In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Live podcast with Daniel Ek Founder & CEO Spotify: The future of audio, AI in music and motivation

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Daniel shares the unique story of how Spotify revolutionized the music industry, the future of audio, the impact of AI, and his approach to leadership and building a strong corporate culture.  The production team on this episode were PLAN-B's Pål Huuse and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was done by Sigurd Brekke with input from portfolio manager Soumi Mitra.  Links:Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast In Good Company. Today marks a very special milestone for the podcast because this is the first ever live podcast. We have a very special guest, namely the visionary Daniel Ek who completely reshaped the music industry by founding and being the CEO of Spotify. Now, how did a self-described Swedish introvert climb to such heights of success? What unique insights and stories did he share with us? You are about to find out.

This is an episode you don't want to miss. Tune in. Great to see you all. And Daniel, a warm welcome. Thank you. Fireworks. That's a lot of way to start a conversation. No we are at the time of the year when Spotify gives you kind of the rap 23. What's on your rap?

Well embarrassingly enough what usually makes it on my rap is my kids music taste. They steal my account still. And it's changed a lot. It was a lot of Dora the Explorer a while ago. And now my youngest is into Nicki Minaj. So a lot of kind of gangster rap. And for myself, it's a lot of African music. So West African vibes, a little bit of country music too. So yeah, a good healthy mix, I think. Where is the music trend going? Well, I think that there's kind of two macro trends in music that is interesting. One is that it's going hyper-local. So you're seeing more variants of music taste now than ever before.

So to give you a great example, one of the most popular music genres in Brazil happens to be gospel music and funk music, just to take two examples. These are genres that probably otherwise wouldn't have made it in a big way in Brazil, but those are one of the big ones. And the other one is that almost everything is going global. So if you looked at past five years, one of the biggest things was how reggaeton and Latin music became a global phenomenon with Bad Bunny and many of the biggest artists these days are now Latin music, where before that was, with a few exceptions, Julio Iglesias or Enrique Iglesias and Shakira was kind of seen as an anomaly. And now some of the biggest artists in the world are Latin artists. And I think if you kind of fast forward that trend, maybe five or 10 years into the future, you're definitely going to see Bollywood music make it into the global scene. And I think if you kind of fast forward that trend, maybe five or 10 years into the future, you're

definitely going to see Bollywood music make it into the global scene. And I think you're going to see a lot of African music make it and become global phenomenons. And it's such a vibrant music scene, especially now in Africa. It's super cool to see what's happening there. But the cool thing is you're also going to see new genres form up. I don't know what will be popular here in Norway, but maybe there will be a country music artist that will make it big here in Norway or another folk music that has the resurgence too. There are many of those kind of micro trends as well that works on the same time.

Now, if I give you a playlist, how long time do you give a song before you move on? How many seconds? Personally, I try to give it, if you recommended it to me, I would give it maybe at least 20 seconds or something like that. Thank you. But the average song I think we have now is about three or four seconds. So what's changed, of course, is that this kind of barrier, when it's so easy for people to consume content,

is music has gone from having very long intros to almost immediately needing to hook you. Is that good? Is it bad for culture? Big question, big debate. I think it's both. I think some things are great, but obviously we are in this kind of fast consumption period. But then things like you and I having deep conversations or podcasts that are two hours long or three hours long about microbiomes and all that stuff. Well, we're not going to have that. Well, you and I probably not, but someone on Spotify will be having that conversation.

And what's so cool about it is that that also works, right? So you have this kind of enormous long-form trend and this kind of world where we're all living in short-form videos, 15 seconds, 200 characters on X, Twitter. Short-form videos, 15 seconds, 200 characters on X, Twitter. Those two worlds coexist at the moment in both. Well, we are going to be a bit short-form here. So, Daniel, I brag that I came from a little town in southern Norway. Now, you brag too that you came from a little town.

Yeah. Tell me about it. Well, I grew up in a suburb to Stockholm called Roriksved. It's one of those we call it miljonprogram, which essentially means when Sweden post the Second World War, built a million houses for its citizens. So my grandparents were an opera singer and a jazz pianist, and they were working class very much, lived in the central city, but had no access to heating or any of that stuff. So it was kind of an old building in the central city. So what happened in the early 50s is these new entire neighborhoods were built in the suburbs of Stockholm. And it was a huge expansion of the city. And one of those was the suburb we decided to move to, or my family decided to move to.

