Daniel Ek
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Wow, this is pretty insane, guys. I think this probably ought to be the biggest recording of a podcast in the world.
Wow, this is pretty insane, guys. I think this probably ought to be the biggest recording of a podcast in the world.
Yeah. You guys should use this as the studio every time, I think.
Yeah. You guys should use this as the studio every time, I think.
Here you are.
Here you are.
All right. Well, love that. Love that. And it's really amazing for me to be here and just see this and all of you guys' success. I remember listening to you guys. as a fan, I think starting 2019 and see that we're now five years later from a small base going to something like this, it's pretty remarkable to see.
All right. Well, love that. Love that. And it's really amazing for me to be here and just see this and all of you guys' success. I remember listening to you guys. as a fan, I think starting 2019 and see that we're now five years later from a small base going to something like this, it's pretty remarkable to see.
And I don't know about you guys, but I thought maybe to commemorate this moment, it'd be pretty fun I know you don't want to tout your success, so I thought maybe I could do that for you. So maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished.
And I don't know about you guys, but I thought maybe to commemorate this moment, it'd be pretty fun I know you don't want to tout your success, so I thought maybe I could do that for you. So maybe we can have a look at some of the amazing stats and achievements you guys have accomplished.
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And on Spotify alone, you guys have now done over 5 million hours, and it tripled in the last year. Pretty remarkable, right? Yeah, big round of applause. So...
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And on Spotify alone, you guys have now done over 5 million hours, and it tripled in the last year. Pretty remarkable, right? Yeah, big round of applause. So...
Yeah, is the Nintendo one the longest one you guys have done? I think Microsoft Volume 2 was our longest.
Yeah, is the Nintendo one the longest one you guys have done? I think Microsoft Volume 2 was our longest.
Yeah, but what's really cool for me, too, is just seeing the fandom of the show. So one thing is, you know, obviously seeing the sort of total numbers, but also seeing the fandoms. And you guys added more than 250,000 followers, and that tripled last year, too. So it's over 250,000 followers on Spotify alone now on The Quiet Show, which, again, is pretty remarkable to see that kind of growth.
Yeah, but what's really cool for me, too, is just seeing the fandom of the show. So one thing is, you know, obviously seeing the sort of total numbers, but also seeing the fandoms. And you guys added more than 250,000 followers, and that tripled last year, too. So it's over 250,000 followers on Spotify alone now on The Quiet Show, which, again, is pretty remarkable to see that kind of growth.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's word of mouth in a new way. But the other part that was really cool to me as I was looking through the data, I kind of expected this to be sort of an English language thing only, maybe the US, maybe UK, that kind of thing. But you guys have truly grown worldwide. So, you know, look at some of this stuff. Like you have Mexico growing five times, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore.
Well, it's word of mouth in a new way. But the other part that was really cool to me as I was looking through the data, I kind of expected this to be sort of an English language thing only, maybe the US, maybe UK, that kind of thing. But you guys have truly grown worldwide. So, you know, look at some of this stuff. Like you have Mexico growing five times, Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore.
Acquired is global. So it's amazing to see here in San Francisco that we got 6,000 people in one place, but I'm pretty sure you guys should take this on the road and we'll see if we can make it in other places too.
Acquired is global. So it's amazing to see here in San Francisco that we got 6,000 people in one place, but I'm pretty sure you guys should take this on the road and we'll see if we can make it in other places too.
Yeah. Could be, could be. Well, you know, it's maybe a timing question. You guys should be like the new rock stars that tour around. That would be the great thing to do. And, you know, it's... I want to really kind of maybe take the moment here and ask you guys how all of this happened.
Yeah. Could be, could be. Well, you know, it's maybe a timing question. You guys should be like the new rock stars that tour around. That would be the great thing to do. And, you know, it's... I want to really kind of maybe take the moment here and ask you guys how all of this happened.
And by way of context, just to put this in perspective, in 2019, when we got into podcasts, the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people listening to this. And you mentioned this, but our goal was to sort of broaden
And by way of context, just to put this in perspective, in 2019, when we got into podcasts, the world around podcast listening and Spotify, there was a few million people listening to this. And you mentioned this, but our goal was to sort of broaden
this whole medium, and today there's over 150 million people listening to podcasts on Spotify, and obviously your show is a huge success, and something that attracts people to the medium because it's both pretty broad these days, but also very, very deep. What do you think contributed to that success?
this whole medium, and today there's over 150 million people listening to podcasts on Spotify, and obviously your show is a huge success, and something that attracts people to the medium because it's both pretty broad these days, but also very, very deep. What do you think contributed to that success?
So one of the things you obviously have done is, you know, added video to the format. And this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. But what do you think is next for the show when it comes to that? Like, what do you see the big innovation of Acquired will be in the future?
So one of the things you obviously have done is, you know, added video to the format. And this is my plug of hopefully getting you guys to finally add video to Spotify as well. But what do you think is next for the show when it comes to that? Like, what do you see the big innovation of Acquired will be in the future?
Well, I mean, I think it starts with your audience, right, and knowing your audience. So, like, for instance, we launched audiobooks about a year ago, but the sort of untold story about that audiobooks launch is what happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audiobooks to the service. So they started hacking the system for all these other things.
Well, I mean, I think it starts with your audience, right, and knowing your audience. So, like, for instance, we launched audiobooks about a year ago, but the sort of untold story about that audiobooks launch is what happened in Germany is all the record companies started uploading audiobooks to the service. So they started hacking the system for all these other things.
And when they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts. So podcasts turned out to be the easier medium for us to start with, but eventually we added sort of audio books too. So I think most amazing things tend to start with people kind of suggesting things or maybe even doing things.
And when they ran out of that, they actually started uploading podcasts. So podcasts turned out to be the easier medium for us to start with, but eventually we added sort of audio books too. So I think most amazing things tend to start with people kind of suggesting things or maybe even doing things.
So it'd be interesting to kind of like figure out what people are doing in and around Acquired already. And that will probably be your sort of adjacency.
So it'd be interesting to kind of like figure out what people are doing in and around Acquired already. And that will probably be your sort of adjacency.
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know, to be honest. I think this is probably the biggest thing that surprised me is that the world just keeps evolving constantly. So you talked about video and on Spotify, it's been a huge growth thing. I would have said to you as well, people probably mostly, why would you want to watch any video?
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know, to be honest. I think this is probably the biggest thing that surprised me is that the world just keeps evolving constantly. So you talked about video and on Spotify, it's been a huge growth thing. I would have said to you as well, people probably mostly, why would you want to watch any video?
But I think younger consumers, especially, they don't know what the difference is. They just want to feel closer presence to the person. And, I mean, we saw it already with the bloopers, right? It's like, this is fun, what you guys are doing, and people have a relationship to you guys too, hence why so many people are showing up here tonight.
But I think younger consumers, especially, they don't know what the difference is. They just want to feel closer presence to the person. And, I mean, we saw it already with the bloopers, right? It's like, this is fun, what you guys are doing, and people have a relationship to you guys too, hence why so many people are showing up here tonight.
And I think video is just a way to express that, whether or not they're watching the full four hours, or whether they're diving in and out over a particular type of segment. I think just giving the consumer the choice is sort of one of the big things. And that's kind of what we're leaning into as well, is just allowing the creator and the consumer to more directly interact in more novel ways.
And I think video is just a way to express that, whether or not they're watching the full four hours, or whether they're diving in and out over a particular type of segment. I think just giving the consumer the choice is sort of one of the big things. And that's kind of what we're leaning into as well, is just allowing the creator and the consumer to more directly interact in more novel ways.
Yeah, I mean, I think it starts like so many other things. I think Mark and I, we just struck this sort of friendship and we started talking about, you know, the little told story is, if I remember this correctly, I think Mark even pre-Facebook was trying to do a music startup. And then he was like, yeah, this feels like a difficult thing. Wirehug? Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I mean, I think it starts like so many other things. I think Mark and I, we just struck this sort of friendship and we started talking about, you know, the little told story is, if I remember this correctly, I think Mark even pre-Facebook was trying to do a music startup. And then he was like, yeah, this feels like a difficult thing. Wirehug? Yeah, exactly.
And so I think he's like, I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the Valley tried to do a music startup. And so he was definitely passionate about it. And then his idea obviously was a social music product. And, you know, we started talking about it. In the beginning, it started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social.
And so I think he's like, I think pretty much every great entrepreneur in the Valley tried to do a music startup. And so he was definitely passionate about it. And then his idea obviously was a social music product. And, you know, we started talking about it. In the beginning, it started like he wanted mostly Spotify to be more social.
And I kind of said, well, I don't know that that's... Do you remember how you got introduced?
And I kind of said, well, I don't know that that's... Do you remember how you got introduced?
Yeah, well, I got introduced to Mark through Sean Parker. And so Sean kind of said to Suck, like, hey, you got to meet this entrepreneur from Sweden. And I remember Suck at the time was living in a very small house and we went for a barbecue at his house. This is probably... I don't know, 2008 or 9, like one of those things.
Yeah, well, I got introduced to Mark through Sean Parker. And so Sean kind of said to Suck, like, hey, you got to meet this entrepreneur from Sweden. And I remember Suck at the time was living in a very small house and we went for a barbecue at his house. This is probably... I don't know, 2008 or 9, like one of those things.
And then we kind of struck a friendship and we started jamming on various ideas around how to make music more social. And you weren't even live in the US yet, I don't think. We definitely weren't live. So the sort of secret of Spotify was we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to kind of like it. And I think Sean in particular, he kind of used it as a social currency.
And then we kind of struck a friendship and we started jamming on various ideas around how to make music more social. And you weren't even live in the US yet, I don't think. We definitely weren't live. So the sort of secret of Spotify was we sort of seeded one account at a time to get a bunch of influencers to kind of like it. And I think Sean in particular, he kind of used it as a social currency.
So everyone came to him to kind of try to get. Oh, the invites.
So everyone came to him to kind of try to get. Oh, the invites.
Yeah, it was a big, big thing for quite a few years before we launched where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't. Anyway, he got Mark on it, and I think Mark kind of wrote this status update, like, Spotify is so good. And then, you know, everyone's like, how did you get this? This was kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it?
Yeah, it was a big, big thing for quite a few years before we launched where it was kind of the secret thing if you were in the club or if you weren't. Anyway, he got Mark on it, and I think Mark kind of wrote this status update, like, Spotify is so good. And then, you know, everyone's like, how did you get this? This was kind of the main thing. When can I get it? How can I do it?
And, yeah, then we started jamming around, like, what a social music product ought to be. And we had this sort of idea, wouldn't it be cool, sort of like with... You know, ICQ at the time where you had these status updates, like, wouldn't it be cool to be able to check out what your friends were listening to?
And, yeah, then we started jamming around, like, what a social music product ought to be. And we had this sort of idea, wouldn't it be cool, sort of like with... You know, ICQ at the time where you had these status updates, like, wouldn't it be cool to be able to check out what your friends were listening to?
And we kind of got to work together, built that product, and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.
And we kind of got to work together, built that product, and coincided it with the Spotify US launch.
Exactly right. So you could see all your friends. It actually still exists in Spotify product on desktop. So you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time. It's one of our more popular legacy features that's been around now for like 13 years.
Exactly right. So you could see all your friends. It actually still exists in Spotify product on desktop. So you can kind of see what your friends are listening to real time. It's one of our more popular legacy features that's been around now for like 13 years.
It's still there. Okay.
It's still there. Okay.
Well, I still think Social is hugely important. And for instance, we have we have a product now called jam which allows you to Be with your friends and actually alter what you're listening to at the same time and it's growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world and So it's something that I think very much is a social product.
Well, I still think Social is hugely important. And for instance, we have we have a product now called jam which allows you to Be with your friends and actually alter what you're listening to at the same time and it's growing incredibly rapidly right now all over the world and So it's something that I think very much is a social product.
But while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this notion that just seeing what all of your friends are listening to may not be the right social product. But if you instead say, I want to work together with my friends and I want to have a shared listening, whether we're in the same place or not, that turns out to be a pretty amazing thing.
But while I still think music is very social, I think what we got wrong in the product was this notion that just seeing what all of your friends are listening to may not be the right social product. But if you instead say, I want to work together with my friends and I want to have a shared listening, whether we're in the same place or not, that turns out to be a pretty amazing thing.
