David Senra: So I want to consider this conversation like a continuation of the conversation we had last year in New York.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: It was by far the most impactful conversation I had the entire year.

Daniel Ek: Wow.

David Senra: It is in large part the reason we're sitting down and actually recording this conversation. And what I loved was, I thought about how the advice you gave and the stories you told really fundamentally changed my approach to my work, and then also, like, my philosophy of how I'm living my life.

Daniel Ek: Wow.

David Senra: And because you... It's very rare, like this year I'm going to hit over 400 biographies read for the podcast, right? And somebody asked me recently, it's like, "Do you ever uncover new ideas?"

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: It's like, no, I feel like I'm telling the same story, the same personality type over and over and over again.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And you'll get a new idea or novel idea, you know, every once in a while, but certainly not all the time.

Daniel Ek: Right. Yeah.

David Senra: But you shared something at the dinner that was a truly novel idea.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And then a few months later, I read this interview, and I was like, "Oh, I'm not the only one that Daniel's advice changed their career."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: So I'm going to read something. There was an interview given by the CEO of Uber, who's a friend of yours, Dara.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Senra: And I'm going to read this excerpt, which was absolutely perfect, and he was talking about contemplating, "Should I take this job or not?"

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: Like, this is a huge opportunity, but also, like, kind of scary. And this is tied to your idea that you should optimize for impact over happiness.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: I haven't heard anybody else articulate that. And so Dara says, "I was reading about all the issues happening with Uber in the news, the various challenges that were coming up there. So when I first got the call to be the CEO, I said, 'Heck no, I'm not crazy. I'm not up for this.'"

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: "But I had one particular conversation that really shifted me, which was with Daniel Ek, who's a good friend. And I still remember, I was talking to him about my career at Expedia and how happy I was, and he looks at me," and then you did this to me too, "and he looks at me, and he goes, 'Since when is life about happiness? It's about impact. You can have an impact on Uber, which is a really important company in the world that's shaping the future of cities.' And I thought to myself, 'My God, this is so obvious, I've got to take a shot.' I knew it was going to be uncomfortable." Can you just explain how you think about optimizing for impact over happiness and why?

Daniel Ek: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: And I think it can be, you know, 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 impact. 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 I, you know, would put it in this case is, you know, what was obvious for me, with someone like a Dara, was he was content, he wasn't happy, 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'd kind of mostly figured it out, and so he was content.

Daniel Ek: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: And so, I sort of advised him to, "Hey, you should go for this, and that's a far greater thing, and that's going to lead to much more happiness, not just for you, but also for other people."

David Senra: Did somebody do that for you? Did somebody tell you to optimize for impact over happiness? Or is this just you, the way you work?

Daniel Ek: I think I self-motivate myself that way.

David Senra: Okay.

Daniel Ek: To do the hard things. You know, 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.

Daniel Ek: And so, 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 projects in Sweden, and I was not the normal kid, you know. I was kind of probably a middle-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.

David Senra: So wait, you felt like an outsider even at that age?

Daniel Ek: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: Do you still today?

Daniel Ek: Yeah. 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, we're in Silicon Valley.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: I'm not American, so there's an element of myself where I don't belong to the club.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: And I've always felt that way. And because I've always felt that way, I can't take lessons from other people 100% because some of my stories, some of my conditions, some of the waves, the structures, even how to structure a company, you have to structure differently if you're a European company versus an American company. So you have to go back to sort of first principles, and kind of find the 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.

Daniel Ek: 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." And he said, "Oh, really? Yeah, I just didn't take the call even."

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: 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 content. He downshifted down to the easy gear; life was good. It was really easy.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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, you know, gear up even more to an extreme level? Why aren't you going to go for greatness? Why aren't you gonna 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.

Daniel Ek: I don't pretend to know that I think that there's one game to play, or one universal truth to life, but I certainly believe from entrepreneurial types that are probably more like myself that, you know, this is sort of one of those sort of key things, is really consider impact.

David Senra: One of the things I admire most about Daniel Ek is his relentless dedication to improving his craft and to improving his product. It's a mission that he's still on nearly two decades later. It'd be impossible to argue that Spotify isn't one of the most well-crafted products ever created. And Daniel and his team's dedication to constantly improving their product reminds me a lot of my friend Kareem, who's the co-founder and CTO of Ramp. Kareem is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance. I spend a lot of time talking to Kareem, and every single conversation centers around his obsession with crafting a high-quality product, and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers. Kareem and Daniel both believe that nothing is ever good enough, and that everything can always be improved. Kareem is running one of the most talented technical teams in finance, and they use rapid, relentless iteration to make their product better every day. So far this year, Ramp has shipped over 300 new features.

David Senra: Ramp is completely committed to using AI to make a better experience for their customers, and automate as much of your business's finances as possible. In fact, Kareem just wrote this, "AI is all I think about these days. It is our duty to be first movers, and push limits so we can make the greatest possible product experience for our customers." Ramp uses a combination of craftsmanship and rapid iteration to invent new products for their customers. Many of the fastest-growing and most innovative companies in the world are running their business on Ramp. Make sure you go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time and money. Let AI chase your receipts and close your books so you can use your time and energy building great things for your customers, because at the end of the day, that is what this is all about: building a product or service that makes someone else's life better. That is what I'm trying to do, that is what Daniel Ek has dedicated his life to doing, and that is what Ramp has done too. Get started today by going to ramp.com.

David Senra: You mentioned you thought some people don't go for impact because they're content. When was the last time... Like, you're definitely not content now, right? So I've gotten to know you well, and we've talked for hours and hours and hours, and this is why I wanted you to be the first person I had this conversation with. And, like, I was curious what you were going to say, like, no, I know you have this, like, inner burning desire and fire inside of you, which is, to me, your outside is like you're very calm, you're very articulate, and you're very polite.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But you have that, like... The same thing I read in these books all the time, it's just like, "This person had a burning desire to achieve mission success," is the way I think about it.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Were you content after you sold your first company? You were like 22, 23.

Daniel Ek: Well, content is the right word. I wasn't happy.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: So I was content for a moment of time. I was 22, I never had much success with women because I was a computer geek, and back then, computers were 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, I'll tell you that.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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. That was the goal. And I was thinking to myself-

David Senra: How old were you when you came up with that number?

Daniel Ek: Probably 15.

David Senra: Okay.

Daniel Ek: You know, someone gave me, like, this book, "Rich Dad Poor Dad," I think. I read it.

David Senra: I think everybody gets it at the same age.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. I read it. It was, like, really seminal for me, so I kind of made that number.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: I figured to myself if I worked really hard, I could get there when I was 40. I was 22 when I got there.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: And so that wasn't really part of the plan, right? And so I kind of like, "Okay, well, what's next? What am I going to do?" Because I didn't have to work for money.

