sell was like my fourth or fifth one. I'd been doing a bunch of other things, and I was doing many things in parallel.

David Senra: Which you still do today.

Daniel Ek: Well, I started doing again, which is a very different thing. I still think the jury's out on whether that's a good idea or a bad idea.

David Senra: Explain.

Daniel Ek: Again, I do believe that focusing all your time and effort on this one thing and obsessing about it, almost to the point where you're not even aware of the rest of the world that goes on, is what creates greatness. I know you can relate to this. That's how Spotify came to be. I literally couldn't care about anything else for at least the first 15 years. Only now am I foolish enough to believe that I might be able to do multiple things at the same time again, which was sort of my spirit in my 20s.

David Senra: Is that connected to what you were saying earlier that you think you might be a better coach than player?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, I certainly think so. My leadership style is so different than many of these entrepreneurs that most of us look up to and hail, whether it's the Steve Jobses or Elon Musks. I just don't feel like there's a vague resemblance with them. It's just not me. I'm a very different archetype of entrepreneur.

David Senra: We were texting back and forth about this, so we should just talk about this now so we don't forget. We were talking about the archetypes, different archetypes of entrepreneurs. There could be a young Daniel Ek out there. We just know that's going to happen. There's this great thing. I'm slightly obsessed with Michael Jordan. He's the lock screen on my phone. He's my contact card. So when people start texting me, it's like Michael Jordan with his eyes like this, I'm kind of setting the tone. He said this great thing. At the end of his career is the rise of Kobe Bryant. Everybody towards the end of his career was obsessed. "Oh, Tracy McGrady is going to be the next Michael Jordan. This guy's going to be the next Michael Jordan." He's like, "First of all, you didn't find me. I just happened to come along. That will happen again. You don't have to find the next person. They will come along." I always say they will reveal themselves.

I do think this is fascinating and no one else talks about this. The weird thing about talking to you, and I don't mean that in a pejorative, is you just say stuff that no one else says. Then I'm like, why don't more people know about Daniel's very unique ideas? No one's concerned about the archetypes. Everybody's like, "Oh, you just have to be like Steve Jobs. You just have to be like Elon." Your point is like, no, there's multiple different archetypes. Obviously, I've studied this maybe more than anybody else in the world. It's very clear that there are. Yet they're all kind of narrowly focused on this is the one path. You and I went over this back and forth before. It's so ridiculous to say this is the way founders should run their company because you said it back in 2021 in that series. At Spotify, we've had conversations like this. This is something I always say. It's tied to the personality of the founder. 100%. The advice is useless unless it's tied to who you are as a person. Spotify is a reflection of you.

Now, I do want to talk also about this other great idea that you gave me. Then I heard Jeff Bezos echo recently about the fact that there's similarities between the way your child develops and the way a company develops. That was very fascinating. But where are you? Explain why you would even want to broach the subject of talking more about the different founder archetypes.

Daniel Ek: Well, as a young entrepreneur myself, I went through the book like so many of us by becoming enamored by an entrepreneur and looking up to them. In many cases, because they had traits that I didn't have. We read all these stories, whether it's biographies or articles about how they manage their company and how they live their lives and the routines that they have. Certainly in my case, I certainly tried to mimic Steve Jobs. I certainly tried to mimic Bezos and Gates and all of the great ones, the very charismatic ones like Howard Schultz of Starbucks. I've learned from all of them. In a way, I've tried to imitate them because I thought that they were so great at what they do. But every single time I've walked away being disillusioned, because I realized that it didn't work for me.

This idea of this archetype is like, I bet you that there's plenty of entrepreneurs out there that read about currently, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg or Jensen or any of these things. They're like, "That's not me. So I guess I'm not as good as them and I can't do what they're doing. So clearly I don't have it in me."

David Senra: I think you were spot on when you said it's the hardest single thing really for a founder and entrepreneur in a much different way, I think, than a normal person. But I think every normal person goes through this: finding yourself.

Daniel Ek: That's literally what I just wrote down.

David Senra: I don't want this to be more of a conversation than an interview because I'm a terrible interviewer and I love to talk.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, sure.

David Senra: I do a monologue show for God's sake. But I had this theory too because it's obvious in the books. There's this myth of the genius young entrepreneur. If you go and read all the biographies, they weren't laying about doing nothing when they were younger. But it's very clear, if you look at all of them, Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Akio Morita, Sam Walton, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, Edwin Land, they do their best work when they're much older. I thought a lot about them. Dang, this is a reoccurring thing over and over again. Some cases are in their 40s, 50 years old, and they're at the top of their game. I was wondering, what is this?

David Senra: Okay. Well, obviously it is some skill sets so you can practice more. You have more experience, so then you can make better decisions. You have a better network, you have resources, you have all that. But one thing that I believe that I cannot prove, but I believe with every bone in my body, is that because you know, they knew themselves much more.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Think about the way you know yourself in your early forties than you did when you were 23.

Daniel Ek: Oh yeah.

David Senra: It's like we thought when we were 23, you don't know anything. Even the most brilliant 23-year-old does not know themselves. That comes through time and experience. This is something I learned from Michael Dell's autobiography, which was excellent. I used to say it's like they build a company that's authentic to them.

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: He also, the way he says it, they build a company that's natural to them.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: And you can't build a company that's natural to you if you don't know who you are.

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: And so I have this belief that, and I think your accomplishments are freaking crazy. And I know you like to downplay them and it's just because you're very polite and everything else. I was watching this funny interview with you and they mentioned something like, you're the most successful person to ever come out of Scandinavia. And your face, your words were very polite, but your face, it's like somebody poked you. You're like, "Oh, I don't want to be described that way." But your response is like, I know that face. I know exactly what you said. But this idea that you are the sum of your accumulated experiences, that is one form of education, but the other form of education is like, I know I went to your house. I rummaged through your library, maybe kind of rudely, but I loved how you're obsessed with history and philosophy too. And I was like, this is a person that's curious about the external world, but he also wants to know who he is, what's important to him, and then building a business and an apparatus around that. So I just wanted to get that out because you mentioned something that I don't think I should probably talk about more frequently, but something I definitely believe is you're going to get better at entrepreneurship when you get better at knowing who you are and what you actually want to do.

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: And as you say, I think the game I'm playing now is just being the best version of myself. And the best version of myself is one that will have even more impact than the one that had before, because it will be even more true to who I am. So what is your archetype? I mean, do you even know?

Daniel Ek: No, I don't know, which is why I was asking you, because I figured who's the person in the world that probably has a better idea of all the different archetypes? Because I can still learn how to do the game better, if that makes sense.

David Senra: I would say there's a very interesting idea that I've noticed. There's this maxim I say over and over again that all of history's greatest entrepreneurs study history's greatest entrepreneurs. And if you make a podcast on that, you get to meet the living versions of that now. And what I'm struck by, and I'm like this myself, I have all kinds of blind spots, which you picked away the first time we had dinner. You were just like, "You're doing this wrong." And you were very polite, but you were just like, "You're lying to yourself. You're obsessed with this and you're fighting with the hand behind the back." But I'm so amazed. It's exactly what you said. It's like they need a mirror. There's another great idea that I've seen a few times, one of the truly novel ideas. It's this idea of hiring a paid critic. So Sony is making audio equipment in the 50s, very primitive devices. And what they realized was they hired a young vocal arts student. I don't know how to pronounce his name, Naria Oga or something like that. And the reason they did that is because he was a fan of early Sony products, but he also had very fine, refined taste. And so he would just light them up. He's like, "I'm a big fan of Sony, but your products aren't good enough. You have all these deficiencies." And Akio, being the genius that he was, he goes, "We hired him as a paid critic. His job was to attack the deficiencies in our product because we don't even see them." And the paid critic, his point was that, "Hey, if you're a ballet dancer, you have a mirror. Your mirror tells you what you're doing right, what you can fix, what you need to do. He's like, 'I'm your oral mirror.'"

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And then fast forward to when the book is published in like 1986, that paid critic is now the president of Sony. And I feel exactly this way. It's like we need a mirror.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And I think what I'm curious about with you is I remember I just had dinner with Mike Ovitz. And I think his autobiography is one of the best entrepreneur autobiographies ever written because he tells you about the bad shit. The fact that he didn't like who he was. He was depressed. He was making bad decisions based on the opinions of other people, which entrepreneurs cannot do. And I was struck by the fact that he didn't know himself at 25, or I think he was 27 when he started CAA. He sure as hell knows himself as an almost 80-year-old man. But I asked him about people I know have been friends with him for 25 years. And I was just like, "What do you think has enabled you to maintain that relationship?" And he said, "He tells me the truth."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And he's like, "You get into my position where he's famous, he's wealthy. Most of the people that he interacts with are on his staff. It's very dangerous." And he said, "There's not many people in my life that tell me the truth."

Daniel Ek: Who tells you the truth? Many people, which is the good news for me. It starts with my family, my mom. My mom is the most normal person you would be. She's proud of my accomplishments, but in a sort of standoffish way. She couldn't care anything about the impact of it. It is more that I've overcome obstacles for myself that she knows matters to me.

