My conversation with Daniel Ek: Founder of Spotify

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/bdc33e88c1a7fe8b

I'm starting a new show where I have conversations with the greatest living founders. The show is called David Senro. It will be on a separate podcast feed.
From founders. The first episode
is with Daniel Eck, who's one of the wisest people I know.
And I've learned a lot from Daniel in private conversations.
It's actually from one of our conversations.
That I decided I should start recording these.
So other people can learn.
from them too. You are about to hear the very first episode in full.
But make sure you follow David Senera on Spotify.
Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you're listening to this.
So you don't miss future episodes. I've already recorded a bunch.
Some of the best founders on the planet.
Nothing is changing with founders podcasts.
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This conversation and don't forget
To follow the new show David Senera now.
So I wanna 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.
And
What I loved was I was th I thought about how the advice you gave and the stories you told
uh really fundamentally changed my approach to my work and then also like my philosophy of how I'm living my life.
And because you it's it's very rare. Like this year I'm gonna hit over four hundred biographies
Uh read for the podcast, right?
And somebody asked me recently, it's like do you ever uh uncover new ideas? It's like no, I feel like I'm telling the same story, the same personality type over and over and over again. And you'll get a a new idea or an idea.
No, every once in a while, but certainly not all the time.
Yeah. But you shared something at the dinner that was a truly novel idea.
And 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 gonna read something.
There was an interview given by
The CEO of Uber, who's a friend of yours, Dara. Yeah.
And I'm gonna read this excerpt, which was absolutely
Perfect. And he was talking about
Uh
contemplating should I take this job or not? Like this is a huge opportunity, but also like
Kind of scary.
And this is tied to your idea that
you should optimize for impact over happiness.
Articulate that.
And so Dar 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 Eck, who's a good friend.
And I still remember I was talking to him about my career at Expedia and how happy I was.
And he looks at me and you 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.
а най фат ти майсев май гад
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 over happiness and why?
Well, it it first off, it's it's incredibly kind of Dara to say that.
Um
Yeah, I
I I think about this. I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact.
Mm-hmm.
And
Uh I think it can be, you know, you can feel happiness in small bursts and small moments, uh, and you can have a lot of variants in your life.
So you can choose to have that part, which is the ups, the downs of life, et cetera. So I'm not saying you can have happiness, but I think truly sustained happiness comes from
Uh impact. And impact is something that's deeply personal to you. Uh only you can define what
Impact means for you.
Um so I think it means different things for different people, but I do think it's a trailing um indicator.
So the way I uh you know, I I would put it in this case is
You know, what was obvious for me, uh, with someone like Adara, uh, was he was content. He wasn't happy.
And um, you know, he had gone through a phase um knowing him for a while where uh he had a lot of ups and downs with Expedia and all that stuff and
And he kinda mostly figured it out. And so he was content.
And
I
think that
In his case
You know, where he was at his life.
Um
It was such an obvious thing.
that he didn't even realize that he just
Grown content.
And so
For me
Um
You know, Uber
Is a very special company, and to be even be asked to be the CO of that and the impact I knew he could have.
on that company.
Just felt to me like an obvious thing. Mm-hmm.
And so
Um
I I
I sort of advised him to hey you should go for go for this.
Uh and and that's a far greater thing and that's gonna be
For
will lead to more much more happiness, not just for you, but also for other people.
Did somebody do that for you?
Did somebody tell you to optimize for impact over happiness, or is this just the the way uh you work?
I think I self motivate myself that way. Okay.
to do the hard things. Um you know, like many other people, I'm I'm quite lazy by nature.
Uh I try to take the simple road out uh often enough. Um
But
What I've learned um
That
has given me the greatest joys is overcoming the biggest adversities.
And
Overcoming the biggest adversities usually has been solving
um a problem of some kind.
uh for someone or something.
That
No one else had been able to figure out.
And for me, that's my definition of impact.
And
Uh it's not right there at the moment that I feel that. Uh actually in many cases I feel it much longer, but it's when I go back and I reflect.
um on accomplishments uh or moments of impact, then I feel true happiness.
And so um
I
I've I've just grown to kind of like
Self.
uh motivate myself constantly.
And
I I think this by the way
kinda comes from like a much deeper thing, right? Like I I came from like pretty much
What was the project in Sweden and
I w I was not the normal kid. Um you know. I was kind of 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, et cetera.
So wait, you felt like an outsider even at that age?
Oh yeah. You still today? Yeah. Every moment my life. Uh even among other fellow entrepreneurs, I sometimes feel like an outsider because like
Right now, for instance, you and I were in Silicon Valley.
Yeah, I'm not American.
Um so there's um a an element of myself where I don't belong to the club.
And I've always felt that way.
And because I've always felt that way, I've had to
I I can't take lessons from other people a hundred percent because
Some of my story, some of my condition, some of the waves, the structures, even how to structure a company. You have to structure differently. If
You're a European company.
versus American companies. You have to go back to sort of first principles and kinda
Find the sort of principle answer to to anything and what works for you.
And so I've had to kind of self motivate myself.
For most of my life.
Um
And and only
I would say in the last maybe five years.
I've come to realise that
Um
You know, in a way, um, I'm maybe a better coach than I am a player.
And so I've kind of understood more and more that actually that sort of drive, that intensity, um, is is actually something that can be taught. It's not entirely innate.
And it's about
Almost letting people know that that's okay.
Um, and and so much of that comes from those types of conversations is about almost reflecting back.
It's not about sort of me projecting onto other people what I think they should do.
But in in listening to Dara, it was just so obvious to me.
When he kind of explained because you know the conversation started with us talking about Uber and I said I recommended you.
uh to the job. And he said, uh Oh really, yeah, I just didn't take the the call even. And I was like, Well why not? Yeah and he was like, Well, I'm really happy about this thing and
And I was like listening and I actually just let him keep talking.
And the more he he he spoke, the more obvious it became he he was content.
He he lived in he he was he was running on the uh down shift it 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, uh, where
He's sort of like okay, well
You know, you've always been running on a higher gear.
Do you want to
You know, gear up even more.
to an extreme level.
Why aren't you gonna go for greatness? Why aren't you gonna test yourself? Because if you succeed, this could be huge.
And you really don't get many of these chances in your life.
And so
Much of the conversation was really ro 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.
But 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
uh you know having impacts by being a great father around your kids.
I I don't pretend to know that I think that there's one game to play or one universal truth to life. I certainly believe from entrepreneurial types
That um
probably more to myself that uh more like myself that you know this is sort of a one of those sort of key
things is really consider impact.
One of the things I admire most about Daniel Eck is his relentless dedication to improving his craft and to improving his product.
It's a mission that he's still on nearly two decades later.
It'd be impossible to argue that Spotify isn't one of the most well crafted products ever created.
And Daniel and his team's dedication to constantly improving their product.
Reminds me a lot of my friend Karim, who's the co founder and CTO of Rank.
Kareem is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance. I spent a lot of time talking to Kareem, and every single conversation centers around his obsession.
with crafting a high quality product.
And using the latest technology to constantly create
better experiences for his customers.
Karim and Daniel both believe
That nothing is ever good enough, and that everything can always be improved.
Karim is running one of the most talented technical teams in finance and they use rapid, relentless iteration to make their product better every day.
So far this year Ramp has shipped over three hundred new features.
Ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers.
And automate as much of your business's finances as possible.
In fact, Karim just wrote this. AI is all I think about these days.
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That is what this is all about building a product or service.
That makes someone else's life better.
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Get started today by going to ramp dot com.
You mentioned
He thought
Some people don't go for impact because they're content.
When was the last time? Like you're definitely not content now.
Right, so I've gotten to know you once. We've talked for hours and hours and hours and this is why I wanted you to be the first person I had this conversation with.
And I like and I was curious if you could say that's like no no, I know you have this like inner burning desire
And fire inside of you.
To me your outside is like you're very calm, you're very articulate.
And you're very polite, but you have that like
It's the same thing I read in these books all the time. It's just like this person was had a burning desire to achieve mission success. Yeah.
Were you content after you sold your first company? You were like twenty two, twenty three. Well, uh content is the right word. I wasn't happy. Uh so I was content for a moment of time. I was twenty two. Um I never had much much success with with women.
Uh because I was a computer geek and back then uh computers was not the coolest thing uh in the world.
And um, you know, so I I was like, Okay, well now I've got all this money and uh you know, this was this was my world view. Uh I can go out in nightclubs, I'm I'm gonna be the cool guy. Um and I had fun for a while. I'll tell you that.
But um it also was incredibly
um Halloween because um you know I realized that these girls uh weren't with me because of me.
Uh, they were with me because you know, I had status.
And I was able to uh use money to buy status uh and be a cool guy in for a small
uh moment.
Of time.
And so um
That taught me a lot. Right. And and actually
You know, I kinda walked away.
For over a year.
not doing anything at all. Um and just sort of deeply reflecting
on life, uh what I wanted to do, because for me
Yeah, I had a magic um
Number
Which was ten million.
If I got that number, I would retire.
That was the goal. And I was thinking to myself How old were you when you came with that number?
Probably fifteen.
Okay. Um you know, someone gave me like this book, uh Rich
Dad, poor dad, I think. Uh I read it. I think everybody gets it the same age. Yeah. I read it. It was like really seminal uh for me. So so I kinda made that number. Um I figure to myself I worked really hard. I could get there when I was forty.
Uh I was twenty two when I uh got there.
Um, and so that wasn't really part of the plan, right? And and so I I um
I kind of like, okay, well what's next? What am I gonna do?
Um, because I didn't have to work for money.
Were you depressed?
When you don't you you don't have your company anymore, you sold it, you have the number you thought it was gonna take you two d you know, till 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. Yeah. I'm 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. Like I think we've sometimes we have a sick culture where like
people, especially on social media, that they glorify like
Consumption. It's like I don't care I don't care what you consume, I care what you produce. You should be proud not that you
Can have money to buy any sort of thing.
What did you make?
'Cause it the w the way I think about this all the time, which is always fascinating, how many times this comes up in the biographies and for hundreds of years.
People constantly think like oh we've reached the end, there's no more opportunity.
And just and every single time humans keep saying it's like there we can't there's this is gonna be the last company, this can be the last technological shift, this can be the last invention. And the the best description of a business I've ever heard came from Richard Branson.
And he said, All of business is is an idea that makes somebody else's life better. Mm-hmm. And if you look at it like that, it's like then that you have infinite
possibilities and opportunities all the time.'Cause 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 kinda consuming. Like would you consider yourself depressed? What would you consider yourself
Yeah, I it it's probably the most uh depressed I've been in my life, to be honest, because you know, I I I knew from a very young age uh what I wanted to do. And it was unlike most other people that I grew up with. Uh I just knew I wanted to build things. Uh you were doing that when you were like fourteen.
Right. Yeah, but it started like even earlier than that. I just didn't know it was called a company. I had no idea what finances were or V CE or any of these things.
But I was just building things and I knew I loved computers and I knew I wanted to do that and I I knew I would make a living uh doing that somehow.
This is another thing that
Like drives me insane.'Cause I I hear like
other people's um like advice to entrepreneurs, which I I hate. I think it's like terrible. Like we shouldn't have an entrepreneurial ecosystem, especially because most of the media that entrepreneurs are consuming are actually from investors and you have wildly different incentive structure and everything else. And it just conflicts with a lot of stuff that's in the biographies and I'll just go with those guys or anybody else, right?
And they're always just like yeah.
You know
uh my my belief and something that I repeat on this maximum that belief comes before ability. That it's in these stories every single time you have somebody like I I just re reread the the biography, the autobiography of the founder of Sony.
Akeyo at the time was we're gonna start this company in nineteen forty six. Yeah.
In Tokyo, that's occupied by the Americans.