David Senra: Were you depressed? You don't have your company anymore, you sold it, you have the number you thought it was going to take you till four decades to reach, you reach it now.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You're going to the clubs, you're realizing, "These people aren't even my friends."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "They don't care about me at all."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "There's no impact I'm making on the world."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "I'm just consuming; I'm not producing anything."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: This is something I talk about all the time, like, I think we sometimes have a sick culture where, like, people, especially on social media, they glorify, like, consumption.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: It's like, I don't care what you consume.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I care what you produce. You should be proud not that you have money to buy an expensive thing. What did you make? Because the way I think about this all the time, which is always fascinating how many times this comes up in the biographies, and for hundreds of years, people constantly think, like, "Oh, we've reached the end. There's no more opportunity." And every single time, humans keep saying, it's like, "We can't,  this is going to be the last company, this is gonna be the last technological shift, this is going to be the last invention."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And the best description of a business I've ever heard came from Richard Branson. And he said, "All a business is, is an idea that makes somebody else's life better."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And if you look at it like that, it's like then you have infinite possibilities and opportunities all the time, because there are infinite small and large ways to make other people's lives better.

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: You weren't, at that time, making anybody else's life better.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: You were just kind of consuming.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: Would you consider yourself depressed? What would you consider yourself?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, it's probably the most depressed I've been in my life, to be honest, because, you know, I knew from a very young age what I wanted to do, and it was unlike most other people that I grew up with. I just knew I wanted to build things.

David Senra: You were doing that when you were, like, 14, right?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, but it started, like, even earlier than that. I just didn't know it was called a company.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: I had no idea what finances were, or VCE, 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.

David Senra: This is another thing that, like, drives me insane because I hear, like, other people's, like, advice to entrepreneurs, which I hate.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I think it's, like, terrible, like, we shouldn't have an entrepreneur ecosystem, especially because most of the media that entrepreneurs are consuming are actually from investors, and you have wildly different incentive structure and everything else.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And it just conflicts with a lot of stuff that's in the biographies, and I'll just go with those guys over anybody else, right?

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And they're always just like, "Yeah..." You know, my belief is something that I repeat over and over again, this maxim, that belief comes before ability."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: That it's in these stories every single time. You have somebody... Like, I just reread the autobiography of the founder of Sony, okay?

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: Akio, at the time, was, "We're going to start this company in 1946 in Tokyo, that's occupied by the Americans, that has been firebombed."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: Right? He's passing, he's going to work, and he's passing just burnt out rubble, millions of homes of Japanese.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: More than half the population has left the city. They start what turns out to be Sony, which is one of the most successful and influential companies of all time, in a burned out department store. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book is they need to have umbrellas on their desks because when it rains, it comes through the roof.

Daniel Ek: Just pours down. Oh, wow. Yeah.

David Senra: Right? And yet in his book he says, "I don't have a problem saying, even then, I knew I had potential, and I could be great and I could do great things."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: He had the belief before the ability. You said, "I didn't even know it was called entrepreneurship, and I'm starting to build things."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And this is the question I have for you. When did you know you were good?

Daniel Ek: I don't know that I'm good. I know I'm different. But I have this sort of insane belief that I can get good if I try hard enough.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: And I still feel that way, by the way, like, because the comparative sets have changed, right? Like, you know, it was from everyone in my school, maybe, in the early days, to everyone in Stockholm somewhat later, to everyone in Europe at some point, and now it's like the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time that I'm constantly comparing myself to. And obviously, I don't believe that I'm as good as them, but I believe I am slightly different than them in some ways, and I believe that if I work really, really hard on something, I can make something really great. And that's the sort of bar that I keep for myself, and for me, it really stems also from sort of this notion, back to what you were talking about, about sort of the realization that through computers, right?

Daniel Ek: Steve Jobs has this saying, "It's the bicycle of our mind," which was really how I felt about computers, like, growing up. It's just this magic tool that allows me to solve so many other things and create things.

David Senra: That's how I feel about podcasts.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. 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, fix it. Because if I'm not interested enough in it to spend a decade fixing it, it's probably not worth pursuing.

David Senra: This is, like, something I'm super passionate about because, you know, if you really think about, like, they don't write biographies about people that, like, start, scale, sell a company and do it for, like, five years.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I'm not interested in that.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, I'm not interested in your startup.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I'm interested in your last company. I'm interested in something you're going to do for the rest of your life.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And this is what I draw inspiration off of, it's just, like, going back to what you said earlier about impact and contentment, and how, like, you're willing to go into an area where it's, like, you know it's difficult.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: I love what Jeff Bezos said about this. He used to tell people in Amazon at the very beginning, he's like, "We're trying to build something that we can be proud of, something that we can tell our grandkids about."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: Anything that you're going to be proud to tell your grandkids about is not going to be easy.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: So we're going into this with... You know, he gave himself, like, a 30% chance of success.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yep.

David Senra: I think at the beginning of Spotify, you know, your guy's like, "Hey, I might have to get a job after this, but I have to do this."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "Like, it is inside of me."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: There's a bunch of people that say the reason they joined Spotify in the early days is because Daniel would teach us and tell us that he's building for the long term.

Daniel Ek: Ye.

David Senra: So there had to be acquisition offers early on.

Daniel Ek: Sure.

David Senra: And did you ever consider them? Like...

Daniel Ek: Well, I considered them, but not for money. I considered them because I already had the money that I thought I needed in my life, right? And that was an incredibly powerful position to be in. It was freeing me of a lot 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've been a company that could further our mission and cared about what we cared about as much as we did, I probably would've sold. But I never found that. And because I didn't find that, we just kept going. And it wasn't obvious to me that this would be, like, something I would do for 20 years, I'll tell you that. But what I did know is that, you know, I came from doing lots of projects beforehand, and so sort of, you know, we talked about the one company I did sell, but that was like my fourth or fifth one.

Daniel Ek: So I'd been doing a bunch of other things, and I was doing many things in parallel.

David Senra: Which you still do today.

Daniel Ek: Well, I started doing again. Which is a very different thing.

David Senra: Okay.

Daniel Ek: And I still think the jury's out, by the way, on whether that's a good idea or bad idea.

David Senra: Explain.

Daniel Ek: Well, you know, again, I do believe that focusing all your time and effort on this one thing, and obsess about it 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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.

David Senra: Is that connected to what you were saying earlier, that you think you might be a better coach than player?

Daniel Ek: Yeah. I certainly think so. And because my leadership style is so different than many of these sort of entrepreneurs that most of us sort of look up to and hail, whether it's the Steve Jobses or Elon Musks, et cetera, 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.