David Senra: That's great.

Daniel Ek: And so oftentimes when I may bring an issue home, because she doesn't really know what's going on in the business world and she doesn't really care, she kind of gives me this mirror back where most of life actually doesn't revolve around technology or the business world. It's like this is the life. So that's a great one. I have a very dear friend, Jack, who very similarly plays that part in my life. He's the most realist person there is. My wife is another one. Gustav that you met is another person. He will tell me the truth even when I don't want to hear it. I've been incredibly fortunate that many of the people I just talked about have been around me for 20 years. My mom, obviously, my entire life. But many of these people have been around for a very, very long time. And I think that trust is one of the most under-talked about things, because it's not easy to scale. And it's incredibly hard. It's the number one thing why most organizations break down and why you need processes and all the other bureaucracies, ultimately because there's no trust. If you had 100% trust, you wouldn't need any of this stuff and you would move much faster. It's crazy.

David Senra: Munger, again, I literally get emails every week. They're like, "Why do you mention Charlie Munger on every episode?" I'm like, "He's the wisest person I've ever come across. What do you want me to do?" He has so many good ideas. But he said something again, and he's another person where he points things out that once he says it, it's obvious, but no one else does it. And he goes, "Trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world." And he talked about that. Your job, when I actually got to have dinner with him, he's like, "Your job is to build a seamless web of deserved trust with great people."

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: And he's like, "That's not any..." He was telling stories. He's like, "Everybody knows that I met Buffett when he was 28 and I was 35. They don't understand there were all these other guys around us and we built friendships and did deals forever. Most of them had passed away by the time I met him." But that idea, it's like, trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world. It truly is.

Daniel Ek: And if you think about it, why is that so rare? It's because it doesn't scale. Trust is this notion that you'll keep doing actions that will ladder up over time. It really compounds. But you're going to add maybe 1% of trust for each positive interaction you're going to do. But it takes one interaction that's bad to ruin all of it. The moment where you even start doubting whether you can trust someone or not, you have no trust. So the point being is, it's absolute trust. If you really think about it, there's this sort of final gradient. Most people define it as this binary thing, but it really isn't. It's really kind of like, what most people will say is either I trust someone or don't. But even if you do trust someone, there's degrees of trusting someone. How many people do you trust with your life? How many people do you trust with your bank accounts, just handing it over?

David Senra: Are you a trusting person though, to a certain degree? I think that's one that from what people that know me... I actually had breakfast with a good friend of mine. He's slightly older but he tells me truth and he is very nice, but he'll point out the problems that are going to stop me from going to where I want to go. And one of his points, because I would answer if I asked that question myself, it's like I don't trust anybody. I think I'm getting a little better with that, but I am concerned that I'm going to be one of my own worst enemies because of this, like I can't let go.

Daniel Ek: But look, you talked about yourself, it started in your childhood. In my case, I grew up without a father, for sure, but I have the most loving mother. She gave me everything. And to have that start in my life, I've always felt that whatever I do, whatever the failure is, she will always love me. And to have that in your back pocket, I think it means you automatically come from a different vantage point than what I believe you had in your childhood. And then my approach to life is just like, okay, well, again, I'm not saying I have absolute trust in every person, but I choose to believe that trusting people makes for a much more fun, rich, and rewarding life than one that doesn't.

David Senra: I think you're definitely right about that.

Daniel Ek: And I believe that life is more fun doing the journey with other people around it than doing it in single player mode. And that doesn't mean that I'm not also a person that likes my own spare time, my own comfort, my own solitude. I have that part. And that's the duality in my personality. But I really do believe, and it will go back to philosophy, but the more I give away, the more I get back. And so I just keep focused on doing that. And for me, the ultimate impact at this point, why I said I'd like to be the best coach there ever was. The best entrepreneur coach. Maybe that's my archetype. More than a player, because I've come to see that these people that I've done Spotify with for the past 15 years, seeing their success, seeing their impact, seeing their growth is the thing that gives me the most amount of pride at this point. It really isn't anything else. Financially, I couldn't care. Not that important. It's great to have a lot of money to have as a currency to then have more impact. There's more chips on the table to do new, more cool, interesting stuff. But the real thing for me will be the friendships that I built, the trust that other people placed in me to allow me to help them on this journey, help me on my journey, and us doing it together. And I've just seen it so many times. I've been burned by it for sure, sometimes when people have broken that trust that I put in them. But I will honestly say that's been like 1% or 2% negative experience relative to all the positive things that come out of it.

David Senra: The sad part of this, I can't think of anybody that's betrayed me in like two decades. So it's like I'm just making up this problem, this imaginary problem that maybe used to exist, but certainly doesn't exist now. And this is where I think it's really helpful to, again, I don't need a bunch... There's a great quote from the founder of Red Bull who I became slightly obsessed with. And I'm really proud of the episode I made on it because we had to literally translate. There were no biographies in English. We had translated a biography from German. And his point was just, like, I don't need 50 friends. I believe in much fewer and better and deeper. And as long as you make those choices correctly, again, I can't think of a single person that I feel is in my life that doesn't want the best for me. And yet I still have this like, "Oh, I'll just do it all myself."

Daniel Ek: Very related to this. Another thing that you said that really surprised me is when people ask me, they're like, "Obviously know who Daniel is. I use Spotify. I know everything going on. But why do you talk about him so much?" And I mentioned you on the podcast and I was like, "Oh, because I've learned a lot from you. You're very, very careful what you want in life." And I get to meet pretty crazy people and most of the times, they're great. But then you see there's a lot of negativity to them. One, there's a shocking amount to have very few, if no friends, which is scary to me. And then they kind of interact with you as if you're an asset. And once I suck that asset, get everything out of the asset, then you will be disposed. And I feel the same people that do that have almost no intellectual humility. Where I always say it's like, every single person I read about is smarter and more productive than I am. The way I look at the world in general is very much the same way. Thomas Edison has this great quote. He's like, "We don't know one one-thousandth of a percent of anything." And that's the way I feel. It's because every day I learn something new. I'm like, "I was so stupid back then."

Daniel Ek: You have extreme levels of intellectual humility. I don't even know if many people know this, but you would go in shadow and spend time. I don't know if you have a term for this. You just call up somebody that's running a company and say, "I'm going to come and sit on every single one of your meetings?"

David Senra: Yeah, pretty much. That's how it goes. And look, it comes back to this. I don't believe that I know much. Let me just set the table for this real quick. The way you put it to me, like, I'll go get them their coffee.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: I don't care.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: I'm there to learn from them.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: If I need to go get their coffee, I'll go get their coffee.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: Do you understand? That's insane. I think that's the right mindset.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But I don't think anybody would believe somebody running a hundred billion dollar company and has done the things that you've done. Like, "Yeah, no, I'm fine. I'll shout out this guy and I'll do whatever I need to do."

Daniel Ek: Well, I mean, look, I just realized it sort of started from this thing, right, where you and I have both read all the books. And actually, many of the entrepreneurs have read not as many books as you have around all the greatest entrepreneurs. But they've read the big ones.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Certainly of their time, the Bezos, the Steve Jobs, the Elon Musk biographies and all that kind of stuff. But there's a certain thing around reading it and internalizing it and seeing the culture up front. And what I realized was building Spotify, obviously it's the biggest company I've ever built, so I'm learning on the job and I don't know what I don't know because I've never really worked at a company. And in a way, what I realized as we hired people from these other companies was that there were all these things that they were doing that they kept telling us about and I didn't really understand how it worked. So I'll mention one, for instance, I do really well in these one-on-one situations. I might even do well in three or four person groups and maybe six, but a 10 person group, I don't have the personality where I command the room. It just doesn't work. And then you have someone like a Mark Zuckerberg who literally has this thing called large group where he has 20 to 25 people that he runs every week. And for me, it sounded absolutely awful. Like, how did he get anything done in that meeting? And so lo and behold, I asked him, "Hey, can I come and learn from you?" And he was incredibly gracious. And we've obviously been friends for a long time. And he said, "Sure." And so I spent the better part of what I believe the first time was like a week, literally in pretty much all of his meetings from start to finish. And the big question, obviously, for me is, "Okay, well, what does he get out of it? And can I make myself useful while doing it?" So hence, I took meeting notes. If I could get him coffee, I would. It was literally these types of things. But at the end of it, the most interesting thing was obviously trying to distill down what surprised me about the culture. It wasn't really around like Meta and what was then Facebook is a world-class company. It wasn't like I miraculously thought I could do a lot of things different or better. But there were things that surprised me around how he managed the company. And seeing that and hearing that from another founder, hopefully one that he respects too, may lead to insights and breakthroughs. And during that week, it's not just that I follow people around, I actually meet with their entire executive team and interview them too. So sit down and try to learn from them to really, truly internalize the culture and try to understand it. And so all of a sudden you do realize, for instance, how you can make a large group team meeting work. And there were lots of other things which I shamelessly copied from that experience. And it just turned out for me to be an amazing way to learn by seeing the culture up front that enables the certain practices to work. It almost comes back to these two things we talked about already, which is this mirror of reflecting it back. And then the second notion, I think, which is it's got to be true to you. So there are many things where you can copy a specific way. For instance, Elon does things. But if it's not truly innate to you and your personality, I promise you it will not have the same impact as when Elon does this.