And it was great because you had amazing housing. It was very cheap. It was affordable. And lots of young families with kids moved there. And so mom grew up there she stayed there loved it and I was born but by that time it had changed from this kind of young families to being going through the 60s lots of drugs addictions down to huge amounts of immigration so my youth was you had in Sweden a huge inflow of people from the former Yugoslavia countries Iran Iraq Somalia many of those countries so the demographics in in a place changed a lot but the more more important things is we went from a middle class suburb to like a very poor and working class.

And there were lots of drugs. And it's kind of the projects basically of Sweden. It became one of those zones that was talked about for, you know. So the nickname of Rågsvett became Drågsvett because there was so much drugs. And what do you think it did to you growing up in a small place in terms of your level of ambitions and your goals in life? Well, I think... Because, you know, a lot of us have goals,

but you've had some pretty hairy, audacious goals, right? Yeah. I mean, it's been like Daniel against Goliath. Yeah. Well, what I think is so fascinating about that area was that it produced both extremes. So when I look at the people from my year group, say the same year as me, one year older, one year younger, we had four NHL pros. We had one NBA pro. We had two or three soccer pros, including on the Swedish national team and very high up on the leagues. So athletic-wise and a bunch of professional musicians.

And the founder of Spotify. And the founder of Spotify. Now, you've said, bet on yourself. That's been one of your mantras. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the advice that I would give everyone, right? Because a lot of people are talking about investing in things and some people are fortunate enough

to make some money and then a few of them ask me for my advice what they should do with that money. And I'm not an investor first and foremost, but even if I was, I would just tell them that the best advice I have is bet on yourself, because you would hopefully know yourself and know your own skills and your own limitations better than you would know a random stranger you've

never met. Some people want to do the safe thing and invest in a well-known company. Now, you started to build websites when you were 14, you founded a company when you were 16, you were retired when you were 23. Yeah. Why did it take you so long? Yeah. Well, I had a few ups and downs, by the way, in between. In the dot-com bubble, I lost it all and had to move back in with my parents and eat noodles for a while. And so it was a tough few years. And then through a series of luck, I essentially ended up selling steaks and companies. I got paid equity while I did that. And I don't know what equity was, but it was shares in companies.

I thought it meant that people would pay me back if they can afford it. So that shows you my level of financial sophistication. But eventually I made a bunch of money and that amount of money was what I thought I might reach if I was lucky in my 40s or 50s. And so I did what I said I would do, which is that's the time when I will retire. Yeah. So you bought a Ferrari, sprayed champagne. Yeah, you're bringing up all... So what happened then? How did your view on money change?

I had a lot of fun, I should say, for a few years. And I was able to get some of the girls I couldn't get before. So there was a couple of fun years. I'm pretty keen to explore this, but it may not be the place. It's definitely not the place. But I realized, to be honest, I lost a bit of myself in that process. And that life that I thought I wanted, I never actually wanted.

And working for me, doing the entrepreneurship things that I was, the companies I was building, et cetera, I didn't realize it was companies. I saw them as projects. But the main realization I had was that, you know, I would have done that even if no one paid me anything, right? And so I realized there was a passion that was driving me more so. And that passion kind of centered around three very simple ideas. One of them is, I like being around people that I can learn from, right? Another thing that I vowed to myself to not do was, I wanted to have fun while doing what I'm doing.

So many people are doing things they don't enjoy doing. I wanted to laugh, not take life too serious, but actually kind of just play jokes, practical jokes with each other. Everything doesn't have to be super serious. And then the third thing is I wanted to do something that I could have a small chance, even if it's just a microscopic way of having a positive impact in the world. So taking all those things,

why did that end up in being a music project? Well, I had a co-founder who was in a very similar situation. He exited a company called Trey Dubler and it became a very big, by Swedish standards, success. And he made a lot of money, way more than I had. And he kind of found himself in a very similar situation. So he asked me one day, well, what do you want to do? I want to do something with you. And I said, I pitched him kind of an advertising company, another one, I'd already done one. And

I pitched him a bunch of other things. And he said, well, why are you passionate about that? And I said, well, I'm not, but I think it would be a great business. And I had rationalized it really well. And he said, no, no, no. I want to hear what you're really passionate about. Like, what would you do? And I said, well, what I really would do was I would do music because I've got two passions in my life. I've got computers and I've got music.