So you see people do it at parties where you can literally join someone's jam and you can sort of all queue up songs together instead of taking my phone or your phone, we could all be sort of working together on something.
So you see people do it at parties where you can literally join someone's jam and you can sort of all queue up songs together instead of taking my phone or your phone, we could all be sort of working together on something.
But what we saw during the pandemic and that's like where jam sort of started was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having sort of this shared, you know, consistent music listening where we're all listening to the same thing at the same time. even though we were sort of apart. It's like the best of linear TV brought to music. Yeah.
But what we saw during the pandemic and that's like where jam sort of started was we started seeing that people were using this to stay connected as well by having sort of this shared, you know, consistent music listening where we're all listening to the same thing at the same time. even though we were sort of apart. It's like the best of linear TV brought to music. Yeah.
So I think we're still sort of, you know, definitely playing with the social concepts and trying to get that right. But I think, you know, Facebook kind of moved off of this sort of presence-based social aspect for all things. So it wasn't just music, actually. People were doing it for games back then, too. So it was like, you know, I've created another Farmville. Oh, yeah.
So I think we're still sort of, you know, definitely playing with the social concepts and trying to get that right. But I think, you know, Facebook kind of moved off of this sort of presence-based social aspect for all things. So it wasn't just music, actually. People were doing it for games back then, too. So it was like, you know, I've created another Farmville. Oh, yeah.
Many things. And I've learned so much from him and the rest of the team at Meta as well. But I think specifically from him, he's probably the best learner I've ever seen. You can have a conversation with him about a topic. He may not know very much about it. And then the next time, he would know more than, I would say, most experts about the subject.
Many things. And I've learned so much from him and the rest of the team at Meta as well. But I think specifically from him, he's probably the best learner I've ever seen. You can have a conversation with him about a topic. He may not know very much about it. And then the next time, he would know more than, I would say, most experts about the subject.
And it's really remarkable just how tenacious he is sort of about learning and staying curious about things. So that's definitely been a super inspiring thing for me. And I think that this sort of shines through with how he runs the company too. He has a very sort of clear idea, but he also takes a lot of feedback and sort of iterates things.
And it's really remarkable just how tenacious he is sort of about learning and staying curious about things. So that's definitely been a super inspiring thing for me. And I think that this sort of shines through with how he runs the company too. He has a very sort of clear idea, but he also takes a lot of feedback and sort of iterates things.
on that and it's everything from, one of the cool things for me has been seeing how he runs meetings. For instance, I kind of like having relatively small meetings with people. Mark, the average meeting he has is like 15 to 20 people in the room. And how you make a product review or discussion productive with 15 and 20 people, still get people to be heard. He's very, very good at that stuff.
on that and it's everything from, one of the cool things for me has been seeing how he runs meetings. For instance, I kind of like having relatively small meetings with people. Mark, the average meeting he has is like 15 to 20 people in the room. And how you make a product review or discussion productive with 15 and 20 people, still get people to be heard. He's very, very good at that stuff.
And that's just a few of the things that I've learned, which has helped me as a leader as well.
And that's just a few of the things that I've learned, which has helped me as a leader as well.
Well, I mean, the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with him because I know it'll end badly for both of us. So, you know, as you know, Mark likes sports. So one of the things I don't do with Mark is play sports for exactly this reason. You know, what was the last time he sort of tore his ACL when someone, you know, rather than giving up. So...
Well, I mean, the rule I have with Mark is I don't try to go into a competition with him because I know it'll end badly for both of us. So, you know, as you know, Mark likes sports. So one of the things I don't do with Mark is play sports for exactly this reason. You know, what was the last time he sort of tore his ACL when someone, you know, rather than giving up. So...
I feel like it'd end pretty badly. I like playing when I know I'll win, so I think it's a pretty good thing to not do that.
I feel like it'd end pretty badly. I like playing when I know I'll win, so I think it's a pretty good thing to not do that.
That's pretty much spot on, to be honest. One of the things we talk about a lot that I don't say that much, but Gustav, who's backstage here, who's our product officer and CTO, is we say talk is sheep. Most people talk about execution, speed of execution, let's move, let's go. We actually spend a lot of time just discussing and talking.
That's pretty much spot on, to be honest. One of the things we talk about a lot that I don't say that much, but Gustav, who's backstage here, who's our product officer and CTO, is we say talk is sheep. Most people talk about execution, speed of execution, let's move, let's go. We actually spend a lot of time just discussing and talking.
So the internal saying at Spotify is talk is sheep because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it.
So the internal saying at Spotify is talk is sheep because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it.
Exactly right. It's more expensive to build than most people think. And so we actually spend a lot of time discussing, and people get really confused when they enter our culture. They're like, but why don't we just execute? And we're still sitting and debating and game theorizing how this will play out and getting all the things right. working in a certain way.
Exactly right. It's more expensive to build than most people think. And so we actually spend a lot of time discussing, and people get really confused when they enter our culture. They're like, but why don't we just execute? And we're still sitting and debating and game theorizing how this will play out and getting all the things right. working in a certain way.
And we have our sort of ways of doing that now that we've sort of codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point. But a part of that is also because, so to set the stage is because we had to, because remember everything, unlike many other products, when you're building a company, you can kind of sort of iterate and do stuff. We had to get the entire industry with us.
And we have our sort of ways of doing that now that we've sort of codified across the company, which I think is pretty unique at this point. But a part of that is also because, so to set the stage is because we had to, because remember everything, unlike many other products, when you're building a company, you can kind of sort of iterate and do stuff. We had to get the entire industry with us.
So if we wanted to do something, we had to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do. And in many cases, even making relatively simple changes could take one or two years for us to get licensed. So you better be sure that you're right when you're doing it. And this has kind of now become a thing in how we're doing stuff.
So if we wanted to do something, we had to convince a bunch of people that it was the right thing to do. And in many cases, even making relatively simple changes could take one or two years for us to get licensed. So you better be sure that you're right when you're doing it. And this has kind of now become a thing in how we're doing stuff.
We're probably not going to be the fastest in moving fast and breaking things. That's it. But we are going to be very deliberate, and we're probably going to be more right when we actually do something.
We're probably not going to be the fastest in moving fast and breaking things. That's it. But we are going to be very deliberate, and we're probably going to be more right when we actually do something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we won't be the fastest, no.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we won't be the fastest, no.
Oh, I think it sort of depends on which markets you're kind of looking at it. But we were pretty much, it started happening in quite a few markets already 2020 and 2021. And in 2022, we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world. So three years. Yeah. From launch.
Oh, I think it sort of depends on which markets you're kind of looking at it. But we were pretty much, it started happening in quite a few markets already 2020 and 2021. And in 2022, we were pretty much the market leader in most markets around the world. So three years. Yeah. From launch.
We don't always know how fast this will be, but I think we had a pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way, sort of hill climb from the mountain we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction.
We don't always know how fast this will be, but I think we had a pretty good sense that we could sort of iterate and improve our way, sort of hill climb from the mountain we were on when we saw the sort of initial traction.
But I think the contrarian bet we did, unlike many others did, was, you know, at the time when we launched, it was sort of viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything, right? Like you had to have a separate podcasting app, and podcasting and music were very different. And for us, it's just listening.
But I think the contrarian bet we did, unlike many others did, was, you know, at the time when we launched, it was sort of viewed that you needed to have a different app for everything, right? Like you had to have a separate podcasting app, and podcasting and music were very different. And for us, it's just listening.
And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people and today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff. And it turns out that like what we saw all the time, it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to podcasts. So why not use this experience and also recommend them great other stuff?
And what we realized is we should use this base of what was then several hundred million people and today's way north of half a billion people and just serve them more stuff. And it turns out that like what we saw all the time, it wasn't like our music listeners weren't listening to podcasts. So why not use this experience and also recommend them great other stuff?
And we went from there and then a year ago we also added audio books because that turned out to be another way to increase people's listening and that they were also spending time doing.
And we went from there and then a year ago we also added audio books because that turned out to be another way to increase people's listening and that they were also spending time doing.
Yeah, of course, you're right. Obviously, just because you have the distribution advantage doesn't mean it'll work. But I think going back to it, what's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something deliberate, sort of top-down, it's sort of failed.
Yeah, of course, you're right. Obviously, just because you have the distribution advantage doesn't mean it'll work. But I think going back to it, what's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something deliberate, sort of top-down, it's sort of failed.
And most of the time, actually, what we see is the inklings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there. So I mentioned this at the beginning, but... Germany was sort of an early indicator for a lot of things for us, both in podcasting and in books.
And most of the time, actually, what we see is the inklings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there. So I mentioned this at the beginning, but... Germany was sort of an early indicator for a lot of things for us, both in podcasting and in books.
And what I realized even before we launched books, for instance, was around 2018, we started seeing books showing up on the top list in Germany of the most sort of listen to music tracks, right? It wasn't music, it was clearly books, but it sort of made it all the way up to the top list.
And what I realized even before we launched books, for instance, was around 2018, we started seeing books showing up on the top list in Germany of the most sort of listen to music tracks, right? It wasn't music, it was clearly books, but it sort of made it all the way up to the top list.
And shortly thereafter, we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country, but we weren't even trying. And it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify. So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you kind of know you've got something.
And shortly thereafter, we started showing up as the biggest book distributor in the country, but we weren't even trying. And it was actually a pretty horrible experience to listen to books on Spotify. So when your product is being used in spite of it actually being a pretty terrible experience, you kind of know you've got something.
So that was the sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand.
So that was the sort of genesis for how we then were able to build and sort of expand.
Hi.
Hi.
2012, 13?
2012, 13?
But I think the amazing thing is, unlike you talking to a journalist, et cetera, it's truly a conversation one.
And the second part is there's enough time to actually elaborate on the thought and the idea.
Whereas you have to be so succinct in how you express your idea and truly get it across in 30 seconds, or like you lose the moment and the journalists want to move on.
He just switches it on and he's like so good.
For some reason, he and I always end up getting on the same panels.
And I'm like, it's game over even before it started.
You're going to have all the great stuff.
I like to say that there was probably this genius insight at some point in moment, but that's certainly not in the case of Spotify true.
And for a long time, you know, I was kind of finding the urge on this, but we were oftentimes trying to not think of ourselves as the users and customers, because once you got through kind of a hundred million users, you're kind of like, well,
Obviously, I shouldn't be the target demo.
I need to kind of listen to what the actual users are telling me.
And there's some part that's true with that.
But then more and more what I've realized is also that actually internally, we probably have the best sounding board of a quite representative Spotify user and what they might like.
And so one of my favorite topics is how often people game our platform.
For instance, in Germany, unbeknownst to us, but one of the sort of crazy things that ended up happening was just people started uploading audiobooks because it turns out that these music labels actually own a bunch of audiobook rights.
And so as the platform was taking off, they realized what else can we put on this platform that gives us a leg up and creates more revenue for us.
And they realized that they have this catalog of audio books sitting on there.
So I think that was kind of one realization where we kind of realized, hey, this platform, it doesn't seem to matter all that much what we're putting on it.
And then I and others at Spotify, we were big podcast listeners ourselves.
And we love that, but we hate the fact that we had to switch app from our normal one.
We hate the fact that we couldn't get the recommendations working.
We hate the fact that we couldn't get this to work on my car speaker or my home speaker and all these things that we spent literally a decade building for the music industry.
So it kind of dawned upon us that podcasters have sort of the same problems that the music creators have.
And we should be able to play a pretty big role.
And all the primitives that we built for music should work really well in terms of discoverability, in terms of ubiquity that we call, which is sort of our ability to play on any device.
And of course, our freemium model where the ad supported and eventually paid models as well should be able to all work together.
And so the craziest thing in the beginning was probably when we started talking about it as building it in the same app.
That was what the biggest resistance was.
Because the common wisdom at the time was obviously, well, podcasting has to be a distinct own thing.
Even merchandising podcasting is a very different problem than music.
And it's actually one of the things that we're still working on trying to crack the code on.
But that was probably the most contrarian, both inside and outside.
But to us, it was probably the most obvious one because we had already seen the behavior happening in Germany.
