DAVID SENRA: Daniel Ek, Spotify
Guests: Daniel Ek
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today, I'm excited to share the launch of a new podcast that I've helped create and produce.
This new podcast is hosted by David Senra.
For those of you not familiar with David Senra, he is the expert in all things greatness.
He studies greatness, and he understands it, mostly in the domain of business,
but also creatives, athletes, and other world-class performers.
In this new show, David sits down with the best of the best business founders and extreme winners to understand their drive, their process of creation, how they overcome failures, their lessons in leadership, and other tools for achieving success.
This first episode of the podcast is with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify.
It's an absolutely spectacular conversation that I'm certain you'll enjoy.
If you'd like to listen to future episodes of this new podcast, please be sure to subscribe to it.
It's simply called David Senra, and links to it are in the show notes for this episode.
Again, the podcast is called David Senra.
Episode two of David Senra will be with the founder of Dell Technologies, Michael Dell.
So again, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening now.
And now, episode one of David Senra with the founder of Spotify, Daniel Ek.
So I want to consider this conversation like a continuation of the conversation we had last year in New York.
it was by far the most impactful conversation I had the entire year.
It is in large part the reason we're sitting down and actually recording this conversation.
And what I loved was I thought about how the advice you gave and the stories you told
really fundamentally changed my approach to my work and then also like my philosophy of how I'm living my life.
And because you, it's very rare, like this year I'm going to hit over 400 biographies read for the podcast, right?
And somebody asked me recently, it's like, do you ever uncover new ideas?
It's like, no, I feel like I'm telling the same story, the same personality type over and over and over again.
And you'll get a new idea or a novel idea every once in a while, but certainly not all the time.
But you shared something at the dinner that was a truly novel idea.
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 going to read something.
There was an interview given by the CEO of Uber, who's a friend of yours, Dara.
Yeah. And I'm going to read this excerpt, which was absolutely perfect. And he was talking about 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. I haven't heard anybody else articulate that.
And so Dara says, I was reading about all the issues happening with Uber in the news, the various challenges that were coming up there.
So when I first got the call to be the CEO, I said, heck no, I'm not crazy.
I'm not up for this.
But I had one particular conversation that really shifted me, which was with Daniel Ek, who's a good friend.
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 he did this to me too.
And he looks at me and he goes, since when is life about happiness?
It's about impact.
You can have an impact on Uber, which is a really important company in the world that's shaping the future of cities.
And I thought to myself, my God, this is so obvious.
I've got to take a shot.
I knew it was going to be uncomfortable.
Can you just explain how you think about optimizing for impact over happiness and why?
Well, first off, it's incredibly kind of Dara to say that.
You know, I think about this.
I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact.
And I think you can be, you know, you can feel happiness in small bursts, in small moments, and you can have a lot of variance in your life.
So you can choose to have that part, which is the ups, the downs of life, et cetera.
So I'm not saying you can't have happiness, but I think truly sustained happiness comes from impact.
And impact is something that's deeply personal to you.
Only you can define what impact means for you.
So I think it means different things for different people.
But I do think it's a trailing indicator.
So the way I would put it in this case is, you know, what was obvious for me with someone like Dara was he was content.
He wasn't happy.
And, you know, he had gone through a phase knowing him for a while where he had a lot of ups and downs with Expedia and all that stuff.
And he kind of mostly figured it out. And so he was content. And I think that in his case, you know, where he was at his life, it was such an obvious thing that he didn't even realize that he'd just grown content.
And so for me, you know, Uber is a very special company.
And to even be asked to be the CEO of that and the impact I knew he could have on that company just felt to me like an obvious thing.
And so I sort of advised him to, hey, you should go for this.
And that's a far greater thing.
And that's going to be far, will lead to 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 way you work?
I think I self-motivate myself that way.
Okay.
To do the hard things.
You know, like many other people, I'm quite lazy by nature.
I try to take the simple road out often enough.
But what I've learned that has given me the greatest joys is overcoming the biggest adversities.
And overcoming the biggest adversities usually has been solving a problem of some kind for someone or something that no one else had been able to figure out.
And for me, that's my definition of impact.
And it's not right there at the moment that I feel that.
Actually, in many cases, I feel it much longer, but it's when I go back and I reflect on accomplishments or moments of impact, then I feel true happiness.
And so I've just grown to kind of like self-motivate myself constantly.
And I think this, by the way, kind of comes from like a much deeper thing, right?
Like I came from like pretty much what was the project in Sweden and I was not the normal kid.
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, etc.
So you felt like an outsider even at that age?
Oh, yeah.
You still today?
Yeah.
Every moment of my life, even among other fellow entrepreneurs, I sometimes feel like an outsider.
Because like right now, for instance, you and I were in Silicon Valley.
I'm not American.
So there's an element of myself where I don't belong to the club.
And I've always felt that way.
And because I've always felt that way, I've had to – I can't take lessons from other people 100% because some of my story, some of my conditions, some of the ways, the structures, even how to structure a company.
You have to structure differently if you're a European company versus an American company.
So you have to go back to sort of first principles and kind of find this sort of principled answer to anything and what works for you.
And so I've had to kind of self-motivate myself for most of my life.
And only, I would say, in the last maybe five years, I've come to realize that, you know, in a way, I may be 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 is actually something that can be taught.
It's not entirely innate.
And it's about almost letting people know that that's okay.
And so much of that comes from those types of conversations.
It's about almost reflecting back.
It's not about sort of me projecting onto other people what I think they should do.
But in listening to Dara, it was just so obvious to me when he kind of explained because, you know, the conversation started with us talking about Uber.
And I said, I recommended you to the job.
And he said, oh, really?
Yeah, I just didn't take the call even.
And I was like, well, why not?
And he was like, well, I'm really happy about this thing.
And I was like listening and I actually just let him keep talking.
And the more he spoke, the more obvious it became.
He was content.
He was running on the downshifted down to the easy gear.
Life was good.
It was really easy.
But there was an element of him, and you could hear it in his voice, where he's sort of like, okay, well, you 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 going to go for greatness?
Why aren't you going to 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 around that.
But with another person,
I might've 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 having impact
by being a great father around your kids.
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 probably more to myself, 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 Ek 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 Ramp.
Karim is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance.
I spend a lot of time talking to Karim, 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 300 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.
It is our duty to be first movers and push limits so we can make the greatest possible product experience for our customers.
Ramp uses a combination of craftsmanship and rapid iteration to invent new products for their customers.
Many of the fastest growing and most innovative companies in the world are running their business on Ramp.
Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money.
Let AI chase your receipts and close your books
so you can use your time and energy
building great things for your customers.
Because at the end of the day,
that is what this is all about,
building a product or service
that makes someone else's life better.
That is what I'm trying to do.
That is what Daniel Ek has dedicated his life to doing.
And that is what Ramp has done too.
Get started today by going to ramp.com.
You mentioned you 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 was curious if you could say that.
I was like, no, no, I know you have this like inner burning desire and fire inside of you, which is to me, your outside is like you're very calm.
You're very articulate and you're very polite.
But you have that like the same thing I read in these books all the time.
It's just like this person had a burning desire to achieve mission success is the way I think about it.
Yeah.
Were you content after you sold your first company?
You were like 22, 23.
Well, content is the right word.
I wasn't happy.
So I was content for a moment of time.
I was 22.
I never had much success with women because I was a computer geek.
And back then, computers was not the coolest thing in the world.
And, you know, so I was like, okay, well, now I've got all this money.
And, you know, this was my worldview.
I can go out in nightclubs and I'm going to be the cool guy.
And I had fun for a while, I'll tell you that.
But it also was incredibly hollowing because, you know, I realized that these girls weren't with me because of me.
They were with me because, you know, I had status.
And I was able to use money to buy status and be a cool guy for a small moment of time.
And so that taught me a lot, right?
And actually, you know, I kind of walked away for over a year not doing anything at all and just sort of deeply reflecting on life, what I wanted to do.
Because for me, you know, I had a magic number, which was 10 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 up with that number?
Probably 15.
Okay.
You know, someone gave me like this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I think.
§02Transcript — part 2
I read it.
I think everybody gets it the same age.
Yeah.
I read it.
It was like really seminal for me.
So I kind of made that number.
I figured to myself I worked really hard.
I could get there when I was 40.
I was 22 when I got there.
And so that wasn't really part of the plan, right?
And so I kind of like, okay, well, what's next?
What am I going to do?
Because I didn't have to work for money.
Were you depressed when you don't have your company?
anymore you sold it you have the number you thought it was going to take you to 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 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 an expensive thing what did you make because 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 every single time, humans keep saying, it's like, we can't, this is going to be the last company.
This is going to be the last technological shift.
This is going to be the last invention.
And the best description of a business I've ever heard came from Richard Branson.
And he said, all a business is an idea that makes somebody else's life better.
And if you look at it like that, it's like then you have infinite possibilities and opportunities all the time.
because there's infinite small and large ways to make other people's lives better.
You weren't at that time making anybody else's life better.
You were just kind of consuming.
Like, would you consider yourself depressed?
What would you consider yourself?
Yeah, it's probably the most depressed I've been in my life, to be honest,
because, you know, I knew from a very young age what I wanted to do.
And it was unlike most other people that I grew up with.
I just knew I wanted to build things.
You were doing that when you were like 14, 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 VC 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 knew I would make a living doing that somehow.
This is another thing that drives me insane because I hear other people's advice to entrepreneurs, which I hate.
I think it's terrible.
We shouldn't have an entrepreneurial ecosystem, especially because most of the media that entrepreneurs are consuming are actually from investors.