David Senra: I think you're dead right about this. The way I would think about your archetype is I think you nailed it with coach. And then you'll hear people inside Spotify say you have a very collaborative management style. I don't think anybody is going to describe Steve Jobs as collaborative. Now, he was able to collaborate, but at the end, it was kind of like, "I'm making all the decisions." There's actually an interesting story. I'm curious how you think about this. How do you balance the decisions you make, specifically on product, with your own personal taste and intuition versus being metrics-driven? There's this hilarious story. It's in two different books. One's in this book called Creative Selection, which is excellent. I read it three times. It's about this guy named Ken Kocienda, who was a programmer. He demoed to Steve many, many times when they were building their best products. And then there's another story in Jony Ive's biography. And they were comparing and contrasting the way Google would make products versus how Apple did when Steve Jobs was in charge. And the guy's like, "Hey, at Google, we have to decide between blue and light blue. And we run like 200 tests of all the different shades in between that."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And Jony's like, "We would never, ever do that." Do you remember, you were old enough to remember this. They create the iMac, but like the big fat bubble one.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: Probably like late 90s. And it was the first time there was going to be all these crazy colors and everything else. And Jony tells the story. He's like, "You know how we chose the colors? Me and Steve went to the Apple Design Center. And we talked about it. And 30 minutes later, the colors you saw, we shipped."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: That was it. Where are you on that spectrum?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, I think the most important thing that you described is it's a spectrum. It's not 100% one way or the other way. Because, again, I remember early on people talking about that sort of dichotomy of how Google does things and how Apple does things. And many founders then tended to gravitate when Apple was at sort of peak Steve Jobs to, "No, I run the product review. It's only my opinion that matters. And it's my taste and I've got this articulation, all these things." And lo and behold, some terrible decisions ended up coming out of this. And I think where people sort of break down on almost all issues is they take it literally. I don't believe for a second that Apple was 100% in the camp where Steve Jobs just had universally the answer to everything. He didn't listen to anyone else's opinions. He didn't try things out. Sometimes maybe trying it out by testing his ideas on multiple people inside and outside. But of course he did that. And I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant and doesn't get talked about. He actually called up journalists sometimes and tested ideas on them. And like, "We might do this kind of thing." And then the journalists react to it. And it's like, "Okay, that was a bad idea." And then go back.

David Senra: They describe this as like sonar, how dolphins, they like throw things out and it might be a crazy idea and then it reflects back to them and they use it as a form of education. But the hilarious one is they couldn't figure out what they were going to call what turns into the iMac. He was obsessed with the Walkman and Sony. He goes, "I have the name for this computer. It's going to be the MacMan because of the Walkman." And people around him were like, "No, please don't do it. It can't be that." And he was like, "This is terrible." And they kept meeting after meeting. He's like, "Steve, this theme sucks." And they give him a bunch of lists. And then the first time he hears iMac, he's like, "Don't like it at all." And then they're like, "We really like it, so we'll put it in the next group. And then we'll put the third one down." And then he goes, "Now I don't hate it." And then one day he's walking in the hall. He's like, "I came up with the name, but it's iMac."

Daniel Ek: Yeah, of course.

David Senra: That's the way, right?

Daniel Ek: And so I feel like that's truly the case. I think the realization is you tend to over-gravitate to one or the other. And certainly in Spotify's case, we did the same. We were early on, very much so. I mean, the first user interface was pretty much designed by myself and this guy called Rasmus. So much of that you could describe was my taste. But sooner or later, what ends up happening is you get into a space where you don't even know anymore. Because your current feedback loop of where the world is and the customer you're designing for starts becoming a little bit different. And then you need to get to a point where you start incorporating some feedback mechanism. So for me, taste is sort of judgment plus curiosity. And the more you can extend the curiosity branch, that improves your judgment, which then builds your taste. And so it's really a question for me about just allowing for as much feedback as humanly possible so that you can get yourself or a small team to some level of taste.

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David Senra: Are there any product updates that get pushed live that you didn't like?

Daniel Ek: Oh, plenty. Plenty. And this may be a little bit unique, but coming back to it, so I ended up having... The typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person, right?

David Senra: By the way, it's 100% true. I totally believe that.

Daniel Ek: I think it's the most important thing in the zero to one stage. But what a lot of people don't talk about is the fact that there isn't one stage of this journey. It's like you're oscillating between zero to one, one to a hundred, and then the last stage was more like optimization stage. And you have to constantly do that. And you're going to need different skills at different places. And this is why, by the way, I believe it's so important for entrepreneurs to realize when to apply what tools in this journey. So what happened with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom and wealth, which is I don't really run product anymore. Because what happened was I got this guy called Gustav that you now met, and he runs product. And he's actually way better than me at doing it. And so speaking about being truthful, what ended up happening many years ago was I was running these product meetings. He was sort of running it, but I wanted to run it. So I kind of interjected myself over him, but I didn't have the time to really spend all this time. So he was sort of running it for me, but I still insisted on having product reviews. And talking again about the importance of having people who give you candid feedback, he took me aside after one of these product sessions and he's like, "You know, you're not really that good at doing these things and you're not really that helpful. So most of the time, me and the team, we're kind of looking and we're trying to basically appease you in the meeting, but you're not really adding as much value as you think." And not surprisingly, my first instinct was to be really pissed off. I sort of went home. I was like, "Man, I'm going to have to fire this guy. It's horrible. How could he say this?" But I also realized that that was an emotional response. So again, I wasn't fully convinced that this was true, but I sort of went back and said, "Okay, well, you know what? I'm going to give you three months where I don't do the product reviews. And then we evaluated how this worked." And lo and behold, he actually did a great job. And so the team was much happier. He was making more of the decisions without me. I wasn't meddling. There weren't two different people deciding what worked, but it was really him. And ever since that moment, I don't really run product anymore in the traditional sense. I'm involved in the product and he solicits feedback from me all the time, but I don't run the product meetings. And I say that because what happened for me was a real setback, not just in that moment, but it also sort of made me think, "Oh, wait a minute. So what am I really? What's my value add then in this company?"

Daniel Ek: And it took me a while and I realized that all of a sudden, hmm, actually, you know what, that won't be it, but maybe I can add value in this place. And I sort of oscillated to this different place in the company, which was much closer to understanding the creator and spending more time with the content people, et cetera. And so my product feedback ended up being, and this is the dynamic that's quite unique to Spotify in that we have these two stakeholders. We have consumers on the one end and we have creators. And so I just made it my effort to understand and know the creator way better than anyone else in the company. And so my product feedback to them comes from that lens. And that became value add because, again, that's a very different thing. That's an outward facing thing. You actually have to sit down and meet with creators. It is so much more about innately understanding their needs and talking to them and understanding not just how they use the product, but their business. What problems are they facing that's not just sort of how they leverage the product, but actually holistically around them. And so that was just one of those things. And then subsequently what ended up happening is I got this guy called Alex, and he's now doing that part better than me too. And so I was like, okay, well, now I need to find a different way to add value. And now it turns out that my value add is the sort of in-between between the two, where business or creators meets consumers and where there's maybe a third stakeholder we have to consider in all of this. And so my whole sort of experience in all of this has really been around kind of figuring out who I am and what I'm innately good at. And this has been a learning journey for 20 years.

David Senra: What you're just describing right now, this unfolded over how many years?

Daniel Ek: I would say the first 10 years was the zero to one journey. And the last 10 has been that journey where we're not zero to one anymore as a company holistically. But there are elements of the company where we're zero to one where I'm absolutely 100% involved.

David Senra: I think this is a good opportunity to talk about another one of your very unique ideas. There was this excellent – I just did this episode on Jeff Bezos because he doesn't give that many interviews. And so I would take a transcript of his interviews and treat it like a book and just go through it. And he said something like from day one, he knew like he wanted to build a company that could outlast him.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Right. He still loves it. He'll love it forever. And it was very reminiscent of like what we're trying to do as parents where it's like you're shaping your kid, but you're only successful if they can survive without you.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And when I heard him say that, it was a few months after you had beautifully articulated this idea. It's just like, well, I think there's a lot of, you're going to say it better than I did, but essentially like there is a very rather clear analogy between the way your child, when they're first born, is essentially like a product of you. They're going to mimic their parents, their environment that they're in. But as they grow older and older, I just went through this and I have a 13-year-old, you know, when she was much smaller, she's much like me and her mom, right? And then now she's like, she's got traits that I don't even have.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, 100%.