And once we had tried unloading it for ourselves so that we could play around with the product, it was kind of obvious that this would be a great experience.
And it's probably been the most interesting one for me and what I often tell other entrepreneurs is like, well, the fact that people doubt you in the beginning, you kind of need to pay attention to that and hear what valid concerns they may have.
But a bunch of that is just like they're not used to the concept and it's going to change.
And not that you were right, but actually, well, of course, this is kind of obvious, right?
So my favorite one, obviously, streaming music, where when we began doing it, I always got this sort of pushback of like, why would I want to rent my music?
Yeah, people were not talking about it.
And people actually conceptualized more around sort of renting things.
And you know, that means that technically, what happens if you guys don't want to have that song anymore, the song disappears and...
And we were fighting against it where it was so obvious to us that because I grew up with piracy that, no, actually, all you want is access to it.
And it was such a hard notion for people to get conceptually because we've been spending 30 years just getting people into that.
And I feel like most of the tech industry has spent a decade plus learning about having separate apps.
And we kind of said, no, no, no, it doesn't really matter.
We can put it in the same app and actually people will love it even more because we're solving the same sort of user needs.
Well, it was really a lot more of a first principles kind of thinking around it.
It didn't really make sense if you looked at sort of like, what are we trying to solve for?
And was it truly so different in terms of a consumer experience?
No, it was the same playing view, slightly different sort of modalities, but totally possible.
And if you thought about it as a discovery, okay, well, that's a similar problem.
Ubiquity, being able to play it on all these speakers, made a lot of sense of having the same thing.
Search, all of these things were basically shared infrastructure that we could utilize.
And again, if you're searching for content, why...
You don't really care all that much about it on YouTube.
And on one end, you're listening to music on one side, you had all these other short form videos and sports and so on.
You don't think that those are distinctly different behaviors.
And it's because you really think podcasting is a different format.
I mean, that's the thing with audiobooks too, right?
Like, what's the difference between an audiobook and a podcast thing?
Well, you would say chaptering and some of those stuff.
My view, I guess, is the boundaries are from a format side is definitely being blurred quite a lot and for right reasons.
But the better way to think about audiobooks and podcasting is it's really around a business model mostly.
So one way to frame it instead would be podcasting is ad-supported audio and audiobooks is paid audio.
So for you guys, I mean, I also happen to know you spent so much time and effort on the research of that site.
You could imagine that in the future you have the ad-supported side of your podcast be certain types of episodes and you'd have for your subscribers the unlock where they get access to these kind of deep dives
And obviously the subscription thing could be as simple as like, hey, you're part of our other network and it doesn't cost money, or you could paygate it all the way through.
But I think it's more of a business model that's the big format differentiation.
Because as we said, like the quality, the mics we're using relative to an audiobook, there's no difference here.
You're using like high quality camera equipment.
Also very similar to more professional style than sort of do-it-yourself kind of equipment.
Editing, all these things, it's getting more and more blurred.
Yeah, and obviously our view is we eventually think audiobooks should be much, much larger than what it is today.
Hundreds of millions of people who are actually listening to audiobooks because the content is great rather than today what's tens of millions of people.
Yeah, we believe it's like tens of millions.
It's one of the fastest growing categories, which makes it interesting.
But it's, again, fundamentally, it's both a business model problem.
It's, you know, again, a discovery problem and all those other things.
And there probably needs to exist a different business model for all of these things.
But you could even, in your case, I mean, you guys have probably right now a pretty defined audience, I would guess, and probably a very high value audience, which makes ad supported monetization possible.
probably better than the average creator for you guys just given the type of audience that people want to want to get to but you could even contemplate like some of your deep dives like i've i've heard like actual hedge fund investors literally have that as the sole input to their entire process which is terrifying yeah well not investment advice yeah exactly
But I mean, it is one of the areas that I'm kind of the most intrigued about.
I think Ben Thompson had this piece very recently.
I think he called it like the unified content business model piece.
I don't necessarily agree with everything he said, but I think his main takeaway is obviously that all media models ought to move to freemium.
As someone who's been saying that for 15 years, I obviously agree with him there.
But I think that's true in all formats, right?
Like, as I said, I think, you know, what's the difference between audiobooks and podcasting?
There are definitely differences, but the formats are blurring.
But the main one is the business model, as I said.
So it's just, it's talk audio, but with a paid or an ad-supported business model.
And I guess my advice to you guys would just be, I think you should kind of like explore both and see to an extent what's possible.
And you have to contemplate that if you're making moves, like certainly of our size, because many of these investments that we're making are multi-year ones and pretty substantial from a signaling point of view too.
And obviously public market investors want to know like, well, is this ultimately a good business and why do you think that is?
for me to have said, well, we've bought a bunch of companies, but I don't really know what kind of business it'll be.
It's probably not gonna be the right answer.
So obviously we contemplated that and we thought about that, but the reality is there's a lot of the grass is greener on the other side when you go too deep in that.
So obviously on the one hand, if you deal with a lot of licensed content,
and um you know in this case from some major labels and obviously a lot of indies as well but still relatively supply constrained from from some big ones the natural tendencies for you to think well this is much better because all of a sudden you have this sort of much wider scope of different creators that matters it's great uh you can aggregate a fragmented market yeah you you can
We don't really contemplate all that much.
It's obviously, there's other challenges for that business model.
Moderation all of a sudden becomes a massive thing.
You have to build an actual ad network that probably then scales.
You may have an opportunity to gain revenue
But fundamentally, you have to do many more steps along the way.
We don't have to contemplate content moderation as much when it comes to music.
We certainly don't have to have these very elaborate systematic processes about what constitutes speech and violence.
And we knew that because I'd seen enough of these, obviously, platforms.
But it is important because if you think about it from a P&L, so on the surface of this, these models are great, right?
Because very high gross margins and so on and so forth.
But even at scale, if you think about it, is the cost increasing or decreasing?
And if you think about, you know, right now, obviously AI will come in and it will be massive.
But I think at one point in time, Facebook or now Meta had over 100,000 content moderators actually working for them.
And even today, if you think about it,
So, all right, well, maybe that's not 100,000 anymore because they've been able to automate some of that process.
So the other side is now using quite sophisticated AI.
And that means that your AI models has to be a lot more, you know, sophisticated.
So I think the best case scenario, I was looking at this, this is very old data, but I believe at the time of Facebook's IPO, it was something like the cost for Facebook to onboard a user was like a dollar a user or something like that in like hardware costs and all that stuff, basically to have lifetime value of a customer.
And so at that time, obviously the monetization wasn't as advanced.
So that was what was burning cash for quite a while.
And then eventually their growth rate probably slowed down enough where their monetization started kicking in and kind of scaled up enough where those two effects kind of took out each other and they became very profitable.
But if you look at it now, I don't know what the cost would be, but if I would guess, if I would start a social media company today,
the cost may be an order of magnitude more, right?
Because of all the other things you now have to do.
The ad platforms are way more sophisticated.
They have to build, the moderation tools are way more sophisticated.
Now, the good news, so you may then come to this and say, well, was that a mistake then?
Well, we knew a lot about that going in and we weren't entirely new.
It wasn't like we were starting an ad business from the scratch.
So we had we had relatively good idea of what type of problems we would encounter.
And the amount of inventory, obviously, that we were monetizing it against was relatively small.
And one of the big things right now is obviously this is a huge thing, perhaps even more so than music for us to offer monetization to a lot of these podcasters that perhaps unlike yourself can't sell ads.
So I want to ask you about that because I saw the episode you guys did with David Senra, by the way.
So, and he's interesting because like, in my opinion, he seems to almost dig in more in like what made him successful and like tries to not at all veer to broadening the base.
Like, cause you could just go serve your niche even better or you could try to like, well, let's try to include other forms of content.
Like how do you decide what type of content to go after?
Yeah, I think it's brilliant how you're able both to satisfy your own curiosity, I guess, and at the same time, it doesn't seem that far-fetched, some of the ideas you're trying.
Obviously, I would probably assume the Taylor Swift one was brilliant.
more out there than than something else but but the lvmh one actually felt to me super natural um and it's it's funny you know how well talked about it it's been even among like what i would have not assumed would have been your crowd like i had a bunch of like really old school value investors that i honestly didn't even realize listened to podcasts they've been pinging me about it like have you listened to this one it's like
So I think there's a way where there's probably some overlap between the audiences, but also kind of clearly attracts a new... Yeah.
But sort of diving deeper on that, I'm curious then, would it have been that much more effort for you guys to produce the eight, or did you have the content, but it just didn't make sense from an audience point of view?
Yeah, I was just thinking about sort of touching upon where we sort of were a little while ago about sort of paid versus ad supported.
I bet you that there would be a very small one, but there would be an audience that would listen to all eight.
Whether you want to spend all the time doing the eight is a totally different question.
It seems to me like the best creators just pursue whatever they're interested in.
And some of it will work, some of it won't work.
They don't really seem to care all that much.
Obviously they'll learn from what seems to be resonating and all, but that's the cool part.
Like we're living in an internet where on the one hand, everyone talks about this 15 second kind of clips thing and everyone's sort of,
But then at the same time, you could have like three, four, five hour long conversations in super esoteric, very, very deep topics.
I believe one of the biggest problems we have in this new creator economy is the one of attribution, right?
So many creators like you have or try many of these different platforms and use it, but
And they can see on each individual platform how well they're doing, but it's very hard for them to understand what actually drives what.
I see some creators who are under-investing in other platforms and probably too singularly, just because they have success on one, they kind of ignore all the others.
Which my advice to all of those is that feels kind of dangerous to do, because if there would be an algorithm change or any of the kind, even, you know, unanticipated by the platform, because, you know, they may see that something resonates, watch time resonates better with some other metric.
It doesn't have to be skewed as an evil thing.
It just could be something that actually benefits the user.
But if you built your entire livelihood of that one platform, that could be a big problem for you.
So I see them under investing in other platforms.
And then the other one also be true, which is they're over investing in too many and not realizing that actually they probably would do better in just focusing more on one or two.
And so I think that there's two different problems.
I believe that for us and why we care about this and certainly why we designed the home feed the way we did is because fundamentally how we merchandise content has to be very different for music than it is for an audio book or a podcast.
And if you think about it, it's kind of logical because in a song, it's a three minute commitment of your time.
And you can actually probably tell within the first 10-15 seconds whether this is worth investing your time in or not.
But you probably then know the brand and you know how to give it the time and attention to it, because you're like, well, love Radiohead, I'm gonna give this song a chance.
And maybe not just one chance, I'll listen to it a few times before I make up my mind.
And obviously, if you now think about that with podcasting, I mean, if I'm listening to you guys, and even if it's a topic I don't necessarily know that I'm interested in, I might give it a shot because it's you guys.
And I trust you because I built up this rapport with you.
It is a much bigger commitment for sure.
But I may give it 10, 15, 20 minutes, right?
But if I've never listened to you guys before, that one hook that gets me in, how many people in marketing you usually had.
And in early Spotify, we had eight people needed to have heard about Spotify before we were able to sign someone up.
And so we realized that the geographical density in which that happened was actually a key sort of contributor and a timeline.
So much of our early marketing efforts were in college cities in the US.
You have like consumers who are probably more attuned to music being a big part of their life, small geographical areas.
We did a bunch of different things that were hugely successful.
We all believe that these like sort of internet companies that go global day one, that's like the right approach.
I actually think 99.9%, this is just untrue and false.
we all are benefited from constraining ourself to finding what our first audience is.
And it could be geographically niched.
It could be that it actually is, again, a subset of a demographic or whatever.
But more often than not, it's actually geography helps limiting yourself to a city, to a state, to a country, whatever it might be.
I can tell you definitively Spotify would not have been alive today had it not been that we couldn't launch in the US as our first market.
And if you ask me at the time, it was like a huge kind of step back to say, well, I can't launch in the most biggest market in the world.
And I'm running an internet company, like, come on.
Well, I had many of those episodes, and it always followed with enormous weight gains and hair loss.
When I started, I had hair, and then two, three years later, I didn't have hair.
There's like old pictures of me with hair, like from the first year or something.
Well, so obviously I think it has been, but obviously I can't recommend, it is an emotional rollercoaster.