David Senra: We were texting back and forth about this, so we should just talk about this now, so we don't forget.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: We were talking about, like, maybe we should talk about, like, the different archetypes of entrepreneurs because, like, there could be, you know, somebody, like a young...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: There's undoubtedly a young Daniel Ek out there, right? We just know that that's going to happen. There's this great thing... I'm slightly obsessed with Michael Jordan. He's the lock screen on my phone, he's my contact card, so when people, like, start texting me, it's, like, Michael Jordan with his eyes like this, like, kind of setting the tone.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And he said this great thing because, you know, at the end of his career, it's the rise of Kobe Bryant.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And everybody, towards the end of his career, they were, like, obsessed.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, "Oh, Tracy McGrady is going to be the next Michael Jordan, and this guy's gonna be the next Michael Jordan, this guy's the next Michael Jordan. And he's like, "You don't have to worry about finding the next Michael Jordan." He goes, "First of all, you didn't find me."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: "I just happened to come along."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm, yeah.

David Senra: "And that will happen again. You don't have to find the next person; they will come along."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And I always say they will reveal themselves.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: So I do think this is fascinating, and no one else talks about this. Again, the weird thing about talking to you, and I don't mean that in a pejorative, it's like you just say stuff that no one else says.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And then I'm like, "Why don't more people understand, like, know about Daniel's very unique ideas?"

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: Like, no one's concerned about the archetypes. Everybody's like, "Oh, well, you just have to be like Steve Jobs, or you just have to be like Elon."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And your point is like, no, there's, like, multiple different archetypes. Obviously, like, I've studied this maybe more than anybody else in the world.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And it's very clear that there are.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And yet they're all kind of, like, narrowly focused on, "This is the one path." And me and you went over this back and forth before, it's just like, it's so ridiculous to say, like, "This is the way founders should run their company," because you said it back in 2021 in that series on Spotify, we've had conversations like this, this is something I always say, it's like, it's tied to the personality of the founder.

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: Like, the advice is fucking useless unless it's tied to who you are as a person.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: Spotify is a reflection of you.

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: Now, I do want to talk also about this other great idea that you gave me, and then now I heard Jeff Bezos echo recently, about the fact that there's similarities between, like, the way your child develops, and the way a company develops that was very fascinating.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Senra: But where are you, like... Explain why you would even want to broach the subject of, like, talking more about the different founder archetypes.

Daniel Ek: 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 had traits that I didn't have. And so we read all these stories, whether it's biographies or articles about how they managed their company and how they lived 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 Bezos and Gates and all of the great ones, you know, the very charismatic ones like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and, you know, I've learned from all of them, and in a way, I've tried to imitate them, right? Because I thought that they were so great at what they do.

Daniel Ek: 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, "Uh, that's not me, so I guess I'm not as good as them."

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: "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.

David Senra: That's literally what I just wrote down. So I don't want... Again, this is more of a conversation than an interview, because I'm a terrible interviewer and I love to talk.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, sure.

David Senra: I could do a monologue show for God's sake.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But I had this theory too, because it's obvious in the books, like, there's this, like, myth, it's like, of, like, the genius young entrepreneur.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And if you go and read all their biographies, they weren't, like, laying about doing nothing when they were younger.

Daniel Ek: No.

David Senra: But it's very clear, if you look at all of them, Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Akio Morita, Sam Walton, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, Edwin Land, they do their best work when they're much older.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And so I thought a lot about that, I'm like, "Dang, this is like a reoccurring thing over and over again." Some cases they're in their 40s, 50 years old, and they're at the top of their game.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And then, you know, I was wondering, like, what is this? Okay, well, obviously, like, it is some skill sets so you can, like, practice more.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: You have more experience, so then you can make better decisions. You have a better network, you have resources, you have all that. But one thing that I believe that I cannot prove, but I believe with every bone in my body, is, like, because, you know, they knew themselves much more...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, think about the way you know yourself in your early 40s than you did when you were 23.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: It's like we thought when we were 23, you don't know anything.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Even the most brilliant 23-year-old does not know themselves.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: That comes from time and experience.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And it's just like, no... This is something I learned from Michael Dell's autobiography, which was excellent. I used to say it's like they build a company that's authentic to them.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, 100%.

David Senra: Also, the way he says it is like they build a company that's natural to them.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: And you can't build a company that's natural to you if you don't know who you are.

Daniel Ek: Right.

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: And so I have this belief that's like... And I think, like, your accomplishments are freaking crazy, and I know you like to downplay them, and it's just because you're very polite and everything else. I was watching this funny interview with you, and they mentioned something like, "You're the most successful person to ever come out of Scandinavia," and your words were very polite, but your face, it was like somebody poked you, you're like, "Oh, I don't want to be like this guy," though.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But your response was like... I know that face. I know exactly what you said.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But this idea that, like, you are the sum of, like, your accumulated experiences.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Right? That is one form of education. But the form of education is like... I know I went to your house, I rummaged through your library, maybe kind of rudely. But I loved how you're obsessed with history and philosophy too.

Daniel Ek: Go for it.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And I was like, "Oh, this is a person that's curious about the external world."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: "But he also wants to know, like, who he is, what's important to him, and then building a business, and, like, an apparatus around that."

Daniel Ek: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: So I just wanted to get that out because you mentioned something, like, I don't think... I should probably talk about it more frequently, but it's something I definitely believe is like you're going to get better at entrepreneurship when you get better at knowing who you are and what you actually want to do.

Daniel Ek: 100%. 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. And the best version of myself is one that will have even more impact than the one that I had before, because it will be even more true to who I am.

David Senra: So what is your archetype? I mean, do you even know?

Daniel Ek: 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?

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Because I can still learn how to, like, you know, do the game better, if that makes sense.

David Senra: I would say there's a very interesting idea that I've noticed, you know, obviously, like, there's this maxim I say over and over again that all of history's greatest entrepreneurs study history's greatest entrepreneurs, and if you make a podcast on that, you get to meet the living versions of that now. And what I'm struck by, and I'm like this myself, I have all kinds of blind spots, which you, like, picked away the first time we had dinner.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And you were just like, "You're doing this wrong." And you were very polite, but you're just like, "You're lying to yourself."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, you know, "You're obsessed with this, and you're, like, fighting with the hand tied behind your back," but I'm so amazed. It's exactly what you said.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: It's almost like they need a mirror.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: So there's another great idea that I've seen a few times. One of the truly novel ideas, it's this idea of hiring a paid critic.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: So Sony is making, you know, audio equipment.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: It's like in the '50s.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And they're very primitive devices.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And what they realized, was they hired a young vocal arts student, and I don't know how to pronounce his name, it's Norio Ohga or something like that. And the reason they did that is because he was a fan of early Sony products, but he also had very fine, refined taste and everything else.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: And so he would just light them up about...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It was like, "I'm a big fan of Sony, but your products aren't good enough; you have all these deficiencies." And Akio, being the genius that he was, he goes, "We hired him as a paid critic."

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: "His job was to attack the deficiencies in our product, because if we don't even see them..."

Daniel Ek: Right.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And the paid critic, his point was that, "Hey, if you're a ballet dancer, you have a mirror, right?"