And I would do a music company. And he said, so why shouldn't we do that? And I said, well well that's a terrible idea because that's a terrible business the music industry going like this and he said well why is it going like this and i said well because uh piracy so what so what did the music industry look like then so i come into your home yep um i mean you know these are young people they they are hardly seen you or LP or whatever. Well, back then there was two companies that was quite big.

There was a company called Napster. Anyone here heard of Napster? Okay, a few of you nodding. There was another one called Kazaa. Maybe anyone heard of that? Some people nodding. But basically, it was the precursor of Spotify but they were illegal you could download any music in the world for free and it was great and

it was how I download the music before I had money but it had a few downsides one of them obviously is it didn't contribute anything back to the music industry and the second thing is for consumers, it took a while to download the music and you could get virus in it. And it was like, sometimes it wasn't the music you actually thought you wanted to hear. So to have all these drawbacks. And so that was how most people listened to it.

And in Sweden, we even had the prime minister of Sweden going out saying that he thought it was okay to do that. And so I thought that was strange. Well, you even had a pirate party, political party. Exactly. We had the pirate party who made it all the way to the EU advocating for why corporate law needed to change so that everyone could take whatever they wanted for free. It was kind of an interesting time. So did you basically save the music industry?

Well, I would not characterize it as such, but I would say streaming saved the music industry, and Spotify is the biggest player in streaming. Well, isn't that the same? Trying to be diplomatic. So in my mind, you are a hero, okay? But you're not presented that way everywhere, like in the Netflix series, which you probably have seen.

I haven't, actually. Okay. But do you think some people, I mean, why are some people skeptical? Is it because you made so much money? Yeah, I think that we have... I think you should see it, by the way. It's pretty good. Okay, yeah.

I think we don't do well with complex narratives in general as a society. And so what I mean by that is that the reality is almost nothing is black and white. Almost everything is our shades of gray. And you have in this case, Spotify, which, you know, if you take music specifically, it is undoubtedly so that the music industry is back at all time high. And it's undoubtedly so that there are more artists now that can live off of music

than ever before in history. But it's a complex narrative, because at the same time, when people are saying they aren't getting paid as much as they used to, it's actually true. And it's true for a number of different reasons. One could be that you used to be very popular, and for whatever reason, you aren't. It's a very tough conversation to have that, especially if you're me, to say to someone, hey, you're not very popular anymore. You are not Taylor Swift. Exactly. And then the other thing that we have to be cognizant of is the fact that even though there are more people that are being successful in music now, there are also more people trying.

So the number of people that are failing are far greater than ever before too. And that's because we've democratized music now. So the number of people, the ease of access is far greater, but the ease of production, because everyone now can make music on a laptop, they don't need expensive studios or expensive equipments to make it, is also true.

And that wasn't done by us. So that means that there are more people now competing and on a percentage basis, there are actually fewer people succeeding on a percentage basis, on a relative basis, but on an absolute basis, there are actually fewer people succeeding on a percentage basis, on a relative basis. But on an absolute basis, there are more people succeeding. So it's a complex narrative, right? And so you see these things. And in a way, it is truthful because when certain artists say, well, I only made $15 and I had a million streams, it could be true. But

that's because they are one part writer out of many other writers, and that's shared, and there's plenty other people who have part of that. It's also equally true that a million streams isn't that much, even if it sounds like a lot in the grand scheme. You just talked about Blinding Lights having three billion, just to put a number of it, which is way bigger than I thought it was even. So that just shows how scale has been redefined, both in the number of people participating, but also what it requires to be very successful today. And so that is a narrative. And then later on top of that, that I've become incredibly wealthy for creating Spotify, which may or may not be unfair. And that's, I understand, is a very challenging topic for people to address.

And I think it's a well-worthy debate. And I think it's fine to be criticizing me for all of that too, because it is something that I'm conflicted about. It is deeply problematic for me. Why, excuse me, why are'm conflicted about. It is deeply problematic for me. Why, excuse me, why are we conflicted about it? Well, I think it's the Nordic heritage in a way. I look at it as seeing the society here and I still believe in the society as the greater part.

And I see the same thing that everyone else does. The rich are getting richer and more people are struggling. It is true collectively. And for me, I think we have a societal issue where if you contrast the two systems, I really think the key word here is equality. In the US, equality means equal opportunity. And in many parts of Europe, equality means equal outcome. And the reality, in my opinion, is neither system is delivering against its set objectives at the moment, right? The US isn't delivering equal opportunity.