You guys know this being an entrepreneur, it's not for the faint hearted.
And I think every really successful entrepreneur, in my opinion,
has had at least three near-death experiences with their company, right?
Where you just feel like, I'm not sure whether this thing is going to work, not work, whether we're going to be alive tomorrow or not.
And I kind of hate how media portrays this and sometimes how entrepreneurs, we're supposed to be sort of like, we're so big, we understood everything from day one.
Like my journey was, you know, I had a lot of luck.
I worked insanely hard to get to even half of where we were today.
And then it's been a true sort of emotional rollercoaster.
And it is true what you say, but like for me, had you told me how hard this would have been, I would have never done it.
I'm happy I went through it, but I would have never done it.
It was one of those where if you'd asked us externally, it felt like this massive event.
But if you were inside of Spotify at that moment, there was no one who...
thought that that was sort of the defining moment.
We certainly worried about, okay, well, is this the beginning of like more artists sort of pulling out, et cetera, for a few days.
And then, you know, I spoke to a lot of artists, but I think there were certainly a lot of skepticism about Spotify at the time.
But generally speaking, there had been enough things in Europe where people really saw like, no, actually this kind of works.
Maybe it's better for her to do this thing.
But there was enough people that believed at that time that it was only a matter of time before the US would be majority streaming to the sort of,
way it's been portrayed oftentimes with Spotify in particular has been like this sort of dogmatic it has to be all in with me or not and actually that's not how I advise artists or creators
I always tell them like this kind of, and it's kind of unusual thing because everyone wants to build their own platform and so on.
But my firm view is that truly I believe in open as the model at its core.
And so my view has been like, there's some artists that at that time, I don't believe it's true anymore, but like the Adele's of the world that probably benefited from physical scarcity that probably didn't need to be on streaming platforms
that probably should have done a windowing type model.
The number of those artists were going to be very, very small.
Was that because of the demographics of her audience?
But also she on her own can basically control the zeitgeist, right?
Like she can decide that this is a big cultural moment.
Not a lot of people in the world can get hundreds of millions of people around the world to wait for a moment.
And she did it brilliantly with this album launch too.
Yeah, a lot of, I don't know if it was hundreds of millions, but certainly tens of millions of people literally waited and sort of, she got them in on the hour and it was like each hour was another sort of gift.
And she's really remarkable at understanding how to speak to her audience and she does it authentically.
And there's definitely other artists that can do the same.
But what's rare is for her to have that kind of zeitgeist and connection with that, deep connection with that audience, the fan base that she has, how vigorous and how intense they are.
Yeah, I think the predominant thing that changed was streaming just became the majority of the industry in a bigger way.
So if the option was like, hey, am I on streaming or not on streaming?
Do I think she could have reached number one at that point without streaming?
Probably not would have been the answer.
No, it definitely hadn't happened in the US.
I mean, Spotify at that time was like shy of three years in the US.
streaming penetration was relatively low.
At that time, physical sales was still very big.
I remember, I think it was Lil Wayne that sold like 3 million albums in that year on Costco out of all places.
Yeah, it's some sort of demographic connection thing was going on.
And we were talking about it before, but Starbucks and Howard Schultz was actually one of the biggest retailers of CDs.
That's actually how I met him the first time.
Yeah, because they were becoming a partner of ours.
Exactly at that moment and got to know him, spent some time with him.
So yeah, I mean, the world just looked very different back at that time.
And yeah, I mean, ever since she's been great with the team and she's super smart.
There's quite a few of them because I actually believe these days, if you consider a mega artist of that stature, it's like they're their own enterprise and they're the CEO of that enterprise.
They certainly have people who help them.
But at this level today, there's almost no one of them that's not very active as well on the business side and understand deeply what their audience wants, what's authentic to them.
By making move X, how does that affect that relationship?
You know, you have everything from the Taylor Swifts of the world, and then you have something like BTS, which is like insane.
Because they're same order of magnitude scale, right?
I don't pretend to know all of Taylor Swift's business sides and who's involved in everything.
But from what I would guess is she probably runs with a pretty lean team
And that's certainly been our interaction with her.
And then if you think about something like BTS, but actually quite a lot of the Korean artists, it is like an industry.
Just on the songwriting side, it's the difference between if in Taylor Swift's camp, it's like two, three, four, maybe at the top.
In some Koreans, it's 200 writers involved.
And then you have like everything from merchandising, there's another few hundred.
Yeah, well, that could be your next deep dive because honestly, it is fascinating how they do it and the 360, how they think about it, not just from sort of maximizing their recorded side, but actually thinking about sort of fan development, all the digital platforms, they have their own developers, programmers, building specific platforms.
And I think this is a broader trend, right?
We're now living in a very global world when it comes to culture.
At the same time, there's still a lot of local nuances, right?
So it's this extremity that we talked about.
On the one end, you have this super, super niches that exists.
But then once every blue moon, one of these niches kind of develop into something that's actually quite sizable, and you kind of start realizing that maybe this has a global appeal on top of it.
So in LATAM, as an example, gospel music is quite big.
Okay, well, that's probably not what you associate with popular music.
But there are real things, and obviously they exist in microcosms elsewhere, like you could probably guess in the South, in the US, gospel might be a larger genre, etc.,
So it's not like it's totally kind of isolated and just happening there.
But there's something that creates a sort of cultural resonance with those types of styles.
And then you have something like reggaeton.
And then actually in each cluster, it's kind of like starts...
And when you really look at it, like it has oftentimes a pretty huge diaspora outside of that sort of near region as well.
So, I mean, the Hispanic population, the US would be kind of an obvious one, right?
And so many years ago, we kind of started seeing them breaking out their natural clusters and becoming a pretty big thing.
And it was, for me at that time, it was just pretty obvious that if we invested in that genre on a global basis, we thought that that would have a global appeal.
They may not know what the lyrics are about though.
Yeah, that would be a very different thing.
There's a lot of local cultural things that seems like, what is talking about, you know, someone cheating with this one and all this kind of relationship stuff.
But yeah, I mean, yeah, that's the fascinating thing, right?
But at the same time, you probably wouldn't have imagined MSG being sold out and like 20,000, if not more, people singing Korean lyrics that doesn't look Korean, by the way, like know every word to every lyric.
Like when things catch on, it's music.
It makes people feel there's something about the artist, there's something about how they're communicating that resonates with you as an individual.
And it is the foundational storytelling.
Like we can objectively describe, oh, there's art, but how you feel, why do you feel a certain way when you're looking at a painting?
Why do you feel a certain way when you're listening to a song?
And that's the amazing thing about what we're able to do.
And the really cool thing is you're able to take artists that otherwise perhaps may not even have been able to be professional and now they have a global audience.
I don't know how to express it other than that they have some sort of God-given talent.
That's the best way I can describe this kind of genius when they're able to express
these things in a way that it just resonates with people all over the world.
Just instantly, it's like, how do you do that?
I was talking to Ted Sarandos about this.
If you think about filmmaking, it's still, as you said, one of the things about a Nintendo is you have to have the resources enabled to build a game, and that's still not cheap, and it's expensive.
And back in the day, maybe you had to build the entire console in order to even have a chance of doing it.
But these days, you still, like, a AAA game is... A few hundred million dollars.
And sure, you can build an indie game and so on and so forth, but it's still a very limited number of people that are able to do that.
But even in filmmaking or in TV series, the amount of people that used to be able to be showrunners or producing or directing these things, it was a fairly limited group of people, right?
And it probably mattered a lot, not to diminish any of their talents, but it probably mattered who you knew was an integral component and having talent.
So you kind of had two different things.
But in the last few years, as the budgets have expanded, and certainly in the Netflix case,
it would have been physically impossible to just keep this same set of producers, directors, et cetera, right?
Because they're just trying to make so much more content.
So one of the interesting things is the same thing is happening now where there's last time directors and producers, not just doing sort of local productions, but actually now coming to Hollywood-
And I've seen it in my case, there's been a bunch of Swedish writers and producers and actors now that are getting into Hollywood productions and it's been fun to see.
And not just the usual names, but actually like some more unknown talent making its way as well.
And there are more people trying, but there are also more opportunities.
And then obviously, as you mentioned on the podcasting side, the same is true there, but it's true on both sides.
But there's also more competition, which is, I think when people are talking about Spotify and criticizing it, that's the part I think is the biggest misconception because they hear so many people who are trying and it doesn't work where they're not making a lot of money of it.
they're naturally sort of drawing the conclusion that, hey, there has to be something wrong with the model.
But in reality, both things could be true at the same time.
And I think podcasting is like much earlier in its maturity.
I'm not sure a podcaster sees it as it's sort of given that monetization is there and it needs to be there from day one.
Whereas I think obviously with the professionalization of music, that's a much bigger part of the expectancy.
But that's actually a kind of relatively limited part of our human history.
it's probably even less than a hundred years that we've had recorded music and it being a form.
And yet it's part of the copyright regime.
It's part of like some pretty important loss.
So I think it comes with a different expectancy.
I'm just saying just the arc of history.
And I was actually gonna latch on to something you talked about sort of being creative too.
One of the things I often think about when you think about sort of the history of music
Going back to it, at the time of Mozart, if I wanted to create music, the reality is I had to be a musical genius because I needed to hear every single tone in my head, every single note.
I needed to hear all the different instruments, how they would all play together.
I could write them down, but I could never hear them all being played at once, right?
they were only able to listen to their actual compositions like a few days before the actual concert that they were doing and then making small tweaks.
But by that time it had to be pretty perfect.
And so sure, they could play a little bit on the piano, but then they kind of needed to not visualize, but somehow internalize
Having a whole orchestra is the AAA game equivalent.
And so obviously very few could do that, but also the process, the creation process was insane because you needed to do so much.
And then, you know, you move forward and think about it sort of
the era of playing instruments and take jazz, which is highly technical, right?
Like every single member in a jazz band is excellent at their instruments, right?
Like it's really hard to be that good of a musician and play jazz.
And then, you know, fast forward a little bit more and take someone like, you know, Swedish Avicii as an example.
But he didn't really know how to play any instruments.
may or may not be correlated with making great music exactly exactly my point but but he actually had a different tool he had he had software right and he's actually he was really good at that software and you know all the knobs and um you know plug-ins and all that stuff and how it worked and a lot of musicians are that way today like if you actually look at the workflow it's very technical
Like I have this thing that I do where I probably shouldn't admit this, but like I said on YouTube on evenings, I look at music producers, their workflows, and like when they get into the weeds of like decoding how they do stuff.
And it's a lot of fun because artists love just hanging out here too, because we've got kind of everything that they'd like to use and to do.
But my point is, I mean, if you think about it, it is a kind of a very technical workflow that takes a lot of time to get into.
And some of the parts of that workflow, you'd have to watch probably hundreds of hours of YouTube videos to even decode or how to do it and like start getting into it.
And a lot of these today's composers are experts in their workflows, right?
Like they've kind of had their plug-in sets, they've got like these 16 things that they daisy-chain together in order to create that one effect that defines them and so on and so forth.
So the barrier still, like if you said today, I want to start making music and I want to make something that sounds pretty good, it's still quite high, that barrier.
And it's getting lower and lower and it's getting easier and easier.
But I would still argue the bar for you to make something that sounds professional would actually be a high quality song.
It requires a lot of time and a lot of effort.
My opinion is it takes a little bit too much to get started.
Like it's quite a barrier to entry still.
I mean, if you just want to make something like super simple, it doesn't take a lot.
There's all Smule and all these other apps.
But from there on to actually compose something, getting into the idea of the workflows, the plugins, all that kind of concept, it's quite a lot to master.
And I think that's the potential power with something like AI, obviously, right?
Which is we're most likely going to have another order of magnitude of simplicity.
On a personal level, if you liken that to coding, I used to code, but I haven't now for about 10 years.
And so probably a little bit embarrassing to admit, but the barrier to entry or re-entry for me was so high with all Node, all of these different frameworks, even setting up my own workflow for me to be able to do something in the Spotify environment.
ecosystem this is hundreds of hours probably for me to kind of re um acquaint myself with all all the stuff right how do i install the php server yeah i got bad news for you yeah it it's changed a lot right and so the amazing thing is um i i just for the fun of it like wanted to start doing stuff and i asked chat gpt to help me and pretty much um on a few hours on a sunday afternoon i was up and running
And because of that sort of starter help, I had my own sort of environment set up.