David Senra: And her own decisions and like doing things maybe I would do or I would not do. And you're like, it's kind of the same for the company. And you had this idea where like, I think at the time Spotify was 19 years old or it's 19 or 20 years old. And it's just like, well, you know, you're one or two. It is me. It's like the same way you have a two-year-old. Anybody knows this. But now there's characteristics that emerge from within the company that are separate from the founder. That's like a fascinating insight.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, I mean, look, there's clearly kind of like three distinct stages of parenthood, right? And the first one is you're literally the person that keeps them alive, right? And you're 100% there. And you pretty much make every decision for them, because they can't make it themselves. And then gradually the next stage is you're there. You're quite involved. You probably step in when they're doing something which would be terrible and would create bad long-term consequences. And then like the last stage, you're not even – you can't even do that. So the job is much more subtly to just be there when they need you. And I'm somewhat simplifying it but I think that with everything don't take it literally but sort of the core of the gist of the idea is certainly a larger company becomes more and more and an older company becomes more and more of that and so much of what I do today is literally that I try to be there for people when they need me in various fields, which happens, but it's not as often as every day all the time. And what I deeply care about today, and I do spend a lot of my time on, is this notion around this first seed of a new idea and protecting that idea. And I think it's probably the most underreported, talked about way is how do you do that? Like, how do you consistently find lighting in a bottle? Like, you know, and it's also theoretical at the point of any strategy book talking about how you do it or even when you go behind.

David Senra: And the other day I was with the guy Hamilton Hamler who wrote Seven Powers book, which is an amazing book on strategy, by the way. But one of the most interesting ideas that I learned after sort of, again, overfitting the concepts in the book and sort of teaching people about it is you can only tell that you have power when it's there. It doesn't tell you how to get there. This is the criticism of like founders and the podcast and the books. Like, but he's not telling me what to do. It was like, this is not a podcast for people that want to be told what to do. It's here's how this guy or this woman thought about their company. This is what they experienced. You pull out these ideas. I love how you say don't, you kept saying don't take it literally. I've told you this before. Like I drive people crazy because I tend to turn everything into an abstraction. So like when I hear you, I've sent this message to you where you're like, You kind of remind me of James J. Hill, which just might be the only person that's ever texted you this. And James J. Hill was the most successful railroad baron of all time. And I just thought the way you just said the way he built, he essentially was laying railroad tracks, right? And the goal of the company was obviously we're going to have goods and people on the tracks. Right. But this alone is how do I make what I'm doing more valuable? And he's the only railroad founder ever in American history to not go bankrupt. They all went bankrupt. It's crazy. What he realizes is like he has to spend just as much, if not more time, developing and nurturing the communities that are springing up around it. And if he builds these communities around it, that makes his railroad more valuable. But I love this criticism because it's like, oh, you got to find a different show or you got to find a different thing because like entrepreneurs don't want to be told what to do. I've never met an entrepreneur. It's like, give me a list. It's a profession for people that don't take direction very well.

Daniel Ek: Exactly. It's hilarious about this. I think this is tied to something also that is very fascinating with you. You have a high – and most people, again, I think the more control you have over your life, the more success you have, people make the mistake of eliminating any people telling the truth, any inconvenience. They become really brittle. You have an insane high tolerance for crazy people.

David Senra: Okay.

Daniel Ek: Um, somebody told me, somebody works closely with you that you judge people on their best idea, not their worst.

David Senra: And I just finished rereading Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, uh, really creator of a magic money machine is really, really, thank you about the guy. Um, and they said something very similar. They like it doesn matter He like if there a single good idea in your pile of horse manure like he find it Like he will go through All he cares about is the very best ideas He will willing to go through 99 shitty ideas to get the very best because he understands how powerful those are Can you explain, like, how you develop this tolerance? Because most people, like, especially this company's age, too.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You know, you're built. Usually you have a lot of variance in the beginning.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then they get more successful. when they kind of, they make them, corporations make the mistake of like, no, we need like, we need all the edges. We need the high and the low out of there. You embrace that. The way you put it to me when we were talking about this is like high temperature people.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And for like, in like training AI.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I actually think LLMs and the latest advancement in AI kind of have created an excellent framing on this and to talk about this sort of high temperature notion. So in LLMs, you can basically tune up the temperature. And if you tune up the temperature, you know, it basically starts hallucinating. So, you know, the bad thing with the hallucination, of course, is you have no idea what's true or not. But there is spurs of vocational brilliance that comes out of there. And the truly new ideas that come out of there. So the criticism of the current generation LLMs is they're not very creative. and that's ultimately because we've kind of turned down the temperature on them and we safety train them to the point where we keep them within the guardrails so there is a way when you train these things to be highly creative but batch it crazy and that's just turning up the temperature yeah and i believe that um you know one of the the and and this is by the way something that um i intend to focus a lot more on in the next decade um you know i'm very reflective at the moment because i I'm in my 19th year. And I think it's interesting you sort of talked about big companies because I used to think – before I sort of ran a big company myself, I just used to think they're bad, period. And I've sort of revised my view, and now I think they're really good at doing what they're already doing and doing it better. So back to that point, like a large-scale corporation, what they do is they just get better and better and better at doing what they already do. And the way to do that is obviously minimize mistakes. So, you know, that also means minimize billions, minimize waste, minimize all these other things. So naturally, what you end up having is more and more capitalism, public markets, all these things drives you towards one thing. Optimize what you're doing to the point where it's the most efficient thing that it can possibly be. but that is not how conducive to how you get the best ideas and what i'm greatly um you know satisfied and happy with and i've been fortunate enough as i don't anymore run spotify as much day-to-day as i used to i'm still very involved but i'm not involved in all the team meetings and doing all the things that I used to do, so I was like 90% internally focused on just getting the machine to run, is that I've been more and more able to not just have the free time to think, but I've been more able to meet more people. And part of the beauty of that is that it brought me back to music again. And it brought me back to the creative process of music again. And it is something remarkable in a studio where you have um a bunch of people um just throwing ideas at each other and musicians actually in many ways uh know more about the entrepreneurial process than most people give them credit i think it's the same thing filmmakers like athletes

David Senra: Yeah, 100.

Daniel Ek: And so this point then is that what I truly believe the very best musicians do and the most creative people do is they are not afraid of throwing out ideas, even terrible ones. And it's in even the most terrible one, there may be a nugget. You and I, we talked about this over breakfast where, you know, there was a person who sort of gave some bad advice to you. But sometimes even, you know, the insight behind the advice, sort of the question behind the question can lead to some really interesting things. And so what I've come to do, realize, is most people want conformity and they value sort of a reliable consistency of giving X amount of impact per seconds or minute or truthfulness over X percent. they have some sort of heuristics for what is valuable person from a business context or whatever sort of context you're judging it on, but certainly in a business concept, this conformity. So you want to sort of put people in about this person is good and they're always good. But, you know, what I'm more interested in these days is I'm interested in this idea I'd never heard about before. And I find it with, you know, some people, you know, that even in an hours-long conversation with the best people in the world where I've learned the most, it may be 55 minutes of that conversation that honestly was, you know, completely worthless, not that interesting for me. But then there's a spur of the moment, two, three minutes of brilliance, which I never heard before, which will deeply and profoundly impact my life. Those are my people. That's what I'm interested in. And I've come to learn that most people don't like to be around those people. But I love it. And I think it's, you know, such a rewarding and interesting thing. And I'm looking forward to spending more time with those people in the coming decade. And it's sort of one of those things that I've sort of want to do more of and learn more from.

David Senra: I think this is related. One of your oldest friends texted me the other day. And it was a screenshot of this episode I did with Chung Ju Young, who's the founder of Hyundai. And it's probably the most – I think it is the most inspiring autobiography I've read. because the guy writes the book when he's like 90 and he grows up the son of a poor farmer. You know, they had to eat tree bark to survive. He dies the richest person in South Korea, builds this huge conglomerate. I thought I was going to read a book about a guy making cars. I didn't realize that was like nothing. He was building, did all the construction, built some of the biggest ships in the world. Like he was just, his nickname was the bulldozer. And the reason he sent me the screenshot in this specific part of the podcast, he's like, this is just like Daniel. And one thing that Chung would talk about is as the more you progress in your career, the bigger the company gets, the more like rigid it gets. They go from like default optimistic, default risk taking to any new idea. No, no, no, no, no. Like, no, we're not doing that. That's too risky. Like I can't build a car like we're a tiny little island. And he goes, Daniel, that gives me the same exact advice where he will say something. I will say no. And he goes, but did you even try?

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then he goes, it's related to his ability, if you actually analyze, his willingness to go into all these different industries where he doesn't know anything about the industry.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, yeah. And I think that sort of comes back to the George Bernard Shaw quote, right? The unreasonable man. Let me read the full quote because it's an excellent quote too. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. I have it painted on my wall at home.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: And I'm just reminded of that. Because I think the reality is it is really, really tough to not conform, to not be part of a group. And it's so easy. And there's so many temptations in life that draws us back to that conformity, right? money is another one when you make a lot of money you tend to make life more comfortable so you tend to spend more time golfing you spend some time doing all these other things but the reality is you become distracted and you're not going to be on your eight game anymore and so the hard thing then is to keep going and keep improving and keep doing these things but But you're going to have to sacrifice a lot in doing so. You're going to sacrifice people's birthdays, social commitments. You're not going to show up for a lot of things.