And I don't believe Europe is delivering equal outcome, too. So the natural criticism of that then ends up becoming criticizing those that have the extreme tail end events, which I think we as a society should debate. Absolutely. And it is kind of crazy, by the way, to be a billionaire by the age of 30, wouldn't have happened 50 years ago. Wealth gets created much faster than it has been historically been before. And I don't know what the answer is to those things. It is something that I'm personally conflicted by, like I think many other Nordic and Scandinavian people would be.

Absolutely. people would be. Absolutely. But I mean, the whole thing started with you starting Spotify, and a lot of people here would love to start a company. And we even had somebody here, you know, how can we get kind of Daniel X genes spread out? I mean, that sounds a bit bad, but I think Elon Musk has taken bit bad, but your brain, I was thinking more about the brain. You know, how can we get, like, your brain spread out? How can we get your spirit, all these kind of things? Okay, so you want to start a company.

What are the important things? What's the secret sauce? I should, by the way, say I want your button there, too, to have meetings. You know, it's, they're fascinating debates around this. I don't know. I think his name is David Epstein. He wrote this book called Range. It's basically about genetics versus the environment. And one of the things he talks about is whether grit is something

that is genetic or whether it is driven by environment. And he presents a quite compelling case that maybe it is genetic. I would have always thought it was more formed by the environment. So grit is what we in Norwegian would call täl. Yeah. And so I don't know,

but even if that's the case, I like to believe that environment will shape us to quite a large extent. And so my view is, I do believe that when you think about it, I think that there's raw ingredients you need in order to build companies. You need frameworks to enable you.

So hurdles and administration and complexity, all of these things, will limit the number of companies that get created. You need capital in order to do that. So you need someone, whether it used to be banks doing it, now it's VC funds and all sorts of angel investors and whole ecosystems doing it. And then, of course, you need talent. You need lots and lots of people with varying degrees of skills. How do you attract the talent?

And how do you attract the talent? Exactly right. Storytelling, those types of skills that all are needed in the founders that are there. But those are sort of the critical degrees. My point, however, is all of that exists in plentiful in Europe. And even storytellers, there are lots of more ways to become a great storyteller and learn through YouTube and podcasting and all of these different ways now that just didn't used to. Knowledge is plentiful on the internet. There's plenty of ways to do that. So I don't believe that there's any reason and best practices and startups goes,

there's all of that. It all comes down to one thing, which is mindset, in my opinion. What's wrong with European mindset? I think there's plenty of things. We don't have enough people like us, people we can surround ourselves that have been there, done that, that can help us navigate these paths. And on the mindset path, my view is, I also believe that we don't think it applies to us because we haven't seen enough other people succeed and do it. So when I think about creating companies, just start with a simple thing.

The first advice I give, a complete novice one. It doesn't even have to with a simple thing. The first advice I give a complete novice one, it doesn't even have to be a technology one. I say, well, the fact that you just start the company, you're already in the top 1%. Because 99%, the truth is, we'll talk about a business idea and the amount of time that people come up to me and said, well, I had the same idea that you did. And they might have, by the way, because that's the amazing things about ideas. Okay, so rule number one, get your finger out. Yeah, exactly. And just do it. Start the first step. Because I like to believe that that is the number one hindrance to something. The amount of things, and people talk about ideas, like there

should be any novel ideas. The amount of times we changed the Spotify's idea from what it was the the core remained the same but how we would go about it changed so many times but it would in Sweden you know have a lot of role models right and you came out of the Kinevik you've been in the Kinevik system you have very you have a lot of successful startups now how is that creating more startups? What does that look like? I think, so you're rightly pointing out that the Kinevik or Stenbeck thing was a big role model, in my opinion, in the Swedish archetype. And just to draw the parallels

so that people understand it about this sort of next generation. So the Kinevik guys, the people who worked there, Niklas Zennström of Skype came out of there. All the Spray, Icon Media Labs, Bredbansbolaget, like all of these dot-com things, most of them failed, by the way, came out of there. My first job was at Spray as a 16-year-old kid.

I slept in bunk beds and I was coding all night, drinking Jolt Cola. I thought it was like the best thing. I was like, holy shit, this is like what I want to do the rest of my life. Obviously that company crashed and burned because we had no idea how to do business. But that was the dream, right? And that was what got my inspiration. And then a few companies later, I joined a company called Stardoll. A few companies later, I joined a company called Stardoll. It was all ex-spray people.

