Solve a problem worth a decade of your life

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 14:27

   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 VCE or any of these things.

2. 14:51

   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.

3. 15:15

   And it just conflicts with a lot of stuff that's in the biographies. And I'll just go with those guys over anybody else, right? And they're always just like, yeah, you know, my belief is something that I repeat. I'm really going to dismantle them that belief comes before ability. It's in these stories every single time you have somebody. I just reread 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 has been firebombed.

4. 15:44

   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. 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 yeah right and yet in his book he says i don't have a problem saying even then i knew i had potential and i could be great and i could do great things yeah he had the belief before the ability you said i don't even know it was called entrepreneurship yeah and i'm starting to build things and this is the question i have for you when did you know you were good uh I uh I don't know that I'm good I know I'm different and um the um but I have this

5. 16:39

   sort of insane belief that I can get good if I try hard enough um and I still feel that way by the way like uh because the the comparative sets has changed right like you know uh it 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.

6. 17:28

   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.

7. 17:58

   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 um 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 um fixing because if i'm not interested enough in it to spend a decade fixing it's it's probably not worth pursuing this is like something i'm super passionate about because you know if you really think about like they don't write biographies It's about people that like start, scale, sell a company and do it for like five years.

8. 18:44

   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.

9. 19:06

   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. Right. So we're going into this with, you know, he gave himself like a 30% chance of success. I think it began with 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.

10. 19:28

    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?

11. 19:53

    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.

12. 20:16

    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.