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: "Your mirror tells you what you're doing right, what you can fix, like, what you need to do."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: He's like, "I'm your oral mirror."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And then fast forward to when the book is published in like 1986, that paid critic is now the president of Sony.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And I feel exactly... I'm this way. It's like we need a mirror.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And I think what I'm curious about with you is like, I remember I had just had dinner with Mike Ovitz, and you know, I think his autobiography is one of the best entrepreneur autobiographies ever written because he tells you about the bad shit.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: The fact that he didn't like who he was, he was depressed, he was doing this, making bad decisions based on the opinions of other people, which entrepreneurs cannot do.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And I was struck by, like, the fact that he didn't know himself at, you know, 25 or 20. I think he was 27 when he started CA. Sure as hell knows himself as like almost an 80-year-old man. But I asked him about, you know... Some people I know have been friends with him for 25 years.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And I was just like, "What do you think has enabled you to maintain that relationship?"

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And he said, "He tells me the truth."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And he's like, "You get into my position where..."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: You know, he's famous, he's wealthy, most of the people that he interacts with are on his staff, and he's like, "It's very dangerous."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And he said, he's like, "There's not many people in my life that tell me the truth."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: Who tells you the truth?

Daniel Ek: 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 this 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 matter to me. So oftentimes-

David Senra: That's great though.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, and so oftentimes, like, when I may bring an issue home, because she doesn't really know what's going on in the business world, and she doesn't really care... She kind of, like, gives me this mirror back where most of life actually doesn't revolve around technology or the business world, et cetera. It's like, this is the life. So that's a great one. I have a very dear friend, Jack, who very similarly plays that part in my life. He's the most realist person there is. My wife is another one. Gustav that you met is another person. He will tell me the truth even when I don't want to hear it. And yeah, I've been incredibly fortunate that, like, many of the people I just talked about are people that have been around me for 20 years. My mom, obviously, my entire life. But many of these people have been around for a very, very long time.

Daniel Ek: And I think that's... 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.

David Senra: It's crazy, Munger, again, like I literally get emails every week, they're like, "Why do you mention Charlie Munger on every episode?" I'm like, "'Cause he's the wisest person I've ever come across."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "What do you want me to do?"

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, I'm sorry he has so many good ideas. But he said something again, and he's another person where he, like, points things out that once he says it, it's obvious, but no one else does it.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And he goes, "Trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world." And he talked about that, like, when I actually got to have dinner with him, he's like, "Your job is to build a seamless web of deserved trust with great people."

Daniel Ek: 100%.

David Senra: And he was telling stories, like, "Everybody knows that, you know, I met Buffett when he was 28 and I was 35."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: "They don't understand, there were all these other guys around us, and we built friendships and did deals forever."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Most of them had passed away by the time I met him.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But that idea, it's like, trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world.

Daniel Ek: It truly is. And if you think about it, why is 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. It really compounds. 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm. Good point.

Daniel Ek: 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 are degrees of trusting someone. How many people do you trust with your life? How many people do you trust with your bank account? Just handing it over.

David Senra: Are you a trusting person though?

Daniel Ek: To a certain degree.

David Senra: I think that's one of, like... People that know me... So I have actually had breakfast with a good friend of mine, you know, he's slightly older, but he tells me the truth, and he is very nice, but he'll point out the problems that, like, are going to stop me from going to where I want to go.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And one of his points... Because if I asked that question myself, it's like, "I don't trust anybody."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I think I'm getting a little better with that, but I am concerned that, like, I'm going to be one of my own worst enemies because of this, like, I can't let go.

Daniel Ek: 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 had the most loving mother. She gave me everything. 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: 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-

David Senra: I think you're definitely right about that.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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 of my personality. But I really do believe, and it'll go back to philosophy, but the more I give away, the more I get back. And so I just keep focus on doing that. And for me, the ultimate impact at this point, why I said, you know, I'd like to be the best coach there ever was, the best entrepreneur coach, maybe that's my archetype, than 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 gave me the most amount of pride at this point.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: It really isn't anything else. Like, you know, financially, I couldn't care. Not that important. It's great to have a lot of money to have as a currency to then have more impact. It's more chips on the table to do new, more cool, interesting stuff.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: But the real thing for me will be the friendships that I built, you know, 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. And 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 one or 2% negative experience relative to all the positive things that have come out of it.

David Senra: The sad part of this, I can't think of anybody that's, like, betrayed me in, like, two decades.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: So it's like I'm just making up this problem, this imaginary problem that maybe used to exist, but certainly doesn't exist now. And this is where I think it's really, like, helpful to, again, I don't need a bunch, you know... I don't believe... There's a great quote from the founder of Red Bull, who I became slightly obsessed with, and I'm really proud of the episode I made on him, because, like, we had to literally translate. There were no biographies in English.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And we had to translate a biography from German. And his point was just like, "I don't need 50 friends." Like, I believe in much, like, fewer and better and deeper.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And as long as you make those, like, choices correctly, you know, again, like I can't think of a single person that I feel is in my life that doesn't want the best for me.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And yet I still have this like, "Oh, like, I'll just do it all myself."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Related to this, another thing that, like, you said that really surprised me is, like, when people ask me, they're like, "Obviously, I know who Daniel is. I use Spotify."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: "I know everything going on, but like, why do you talk about him so much?" And I, like, mention you on the podcast, and like, I was like, "Oh, because I learn a lot from you." You're very, very careful with what you want in life. Like, and I get to meet pretty crazy people, and most of the times, like, they're great, but then you see, like, there's like a lot of negativity to them. One, there's a shocking amount that have very few, if no friends, which is scary to me.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then they kind of, like, interact with you as if like you're like an asset.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And once I suck that asset, like, get everything out of the asset, then like, you will be disposed.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And I feel the same people that do that have almost no intellectual humility, right? Where I always say it's like every single person I read about is smarter and more productive than I am. The way I look at this, the world in general is very much in the same way... Like Thomas Edison has this great quote. He's like, "We don't know 1/1000 percent of anything."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And that's the way I feel, because every day I learn something new. I'm like, "I was so stupid back then."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You have extreme levels of intellectual humility. I don't even know if many people know this, but, like, you would, like, go and shadow and spend time... I don't know if you have a term for this. You just, like, call up somebody that's running a company, and say, what?

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: "I'm going to come and sit in on every single one of your meetings?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, pretty much. Like, that's how it goes. And look, it comes back to this. I mean, I don't believe that I know much.

David Senra: Let me just set the table for this real quick. The way you put it to me, like, "I'll go get them their coffee."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: "I don't care."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: "I'm there to learn from them."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: "If I need to get their coffee, I'll go get their coffee."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: Do you understand? That's insane. Like, I think that's the right, like, mindset.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But I don't think anybody would believe somebody running, you know, a $100 billion company and has done the things that you've done, will be like, "Yeah, no. I'm fine. Like, I'll shadow this guy, and, like, I'll do whatever I need to do."