And when we started Spotify, I hired those people who were ex-spray and ex-Stardoll people to come join Spotify. And so the reason why I tell you that arc is because success begets success. And even attempts and experience begets more experience. Do you think, so in this country, we export oil and fish. Yep. You export music. Yep. You've got quite a lot of pretty good ones. Do you think that was important in your startup?

Yeah, that was the other part too. It had a healthy music ecosystem to begin with. That was amazing. And that stems all the way back from ABBA. All the great producers, everyone else came from there. And that created more songwriting talent and so on. And perhaps that's what got me into music to begin with too. A funny side note as well

is when you look at all the music streaming services today, Apple Music is actually byproducts of Beats Music, which was originally a Swedish-Norwegian company. So Apple Music has some Norwegian roots. Tidal, that's now owned by Block, that was formerly known as Square, to make things even more complicated, was Aspiro, a Norwegian publicly traded company too. So all of the world's global music streaming companies were basically Norway and Swedish. A lot of people don't know that. And so Norway actually has probably hundreds of millions of music consumers too

that was originally built by Norwegian engineers. Wow. And now half the Norwegian population is actually on Spotify. So well done you. Now, one thing. Now, I have a very, I have a truly fantastic assistant who helps me with everything. Now, you said at some stage,

you talked about the power of befriending the assistants. They hold the key to the kingdom. What is that about? Well, this is a question which my assistants insisted on. Yes, of course. Of course. Yeah, I mean, I often hear the phrase where you should go directly to the CEO, right?

And I'm sure you get that too. A lot of people think that you're magically going to be able to enact some kind of decision and it is actually true that there are certain types of organization where the ceo would probably always make the decision a great example would be a tesla like you have to go to elon musk if you want anything to really happen of significance but then i think it's more the scandinavian leadership model where you delegate decision making, you allow your leaders to make it. So in many ways, I'm probably the least powerful person in Spotify, and I probably make the fewest amounts of decisions in Spotify. And my point with

that is just to say that it's not always the sort of the one with the highest title or whatever that you should go to. It is trying to find the right person. And quite often, even in order to get the right person, you need to influence a bunch of other people. And many people forget the people who are actually doing most of the work. And I find like one of those groups to be assistants. So almost all powerful people have assistants of the work. And I find like one of those groups to be assistants. So almost all powerful people have assistants of some kind. And they are actually the ones who decide who this person is meeting or not meeting and can really help and shape whatever

happens in that person's day. So it's just one of these stories where no one talks about it, but that's how it works. And it's kind of just a powerful trip, I would say, is to realize that there's so many people that make a great company work and assistants in particular are hugely important and powerful people, but they rarely get that recognition. And they, people, but they rarely get that recognition. And they, in my case, made all the difference why I was, as a 23-year-old kid in Sweden, was able to get in and have these meetings. I remember one time I had a CEO for one of the big record companies, and I had a standing meeting with him every Friday where he said no to me. That was literally all we did. And about the third or fourth time, we had this meeting and he's like,

how the fuck are you meeting with me every Friday? Like, how do you get on my calendar? And what ended up happening was, I had coffee with me every Friday and I happened to know that there was a particular chocolate bar brand that this assistant liked. So I brought her that and I said, so let's was a particular chocolate bar brand that this assistant liked. So I brought her that and I said,

and when I came out, I said, he wants to meet next week too, every Friday. And she's like, sure. And panned it in right in there. And eventually he agreed and we had a deal. So sometimes you have to be a little bit cheeky when you kind of make things happen and will it into existence, but the assistance in this case was just very, very powerful. Well, here's Jiki.

Where is the Spotify product going from here? How is AI going to change it? How is it going to be more individualized and personalized? Yeah, I mean, the general arc of Spotify can really, and I think most businesses actually can be explained about allowing people to move from point A to point B with lower and lower friction. And when I say that, it's like anything. Imagine making it easier for people in stores to find what they want. That is probably a huge business. Making it easier to pay. That's removing friction, moving from point A to point B in people's lives. So much is about

solving very simple problems. So when you think about Spotify, the first thing to do is to think about who are we serving? And we actually have two constituents that are equally important to us. One is our consumer, and the second one is our creators, the people who have this really just amazing talents, God-given talents in storytelling or music or authors, all of those different ones that we serve. So the easiest way to figure out what Spotify is going to do is to solve the problems for those constituents. And the best problems are the ones that are true for both of them at the same time. So if there's a huge consumer need that also happens to be a big creator need, it is obviously going to make it very, very high up on the Spotify list on the roadmap. So all you need to know, if you want to know what