That is complete has been firebombed. Yep.
Right, he's passing he's going to work and he's passing
Just burnt out rubble, millions of homes of Japanese. Yeah. More than half the population has left the city. They start with turns out to be Sony, which is the one of the more 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 they need to have umbrellas on their desks because when it rains, it comes through the roof. Right. And 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.
Yeah. And I'm starting to build things.
And this is the question I have for you. When did you know you were good?
Uh
I
Uh I don't know that I'm good. I know I'm different.
And um
The
Um but I have this sort of insane belief that I can get good i if I try hard enough.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and I still feel that way, by the way. Like uh because the the comparative sets has changed, right? Like, you know, uh it it was from everyone in my school, maybe in the early days, to everyone in Stockout.
um some w somewhat l uh later to everyone in Europe at some point and now it's like the most brilliant entrepreneurs
of our time uh that I'm constantly comparing myself to.
And obviously I don't believe that I'm as good as them.
Uh but I believe I am
slightly different than them in some ways. And um I believe that um
If I work really, really hard on something.
I can make something really great.
And
That's the sort of bar that I keep for myself. And um
But for me it it really stems also from
sort of this notion back to what you were talking about about um sort of
The realization that
uh through computers right Steve Jobs has has the saying uh it's the bicycle of our mind
Which was really how I felt about computers like growing up. It's just this magic tool.
That allows me to solve.
So many other things and create things. Yeah.
And um
And and and so, you know, I knew I wanted to do that and
I also knew that um
Yeah, my co founder Martin, he he has this uh thing he keeps saying, the the value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.
And so w what I keep doing is essentially I got this
Toolbox.
Called a computer.
Um, and I got all these problems around the world.
Which problems am am I passionate about solving?
And at which problems can I spend the next decade of my life?
Um fix it.
'Cause if I if I'm not interested enough in it to spend a decade fixing it's it's probably not worth pursuing. This is like something I'm super passionate about because
You know, if you really think about like
They don't write biographies about people that like start
Scale, sell a company and do it for like five years. I'm not interested in that. I I don't like I'm I'm not interested in your startup. I'm interested in your last company. I'm interested in something you're gonna do.
for the rest of your life. Yeah. And this is what I draw inspiration off of. It's just like going back to what you said earlier about uh impact and and contentment and how like you're willing to
go into an area where it's like you know it's difficult. Mm.
I love what Jeff Bates said on this. He's just like
He was
he tells the people he w used to tell people in Amazon at the very beginning, he's like, We're trying to build something.
That we can
be proud of, something that we can tell our grandkids about.
Anything that you're gonna be proud to tell your grandkids about is not going to be easy right. So we're going into this with
You know, he gave himself like a thirty percent chance of success. Yeah. I think at the beginning of Spotify, you know, you're guys like, Hey, we're gonna I might have to get a job after this, but I have to do this. Yeah.
Like it is inside of me. Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
So
There had to be acquisition offers.
Early on, sure.
And did you ever consider them like
Well, I I consider them, but not for money. Um I considered them because I already had uh the money that I thought I needed in my life. Uh right. And and that was an incredibly powerful position to be in. It was freeing me of a lot a lot of constraints.
And uh for me it was more, you know, as as we got a approach, it was always about can this thing further our mission?
And if I truly believe that 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 it.
Uh but I never found that.
And because I didn't find that, um
I we just kept going.
And um it wasn't obvious to me, uh, that this would be like um something I would do for twenty years, I'll tell you that.
Um
But what I did did know is that, you know, I came from doing lots of projects beforehand. Um and so sort of
Um, you know, we talked about the one company I did sell, but I that was like my fourth or fifth one.
So I'd been doing a bunch of other things and I was doing many things in parallel.
Yeah. Which you still do today.
Well um
I started doing it again.
Which is a very different thing. And and I still still think the jury's out, by the way, on whether that's a good idea or bad idea.
Um explain.
Well, you know, I I again I I I
do believe that um
Focusing all your time and effort
uh on this one thing. Um and
obsessed about it and almost to the point where you're not even aware of the rest of the world that goes on is what creates greatness.
Um
And I know you can relate to this, but that that's how Spotify came to be. I literally couldn't care about anything else, uh, for at the very least, uh
The first fifteen years.
Only now am I foolish enough to believe that actually, you know what, I might be able to do multiple things.
At the same time again, which was
Sort of my spirits.
In my twenties.
Is that connected to what you were saying earlier that you might be a better you think you might be a better coach than player? Yeah.
Um I I I certainly think so. Um and and
Uh, because my leadership style is so different than
uh many of these these sort of um entrepreneurs that most of us sort of look up to um
inhale whether it's the Steve Jobs' or Elon Musk's, et cetera.
I just don't feel like um
There there's a vague resemblance t w with them, but it's just not me. It's like I'm a I'm a very different
Archetype of entrepreneur.
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 like maybe we should talk about like the archetypes.
uh different archetypes of entrepreneurs because like there could be
You know, there could be somebody like a young there's
Undoubtedly a young Danual Ark out there.
Right. We just know that that's gonna happen. There's a this great thing. I'm I'm slightly obsessed with Michael Jordan.
Uh he's the
He's the the lock screen on my phone he's my
contact cards. So when people like they start texting me, it's like Michael Jordan with his eyes like this, like I'm kind of setting the tone. Yeah. And he said this great thing because you know, at the end of his career it's the rise of Kobe Bryant. Yeah. And everybody's at w towards the end of his career, they were like obsessed. Like oh Tracy McGrady's gonna be the next Michael Jordan and this guy's gonna be the next Michael Jordan. This guy's next Michael Jordan.
And he's like
First he's like, uh you don't have to worry about finding the next Michael Jordan. He goes, First of all, you didn't find me. I just happened to come along. Yeah. And that will happen again.
You don't have to find the next person. They will
come along and I always say they will reveal themselves. Yep. So I I do think this is fascinating and no one else talks about this. Again, d the weird thing about talking to you and I I don't mean that pejorative, it's like
You just say stuff that no one else says. And then I'm like, why
Isn't why don't more people understand, like know about Daniel's very unique ideas? Like no one's concerned about the archetypes. Everybody's like, Oh, we just have to be like Steve Jobs, you just have to be like Elon. Yeah. And your point's like, no, there's like multiple different archetypes. Obviously, like I've studied this maybe more than anybody else in the world, and it's very clear that there are.
Yeah.
And yet they're all kind of like narrowly focused.
On
This is the one path. And mean you went over this back and forth before it's just like
It's so ridiculous to say like there is this is the way founders should run their company because you said it back in two thousand twenty one in that series and Spotify. We've had conversations like this. This is something I always say, it's like
It's tied to the personality of founder, 100%.
The advice is fucking useless unless it's tied to who you are as a person. Understanding Spotify is a reflection of you. Now I do want to talk also about
this other great idea that you gave me and that now I s heard uh Jeff Bezos echo recently about the fact that
There's similarities between like
the way your child develops and the way company develops. That was very fascinating. Yeah. But where are you like
Explain why you would even want to broach the subject of
Like talking more about the different founder archetypes.
Well, I I I think, you know, again, as a young entrepreneur myself, um, I went through the book like so many of us, uh by
Becoming
Enamored by
Uh
uh an entrepreneur looking up to them in many cases because they had traits that I didn't have.
And so um we read all these stories, whether it's biographies or or articles about how they manage their company and how uh how uh they live their lives and the routines that they have.
And certainly in my case, like you know, uh
I certainly tried to mimic Steve Jobs. I certainly tried to mimic Bases and Gates and all of the great ones, um
You know, the the very charismatic ones like Howard Schultz of Starbucks and
Yeah, I've I've
I've learned from all of them and in a way uh
I've tried to imitate them, right? Um because I've thought that they were so great at what they do.
Uh but every single time I've walked away being um disillusioned, uh, because I realized obviously that it didn't work for me.
And
Um
So this this sort of
idea of this archetype um is like
Um entrepreneurs out there.
That uh read about
currently, uh whether it's Mark Zuckerberg or Jensen or any of these things, and they're like, uh 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 um I don't have it in me.
I think you're you were spot on when you said it's like the hardest single thing, um
Really?
For a founder and entrepreneur.
In in a much different way, I think, than a normal person, but I think every normal person goes through this is finding yourself.
That's literally what I just wrote down.
So I don't want again, I this is more of a conversation than interview because I'm I'm a terrible interviewer and I love to talk. Yeah, try to do a monologue show for God's sake.
But
I had this theory too because it's obvious in the books. Like th there's this like myth. It's like
of like the genius young entrepreneur. Yeah. And if you go and s read all the biographies.
They weren't like laying about doing nothing when they were younger. No. But I it's very clear.
If you look at all of them.
Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Ake Marita.
Sam Walton, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, Edwin Lan, they do their best work.
When they're much older.
And so I I would I thought a lot about that. I'm like, dang, this is like a recurring thing over and over again. Some cases are in their forties.
fifty years old and they're at the top of their game. Yeah.
And I and then it's you know, I was wondering like what is this? Okay, well
Obviously like it is some some of a skill set so you can like practice more. Uh 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 of my body, it's like
Because you know they knew themselves much more. Yeah. Like think about the way you know yourself in your early forties than you did when you were twenty three. Oh yeah. It's like
We thought when we're twenty three, you don't know anything. Even the most brilliant twenty three year old does not know themselves. You need that that comes through time and experience. Yeah. And it's like no.
The this is something I learned from um Michael Dell's autobiography, which was excellent. I used to say it's like they build a company that's authentic to him. Yeah. Hundred percent.
He also he the way he says they they build a company that's natural to them. Right. And you can't build a company that's natural to you right if you don't know who you are. Hundred percent. And so I have this belief that's like you're I and I think like your your accomplishment are freaking crazy. And I know you like to downplay them and just because you're very polite and everything else. I saw I was watching this funny uh interview with you.
And uh
They 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 oh it's like somebody poked you're like oh I don't want to be like though
But your response is like I know that face. I know exactly what he what he said. But
This idea that
Yeah.
Y the the you are the sum of like your accumulated experiences. Yeah, right.
That is one form of education, but the form of education is like
I know y I went to your house. I
Rummage through your library, maybe kind of rudely.
But I loved how you're obsessed with history and philosophy too. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, this is a person
That's

curious about the external world. Mm-hmm. But he also wants to know like
Who he is, what's important to him.
And then building a business and a like an apparatus around that. So I d I I just wanted to get that out because you you s you mentioned something like
I don't think I should probably talk about more frequently, but something I I definitely believe is like you're gonna get better
at entrepreneurship.
when you get better knowing who you are and what you actually want to do. A hundred percent. Um
And and uh as as you say, it's like um you know, I I I think
the the game I'm playing now is just being the best version of myself.
And um the best version of myself is the one that
will have even more impact.
than the one that 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? No. I I I don't know, which is why I was asking you because I I I figured who's who's the person in the world that probably has a better idea of of like all the different archetypes.
Um, because you c y I can still learn how how to like, you know, do the game better.
That makes sense. Um I would say there's a very interesting idea.
And um
that have noticed, you know, obviously like there's this maximum I say over and over again that all officially great entrepreneurs
study entrepreneurs. And if you make a podcast on that, you get to meet
the 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 like
picked away the first time we had dinner and you're just like
you're doing this wrong and you were very polite, but you're just like, You're lying to yourself. You're not like you know you're
You're obsessed with this and you're like
fighting with a hand we have time at the back, but I'm so amazed.
It's exactly what you said. It's like
It's almost like they need a mirror. So there there's another great idea.
That I've seen a few times.
Uh one of the truly novel idea. It's this idea of hiring a paid critic. So Sony is making
You know, audio equipment.