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, my belief is something that I repeat.
over and over again, this maxim, that belief comes before ability.
It's in these stories every single time you have somebody.
Like I just reread the biography, the autobiography of the founder of Sony.
Akio at the time was, we're going to start this company in 1946.
In Tokyo that's occupied by the Americans that is completely, has been firebombed.
Right? He's passing, he's going to work, and he's passing just burnt-out rubble, millions of homes of Japanese.
More than half the population has left the city.
They start what turns out to be Sony, which is one of the most successful and influential companies of all time, in a burned-out department store.
One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is they need to have umbrellas on their desks because when it rains, it comes through the roof.
Oh, wow.
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.
And I'm starting to build things.
And this is the question I have for you.
When did you know you were good?
I don't know that I'm good.
I know I'm different.
And the – but I have this sort of insane belief that I can get good if I try hard enough.
And I still feel that way, by the way, like because the comparative sets has changed, right?
Like, you know, it was from everyone in my school maybe in the early days to everyone in Stockholm somewhat later to everyone in Europe at some point.
And now it's like the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time that I'm constantly comparing myself to.
And obviously, I don't believe that I'm as good as them.
But I believe I am slightly different than them in some ways.
And I believe that 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 for me, it really stems also from sort of this notion back to what you were talking about, about sort of the realization that through computers, right?
Steve Jobs has the saying, 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.
That's how I feel about podcasts.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so, you know, I knew I wanted to do that. And I also knew that, you know, my co-founder, Martin, he has this thing he keeps saying, the value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.
And so what I keep doing is essentially I've got this toolbox called a computer, and I got all these problems around the world.
Which problems am I passionate about solving?
And which problems can I spend the next decade of my life fixing?
Because if I'm not interested enough in it to spend a decade fixing it, it's probably not worth pursuing.
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'm not interested in your startup.
I'm interested in your last company.
I'm interested in something you're going to do for the rest of your life.
And this is what I draw inspiration off of.
It's just like going back to what you said earlier about impact and contentment and how like you're willing to go into an area where it's like, you know, it's difficult.
I love what Jeff Bezos said on this.
He 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 going to be proud to tell your grandkids about is not going to be easy.
So we're going into this with, you know, he gave himself like a 30% chance of success.
I think at the beginning of Spotify,
You know, you're guys like, hey, we're going to, 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?
Well, I considered them, but not for money.
I considered them because I already had the money that I thought I needed in my life, right?
And that was an incredibly powerful position to be in.
It was freeing me of a lot of constraints.
And for me, it was more, you know, as we got approached, it was always about can this thing further our mission?
And if I truly believed that there would have been a company that could further our mission and cared about what we cared about as much as we did, I probably would have sold.
But I never found that.
And because I didn't find that, we just kept going.
And it wasn't obvious to me that this would be like something I would do for 20 years.
I'll tell you that.
But what I did know is that I came from doing lots of projects beforehand.
And so sort of – we talked about the one company I did sell, but 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.
Which you still do today.
Well, I started doing again, which is a very different thing.
And I still think the jury's out, by the way, on whether that's a good idea or a bad idea.
Explain.
Well, again, I do believe that focusing all your time and effort on this one thing and obsess 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.
And I know you can relate to this, but that's how Spotify came to be.
I literally couldn't care about anything else for, at the very least, the first 15 years.
And 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 spirit in my 20s.
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, I certainly think so. And because my leadership style is so different than many of these sort of entrepreneurs that most of us sort of look up to and hail, whether it's the Steve Jobses or Elon Musks, etc.
But I just don't feel like there's a vague resemblance with them, but it's just not me.
It's like 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, different archetypes of entrepreneurs because like there could be, you know, there could be somebody like a young – there's undoubtedly a young Daniel Ek out there, right?
We just know that that's going to happen.
There's this great thing.
I'm slightly obsessed with Michael Jordan.
Uh, he's the, he's the, the lock screen on my phone.
He's my contact card.
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 is the rise
of Kobe Bryant.
Yeah.
And everybody's at, towards the end of his career, they were like obsessed.
Like, oh, Tracy McGrady is going to be the next Michael Jordan.
And this guy's going to 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 do think this is fascinating and no one else talks about this.
Again, the weird thing about talking to you, and I don't mean that in a pejorative, it's like you just say stuff that no one else says.
And then I'm like, why don't more people understand, like know about Daniel's very unique ideas?
Like no one's concerned about the archetypes.
I was like, oh, you just have to be like Steve Jobs.
You just have to be like Elon.
Yeah.
And your point is like, no, there's like multiple different archetypes.
Obviously, like I've studied this maybe more than anybody else in the world.
It's very clear that there are.
And yet they're all kind of like narrowly focused on this is the one path.
And me and you went over this back and forth before.
It's just like it's so ridiculous to say like this is the way founders should run their company because you said it back in 2021 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 the founder.
100%.
The advice is fucking useless unless it's tied to who you are as a person.
Spotify is a reflection of you.
Now, I do want to talk also about this other great idea that you gave me.
And then I heard Jeff Bezos echo recently about the fact that there's similarities between like the way your child develops and the way a 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 think, you know, again, as a young entrepreneur myself, I went through the book like so many of us by becoming enamored by an entrepreneur and looking up to them in many cases because they had traits that I didn't have.
And so we read all these stories, whether it's biographies or articles about how they manage their company and how they live their lives and the routines that they have.
And certainly in my case, like, you know, I certainly tried to mimic Steve Jobs. I certainly tried to mimic Bezos and Gates and all of the great ones, you know, the very charismatic ones like Howard Schultz of Starbucks.
And, you know, I've learned from all of them. And in a way, I've tried to imitate them, right? Because I thought that they were so great at what they do. But every single time I've walked away being disillusioned, because I realized, obviously, that it didn't work for me.
and um so this this sort of idea of this archetype um is like i bet you that there's plenty of
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 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 were spot on
when you said it's like the hardest single thing really for a founder and entrepreneur
in a much different way, I think, than a normal person.
But I think every normal person goes through this is finding yourself.
That's literally what I just wrote down.
§03Transcript — part 3
So I don't want, again, this is more of a conversation than interview
because I'm a terrible interviewer and I love to talk.
Yeah, sure.
I do a monologue show, for God's sake.
But I had this theory too because it's obvious in the books.
It's like there's this like myth.
It's like of like the genius young entrepreneur.
Yeah.
And if you go and read all the biographies, they weren't like laying about doing nothing when they were younger.
Yeah.
But I, it's very clear if you look at all of them, Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Akio Morita, Sam Walton, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, Edwin Land.
They do their best work when they're much older.
And so I thought a lot about them.
Like, dang, this is like a reoccurring theme over and over again.
In some cases, they're in their 40s, 50 years old, and they're at the top of their game.
Yeah.
And then, you know, I was wondering, like, what is this?
Okay, well, obviously, like, it is some skill set, so you can, like, practice more.
You have more experience, so then you can make better decisions.
You have a better network.
You have resources.
You have all that.
But one thing that I believe that I cannot prove, but I believe with every bone in my body, it's like, because you know they knew themselves much more.
Yeah.
Like, think about the way you know yourself in your early 40s than you did when you were 23.
Oh, yeah.
It's like, we thought when we were 23.
Yeah.
You don't know anything.
No.
Even the most brilliant 23-year-old does not know themselves.
That comes through time and experience.
And it's like, no, no.
This is something I learned from Michael Dell's autobiography, which was excellent.
I used to say it's like they build a company that's authentic to them.
Yeah, 100%.
He also, the way he says it, they build a company that's natural to them.
Right.
And you can't build a company that's natural to you if you don't know who you are.
100%.
And so I have this belief that's like, and I think your accomplishments are freaking crazy.
And I know you like to downplay them.
And it's just because you're very polite and everything else.
I was watching this funny interview with you.
And they mentioned something like, you're the most successful person to ever come out of Scandinavia.
And your face, your words were very polite, but your face, it's like somebody poked you.
You're like, oh, I don't want to be described that way.
But your response is like, I know that face.
I know exactly what you said.
But this idea that you are the sum of your accumulated experiences, right?
That is one form of education.
But the form of education is like, I know I went to your house.
I rummaged through your library, maybe kind of rudely.
But I loved how you were obsessed with history and philosophy too.
And I was like, oh, this is a person that's – he's curious about the external world.
But he also wants to know like who he is, what's important to him.
And then building a business and like an apparatus around that.
So I just wanted to get that out because you mentioned something like I don't think – I should probably talk about it more frequently.
But it's something I definitely believe.
It's like you're going to get better at entrepreneurship when you get better knowing who you are and what you actually want to do.
100 percent um and and uh as you say it's like um you know i i think the the game i'm playing now
is just being the best version of myself and uh the best version of myself is one that will have
even more impact than the one that had before because it will be even more true to who i am
so what is your archetype i mean do you even know no i i don't know which is why i was asking you
because I figured who's the person in the world
that probably has a better idea
of like all the different archetypes
because I can still learn how to like,
you know, do the game better,
if that makes sense.
I would say there's a very interesting idea
and that I've noticed, you know,
obviously like there's this maxim I say over and over again
that all of history's greatest entrepreneurs
study history's greatest entrepreneurs.