David Senra: You told me a funny story one time about how committed you are to your work and your friends know this about you, that sometimes you'll be in the middle of a dinner and then an idea comes to mind or something you need to pursue. And they just know, oh, he's gone and he's not coming back tonight.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, yeah. That is an unreasonable – people are like, oh, I can't do that. It's social etiquette.

David Senra: I even – sometimes I find myself to do this because we're both introverts. We've talked about this before. But like I kept getting invited to group dinners. And I just felt like, oh, this is like a prestigious group dinner. This person is really successful. People would love this opportunity. And so at the beginning when I first started doing this, I started going. I'm like, this sucks. I don't – I remember one time it was in a private room and they shut the doors. And within like five minutes, I knew I was like, I got to get out of here.

Daniel Ek: Oh, wow.

David Senra: I was like, don't worry. I'm going to pretend to go to the bathroom and just never go back. So I stand up and go, oh, where's the restroom? It's right in the room. I'm like, oh, no. And what I did, which I wouldn't do today, is I sat down and I wasted an hour and a half of my time. Instead of just being the unreasonable man. I'm not going to say, what would Daniel act do? He would get our avoid the dinner in the first place.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. I would say I'm not proud of sneaking out sometimes on that. But look, I mean, at the end of the day, I think that that's less about sort of being protecting my time and more sort of about protecting unique and novel ideas and how rare they are. And by the way, we'll hopefully get into that. But I think less about sort of a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be obsessed about time. I'm really not. I'm more obsessed about energy management.

David Senra: Wait, wait. Yeah, let's get to it now. What do you mean?

Daniel Ek: Well, I mean, you know, you constantly hear this thing about all these, you know, you're supposed to wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning and you're supposed to do all these things, et cetera. It's like, first and foremost, there's no rule. Like, I know a lot of successful people, as I'm sure you do too. It's like some of them wake up at noon. Some of them wake up at 4 a.m. You can do a lot of different things. The obsession with morning rituals is stupid.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: But the other thing is about sort of you're supposed to pack every like you're supposed to have meetings every 15 minutes. And like a 15 minute increments is better than a 30 minute increments. So on and so forth. Look, it might work for you. And for some people, it might be like the absolute best thing. I've become more obsessed about sort of managing my energy, because like if you have time but you have no energy, you're not going to accomplish anything anyway.

David Senra: So how do you manage your energy then?

Daniel Ek: Well, it's about finding out what gives you energy, right, to begin with, and what drains energy. And it's about finding out which time during the day you're most productive. And it's, again, innately about understanding yourself. And what the whole world tries to do is get you to conform to their schedule. Oh, we have an 8 a.m. morning meeting because that's when you get into the office, or you're supposed to do this and that and all these other things, again, in a big corporation. And it's about conformity to like the average or to an okay standard instead of going for excellence. And what truly, truly is unique. And I think the truly, truly unique thing is you've got to just figure out what works for you and you've got to do more of that. And that's more about energy management, I believe. And it's so much more about like even before this thing, I think both you and I, we went and worked out.

David Senra: Right.

Daniel Ek: You know, that gives me energy. It's what's going to sustain the rest of my day. I used to not do workouts at all because I thought I don't have time. There's no productivity. I used to go for the worst productivity thing I did was I was at one point doing these 15-minute naps. I don't know if you've heard about this exercise.

David Senra: No.

Daniel Ek: It's a really bad idea, by the way. So don't try this. But I sort of learned that you can like daisy-shame sleep together by doing like these 50-minute...

David Senra: Oh, it's like polyphasic.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the basic gist is you're supposed to be able to last like on four hours of sleep. And I was like, oh, this is great. So I did that. And actually, the interesting side part is it worked for about three weeks. And then I missed one of these 15-minute increments. And holy shit, I was like completely suicidal for like weeks afterwards. It was like not a great thing at all. But the point being is, you know, it's about sort of finding that energy management for yourself. I think certainly there's common wisdom around sort of what an average good sleep should look like, et cetera. But the reality is there are some people that will work on six hours of sleep and they'll do just fine and may even be more productive that way. I wish I was like that. Like if I can have a superpower, I always say like I like to fly – the first thing, I just want to fly like Superman. If I can't do that, I just want sustained high energy levels 24-7 because I need a ton of sleep.

David Senra: And I felt bad about this because the same exact reason you're describing. It's like people are like, no, you got to get up at 4.30 or you got to sleep less or sleep faster. Arnold Schwarzenegger would say you got to sleep faster. And then I'm reading James Dyson's first autobiography. And, you know, a guy who made one of the most successful companies of all time. He's still doing it at 76 years old. And he goes, I need a hell of a lot of sleep, 10 hours a night, or my entire next day is ruined. I'm like, wait a minute. This guy built – he's a single shareholder of a multi, multi, multi-billion dollar company. You build some of the best products in the world, and you're sleeping 10 hours a day. There are no – you just said there are no rules.

Daniel Ek: No, it really isn't. And so, I mean, look, you just got to find that thing, right? But when you realize that – so if you start with that as the basic thing, like all the things you and I have been talking about for this time now, the reality is it's about knowing yourself, which is really hard, and you get to know more. And it's about building a system that works for you. What's giving – I know hanging out with crazy people gives you energy.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Right?

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: You know, there's actually something. So I text a mutual friend of ours, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. And I was like, I'm talking to Daniel. And Patrick, I think, asks the best questions in the world. And so obviously I need to like use like phone a friend. That one lifeline.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, exactly.

David Senra: And he's a good mirror too. Because like it's almost like a therapy session. Like he'll be very quiet, doesn't like attention to himself. And yet he'll like hit you with a question. Like I didn't even think about that.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And he has this great way to describe you. Because my guess is that, like, not even guess. I'm pretty, I think you're obsessed of, like, learning and understanding the world around you. And, like, that drives, like, a huge part of what you're doing in this exploration. And you can build companies around the stuff you're interested in. That's kind of like this compounding learning machine. But he goes, out of everyone I know, Daniel has the ability to apply what he learns the fastest at the highest level. and this was actually related to a conversation that we had at your house which is fascinating um because again you're i know you don't like public adulation i'm still going to do it because i think it's fascinating where it's like everybody focuses on spotify which is a marvelous achievement that very few people on the planet are capable have been able to experience and yet they like also because it's not really talked about it's like all this other success that you're having outside of this too because you have this like you're very curious about things and now you have a network and knowledge and resources that you can actually impact and try to make the world a better place and you're not going after easy shit by any means which i also admire about you it goes back to the impact over happiness thing yeah and so we're talking about this and i'm like were you because usually true interest is revealed early so if we go and look at your life story just like people like oh what hobbies do you have like i like to read yeah and like what else i'm like yeah i like to read that's it it's like i was like that when i was five i didn't i wasn't like at five years old, what's a good hobby for my future self-development? It's like, no, I just like reading. I like books better than people in general. And so you see that in your early life, like you're starting companies and you didn't even know it was a company. It's just like trying to do something. So I was like, oh, you must have been interested in investing forever. And you're like, no, I never even thought about it until 2018. And you said the funniest thing, you know, how did you learn about it? He goes, I started listening to Patrick's podcast. And then I'd hear an idea of like, that's a good idea. I would try that. Oh, I don't like that idea. and then you start reading books and then you're just literally taught yourself. You weren't interested at all. And now you're essentially world-class at it in a very short amount of time. And this is just the face again. You just did the same face. But like explain how like you think about this where it's like, I always say, learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior. And I think if I thought of anybody else I know that personifies that, it's like you. It's like, I'm not just like listening to this podcast for shits and giggles.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I'm not reading this book.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Even if you find it enjoyable.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like I'm looking to like apply this.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Well, I think it's back to that, like sort of these two concepts we talked about. My whole journey is one of self-mastery and finding out how I can become the best version of myself. And meanwhile, what gives me energy is solving problems. you know and and as you say I think this is revealed early like I loved I didn't know it was companies but I loved like sorting out problems for other people I've been doing my entire life whether it's a relationship advice whether it's all these other things and this is why I think these conversations are important to have because like you are the personality type that I've read about it's just like now instead of reading about you when you're 80 you're dead you're like in the middle of it so it's very fascinating to me because I'm like trying to balance like my understanding of this through reading with like an actual person where it's like most of the people they're not like i'm starting a company for company's sake right just say what you said i like solving problems yeah that that's it that's that's all like so if you look at like the video games i actually think what kind of video games you like is a pretty good revealer of your things too like i wasn't um playing any kind of first person shooter games or anything of that some of it but not much most of what i was playing was uh strategy games um you know civilization business strategy game i played every tycoon game of how to run businesses uh better and of course you did you know so those were sort of my favorite games um you know growing up and i love sim city sim city was amazing

David Senra: Uh that's what I would say about entrepreneurs is like it's the best job in the world I don't understand the people that give it up like uh I hate even saying this because I like rule number two in the center family right is what I teach my kids is mind your own business so it's like I don't I think you're very similar it's like I don't have any suggestions on how you should live your life like if we're friends we can talk and go back and forth it was like I just mind my own business yeah but sometimes like I just i i don't have any other way like I meet so many entrepreneurs and um they're like I sold my company I'm like sorry to hear that they're like what yeah I'm like why would you get out of the game and then they sell their company then you go be a vc I'm like oh my god yeah this is the best game in the world

Daniel Ek: Yeah it's never ending

David Senra: Yeah it's not like sports where like no you you can get better with time you can solve problems you can build your own world if you think about what we were doing in the computer with sim city it's like oh like I'll put a highway there that's like I'm there we're world builders

Daniel Ek: Yeah you get to control like who's around you what you're what like what are the rules in the world that happens? What's the outcome of the people in the world?