This is like
And they're very primitive devices. And what they realized was
They they hired a young vocal arts student and I don't know how to pronounce his name's Naria Ogar or something like that.
And the reason they did that is because he was a fan of early Sony products. Yeah. But he also had very fine, refined taste and everything else. And so he would just light them up about
Oh, it's like I'm a big fan of Sony, but your products aren't good enough, you have all these deficiencies.
And Akeo 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 if we don't even see them, yeah.
And he uh
No um the paid critic.
His point was that hey, if you're a ballet dancer
You have a mirror.
Right. Your mirror tells you.
Whether what what you're doing right, what you can fix, like your what you need to do. He's like
I'm your oral.
Mirror. Yep.
And then then fast forward to when the book is
Uh
Published in like nineteen eighty six.
That paid critic is now the president of Sony. Mm.
And I feel exact I'm this way. It's like we need a mirror. Yeah.
And the w the I think what's w what I'm curious about with you
It's like
Um
I remember I just had dinner with Mikeovitz.
And you know, he's he I think his autobiography is one of the best uh entrepreneur autobiographic fees.
Ever written because he
Tells you about the bad shit.
didn't like who he was. He was depressed. He was doing this
Making bad decisions based on the opinions of other people, which entrepreneurs cannot do. Yeah. And I was struck by
Like
The fact that
he didn't know himself at, you know, twenty five or twenty I think he's twenty seven when he's when he started CA. Sure as hell knows himself a as like
Almoст
uh I'm an eighty year old man. But I asked him about
You know, he's had some people I know have been friends with him.
For twenty five years.
And I was just like
Why what do you think has enabled you to maintain that relationship? And he said, uh
He tells me the truth.
Yeah.
And he's like you get into my position. Yeah.
Where you know, he's famous, he's wealthy.
Most of the people that he interacts with are on his staff. Yeah.
And he's like
You it's very dangerous.
And he said he's like there's not many people in my life
That tell me the truth. Yep.
Who tells you the truth?
Many people, which is the good news, uh for me. Um, you know, it starts with my family, my mom.
Um you know, my mom is the most normal person you would be
She uh she's proud of her my accomplishments.
But in in sort of the standoffish way. She couldn't care anything about the impact of it. Uh it is more like that I've overcome
um obstacles for myself that she knows matters to me.
So oftentimes that's great. Uh yeah. And and so oftentimes like when when uh I may bring an issue home
'Cause she doesn't really know what's going on in the business world and she doesn't really care. She kind of like
gives me this mirror back where most of life actually doesn't revolve around technology or the business world, et cetera. It's like this is the life.
Um, so that's a great one. Um I have a very dear friend, uh, Shaq, who
Very similarly
place that part in my life. He's the most realist person there is. Uh my wife uh is another one. Uh
Gustave that you met is another person. He uh will tell me the truth even when I don't want to hear it.
Um and um
Yeah, I I I've been incredibly fortunate that like many of the people I just talked about are people that have been around me for twenty
Years.
My mom, obviously, my entire life, but
But many of these people have been around for a very, very long time.
Um and I I think that's um
Um
You know, I I I really believe trust is one of the most
Um
Under talked about.
Things. Um
You know, 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 b bureaucracies ultimately because there's no trust.
If you had a hundred percent trusts, you wouldn't need any of this stuff and you would move much faster. It's crazy. Munger again, like
I I literally get emails.
Every week. They're like, Why do you mention Charlie Munger on every episode? I'm like, because he's the wisest person I've ever come across. What do you want me to do? Like, I'm sorry he has so many good ideas.
But he said something again, and he's another person where he like points things out that once he says it, it's obvious, but no one else says it. He goes, trust is one of the greatest economic
uh forces in the world.
And he talked about that your job when I w actually got to have dinner with him, he's like, Your job is to build a seamless web of deserved trust with great people. Hundred percent. And he's like that's not and he w he was telling a story. He's like
Everybody knows that.
You know, I met
Buffet when I was when he was twenty eight and I was thirty five. They don't understand there's 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.
Yeah, that idea it's like
Trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world.
It truly is. And if you think about it, why is why is that so rare? It's it's because it doesn't scale.
Right. So trust is the then this notion that you'll keep doing um actions.
That will ladder up over time. It really compounds.
But
Um you're gonna add maybe one percent of trust for each positive interaction you're gonna do.
But it takes one interaction that's bad to ruin all of it.
The moment where you where you even start doubting whether you can trust someone or not, you have no trust.
Mm good.
The the point being is it's it's like 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 it's
It's really kind of like
You know
What most people will say is either I trust someone or I don't.
But even let's say you do trust someone, there's degrees of trusting someone.
Um how many people do you trust with your life?
How many people do you trust with your bank accounts? Just handing it over. Are you a trusting person, though?
Yeah.
I think that's one of like from what
people that know me. So I have uh I actually had breakfast with a a good friend of mine and you know, he he's slightly older, but
He t he tells me the truth and he
is very nice, but he'll point out the problems that like are going to stop me from going to where I want to go. Mm-hmm. And one of his
Points.
'Cause I would answer like if I asked that question myself, I was like, I don't trust anybody. Yeah. And I think I'm getting a little better with that, but uh I am concerned that like I'm gonna be one of my own worst enemies because of this like
I can't let go. Yeah, but look, I mean, you you talked about it yourself.
You it started in your childhood. Um, like in my case, I grew up without a father, uh, for sure, but I have the most loving mother.
Um, she gave me everything.
And to have that start in my life, I've always felt that whatever I do.
Whatever the failure is.
Uh she will always love me.
Mm. 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, right?
And
And and then
My approach to life is just like
Okay, well um you know
by again, I'm not saying I have absolute trust in every person, um, but I choose to believe that
uh trusting people makes for uh a much more fun uh rich and rewarding life
Than one that doesn't.
And I believe that I think you're definitely right about that.
Yeah, and and and I believe that a life is more fun doing the journey with other people around that than doing it in single player mode.
And that doesn't mean that I'm not also um a person that likes
uh my own spare time, my own comfort, my own solitude.
I have that part, and that's the duality in my personality.
But um
I really do believe and it it it'll go back to philosophy, but the more I give away the more I get back.
And and so I just keep focus on
doing that. And for me the ultimate
uh impact at this point why I said you know I
I like to be
the best coach there ever was.
the best entrepreneur coach. Maybe that's my archetype, but um
than than a player because
I've come to see that these people that I've done Spotify with uh for the past fifteen years as an example.
Seeing their success.
seeing their impact, seeing their growth.
Is the thing that give me the most amount of pride.
At this point. It really isn't anything else. Like
You know, financially I couldn't care.
Um not that important. It's great to have a lot of money to have
Um
as a currency to then have more impact. It's more ships on the table.
to do new, more cool, interesting stuff.
But um
But the real thing, um
for me will be the friendships that I built, um, you know, the
The trust that other people placed in me.
Two
Allow me to help them on this journey, help me on my journey.
And us doing it together.
And
Uh I've just seen it so many times. I've been burned by it for sure. Um, sometimes when when people have broken that trust that I put in them.
But I will honestly say that's been like one or two percent.
negative experience relative to all the positive things that come out of it. The sad part about this, I can't think of anybody that's like betrayed me in like two decades. Yeah. So it's like
I'm just making up this problem, this imaginary problem that maybe used to exist, but certainly doesn't ex is exist now.
And this is where I think it's it it's really like
uh helpful to again, I don't need a bunch, you know, I don't I don't believe I there's a great um
quote from the founder of Red Bull, who I became slightly obsessed with. Um and I'm really proud of the episode I made on it because like we had to literally translate there was no biographies in English and then we had translated biography from German. Um
And his point was just like I don't need fifty friends. Like I believe in much like
S
fewer and better and deeper. Yeah. Um and as long as you make those like choices correctly.
You know, again, like I can't think of a a single person I feel is in my life that doesn't want the best for me. Yeah.
And yet I still have this like, oh like I'll just do it all myself. Yeah. Um
Uh very qu
related to this. Another thing that like you said that really surprised me.
Is like when people ask me, they're like, obviously know who Daniel is, I use Spotify, I know everything going on.
But like
Why do you talk about'em so much? And I like mention you on the podcast and and like I was like oh
'cause I've learned a lot from you.
Be very, very careful what you want.
in life.
Like
And I get to meet
Pretty crazy people.
And
Most of the time it's like
Uh it's they're great.
But then you see like there's like a lot of negativity to them. One, there's a shocking amount that have very few, if no friends. Yeah. Which is scary to me.
And then they kinda like
Interact with you as if like
You're like a
asset. And once I suck that asset, like get everything out of the asset, then like I you will uh be disposed.
And I feel the same people that do that.
Have
Almost no intellectual humility.
Right? Where I always say it's like
Every single person I read about is smarter and more productive than I am.
The way I look at this, the world in general.
Is
very much in the same way like Thomas Edison has this great quote. He's like, We know w we don't know one one thousandth of percent of anything. Yeah. And that's the way I feel it's'cause like every day I learn something new. I'm like
Yeah, I'm gonna be I was so stupid back then. Yeah.
You have
In extreme levels of intellectual humility. I don't even know if many people know this, but like you would like go in shadow.
And spend time. I don't know if you have a term for this.
You just like call up somebody that's running a company and say
What, I'm gonna come and sit on every single one of your meetings.
Yeah, pretty much. Uh like that that that's how it goes. Um
And and and look, it comes back to this. I mean, I I don't believe that I know um much.
Let me 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. Yep. I don't care. Yep. I'm there to learn from them. Yep. I need to go get their coffee. I'll go get their coffee. Yep.
Do you understand that's insane?
Like I think that's the right
Like f mindset. Yeah. But
I don't think anybody would believe somebody running, you know, a hundred billion dollar company and has d done the things that you've done.
Like, yeah, no, I I'm fine, like I'll shout this guy and like I'll do whatever I need to do.
Yeah.
Well I mean look
Um I I just realized it it it sort of started from this thing, right, where um
You and I have both read all the books, and actually many of the entrepreneurs have read um
Not as many books about as as you have uh around uh all the greatest entrepreneurs. But they've read
the big ones. Yeah. Certainly of their time. The basisists, the the the Steve Jobs, the the Elon Musk's biographies and all that kind of stuff.
But but the
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 don't I've never really worked on a company.
Right. And
is in a way what I realized as we hired people from um these other companies is that
There were all these f things that they were doing, um that they kept telling us about and I didn't really understand.
Like how it worked. Um so um I'll I'll mention like one, for instance
I do really well in these like one on one situations. I might even do well in like three or four person groups and maybe six.
But um ten person group, like
I don't have the personality where I command the room. Uh it just doesn't work.
And then you have someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who literally has this thing called large group where he has twenty to twenty five people.
That he runs every week.
Yeah, and for me it sounded absolutely awful. Like how did you get anything done um in in that meeting? Yeah.
And so lo and behold, I asked him.
Hey.
Uh, can I come and learn from you? And uh he was incredibly
Uh gracious. Uh and we've obviously been friends for a long time.
And and he said sure.
Um, and so I spent uh the better part of
What I believe the first time was like a week. Um
literally in uh pretty much all of his meetings, uh from start to finish. And
The the big question obviously for me is like, Okay, well what does he get out of it and
Can I make myself useful uh while doing it. So hence I took meaning notes, uh, you know, uh if I could get him coffee, I would.
Um, you know, it it was literally
These types of things.
Um but at the end of it, um
Um
I the most interesting thing was obviously trying to distill down
What surprised me.
About the culture.
It wasn't really Brown like Meta uh what was then Facebook is a world class company. It wasn't like
You know, I uh m miraculously thought I could do a lot of things.
Or better.
But um there were things that surprised me uh around how he managed a company and and seeing that and hearing that from another
Founder um
Hopefully one that he respects too.
uh may um sort of lead to insights and breakthroughs.