And if you make a podcast on that,
you get to meet the living versions of that now.
and what i'm struck by and i'm like this myself i have all kinds of blind spots which you 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 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 behind 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'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 in the 50s 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 is Norio Ohga 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 right and so he would just light them up about he's like i'm a big fan of sony but
your products aren't good enough you have all these deficiencies and Akio being the genius he was he
goes, we hired him as a paid critic. His job was to attack the deficiencies in our product because
we don't even see them. And the paid critic, his point was that, hey, if you're a ballet dancer,
you have a mirror, right? Your mirror tells you what you're doing right, what you can fix,
like what you need to do. He's like, I'm your aural mirror. And then fast forward to when the
book is uh published in like 1986 that paid critic is now the president of sony and i feel
exactly i'm this way it's like we need a mirror yeah and i think what's what i'm curious about
with you is like um i remember i just had dinner with mike ovitz and you know he's i think his
autobiography is one of the best entrepreneur autobiography he's ever written because he
tells you about the bad shit the fact that he was didn't like who he was he was depressed he
He was doing this, making bad decisions based on the opinions of other people, which entrepreneurs cannot do.
And I was struck by, like, the fact that he didn't know himself at, you know, 25 or – I think he was 27 when he started CAA.
Sure as hell knows himself as, like, almost an 80-year-old man.
But I asked him about – you know, he's had some people I know have been friends with him for 25 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 yeah who tells you the truth many people which is the good news uh for
me, you know, it starts with my family, my mom. You know, my mom is the most normal person you
would be. She's proud of my accomplishments, but in sort of the standoffish way. She couldn't care
anything about the impact of it. It is more like that I've overcome obstacles for myself that she
knows matters to me. So oftentimes, that's great. Yeah. And so oftentimes, like when I may bring an
issue home, because she doesn't really know what's going on in the business world, and she doesn't
really care. She kind of like, gives me this mirror back where most of life actually doesn't
revolve around technology or the business world, etc. It's like, this is the life. So that's a great
I have a very dear friend, Jack, who very similarly plays that part in my life.
He's the most realist person there is.
My wife is another one.
Gustav that you met is another person.
He will tell me the truth even when I don't want to hear it.
And, yeah, I've been incredibly fortunate that many of the people I just talked about are people that have been around me for 20 years.
My mom, obviously, my entire life, but many of these people have been around for a very, very long time.
And I think that's, you know, I really believe trust is one of the most under-talked about things, 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 bureaucracies ultimately because there's no trust.
If you had 100% trust, you wouldn't need any of this stuff and you would move much faster.
It's crazy.
Munger, again, like 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.
And he goes, trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world.
And he talked about that.
Like, your job, when I actually got to have dinner with him, he's like, your job is to build a seamless web of deserved trust with great people.
100%.
And he's like, that's not – and he was telling stories.
He's like, everybody knows that, you know, I met Buffett when he was 28 and I was 35.
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 them.
But 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 that so rare?
It's because it doesn't scale, right?
So trust is this notion that you'll keep doing actions that will ladder up over time.
It really compounds.
but you're going to add maybe 1% of trust
for each positive interaction you're going to do
but it takes one interaction that's bad to ruin all of it.
The moment where you even start doubting
whether you can trust someone or not, you have no trust.
So the point being is it's 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's really kind of like
you know what most people will say
is either I trust someone or don't
but even let's say you do trust someone
there's degrees of trusting someone
how many people do you trust with your life
how many people do you trust
with your bank account
just handing it over
to a certain degree
I think that's one that like
people that know me
so I actually had breakfast with a good friend of mine
he's slightly older
but he tells me truth
And he is very nice, but he'll point out the problems that like are going to stop me from going to where I want to go.
And one of his points, because I would answer, like if I asked that question myself, I was like, I don't trust anybody.
Yeah.
I think I'm getting a little better with that, but I am concerned that like I'm going to be one of my own worst enemies because of this like I can't let go.
Yeah, but look, I mean, you talked about it yourself.
It started in your childhood.
Like in my case, I grew up without a father for sure, but I have the most loving mother.
She gave me everything.
And to have that start in my life, I've always felt that whatever I do, whatever the failure is, she will always love me.
And to have that in your back pocket, I think it means you automatically come from a different vantage point than what I believe you had in your childhood, right?
And then my approach to life is just like, okay, well, again, I'm not saying I have absolute trust in every person, but I choose to believe that trusting people makes for a much more fun, rich, and rewarding life than one that doesn't.
And I believe that.
I think you're definitely right about that.
Yeah, and I believe that life is more fun doing the journey with other people around
than doing it in single player mode.
And that doesn't mean that I'm not also a person that likes my own spare time, my own
comfort, my own solitude.
I have that part, and that's the duality in my personality.
But I really do believe, and it will go back to philosophy, but the more I give away, the
more I get back.
and and so i just keep focused 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 yeah um then then a player because i've come to see that these people that
I've done Spotify with for the past 15 years as an example seeing their success
seeing their impact seeing their growth is the thing that give me the most
amount of pride at this point it really isn't anything else like you know
financially I couldn't care not that important it's great to have a lot of
money to have as a currency to then have more impact it's more chips 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 to allow me to help
§04Transcript — part 4
them on this journey help me on my journey and us doing it together and i've just seen it so many
times. I've been burned by it for sure. Sometimes when people have broken that trust that I put in
them. But I will honestly say that's been like one or 2% negative experience relative to all
the positive things that come out of it. The sad part of this, I can't think of anybody that's
betrayed me in like two decades. So it's like, I'm just making up this problem, this imaginary
problem that maybe used to exist, but certainly doesn't exist now. And this is where I think it's
really like uh helpful to again i don't need a bunch you know i don't i don't believe 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 that we had translated a biography from german um and his point was just like i don't
need 50 friends like i believe in much like 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 single person that 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 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 him so much and i like mentioned you
on the podcast and like i was like oh because i've learned a lot from you you're very very careful with
what you want in life like and i get to meet pretty crazy people and most of times like 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 to have very few if no friends yeah which is scary to me and then they kind of 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 you will be disposed and i feel the same people that do that have
almost no intellectual humility right where i always say it's like every single person i read
about is smarter and more productive than i am the way i look at this the world in general is
very much in the same way like thomas edison has this great quote he's like we know what we don't
know one one thousandth of percent of anything yeah and that's the way i feel it's because 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
meetings yeah pretty much uh like that that's how it goes um 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 mindset yeah but i don't think anybody would
believe somebody running, you know, a hundred billion dollar company and has done the things
that you've done. Like, yeah, no, I'm fine. Like I'll shadow this guy and like, I'll do whatever
I need to do. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, um, I, I just realized 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 around all the greatest entrepreneurs,
but they've read the big ones.
Yeah.
Certainly of their time, the basis is the Steve Jobs,
the Elon Musk's biographies and all that kind of stuff.
But there's a certain thing around reading it
and internalizing it and seeing the culture up front.
And what I realized was building Spotify,
obviously it's the biggest company I've ever built.
So I'm learning on the job.
And I don't know what I don't know
because I've never really worked at a company, right?
And it's in a way what I realized as we hired people from these other companies is that there were all these things that they were doing that they kept telling us about.
And I didn't really understand like how it worked.
So I'll mention like one, for instance, I do really well in these like one-on-one situations.
I might even do well in like three or four person groups and maybe six.
But 10 person group, like I don't have the personality where I command the room.
It just doesn't work. And then you have someone like a Mark Zuckerberg who literally has this thing called large group where he has 20 to 25 people that he runs every week. And for me, it sounded absolutely awful. Like, how did he get anything done in that meeting?
And so lo and behold, I asked him, hey, can I come and learn from you? And he was incredibly gracious. And we've obviously been friends for a long time. And he said, sure. And so I spent the better part of what I believe the first time was like a week, literally in pretty much all of his meetings from start to finish.
And the big question, obviously, for me is like, okay, well, what does he get out of it?
And can I make myself useful while doing it?
So hence, I took meeting notes.
You know, if I could get him coffee, I would.
You know, it was literally these types of things.
But at the end of it, the most interesting thing was obviously trying to distill down what surprised me about the culture.
It wasn't really around like Meta and what was then Facebook is a world-class company.
It wasn't like, you know, I miraculously thought I could do a lot of things different or better.
But there were things that surprised me around how he managed the company.
And seeing that and hearing that from another founder, hopefully one that he respects too, may sort of lead to insights and breakthroughs.
throughs. And during that week, it's not just that I follow people around, I actually meet with their
entire executive team and interview them too. So sit down and try to learn from them to really,
truly internalize the culture and try to understand it. And so all of a sudden, you do realize,
for instance, how you can make a large group team meeting work. And there were lots of other things
which I shamelessly copied from, for instance, that experience.
And it just turned out for me to be an amazing way to learn
by seeing the culture up front that enables the certain practices to work.
It almost comes back to kind of this two things we talked about already,
which is this mirror of reflecting it back.
And then the sort of second notion, I think, which is it's got to be true to you.
So, you know, there are many things where you can copy a specific way.
For instance, Elon does things.
But if it's not truly innate to you and your personality, I promise you it will not have the same impact as when Elon does things.
I think you're dead right about this.
The way I would think about, like, your archetype is I think you nailed it with, like, coach.
And then you'll hear people inside Spotify say it's like very, you have a very collaborative like management style where I don't think anybody is going to describe Steve Jobs as collaborative.
Now he was able to collaborate, but at the end, like he was, it was kind of like, I'm making all the decisions.
There's actually an interesting story.
I'm curious how you think about this.
Like, how do you balance, like, the decisions you make, specifically on, like, product, right, with, like, your own personal taste and intuition versus, like, being metrics-driven?
There's this hilarious story.
It's in two different books.
One's in this book called Creative Selection, which is excellent.
It's read three times.
It's from this guy named Ken Kocienda, who was a programmer.
He demoed to Steve many, many times when they were building their best products, right?