Did you contribute code to the Spotify code base?
to do before before they allow you gotta pass a coding test yeah i think out of spite they probably won't let me do that anyway they pride themselves on on not um i don't have any access to any of the actual systems um
But it was such a liberating feeling because it made the re-entry for me so much easier and so much more enjoyable.
So if you think about the world of music now, there are tens of millions of people in the world that probably are recording stuff, but there's 100, 200 million, something like that, that's playing some kind of instrument and expressing themselves musically.
There's nothing that says that it wouldn't be possible for those hundred million plus people to make something that actually sounds pretty good.
Now, again, what is that going to do with the music industry?
And is it really going to be that all of a sudden everything becomes commoditized?
I don't believe so, because we've seen time and time again, the quality rises to the top and actually becomes even more valuable in that world.
Photography being the sort of key reference point.
When Instagram came, oh, no one's going to want photography, but price of fine art photography actually increased, not decreased.
So my view is you're going to see both extremes.
You're going to see the middle getting wiped out, more people participate, but the very, very top is probably going to increase in value as well.
And they'll figure out other things to do with this technology.
But it is pretty cool for humanity, and we talked about that, being able to relate and expressing ideas.
Every permutation of every cultural idea will finally be able to be expressed.
We've never been in a world where that's been possible before.
And it'll be really fascinating to see what that means for our understanding of other cultures, our ability to relate to other people, some really cool stuff.
It's about a little bit more than double that now.
And right now, obviously, that's a manual process where we have to hire voice actors that reenact that.
We have to kind of tweak the script a little bit to make it culturally relevant.
And obviously, this won't be news to you, but perhaps to some of your listeners that...
I mean, already, probably today, it won't be as high quality and the cost would be too expensive to express this.
But there's no reason technically why you guys and I, this podcast couldn't be done right now in Chinese with our voices.
Well, we've had him speak Swedish for sure.
And he obviously doesn't know Swedish.
But it's only today available because the intonation is a little bit off.
So it's really only English language content.
And honestly, that's probably just a training problem.
So if we were training the models on specific languages and not just X-Voice per se, I think that would have been totally possible.
And again, the largest problem today is the cost per minute would be too high for most podcasts.
I think you guys could actually support it probably with your model, but the average podcaster couldn't.
You know, I don't know if you guys have seen this, but like Mr. Beast has like a Spanish language channel.
I don't know if he has like a French one, et cetera, but he certainly has a Spanish language.
Computer translated or humans re-recording?
I think it's humans re-recording it at the moment, but it's huge.
I think it may have like 15, 20% more subscribers, additional subscribers, not more than what the English language one has.
And I think that's like the next step, right?
Like where, where, you know, in your case, like why wouldn't you take the LVMH episode and make it all in French or whatever?
Yeah, I mean, I think we're only in the beginning, obviously.
And that's hugely exciting for creators like yourself.
Because it's totally possible for us to make an entire episode where we're saying totally different things than what we're saying now.
And it, at some point in the future, might be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
No, no, I think you're entirely right, which is why, you know, there's been a lot of sort of debate around the Elon Musk, the subscriber thing.
And actually, as usual, when you tease it out, there's many different things in that controversy.
But perhaps the most potent and most interesting one has been the one around the notion and idea around like staking as a way of reducing the bot thing.
And I feel like so much has just ended up being sort of, hey, do I have to pay in order to reach my audience now?
But I think the more interesting one was kind of like, well, forget about if it's paid or not, but just increasing the cost of spam, but also increasing kind of the quality of verification and being able to truly understand what's what in the end.
Yeah, I mean, our goal is to be the best partner of creators.
Not the only partner, but just the best.
And win by basically not forcing the creator to do something, but just offering a really good way for creators to work.
Low friction, but also lots of potential to customize their business the way they would like to.
I think for some creators, the monetization aspect is absolutely critical.
They may even be a gatekeeper or a gate between them doing something on that platform or not.
And maybe they have switching costs relative to what other stuff they're doing.
Think about a creator that's in a traditional media ecosystem.
If they want to take their thing, okay, well, maybe I will be less valuable on cable or whatever other thing I'm on.
That would be one end of the spectrum, right?
And then you have another creator that may have an entirely different business model.
I don't know about your other Twitter creator friend, but perhaps that creator either has a different business model somewhere else.
But, you know, the question is if that's truly a creator or, you know, you could argue VC's
A lot of them have Twitter as their marketing channel, right?
There are many different ways and the needs are different, which is why, you know, for some of them, they would probably happily forfeit all the monetization because they feel like they have such a strong other business model on the back end.
Most of us, as platforms go, we have to start out very simple with our models, right?
And it takes a long time to then change that default setting.
But I mean, as I even talked about in music, it had to be like very binary.
There was kind of no in between like, well, let's do windowing, let's do this and that, etc.
My biggest problem was getting everyone off of piracy into this other model and I needed the consistency of user experience.
Now, the next decade of music may look very different.
It may look like something where there's going to be a lot more options for what a creator chooses to do.
I certainly would hope so, and we're certainly going to work towards that avenue.
But any change that we're doing with the scale that we're having, there's going to be winners and losers.
It's almost impossible to find a single thing we could do that's just universally going to help.
And that naturally creates the constraints that it's more of a one-way door than a two-way door where we can kind of like iterate and invest on it.
So I'm fairly certain that like what you're seeing now in this world of platforms and creator ecosystems is if you asked YouTube like, hey,
If you could redesign the platform right now, would you just make all the same decisions you made about discovery and monetization all over again?
As evident actually by Shorts that works a little bit different on their platform, right?
And they're all different too, because shorts, obviously you have many more potential impressions over a shorter period of time.
And an average YouTube video has been X minutes, and that means more interstitial ads.
And then we have host red ads or the equivalent of sort of more native ads or paid promotional ads that both Instagram and YouTube have.
So we're living in an ecosystem where on the one end,
10, 15 years ago, we were very primitive in terms of monetization.
And I kind of think about it in a way, like this is not too dissimilar from mom and pop shops, they've sort of like coming up in the US as a cultural norm.
You know, on the one hand, you had physical infrastructure, urbanization driving these kind of things where we both created these mega Walmarts of the world as a direct consequence, but actually the complete opposite was also true.
We had this hyper local thing, et cetera.
And if you think about it today, these mom and pop stores, the ones that are still around, they're hyper distinct in what they're offering.
They're really focused on community in many cases, really knowing your customer.
They're offering events around their stores.
They're offering obviously online things through Shopify and so on and so forth.
And in a way, I think about it in a very similar way for the creator economy too.
It was based on a very simple model where there were free platform, ad-supported platforms, and paid platform.
All of that is kind of not merging together.
In addition to that, just monetizing the content in itself is probably becoming auxiliary revenue sources around them.
360, very similar again to mom and pop shops, like where you could do live events, you could be doing merchandising, you could build another business like Kylie Jenner or something on the side of it.
Yeah, the music industry is healthier than it's ever been before.
But certainly when you think about it from a singular artist point of view, there was a point in time where the majority of the revenue could be derived from recording music.
But the challenge to that, what I would say is that the time in history where that was true was actually very, very short.
And so the question is, what's the analogy?
Was it that like that's the right model or was it actually that having multiple revenue models was always the answer?
But there happened to be a moment in time when recorded music was sort of the prevalent revenue source.
And I don't know, I mean, I certainly don't say that to try to shy away from sort of our role.
And my goal is just like, I think these people generally, whether you're a podcaster, whether you're a musician,
And I love seeing people like yourself or David or Sandra or Taylor Swift or whoever.
Or Rogan or whoever that are like really deep on whatever they're passionate about.
And they're able to get across the microphone and having lots of people that can resonate with them.
And that's the insane part too, right?
Because that fame, in a way, it doesn't necessarily, if you think about an Elvis Presley, what time did it take for Elvis Presley to get to a billion people that had heard him?
I don't know, but I would venture to say it probably took a decade at the very least, maybe two for him to do that.
And sure, it was worth a lot, that billion then, but it was hard to scale to that.
And then you think about how many artists today get to be heard by a billion people.
And actually that number is way higher and it's way faster for you to do it.
Now, but because it's not as scarce anymore, perhaps the societal value slash monetary value, whatever you want to put it on it, maybe isn't the same because it's not as scarce.
But as you said, if you're smart in how you do it, and this is the sort of the side guise on how you execute it, it doesn't work when it's not authentic.
So you take the Rihanna example, it worked because she had a way to do it, which was authentic to her, but also authentic to her audience.
If she would have tried to flog something else that she didn't care about, it probably wouldn't have worked.
And that's the unique thing when you realize and you think about it yourself as an enterprise and, you know, JC, you know.
Yeah, but back to that, they're incredibly talented artists and they're incredibly talented business people as well.
Yeah, I think it's a very astute observation that you're making that it's not been sort of being able to just ride on this macro tailwind and just do that, but actually it's been many different things.
And the way I oftentimes talk about it is, if you think about an exponential curve, if you really zoom in on that exponential curve, it actually is like a lot of different linear curves stacked on top of each other that creates that kind of exponential curve.
And this will sound like a little bit of a cliche, but what I've really realized, perhaps even in just the last two, three years more, I knew that I could talk about it, but I hadn't truly internalized it, is to be intentional about the culture you're building, right?
There are many different cultures that can be successful.
But there are trade-offs with each cultural expression.
And oftentimes today, what I see with younger entrepreneurs is that they're unintentional about what type of culture they are.
So as an example, we all, many years ago, I was certainly enamored with Google, right?
Like the 20% projects and all these different things.
It's not the culture itself, but it's the cultural expressions.
So that's where the early innings of Spotify's culture was like, I'm sure, almost every Silicon Valley company of that era.
And then we all switched, maybe became Facebook for a while.
And we all kind of took that of like moving fast and breaking things and so on and so forth.
And then you had like an Amazon kind of model where on the one end it was incredibly long term, but also maybe a little bit more bottoms up innovation than top down.
And then you see another cultural expression with like a Tesla where incredibly top down, incredibly focused company actually for this type of scale that they're doing.
And my point is, I think the most important thing is to really, really think through and be really, really diligent about the culture you create.
And we certainly were victims of that at Spotify because we had taken all these different things.
There were certainly things that were Spotify.
But we kept talking about all these other companies and we're like, well, we like this thing that Amazon's doing, so we should copy that.
And then, oh, we like this thing that Google's doing, so we should copy that.
And actually what ended up happening was we were at one point in time, almost like a little bit of a Frankenstein monster because we had...
some of the stuff from everyone, and we had some of the bad stuff from everyone too, instead of sort of really leaning into that.
And then sort of without really being intentional about it, we started iterating and improving on that culture.
So for instance, when we launched certain things, people are like, well, this thing wasn't very great.
And they have a mental model of what they expect of Spotify.
And the mental model may be, hey, your music app is so amazing.
How come in 2019 your podcast just sucked?
And so that must mean that podcasting won't work.
Having a separate app must be the right thing to do, etc.,
And what people didn't realize is we're actually one of these companies that happily will release something out that's not great.
It's probably have the right strategy, but execution isn't super crisp and perfect.
And it's not great right now, but we will make it great.
But that's a different culture, right?
And that's one where we're iterating on.
But then the flip side of that would be something like AIDJ, where actually, I think it is really high quality.
that are AI where it's really kind of wonky.
We've made something that's actually working and is working on very large scale, probably one of the most popular AI products out there now in terms of reach.
We don't really tout it all that much.
But it's huge in terms of moving our metrics in a pretty substantial way.
And I think it'll even outdo Discover Weekly.
But we had to be super intentional about it because we knew that it was an area where...
we had to think through the consequences of this because it would be highly scrutinized.
So as you can imagine, one of the benefits by choosing to do it for music and not for podcasting was obviously that it would have been horrible if we somehow summarized or said something based on a podcast that wasn't safe or culturally attuned to say,
And yet with music, it's kind of the primary candidate.
Plus it's the one where we have a huge audience that's listening in the background every day.
