Daniel Ek, Spotify | David Senra

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.

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 Kareem, who's the co-founder and CTO of Ramp. Kareem is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance. I spent a lot of time talking to Kareem, and every single conversation centers around his obsession with crafting a high-quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers. Kareem and Daniel both believe that nothing is ever good enough and that everything can always be improved.

Kareem 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, Kareem 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 Eck 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 like and i was curious if you could say that's like no no i know you have this like inner burning desire and fire inside of you 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. 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 so I was like, okay, well, now I've got all this money and 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 incredible.

Probably hollowing because, you know, I realized that these girls weren't with me because of me and 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. I read it. I think everybody gets it at 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, you know, until 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. 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. And, like, I think 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?

Um, but what I did, did know is that, you know, I came from doing lots of projects beforehand. Um, and so sort of, um, you know, we talked about the one company I did sell, but I, that was like my fourth or fifth one. So I'd been doing a bunch of other things and I was doing many things in parallel. And you still do today. Well, um, 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 bad idea.

Explain. Well, you know, 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. 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 Eck 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 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 yeah 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 towards the end of his career they were like obsessed like oh tracy mcgrady's gonna be the next michael jordan and this guy's gonna be 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 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. 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. Everybody's like, oh, you just have to be like Steve Jobs. You just have to be like Elon. 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 that's very clear that there are yeah 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 there is 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 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. 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, Now, 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 Bases 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. 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, like there's this like myth, that's like, of like the genius young entrepreneur. And if you go and read all the biographies, they weren't like laying about doing nothing when they were younger. 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 thing over and over again. Some cases are in their forties, 50 years old, and they're at the top of their game. 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.

Like, think about the way you know yourself in your early 40s than you did when you were 23. It's like, we thought when we were 23, you don't know anything. 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 saw i was watching this funny uh interview with you and uh they they mentioned something like you're the most successful person to ever come out of scandinavia and your face your words were very polite but your face oh it's like somebody poked you're like oh i don't want to be like described that way but you're But your response is like, I know that face. I know exactly what you said. But this idea that you are the sum of like 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, made me kind of rudely. But I loved how you're obsessed with history and philosophy too. Yeah. And I was like, oh, this is a person that's, he's curious about the external world. But he also wants to know like who he is, what's important to him. Yeah. 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 more frequently, but something I definitely believe is 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, time out of 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, one of the truly novel ideas.

It's this idea of hiring a paid critic. So Sony is making, you know, audio equipment. It's like in the 50s. And they're very primitive devices. And what they realized was they hired a young vocal arts student. And I don't know how to pronounce his name. It's Naria Oga or something like that. And the reason they did that is because he was a fan of early Sony products. But he also had very fine, refined taste and everything else. 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 Akil, being the genius that he was, he goes, we hired him as a paid critic.

His job was to attack the deficiencies in our product because 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 oral mirror. And then fast forward to when the book is 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 I'm curious about with you is like I remember I just had dinner with Mike Ovitz. And, you know, 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 didn't like who he was, he was depressed, he was doing this, making bad decisions based on the opinions of other people, which entrepreneurs cannot do. 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 CA. 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, what do you think has enabled you to maintain that relationship? And he said, he tells me the truth. And he's like, you get into my position where, you know, he's famous, he's wealthy.

Most of the people that he interacts with are on his staff. And he's like, it's very dangerous. And he said, he's like, there's not many people in my life that tell me the truth. Who tells you the truth? Many people, which is the good news 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. 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 one. I have a very dear friend, Jack, who very similarly placed 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 like 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

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 what you want in life like and i get to meet pretty crazy people and most of the 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

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 don't know one one thousandth of percent of anything. And that's the way I feel. It's because every day I learn something new. I'm like, I'm going to be, I was so stupid back then. You have

is I think you nailed it with like coach And then, uh, 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 about this guy from this guy named Ken Kosienda, who was a programmer. He demoed to Steve many, many times when, like, when they were building their best products, right? and then there's another one story in uh johnny ives uh biography and they they talked they were comparing and contrasting the way like google would make products versus how apple did when steve johns was in charge and you know the guy's like hey you know google we have to decide between like blue and light blue and we run like 200 tests of like all the different shades in between that yep and johnny's like we would never ever do that yep do you remember you were old enough to remember this they create the the the imac but like the big fat bubble one yep you know probably late 90s And it was the first time there was going to be all these crazy colors and everything else.