And then there's another story in Jony Ive's biography.
And they were comparing and contrasting the way Google would make products versus how Apple did when Steve Jobs was in charge.
And the guy's like, hey, at Google, we have to decide between blue and light blue.
And we run like 200 tests of all the different shades in between that.
And Jony's like, we would never, ever do that.
Do you remember, you were old enough to remember this.
they create the iMac, but like the big fat bubble one.
Yep.
You know, probably like late 90s.
And it was the first time there was going to be all these like crazy colors and everything else.
And Jony tells the story, he's like, you know how we chose the colors?
He's like, me and Steve went to the design, like the Apple Design Center,
and we talked about it.
And 30 minutes later, the colors you saw, we shipped.
That was it.
Where are you on like that spectrum?
Yeah, I think the most important thing that you described is it's a spectrum. It's not 100%, you know, one way or the other way. Because, again, sort of like I remember early on, you know, people talking about that sort of dichotomy of how Google does things and how Apple does things.
And many founders then tended to gravitate when Apple was at sort of peak Steve Jobs to, no, I run the product review.
It's only my opinion that matters and it's my taste.
And I've got this articulation, all these things.
And lo and behold, like some terrible decisions ended up coming out of this, et cetera.
And I think where people sort of break down on almost all issues is they take it literally.
I don't believe for a second that Apple was 100% in the camp where Steve Jobs just had universally the answer to everything.
He didn't listen to anyone else's opinions.
He didn't try things out, sometimes maybe trying it out by testing his ideas on multiple people inside and outside, you know, et cetera.
But of course he did that, right?
And I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant and that don't get talked about.
He actually called up journalists sometimes and tested ideas on them.
And like, we might do this kind of thing.
And then here the journalists react to it.
And it's like, okay, that was a bad idea.
And then go back.
They describe this as like sonar, how dolphins, like, they like throw things out.
And it might be a crazy idea.
And then it reflects back to them.
And they use it as like a form of education.
But the hilarious one is they couldn't figure out what they were going to call what turns into the iMac.
He was obsessed with Akio Morita at Sony.
He goes, I have the name for this computer.
It's going to be the Mac Man.
Because of the Walkman.
And people around him were like, no, please don't do it.
There can't be that.
And he was like, this is terrible.
And they kept meeting after meeting.
He's like, Steve, this name sucks.
And they give him a bunch of lists.
And then the first time he hears iMac, he's like, don't like it at all.
And then they're like, well, we really like it.
So we'll put it in the next group.
And then we'll put the third one down.
And then he goes, now I don't hate it.
And then one day he's walking in the hall.
He's like, I came up with the name.
It's iMac.
Yeah.
And of course, yeah.
That's the way.
That's the way, right?
And so I feel like that's truly the case.
I think the realization is you tend to over gravitate to one or the other.
And certainly in Spotify's case, we did the same.
Like we were early on, very much so.
I mean, the first user interface was pretty much designed by myself and this guy called Rasmus.
So much of that you could describe was my taste.
But sooner or later, what ends up happening is you get into a space where you don't even know anymore.
because your current feedback loop of where the world is
and the customer you're designing for starts becoming a little bit different.
And then you need to get to a point where you start incorporating some feedback mechanism.
So like for me, taste is sort of judgment plus curiosity.
And the more you can sort of like extend the curiosity branch,
that improves your judgment, which then builds your taste.
And so it's really a question for me about just sort of allowing for as much feedback as humanly possible so that you can, you know, 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.
Plenty.
And this may be a little bit unique, but coming back to it,
so I ended up having –
so the typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person, right?
By the way, it's 100% true.
I totally believe that. I think it's the most important thing in the zero to one stage.
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 last stage was more like optimization stage.
And you have to like constantly do that.
And you're going to need different skills at different places.
And this is why, by the way, I believe it's so important for entrepreneurs to realize when to apply what tools in this journey.
So what happened with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom and wealth, which is I don't really run product anymore.
Because what happened was I got this guy called Gustav that you now met, and he runs product.
And he's actually way better than me at doing it.
And so speaking about sort of being truthful, what ended up happening many years ago was I was running these product meetings.
He was sort of running it, but I wanted to run it.
So I kind of interjected myself over him, but I didn't have the time to like really spend all this time.
So he was sort of like running it for me, but I still insisted on having product reviews.
and sort of talking again about the importance of having people
who give you candid feedback.
He took me aside after one of these product sessions
and he's like, you know, you're not really that good
in doing these things and you're not really that helpful.
§05Transcript — part 5
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 not surprisingly, my first instinct was to be really pissed off.
I sort of went home.
I was like, man, I'm going to have to fire this guy.
It's like horrible.
Like, how could he say this?
But I also realized that that was an emotional response.
So again, I wasn't fully convinced that this was true, but I sort of went back and said,
okay, well, you know what?
I'm going to give you three months where I don't do the product reviews.
And then we evaluated how this worked.
and lo and behold, he actually did a great job.
And so the team was much happier.
He was making more of the decisions without me.
I wasn't meddling in.
There wasn't two different people deciding what worked,
but it was really him.
And ever since that moment,
I don't really run product anymore in 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, not just in sort of that moment, but it also sort of like, oh, wait a minute.
So what am I really, you know, what's my value add then in this company?
And it took me a while and I realized that all of a sudden, hmm, actually, you know what, that won't be it, but maybe I can add value in this place.
And I sort of oscillated to this different place in the company, which was much closer to understanding the creator and spending more time with the content people, et cetera.
And so my product feedback ended up being, you know, and this is the dynamic that's quite unique to Spotify in that we have these two stakeholders.
We have consumers on the one end and we have creators.
And so I just made it my effort to understand and know the creator way better than anyone else in the company.
And so my product feedback to them comes from that lens.
And that became value add because, again, that's a very different thing.
That's an outward facing thing.
You actually have to sit down and meet with creators.
It is so much more about innately understanding their needs and talking to them and understanding not just how they use the product, but their business.
What problems are they facing that's not just sort of how they leverage the product, but actually holistically around them.
And so that was just one of those things.
And then subsequently what ended up happening is I got this guy called Alex, and he's now doing that part better than me too.
And so I was like, okay, well, now I need to find a different way to add value.
And now it turns out that my value add is the sort of in-between between the two, where business or creators meets consumers and where there's maybe a third stakeholder we have to consider in all of this.
And so my whole sort of experience in all of this has really been around kind of figuring out who I am and what I'm innately good at.
And this has been a learning journey for 20 years.
What you're just describing right now, this unfolded over how many years?
I would say the first 10 years was the zero to one journey.
And the last 10 has been that journey where we're not zero to one anymore as a company holistically.
But there are elements of the company where we're zero to one where I'm absolutely 100% involved.
I think this is a good opportunity to talk about another one of your very unique ideas.
There was this excellent – I just did this episode on Jeff Bezos because he doesn't give that many interviews.
And so I would take a transcript of his interviews and treat it like a book and just go through it.
And he said something like from day one, he knew like he wanted to build a company that could outlast him.
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 articulated this idea.
It's just like, well, I think there's a lot of, you're going to say it better than I did, but essentially like there is a very rather clear analogy between the way your child, when they're first born, is essentially like a product of you.
They're going to mimic their parents, their environment that they're in.
But as they grow older and older, I just went through this and I have a 13-year-old, you know, when she was much smaller, she's much like me and her mom, right?
And then now she's like, she's got traits that I don't even have.
Yeah, 100%.
And her own decisions and like doing things maybe I would do or I would not do.
And you're like, it's kind of the same for the company.
And you had this idea where like, I think at the time Spotify was 19 years old or it's 19 or 20 years old.
And it's just like, well, you know, you're one or two.
It is me.
It's like the same way you have a two-year-old.
Anybody knows this.
But now there's characteristics that emerge from within the company that are separate from the founder.
That's like a fascinating insight.
Right. Yeah. I mean, look, there's clearly kind of like three distinct stages of parenthood. Right. And the first one is you're literally the person that keeps them alive. Right. And you're 100 percent there. And you pretty much make every decision for them because they can't make it themselves.
And then gradually the next stage is you're there.
You're quite involved.
You probably step in when they're doing something which would be terrible and would create bad long-term consequences.
And then like the last stage, you're not even – you can't even do that.
So the job is much more subtly to just be there when they need you.
and I'm somewhat simplifying it
but I think that with everything
don't take it literally
but sort of the core of the gist of the idea
is certainly a larger company becomes more and more
and an older company becomes more and more of that
and so much of what I do today is literally that
I try to be there for people when they need me
in various fields, which happens, but it's not as often as every day all the time.
And what I deeply care about today, and I do spend a lot of my time on,
is this notion around this first seed of a new idea and protecting that idea.
And I think it's probably the most underreported, talked about way is how do you do that?
Like, how do you consistently find lighting in a bottle?
Like, you know, and it's also theoretical at the point of any strategy book talking about how you do it or even when you go behind.
And the other day I was with the guy Hamilton Helmer who wrote Seven Powers book, which is an amazing book on strategy, by the way.
But one of the most interesting ideas that I learned after sort of, again, overfitting the concepts in the book and sort of teaching people about it is you can only tell that you have power when it's there.
It doesn't tell you how to get there.
This is the criticism of like founders and the podcast and the books.
Like, but he's not telling me what to do.
It was like, this is not a podcast for people that want to be told what to do.
It's here's how this guy or this woman thought about their company.
This is what they experienced.
You pull out these ideas.
I love how you say don't, you kept saying don't take it literally.
I've told you this before.
Like I drive people crazy because I tend to turn everything into an abstraction.