And um during the week it's not just that I
uh follow people around, I actually meet with their entire executive team and interview them too.
Um so sit down and try to learn from that to really truly internalize the culture and try to understand it.
And um so all of a sudden you do realize, for instance, how you can make a large group team meeting work.
Um
And there were lots of other things uh which I shamelessly copied from, for instance, that experience.
Um and uh
Uh, it just turned out for me to be an amazing way to learn, um, by seeing the culture up front that enables
the certain um
practices to work. It almost comes back to kind of this
Two things we talked about already, which is this mirror, um of reflecting it back.
And then um the the the sort of second notion I think which is
It's gotta be true to you.
So, um, you know
There are many things where you can copy a specific uh 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 Musk's dead right about this.
The thing the way I would think about like your archetype.
Is I think you nailed it with like
Coach and then
Uh
you'll hear people inside Spotify say it's like very c you have a very collaborative, like
Management style.
Where I don't think anybody
Is going to describe
Steve Jobs is collaborative. Now he was able to collaborate. Yeah.
But at the end, like he was it was kind of like
I'm making all the decisions. There's actually actually an interesting story. I'm curious how you think about this. Like how do you balance like the decisions you make
Specifically on like product, right?
Um with like
Your own personal taste and intuition versus like
Being
Metrics.
Driven. Um there's this hilarious story.
in two different books. One's in this book called Creative Selection, which is excellent. It's uh read three times.
It's about this guy from this guy named Ken Kosiendo.
who was a programmer, he demoed to Steve many, many times and like when they were building their best products, right?
And then there's another one story in uh Johnny Ives uh
Biography.
And they w they talked, they were comparing and contrasting the way like Google would make products versus how Apple did when Steve Jobs was in charge.
And you know
The guy's like, Hey, you know, Google
We have to decide between like blue and light blue. And we run like two hundred tests of like all the different shades in between that. Yep and Johnny's like we would never
Ever do that. Do you remember you you were old enough to remember this?
They create the the the the I Mac, but like the big fat bubble one. Yep. You know probably late nineties.
And
Like and Johnny tells the story is like you know how we
chose the colors. He's like me and Steve went to the design. Like we're the Apple Design Center.
And we talked about it and thirty minutes later. Yep.
We shipped. Yep. Yep. That was it. Yep. Yep.
Wh where are you on like that spectrum?
Yeah, I th I I think the most important thing that uh you described is it's a spectrum.
Mm. It's not a hundred percent um you know, one way or the other way. Because I I again sort of like I remember
early on, um you know, people talking about that sort of dichotomy of how Google does thing and how Apple does thing. And many founders then
tended to gravitate when Apple was at sort of peak Steve Jobs to
No, I run the product review. It's only my opinion that matters.
Um and is my taste and I've got this articulation, all these things.
And lo and behold, like uh some terrible decisions uh ended up uh coming out of this, etc.
And and I think where people um sort of break down on almost all issues is they take it literally.
I don't believe for a second that Apple was a hundred percent 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.
Um, you know, et cetera.
But of course he did that, right? And I I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant and that don't get talked about, he actually called up journalists.
Sometimes.
And test the ideas on them and and like we might do this um kind of thing and then hear the journalists react to it and it's like okay, that was a bad idea and then go back. They describe this as like sonar how dolphins like
They like throw things out and then they it might be a crazy idea and then it reflects back to them and they use it as like a form of education, but the hilarious one is they couldn't figure out what they were gonna call what turns into the I Mac.
He was obsessed with the camera in Sony, he goes.
I have the name for this computer.
It's gonna be the Mac Man. It gets the walkman. And people around it were like
No, no. No, please don't do that. And you're like this is a terrible and they can
Meeting after meeting it's like Steve.
Name sucks. Yeah. And they they they give them a bunch of lists.
And then the first time he hears IMAC he's like, don't like it at all. Yeah.
And then they're like so like we'll put in the next group and then like we'll move to like the third one down. Yeah. And then he goes
Now I don't hate it. And then one day he's walking the hall. He's like, I came up with the name, but it's my back. And of course. Yep.
Th that's the way. That's the way, right?
And and so I feel like
That's truly.
the case. I I I think the
the the realization is you th you tend to overg gravitate to to one or the other. And certainly in Spotify's case, we w we did the same. Like we we were early on
Um, 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
uh sooner or later what ends up happening is you you get into the to a space where you don't even know anymore. Uh because you're
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 like for me taste is is sort of judgment plus curiosity.
And
The more you can sort of
like extend the curiosity branch.
That improves your judgment, which then builds your taste.
And and so
It it's really a question for me about just uh sort of allowing for
As much фібак із хуманий посол.
So that you can uh
You know
Um
Get yourself or a small team.
to some level of taste.
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Are there any product updates?
That get pushed live.
That you
Didn't like.
Oh plenty.
Um plenty. And and and this may be a little bit unique, but you know coming back to it so
You know, I
I ended up
Um
having you know, uh so so the typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person, right?
Um
By the way, it's a hundred percent true. I I totally believe that. 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
You know.
the the last stage was more like optimization stage.
And you have to like constantly do that. And you're gonna need different skills at different places. And this this is why, by the way, I believe it's so important for entrepreneurs to realise when to apply what tools.
Um 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.
Um anymore.
Um because what happened was I got this guy called Gustav that you've now met.
He runs product.
And he's actually way better than me, uh, at doing it.
And so uh speaking about sort of being truthful, what ended up happening uh many years ago was um I was running these product meetings
Um he was sort of running it, but
I I wanted to run it, so I kind of interjected myself over him.
Um but I didn't have the time to like really spend all this time. So he was sort of like running it, um for me, but I still insisted on having product reviews.
And and
Um sort of
Talking again about the importance of having people who
um give you candid feedback. Um he took me aside after one of these um product sessions and he's like
You know you're not really that good. Uh in in doing these things. And you're not really that helpful. So most of the time me and the team we're kind of like looking and we're trying to basically
you know, appease you in the meeting, but you're not really adding as much value as you think.
And and not surprisingly my my first instinct was to be really pissed off. Uh I sort of went home. I was like man, I'm gonna have to fire this guy. It's like horrible. Like how could he say that this
But I also realized that that was an emotional response.
So uh 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 I'm gonna give it three months, uh where I don't do the product reviews.
And then we evaluate how this worked.
And lo and behold, he actually did a great job. And so the product uh team was much happier.
Um you know
He was making more of the decisions without me. I wasn't meddling in. There wasn't two different people deciding what worked, but it was really him.
And and
Ever since that moment, um, you know
I don't really run product anymore, uh in the traditional. 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.
Uh not just in sort of that moment, but it also sort of like oh
Wait a minute. So what
Emma.
I really you know, what's my value at then in this company?
And it took me a while and I realized that all of a sudden, hmm, actually you know what? Um
That won't be it, but
maybe I can add value in this place. And I I sort of oscillated to this different place in the company, which
It's much closer to understanding the crater.
and spending more time with with the content uh people, et cetera.
And so my product feedback ended up being
Um, you know, and this is the dynamic sp that's quite unique to Spotify in that we have these two stakeholders.
We have uh consumers on the one end and we have creators.
And so I just
Made it my effort to understand and know the crater.
Way better than anyone else in the company.
And so my product feedback.
to them comes from that lens.
Um 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, um and talking to them and understanding not just
how to use the product.
Their business.
What problems are they facing that's not just sort of how they leverage the product, but actually holistically around them.
And 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.
Um 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.
Uh where uh
you know, business or creators meet consumers and where
Um, you know, there's maybe a third stakeholder we have to consider, uh, in all of this.
Um and so
My whole sort of experience in all of this has really been around kind of
Figuring out who I am and what what I'm innately good at. And this has been a learning journey for twenty years. Well you're just describing right now, ha ha this unfolded over how many years?
I would say
The first ten years was the zero to one journey.
Mm-hmm.
And the last ten has been that journey, where
Uh we're not
zero to one any more
Um
Uh
As a company holistically.
But there are elements of the company where we're searched to one where I'm absolutely a hundred percent involved. I think that's a good
uh like opportunity to talk about another one of your very unique ideas that I also um I there was this excellent I just did this episode on Jeff Bezos'cause he doesn't give that many interviews and so I would take a transcript of his interviews and you treat it like a book and just go through it.
And he said something like from day one he knew like he wanted to build a company that could
outlast him. Yeah. 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.
Yeah. And when I heard him say that it was a few months after you had
beautifully like articulate this idea. It's just like well
Think there's a lot of
You s you're gonna say better than I did.
But essentially like
There is
A
Very
rather clear analogy between
The way your child when they're first born.
Eight.
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 thirteen year old.
You know.
When she was much smaller, she's much like
Me and her mom. Yeah. Right?
And then now she's like she's got traits that I don't even have hundred percent her own decisions and like mate doing things maybe I would do or I would not do.
And you're like it's kinda the same for the company. And you had this idea where, like, I think at the time Spotify was nineteen years old. It's nineteen or twenty years old. Yep.
And it's just like well
You know, year one or two, it is me. It's like the same way you have a two year old. Anyone knows this. Yeah. But now it there's
characteristics that emerge from within the company that are separate from the founder. Yep.
Yep.
That's like a fascinating uh insight.
Yeah, I mean look.
Um
Th there's clearly kind of like three distinct stages of parenthood, right? And um
The first one is you're literally the person that keeps them alive.
Right. Um and you're a hundred percent there. And every you pretty much make every decision for them.
Because they can't make it themselves. And then gradually the next stage is
Um you're there. You're quite involved. You probably step in when they're doing something
Which um uh 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. Um
So the job is much more subtly to just be there.
Um when they need you.
And um
I'm somewhat simplifying it, um but
Um, I think that the as as with everything, don't take it literally, but but sort of
the the core of the the gist of the idea is
certainly a a larger company becomes more and more and an older company becomes more and more of that.
And so much of what I do uh today is literally that. Um I'm I try to
be there for people when they need me, um in various fields. Um which happens, but it's not as often as every day all the time.
Um and
Um
What
I deeply
care about uh today and I do spend a lot of my time on
Is this notion around um
This
First seed.
A new idea.
and protecting that idea and um
I think it's it's probably the most under
reported, talked about, um
uh way is how do you do that?
Like how do you consistently find lighting in a bottle? Like
You know, and is also theoretical.
um, at the point of any strategy book talking about how you do it or
Even when you go behind, um I was
Um
The other day I was with um
uh the the um uh guy Hamilton Hamler who wrote Seven Powers book.
Yeah, which is an amazing book on strategy, by the way.
Um
But one of the most interesting ideas, um
Um
There that I learned after sort of again.
overfitting the concepts in in the book and sort of teaching people about it is
You can only tell uh
That you have power
When when it's there.
It doesn't tell you how to get there.
This is the the the criticism of like
founders and uh the podcasts and the books are like but he's not telling me what to do. It was like this was not a podcast.
For people that want to be told what to do.
Yeah.
Thought about their company.
This is what they experience. 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'cause I turn I tend to turn everything into an abstraction.
So like when I hear you, I've sent this message to you, where like
You kinda remind me of James J. Hill, which is might be the only person that's ever texted you this.
And James J. Hill was the most successful railroad baron of all time.
And I just thought the way you just said the way
He built
He essentially
Was laying railroad tracks, right?
And he was hid the goal of the company was obviously we're gonna have
Goods and people on the tracks. Right.
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. Yep.
And if he builds these communities around it and makes them that makes his railroad more valuable. Yep.
Um, but I I I just I I love this criticism'cause it's like, Oh, you just you gotta find a different show or you gotta find a different thing'cause 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 it's a profession for people that don't direct them right. Exactly. Exactly. It's hilarious about this. I I wanna I think this is tied to something also that is very fascinating with you.