And Johnny tells the story. He's like, you know how we chose the colors? He's like, me and Steve went to the design, 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 that spectrum? Yeah, I think the most important thing that you described is it's a spectrum. It's not 100% 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 journalist 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're going to call what turns into the iMac. He was obsessed with the Q Marine and 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 that. There can't be that. And he was like, this is terrible. And they kept meeting after meeting. He's like, Steve, this theme 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 it 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 get yourself or a small team to some level of taste The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations, unless you have HubSpot.

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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 uh like opportunity to talk about another one of your very unique ideas that i also um i there was excellent i just did this episode on jeff bezos because he doesn't give them any interviews and so i would take a transcript of his interviews and you treat it like a book and just go through it and he said something like from day one he knew like he wanted to build a company that could outlast him yeah right he still loves it he'll love it forever and it was very reminiscent of like what we're trying to do as parents where it's like you're shaping your kid but you're only successful if they can survive without you yeah and when i heard him say that it was a few months after you had beautifully like articulated this idea it's just like well i think there's a lot of you're gonna say better than i

did but essentially like there is a very rather clear analogy between the way your child when they're first born is essentially like a 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 yeah right and then now she's like she's got traits i don't even have yeah 100 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, year 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.

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 a hundred percent there and every you pretty much make every decision for them because they can't make it themselves and then gradually the next stage is 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 um 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, I was, the other day I was with the guy Hamilton Hamler 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's like, this is not a podcast for people that want to be told what to do. yeah 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 turn i tend to turn everything into an abstraction so like when i hear you i've sent this message to you where like you kind of remind me of james j hill which just might be the only person'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, 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 want to, I think this is tied to something also that is very fascinating with you is you have a high, and most people, again, like the, I think the more control you have over your life, the more success you have.

People make the mistake of like eliminating any, any people telling me truth, any inconvenience. They become like really brittle. You have an insane high tolerance for crazy people. Okay. 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, really creator of a magic money machine is the right way to think about the guy. 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.

He will go through – all he cares about is the very best ideas. He will – willing to go through 99 shitty ideas to get the very best because he understands how powerful those are. Can you explain, like, how you develop this tolerance? Because most people, like, especially this company's age too, you know, you're built – usually you have a lot of variance in the beginning. And then they get more successful and they kind of – they make – corporations make the mistake of, like, no, we need, like – we need all the edges. We need the high and the low out of there. You embrace that. The way you put it to me when we were talking about this is, like, high-temperature people for, like, training AI.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 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 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 and it was a 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 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 yeah and i go and then he goes it's related to his ability if you actually analyze his willingness to go into all these different industries where he doesn't know anything about the industry yeah yeah and I I think that sort of comes back to to uh the

George Bernard Shaw quote right the unreasonable man um let me read the full quote because it's an excellent quote too uh Uh, uh, The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. I have it painted on my wall at home. Yeah. And I'm 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 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 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, you know, 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 like 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 bed. Yeah, yeah. that is an unreasonable yeah you know people like oh i can't do that social etiquette like i even sometimes i find myself to do this because we're both introverts we've talked about this before but like um i kept getting invited to group dinners and i just felt like oh this is like a prestigious group dinner this person's really successful people would love this opportunity and so at the beginning when i first started doing this i started going i'm like this sucks i don't i remember one time it would be like it was in a private room and they shut the doors and within like five minutes i knew i was like i gotta get out of here i was like don't worry i'm gonna pretend to go to the bathroom and just you know never go back i was like so i said i go where's the restroom like yeah it's right in the room like oh no oh no oh 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 yeah instead of just being the unreasonable man yeah like i'm now going to say like what would daniel act do he would get yeah he would get our avoid the dinner in the first place yeah yeah i would say uh you know i'm not

proud of or 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

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 actually something. So I text a mutual friend of ours, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and I was like, I'm talking to Daniel, and Patrick, I think, asks the best questions in the world. And so obviously I need to, like, use, like, phone a friend for – That one lifeline.