Daniel Ek: Yeah. 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 about, as you have around all the greatest entrepreneurs, but they've read the big ones certainly of their time.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: The Bezos', the Steve Jobs, the Elon Musk's biographies, and all that kind of stuff. But there's a certain thing around reading it and internalizing it, and seeing the culture up front. And what I realized was that 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?

Daniel Ek: And 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 how it worked.

Daniel Ek: So, I'll mention one. For instance, I do really well in these one-on-one situations. I might even do well in three or four-person groups, and maybe six. But in a 10-person group, I don't have the personality where I command the room.

Daniel Ek: It just doesn't work. 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?

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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 he said, "Sure." And so, I spent the better part of what I believe... The first time was a week, literally in pretty much all of his meetings from start to finish.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: And the big question obviously for me is, "Okay, well, what does he get out of it, and can I make myself useful while doing it?" So, hence, I took meeting notes. You know, 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.

Daniel Ek: 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 differently 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.

Daniel Ek: And during that week, it's not just that I follow people around. I actually meet with their entire executive team and interviewed 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.

Daniel Ek: And it just turned out, for me, to be an amazing way to learn by seeing the culture up front that enables the certain practices to work. 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."

Daniel Ek: So, you know, there are many things where you can copy a specific way, for instance, Elon does things. 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 things.

David Senra: I think you're dead right about this. The way I would think about your archetype is... I think you nailed it with Coach. And then, you'll hear people inside Spotify say that you have a very collaborative management style, where I don't think anybody is going to describe Steve Jobs as collaborative.

David Senra: Now, he was able to collaborate, but at the end, it was kind of like, "I'm making all the decisions."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: There's actually an interesting story that I'm curious how you think about this. How do you balance the decisions you make, specifically on product, right?

Daniel Ek: Mm.

David Senra: With your own personal taste and intuition versus being metrics-driven?

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: There's this hilarious story. It's in two different books. One's in this book called 'Creative Selection,' which is excellent. I read three times. It's from this guy named Ken Kocienda, who was a programmer, and he demoed to Steve many, many times, and when they were building their best products, right? And then there's another story in Jony Ive's biography. And they talked, and they were comparing and contrasting the way Google would make products versus how Apple did when Steve Jobs was in charge.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And the guy's like, "Hey, you know, at Google, we have to decide between like blue and light blue, and we run like 200 tests of all the different shades in between that."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Right.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And Jony's like, "We would never, ever do that."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: Do you remember... You are old enough to remember this. They create the iMac, but the big fat bubble one.

Daniel Ek: Yep. Sure.

David Senra: Probably late '90s.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Senra: And it was the first time there were going to be all these crazy colors and everything else, and Jony tells the story.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: He's like, "You know how we chose the colors?" He's like, "Me and Steve went to where the Apple Design Center is, and we talked about it."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: "And 30 minutes later, the colors you saw, we shipped."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Yep. Yep.

David Senra: That was it.

Daniel Ek: Yep. Yep.

David Senra: Where are you on that spectrum?

Daniel Ek: Yeah. I think the most important thing that you described is that it's a spectrum.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: It's not 100% one way or the other way. Because, again, I remember early on, 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: And it's my taste, and I've got this articulation, all these things."

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: And lo and behold, some terrible decisions ended up coming out of this, et cetera. And I think where people sort of break down on almost all issues is that 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.

Daniel Ek: He didn't try things out. Sometimes, maybe trying it out by testing his ideas on multiple people inside and outside, et cetera. But of course, he did that, right? And I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant, and that doesn't get talked about. He actually called up journalists sometimes and tested ideas on them.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: And like, "We might do this kind of thing." And then hear the journalists react to it, and it's like, okay, that was a bad idea, and then go back.

David Senra: They described this as sonar, how dolphins, they throw things out, and then...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It might be a crazy idea, and then it reflects back to them, and they use it as a form of education.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But the hilarious one is that they couldn't figure out what they were going to call what turns into the iMac. He was obsessed with the Akio Morita at Sony. He goes, "I have the name for this computer. It's going to be the MacMan." Because of the Walkman, and people around him were like, "No, please don't do that."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: No, no, no. Yeah.

David Senra: "It can't be that." And like, "This is a terrible..." And they kept... Meeting after meeting, he's like, "Steve, this name sucks."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And they give him a bunch of lists, and then the first time he hears iMac, he's like, "Don't like it at all."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then, they're like, "Well, we really like it, so we'll put it in the next group, and then we'll move the third one down."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then he goes, "Now I don't hate it."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then one day, he's walking the hall, he's like, "I came up with a name. It's iMac."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, of course. Yeah. That's the way, right? And so, I feel that's truly the case. I think the realization is that you tend to over-gravitate to one or the other. And certainly in Spotify's case, we did the same. Like, we were early on very much so, I mean, the first user interface was pretty much designed by myself and this guy called Rasmus.

Daniel Ek: So much of that you could describe was my taste. But sooner or later, what ends up happening is you get into a space where you don't even know anymore, because your current feedback loop of where the world is and the customer you're designing for starts becoming a little bit different.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: 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 extend the curiosity branch, that improves your judgment, which then builds your taste.

Daniel Ek: 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.

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David Senra: Are there any product updates that get pushed live that you didn't like?

Daniel Ek: Oh, plenty.

David Senra: Okay.

Daniel Ek: Plenty.

Daniel Ek: And this may be a little bit unique, but coming back to it, so I ended up having, you know...

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: So, the typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person, right? By the way, it's 100% true. 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.

Daniel Ek: It's like you're oscillating between zero-to-one, one-to-100, and then, the last stage was more of an optimization stage. And you have to 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.

Daniel Ek: So, what happened with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom and wealth, which is that 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 that I was running these product meetings.

Daniel Ek: 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 really spend all this time. So he was sort of 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.

Daniel Ek: He took me aside after one of these product sessions, and he's like, "You know, you're not really that good at doing these things, and you're not really that helpful. So most of the time, me and the team were kind of looking, and we're trying to basically appease you in the meeting, but you're not really adding as much value as you think."

Daniel Ek: And not surprisingly, my first instinct was to be really pissed off. I sort of went home. I was like, "Man, I'm going to have to fire this guy. It's horrible. Like, how could he say this?"

Daniel Ek: 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: And so the product team was much happier. You know, he was making more of the decisions without me. I wasn't meddling in. There weren't two different people deciding what worked, but it was really him. And ever since that moment, I don't really run product anymore, in the traditional sense. I'm involved in the product, and he solicits feedback from me all the time, but I don't run the product meetings.

Daniel Ek: And I say that because what happened for me was a real setback, not just in that moment, but also sort of like, "Oh, wait a minute, so what's my value-add then in this company?"