Is
You have a high and most people again.
Like the I think the more control you have over your life, the more success you have.
People make the mistake of like eliminating any any people telling the truth, any inconvenience. They're probably like really brittle.
Mm.
You have
An insane high tolerance for crazy people. Okay.
Um, somebody told me somebody works closely with you.
That you judge people on their best idea, not their worst. And I just finished rereading Jim Simons, founder of RSS Technologies.
Uh
Really?
creator of a magic money machine is really what you think about the guy. Yeah. Um and they said something very similar. Like
It doesn't matter.
He's like if there's a single good idea in your pile of horse manure, like he'll find it. Like he will go through. Yeah.
He all he cares about is the very best ideas. Yeah. He will willing to go through
Ninety nine.
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 as companies age two. Yeah. You know, you're built usually you have
A lot of variants in the beginning. Yeah. And then they get more successful and they kinda they make the corporations make the mistake of like no, we need like to
We need all the edges. We need the high and the low. Yep.
out of there. Yep. You embrace that. You you the way you put it to me.
We were talking about this like
High temperature people. Yeah.
And uh for like
In in like training AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um
Yeah, y yeah. I I I actually think LMs and and the latest advancement in AI kind of have have created an excellent framing on this, um and and sort to talk about this sort of high temperature notion.
So in L of Ms you can basically
Tune up the temperature.
And if you tune up the temperature
Um
You know
It it basically started hallucinating.
So um
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 w the current generation LMs is they're not very creative.
And that's ultimately because we've kind of turned down the temperature on them and we've safety trained them to the point where we keep them within the guardrails.
So there is a way when you train these things, uh, 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 th 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 I'm very reflective at the moment because I am in my nineteenth year.
Um
And um
And and I think it's interesting you sort of talked about big
companies because I used to think w before I sort of ran a big company myself, I just think used to think they're bad.
uh period. And what I I've sort of revised my view and and and now I think they're really good um
At doing what they're already doing and doing it better.
So back to that point, like uh a large scale
corporation, what they do is they just get better and better and better at doing what they already do.
And
Um
The way to do that is obviously minimize mistakes.
So um
you know, that also means minimize brilliance, minimize waste, minimize all these other things.
So naturally what you end up having is uh 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 ninety
percent internally focused on just getting the machine to run.
Um is that have been more and more
Um
able to not just have the free time to think, but I've been more uh able to be 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. Hundred percent like
Yeah.
Hundred percent.
And so so this
Point then is that um
What I truly believe the very best musicians do, um
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. Uh you and I we talked about this over breakfast where
Um, you know, there was a person who sort of
Yeah.
Um
But
Sometimes even you know, the the
The
insight beh b behind the advice, the sort of the question behind the question can lead to some really interesting things.
And so um what I've come to do realize is most people want conformity.
uh and they value sort of a reliable consistency of, you know, uh giving X amount of impact per second or minute or
You know, uh
X uh truthfulness, um, you know, over X percent. They have some sort of heuristics for what is valuable person
uh from a business context or what whatever
sort of context you're judging it on, but certainly in a business concept is conformity. If you want to sort of put people in about it, this person is good, and they're always good.
Um but
You know
W what I'm more interested in these days is
I'm interested in this idea never heard.
Uh about before. Um and
Um I find it with with
You know
Some people um you know
That um even in an hours long conversation
Um, with the best people in the world where I've learned the most.
It may be fifty five minutes of that conversation that honestly was uh y you know
Completely worthless, not that interesting for me. Uh but then there's a
A spur of the moment two three minutes of brilliance.
Which I've never heard before, which will deeply and profoundly impact my life.
Those are my people.
That's what I'm interested in.
And uh I've come to learn that
Uh most people don't like to be around those people. But I love it. Um and I think it's uh
You know
Such a rewarding and interesting thing. And I've I've
Um
I'm looking forward to spending more time.
with those people in the coming decade. Um and it's it's sort of one of those things that I've I've sort of
wanna do more of um and learn more from.
Th I think this is related. One of your oldest friends text me the other day.
And it was a screenshot of this episode I did uh with Cheng Jiang, who's the founder of Hondae.
And it's probably the most ins I think it is the most inspiring autobiography I read.
Because the guy writes the book when he's like ninety, and he grows up the son of a poor farmer.
You know, they almost they had to eat tree bark to survive. He dies. The richest person in South Korea builds this huge conglomerate. I thought I was gonna read a book about a guy making cars. I didn't realize that was like nothing. Like who's building
Did all the construction, build some of the biggest shi in the world. Like he was just his nickname was the Bulldozer.
And the reason he sent me a screenshot in this specific part of a 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. Yeah. They go from like default optimistic, default risk taking to
The any new s idea?
No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Like no, we're not doing that. That's too risky. Like you can't build a car like we're a tiny little, you know, island.
And he goes, Daniel du gives me the same exact advice where
He will say something.
I will say no. And he goes.
But did you even try?
We have.
And I go and then he goes, It's related to his ability if you actually analyze
His willingness to go into all these different industries where he doesn't know anything about the industry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I I I think that sort of comes back to to uh uh the George Bernard show uh short quote, right? The unreasonable man.
Um
Let me read the full quote because it's an excellent quote too.
Uh 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.
Yeah.
And I'm I'm just reminded of that. Uh because I think the reality is, uh it is really, really tough.
to not conform.
To not be part of a group.
And it's so easy.
Uh and there's so many temptations in life that draw us back to that conformity, right? Um
Money's another one. When you make a lot of money, you tend to make life more comfortable.
Um so you tend to spend more time golfing. You spend some time doing all these other things.
Um, but the reality is you become distracted and you're not gonna be on your eight game anymore.
And um
So the hard thing then is uh to keep going.
And keep improving and keep doing these things. But
Um, you're gonna have to sacrifice a lot.
In doing so, you're gonna sacrifice people's birthdays
uh social commitments, uh you're not gonna show up.
uh you know for for a lot of things.
You told me a funny story one time about how committed you are to your work.
And your friends know this about you, that sometimes you'll be in the middle of a dinner.
And then some like an idea comes to mind or something you need to pursue and they just know
Oh, he he's gone. He's not coming back to the game. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not I'm that is an unreasonable
Yeah. People like, Oh, I can't do that social education. I even sometimes I find myself to do this'cause
We're both introverts. We've talked about this before, but like
Um
I I kept getting invited to group dinners. And I just felt like oh, this is like a prestigious group dinner. This person's really successful. People would love this opportunity. And so at the b beginning when I first started doing this,
I start going like
This sucks. I don't I remember one time it they like it was in a private room.
And they shut the doors. And within like five minutes, I knew I was like, I gotta get out of here. I was like, Don't worry, I'm gonna pretend to go to the bathroom and just you know never go back and I was like,'Sa I standing and go, Oh, where's the restroom? Like it's right in the room like Oh no And what I did, which I wouldn't do today, is I sat down and I wasted an hour and a half of my time. Yeah. Instead of just being the unreasonable man. Yeah.
Like I'm not gonna say like what would Daniel act he would get he would get our avoid the dinner in the first place. Yeah, the uh yeah, I I w I would say uh you know, I'm not proud proud of her speaking out um sometimes on that. But
Look, I mean
At at at at the end of the day, um, I I think that uh th that's less about sort of being
Um
Protecting my time.
um and more sort of about protecting um
unique and novel ideas and how rare they are. Um
And and and and by the way, we'll we'll hopefully get into that, but I I
Yeah, I think less about sort of a a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be um
obsessed about time. I'm I'm really not. I'm I'm I'm more obsessed about energy management.
Wait, wait, yeah, let's get to it. Now, what do you mean
Well, I I mean y you know, you you you constantly hear this thing about all these um you know, you're supposed to wake up at four 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 um I know
A lot of successful people on bus, I'm sure you do too. It's like
Some of them wake up at you know noon, some of them wake up at four AM. It's like you can do a lot of different things. The obsession with morning rituals is
Stupid. Yeah.
But the other thing is about s sort of you're supposed to pack every like uh you're supposed to have meetings every fifteen minutes and like if fifteen minute increments is better than the thirty minute increments, so on and so forth. Look, it might work for you. Um
And and for some people it might be like the absolute best thing.
Um
I I've become more obsessed about sort of managing my energy.
Um, because like if you have time but you have no energy
You're not gonna accomplish anything anyway.
So how do you manage your energy then?
Well, it's about finding out um what gives you energy, right, to begin with. Uh and what drains energy. And um it's about finding out which time during the day
Um
you're most productive. Um and it's again innately about understanding yourself.
Um and what the whole world tries to do is get you to conform.
To their schedule.
Oh, we have an eight AM 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.
Yeah, it is about conformity to like the average or to the to a
an okay standard instead of going for excellence.
And what truly, truly is unique. And I think the truly, truly unique th thing is you gotta just figure out what works for you and you gotta do more of that.
And that's um
more about energy management, I believe, and it's so much more about like it even before this thing.
I think both you and I we went and worked out.
Right.
You know, that that gives me energy. Yeah. It's what's gonna sustain the rest of my day. I used to not
do work outs at all because I thought uh I don't have time.
Uh, there's no productivity. I used to go for
Yeah, the the worst uh productivity thing I did was I was at one point doing these
Fifteen minute naps.
I don't know if you've heard about this exercise. No. It's a really bad idea, by the way. So don't don't try this. But I I I sort of learned that you can you can like Day Sishane sleep together by doing like these fifty Oh it's like polyphasic. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the basics just is you're supposed to be able to last like
On four hours of sleep.
I know and also Oh this is great.
So I did that. And actually the interesting side
part is it worked for about three weeks. Um and then I missed one of these
Oh.
Fifteen minute increments on 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 um
You know, it's about s sort of finding that energy management, uh, for yourself. I I think certainly there's
common wisdom uh 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 wanna fly the first thing I was I wanna fly like Superman. Yeah. If I can't do that, I just want
Sustained
Ener high energy levels twenty four seven.
I'cause I need a ton of sleep and I felt bad about this'cause the same exact reason you're describing it's like people's like no, you gotta get up at four thirty or you gotta sleep less or sleep faster, or Nel Schwinger would say, You gotta sleep faster.
And then I'm reading James James Nyssen's first autobiography. And the guy made one of the most successful career uh companies in all of all time. He's still doing it, 76 years old.
And he goes, I need
A hell of a lot of sleep.
Ten 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 building some of the best products on the world and he's sleeping ten hours a day. There are no you just said there are no rules. No. It really uh isn't. And
And so I mean look, you you just gotta find that thing, right? But but when you realize that is so so if you start with that as the b the basic thing.
Um like all the things you and I have been talking about for this time now, um
You know, the reality is it's like it's about knowing yourself, which is really hard and you get to know more. And it's about building a system that works for you.
What what's giving I know hanging out with
Crazy people gives you energy. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Uh
I you know, there's there's actually something. So uh I text a mutual friend of ours, Patrick O'Shaughnessy.
And I was like I'm talking to Daniel and Patrick, I think is asked the best questions in the world. And so obviously I need to like use like phone a friend for
For uh one lifeline. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Um, and he's a good mirror too.
Because like he it's almost like a therapy session. Like he'll be very quiet, doesn't like tension on himself, and yet he'll like hit you with a question like I didn't even think about that. Yeah. Um
And he has this great way to describe you.
' My guess is that
Yeah, I
Like I
Not even guess I'm pretty
I think you're obsessive 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. Yep.
But he goes, uh out of everyone I know
Daniel has the ability to apply what he learns the fastest at the highest level.
Mm-hmm.
And this was actually related to a conversation that we had at your house, which is fascinating. Um
Because again, you're you I know you don't like public adulation, I'm still gonna do it'cause I think it's fascinating.