Yeah, exactly. And he's a good mirror, too, because, like, it's almost like a therapy session. Like, he'll be very quiet, doesn't like attention to himself, and yet he'll, like, hit you with a question, like, I didn't even think about that. yeah um and he has this great way to describe you because my guess is that like not even guess i'm pretty i think you're obsessed of like learning and understanding the world around you and like that drives like a huge part of what you're doing in this exploration and you can build companies around the stuff you're interested in that's kind of like this compounding learning machine yeah but he goes uh 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 is 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. 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 are like, oh, what hobbies do you have? I'm like, I like to read. And like what else? I'm like, I like to read. That's it. And it's like I was like that when I was five. 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 didn'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 goes i started listening to patrick's podcast and then i'd hear an idea like that's a good idea i would try that oh i don't like that idea and then start reading books and then you're just literally taught yourself you weren't interested at all yep and now you're essentially world-class at it in a very short amount of time and this is just the face again yeah you just did the same face yeah 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 it's like i'm not just like listening to this podcast for shits and giggles yeah i'm not reading this book yeah

even if you find it enjoyable yeah like i'm looking to like apply this yeah well i i think it's back to that like um sort of these two concepts we talked about um my whole journey is one of self-mastery and and finding out uh how i can become the best version of myself um and meanwhile what gives me energy is solving problems um you know and and as you say um i think this is revealed early uh like i loved i didn't know it was companies but i loved like sorting out problems for other people i've been doing my entire life whether it's 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 or dead you're like in the middle of it so it's very fascinating to me because i'm like trying to balance like my understanding of this through reading with like an actual person where it's just like most of the people they're not like i'm starting a company for some company's sake right just say what you said i like solving problems yeah that that's it that's that's all like so if you look at like the video games i

actually think what kind of video games you like is a pretty good revealer of your things too like I wasn't playing any kind of first-person shooter games or any of that, some of it, but not much. Most of what I was playing was strategy games, you know, 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, you know, 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 center of 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. I was like I just mind my own business. yeah but sometimes like i just i i don't have any other way like i meet so many entrepreneurs and um they're like i sold my company i'm like sorry to hear that they're like what yeah i'm like why would you get out of the game and then they sell their company then you go be a vc i'm like oh my god yeah this is the best game in the world yeah it's never ending yeah it's not like sports where like no you you can get better with time yeah you can solve problems you can build your own world if you think about what we were doing in the computer at sim city it's like oh like i'll put a highway there that's like i'm i'm there we're world builders you get to control like who's around you what you're what like what are the rules in the world that happens yeah what's the outcome of the people in the world yeah and you get to make and hopefully you're doing it for like benevolent and good reasons where i do think like uh one of my favorite um quotes from a maximus from the history of entrepreneurship comes from henry ford where he's like money

comes naturally as a result of service yeah and the crazy thing about henry ford is by 1919 he 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, he had 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, right? And he's just like, I want to build a car for the everyman. You said something 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. 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 to my 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. 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.

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, 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 uh same thing where um 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's early career where people on amazon would come to him with a huge problem they thought maybe they get fired and yeah 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 permutente 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 uh henry and he goes problems are just opportunities and work clothes right this is a great way to think about it's like if i can solve this problem for other people yeah i make other people's lives better i make the company more valuable and like and then you also have to feel good about what you're creating into the world 100 but i think it comes from from solving problems and and um 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 is like laying a puzzle or anything else. It's like I get to sit around and because of the meeting so many billion 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, Mateo, and we live in the same city.

A few months after I started using 8sleep, I randomly ran into Mateo 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 Mateo, the founder of 8sleep. And my friend replied, he looks like he gets good sleep. Mateo 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. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my eight sleep ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed. So I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no brainer.