So like when I hear you, I've sent this message to you where you're like,
You kind of remind me of James J. Hill, which just might be the only person that's ever texted you this.
And James J. Hill was the most successful railroad baron of all time.
And I just thought the way you just said the way he built, he essentially was laying railroad tracks, right?
And the goal of the company was obviously we're going to have goods and people on the tracks.
Right.
But this alone is how do I make what I'm doing more valuable?
And he's the only railroad founder ever in American history to not go bankrupt.
They all went bankrupt.
It's crazy.
What he realizes is like he has to spend just as much, if not more time, developing and nurturing the communities that are springing up around it.
And if he builds these communities around it, that makes his railroad more valuable.
But I love this criticism because it's like, oh, you got to find a different show or you got to find a different thing because like entrepreneurs don't want to be told what to do.
I've never met an entrepreneur.
It's like, give me a list.
it's a profession for people that don't take direction very well.
Exactly.
It's hilarious about this.
I think this is tied to something also that is very fascinating with you,
is you have a high, and most people, again,
I think the more control you have over your life, the more success you have,
people make the mistake of eliminating any people telling the truth,
any inconvenience, and you become really brittle.
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 renaissance technologies
uh really creator of a magic money machine is really what i think about the guy yeah um and
they said something very similar they're like it doesn't matter he's like if there's a single good
idea in your pile of horse manure like he'll find it like yeah he will go through yeah he all he
cares about is the very best ideas yeah he will willing to go through 99 shitty ideas yeah to get
the very best because he understands how powerful those are can you explain like how you develop
this tolerance because most people like especially this company's age too yeah you know you're built
usually you have a lot of variance in the beginning yeah and then they get more successful and they
kind of 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 yeah out of there yeah you embrace that you the way you put
to me when we were talking about this is like high temperature people. Yeah. And for like,
in like training AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I actually think LLMs and the latest advancement
in AI kind of have created an excellent framing on this and to talk about this sort of high
temperature notion. So in LLMs, you can basically tune up the temperature. And if you tune up the
temperature, you know, it basically start hallucinating. So, you know, the bad thing
with the hallucination, of course, is you have no idea what's true or not. But there are spurts of
vocational brilliance that comes out of there and the truly new ideas that come out of there. So the
criticism of the current generation LLMs is they're not very creative. And that's ultimately
because we've kind of turned down the temperature on them and we safety train them to the point
where we keep them within the guardrails.
So there is a way when you train these things
to be highly creative, but batshit crazy.
And that's just turning up the temperature.
And I believe that, you know, one of the,
and this is by the way,
something that I intend to focus a lot more on
in the next decade.
You know, I'm very reflective at the moment
because I am in my 19th year.
And I think it's interesting,
you sort of talked about big companies
because I used to think,
before I sort of ran a big company myself,
I just used to think they're bad, period.
And I've sort of revised my view
and now I think they're really good
at doing what they're already doing
and doing it better.
So back to that point,
like a large scale corporation,
what they do is they just get better
and better and better
at doing what they already do.
And the way to do that
is obviously minimize mistakes.
so um you know that also means minimize brilliance minimize waste minimize all these other things
so naturally what you end up having is a more and more capitalism public markets all these things
drives you towards one thing optimize what you're doing to the point where it's the most efficient
thing that it can possibly be but that is not how conducive to how you get the best ideas
and what I'm greatly satisfied and happy with
and I've been fortunate enough
as I don't anymore run Spotify
as much day-to-day as I used to.
I'm still very involved,
but I'm not involved in all the team meetings
and doing all the things that I used to do.
So I was like 90% internally focused
on just getting the machine to run.
is that I've been more and more able,
not just have the free time to think,
but I've been more able to meet more people.
And part of the beauty of that
is that it brought me back to music again.
And it brought me back to the creative process of music again.
And it is something remarkable in a studio
where you have a bunch of people
just throwing ideas at each other.
And musicians actually in many ways know more about the entrepreneurial process than most people give them credit.
I think it's the same thing.
Filmmakers, like athletes.
§06Transcript — part 6
100% the same thing.
Yeah.
100%.
And so this point then is that what I truly believe the very best musicians do and the most creative people do is they are not afraid of throwing out ideas.
even terrible ones.
And it's in even the most terrible one,
there may be a nugget.
You and I, we talked about this over breakfast
where there was a person
who sort of gave some bad advice to you.
But sometimes even the insight behind the advice,
sort of the question behind the question
can lead to some really interesting things.
And so what I've come to do, realize, is most people want conformity and they value sort of a reliable consistency of giving X amount of impact per seconds or minute or truthfulness over X percent.
they have some sort of heuristics for what is valuable person from a business context or whatever
sort of context you're judging it on, but certainly in a business concept, this conformity.
So you want to sort of put people in about this person is good and they're always good.
But, you know, what I'm more interested in these days is I'm interested in this idea I'd never
heard about before. And I find it with, you know, some people, you know, that even in an hours long
conversation with the best people in the world where I've learned the most, it may be 55 minutes
of that conversation that honestly was, you know, completely worthless, not that interesting for me.
But then there's a spur of the moment, two, three minutes of brilliance, which I never heard before, which will deeply and profoundly impact my life.
Those are my people.
That's what I'm interested in.
And I've come to learn that most people don't like to be around those people.
But I love it.
And I think it's, you know, such a rewarding and interesting thing.
And I'm looking forward to spending more time with those people in the coming decade.
And it's sort of one of those things that I've sort of want to do more of and learn more from.
I think this is related.
One of your oldest friends texted me the other day.
And it was a screenshot of this episode I did with Chung Ju Young, who's the founder of Hyundai.
And it's probably the most – I think it is the most inspiring autobiography I've read.
because the guy writes the book when he's like 90 and he grows up the son of a poor farmer
you know they 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 he was building did all the construction built some of
the biggest ships in the world like he was just his nickname was the bulldozer and the reason he
sent me the screenshot in this specific part of the podcast he's like this is just like daniel
and one thing that chung would talk about is as the 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 idea no no no no no yeah like no we're not doing that that's too risky
like i can't build a car like we're a tiny little you know island and he goes daniel that gives me
the same exact advice where he will say something i will say no and he goes but did you even try
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 think that sort of comes back to the George Bernard Shaw quote, right?
The unreasonable man.
Let me read the full quote because it's an excellent quote too.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.
The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I have it painted on my wall at home.
Yeah.
And I'm just reminded of that.
Because I think the reality is it is really, really tough to not conform, to not be part of a group.
And it's so easy.
And there's so many temptations in life that draws us back to that conformity, right?
money is another one when you make a lot of money you tend to make life more comfortable
so you tend to spend more time golfing you spend some time doing all these other things
but the reality is you become distracted and you're not going to be on your A-game anymore
and so the hard thing then is to keep going and keep improving and keep doing these things but
But you're going to have to sacrifice a lot in doing so.
You're going to sacrifice people's birthdays, social commitments.
You're not going to show up for a lot of things.
You told me a funny story one time about how committed you are to your work and your friends know this about you, that sometimes you'll be in the middle of a dinner and then an idea comes to mind or something you need to pursue.
And they just know, oh, he's gone and he's not coming back to me.
Yeah, yeah.
That is an unreasonable – people are like, oh, I can't do that.
It's social etiquette.
I even – sometimes I find myself to do this because we're both introverts.
We've talked about this before.
But like I kept getting invited to group dinners.
And I just felt like, oh, this is like a prestigious group dinner.
This person is really successful.
People would love this opportunity.
And so at the beginning when I first started doing this, I started going.
I'm like, this sucks.
I remember one time it was in a private room and they shut the doors.
And within like five minutes, I knew I was like, I got to get out of here.
I was like, don't worry.
I'm going to pretend to go to the bathroom and just never go back.
I was like, so I stand up 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 tonight, is I sat down and I wasted an hour and a half of my time.
Instead of just being the unreasonable man.
Like, I'm now going to say, like, what would Daniel Ek do?
He would get or avoid the dinner in the first place.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would say, you know, I'm not proud of sneaking out sometimes on that.
But look, I mean, at the end of the day, I think that that's less about sort of being protecting my time and more sort of about protecting unique and novel ideas and how rare they are.
And by the way, we'll hopefully get into that.
But I think less about sort of a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be obsessed about time.
I'm really not.
I'm more obsessed about energy management.
Wait, wait.
Yeah, let's get into it now.
What do you mean?
Well, I mean, you know, you constantly hear this thing about all these, you know, you're supposed to wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning and you're supposed to do all these things, et cetera.
It's like, first and foremost, there's no rule.
Like, I know a lot of successful people, as I'm sure you do too, it's like some of them wake up at noon, some of them wake up at 4 a.m.
You can do a lot of different things.
The obsession with morning rituals is stupid.
Yeah. But the other thing is about sort of you're supposed to pack every like you're supposed to have meetings every 15 minutes.
And like a 15 minute increments is better than a 30 minute increments.
So on and so forth. Look, it might work for you.
And for some people, it might be like the absolute best thing.
I've become more obsessed about sort of managing my energy because like if you have time but you have no energy, you're not going to accomplish anything anyway.
So how do you manage your energy then?
Well, it's about finding out what gives you energy, right, to begin with, and what drains energy.
And it's about finding out which time during the day you're most productive.
And it's, again, innately about understanding yourself.
And what the whole world tries to do is get you to conform to their schedule.