And my point being is understanding when to do which and understanding that both of these cultures are perfectly fine, but just being very intentful about when you're choosing to do what and having the right mental models and not sort of becoming half-assed in everything, but actually becoming really good at what makes you, you.
And I would say that probably other thing that's been hugely important and that I wish more people talked about it is there are not many of us, but there's a few companies like Spotify, which in a way has been heavily influenced by Silicon Valley, but we are not Silicon Valley first.
So that sort of notion of being on the side and watching and sort of iterating in a corner, Spotify is definitely sort of not the overnight success.
It's been a sleeper for many, many years.
But also because we were kind of doing this in Europe for the first few years, we started getting some real first learnings.
And I think this is like really key because if you think about the ones we talk about as iconic companies, the Apples, the Amazons of the world.
We all tend to forget a few things, but one is that many of them are quite old at this point.
So they've had a time to refine their cultures and getting that right.
And the other thing is they almost started in empty ecosystems.
And Amazon, sure, there was Microsoft, but they started an internet company in Seattle, right?
Where there was a software company that was really big, but it's not the same culture.
They didn't start it in Silicon Valley.
And I like to believe that that culture became very distinct also by having to figure out its own things from first principles and from learning rather than just being able to gather it through osmosis.
going slower in the beginning to then go faster.
But I think it's been hugely important for Spotify's journey.
And I feel like we're just right now getting into our own of like what is our culture in a very unique way that it's probably the most exciting thing for me at the moment, still being here at Spotify 17 years later.
And that's why I said, I mean, I used to talk about culture, but I would honestly say it was probably two, three years ago where it really clicked for me.
Like, oh, that's what it actually means.
That's just an expression of a culture.
The more interesting thing is the true culture of what makes Google or an Amazon, Amazon, et cetera.
I don't even know whether that's possible to change.
Going a decade forward, that's probably the most exciting thing for me to still contribute to and work on is the culture.
And I think that's what's driving at the moment pretty much every major decision we're making.
Well, first off, it's incredibly kind of Dara to say that.
You know, I think about this.
I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact.
And I think it can be – you can feel happiness in small bursts, in small moments, and you can have a lot of variance in your life.
So you can choose to have that part, which is the ups, the downs of life, et cetera.
So I'm not saying you can't have happiness, but I think truly sustained happiness comes from –
And impact is something that's deeply personal to you.
Only you can define what impact means for you.
So I think it means different things for different people.
But I do think it's a trailing indicator.
So the way, you know, I would put it in this case is, you know, what was obvious for me with someone like Adara was he was content.
And, you know, he had gone through a phase, knowing him for a while, where he had a lot of ups and downs with Expedia and all that stuff.
And he kind of mostly figured it out.
And I think that in his case, you know, where he was at his life...
It was such an obvious thing that he didn't even realize that he'd just grown content.
And so for me, you know, Uber is a very special company.
And to even be asked to be the CEO of that and the impact I knew he could have on that company just felt to me like an obvious thing.
I sort of advised him to, hey, you should go for this.
And that's a far greater thing.
And that's going to be far, will lead to much more happiness, not just for you, but also for other people.
I think I self-motivate myself that way to do the hard things.
Like many other people, I'm quite lazy by nature.
I try to take the simple road out often enough, but what I've learned that has given me the greatest joys is overcoming the biggest adversities.
And overcoming the biggest adversities usually has been solving a problem of some kind for someone or something that no one else had been able to figure out.
And for me, that's my definition of impact.
And it's not right there at the moment that I feel that.
Actually, in many cases, I feel it much longer.
But it's when I go back and I reflect on accomplishments or moments of impact, then I feel true happiness.
And I've just grown to kind of like self-motivate myself constantly.
And I think this, by the way, kind of comes from like a much deeper thing, right?
Like I came from like pretty much what was the project in Sweden and I was not the normal kid.
You know, I was kind of probably a middle schooler.
of the pack kind of kid, but I certainly stood out.
I didn't belong to any social group.
There was no social cohesion, et cetera.
So wait, you felt like an outsider even at that age?
Every moment of my life, even among other fellow entrepreneurs, I sometimes feel like an outsider because like right now, for instance, you and I were in Silicon Valley.
So there's an element of myself where I don't belong to the club.
And I've always felt that way.
And because I've always felt that way, I've had to, I can't take lessons from other people 100% because some of my story, some of my conditions, some of the waves, the structures, even how to structure a company, you have to structure differently if you're
your European company versus an American company.
So you have to go back to sort of first principles and kind of find this sort of principled answer to anything and what works for you.
And so I've had to kind of self-motivate myself for most of my life.
And only, I would say, in the last maybe five years, I've come to realize that, you know, in a way, I may be a better coach than I am a player.
And so I've kind of understood more and more that actually that sort of drive, that intensity is actually something that can be taught.
It's not entirely innate.
And it's about almost letting people know that that's okay.
And so much of that comes from those types of conversations.
It's about almost reflecting back.
It's not about sort of me projecting onto other people what I think they should do.
But in listening to Dara, it was just so obvious to me when he kind of explained because, you know, the conversation started with us talking about Uber.
And I said, I recommended you to the job.
Yeah, I just didn't take the call even.
And I was like, well, why not?
And he was like, well, I'm really happy about this thing.
And I was like listening and I actually just let him keep talking.
And the more he spoke, the more obvious it became.
He was running on the downshifted down to the easy gear.
But there was an element of him, and you could hear it in his voice, where he's sort of like, okay, well, you know, you've always been running on a higher gear.
Do you want to gear up even more to an extreme level?
Why aren't you going to go for greatness?
Why aren't you going to test yourself?
Because if you succeed, this could be huge.
And you really don't get many of these chances in your life.
And so much of the conversation was really around that.
But with another person, I might have given a totally different piece of advice.
So I don't think it's a universal truth.
But I do think the universal truth is that happiness trails impact.
But impact is something that's highly unique.
It could be something innate in you.
It could be having impact on other people.
It could be, you know, having impact by being a great father around your kids.
I don't pretend to know that I think that there's one game to play or one universal truth to life.
I certainly believe from entrepreneurial types that...
probably more to myself, more like myself that, you know, this is sort of a, one of those sort of key things is really consider impact.
So I was content for a moment of time.
I never had much success with women because I was a computer geek.
And back then, computers was not the coolest thing in the world.
And, you know, so I was like, okay, well, now I've got all this money and, you know, this was my worldview.
I can go out in nightclubs and I'm going to be the cool guy.
And I had fun for a while.
But it also was incredibly hollowing because, you know, I realized that these girls weren't with me because of me.
They were with me because, you know, I had status and I was able to use money to buy status and be a cool guy for a small moment of time.
And so that taught me a lot, right?
And actually, you know, I kind of walked away
for over a year, not doing anything at all.
And just sort of deeply reflecting on life, what I wanted to do, because for me, you know, I had a magic number, which was 10 million.
If I got that number, I would retire.
And I was thinking to myself- How old were you when you came up with that number?
You know, someone gave me like this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I think.
I think everybody gets it at the same age.
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?
I kind of like, okay, well, what's next?
Because I didn't have to work for money.
Yeah, it's probably the most depressed I've been in my life, to be honest, because I knew from a very young age what I wanted to do.
And it was unlike most other people that I grew up with.
I just knew I wanted to build things.
You were doing that when you were like 14, right?
Yeah, but it started like even earlier than that.
I just didn't know it was called a company.
I had no idea what finances were or VC or any of these things.
But I was just building things.
And I knew I loved computers.
And I knew I wanted to do that.
And I knew I would make a living doing that somehow.
I don't know that I'm good.
But I have this sort of insane belief that I can get good if I try hard enough.
And I still feel that way, by the way, like, because the comparative sets has changed, right?
Like, you know, it was from everyone in my school, maybe in the early days to everyone in Stockholm, some somewhat later to everyone in Europe at some point.
And now it's like the most brilliant entrepreneurs change.
of our time that I'm constantly comparing myself to.
And obviously, I don't believe that I'm as good as them.
But I believe I am slightly different than them in some ways.
And I believe that if I work really, really hard on something, I can make something really great.
And that's the sort of bar that I keep for myself.
For me, it really stems also from sort of this notion, back to what you were talking about, about sort of the realization that through computers, right?
Steve Jobs has the saying, it's the bicycle of our mind, which was really how I felt about computers growing up.
It's just this magic tool that allows me to solve so many other things and create things.
That's how I feel about podcasts.
And so, you know, I knew I wanted to do that.
And I also knew that, you know, my co-founder, Martin, he has this thing he keeps saying, the value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.
And so what I keep doing is essentially I've got this –
toolbox called a computer.
And I got all these problems around the world.
Which problems am I passionate about solving?
And which problems can I spend the next decade of my life fixing?
Because if I'm not interested enough in it to spend a decade fixing it,
it's probably not worth pursuing.
Well, I considered them, but not for money.
I considered them because I already had the money that I thought I needed in my life.
And that was an incredibly powerful position to be in.
It was freeing me of a lot of constraints.
And for me, it was more, you know, as we got an approach, it was always about can this thing further our mission?
And if I truly believed that there would have been a company that could further our mission and cared about what we cared about as much as we did, I probably would have sold.
And because I didn't find that, we just kept going.
And it wasn't obvious to me that this would be like something I would do for 20 years.
But what I did know is that, you know, I came from doing lots of projects beforehand and
And so sort of, you know, we talked about the one company I did sell, but that was like my fourth or fifth one.
So I'd been doing a bunch of other things, and I was doing many things in parallel.
Which you still do today.
Well, I started doing again, which is a very different thing.
And I still think the jury's out, by the way, on whether that's a good idea or a bad idea.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I think, you know, again, as a young entrepreneur myself, I went through the book like so many of us by becoming enamored by an entrepreneur and looking up to them, in many cases because they have traits that I didn't have.
and so um we read all these stories whether it's biographies or or articles about how they manage their company and how uh 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 um you know the 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 so this sort of idea of this archetype is like, I bet you that there's plenty of entrepreneurs out there that read about currently, 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, 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.
And as you say, it's like, you know, I think the game I'm playing now is just being the best version of myself, right?
And 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 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.
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.
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, et cetera.
It's like, this is the life.
I have a very dear friend, Jack, who very similarly placed that part in my life.
He's the most realist person there is.
Gustav, that you met, is another person.
He will tell me the truth even when I don't want to hear it.
Yeah, I've been incredibly fortunate that many of the people I just talked about are people that have been around me for 20 years.
My mom, obviously, my entire life.
But many of these people have been around for a very, very long time.
You know, I really believe trust is one of the most under-talked about things, you know, because it's not easy to scale and it's incredibly hard.
It's the number one thing why most organizations break down and why you need processes and all the other bureaucracies ultimately because there's no trust.
If you had 100% trust, you wouldn't need any of this stuff and you would move much faster.
And if you think about it, why is that so rare?
It's because it doesn't scale, right?
So trust is this notion that you'll keep doing actions that will ladder up over time.
But you're going to add maybe 1% of trust for each positive interaction you're going to do.
But it takes one interaction that's bad to ruin all of it.
The moment where you even start doubting whether you can trust someone or not, you have no trust.
So the point being is it's like absolute trust.
If you really think about it, there's this sort of final gradient.
Most people define it as this binary thing, but it really isn't.
It's really kind of like, you know, what most people will say is either I trust someone or I don't.
But even let's say you do trust someone, there's degrees of trusting someone.
How many people do you trust with your life?
How many people do you trust with your bank accounts?
Yeah, but look, I mean, you talked about it yourself.
It started in your childhood.
Like, in my case, I grew up without a father, for sure, but I have the most loving mother.
And to have that start in my life, I've always felt that whatever I do, whatever the failure is, she will always love me.
And to have that in your back pocket, I think it means you automatically come from a different vantage point than what I believe you had in your childhood, right?
And then my approach to life is just like,
Okay, well, you know, by, again, I'm not saying I have absolute trust in every person, but I choose to believe that trusting people makes for a much more fun, rich, and rewarding life than one that doesn't.
And I believe that... I think you're definitely right about that.
Yeah, and I believe that life is more fun doing the journey with other people around than doing it in single-player mode.
And that doesn't mean that I'm not also a person that likes my own spare time, my own comfort, my own solitude.