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You can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my 8sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at 8sleep.com forward slash Senra. 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 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. 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 I think you have to love technology in order to go to the depth of understanding what's possible. And because it's 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 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 of 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 uh you know uh a really complex equation trying to

get these things together with multiple unknowns and you're trying to configure these things by locking down constraints on one side and then you're trying another side and the amazing thing about early stage Chantra. Entrepreneurship is, you know, we talked about this Google example of trying 200,000 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 behave in any of these other things and then you have this other side, which is all about scale, which is all about conforming and sort of navigating that sort of dynamism between these two things and polarities between these two things is 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 take two decades or three decades to solve the problem that I'm trying to go after. Maybe in some cases stuff that he's working on might even outlive his 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, it's like, I just have super, like, 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, like, this is cool. Like who made the machines? It's just like, we did. Yeah. 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 he, it's such a, like, it's not, it's kind of a bland read, God bless his heart. But like, it's just him going through like little Wikipedia pages or like my, 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 I was like, oh, I'll just take like that little piece out here and I'll combine it with this piece.

And then what's, what's the new technology today that enables me to solve this problem that didn't exist a few years ago. So you have this patience, right? You have this desire to solve problems. It's almost like it sounded like to me, and maybe you could disagree with me, 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. You couldn't have done an Echo 20. 23, right? 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 mass more stuff. You mass, 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 tribe thing, less is more.

And the older I get, I feel it more and more. You know, 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.

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 like 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 and and without understanding anything about it but what sort of got me deeper curious about it is i realized that investing is is actually more about um learning about your temperament than it is about the specific action that you're doing your temperament actually it's it's more about being in line with your temperaments than the nod or which game you're picking needs to be suited to you and your circumstances and how you want to play this than anything else and so again we come back to philosophy um and so uh one of the concepts um uh is obviously around uh that munger talks about coming back to munger reference again is diversification right and and he calls it It's somewhat simplified diversification, 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 like I read something, you read a line and you're like, okay, let me filter that through like 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 it 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 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 he's like, if you just didn't do that, everything else you did, like if you just didn't sell. So Nick Sleep talks about this and in other books. He'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 this. He's 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 going to keep doing it. I'm going to 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, uh we owned ibm in the 1950s and i didn't know tarred 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 was 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 like, we made a massive mistake. We owned IBM in the 1950s and we sold. And they're having this conversation in the 1970s. And the leadership of the financial firm is like, how do we avoid not doing this? that one they said if we just held that it would have uh the gain would have been more than all the assets we have in our management yeah like we can't do this yeah that same year they sold walmart they have walmart in the 1970s 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 he i think that he bought the stock at like 62 cents or something right and he he had like a 2x or 4x game he's like yeah well i sold this day yeah so it's that's why i was like oh the best financial decisions are not financial decisions at all you're doing it for another reason which is exactly what you said it's like all sam had to do was just keep doing walmart

exactly what he did yeah i remember um yeah i obviously live in miami uh on a friend's boat in uh 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's like it was sam walton's brother's daughter right Right, yeah, yeah. It's crazy. But I think we'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. Then someone who has 10 decent ideas, but nothing is amazing. So that sort of differential equation between the 1% versus the rest is so important, and it's so important to understand. And I think 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? Like 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 uh and yes the tea is amazing but it's not just that it's just seeing that obsession about quality seeing that obsession about being not even one percent but like point one percent or point point one percent 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 uh for me like 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. It's mindedness, but the obsession on a 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, right? 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 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 it's 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 i 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 gonna read that day and it said uh it was buffet it's like the difference between successful people and and really successful people is really successful people say no to everything yeah and this is exactly the constant thing where like i do have a question for you um one 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 a lot that he feels like a different person yeah that i cannot believe that is like what i'm most proud of is not like trying to make something that's great which i think is a selfish thing for us it's like yes when you release it to the world you release spotify you do all these things it's an act of service to other people but you're also doing it because like you it you have to it has to come out yeah but i just cannot believe that i did that and i'm just like that's the thing i'm most more most proud of than anything else just Like, I had to do this.