Oh, we have an 8 a.m. morning meeting because that's when you get into the office,
or you're supposed to do this and that and all these other things, again, in a big corporation.
and it's about conformity to like the average or to an okay standard instead of going for excellence
and what truly truly is unique and i think the truly truly unique thing is you got to just
figure out what works for you and you got to do more of that and that's um more about energy
management i believe and it's so much more about like even before this thing i think both you and
i we went and worked out 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 workouts at all because I thought I don't have time. There's no
productivity. I used to go for the worst productivity thing I did was I was at one point doing these
15 minute naps. I don't know if you've heard about this exercise. No. It's a really bad idea by the
way. So don't try this. But I sort of learned that you can like daisy-chain sleep together by
doing like these 50 oh it's like polyphasic yeah yeah okay so the basic gist is you're supposed to
be able to last like on four hours of sleep and i was like oh this is great so i did that and
actually the interesting side part is it worked for about three weeks um and then i missed one of
these uh 15 minute increments and holy shit i was like completely suicidal for like weeks afterwards
It was like not a great thing at all.
But the point being is, you know, it's about sort of finding that energy management for yourself.
I think certainly there's common wisdom around sort of what an average good sleep should look like, et cetera.
But the reality is there are some people that will work on six hours of sleep and they'll do just fine and may even be more productive that way.
I wish I was like that.
Like if I can have a superpower, I always say like I like to fly.
The first thing is I want to fly like Superman.
Yeah.
If I can't do that, I just want sustained high energy levels 24-7.
Because I need a ton of sleep, and I felt bad about this because the same exact reason you're describing.
It's like people are like, no, you've got to get up at 430 or you've got to sleep less or sleep faster.
Arnold Schwarzenegger would say you've got to sleep faster.
And then I'm reading James Dyson's first autobiography.
And the guy made one of the most successful companies of all time.
He's still doing it at 76 years old.
and he goes, I need a hell of a lot of sleep,
10 hours a night, or my entire next day is ruined.
I'm like, wait a minute, this guy built,
he's a single shareholder of a multi,
multi, multi-billion dollar company,
built some of the best products in the world,
and he's sleeping 10 hours a day.
There are no, you just said, there are no rules.
No, it really isn't.
And so, I mean, look, you just gotta find that thing, right?
But when you realize that,
so if you start with that as the basic thing,
like all the things you and I have been talking about
for this time now, 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's giving, I know hanging out with crazy people gives you energy, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, there's, there's actually something. So I text a mutual friend of ours, Patrick
and I was like, I'm talking to Daniel and Patrick, I think has asked the best questions in the world.
And so obviously I need to like use like phone a friend for, for.
That one lifeline.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And he's a good mirror too because it's almost like a therapy session.
He'll be very quiet, doesn't like attention to himself, and yet he'll hit you with a question like, I didn't even think about that.
And he has this great way to describe you because my guess is that – not even guess.
I'm pretty – I think you're obsessed with learning and understanding the world around you and that drives a huge part of what you're doing and this exploration.
And you can build companies around the stuff you're interested in.
That's kind of like this compounding learning machine.
But he goes, out of everyone I know, Daniel has the ability to apply what he learns the fastest at the highest level.
And this was actually related to a conversation that we had at your house, which was fascinating.
Because, again, I know you don't like public adulation.
I'm still going to do it because I think it's fascinating where it's like everybody focuses on Spotify, which is a marvelous achievement that very few people on the planet have been able to experience.
and yet they like also because it's not really talked about it's like all this other success
that you're having outside of this too because you have this like you're very curious about things
and now you have a network and knowledge and resources that you can actually impact and try
to make the world a better place and you're not going after easy shit by any means which i also
admire about you it goes back to the impact over happiness thing yeah and so we're talking about
this and i'm like were you because usually true interest is revealed early so if we go and look
at your life story just like people like oh what hobbies do you have like i like to read yeah and
like what else i'm like yeah i like to read that's it it's like i was like that when i was five i
didn't i wasn't like five years old what's a good hobby for my future self-development it's like no
i just like reading i like books better than people in general 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 2018. And you said
the funniest thing, you know, how did you learn about it? He goes, I started this Patrick's podcast.
And then I'd hear an idea of like, that's a good idea. I would try that. Oh, I don't like that
idea. And then I start reading books. And then you're just literally taught yourself. You weren't
interested at all. And now you're essentially world-class at it in a very short amount of time.
And this is just the face again.
You just did the same face.
But like explain how like you think about this where it's like I always say learning is not memorizing information.
Learning is changing your behavior.
And I think if I thought of anybody else I know that personifies that, it's like you.
§07Transcript — part 7
It's like I'm not just like listening to this podcast for shits and giggles.
I'm not reading this book even if you find it enjoyable.
Like I'm looking to like apply this.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I think it's back to that, like sort of these two concepts we talked about.
My whole journey is one of self-mastery and finding out how I can become the best version of myself.
And meanwhile, what gives me energy is solving problems.
You know, and as you say, 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 a relationship advice whether it's all these
other things and this is why i think these conversations are important to have because
like you are the personality type that i've read about it's just like now instead of reading about
you when you're 80 you're dead you're like in the middle of it so it's very fascinating to me
because i'm like trying to balance like my understanding of this through reading with
like an actual person, where it's just like most of the people,
they're not like, I'm starting a company for company's sake.
Just say what you said.
I like solving problems.
Yeah.
That's it.
That's all.
So if you look at the video games,
I actually think what kind of video games you like
is a pretty good revealer of your things too.
I wasn't playing any kind of first-person shooter games,
some of it, but not much.
Most of what I was playing was strategy games.
civilization, business strategy game.
I played every tycoon game
of how to run businesses better.
Of course you did.
So those were sort of my favorite games
growing up.
I love SimCity.
SimCity was amazing.
This is what I would say about entrepreneurs.
It's the best job in the world.
I don't understand the people that give it up.
I hate even saying this
because rule number two in the Senra family
is what I teach my kids
is mind your own business.
So it's like, I don't, I think you're very similar.
It's like, I don't have any suggestions on how you should live your life.
Like if we're friends, we can talk and go back and forth.
It was like, I just mind my own business.
But sometimes like I just, I don't have any other way.
Like I meet so many entrepreneurs and they're like, I sold my company.
I'm like, sorry to hear that.
They're like, what?
I'm like, why would you get out of the game?
And then they sell their company and then you go be a VC.
I'm like, oh my God.
This is the best game in the world.
It's never ending.
It's not like sports where like you can get better with time.
You can solve problems.
You can build your own world.
If you think about what we were doing on the computer at SimCity, it's like, oh, like I'll put a highway there.
That's like I'm – we're world builders.
You get to control like who's around you.
What you're – like what are the rules in the world that happens?
What's the outcome of the people in the world?
And you get to make – and hopefully you're doing it for like benevolent and good reasons where I do think like one of my favorite quotes from – or maxims from the history of entrepreneurship.
comes from Henry Ford, where it's like, money comes naturally as a result of service.
Yeah.
And the crazy thing about Henry Ford is by 1919, he owned 100% because 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 10 books on this guy and people knew him forever. He's like,
one idea. It's kind of weird that we're putting together cars. They're really expensive.
He was obsessed with machinery and essentially outsourcing human labor to machines,
started on the farm. And he's just like, I want to build a car for the everyman.
Yep.
You said something very – in the early days of Spotify, he's like, I 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 going to do it.
He said the same thing.
Yep.
But I learned how to do it.
He's like, oh, well, how can I make a car cheaper?
Sure as hell can't put it in by hand.
So we've got to learn how to mass produce something we don't know how to do yet.
And that took him, you know, a decade and a half of failure or whatever.
Yep.
And then what happens is he 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.
Yep.
And as a result, money came naturally as a result of service.
That's 100% how I think about it.
And I think this is the beauty of capitalism, right?
Because ultimately, at the end, there has to be someone willing to pay for what you're doing.
And 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.
What did you say earlier, too?
You're like, I forgot how you phrased it, but in my mind when I interpreted what you said.
it's this idea of not being a go-getter, but being a go-giver.
You're saying something like the more problems you solve,
the more it comes back to you.
Was that the...
Well, so these are two different ideas,
but sort of closely related.
So 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.
So like I tell this to the team
because when we face very difficult problems, it is great.
because, again, if we solve these problems,
we will create a lot of value.
I keep saying you think like Bezos.
So there's a great line, same thing,
where he says, I'm 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 looked it up.
I haven't read them since the end of 2022.
But there's all these stories in Bezos' early career
where people on Amazon would come to him with a huge problem.
They thought maybe they'd get fired.
And he got excited.
Yeah, yeah.
Because 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 100 companies.
One of them still exists, Kaiser Permanente.
He built the Hoover Dam.
He built the Liberty ships in World War II.
And he has this great maxim that, like, people would come to him and they'd be all depressed and he'd be excited.
And they're like, what the hell's going on here, Henry?
And he goes, problems are just opportunities and work clothes.
Right.
This is a great way to think about it.
It's like, if I can solve this problem for other people, I make other people's lives better.
I make the company more valuable.
And then you also have to feel good about what you're creating into the world.
100%.
But I think it comes from solving problems.
And so, yeah, I mean, like I get excited today.
You sort of asked about the other stuff that I get focused on.
I don't focus so much about the solution.
I focus on the problem.
I try to find really interesting problems that, and figuring out, even if there's like a 5% or 10% chance of solving that problem, and I know that would be huge for humanity or society if we figure it out, then it's amazing.
Like, that gets me fired up.
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.
There's probably even a lot of people that would agree that if we could figure it out, that would be really valuable.
But, you know, I find this all the time.
And you said it yourself.
It's like sometimes they're really small, these problems.
Sometimes they're gigantic and sort of earth-shatteringly different.