I have that part, and that's the duality in my personality.
But I really do believe, and it will go back to philosophy, but the more I give away, the more I get by.
And so I just keep focused on doing that.
And for me, the ultimate impact at this point, why I said, you know, I like to be the best coach there ever was, the best entrepreneur coach, maybe that's my archetype, but then a player, because I've come to see that these people that I've done Spotify with for the past 15 years, as an example,
Seeing their success, seeing their impact, seeing their growth is the thing that gives me the most amount of pride at this point.
It really isn't anything else.
Like, you know, financially, I couldn't care.
It's great to have a lot of money to have as a currency to then have more impact.
There's more ships on the table to do new, more cool, interesting stuff.
But the real thing for me will be the friendships that I built, the trust that other people placed in me to allow me to help them on this journey, help me on my journey, and us doing it together.
I've just seen it so many times.
I've been burned by it for sure.
Sometimes when people have broken that trust that I put in them.
But I will honestly say that's been like 1% or 2% negative experience relative to all the positive things that come out of it.
Like, that's how it goes.
And look, it comes back to this.
I mean, I don't believe that I know much.
Well, I mean, look, I just realized it sort of started from this thing, right?
Where you and I have both read all the books and actually many of the entrepreneurs have read not as many books as you have around all the greatest entrepreneurs, but they've read the big ones.
Certainly of their time, the basis is the Steve Jobs, the Elon Musk's biographies and all that kind of stuff.
there's a certain thing around reading it and internalizing it and seeing the culture upfront.
And what I realized was building Spotify, obviously it's the biggest company I've ever built.
So I'm learning on the job and I don't know what I don't know because I've never really worked at a company, right?
And it's in a way what I realized as we hired people from these other companies is that there were all these things that they were doing that they kept telling us about and I didn't really understand why.
So I'll mention like one, for instance, I do really well in these like one-on-one situations.
I might even do well in like three or four person groups and maybe six, but 10 person group, like I don't have the personality where I command the room.
And then you have someone like a Mark Zuckerberg who literally has this thing called large group where he has 20 to 25 people that he runs every week.
And for me, it sounded absolutely awful.
Like, how did he get anything done in that meeting?
And so lo and behold, I asked him, hey, can I come and learn from you?
And he was incredibly gracious.
And we've obviously been friends for a long time.
And so I spent the better part of what I believe the first time was like a week learning.
literally in pretty much all of his meetings from start to finish.
And the big question, obviously, for me is like, okay, well, what does he get out of it?
And can I make myself useful while doing it?
So hence, I took meeting notes.
If I could get him coffee, I would.
It was literally these types of things.
But at the end of it, the most interesting thing was obviously trying to distill down what surprised me about the culture.
It wasn't really around like Meta and what was then Facebook is a world-class company.
It wasn't like I miraculously thought I could do a lot of things different or better.
But there were things that surprised me around how he managed the company.
And seeing that and hearing that from another –
founder, hopefully one that he respects too, may sort of lead to insights and breakthroughs.
And during that week, it's not just that I follow people around.
I actually meet with their entire executive team and interview them too.
So sit down and try to learn from them to really, truly internalize the culture and try to understand it.
And so all of a sudden you do realize, for instance, how you can make a large group team meeting work.
And there were lots of other things which I shamelessly copied from, for instance, that experience.
And it just turned out for me to be an amazing way to learn by seeing the culture up front that enables the certain –
It almost comes back to kind of this two things we talked about already, which is this mirror of reflecting it back.
And then the sort of second notion, I think, which is it's got to be true to you.
So, you know, there are many things where you can copy a specific way.
But if it's not truly innate to you and your personality, I promise you it will not have the same impact as when Elon does this.
Yeah, I think the most important thing that you described is it's a spectrum.
It's not 100%, you know, one way or the other way.
Because, again, sort of like I remember early on, you know, people talking about that sort of dichotomy of how Google does things and how Apple does things.
And many founders then...
tended to gravitate when apple was at sort of peak steve jobs to no i run the product review it's only my opinion that matters um and it's my taste and i've got this articulation all these things and lo and behold like uh some terrible decisions uh ended up uh coming out of this etc and and i think where people um 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.
Sometimes maybe trying it out by testing his ideas on multiple people inside and outside, you know, et cetera.
But of course he did that, right?
And I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant, and that don't get talked about.
He actually called up journalists sometimes and tested ideas on them.
And like, we might do this kind of thing.
And then here the journalists react to it.
And it's like, okay, that was a bad idea.
And 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.
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 the 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.
And this may be a little bit unique, but, you know, coming back to it, so, you know, I ended up...
having you know so so the typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person right um by the way it's 100 true i i totally believe that i think it's the most important thing in the zero to one stage
But what a lot of people don't talk about is the fact that there isn't one stage of this journey.
It's like you're oscillating between zero to one, one to a hundred.
And then, you know, the last stage was more like optimization stage.
And you have to like constantly do that.
And you're going to need different skills at different places.
And this is why, by the way, I believe it's so important for entrepreneurs to realize when to apply what tools in this journey.
So what happened with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom and wealth, which is I don't really run product anymore.
Because what happened was I got this guy called Gustav that you've now met, and he runs product.
And he's actually way better than me at doing it.
And so speaking about sort of being truthful, what ended up happening many years ago was I was running these product meetings
He was sort of running it, but I wanted to run it.
So I kind of interjected myself over him, but I didn't have the time to like really spend all this time.
So he was sort of like running it for me, but I still insisted on having product reviews.
And sort of talking again about the importance of having people who give you candid feedback.
He took me aside after one of these product sessions and he's like, you know, you're not really that good in doing these things and you're not really that helpful.
So most of the time, me and the team, we're kind of like looking and we're trying to basically, you know, appease you in the meeting, but you're not really adding as much value as you think.
And not surprisingly, my first instinct was to be really pissed off.
I was like, man, I'm going to have to fire this guy.
Like, how could he say this?
But I also realized that that was an emotional response.
So again, I wasn't fully convinced that this was true, but I sort of went back and said, okay, well, you know what?
I'm going to give you three months where I don't do the product reviews.
And then we evaluate how this worked.
And lo and behold, he actually did a great job.
And so the product team was much happier.
You know, he was making more of the decisions without me.
There wasn't two different people deciding what worked, but it was really him.
And ever since that moment, you know, I don't really run product anymore in the traditional.
I'm involved in the product and he solicits feedback from me all the time, but I don't run the product meetings.
And I say that because what happened for me was a real setback, not just in sort of that moment, but it also sort of like, oh, wait a minute.
So what am I really, you know, what's my value at then in this company?
And it took me a while, and I realized that all of a sudden, hmm, actually, you know what?
That won't be it, but maybe I can add value in this place.
And I sort of oscillated to this different place in the company, which was much closer to understanding the creator and spending more time with the content people, et cetera.
And so my product feedback ended up being
And this is the dynamic that's quite unique to Spotify in that we have these two stakeholders.
We have consumers on the one end and we have creators.
And so I just made it my effort to understand and know the creator way better than anyone else in the company.
And so my product feedback to them comes from that lens.
And that became value add because, again, that's a very different thing.
That's an outward facing thing.
You actually have to sit down and meet with creators.
It is so much more about innately understanding their needs and talking to them and understanding not just.
how they use the product, but their business.
What problems are they facing?
That's not just sort of how they leverage the product, but actually holistically around them.
And so that was just one of those things.
And then subsequently what ended up happening is I got this guy called Alex, and he's now doing that part better than me too.
And so I was like, okay, well, now I need to find a different way to add value.
And now it turns out that my value add is the sort of in-between between the two, where...
business or creators meets consumers and where there's maybe a third stakeholder we have to consider in all of this.
And so my whole sort of experience in all of this has really been around kind of figuring out who I am and what I'm innately good at.
And this has been a learning journey for 20 years.
What you're just describing right now, this unfolded over how many years?
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 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 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 probably step in when they're doing something which would be terrible and would create bad long-term consequences.
And then like the last stage, you're not even – you can't even do that.
So the job is much more subtly to just be there when they need you.
And I'm somewhat simplifying it, but I think that with everything, don't take it literally, but sort of the core of the gist of the idea is certainly a larger company becomes more and more and an older company becomes more and more of that.
And so much of what I do today is literally that.
I try to be there for people when they need me in various fields, which happens, but it's not as often as every day, all the time.
And what I deeply care about today, and I do spend a lot of my time on, is this notion around this first seed of a new idea.
and protecting that idea.
And I think it's probably the most under-reported, 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.
I actually think LLMs and the latest advancement in AI kind of have created an excellent framing on this and to talk about this sort of high temperature notion.
So in LLMs, you can basically tune up the temperature.
And if you tune up the temperature, it basically start hallucinating.
So, you know, the bad thing with the hallucination, of course, is you have no idea what's true or not.
But there is spurs of vocational brilliance that comes out of there and the truly new ideas that come out of there.
So the criticism of the current generation LLMs is they're not very creative.
And that's ultimately because we've kind of turned down the temperature on them and we've safety trained them to the point where we keep them within the guardrails.
So there is a way when you train these things to be highly creative but batch it crazy.
And that's just turning up the temperature.
And I believe that one of the – and this is, by the way, something that I intend to focus a lot more on in the next decade.
I'm very reflective at the moment because I am in my 19th year now.
And I think it's interesting you sort of talked about big companies because I used to think, before I sort of ran a big company myself, I just used to think they're bad, period.
And I've sort of revised my view and now I think they're really good at doing what they're already doing and doing it better.
So back to that point, like a large-scale corporation, what they do is they just get better and better and better at doing what they already do.
The way to do that is obviously minimize mistakes.
So, you know, that also means minimize billions, minimize waste, minimize all these other things.
So naturally what you end up having is more and more capitalism, public markets, all of these things drives you towards one thing.
Optimize what you're doing to the point where it's the most efficient thing that it can possibly be.
But that is not conducive to how you get the best ideas.
And what I'm greatly satisfied and happy with, and I've been fortunate enough as I don't anymore run Spotify as much day to day as I used to.
I'm still very involved, but I'm not involved in all the team meetings and doing all the things that I used to do.
So I was like 90% internally focused on just getting the machine to run.
It's that I've been more and more able, not just have the free time to think, but I've been more able to meet more people.
And part of the beauty of that is that it brought me back to music again.
And it brought me back to the creative process of music again.
And it is something remarkable in a studio where you have a bunch of people just throwing ideas at each other.
And musicians actually in many ways know more about the entrepreneurial process than most people give them credit.
I think it's the same thing.
Filmmakers, like athletes.
And so this point then is that what I truly believe the very best musicians do and the most creative people do is they are not afraid of throwing out ideas, even terrible ones.
And it's in – even the most terrible one, there may be a nugget.
You and I, we talked about this over breakfast where there was a person who sort of gave some bad advice to you.
But sometimes even the –
Insight behind the advice, sort of the question behind the question, can lead to some really interesting things.
And so what I've come to realize is most people want conformity.
And they value sort of a reliable consistency of, you know, giving X amount of impact per seconds or minute or second.
You know, truthfulness, you know, over X percent, they have some sort of heuristics for what is valuable person from a business context or whatever sort of context you're judging it on.
But certainly in a business concept, it's conformity.
You want to sort of put people in about this person is good and they're always good.
You know, what I'm more interested in these days is I'm interested in this idea I'd never heard about before.
And I find it with, you know, some people, you know, that even in an hours-long conversation with the best people in the world where I've learned the most –
It may be 55 minutes of that conversation that honestly was, you know, completely worthless, not that interesting for me.
But then there's a spur of the moment, two, three minutes of brilliance, which I never heard before, which will deeply and profoundly impact my life.
That's what I'm interested in.
And I've come to learn that most people don't like to be around those people.
And I think it's, you know, such a rewarding and interesting thing.
I'm looking forward to spending more time with those people in the coming decade.
And it's sort of one of those things that I've sort of wanted to do more of and learn more from.
And I think that sort of comes back to the George Bernard Shaw quote, right?
I have it painted on my wall at home.
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 there's so many temptations in life that draws us back to that conformity, right?
When you make a lot of money, you tend to make life more comfortable.
So you tend to spend more time golfing.
You spend some time doing all these other things.