I was willing to, like, drive Uber if I had to, 10 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 of 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 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.

but just changing a scenery uh being in a different frame of mind uh pausing giving um you know it's it's in the creative process you know um the greatest artists talk about some of the greatest songs literally take five minutes to write yeah which is amazing right but some songs are the ones you like work on it um you put it in a drawer and six months later totally unbeknownst to you it clicks you're not even working on that thing it just sort of like oh that's it and they go back and they do the song and it's like the greatest song ever um there's not one path to greatness um there's many um and i feel like the that's that's why i'm so obsessively focused on energy so you mean energy is like you just let that guide you yeah it's like hey if i need a break right now if i need to go for a walk or if i need to go spend time with my wife and kids or like yeah is that what you mean yeah 100 percent um and and i try to uh feel that i feel like so much of our our um life just rips us apart from this thing and tries to get us on a schedule per se um and it's not like i don't have a schedule of course i do have one and um but but i feel so much of it should be more guided by trying to understand ourselves more um intimately right

So I 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. 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-hour 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, you know, 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. 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. So a 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 Apia 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 the same thing you gotta like uh create the environment around you that you want to do you have to choose your game um and when you do that and you start understanding that you start becoming superhuman in your ability to get things done do you have more or less negative self-talk today than you did 20 years ago i i was i'm more comfortable with who i am um than i was 20 years ago I was still very much, my whole life I've been a searcher. I've been, you know, when I was really young in my teens, I went to every possible religious meetup you could be. I went to everything. I went to Hare Krishna centers. I went to, you know, Jewish centers, you know, mosques. I went to everything.

and i try to learn as much as possible because i i truly believe not enough people are are like i've always been surprised why more people aren't interested in where we come from and what the purposes 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 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 um and 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 um as an entrepreneur um and my interests were widely different than my social circuit growing up and all these things but the second thing is i'm an introvert um so um you know that doesn't help um so most people like being around a lot of people and they get energy from it i didn't so that obviously naturally um gets you to question yourself and you know against um many others as an entrepreneur i'm not the most eloquent person i'm not the smartest you're pretty

damn eloquent well i i had to work on it that's like the hard thing i've really really listen i've listened to all your episodes or all your interviews and i did this before we were friends and i every time something comes out i was like oh i gotta watch that you're you're very you're not giving yourself enough credit like you are a very clear communicator like thank you yeah um but but it's really a work product like i i wish there was more recorded stuff on myself when i was like 20 and 21 because not me i i was i was not great uh i was quite terrible um and and so i've just learn 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 were 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 like this every year if you're fine with it uh because like the idea that you even

like come from this tiny little island which i was like uh you know uh like got to visit and then you like competing with the biggest companies in the world and you win it's just doesn't like we we didn't even get there yeah but like you grow up you have a great mom you know you're single family not a lot of money but and then now what i'm curious about is like your lived experience is so there's so few people alive that can actually empathize with that as because they also had it so i'm very curious do you feel different um and what i mean by it is like as 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. um i don't feel difference because innately many of the things the drive the long-termness the obsession the um uh this sort of willingness on the paradox of winning on the one hand but then also trying to truly find a win-win um and work with people to try to find a win-win which is really important to me, has always been there.

And it's always been these things. And like you said, 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, And, you know, nonstop, 24-7, sacrifice 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 goes back to impact to happiness this is what so i think i text this to you um but But one of the roles you play, and I'm very grateful that you allowed us to, like, record this conversation because essentially what I text you is, like, you seem to have, like, no self-imposed ceiling on what you can learn or achieve.

And that spending time with you then transfers that belief to other people. And so, like, every single time, you know, I obviously, like, I take notes of, like, what I learned from the conversation we have after the fact. And I interpret it as, like, obviously not verbatim. I'm saying, like, what did I just learn from Daniel? What does it 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 until 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've rewatched the series all the time. I've read all the books. I've read the encyclopedia. I'll read the family histories. Because I do think, 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 you 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.

Wouldn't have it any other way. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I've obsessively read over 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.