Daniel Ek: 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."

Daniel Ek: 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, the 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.

Daniel Ek: 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: 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 are not just sort of how they leverage the product, but actually holistically around them? And so, that was just one of those things.

Daniel Ek: And then subsequently, what ended up happening is I got this guy we call Alex, and he's now doing that part better than me, too.

Daniel Ek: 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 meet consumers, and where there's maybe a third stakeholder we have to consider in all of this.

Daniel Ek: 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.

David Senra: What you're just describing right now, this unfolded over how many years?

Daniel Ek: I would say the first ten years was the Zero-to-One journey.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: And the last ten have 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.

David Senra: I think this is a good opportunity to talk about another one of your very unique ideas. They were just excellent. I just did this episode on Jeff Bezos because he doesn't give that many interviews, and so I would take a transcript of his interviews, and you treat it like a book and just go through it. And he said something like, from day one, he knew he wanted to build a company that could outlast him.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Right? And he still loves it. He'll love it forever. And it was very reminiscent of what we're trying to do as parents, where you're shaping your kid, but you're only successful if they can survive without you.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And when I heard him say that, that was a few months after you had beautifully articulated this idea. It's just like, well, I think there's a lot of, you were going to say it better than I did, but essentially, there is a rather clear analogy between the way your child, when they're first born, is essentially like a product of you.

David Senra: They're going to mimic their parents, their environment that they're in. But as they grow older and older, I just went through this now, I have a 13-year-old, when she was much smaller, she's much like me and her mom, right?

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And then now she's got traits that I don't even have.

Daniel Ek: Yep. One hundred percent.

David Senra: And her own decisions and doing things, maybe I would do or I would not do.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And you're like, it's kind of the same for the company.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And you had this idea where I think at the time Spotify was 19 years old, or it's 19 or 20 years old.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And it's just like, well, year one or two, it is me. It's the same way you have a two-year-old.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Anybody knows this.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But now there are characteristics that emerge from within the company that are separate from the founder.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

Daniel Ek: Yep. Yep.

David Senra: That's a fascinating insight.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. I mean, look, there's clearly kind of three distinct stages of parenthood, right? And, the first one is you're literally the person that keeps them alive, right? And you're 100% there, and you pretty much make every decision for them because they can't make it themselves.

Daniel Ek: And then gradually the next stage is you're there, you're quite involved, you probably step in when they're doing something which would be terrible and would create bad long-term consequences. And then, the last stage, you can't even do that. So the job is much more subtle to just be there when they need you.

Daniel Ek: And I'm somewhat simplifying it, but I think that, as with everything, don't take it literally. But the gist of the idea is certainly that 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.

Daniel Ek: 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?

Daniel Ek: 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... The other day, I was with the guy, Hamilton Helmer, who wrote '7 Powers Book,' which is an amazing book on strategy, by the way.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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.

David Senra: This is the criticism of founders and the podcasts and the books, "But he's not telling me what to do." It's like this is not a podcast for people who want to be told what to do.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's here's how this guy or this woman thought about their company, this is what they experienced. You pull out these ideas. I love how you kept saying, "Don't take it literally." I've told you this before. I drive people crazy because I tend to turn everything into an abstraction. So like, when I hear you, I had sent this message to you where you kind of remind me of James J. Hill, which might be the only person that's ever texted you this.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And James J. Hill was the most successful railroad baron of all time, and I just thought the way you just said the way he built, he essentially was laying railroad tracks, right? And the goal of the company was obviously, we're going to have goods and people on the tracks, but this alone is, how do I make what I'm doing more valuable?

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: And he's the only railroad founder ever in American history to not go bankrupt.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: They all went bankrupt. It's crazy. What he realizes is that he has to spend just as much, if not more, time developing and nurturing the communities that are springing up around it.

Daniel Ek: Right. Yeah.

David Senra: And if he builds these communities around it and it makes it, that makes his railroad more valuable.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: More valuable.

David Senra: But I love this criticism because it's like, "Oh, you have to find a different show or you have to find a different thing."

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: "Because entrepreneurs don't want to be told what to do. I've never met an entrepreneur. It's like, give me a list.

Daniel Ek: Right.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's a profession for people who don't take direction very well.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Exactly. You're exactly right.

David Senra: It's hilarious about this. I think this is tied to something also that is very fascinating with you, is that you have a high... And most people, again, I think the more control you have over your life, the more success you have, people make the mistake of eliminating any people telling them the truth, any inconvenience. They become really brittle.

Daniel Ek: Mm.

David Senra: You have an insanely high tolerance for crazy people.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Senra: Okay? Somebody told me, somebody who works closely with you, that you judge people on their best idea, not their worst.

Daniel Ek: Mm.

David Senra: And I just finished rereading Jim Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, really, the creator of a magic money machine. It's a really weird thing about the guy.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And they said something very similar. They're like, "It doesn't matter." He's like, "If there's a single good idea in your pile of horse manure, he'll find it."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: He will go through...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: All he cares about is the very best ideas.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: He's willing to go through 99 s***ty ideas to get the very best because he understands how powerful those are.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Can you explain how you developed this tolerance? Because most people, especially as companies age, too.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You're built, usually you have a lot of variance in the beginning, and then they get more successful, and the corporations make the mistake of like, "No, we need all the edges."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Right

David Senra: We need the high and the low out of there.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: You embrace that. The way you put it to me when we were talking about this is like, high-temperature people?

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: In training AI.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I actually think LLMs and the latest advancement in AI 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 starts hallucinating.

Daniel Ek: So, the bad thing with the hallucination, of course, is you have no idea what's true or not, but there are spurts of vocational brilliance that come out of there. And it's really 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.

Daniel Ek: So, there is a way when you train these things to be highly creative, but bats*** crazy, and that's just turning up the temperature.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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. You know, I'm very reflective at the moment because I am in my 19th year, 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 used to think they're bad, period.

Daniel Ek: And what 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, a large-scale corporation, what they do is they just get better and better and better at doing what they already do, and the way to do that is obviously to minimize mistakes. So, you know, that also means minimize brilliance, minimize waste, minimize all these other things.

Daniel Ek: So, naturally, what you end up having is more and more capitalism, public markets, all of these things drive 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 how conducive to how you get the best ideas.

Daniel Ek: 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.

Daniel Ek: 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 90% internally focused on just getting the machine to run. Instead, I've been more and more able, not just to 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.

Daniel Ek: 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 for.

David Senra: I think it's the same thing. Filmmakers, like athletes, they're just like...

Daniel Ek: One hundred percent the same thing.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: One hundred percent. 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.

Daniel Ek: 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, the question behind the question, can lead to some really interesting things.

Daniel Ek: And so, what I've come to realize is most people want conformity, and they value sort of a reliable consistency of giving X amount of impact per second or minute or X truthfulness over X%.

