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All-In · 2 min · Sep 28, 2026

Stardoll cut page loads from four minutes to under a second

Daniel Ek found Stardoll's pages taking about four minutes to load and rebuilt the site with a new technical team. Load times fell below a second as traffic grew, before Sequoia invested.

Daniel Ek

Daniel Ek is a Spotify cofounder and executive chairman; Neko Health cofounder.

Co-founded Spotify in 2006 and now guides its long-term strategy as executive chairman.

  • Chamath Palihapitiya, Host · Founder & CEO, Social Capital

    Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.

  • Jason Calacanis, Host · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH

    Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.

  • David Sacks, Host · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures

    PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.

  • David Friedberg, Host · CEO, Ohalo

    Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.

About this segment

Daniel Ek found Stardoll's pages taking about four minutes to load and rebuilt the site with a new technical team. Load times fell below a second as traffic grew, before Sequoia invested.

From “Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential”, Sep 28, 2026. Watch the full episode

“the average page load time at that time was like four minutes.”
Daniel Ekat 49:11 · All-In49:11

Takeaways

  1. Stardoll's page loads averaged about four minutes.
  2. Ek rebuilt the site and hired a new technical team.
  3. Load times fell below a second as traffic grew.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:58Spotify secured label deals by guaranteeing their near-term budgets4:02
  2. 27:22Short insurer tenures discourage investment in preventionPro pick 4:05
  3. 19:37Longitudinal scans can track changes across hundreds of moles2:38
  4. 39:24Ek sees compute as one signal of AI capability3:18
  5. 17:30Neko detects serious undiagnosed conditions in about 1% of members2:10

  6. 47:31Stardoll cut page loads from four minutes to under a second2:29

  7. 44:26Spotify supports open podcast feeds alongside platform features2:06Up next

Transcript

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

  1. 47:34

    were 20 years old, 21, 22, whatever it was at Stardoll? Yeah. Yeah. You know, it was a great experience it was it's kind of a you know uh it brings me back memory lane you know i um i did start all just before i started spotify um so there was a entrepreneur called matthias who was kind of one of the og entrepreneurs in the swedish ecosystem he had been around since the dot-com bubble. And he had, it was originally the site called Paper Doll Heaven in Turco, Finland, out of all places by this old lady and her son.

  2. 48:11

    And Index Ventures had invested in it and taking kind of a majority stake to help doing this because they had no idea of scaling this site. And actually, you know, Index and Matias kind of came in with the idea of rebranding it and building it into Startle. And so they came to me one day and they sort of asked around for people who knew tech and could be technical enough to help build it. And I had already decided I wanted to go build Spotify, but Danny Reimer is very good at convincing people to do things.

  3. 48:48

    And so as a favor to him and sort of me hoping that he would come and fund Spotify, which by the way, didn't end up happening. But, you know, I kind of said, okay, fine, I'll help you for, I think it was six to 12 months, something like that. But so I went over to Finland and I checked it out and it was kind of wild and crazy because I think the average page load time at that time was like four minutes.

  4. 49:16

    so it took four minutes to render a simple page so it was basically the server was completely breaking down by it seems i was like holy this is crazy i wonder how much more traffic you could do if you actually made this work um like in a snappy way and so we basically re-architected the website i hired an entirely new technical team um and uh brought it down to under a second of load time and obviously the traffic exploded sequoia invested yeah um you know and uh i said okay well i've done my part thank you and then i went off and built spotify it's amazing these origin stories like what happened right before the thing is always interesting to me listen