Daniel Ek: And you get to make, and hopefully you're doing it for benevolent and good reasons. I do think one of my favorite quotes from the history of entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford: "Money comes naturally as a result of service." The crazy thing about Henry Ford is by 1919, he owned a hundred percent of one of the most valuable companies in the world because he bought out his investors. And he didn't do it to start a company. He had one idea. I've read 10 books on this guy. People knew him forever. He had one idea. It's kind of weird that we're putting together cars. They're really expensive. He was obsessed with machinery and essentially outsourcing human labor to machines. Started on the farm. He just wanted to build a car for the everyman.

David Senra: You said something similar in the early days of Spotify. You had this goal of the celestial jukebox. You said, "I don't know how I'm going to do it." He said the same thing. "I learned how to do it." He's like, "How can I make a car cheaper? Sure as hell can't put it by hand. So we've got to learn how to mass produce something we don't know how to do yet." That took him a decade and a half of failure. He didn't start the company to make money, but he made millions of people's lives better. He changed the geography of the world. As a result, money came naturally as a result of service.

Daniel Ek: That is 100% how I think about it. I think this is the beauty of capitalism. Ultimately, there has to be someone willing to pay for what you're doing. The reason for them to pay is solving a problem for them. The better you solve that problem, or the bigger the problem is that you're solving, the more valuable it becomes.

David Senra: What did you say earlier? In my mind, when I interpreted what you said, it's this idea of not being a go-getter but being a go-giver. The more problems you solve, the more it comes back to you.

Daniel Ek: Those are two different ideas but closely related. My co-founder said the value of a company is the sum of all problems solved. If you really think about it, that is exactly what it is. I tell this to the team because when we face very difficult problems, it is great. If we solve these problems, we will create a lot of value.

David Senra: I keep saying you think like Bezos. There's a great line in his shareholder letters. I'm reading them for the fourth time. They are so good and so clear and concise. I should read them every year. I looked it up and I haven't read them since the end of 2022. There are stories in Bezos' early career where people on Amazon would come to him with a huge problem. They thought they might get fired. And he got excited. He's like, "Great. We had a problem we didn't even know. If we solve this, our company gets even more valuable."

Daniel Ek: Exactly.

David Senra: There's a guy named Henry Kaiser who was as famous in his day as Elon is today. He built 100 companies. One of them still exists: Kaiser Permanente. He built the Hoover Dam. He built the Liberty ships in World War II. He had this great maxim. People would come to him depressed and he'd be excited. They'd ask, "What the hell is going on here, Henry?" He goes, "Problems are just opportunities in work clothes." That's a great way to think about it. If I can solve this problem for other people, I make other people's lives better. I make the company more valuable. And you also have to feel good about what you're creating in the world.

Daniel Ek: 100%. It comes from solving problems. You asked about the other stuff I get focused on. I don't focus so much on the solution. I focus on the problem. I try to find really interesting problems. Even if there's a 5% or 10% chance of solving that problem, and I know it would be huge for humanity or society if we figure it out, then it's amazing. That gets me fired up. The intricacies of solving that problem are often very complex because other people know this problem exists. There are probably a lot of people that would agree that if we could figure it out, it would be really valuable. I find this all the time. Sometimes they're really small, these problems. Sometimes they're gigantic and earth-shatteringly different. It's everything from life extension to just walking into a store and seeing things you don't like. Those are problems. If you could do those things better, you could probably build a business.

David Senra: The biggest thing is that people have this misconception about what innovation is. They think they have to figure out something entirely new. But the history of the world is we build on other people's ideas. An innovation is actually taking two or more things that were already well-known and putting them together in a new way. That's really what it is.

Daniel Ek: For me, the most interesting thing is like laying a puzzle. I get to sit around and because I meet so many billion people, I get to listen to problems all around me all the time. I try to distill and figure out, "This person said this thing, but what if you actually articulate the problem like this instead? What does that mean? What does that unlock?" For me, that is so much fun. I couldn't imagine not spending every single day doing this. We started this journey with my story that I didn't have to work. That's why I started Spotify, because I love music and I wanted to figure out a way where consumers got what they wanted and creators were able to get paid by doing what they love to do. That is the genesis of the story. Even today, even if you remove all the money, even from the beginning, even in the middle, and even now, there's no way I wouldn't do this. I spend much of my waking time thinking about this stuff. For me, this is impact. This is what leads to happiness in my life story.

[Ad break for 8sleep]

David Senra: You said something in the early days of Spotify that was very fascinating. You wanted to build an enduring and impactful company that did something that no one else did. It's remarkable listening to this series created in 2021, how much you guys were talking about AI and how early you understood the impact. You saw clearly where we were going. But you said something that I didn't actually understand because the way I think about technology is that technology is just a better way to do something. At Spotify, at the very beginning, you said the decisions that were made have to do with the DNA of the founder because we're the only ones there. But you said, "I like technology for technology's sake." What does that mean?

Daniel Ek: I like the process of science. I like the process of discovery. I like the process of understanding how things work. I've been wired this way all my life. I've been pulling apart computers. I've been trying to understand why a semiconductor works the way it works. I'm intrigued about that. This thing about understanding everything, understanding life, understanding where we come from. But I'm equally interested in solving problems. When you're curious about both of those angles, you can end up finding connection points where those two things meet. It's obvious that there is something over there that no one has really applied in this way before. Maybe there's not one idea, but two ideas over there. You have to love technology in order to go to the depth of understanding what's possible. The greatest ideas come from truly innately understanding something and truly innately breaking constraints around that something by understanding the rules and knowing when you can break them.

David Senra: The greatest entrepreneurs, the greatest founders, are the people that have this one idea. They can almost internalize the consumer. What do they need, even if they can't articulate it themselves? Then they have this entire field of amazing brilliant engineers and scientists and mathematicians doing various things. They figure out the intersection. Then you actually have to make it viable too. You have to have some sort of business model. If you don't have that, eventually this thing won't be sustainable. It's the trifecta of those three things.

Daniel Ek: That makes it even more interesting. Now we're talking about a really complex equation, trying to get these things together with multiple unknowns. You're trying to configure these things by locking down constraints on one side and then trying another side. The amazing thing about early stage entrepreneurship is that every decision you make is life or death. That makes the stakes even higher because you may try one thing and then you run out of money. You have to make sure that is the right thing. It's such a fascinating process. It comes back to a process of creativity, a process of trying things out. I am more and more enamored and in love with this idea that creativity itself is this really powerful thing. Maybe it's the thing that makes us unique as humans relative to everything else that exists in this world. Going deeper and deeper into creativity itself. It doesn't conform. It doesn't scale. It doesn't behave in any of these other things. Then you have this other side, which is all about scale, which is all about conforming. Navigating that dynamism between these two things, very few people can do it really well.

David Senra: I think most of us can't even describe why you're doing what you're doing at the time. You hinted on this earlier. It's so easy to kill new ideas. The arrow on the side of "no, we can't do this." It's amazing to me how many times this comes up in all these biographies. This is a skill you have to learn. A lot of it is being comfortable with the messiness of the creative process. Entrepreneurs by definition are impatient and patient. It looks like a paradox. They want shit done now. Jeff Bezos says "step-by-step ferociously." I'm willing to plan if it takes two decades or three decades to solve the problem. In some cases, stuff he's working on might outlive his lifetime. But that doesn't mean I'm dilly-dallying on a day-to-day basis. I heard you say something one time. You said, "I promise you, I don't think I'm the smartest. I don't think I'm the most talented. If I have one superpower, it's that I have super patience." I think Neko is an example of this. I met your co-founder on it. I got to see this too. I was like, "This is cool. Who made the machines?" You said, "We did." I didn't know it was stealth. From the idea to the first time the customer happened, it was like six years or something.

Daniel Ek: No, the company's eight years old and we barely began.

David Senra: That's an insane love. That's an understanding that we're tackling something. I like what you just said. Innovation and creativity is actually a combination of things that occurred before that we're combining. When you mentioned that, I thought of James Dyson. He's one of my entrepreneur heroes. One of the hidden things people don't know is he wrote a book called *The History of Great Inventions*. It's kind of a bland read, God bless his heart. It's just him going through little Wikipedia pages about what this inventor did, how he did it, and what the result was. Then you see him take these ideas from 1700 or whatever. He says, "I'll just take that little piece out here and I'll combine it with this piece. What's the new technology today that enables me to solve this problem that didn't exist a few years ago?" You have this patience. You have this desire to solve problems. It sounds like you see a giant puzzle that you're trying to figure out. Now you have more resources. You can be patient. You couldn't have done Necco when you were 23. You have this great quote that I know is important to you: "Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort." We haven't talked about quality at all, even though Spotify is the highest. Compared to your competitors, it's in a class by itself. It's obviously very important to you. We have to talk about quality.