Daniel Ek: They have some sort of heuristics for what is a valuable person from a business context or whatever. The 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 a box, "This person is good, and they're always good." But, you know, what I'm more interested in these days is I'm interested in this idea I never heard about before.

Daniel Ek: And I find it with some people, who 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 completely worthless, and not that interesting for me.

Daniel Ek: 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. Those are my people. That's what I'm interested in. And I've come to learn that most people don't like to be around those people.

Daniel Ek: But I love it, and I think it's such a rewarding and interesting thing. And 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.

David Senra: I think this is related. One of your oldest friends texted me the other day, and it was a screenshot of this episode I did with Chung Ju-Yung, who's the founder of Hyundai. And I think it is the most inspiring autobiography I've read, because the guy writes the book when he's like 90, and he grew up the son of a poor farmer. You know, they had to eat tree bark to survive. He dies the richest person in South Korea, having built this huge conglomerate. I thought I was going to read a book about a guy making cars. I didn't realize that was nothing.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You know, he was building, did all the construction, built some of the biggest ships in the world. His nickname was 'The Bulldozer.' And the reason he sent me the screenshot in a specific part of the podcast. He's like, "This is just like Daniel." And one thing that Chung would talk about is that the more you progress in your career, the bigger the company gets, the more rigid it gets.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: They go from like default optimistic, default risk-taking, to...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "Any new idea? No, no, no, no, no."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, "No, we're not doing that. That's too risky. Like, you can't build a car. We're a tiny little island." And he goes, "Daniel gives me the same exact advice where he will say something, I will say, 'No,'" and he goes, "But did you even try?"

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then he goes, "It's related to his ability if you actually analyze his willingness to go into all these different industries where he doesn't know anything about the industry."

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think that sort of comes back to the Georges Bernard Shaw quote, right? The unreasonable man.

David Senra: Let me read the full quote, because it's an excellent quote, too. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Daniel Ek: I have it painted on my wall at home.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: And I'm just reminded of that because I think the reality is, it is really, really tough to not conform, to not be part of a group. And it's so easy, and there are so many temptations in life that draw us back to that conformity, right? Money is another one. When you make a lot of money, you tend to make life more comfortable. So you tend to spend more time golfing. You spend time doing all these other things.

Daniel Ek: 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 and social commitments. You're not going to show up for a lot of things.

David Senra: You told me a funny story one time about how committed you are to your work, and your friends know this about you, that sometimes you'll be in the middle of a dinner and then an idea comes to mind or something you need to pursue, and they just know, "Oh, he's gone and he's not coming back tonight."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Senra: That is an unreasonable...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You know, people are like, "Oh, I can't do that, it's social etiquette."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, I even sometimes find myself doing this because we're both introverts. We've talked about this before, but I kept getting invited to group dinners, and I just felt like, 'Oh, this is a prestigious group dinner.'

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: This person's really successful.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: People would love this opportunity. And so, at the beginning, when I first started doing this, I started going, and I'm like, 'This sucks. I don't...' I remember one time, it was in a private room, and they shut the doors, and within five minutes, I knew. I was like, 'I have to get out of here.'

Daniel Ek: Oh, wow. Yeah.

David Senra: I was like, "Don't worry, I'm going to pretend to go to the bathroom and just, you know, never go back."

Daniel Ek: So, sneak out.

David Senra: And I was like, so I stand up and I go, "Oh, where's the restroom?"

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's right in the room. Like, oh, no.

Daniel Ek: Oh, no. Oh.

David Senra: And what I did, which I wouldn't do today, is I sat down, and I wasted an hour and a half of my time.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Instead of just being the unreasonable man.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, I'm now going to ask, 'What would Daniel Ek do?'

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: He would get or avoid the dinner in the first place.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah. I would say, "You know, I'm not proud of our 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 protective of my time and more about protecting unique and novel ideas, and how rare they are."

Daniel Ek: 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 really not. I'm more obsessed about energy management.

David Senra: Wait, wait. Yeah, let's get to it now. What do you mean?

Daniel Ek: Well, I mean, you know, you constantly hear this thing about all these, you're supposed to wake up at 4:00 AM in the morning, you're supposed to do all these things, et cetera. It's like, first and foremost, there's no rule.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: I know a lot of successful people and biz, as I'm sure you do, too. It's like some of them wake up at noon, and some of them wake up at 4:00 AM. It's like, you can do a lot of different things.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: The obsession with morning rituals is stupid.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. But the other thing is about how you're supposed to have meetings every 15 minutes, and 15-minute increments are better than 30-minute increments, so on and so forth. Look, it might work for you, and for some people, it might be the absolute best thing. I've become more obsessed about sort of managing my energy, because if you have time, but you have no energy, you're not going to accomplish anything anyway.

David Senra: So, how do you manage your energy then?

Daniel Ek: Well, it's about finding out what gives you energy, right? To begin with, 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. "Oh, we have an 8:00 AM 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.

Daniel Ek: And it's about conformity to 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, who have to just figure out what works for you, and you have to do more of that. And that's more about energy management, I believe. And it's so much more about even before this thing, I think both you and I, we went and worked out, right?

Daniel Ek: You know, that gives me energy.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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 that I was at one point doing these 15-minute naps. I don't know if you've heard about this exercise.

David Senra: No.

Daniel Ek: It's a really bad idea, by the way. So don't try this, but I sort of learned that you can daily chain sleep together by doing these 50...

David Senra: Oh, it's like polyphasic...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Yeah. Okay.

Daniel Ek: So, the basic gist is you're supposed to be able to last on four hours of sleep.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: And I was like, "Oh, this is great." So I did that, and actually, the interesting side part is that it worked for about three weeks. And then I missed one of these 15-minute increments, and holy s***, I was completely suicidal for weeks afterwards.

David Senra: Uh-oh.

Daniel Ek: It was not a great thing at all. But the point being is, it's about sort of finding that energy management for yourself. I think certainly there's common wisdom around what an average good sleep should look like, et cetera. But the reality is there are some people who will work on six hours of sleep and they'll do just fine and may even be more productive that way.

David Senra: I wish I were like that. If I could have a superpower, I always say I would like to fly... The first thing is, I just want to fly like Superman.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: If I can't do that, I just want sustained high energy levels 24/7. Because I need a ton of sleep, and I felt bad about this because of the same exact reason you're describing. It's like people are like, "No, you have to get up at 4:30," or you have to just sleep less or sleep faster.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, "You have to sleep faster." And then I'm reading James Dyson's first autobiography, and the guy made one of the most successful career companies in all time. He's still doing it at 76 years old, and he goes, "I need a h*** of a lot of sleep. Ten hours a night or my entire next day is ruined."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I'm like, wait a minute, this guy built... He's a single shareholder of a multi-billion-dollar company. He built some of the best products in the world, and he's sleeping 10 hours a day.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: There are no... You just said, there are no rules.