Where it's like everybody focuses on Spotify, which is
marvelous achievement that very few people on the planet are capable have been able to experience.
And yet they like
Also,'cause it's not really talked about 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. Goes back to the impact over happiness thing. Yeah.
And so we're talking about this.
And I'm like
Were you'cause usually true interest is revealed early. So if we go and look at your life story, just like people are like, Oh, w what hobbies do you have? I'm like
Yeah, 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
Five years old. What's a good hobby for my s future self development? It's like no, I just like reading. I like books better than people in general.
Um
And so you see that in your early life, like you're starting companies and you don't even know it was a company. It's just like trying to do something.
So I was like oh you must be like
Like you must have been interested in like investing forever. And you're like
No. I never even thought about it until two thousand eighteen. Then you said the funniest thing, you go
How did you learn about it goes?
I started listening to Patrick's podcast.
And then I'd hear an idea like, That's a good idea. I would try that. Oh, I don't like that idea. And then start reading books and then you're just literally
Taught yourself.
You weren't interested at all. Yep. And now
You
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.
Well like explaining.

about this, where it's like I always say learning is not memorizing information, learning is changing your behavior. Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah. I'm not reading this book, even if you find it enjoyable. Yeah. Like I'm looking to like apply this. Yeah.
Well, I I I I think it's back to that, like
Um
Sort of these two concepts we talked about. Um
My whole journey is one of self mastery.
And and finding out uh
How I can become the best version of myself.
Um
And
Meanwhile, what gives me energy is solving problems.
Um you know, and and as you say, um I think this is revealed early.
Uh 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 uh 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 eighty, 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 just like
Most of the people, they're not like I'm starting a company for some company's sake.
Just say what you said.
I like solving problems. Yeah.
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 a a pretty good revealer of your things too. Like
I wasn't um
playing any kind of first person shooter games or any 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 uh how to run businesses uh better in in you know so those were sort of my favorite games um you know growing up
Yeah, I love Sim City.
SimCity was amazing. Uh this is where I was saying about entrepreneurs is like it's the best job in the world. I don't understand the people that give it up rul like
Uh
I hate even saying this'cause I 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 y 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. 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. Like, sorry to hear that. Like, what? Yeah. I'm like, why would you get out of the game and then they sell their company and they go be a VC. I'm like, Oh my God. Yeah.
This is the best game in the world. It's never ending. It's not like sports where like 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 I'm there were world builders.
You get to control like
Who's around you, what your w what are like what are the rules in the world that happens. Yeah. What's the outcome of the people in the world. Yeah.
And then you get to make and hopefully you're doing it for like benevolent and and good reasons, where I do think like
Uh, one of my favorite um quotes from Maximus from the History of Entrepreneurship.
comes from Henry Ford where he's like money comes naturally as a result of service. Yeah. And the crazy thing about Henry Ford
is by nineteen nineteen he owned a hundred percent'cause he bought out his investors.
of one of the most valuable companies in the world. And he didn't do it to start a company.
He had one idea.
I've read.
Ten books on the sky and people are doing forever. He's like
One idea, it's kinda 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. Yep. Right.
And he's just like
I wanna build a car for the every man. Yep. Y you said something very er in the early days of Spotify. It's like I w have this goal of, you know, this celestial jukebox or whatever the case is.
And you said at the very I don't know how I'm gonna do it. He said the same thing, but I learned how to do it. He's like oh well
How can I make a car cheaper? Sure, so I can't put'em by hand. So we've got to learn how to mass produce something we don't know how to do yet. And that took'em, you know, a decade and a half of failure or whatever.
And then what happens is
Didn't start the company to make money.
But he made millions of people's lives better. He changed the geography of you know the world, for God's sake. Yeah. And as a result
Money came naturally as a result of service.
That that's a hundred percent how I think about it. Then I think this is the beauty of capitalism.
Right. Um because ultimately uh at the end there has to be someone willing to pay for what you're doing.
And the the reason for them to pay is obviously solving a problem for them.
And the better you're solving that problem or the bigger the problem is that you're solving for people, the more valuable it becomes.
Wh what did you say earlier too? You're like
I forgot how to you how you phrase it, but in my mind when I interpret it what you said, uh uh it's this idea of not being a go getter, but being a go giver.
Saying something like the more problems you solve.
The more comes back to you? Was that the Well so the these are two different ideas, but sort of closely related. So uh it was actually my co founder who sort of said the value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.
And if you really think about it, it is exactly what it is.
Um so like
I tell this to the team because when we face very difficult problems, uh
It is great.
Because again, if we solve these problems, we will create a lot of value.
I keep saying you think like basis.
So there's a great line.
Uh
Same thing. Where um he says that I'm reading reading his shareholder letters for the fourth time.
And it's like these are so good and so clear.
And concise. I should read them every year.
And I was like, I feel like I just read them and I w looked it up. I haven't read them since the end of two thousand twenty two.
But there's all these stories and bases his early career.
Where people on Amazon would come to him with a huge problem. They thought maybe they get fired and they he got excited. Yeah.
Yeah.
'Cause he's like, Oh great, like we had a problem we didn't even know. If we solve this, our company gets even more valuable. Yeah. Exactly. There's this guy named Henry Kaiser who was as famous in his day as maybe like an Elon is
Today.
And he built a hundred companies.
One of them still exists, Kaiser Perretente. He built the Hoover Dam, he built the Liberty ships in World War Two.
And he has this great maxim that like people would come to him and they'd be all depressed and he'd be excited.
But the hose
Going on here.
Uh Henry.
And he goes, Problems are just opportunities and workflows. Right.
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 like and then you also have to feel good about what you're
Creating into the world. A hundred percent. But I think it comes from from solving problems. And and um
And and and and so yeah, I mean, uh like I get excited today. You you sort of asked to like about the other stuff that I get focused on. It's
I don't focus so much about the solution, I focus on the problem.
I try to find really interesting problems that um
And and figuring out.
Even if if there's like a five or ten percent chance of solving that problem
And I know that would be huge for humanity or society if we figure it out.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Like the that gets me fired up.
And and the intricacies of solving that problem because it's oftentimes very, very complex because it's not like other people don't know.
This problem exists.
Uh, there's probably even a lot of people that are would agree that if we could figure it out, uh that would be really valuable.
Um but um you know
I I find this all the time and and you said it yourself. It's like sometimes they're really small, these problems, sometimes they're gigantic and and
sort of earth shadowingly different. Um it's everything around, you know, life extension to
Um, you know, um
uh just walking into a store, um, and you see things you don't like in the store. Well those are problems.
Uh, if you could do those things better, you could probably build a business.
And and so um
The the
Biggest thing however is that
People have this misconception about what what um innovation is. And they somehow think that they gotta try to figure out something entirely new. But the history of the world is we build on other people's ideas.
Um, so an innovation is actually taking two or more things that were already well known and putting it together in a new way.
It's really what it is.
And so for me the most im uh interesting thing is like laying a puzzle or anything else, it's like I get to
sit around and um because of the meeting so many billion people
I get to listen to problems uh all o all around me all the time and I try to
Um distill and figure out okay, well this
person said this thing, but what if what if you actually articulate the problem like this since then?
Uh okay, well what does that mean? What does that unlock?
And and that for me is just um
It's so much fun and I couldn't imagine, you know, not spending every single day
Doing this and
You know, we we we started this journey by telling my story that I didn't have to work. And that's why I started Spotify because I love music and 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.
Um and that's really the genesis of the story.
Um, but but even today, you know, I'm thinking about this and I said if even if you remove all the money, even from the beginning, uh, even in the middle, and even now
uh there's no way I wouldn't do this. Uh and spend mo much of my awaken time thinking about this th stuff.
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Th you said something in the early days of Spotify that was very fascinating. You you wanted to build
Like an enduring and impactful company that did something that no one else did.
Right?
It's Rocco also like when I'm listening to the series that was uh
created in two thousand twenty one, how much you guys are talking about AI and how early you were and you understood the impact, which is like you kind of saw clearly like where we're going.
Uh but you said something that
I didn't actually understand. Because the way I think about technology is like technology is just
A better way to do something.
Right. And you're like at Spotify though, like at the very beginning, it's like
Yeah, I think you nailed it, you're like
The decisions that were made.
Have to do with the DNA of the founder,'cause we're the only ones there.
But you said I like technology for technology's sake. Yeah. What does that mean?
Um
I I like the process of science.
I like the process of discovery. I like the process of understanding the how things work.
Um, you know, I've I've been wired this way all all my life. I've been pulling apart computers, I've been trying to understand why
A semiconductor works the way it works, all these things.
Um and I'm intrigued.
about that. Understand where we come from, understanding all these different things.
Uh but I'm equally.
interested in solving problems. And when when you're curious about both of those two angles
You try y you you can end up
Finding these sort of
Um
Sort of
um connection points where those two things meet. Where it's obvious that there is something over there, um that no one's really kind of applied in this way before. Or and maybe there's not one idea but two ideas over there. It's quite interesting.
Um and
And
I think you have to love technology in order to go to the depth of understanding what's possible.
And and because it's oftentimes like
The greatest ideas is
Truly innately understanding something.
And truly innately breaking constraints around
That's something.
Um by understanding the rules and knowing when when you can break them. Yeah. And so
Like what are the greatest entrepreneurs really? Well the greatest founders are the people that kind of have this one idea of w like what the
They can almost internalize the consumer.
Uh right, like w what is someone willing, what what do they need, even if they can't articulate it themselves.
And then
Have this entire field.
of amazing brilliant engineers and scientists and
Mathematicians and all these
Groups of people.
That are doing various things.
And then sort of figure out the intersection. And then you actually have to make it viable too, which is you have to have some sort of business model. Because if you don't have that, eventually
this thing won't be sustainable.
So
You know.
It it's sort of the trifecta of those three things. And that makes it even more interesting.
Because now we're talking about uh
you know, uh uh a really complex equation trying to get these things together with multiple unknowns and you're trying to configure these things by locking down constraints on one side and then you're trying another side.
And the amazing thing about early stage entrepreneurship is
Uh you know, we we talked about this.
Google example of trying to underdift the colours, you can't do that early on.
That is the amazing thing. Every decision you make is life or death.
And that makes sort of the stakes even higher because you may literally try one thing and then you run out of money.
And so you gotta make sure that is the right thing.
Um and um
It it's just such a fascinating process.
But it comes back. It's a process of creativity. It's a process of trying things out.
And
I'm more and more enamored and more and more
Um
in love with this idea that um
Creativity itself.
uh is this really, really powerful thing, maybe the thing that's makes us unique as humans relative to everything else that exists in this world.
And kind of going deeper and deeper into creativity um itself.
And um
And it doesn't come for him.
And it doesn't scale.
And it doesn't behave in any of these other things, and then you have this other side.
Which is all about scale, which is all about conforming and and
sort of navigating that sort of um
dynamism between these two things and polarities between these two things is
It's
You know.
Very few people that I think uh can do, and it's
really, really well class at doing it. I think most of us you can't even describe why you're doing what you're doing at the time.
And what I mean by that is like you you hinted on this earlier, it's like
It's so easy to kill.
New ideas.
Right. The error on the side of no, we can't do this.
It's it's amazing to me how many times this comes up in all these biographies, where it's just like that's a skill you have to learn.
And a lot of it is like being comfortable with the the the messiness of the creator product.
Process?
But it's also
I sure is but
Definition.
Impatient.
Patient. Yeah. Like they have this this what looks like a paradox where like they want shit done now. I love uh Jeff Basel says about this step by step ferociously. Yep. I'm but you know, that's the
I'm willing to
T.
plan, you know, to to if for take two decades or three decades to solve the problem that I'm trying to go after maybe in some cases stuff that he's working on might even outlive his his lifetime. But it doesn't mean I'm like dilly dally on a day to day basis.