Daniel Ek: There are so many strands of quality. It is both the distinction of taste, whether taste is subjective or objective. You can go so many ways with this question. The way I think about quality is that so much of your early life, certainly in my case, was the formulation of just trying to go for more. The further I've gotten, I've realized it's about everything. You mass more stuff. You try to do more things at the same time. The further you go, you realize that it really is about this very simplistic thing: less is more. The older I feel, more and more, I think most people start out thinking having more friends is better. But I think more people are happier with fewer but better friends than many friends. Quality is ultimately this notion around focusing, distilling, getting to the essence. We can even talk about quality in communication. It's often trimming things down and saying less things. Why is it that when we're talking about very hard things, most people's instant reaction is to try to add more complexity to the issue instead of just simplifying it? They just need to be courageous and say the thing right out loud. The older I get, the more my instinct is towards turning towards that.

David Senra: I'm reminded of investing. Part of why I liked investing has nothing to do with money.

Daniel Ek: It started with the fact that all of a sudden I had more money than I knew what to do with. I didn't want to just hand it off to a bank without understanding anything about it. What got me deeper curious about it is I realized that investing is actually more about learning about your temperament than it is about the specific action you're doing. It's more about being in line with your temperaments than which game you're picking. The game needs to be suited to you and your circumstances and how you want to play it. We come back to philosophy. One of the concepts that Munger talks about is diversification. He calls it somewhat simplified diversification. The common wisdom is that diversification is the best thing you can do. But the truly greatest people financially, if that's the only yardstick you use, typically do completely the opposite. They have oftentimes only one asset. Maybe they'll have two or three, but they certainly don't have more than that. They just go for that.

David Senra: There's a realization you have. I read something, you read a line, and you filter it through how you would say it. I do this all the time. I take notes on all the books I read and then I reread them. I jot down, "What's occurring there? Can I put it into one sentence?" One thing I stumbled upon was that Nick Sleep has this great quote: "The best investors are not investors at all. They're entrepreneurs that never sold." You and I have talked about this. There are a lot of people that sold way too early and they're lauded. If you just didn't do that, everything else you did, if you just didn't sell. Nick Sleep talks about this. In other books, it was like if Sam Walton didn't give away the stock in Walmart to his kids before it appreciated, you would have one of the largest fortunes by a single person ever for their ownership. The concentration of ownership in Walmart. Sam talks about this. He didn't really do investing in anything but Walmart. He wasn't waking up saying, "I need to diversify my portfolio. I need to worry about capital allocation." He just believed in what he was doing. He kept doing it. He threw all his money in there. He did it because he loved to do it. Spending time doing anything else would be an absolute distraction. Nick Sleep talks about this because he's a capital allocator. He's not building a product, but he's making capital allocation decisions. "Do I need to sell this stock, put it into another one? I'm weighing my opportunity costs." He was haunted by this idea. If you look at financial history, he talked about a financial firm one day. They said, "We owned IBM in the 1950s and we sold." I read Michael Dell's autobiography. IBM was the most powerful and wealthiest company in the world when you and I were born. Michael Dell says, "In 1987, I yelled out to my dad. He asked, 'What do you want to do for a living?' I said, 'I want to compete with IBM.' I'm a 19-year-old in my dorm room with a thousand dollars. What kind of grandiose ambition do you have?" IBM was the most valuable company in the world by market cap at the time. It was the first company to go over $100 billion in market cap. This little 19-year-old kid says, "No, I think I can have a go at them." Nick Sleep talks about coming into this firm and reading how they talk about their investments. They said, "We made a massive mistake. We owned IBM in the 1950s and we sold." They were having this conversation in the 1970s. The leadership of the financial firm asked, "How do we avoid not doing this?" They said, "If we just held that, the gain would have been more than all the assets we have in our management. We can't do this." That same year, they sold Walmart. They had Walmart in the 1970s.

Daniel Ek: Wow.

David Senra: They made the same mistake. Buffett, the greatest investor of all time, met Walt Disney. He went and talked to Walt Disney in the 60s. He bought the stock at like 62 cents. He had a 2X or 4X gain. He said, "I sold this thing." That's why I say the best financial decisions are not financial decisions at all. You're doing it for another reason. It's exactly what you said. All Sam had to do was just keep doing Walmart. It's exactly what he did.

Daniel Ek: I remember I live in Miami on a friend's boat in the marina. There's a boat bigger than anything else around there. You can Google who owns it. It was Sam Walton's brother's daughter.

David Senra: Right, right. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy.

Daniel Ek: I think we're on to something important. This notion around just innately focusing and solving problems day by day builds quality. Quality for me is less. Quality for me is focus. Quality for me is improving day by day. All of these things build quality, and quality is rare. Quality in people is rare. Quality in ideas is rare. We tend to make these things binary. We talked about it with people. I'd rather have that person that has one good idea in an entire hour and the rest is crap than someone who has 10 decent ideas but nothing is amazing. That differential equation between the 1% versus the rest is so important. It's so important to understand. We know about it because we can explain it in hindsight, but we don't know when it's happening. What is that qualitative process? What defines quality as it's happening before you can see it objectively from the outside? Those things are interesting. I'm more and more drawn towards it being, for me at least, very much looking at the people in it. Looking at how they build judgment over time, the feedback loop they create, the curiosity they have, and the obsession they have about trying to achieve the impossible. For me, the impossible is something that's perfect. It's never going to exist. The whole universe is this thing where the only thing we've learned is that it's not static. It moves. It cannot by definition be this one thing. It's constantly expanding or contracting. Perfection just doesn't exist. But the aspiration towards perfection is a remarkable thing. I love Japan for this reason. You find these amazing individuals that literally spend their entire life. I was in Japan maybe 10 days ago. I was in one of these temples with a tea master who has done nothing for the past 34 years but perfect how to make tea. Nothing else. Yes, the tea is amazing. But it's not just that. It's seeing that obsession about quality. Seeing that obsession about being not even 1%, but 0.1% or 0.01% in something. You asked about AI and all these things. We can talk about art too. For me, that is going to be even rarer. Average is going to be possible to do even better with AI. But that thing about this guy doing this for 30 years, becoming the very best at what they do, or even what I find incredibly inspiring by you, is just the relentlessness every single day towards the long term. As you say, it's the paradox about the long-term mindedness, but the obsession on the daily basis against conventional odds, against all these other things. I would imagine when you started Founders, probably not many people knew who you were.

David Senra: Nobody. Nobody.

David Senra: And so the competition for your time, there was none. So you could probably sit for six hours or eight hours, et cetera. But today, it's much harder because there's many other things. There's people like myself and other people. And you're like, oh, wait a minute. Maybe this is a good idea to meet this person. Or there's a business opportunity that shows up. And maybe people are asking, look, maybe you should invest. And maybe you're tempted about it even. But this is the thing that happens all the time and this is how greatness gets evaporated. You lose focus.

Daniel Ek: That's a great line. Greatness gets evaporated.

David Senra: A lot of the stuff when I talk on the podcast or everything I say on social media is like reminders to myself, because I just read and reread past highlights. We forget that we forget. So I need a reminder. And it just came across one. It's like, I've had them presented to me in a random order, so I never know what I'm going to read that day. And it said, there's a difference between successful people and really successful people. Really successful people say no to everything. And this is exactly the constant thing. I do have a question for you. Going back to that, I can't even explain why I did what I did because I had close to no traction for five and a half years. And now I look back, I was like, there's no way I would do that today. But somehow that person who I now greatly appreciate, I feel like a different person. I cannot believe that. That is what I'm most proud of. Not trying to make something that's great, which I think is a selfish thing for us. Yes, when you release it to the world, you release Spotify, you do all these things, it's an act of service to other people, but you're also doing it because you have to. It has to come out.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But I just cannot believe that I did that. And that's the thing I'm most proud of. I had to do this. I was willing to drive Uber if I had to, tend bar, do literally whatever. I was like, just give me enough time, I'll figure it out. Now, I didn't think it was going to take half a decade to figure out.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: You have a ton of stories of Spotify with that. There is no line between your work and your life. They're one and the same.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: The issue that I'm having now and in general is that I feel a lot of pressure because I'm trying to change not just my life, but the trajectory of my entire family. And I feel very guilty when I don't work. To the point where I just got back from a crazy trip that people would love to go on, and I just felt guilty for taking time out and off, not working.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And I feel like this is almost like a compulsion. I don't have control over it. Do you have anything like that?

Daniel Ek: Sure. I do feel the same thing, of course. But I'm back to sort of time versus energy management. And I don't know about you, but I feel like the greatest ideas I've had come from the most weird and wonderful places where I expected nothing out of it. So quite often when I do take some time off, I come back with two or three entirely new insights that just wouldn't have come if I kept grinding. Just changing the scenery, being in a different frame of mind, pausing. In the creative process, the greatest artists talk about some of the greatest songs literally taking five minutes to write, which is amazing. But some songs are the ones you work on, you put it in a drawer, and six months later, totally unbeknownst to you, it clicks. You're not even working on that thing. It's just sort of like, oh, that's it. And they go back and they do the song, and it's the greatest song ever. There's not one path to greatness. There's many. And I feel like that's why I'm so obsessively focused on energy.