It's everything around, you know, life extension to, you know, just walking into a store and you see things you don't like in the store.
Well, those are problems.
If you could do those things better, you could probably build a business.
And so the biggest thing, however, is that people have this misconception about what innovation is.
And they somehow think that they got to try to figure out something entirely new.
But the history of the world is we build on other people's ideas.
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 interesting thing, it's like laying a puzzle or anything else.
It's like I get to sit around and because of meeting so many brilliant people, I get to listen to problems all around me all the time.
And I try to distill and figure out, okay, well, this person said this thing, but what if you actually articulate the problem like this instead?
Okay, well, what does that mean?
What does that unlock?
And that for me is just, it's so much fun.
And I couldn't imagine, you know, not spending every single day doing this.
And, you know, 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 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.
And that's really the genesis of the story.
But even today, you know, I'm thinking about this.
And I said, even if you remove all the money, even from the beginning, even in the middle and even now, there's no way I wouldn't do this.
And spend much of my awakened time thinking about this stuff.
Just sort of like for me, this is impact.
And this is what leads to happiness in my life story.
I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep.
He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night.
And as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved.
His point was that you get paid to make high-quality decisions,
and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly.
And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is 8sleep.
I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of 8sleep, Matteo, and we live in the same city.
A few months after I started using 8sleep, I randomly ran into Matteo at a restaurant,
and I was with some friends.
So I go over and say, hi.
When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, who was I talking to?
And I said, that's Matteo, the founder of Eight Sleep.
And my friend replied, he looks like he gets good sleep.
Matteo is living and breathing his product.
I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep.
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§08Transcript — part 8
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You said something in the early days of Spotify that was very fascinating.
You wanted to build, like, an enduring and impactful company that did something that no one else did, right?
It's remarkable also, like, when I'm listening to this series that was created in 2021, 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.
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, I think you've nailed it.
You're like, the decisions that were made have to do with the DNA of the founder because we're the only ones there.
But you said, I like technology for technology's sake.
Yeah.
What does that mean?
I like the process of science.
I like the process of discovery.
I like the process of understanding how things work.
You know, I've been wired this way all my life.
I've been pulling apart computers.
I've been trying to understand why a semiconductor works the way it works, all these things.
And I'm intrigued about that.
Just this thing about understanding everything, understanding life, understand where we come from, understanding all these different things.
But I'm equally interested in solving problems.
And when you're curious about both of those two angles, you can end up finding these sort of connection points where those two things meet, where it's obvious that there is something over there that no one's really kind of applied in this way before.
And maybe there's not one idea, but two ideas over there.
It's quite interesting.
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 off oftentimes like the greatest ideas is truly innately
understanding something and truly innately breaking constraints around that something
by understanding the rules and knowing when when you can yeah to 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 like what the they can almost internalize the consumer right like what
is someone willing what what do they need even if they can't articulate 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's sort of the trifecta of those three things.
And that makes it even more interesting because now we're talking about, you know, 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, you know, we talked
about this Google example of trying 200 different colors. 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 got to
make sure that is the right thing. And 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 in love with this idea that creativity itself is this really, really powerful
thing, maybe the thing that makes us unique as humans relative to everything else that
exists in this world, and kind of going deeper and deeper into creativity itself.
And it doesn't conform, and it doesn't scale, and it doesn't pave in any of these other
things.
And then you have this other side, which is all about scale, which is all about conforming
And sort of navigating that sort of dynamism between these two things and polarities between these two things is, you know, very few people that I think can do and is really, really well classed 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 hinted on this earlier.
It's like it's so easy to kill new ideas, right?
The arrow on the side of no, we can't do this.
It's amazing to me how many times this comes up in all these biographies where it's just like this is a skill you have to learn.
And a lot of it is like being comfortable with the messiness of the creative product process.
But it's also entrepreneurs by definition, impatient, patient.
Like they have this – what looks like a paradox where like they want shit done now.
I love – Jeff Bezos says about this step-by-step ferociously.
I'm willing to plan to – if it takes 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 lifetime.
But that doesn't mean I'm like dilly-dallying on a day-to-day basis.
I heard you say something one time.
You're like, 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, I have super patience.
I think Neko is like an example of this.
I met your co-founder on it.
And I got to see this too.
And I was like, oh, this is cool.
Who made the machines?
It's just like, we did.
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 like six years or something or four years.
No, it's – the company's eight years old and we barely began.
And it's like, okay, that's an insane love.
That's an understanding of like we're tackling one, something that's – I like what you just said.
Like innovation and creativity is actually a combination of things that occurred before that we're combining.
Yeah.
Right?
And when you mentioned that, I thought of like, you know, James Dyson is one of my entrepreneur 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.
And 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, 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, 1700 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 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 that you're trying to figure out.
Now you have more resources.
You can be patient.
Like you couldn't have done Neko when you were 23.
But you have this great quote that I know is important to you.
And it says, quality is never an accident.
It is always a result of intelligent effort.
We haven't talked about quality at all.
Even though Spotify is the highest – if you compare your competitors, it's just in a class by itself.
So it's obviously very important to you.
We have to talk about quality.
So do you want to just pick up where that quote leaves off?
Well, there's so many strands of quality, right?
It is both sort of the distinction of taste, whether taste is subjective or objective.
You can go so many ways with this question.
But the way I think about quality is I think so much of your early life, certainly in my case, was the formulation of just trying to go for more.
and the further I've gotten, I've realized,
and it's about everything, right?
You amass more stuff.
You amass, you try to do more things at the same time.
You try to do all of these things at the same time.
And the further you go, you realize that it really is about sort of ultimately
this very simplistic
trite thing, less is more.
And the older I get, I feel
more and more.
We talked about it with friends.
I think most people
start out thinking
having more friends is better.
But I think more people are happier with
fewer but better friends than many
friends.
And so I think
quality is ultimately this
sort of notion around
focusing, distilling, getting to the essence.
We can even talk about like quality in communication
is often trimming things down and saying less things, right?
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 be courageous and just trying to say the thing right out loud.
The older I get, the more my instinct is towards turning towards that.
And I'm reminded even if we go back to investing, because part of why I sort of liked investing has nothing to do with money.
It started with, 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 want to just hand it off to a bank without understanding anything about it.
But what sort of got me deeper curious about it is I realized that investing is actually more about learning about your temperament than it is about the specific action that you're doing.
Your temperament, actually, it's more about being in line with your temperament than not, 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.
And so one of the concepts is obviously around that Munger talks about,
coming back to Munger reference again, is diversification, right?
And he calls it somewhat simplified diworsification,
because the common wisdom, of course, is in theory,
diversification is the best thing you can do.
But the truly greatest people financially, if that's the only yardstick you use, typically do completely the opposite of that, which is they have oftentimes only one asset.
Maybe they'll have two or three, but they certainly don't have more than that.
And they just go for that.
There's a realization you have, right?
Because I read something, you read a line, and you're like, okay, let me filter that through how I would say it.
So I do this all the time where like I'll take notes on all the books that I read and then I'll reread them.
I'll just jot the down.
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 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, if you just didn't do that, everything else you did, like if you just didn't sell.
uh so nick sleep talks about this is like and in other books it's 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 a single person ever for their ownership the concentration 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. And he's just like, I'm doing it because 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 a capital allocator. He's not building a product, but he's making capital
allocation decisions. Like, do I need to sell this stock, put it 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 financial firm one day where they're like, okay,
we owned IBM in the 1950s. And I didn't know until I read Michael Dell's autobiography,
right because ibm was it's like they're the most powerful and wealthiest company in the world when
me and you were born 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 dorm room with a thousand dollars like what kind of grandiose
ambition do you have i went and started like why is this so crazy and i started it's like it was
the most valuable company in the world by market cap at the time it's the first company to go over
$100 billion in market cap, right? And this little 19-year-old kid's like, no, I think I can
have a go at them. But Nick Sleep talks about, he came into this firm and he's reading how they
talk about their investments. And 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? They said, if we just held that, the gain would have been more
than all the assets we have in our management.
Like, we can't do this.
That same year, they sold Walmart.
They had Walmart in the 1970s.
Wow.
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 60s.
And then I think he bought the stock at like 62 cents or something.
Right.
§09Transcript — part 9
And he had like a 2X or 4X game.
He's like, oh, I sold Disney.
Yeah.
So 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.
It's exactly what he did.
I remember I obviously live in Miami
on a friend's boat in the marina there.
And there's like the boat
like bigger than anything else around there.
It's like, and you can Google like who owns it.
It was like, it was Sam Walton's brother's daughter.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah.
It's crazy.
But I think you're on to something important,
which is this notion around just innately focusing
and solving problems day by day builds quality, right?
And so quality for me is less.
Quality for me is focus.
Quality for me is improving day by day.
All of these things build quality, and quality is rare.
Quality in people is rare.
Quality in ideas is rare.
And we tend to make these things binary.
And we talked about it with people.
Like I'd rather have that person that has one good idea in an entire hour and the rest is crap than someone who has, you know, 10 decent ideas but nothing is amazing.
So that sort of differential equation between the 1% versus the rest is so important and so important to understand.
And I think it's, we again, take it literally.
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 I'm more and more drawn towards that it is, for me at least, very much looking at the people in it 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 going to 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.
So perfection just doesn't exist.
But the aspiration towards perfection is a remarkable thing.
I mean, I love Japan for this reason, right?
You find these amazing individuals that literally spend their entire life.
I was in Japan maybe 10 days ago or something.
And I was in one of these temples with a tea master who literally all he's done for the past 34 years is perfecting how to make tea.