I heard you say something one time, you're like, I 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 is like I just have super like I have super patience. Yeah.
Um I think
Necho.
is like an example of this. I met your co founder on it.
And I got to to see this too.
And I was like, Oh, like this is cool. Like who made the machines? This is like
We did. Yeah. And and then I didn't know it was like
I don't know if stealth is the right word, but from the idea to the first time the customer happened, it was what, like six years or something or four years. No, it's uh the company's eight years old and we barely began.
Yeah.
And it's like okay.
That's an insane love. That's an understanding of like we're ta tackling one something that's yeah. I like what you just said, like uh w innovation and creativity is actually a combination of things that occurred before, yeah, that were combining.
Yeah.
Right.
And um when you mentioned that I thought of like, you know, James Dyson's one of my entrepreneurial heroes. And what I love about one of the hidden
Things that people don't know.
is he wrote a book called The History of Great Inventions. Yeah. It's such a like
It's not it's kind of a bland read, right? God bless his heart. But like it's just him going through like little Wikipedia pages or like my ver his version of like Wikipedia pages about like what this inventor did, how he did it, and what the result was. And then you see him take these ideas from like seventeen hundred or whatever.
And it's like, Oh, I'll just take like that little piece out here and I'll combine it with this piece and then what's
What's the new technology today that enables me to solve this problem that didn't exist a few years ago? So you have this patience, right? You have this desire to solve problems. It's almost like it sounded like to me, and maybe you could disagree with me, like you're sounding like you see a giant puzzle.
Yeah. That you're trying to figure out it was it. Now you have uh like you can you have more resources, you can be patient, like you couldn't have done NECO twenty when you were twenty three. Yep. Right?
Wait.

You have this great quote that I know is important to you.
And it says quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent
Effort. Yeah. We haven't talked about quality at all, even though
Like
Spotify's the high like if you compare your competitors, like
It's just in a class by itself. Yeah. So it's obviously very important to you. Yeah.
Like we can't
We have to talk about quality. So like do you want to like
Just pick up where that quote leaves off.
Well well there there's so many strands of quality, right? Um
Um
It it it is both
Um sort of
the distinction of taste, whether taste is subjective or objective. You can go so many ways with this question.
But um the way I think about quality um
Is
Um
I I think so much of your
Early life.
Um
Certainly my case was
the formulation of just trying to go for more.
And
The further I've gotten, uh, I've realized um and and it's about everything, right? You amass more.
Stuff.
Uh, you're a massive uh
You try to do um you know, more things at the same time. You you try to do all of these things um at the same time.
And the further you go
You realize that um
It it it really is about
Sort of.
Ultimately.
the this very simplistic tribe thing less is more.
And and the older I get, I feel it.
More and more.
Um
You know, we talked about it with friends. Um
I think most people, uh start outs
W thinking having more friends is better.
But I think more people are happier with
Fewer but better friends than many friends.
Um
And and so
I think
qualities ultimately this sort of notion around
Um
Focusing um
Distilling.
Uh getting to the S essence.
Uh we c we can even talk about like
quality in communication is often trimming things down and saying less.
Things, right?
Um, why is it for instance that when we're talking about very hard things, most people's instant reaction is just to try to
add more complexity to the issue.
Instead of just simplifying it, they're just
Trying to um be courageous and just trying to say the thing
Right out loud.
Uh, the older I get, the more of my instinct is towards turning towards that. And
I'm reminded even if we go back to investing, because like part of why I sort of liked investing has nothing to do with money.
It started with uh honestly this fact that all of a sudden I had more money than I knew what to do with and I sort of didn't wanna just
hand it off to a bank and and
Uh without understanding anything about it.
What
sort of got me deeper curious about it is uh I realized that
Investing is is actually more about um
learning about your temperament
than it is about the specific action that you're doing. Your temperament actually it's it's more about being in line with your temperament than
the nod or which game you're picking.
needs to be suited to you and your circumstances and how you want to play this than anything else.
And so again, we come back to philosophy, um
And so
One of the concepts uh
Uh is obviously around uh the Munger talks about coming back to uh Munger
uh reference again is it's diversification, right? And
And he calls it s somewhat simplified diversification. Because
The common wisdom, of course, is in theory, diversification is is the best thing you can do. But
the truly greatest people, um, financially, if that's the only yardstick you use.
typically do completely the opposite of that. Which is
They have
Oftentimes only one asset.
Yeah.
Maybe they'll have two or three, but they certainly don't have more than that.
And they just go for that.
There is a

you have, right?'Cause like I I read something or you read a line.
And you're like, Okay, let me filter that through like how I would say it. So I I do this all the time, where like I'll take uh notes on all the books that I read.
And then I'll reread them and just jot the town. I was like, what's occurring there? Can I put it into one sentence? And one thing I stumbled upon about this was.
that sometimes the uh Nick Sleep has this great quote where he's like the best investors are not investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold. And me and you have talked about this the fact that there's a lot of people that have like sold way too early and they're like lauded. And it's like what if you just didn't do that, everything else you did
Like you if you just didn't sell.
Uh
The so w Nick Sleep talks about this as like and in other books was like
If Sam Walton didn't give away the stock in Walmart to his kids before it appreciated.
You know, you have one of the largest fortunes by single person ever.
The their ownership, the uh the constitution of ownership in Walmart.
And Sam talks about these like I didn't really do investing in anything but Walmart, right?
And it's like he wasn't waking up.
Saying I need to diversify more portfolio. I need to worry about capital allocation. He's just like I believe in what I'm doing. I'm gonna keep doing it, I'm gonna throw all my money in there.
Yeah. And it's just like I doing it'cause I love to do it and spending time doing anything else would be
An absolute distraction. And Nick Sleep talks about this because he's
Yeah, capital allocated. He's not building a product, but he's making capital allocation decisions like do I need to sell the stock, put into another one, I'm weighing my opportunity costs.
And he was haunted almost by this idea, if you look at financial history, it's like
He talked about a firm a financial firm one day.
Where they're like, Okay.
Uh, we owned IBM in the f nineteen fifties. And I didn't know till I read Michael Dell's autobiography, right? Because IBM was
It's like they're the most powerful um
wealthiest company in the world, we mean you report.
Okay.
And
Michael Dell's like, you have to understand, like 1987, for me to like yell out to my dad, he's like, What do you want to do for a living? He's like, I want to compete with IBM. I'm in I'm a 19 year old in my
dormro with a thousand dollars, like what kind of grandiose ambition do you have?
I witnessed like
Why is it so crazy? And I started it's
was the most valuable company in the world by market cap at the time. It was the first company to go over a hundred billion dollars in market cap, right? And this little nineteen year old kid's like, No, I think I can like
Have a go have a go at them.
But Nick Sleep talks about
he came into this firm and he's reading their their how they talk about their investments and like we made a massive mistake.
We owned IBM.
In the 1950s, and we sold. And they're having this conversation in the 1970s. And the leadership of the financial firm is like, how do we avoid
Not doing this.
That one they they said if we just held that
It would have
uh the gain would have been more than all the assets we have in our management. Like we can't do this. Yep.
That same year.
They sold Walmart. They have Walmart
In the nineteen seventies.
So they made the same mistake.
And
Buffett, obviously greatest investor of all time. He met Walt Disney. He went and talked to Walt Disney in like the sixties.
And then he I think the he bought the stock at like sixty two cents or something. Right.
And he he had like a two X or four X game. He's like
Well I sold Disney. Yeah.
So it's the that's why I was like, Oh, the best financial decisions are not financial decisions at all. You're doing it for another reason, which is exactly what you said. It's like
All Sam had to do was just keep doing Walmart, exactly what he did. I remember um
Yeah, uh they said of in Miami.
Uh on a friend's boat and uh the marina there.
And there's like the b uh boat like bigger than anything else around there. It's like and you can Google like who owns it. It is like
It was Sam Walton's brother's daughter.
It's crazy. But but
But I think we're on to something important. Um
Wh which is this notion around?
Just
um innately focusing um and and solving problems day by day builds quality.
Right.
Um and and and so
Uh quality for me is is less. Quality for me is uh focus. Quality for me is
Improving day by day.
Um, all of these things build quality and quality is rare.
Um quality in people is rare, quality in ideas is rare.
And
We tend to make these things binary.
Um and uh we talked about it with people. Like I'd rather have that
Person that has
One good idea in a um in an entire hour and
The rest is crap.
Than someone who has
You know, ten.
Decent ideas, but nothing is amazing.
So that sort of differential equation between the one percent versus the rest is is so important and it's so important to understand. And I think it's it's
We again
take it literally, uh, and we know about it because we can explain it in hindsight, but we don't know when it's happening.
So 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. And um I'm more and more drawn towards that um
It is
Um for me at least.
very much looking at the people um in it. Um
and looking at how they build judgment over time, the sort of feedback loop they create, the curiosity that they have about this and the obsession they have.
about trying to achieve the impossible and for me the impossible is something that's perfect
It's never gonna exist. The whole universe is this thing where
The only thing we've learned, we keep debating all these things about the universe, but the only thing we know is it's not static.
It moves.
It cannot by definition be like this one thing. It's just constantly expanding or contrasting or it's moving. It's it's um
So so perfection just doesn't exist. But
The aspiration towards perfection.
uh is a remarkable thing. I mean I love Japan for this reason, right?
Like you you find these amazing individuals that literally spend their entire life
I was um in Japan uh maybe ten days ago or something, and I
I I was in one of these temples uh with a team master.
who literally all he's done uh for the past
Uh I've asked them for the past thirty four years.
is perfecting how to make tea.
That's it.
Nothing else.
Uh and yes, the tea is amazing.
But
It's not just that, it's just seeing that obsession about quality, seeing that obsession about
I'm being
Not even one percent.
But like point one percent or point point one percent uh in something.
And I think feel like you you you sort of asked about AI and all these things.
And and
We can talk about art too, but like
Uh for me
Like
Mm.
That is gonna be even rarer.
Like average is gonna be possible to do even better than average is gonna be possible to do with AI.
But but that's sort of
thing about this guy doing this for thirty years just becoming the very, very best
About what they do or
Even what I find incredibly inspiring by you is just the relentlessness.
Every single day towards the long term.
It's it's like the as you say, it's the paradox
about the long term. Um
uh m mindedness, uh, but uh the obsession on a daily basis.
uh and against conventional odds, against all these other things, because I I I would imagine, I don't know, but I would imagine like when you started
Uh founders.
Uh probably not many people knew who you were, right? Nobody. Nobody, right? And so the the
competition for your time.
Uh was there was none. So you could probably sit for six hours or eight hours, et cetera. But today
It's much harder.
Um, because there's many m other things. There's people like myself and other
people then you're like, Oh, wait a minute, maybe this is a good idea to meet this person or there's uh
uh, you know, um a business opportunity that shows up and maybe people are asking like maybe you should invest and maybe you're tempted about it even.
But it's this is the thing that happens.
All the time. And this is how greatness gets evaporated is you lose focus. That's a great line. Greatness gets evaporated.
The a lot of the stuff like when I talk on the podcast or ev everything I say social media is like reminders to myself. Cause I just read
reread past highlights'cause like we forget that we forget. And so I need a reminder.
And it just cross one that's just like
Uh I've had them presented to me in a random. So it's like I never know what I'm gonna read that day.
And it's at uh there's a buffet it's like a difference between successful people and and really successful people is really successful people say no to everything. Yeah.
And this is exactly the constant thing where like
I do have a question for you. Um
One, I going back to that, it's like
I can't even explain.
why I did what I did because like I had
close to no traction for five and a half years. Mm-hmm.
And now I look back I'm like there's no way I would do that today. Yeah.