Spotify is going to do, is look for things that you know will be huge problems for consumers and huge problems for creators, and we will prioritize that. There will be instances where we prioritize things that are only good for consumers and neutral to creators, but that would make a lower down on the priority list and vice versa, of course. So how am I going to experience Spotify differently in two years' time? Well, I think you're going to be able to find

even more great content and much more easier. The best way I would tell you that would be the number one problem consumers have is still how do I find what I want to listen to? And the number one problem creators have... But do I know what I want to listen to? I don't know all kinds of music. You probably don't know, and that's true.

But that's our job to help you do that, right? And then equally from a creator's side, the number one problem is help me find more audience. I want to be able to reach my audience in better ways. And it actually happens to be sort of two sides of the same coin. And so I think what you're going to do, the best way to talk about what Spotify is today is, the truth is as good as we are at recommendations,

if you really put your mind to it, you could create a better playlist yourself. If you really spent the time on researching and doing all that stuff. I think five years to 10 years from now, that will not be true. I think we will do a better job even if you spend a whole working day trying to figure out what you wanted to listen to. We will be able to create a playlist that is so much better than any of that so that means in plain english to be right now spotify is your friend that knows music really well and podcast and all that other stuff and it knows you okay but it doesn't understand you what you might want

at precisely this moment or novel things that you haven't shown appreciation for before, but might be if we introduced it in the right way. And I think we're going to become that trusted friend where we're going to introduce you to things that you probably thought, no way in hell am I going to be interested in this. And you're going to be like totally hooked to it. So for instance, podcasts, now we have 2 million different podcasts in the world. And people who listen to podcasts listen on an average of six and a half hours per week. I mean, I've heard they even come to live podcasts these days. They do.

That's incredible. What do you listen to? Apart from In Good Company, of course. Of course, of course. You know, I listen to so many different things. One of the big things for me is, just like reading, I always read three books at the same time.

I read a novel to get me to relax. I read something that I think will develop me professionally that I kind of know. And I read something about something I know nothing about and have no way of knowing if I'm even interested in it. And so my podcast habits are quite similar. So I usually listen to something that kind of just interests me. So in my case, it's sports.

You try to buy Arsenal, right? That is correct. In a weak moment of passion, I try to do that. It's kind of an expensive hobby, no? That is an expensive hobby, indeed. But sometimes you just got to go with your heart. Why did you want to buy Arsenal? It's been my favorite team since 1991.

And I, in a kind of passionate moment, felt like the club was going in the wrong way, and I said, I didn't realize it would be that picked up, by the way, but I kind of said, look, if they want to sell it, I'd be happy to take it off their hands, and then all of a sudden that became like a two-month long thing, and people were like, are you serious? And I had to go through the process of actually like,

okay, well, what would it even cost? How would I put together the bid and so on? And eventually I did all that work and was fully serious in doing it. But what do you personally learn from sport as a leader? I learned a lot. And the most important thing is in business, you can play, if you think about a sports analogy,

you can have one team that shows up with 10,000 players on one team and the other one has 10. So it can be a little bit of an unfair competition and unfair game at times. But in sports, in football, which is my favorite sport, you have 11 players, both sides have that, right?

And you have 11 players, both sides have that, right? And you can have players and you can have whatever theoretical system you want, but the reality is those players will show up at that time and they have different skills and weaknesses and their skills and weaknesses will develop over time too. And so as a leader, one of the big things I truly believe is people have all these boxes and they try to fill the boxes. It's somewhat true, but you also have to play through strengths of your team. Like if you have lots of people who are quite offensive, you need to back it up by being defensive yourself. If everyone is defensive, you have to be the one that's quite offensive.

So when you build your team, what is important then? It's about finding different players with different skill attributes, preferably things, in my case, since we're a founder-led company, finding skills to complement mine, right? And so in that case, it may be doing things, I happen to be no surprise here, but maybe being a bit too optimistic at times. So I need to surround myself with people who are more level-headed than me, that see risks when I don't see any ones, that balances that. That would be one type. I also need people who are probably more realistic on deadlines than I am, because I tend to be more optimistic. So engineers that like structure rather than just design and seeing solutions.