That's it.
Nothing else.
And yes, the tea is amazing.
But it's not just that.
It's just seeing that.
obsession about quality is seeing that obsession about being not even one percent but like 0.1%
or 0.01% in something and I think feel like you you sort of asked about AI and all these things
and and we can talk about art too but like for me like that is going to be even rarer like average
is going to be possible to do even better than average is going to be possible to do with AI
But that sort of thing about this guy doing this for 30 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 like, as you say, it's the paradox about the long-term mindedness, but the obsession on the daily basis and against conventional odds, against all these other things.
Because I would imagine, I don't know, but I would imagine like when you started Founders, probably not many people knew who you were.
Nobody.
Nobody, right?
And so the competition for your time, there was none.
So you could probably sit for six hours or eight hours, et cetera.
But today, it's much harder because there's many other things.
There's people like myself and other people.
And you're like, oh, wait a minute.
Maybe this is a good idea to meet this person.
Or there's a business opportunity that shows up.
And maybe people are asking, look, maybe you should invest.
And maybe you're tempted about it even.
but 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 a lot of the stuff like when i talk on
the podcast or everything i say on social media is like reminders to myself because i just read
reread past highlights because like we forget that we forget and so i need a reminder and it
just came across one it's just like uh i've had them presented to me in a random order so it's
like i never know what i'm going to read that day and it said uh there's a buffet it's like a
The difference between successful people 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.
One, 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.
And now I look back, I was like, there's no way I would do that today.
Yeah.
But somehow that person who I now greatly appreciate and love, he feels like a different person.
Yeah.
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, 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, you have to, it has to come out.
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, tend bar, do literally whatever.
I was like, just give me enough time.
I'll figure it out.
Now I didn't think it was going to take half a decade to figure it 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.
The issue that I'm having now and in general is that I feel a lot of pressure because 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 crazy trip that people would love to go on.
And I just felt guilty for not for like taking time out and off and not working.
And I feel like this is like almost like a compulsion, like I don't have control over it.
Do you have anything like that?
Sure.
I do feel the same thing, of course.
But I'm back to sort of time versus energy and management.
And I don't know about you, but I feel like the greatest ideas I've had comes from the most weird and wonderful places where I expected nothing out of it.
So quite often when I do take some time off, I come back with like two or three and some entirely new insights that just wouldn't have come if I just kept grinding that thing.
by just changing a scenery, being in a different frame of mind,
pausing, giving, you know, it's in the creative process.
You know, 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,
you put it in a drawer and six months later,
totally unbeknownst to you, it clicks.
You're not even working on that thing.
It's just sort of like, oh, that's it.
And they go back and they do the song and it's like the greatest song ever.
There's not one path to greatness.
There's many.
And I feel like that's why I'm so obsessively focused on energy.
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.
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, 100%.
And I try to feel that
I feel like so much of our life
Just rips us apart from this thing
And tries to get us on a schedule per se
And it's not like I don't have a schedule
Of course I do have one
But I feel so much of it should be more guided
By trying to understand ourselves more intimately
So I don't know if you've heard of this
But going back to sleep
There's been this kind of thing around more recently, which I was surprised.
One of my 10-year-old daughter told me about this is around that actually, you know, she sort of said like we have this idea of eight hours.
And she actually mentioned instead that the real notion is that we kind of did it almost like fasting.
Like Ramadan is, you know, it's based on the sun.
And sometimes it could be six hours or sometimes it could be 12 hours.
So it used to be the sleep was actually in two periods.
So you didn't sleep one consecutive thing.
You sort of had a three, four hour sleep.
And then, you know, you woke up and then you had another three, four hours sleep again.
And so much of that was based on light.
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, going back as late as the 18th century, before we started having electric lights and candles and all these things, is we actually slept a lot 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 of this sort of innate knowledge about listening to ourselves, understanding our innate personality, understanding hunger.
Like I can tell you as someone, I've gained in periods of my life like 40 pounds in my worst negotiations, et cetera.
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 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
satiation means because for me for instance i don't feel it until 20 minutes after so like if
if i didn't like sort of eye what i should eat i would 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
going to be enough. And it doesn't feel like enough at that moment because I ruined my body,
but 20 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 life is not one game, but it's a thousand games. And there's this brilliant quote
by this guy called Kwame Appiah that is another one of those things.
I just circled it. Perfect timing. No, we're in perfect alignment. Go ahead.
Well, I'm probably going to ruin the exact one, 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 for me, realizing that, it's just been eye-opening, right?
It's another one that's on my wall.
because I feel like quite often when I'm talking to people
and they're talking and trying to get life advice,
they're not playing their game.
They're playing someone else's game.
They're certainly not playing the game they want to be playing,
but they somehow think that life is just one game
where actually so much is about choosing the right game for you.
And so, yeah, I keep coming back to that.
like energy management is the same thing.
You've got to like create the environment around you
that you want to do.
You've got to choose your game.
And when you do that and you start understanding that,
you start becoming superhuman
in your ability to get things done.
Do you have more or less negative self-talk today
than you did 20 years ago?
I'm more comfortable with who I am
Um, then I was 20 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, Jewish centers, um, you know, mosques.
I went to everything.
§10Transcript — part 10
And I try to learn as much as possible because I truly believe not enough people are like – 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 that I, like many others, don't have any idea, obviously, what will happen.
But I think they're really important.
So I've always been a searcher.
And I think that actually sort of like led me to sort of also be a searcher about myself too.
and trying to find sort of who I am.
But the older I've gotten,
the more and more things
have started clicking about myself
and the more unapologetic I am about.
And so your inner monologue gets less harsh?
Yeah, because like, you know,
not only do you stand out quite a lot
as an entrepreneur
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.
So, you know, that doesn't help.
So most people like being around a lot of people and they get energy from it.
I didn't.
So that obviously naturally gets you to question yourself.
And, you know, against many others as an entrepreneur, I'm not the most eloquent person.
I'm not the smartest.
You're pretty damn eloquent.
Well, I had to work on it.
That's like the hard thing.
I really, really am.
Listen, I've listened to all your interviews and I did this before we were friends.
And every time something comes out, it's like, oh, I got to watch that.
You're not giving yourself enough credit.
Like you are a very clear communicator.
Thank you.
Yeah.
But it's really a work product.
Like I wish there was more recorded stuff on myself when I was like 20 and 21.
Not me.
I was not great.
I was quite terrible.
And so I've just learned that it's a superpower and something I have to work on 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 want to come and
join whatever thing we're trying to will into this world. I have two more questions that I'm
personally curious about. One is going to 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 in a tiny little, we didn't even,
We'll have to do this every year if you're fine with it.
Because the idea that you even come from this tiny little island, which I got to visit, and then you're competing with the biggest companies in the world and you win.
We didn't even get there.
But you grow up, you have a great mom, you're a single family, not a lot of money.
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 because they also had it.
So I'm very curious.
Do you feel different?
um and what i mean by it is like as 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 an undeniable fact like do you feel different
i think yes and no um so i i feel different in in the same way a 40 year old would feel different
than a 10-year-old would do.
I feel different in,
I'm a product of all the experiences of my life.
And obviously I've been incredibly fortunate to,
I was counting the other day,
I've been to like 130 countries or something in my life.
I've seen so many cultures, so many people,
I have friends all over the world.
All of that has shaped me into who I am.
I don't feel different because innately,
many of the things, the drive, the long-termness, the obsession, this sort of willingness on
the paradox of winning on the one hand, but then also trying to truly find a win-win and
work with people to try to find a win-win, which is really important to me, has always
been there.
And it's always been these things.
And like you said, you know, you kind of look back at yourself a few years back when you started off and say, wow, how did I do this?
And you're amazed at that.
I can feel the same way about young Daniel.
I can feel myself about the young Daniel that worked every weekend, you know, nonstop, 24-7, sacrificed so many things, so many summers, so many other things.
You know, I had a blast doing so, but I didn't have a normal upbringing just because I was so obsessed about learning, so obsessed about making it.
And it put me in the position of where I am today.
And I actually feel like I owe that guy to keep pushing myself, right?
Because there's so many things.
There's so many demands of my time, so many things that tells me to sort of downshift gear into an easier gear because life would be a lot more comfortable that way.
This is not a comfortable thing.
No, it goes back to impact to happiness.
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 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.
It's like, obviously not verbatim.
I'm saying like, what did I just learn from Daniel?
What does apply to me?
He's like, oh, you have all these, you think you don't, I thought like I was ambitious and I, like, I didn't even realize till you kind of 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 a hell of inspiring.
One other question for you.
I'm obsessed with Game of Thrones to an unhealthy degree.
I rewatched 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 and fiction.
And my job and my obsession requires me to – 99% of my reading is nonfiction and I don't – I want to read more fiction.
And 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 story in the prequels of Game of Thrones where two brothers are fighting in this war.
one of the brothers was pulled into the war that did not want to be there, and he made the sacrifice
because it was for the good of his family. He wound up dying in the war that he didn't want to
fight in the first place. And his brother that survived, got his remains, buried him,
and then put him in a grave with only one word on his tombstone. And that one word was loyal.
So hopefully, a hundred years from now, when you do have a tombstone, if there was only going to
me one word on that tombstone, what would you want it to be?
I don't think too much anymore.
I used to think a lot about how other people saw me or see me.
I don't do that anymore.
so I would
choose more of a
self-reflective one
and I wish
only one thing
on my tombstone
future one
it feels absurd
talking about it
but
would be that
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 I really appreciate
doing this
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.
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 400 biographies of history's greatest 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.