But somehow that person who I now greatly appreciate a lot that he I feels like a different person. Yeah that I cannot believe that is like what I'm most proud of is not like
Trying to make something that's great.
Which I think is a selfish thing for us. It's like yes, uh 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 like you it you have to. It has to come out.
Yeah.
But I just cannot believe that
I did that and I'm just like that's the thing I'm most more most proud of than anything else. Just like
I had to do this. I was willing to like
drive Uber if I had to, ten bar, do literally whatever. I was like just
I w give me enough time, I'll figure it out. Now I didn't think it was gonna take
Half a decade to figure out you have a ton of stories with Spotify with that.
There is no line, I feel, between
Like your work and your life, like they're one and the same. Yeah.
the issue that I'm having now and in general is that I feel
a lot of pressure'cause like I'm trying to change not just my life, but like the trajectory of like
My entire family. And I feel very guilty when I don't work. To the point where like
you know, I just got back from a a crazy trip that people would love to go on and like I just felt guilty for not for like taking time
out and off not working. Yeah. And I feel like this is like almost like a compulsion, like I don't have control over it. Yeah.
Do you have anything like that?
Sure.
Um, I do feel the same thing, of course. Um
But
I'm I'm back to sort of time versus energy.
uh management. And um I don't know about you, but I feel like
the greatest ideas I've had uh comes from the most weird and wonderful places where
I expected not.
out of it.
So quite often when I do take some time off
I come back with like two or three and um
Some entirely new insights.
They just wouldn't have come if I just kept grinding at that thing by just changing a scenery.
uh being in a different frame of mind, uh passing
Giving um you know, it's it's it's in the creative process, you know, um the greatest artists talk about
Some of the greatest songs literally take five minutes to write.
Yeah.
Which is amazing, right? But some songs are the ones you like work on it. Um, you put it in a drawer and six months later
Totally unbeknownst to you. The clicks.
You're not even working on that thing. It just sort of like oh
That's it.
And they go back and they do the song and it's like the greatest song ever.
Um there's not one path.
to greatness. Um there's many.
Um and
I feel like
The that's that's why I'm so obsessively focused on energy.
So you mean energy is like you just let that guide you?
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 or like yeah, a hundred percent. Um and and I try to
Uh
feel that. I feel like so much of our our
um life just rips us apart from this thing and tries to get us on a schedule per se. Um and it's not like I don't have a schedule. Of course I do have one. And
Um
But but I feel so much of it should be more guided by trying to
understand ourselves more.
Um
Intimately, right.
So I I don't know if you've you've heard of this, but um going back to sleep, there there's been this kind of
Thing around um
More recently, which I was surprised one of my my ten year old daughters told me about this is around
Um
Um that um
Actually, you know, um
She's she sort of said, Like we have this idea that uh of eight hours and and she actually mentioned instead that
Um
Yeah, the real notion is um that it
We kind of did it almost like fasting. Um
Like Ramadan is, you know how
It's based on the sun sometimes. It could be six hours or something, it could be twelve hours. So
He used to be the sleep was actually
Uh in two periods.
Uh so you didn't sleep one consecutive thing, you sort of had a um
three, four hour sleep. Uh and then you know, you woke up and then you had another three, four hour sleep again.
And so much of that was based on light.
Um, and you know, maybe it was driven by other things that were happening in our life too.
And for Nordic people, what it actually meant, uh, going back as as late as the you know, eighteenth century, before we started having electric lights and candles and all these things is
We actually slept a lot uh less on the summers and we slept a lot more in the winters.
Guided by lights.
So we keep thinking it's the static thing, but it's actually again driven by the environment around us.
And so much
Um of this sort of
Innate knowledge about listening to ourselves.
understanding um our
um innate personality, understanding
hunger, like I I can tell you someone I've I've
Gained.
in periods of my life like um forty pounds.
um in my worst negotiations, etc.
And and 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 of of understanding when I'm hungry and when I'm not hungry.
Um so um you know
Huge part of
losing weight for me over the past few years was just really kind of innately starting to
Listening to my body again.
And like starting to figure out what s satiation means because for me, for instance, I don't feel it until twenty minutes after.
So like i if if I didn't like sort of I what I should eat, I wouldn't just keep eating way more than I should.
Um, and so much of me has just been portion sizing of like understanding, okay, well that's probably
Gonna be enough.
And it doesn't feel like enough at that moment because I ruined my body, but twenty minutes later I understand it.
And so I'm just trying to sort of again convey this sort of thing about
Understanding who you are, choosing the game you're playing and realizing
That there's life is not one game, but it's a thousand games.
And there's this brilliant quote, um
by this guy called Kwame Appia that that's another one of those things I just sort of got circled it. Perfect timing. We're no we're in perfect alignment. Go ahead. Well uh I'm probably gonna ruin the exact one so so maybe you can read it. Okay, I'll read it. It's 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.
Yeah.
And and for me
uh realizing that
Um
It it it's just been eye opening, right? Uh it's another one that's on my wall.
Um because I feel like
quite often when I'm talking to people
Um
And and they're talking and trying to get life advice.
They're not playing their game.
They're playing someone else's game.
Uh they're certainly not playing the game they wanna be playing. But they somehow think that life is just one game.
Where actually so much is about choosing the r the right game for you.
Um and so
Um
Yeah, I keep coming back to that. Like energy management is the same thing. You gotta like uh create the environment around you that you wanna do. You gotta choose your game.
Um and when you do that and you start
Understanding that
You start
becoming superhuman in your ability to get things done.
Do you have more or less negative self talk today than you did
twenty years ago.
I I was
I'm more comfortable.
With who I am.
Um
than I was twenty years ago.
I was still very much my whole life I've been a searcher.
I've been um you know, uh when I was really young in my teens I went to every possible religious meetup you could be
Uh I went to everything. Uh I went to Hare Krishna centers. I went to
to um
You know, um uh
Mm-hmm.
Jewish centers, um you know, mosques. I wanted everything.
And I try to learn as much as possible because I I truly believe not enough people are are like
I 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 sort of
Some of the greatest questions then.
I like many others don't have any idea uh obviously what what will happen, but
I think they're they're really important. So I've always been a searcher.
And I think that naturally sort of like led me to sort of also be a searcher about myself too.
Um and and trying to find
Sort of who I am.
The older I've gotten the more and more things have started clicking about myself.
And the more unapologetic.
I am a bat uh And so your inner monologue gets
less harsh. Yeah. Because like, you know, not only do you stand out quite a lot, um, as an entrepreneur, um, and my interests were widely different than my social circuit growing up and all these things, but the second thing is I'm an introvert.
Um, so um you know that doesn't help. Um so most people like being around a lot of people.
And they get energy from it. I didn't.
So that obviously naturally um gets you to question yourself and
You know, against um many others as an entrepreneur, I'm not the most eloquent person. I'm not the smartest
You're pretty damn eloquent.
Well I I have to work on it. That's still like the hard thing. I've I've really, really I'm listening. I've listened to all your episodes or all your interviews.
And I did this before we were friends and I n every time something comes out, I was like, Oh, I gotta watch that. You're you're very you're not giving yourself enough credit. Like you are a very clear communicator. Thank you. Yeah. Um but but it's really a work product. Like I I wish
There was more recorded stuff on my myself when I was like
Twenty. And twenty one. Uh I I was I was not great.
Uh I was quite terrible. Um
And and so I've just learned that it's a superpower uh and something I have to work on is 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 wanna come and join.
Uh whatever thing we we're trying to will into this
World.
I have two more questions.
Uh
That I'm personally curious about.
One is gonna be a very weird question, but the first one is
Do you feel
different. Okay. So like most of the people watching this or listening to this.
Like so few people are going to be born in the projects
And
A tiny little We didn't even have to do like
This every year if you're fine with it.
Uh because like the idea that you even like
come from this tiny little island which I was like
Uh you know.
Uh
Like got to visit.
And then you like competing with the biggest companies in the world and you win. It's just doesn't like we we didn't even get there. Yeah.
But like
You grow up
You have a great mom, y you know, you're single family, not a lot of money, but
And then now
What I'm curious about is like your lived experience is so
There's so few people alive that can actually
empathize with that as
Because they also had it.
So
I'm very curious, do you
feel different.
Um
And what I mean by it is like as
Yeah.
You've grown from, you know, a kid in the projects. Yeah.
Even if you had early success, to now being, you know, one of the most
successful entrepreneurs on the planet, which I know don't do the face.
But it's a undeniable fact. Like do you feel different?
I think yes or no.
Um
So I I feel different in in the same way a forty year old would feel different than a ten year old would you. I feel different in um I'm a product of all the experiences of my life and obviously I've been incredibly fortunate to
Uh I was counting the other day I've been to like a hundred and
thirty 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.
Um
I don't feel different because
Innately many of the
Things.
the drive, the long termness, the obsession, the
Um
Um
this sort of willingness on the paradox of winning on the one hand
But then also trying to truly find a win win. Um
and work with people to try to find a win win, which is really important to me.
Um
Uh has always been there.
And it's always been these things. And like you said, you know, you kinda look back at
uh yourself uh a few years back when you started off and saying, Wow, how did I do this? Um and and you're amazed at that.
I can feel the same way about young that now.
I can feel myself about the young Daniel that worked every weekend.
Um
um, you know, nonstop twenty four seven sacrificed so many things, so many summers, so many other things.
Um, you know, I had a blast doing so, but I didn't have a normal upbringing.
uh just because I was so obsessed about learning, so obsessed about uh making it. Um
And
And it put me in the position of where I am today.
Um
And
I actually feel like I owe that guy.
To keep
pushing myself, right? Because there's so many things. There's so many demands of my time. So many things that's tells me to to sort of
down shift gear uh into an easier gear because life would be a lot more comfortable that way.
This is not a comfortable thing.
So I think I text this to you.
Um
But
One one of the roles you play, and I'm very grateful that you allowed us to like record this conversation because
Essentially w what I texture is like you seem to have like no self imposed ceiling on what you can learn or achieve.
And that spending time with you then transfers that belief to other people.
And so like every single time.
You know, I obviously like
I take notes of like what I learned from the conversation we have after the fact.
And I interpret it as like obviously not verbatim.
I'm saying like
What did I just learn from Daniel and what is the part of me? It's like oh
You have all these so you think you don't I thought like I was ambitious and I like I didn't even realize till you kinda pulled the scales off my eyes like.
You have this like limiting belief that you have no limits. There is no limits in life. And so like
You're hell of inspiring. One other question for you.
Um I'm obsessed.
With Game of Thrones to an unhealthy degree. Um, I re watch the series all the time. I've read all the books.
I read the encyclopedia.
I'll read the family histories because I do think like
Like you can learn a lot from human nature in f in fiction. And and my job
And my obsession requires me to ninety nine percent of my reading is nonfiction and I don't
I wanna read more fiction. Yep. And I I came across something recently because I'm going through Jeff Bezos Shareholders again and then I read like
What was my interpretation of this in the past? And then I came across something that was fascinating. There's a there's a story in the prequels to Game of Thrones.
Where uh two brothers
um 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. Yep. He wind up dying in the war that he didn't want to
Yeah, to
Fighting in the first place.
Sta 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.
Mm. So hopefully you don't you 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?
Um
I I don't think too much anymore. I used to think a lot about how other people s saw me or see me. Um I don't do that anymore.
Um so I would
I would choose
More of a self reflective.
Uh one.
Um
Um
And I wish um only one thing um on my tombstone future one feels absurd talking about it, but
Uh would be that um he lived.
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 uh I really appreciate doing this. Well well, thank you so much, and it's such a huge honor to be your first guest in this series. Of course.
Thank you so much. We're gonna have it any other way.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade.
I've obsessively read over four hundred biographies of history screen entrepreneurs.
Searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.