David Senra: So you mean energy is like you just let that guide you?

Daniel Ek: Yeah. It's like, hey, if I need a break right now, if I need to go for a walk, or if I need to go spend time with my wife and kids.

David Senra: Is that what you mean?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, 100%. And I try to feel that. I feel like so much of our life just rips us apart from this thing and tries to get us on a schedule per se. And it's not like I don't have a schedule, of course I do have one. But I feel so much of it should be more guided by trying to understand ourselves more intimately. I don't know if you've heard of this, but going back to sleep, there's been this kind of thing around more recently which I was surprised by. One of my 10-year-old daughters told me about this. She said we have this idea of eight hours. And she actually mentioned instead that the real notion is that we kind of did it almost like fasting. Like Ramadan is based on the sun. Sometimes it could be six hours or sometimes it could be 12 hours. So it used to be that sleep was actually in two periods. You didn't sleep one consecutive thing. You sort of had a three or four hour sleep, and then you woke up, and then you had another three or four hours sleep again. And so much of that was based on light. And maybe it was driven by other things that were happening in our life too. For Nordic people, going back as late as the 18th century, before we started having electric lights and candles, we actually slept a lot less in the summers and a lot more in the winters, guided by light. So we keep thinking it's a static thing, but it's actually driven by the environment around us. And so much of this sort of innate knowledge about listening to ourselves, understanding our innate personality, understanding hunger. I can tell you as someone who has gained in periods of my life like 40 pounds in my worst negotiations, one of the problems I have now is that I literally don't know when I'm hungry, because I ruined that sort of natural feeling in my body. So a huge part of losing weight for me over the past few years was just really starting to listen to my body again and figuring out what satiation means. For me, I don't feel it until 20 minutes after. So if I didn't sort of eye what I should eat, I would just keep eating way more than I should. So much of it has been portion sizing, understanding that that's probably going to be enough. It doesn't feel like enough at that moment because I ruined my body, but 20 minutes later, I understand it. I'm just trying to convey this thing about understanding who you are, choosing the game you're playing, and realizing that life is not one game, but it's a thousand games. There's this brilliant quote by this guy called Kwame Apia that's another one of those things. I just circled it.

David Senra: Perfect timing. No, we're in perfect alignment. Go ahead.

Daniel Ek: Well, I'm probably going to ruin the exact one, so maybe you can read it.

David Senra: Okay, I'll read it. "In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game. The challenge is to figure out what game you're playing."

Daniel Ek: Yeah. And for me, realizing that has just been eye-opening. It's another one that's on my wall. Because I feel like quite often when I'm talking to people and they're trying to get life advice, they're not playing their game. They're playing someone else's game. They're certainly not playing the game they want to be playing, but they somehow think that life is just one game, when actually so much is about choosing the right game for you. So I keep coming back to that. Energy management is the same thing. You have to create the environment around you that you want. You have to choose your game. And when you do that and you start understanding that, you start becoming superhuman in your ability to get things done.

David Senra: Do you have more or less negative self-talk today than you did 20 years ago?

Daniel Ek: I'm more comfortable with who I am than I was 20 years ago. I was still very much, my whole life, I've been a searcher. When I was really young in my teens, I went to every possible religious meetup you could be. I went to everything. I went to Hare Krishna centers, I went to Jewish centers, mosques, I went to everything. And I try to learn as much as possible because I truly believe, not enough people are—I've always been surprised why more people aren't interested in where we come from and what the purpose is of life. For me, those are some of the greatest questions that I, like many others, don't have any idea what will happen. But I think they're really important. So I've always been a searcher. And I think that led me to also be a searcher about myself too, trying to find who I am. But the older I've gotten, the more things have started clicking about myself. And the more unapologetic I am.

David Senra: And so your inner monologue gets less harsh?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, because not only do you stand out quite a lot as an entrepreneur, and my interests were widely different than my social circuit growing up, but the second thing is I'm an introvert. So that doesn't help. Most people like being around a lot of people and they get energy from it. I didn't. So that obviously naturally gets you to question yourself. And against many others as an entrepreneur, I'm not the most eloquent person. I'm not the smartest.

David Senra: You're pretty damn eloquent.

Daniel Ek: Well, I had to work on it. That's still the hard thing. I've really—I'm not. Listen, I've listened to all your interviews. And I did this before we were friends. And every time something comes out, I was like, oh, I got to watch that. You're not giving yourself enough credit. You are a very clear communicator.

David Senra: Thank you.

Daniel Ek: But it's really a work product. I wish there was more recorded stuff of myself when I was 20 and 21 because I was not great. I was quite terrible. And so I've just learned that it's a superpower and something I have to work on: getting my message across to other people to believe what I'm believing and see what I'm seeing in order to get them to want to come and join whatever thing we're trying to will into this world.

David Senra: I have two more questions that I'm personally curious about. One is going to be a very weird question. The first one is: do you feel different? Most of the people watching this, listening to this, so few people are going to be born in the projects in a tiny little—we'll have to do this every year if you're fine with it—because the idea that you come from this tiny little island, which I got to visit, and then you're competing with the biggest companies in the world and you win, it just doesn't—we didn't even get there. You grow up, you have a great mom, single family, not a lot of money. But now, what I'm curious about is your lived experience. There are so few people alive that can actually empathize with that because they also had it. So I'm very curious: do you feel different? And what I mean by it is, as you've grown from a kid in the projects, even if you had early success, to now being one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet—which I know you don't do the face, but it's an undeniable fact—do you feel different?

Daniel Ek: I think yes and no. I feel different in the same way a 40-year-old would feel different than a 10-year-old would. I feel different in that I'm a product of all the experiences of my life. And obviously, I've been incredibly fortunate. I was counting the other day, I've been to like 130 countries or something in my life. I've seen so many cultures, so many people. I have friends all over the world. All of that has shaped me into who I am. I don't feel different because innately many of the things—the drive, the long-termness, the obsession, this sort of willingness on the paradox of winning on the one hand but then also trying to truly find a win-win and work with people to find a win-win, which is really important to me—has always been there. And it's always been these things. And like you said, you kind of look back at yourself a few years back when you started off and say, wow, how did I do this? And you're amazed at that. I can feel the same way about young Daniel. I can feel myself about the young Daniel that worked every weekend, nonstop, 24-7, sacrificed so many things, so many summers, so many other things. I had a blast doing so, but I didn't have a normal upbringing just because I was so obsessed about learning, so obsessed about making it. And it put me in the position of where I am today. And I actually feel like I owe that guy to keep pushing myself. Because there are so many demands of my time, so many things that tell me to downshift gear into an easier gear because life would be a lot more comfortable that way. This is not a comfortable thing.

David Senra: Goes back to impact versus happiness.

Daniel Ek: This is what—so I think I texted this to you, but one of the roles you play, and I'm very grateful that you allowed us to record this conversation, is that you seem to have no self-imposed ceiling on what you can learn or achieve. And spending time with you then transfers that belief to other people. So every single time, I take notes of what I learned from the conversation we have after the fact. And I interpret it as, obviously not verbatim, but I'm saying, what did I just learn from Daniel? What does it apply to me? And I realize, oh, you have all these—you think you don't—I thought I was ambitious and I didn't even realize until you kind of pulled the scales off my eyes. You have this limiting belief that you have no limits. There are no limits in life. So you're incredibly inspiring.

David Senra: One other question for you. I'm obsessed with Game of Thrones to an unhealthy degree. I've rewatched the series all the time. I've read all the books. I've read the encyclopedia. I'll read the family histories. Because I do think you can learn a lot from human nature and fiction. And my job and my obsession requires me to—99% of my reading is nonfiction and I want to read more fiction. I came across something recently because I'm going through Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters again and then I read what was my interpretation of this in the past. And I came across something that was fascinating. There's a story in the prequels of Game of Thrones where two brothers are fighting in this war. One of the brothers was pulled into the war that did not want to be there, and he made the sacrifice because it was for the good of his family. He wound up dying in the war that he didn't want to fight in the first place. And his brother that survived got his remains, buried him, and then put him in a grave with only one word on his tombstone. And that one word was "loyal." So hopefully, a hundred years from now, when you do have a tombstone, if there was only going to be one word on that tombstone, what would you want it to be?

Daniel Ek: I don't think too much anymore. I used to think a lot about how other people saw me or see me. I don't do that anymore. So I would choose more of a self-reflective one. And I wish only one thing on my tombstone—future one, it feels absurd talking about it—but it would be that he lived.

David Senra: That's a great one. That's a great way to end it. Daniel, I'm thankful for your time, thankful for your friendship. You're one of the people I most admire, and I really appreciate you doing this.

Daniel Ek: Well, thank you so much. And it's such a huge honor to be your first guest in this series.

David Senra: Of course. Thank you so much. Wouldn't happen any other way.