So I think it's about complementing the teams that you have. And sometimes that gets very intricate too in the specific sites. In our case too, very specific to Spotify, much of what we do is such a legal environment. I was joking to one of the founders I met earlier today who has a legal startup. And I said, well, a funny side note is I actually run a law firm too, because I have more than 200 lawyers at Spotify that work too,

which is a lot. 200. Yeah, it's quite a lot. And so one of the problems, because I have so many of them, is the risk. And they are quite powerful, of course. A lot of people, when the lawyer tells you not to do something, that's usually no, like completely stops the conversation. So how do you create an environment where you can take risks without many lawyers permitting, right? There's this very specific problem to Spotify, and we deal with IP rights that are very, very, lots and lots of complexity that deals with that. So you need a head lawyer that, as a person on my team, that can see these nuances and can teach their team around when to take the business input and try to find solutions rather than just being the stop but daniel you've been doing this now for 17 years right yep um

you have 200 lawyers you've been dealing with music rights music and all that stuff yeah you've got all the money in the world what what keeps you going at spotify after all these years very few founders stay for that long yeah uh well what what keeps me going is um i still think that there's so much left to do and in just our core thing i still think that there's so much of this work for these amazing creative people around the world that we've only begun to work my My view is that the people we're serving on the creator side are some of the most talented individuals. I don't know why some of these artists, when you hear them sing,

you just feel different, right? The closest I've come to it is a God-given talent, honestly. And why some of these storytellers, whether they're a comedian, they're able to take these really complex things and really taboo things. If you and I would talk about it the way they do, we get instantly canceled. But they somehow are able to get us to laugh about these really sensitive things.

And they're so important for our society. And we get to serve them. And we get to get people to feel more. Because ultimately, what Spotify is doing and what music does is it takes every moment in your life and it gets you to feel more in that moment and so for me that is like such a huge honor just to be able to be part of and it's so fantastic and then with my wealth also then to be able to pass that on to other entrepreneurs and hopefully get them to think as big or bigger than I ever did and get them to tackle bigger problems for our society. Because you support some of the startups now in different industries, right?

Yes. Type of things you do? Well, I have a defense company, for one, that was highly controversial a few years ago, maybe less so now. Defense is good in Sweden. It is very good in Sweden. And unfortunately, very necessary, I think,

in the world at this moment. And then healthcare, trying to redefine healthcare is one. And a lot of climate companies that I am involved in trying to change hopefully advancing industry, advancing infrastructure so that we move to a more sustainable future. Most of the talent people I meet cannot be described as happy.

They are more like tortured souls. What about you? Well, I look pretty happy, don't I? No, but I think that there's certainly, you have a ship on your shoulder and I certainly have that too. Still, I still feel inadequate pretty much every day. I still feel like shit when I screwed up something, even how I formulate something two minutes ago. I was like, I should have done a better job. And that is constantly how I think about things. I constantly see problems as much as I see opportunities in front of us. And I feel impatient to try to do that. But I try to counter that by surrounding myself,

as I said, with people where we can joke. And I love coming to work every day because I get to learn from these people. I get to send them weird memes, which they half of the time don't understand and send me weird question marks back. But it's the way we roll with things. And that brings me happiness. And that brings me happiness.

And it brings me happiness to see the impact we're having. It brings me happiness to see when we have people inside of the company, like when you see them developing. One of our leaders that's now developed, I remember her quite a lot. 12 years ago, she was an intern in our London office. And I met her about three years ago. Now, when they presented me as someone who might be capable to take our live music efforts. And I thought to myself, really? We're going to take one of the interns and try to do that? I'm all for taking risks, but I'm not sure about that.

But what I obviously had failed to realize is a lot happened in the 12 years in the company. And she'd been doing quite a lot of amazing things inside of the company since then. And not a day has gone by without me being super impressed by her and the amazing work she's doing. And I just use that as an example because seeing growth and positive impact just gives me a lot of satisfaction. But we live a very short period of time. And my parting words to all of you would just be, use the time wisely. We don't know when it's going to end. I feel lucky to wake up each morning but I also feel incredibly impatient to try to do the best that I can with my limited time here on earth

and that's the torture part of me I'm both happy on the one side but also feel like holy shit life is short and I want to make the most out of it so that I can leave it hopefully in a better place than when I entered

and Daniel you know what a big thanks for spending part of your short life with us here in Oslo.