But the reality is you become distracted and you're not going to be on your A game anymore.
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.
Yeah, I would say, you know, I'm not proud of sneaking out sometimes on that.
But look, I mean, at the end of the day, I think that that's less about sort of being protecting my time and more sort of about protecting myself.
Unique and novel ideas and how rare they are.
And by the way, we'll hopefully get into that, but I think less about sort of – a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be obsessed about time.
I'm more obsessed about energy management.
Yeah, let's get to it now.
Well, I mean, you constantly hear this thing about all these – you're supposed to wake up at 4 a.m.
You're supposed to do all these things, et cetera.
It's like first and foremost, there's no rule.
I know a lot of successful people, as I'm sure you do too.
It's like some of them wake up at noon.
Some of them wake up at 4 a.m.
You can do a lot of different things.
Yeah, but the other thing is about sort of you're supposed to pack every, like you're supposed to have meetings every 15 minutes and like a 15-minute increments is better than a 30-minute increments, so on and so forth.
Look, it might work for you.
And for some people, it might be like the absolute best thing.
I've become more obsessed about sort of managing my energy because like if you have time but you have no energy, you're not going to accomplish anything anyway.
So how do you manage your energy then?
Well, it's about finding out what gives you energy, right, to begin with, and what drains energy.
And it's about finding out which time during the day you're most productive.
And it's, again, innately about understanding yourself.
And what the whole world tries to do is get you to conform to their schedule.
morning meeting because that's when you get into the office or you're supposed to do this and that and all these other things, again, in a big corporation.
And it's about conformity to like the average or to an okay standard instead of going for excellence.
And what truly, truly is unique.
And I think the truly, truly unique thing is you've got to just figure out what works for you and you've got to do more of that.
more about energy management, I believe.
And it's so much more about like, even before this thing, I think both you and I, we went and worked out, right?
You know, that gives me energy.
It's what's going to sustain the rest of my day.
I used to not do workouts at all because I thought I don't have time.
There's no productivity.
I used to go for the worst productivity thing I did was I was at one point doing these 15 minute naps.
I don't know if you've heard about this exercise.
It's a really bad idea, by the way.
But I sort of learned that you can like Daisy Shane sleep together by doing like these 50.
Oh, it's like polyphasic.
So the basic gist is you're supposed to be able to last like on four hours of sleep.
And I was like, oh, this is great.
And actually the interesting side part is it worked for about three weeks.
And then I missed one of these 15-minute increments.
And holy shit, I was like completely suicidal for like weeks afterwards.
It was like not a great thing at all.
But the point being is –
You know, it's about sort of finding that energy management for yourself.
I think certainly there's common wisdom around sort of what an average good sleep should look like, et cetera.
But the reality is there are some people that will work on six hours of sleep and they'll do just fine and may even be more productive that way.
And so, I mean, look, you're just going to find that thing, right?
But when you realize that, so if you start with that as the basic thing, like all the things you and I have been talking about for this time now, you know, the reality is it's like it's about knowing yourself, which is really hard, and you get to know more.
And it's about building a system that works for you.
I know hanging out with crazy people gives you energy, right?
You just did the same face.
Well, I think it's back to that, like sort of these two concepts we talked about.
My whole journey is one of self-mastery and finding out how I can become the best version of myself.
And meanwhile, what gives me energy is solving problems.
You know, and as you say, I think this is revealed early.
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 relationship advice, whether it's all these other things.
So if you look at the video games, I actually think what kind of video games you like is a pretty good revealer of your things too.
I wasn't playing any kind of first-person shooter games 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.
So those were sort of my favorite games, you know, growing up.
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 you're solving a problem for them.
And the better you're solving that problem or the bigger the problem is that you're solving for people, the more valuable it becomes.
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.
And then you also have to feel good about what you're creating into the world.
But I think it comes from solving problems.
And so, yeah, I mean, like I get excited today.
You sort of asked about the other stuff that I get focused on.
I don't focus so much about the solution.
I try to find really interesting problems 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 complex.
sort of earth shatteringly difference.
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.
And so for me, the most interesting thing, it's like laying a puzzle or anything else.
It's like I get to sit around and because of 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?
And what does that unlock?
And, and that for me is just, um, it's so much fun and I couldn't imagine, you know, not spending every single day doing this.
And, you know, we, we, 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, 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 like the process of science.
I like the process of discovery.
I like the process of understanding how things work.
You know, I've been wired this way all my life.
I've been pulling apart computers.
I've been trying to understand why a semiconductor works the way it works, all these things.
And I'm intrigued about that.
Just this thing about understanding everything, understanding life, understand where we come from, understanding all these different things.
but I'm equally interested in solving problems.
And when you're curious about both of those two angles, you can end up finding these sort of connection points where those two things meet, where it's obvious that there is something over there that no one's really kind of applied in this way before.
And maybe there's not one idea, but two ideas over there.
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.
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 do they need, even if they can't articulate it themselves, right?
And then have this entire field of amazing, brilliant engineers and scientists and mathematicians and all these groups of people that are doing various things.
And then sort of figure out the intersection.
And then you actually have to make it viable too, which is you have to have some sort of business model.
Because if you don't have that, eventually this thing won't be sustainable.
So, you know, it's sort of the trifecta of those three things.
And that makes it even more interesting.
Because now we're talking about, you know, a really complex equation trying to get these things together with multiple unknowns.
And you're trying to configure these things by locking down constraints on one side and then you're trying another side.
And the amazing thing about early stage entrepreneurship is, you know, we talked about this Google example of trying 200 different colors.
You can't do that early on.
That is the amazing thing.
Every decision you make is life or death.
And that makes sort of the stakes even higher because you may literally try one thing and then you run out of money.
And so you got to make sure that is the right thing.
And it's just such a fascinating process, but it comes back.
It's a process of creativity.
It's a process of trying things out.
And I'm more and more enamored and more and more in love with this idea that creativity itself
is this really, really powerful thing, maybe the thing that makes us unique as humans relative to everything else that exists in this world, and kind of going deeper and deeper into creativity itself.
And it doesn't conform and it doesn't scale and it doesn't 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 important.
you know, very few people that I think can do and is really, really well classed at doing it.
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 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.
They're just trying to be courageous and just trying to say the thing right out loud.
The older I get, the more my instinct is towards turning towards that.
And I'm reminded even if we go back to investing because 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 –
without understanding anything about it.
But what sort of got me deeper curious about it is I realized that investing is actually more about learning about your temperament than it is about the specific action that you're doing.
Your temperament, actually, it's more about being in line with your temperaments than not, or which game you're picking needs to be suited to you and your circumstances and how you want to play this than anything else.
And so, again, we come back to philosophy.
And so one of the concepts is obviously around, that Munger talks about, coming back to Munger philosophy,
reference again is diversification right and and he calls it's somewhat simplified diversification because the common wisdom of course is in theory diversification is 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 assets and
Maybe they'll have two or three, but they certainly don't have more than that.
And they just go for that.
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.
And so quality for me is less.
Quality for me is focus.
Quality for me is improving day by day.
All of these things build quality and quality is rare.
Quality in people is rare.
Quality in ideas is rare.
And we tend to make these things binary.
And we talked about it with people.
Like I'd rather have that person that has one good idea in an entire hour and the rest is crap than someone who has, you know, 10 decent ideas but nothing is amazing.
So that sort of differential equation between the 1% versus the rest is so important, and 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 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...
It's 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.
And yes, the tea is amazing.
It's just seeing that obsession about quality, seeing that obsession about...
being not even 1%, but like 0.1% or 0.1% in something.
And I think, feel like you sort of asked about AI and all these things.
And we can talk about art too, but like for me, like that is going to be even rarer.
Like average is going to be possible to do even better than average is going to be possible to do with AI.
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 it's like as you say it's the paradox about the long term um
mindedness, but the obsession on the daily basis.
And against conventional odds, against all these other things, because I would imagine, I don't know, but I would imagine like when you started Founders, probably not many people knew who you were, right?
And so the competition for your time
uh was there was none so you could probably sit for six hours or eight hours etc 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 uh
You know, 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.
Greatness gets evaporated.
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.
They just wouldn't have come if I just kept grinding that thing, but just changing a scenery, being in a different frame of mind, pausing, giving, you know, it's in the creative process.
You know, the greatest artists talk about some of the greatest songs literally take five minutes to write.
Which is amazing, right?
But some songs are the ones you like work on and you put it in a drawer and six months later, totally unbeknownst to you, it clicks.
You're not even working on that thing.
It's just sort of like, oh, that's it.
And they go back and they do the song and it's like the greatest song ever.
There's not one path to greatness.
And I feel like that's why I'm so obsessively focused on energy.
I feel like so much of our life just rips us apart from this thing and tries to get us on a schedule per se.
And it's not like I don't have a schedule.
Of course, I do have one.
But I feel so much of it should be more guided by trying to understand ourselves more intimately, 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 hours sleep again.
And so much of that was based on light.
And, you know, maybe it was driven by other things that were happening in our life too.
And for Nordic people, what it actually meant, going back as late as the, 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.
Like I can tell you 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, you know, huge part of losing weight for me over the past few years was just really kind of innately starting to listening to my body again and like starting to figure out what satiation means.
Because for me, for instance, I don't feel it until 20 minutes after.
So like if I didn't like sort of eye what I should eat, I would just keep eating way more than I should.
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's another one of those things.
Well, I'm probably going to ruin the exact one, so maybe you can read it.
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.
Energy management is the same thing.
You've got to create the environment around you that you want to do.
You've got to choose your game.
And when you do that and you start understanding that, you start becoming superhuman in your ability to get things done.
I'm more comfortable with who I am 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 Hare Krishna centers.
Jewish centers, you know, mosques.
And I try to learn as much as possible because I truly believe not enough people are like... I've always been surprised why more people aren't interested in where we come from and what the purpose is of life.
For me, those are sort of some of the greatest questions that I, like many others, don't have any idea, obviously, what will happen.
But I think they're really important.
So I've always been a searcher.
And I think that actually sort of like led me to sort of also be a searcher about myself too and trying to find sort of who I am.
But the older I've gotten and the more and more things have started clicking about myself and the more unapologetic I am about... And so your inner monologue gets...
Because like, you know, not only do you stand out quite a lot as an entrepreneur, and my interests were widely different than my social circuit growing up and all these things.
But the second thing is I'm an introvert.
So, you know, that doesn't help.
So most people like being around a lot of people, and they get energy from it.
So that obviously naturally gets you to question yourself.
You know, against many others as an entrepreneur, I'm not the most eloquent person.
You're pretty damn eloquent.
Well, I had to work on it.
That's like the hard thing.
But it's really a work product.
I wish there was more recorded stuff on myself when I was like 20 and 21 because I was not great.
And so I've just learned that it's a superpower thing.
And something I have to work on is getting my message across to other people to believe what I'm believing and see what I'm seeing in order to get them to want to come and join whatever thing we're trying to will into this world.
So I feel different in the same way a 40-year-old would feel different than a 10-year-old would do.
I feel different in I'm a product of all the experiences of my life.
And obviously I've been incredibly fortunate to – I was counting the other day.
I've been to like 130 countries or something in my life.
I've seen so many cultures, so many people.
I have friends all over the world.
All of that has shaped me into who I am.
I don't feel difference because innately many of the things, the drive, the long-termness, the obsession, this sort of willingness on the paradox of winning on the one hand, but then also trying to truly find a win-win and work with people to try to find a win-win, which is really important to me.
And it's always been these things.
And like you said, you know, you kind of look back at yourself a few years back when you started off and say, wow, how did I do this?
And you're amazed at that.
I can feel the same way about young Daniel.
I can feel myself about the young Daniel that worked every weekend and
you know, nonstop, 24-7, sacrificed so many things, so many summers, so many other things.
You know, I had a blast doing so, but I didn't have a normal upbringing just because I was so obsessed about learning, so obsessed about making it.
And it put me in the position of where I am today.
And I actually feel like I owe that guy to keep pushing myself, right?
Because there's so many things, there's so many demands of my time, so many things that tells me to sort of downshift gear into an easier gear because life would be a lot more comfortable that way.
This is not a comfortable thing.
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.
And it's such a huge honor to be your first guest in this series.