Daniel Ek: No. There really isn't. And so, I mean, look, you just have to find that thing, right? But when you realize that... And so, if you start with that as the basic thing, all the things you and I have been talking about for this time now. The reality is 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.

David Senra: What's giving... I know hanging out with crazy people gives you energy.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: Right?

David Senra: You know, there's actually something. So I texted a mutual friend of ours, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and I was like, "I'm talking to Daniel," and Patrick, I think, asks the best questions in the world. And so, obviously, I need to use phone a friend for this.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: That one lifeline, phone a friend.

David Senra: Yeah, exactly.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And he's a good mirror, too, because it's almost like a therapy session. He'll be very quiet, doesn't like attention to himself, and yet he'll hit you with a question. I didn't even think about that.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Senra: And he has this great way to describe you. Because my guess is that, or not even a guess. I think you're obsessive with learning and understanding the world around you, and that drives a huge part of what you're doing and this exploration.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: And you can build companies around the stuff you're interested in, and that's kind of this compounding learning machine.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: But he goes, "Out of everyone I know, Daniel has the ability to apply what he learns the fastest at the highest level."

Daniel Ek: Hmm.

David Senra: And this was actually related to a conversation that we had at your house, which was fascinating, because again, I know you don't like public adulation. I'm still going to do it because I think it's fascinating, where everybody focuses on Spotify, which is a marvelous achievement that very few people on the planet have been able to experience. And yet also, because it's not really talked about, it's all this other success that you're having outside of this, too.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: Because you have this, you're very curious about things.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And now you have a network and knowledge, and resources that you can actually impact and try to make the world a better place. And you're not going after easy s*** by any means, which I also admire about you. It goes back to the impact over happiness thing.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And so, we're talking about this, and I'm like, "Were you..." Because usually, true interest is revealed early.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: So if we go and look at your life story, just people are like, "Oh, what hobbies do you have?" I'm like, "I like to read."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And they're like, "What else?" I'm like, "I like to read."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Read. Yeah.

David Senra: That's it. And it's like...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I was like that when I was five.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I didn't... I wasn't like, at five years old, "What's a good hobby for my future self-development?"

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's like, no, I just like reading.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I like books better than people in general.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And so, you see that in your early life, like you're starting companies.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And you didn't even know it was a company.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's just trying to do something. So I was like, "Oh, you must have been interested in investing forever." And you're like, "No, I never even thought about it until 2018," and you said the funniest thing.

Daniel Ek: Mm-mm. No.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You go, "How did you learn about it?" He goes, "I started listening to Patrick's podcast."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then I'd hear an idea. I'd be like, "That's a good idea. I would try that. Oh, I don't like that idea."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then I'd start reading books, and then you're just literally taught yourself.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You weren't interested at all.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And now you're essentially world-class at it in a very short amount of time. And this is the face again.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You just did the same face.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: But explain how you think about this, where it's like, I always say, learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And I think if I thought of anybody else I know that personifies that, it's like you. It's like, I'm not just listening to this podcast for s**** and giggles.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I'm not reading this book even if you find it enjoyable.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, I'm looking to apply this.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Well, I think it's back to that. 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. I loved...

Daniel Ek: I didn't know it was companies, but I loved sorting out problems for other people. I've been doing it my entire life. Whether it's relationship advice, whether it's all these other things.

David Senra: This is why I think these conversations are important to have, because you are the personality type that I've read about. It's just like now, instead of reading about you when you're 80 or dead, you're in the middle of it. So it's very fascinating to me because I'm trying to bounce my understanding of this through reading with an actual person, where it's just most of the people, they're not like, "I'm starting a company for something, company's sake."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: They're just like what you said, "I like solving problems."

Daniel Ek: Yeah. That's it. That's all. 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. Like, I wasn't playing any kind of first-person shooter games or anything that... some of it, but not much. Most of what I was playing was strategy games. You know, 'Civilization,' a business strategy game.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: I played every tycoon game on how to run businesses better. And, and, and...

David Senra: Of course you did.

Daniel Ek: You know? So those were sort of my favorite games growing up.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: I love SimCity.

Daniel Ek: SimCity was amazing.

David Senra: This is what I always say about entrepreneurs, is like, it's the best job in the world. I don't understand the people who give it up. I hate even saying this because rule number two in the Senra family, right? Is what I teach my kids is mind your own business. So, it's like, I think you're very similar. It's like, I don't have any suggestions on how you should live your life. Like, if we're friends, we can talk and go back and forth.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But it's like, I just mind my own business.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But sometimes, I don't have any other way. I meet so many entrepreneurs, and they're like, "I sold my company." I'm like, "Sorry to hear that."

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: They're like, "What?"

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I'm like, "Why would you get out of the game?" And then they sell their company and then they go be a VC.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I'm like, "Oh my God."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: This is the best game in the world.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's never ending.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's not like sports where you can get better with time.

Daniel Ek: No.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You can solve problems.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You can build your own world. If you think about what we were doing on the computer with SimCity, it's like, 'Oh, I'll put a highway there.'

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, we're world builders.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: You get to control who's around you, what are the rules in the world that happens?

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: What's the outcome of the people in the world?

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then you get to make... and hopefully you're doing it for benevolent and good reasons, where I do think... One of my favorite quotes from maxims from the history of entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford, where he's like, "Money comes naturally as a result of service."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And the crazy thing about Henry Ford is that by 1919, he owned 100%, because he bought out the investors of one of the most valuable companies in the world, and he didn't do it to start a company. He had one idea. I've read 10 books on this guy, and people have known him forever. He has one idea. It's kind of weird that we're putting together cars. They're really expensive. He was obsessed with machinery and essentially outsourcing human labor to machines.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: Started on the farm.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: Right? And he's just like, "I want to build a car for the everyman."

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: You said something in the early days of Spotify. You were like, "I have this goal of this celestial jukebox or whatever the case is."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And you said at the very... "I don't know how I'm going to do it." He said the same thing.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "But I learned how to do it."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: He's like, "Oh, well, how can I make a car cheaper? Sure as hell can't put it in by hand."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "So we've have to learn how to mass produce something we don't know how to do yet."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And that took him a decade and a half of failure or whatever.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And then what happens is he didn't start the company to make money, but he made millions of people's lives better. He changed the geography of the world, for God's sake.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yep. Yep.

David Senra: And as a result, money came naturally as a result of service.

Daniel Ek: 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 that 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.

David Senra: Well, what did you say earlier, too? I forgot how you phrased it, but in my mind when I interpret what you said, it's this idea of not being a go-getter, but being a go-giver. You're saying something like, "The more problems you solve, the more it comes back to you."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Was that the...

Daniel Ek: Well, so these are two different ideas, but sort of closely related.

David Senra: Okay.

Daniel Ek: So, it was actually my co-founder who sort of said, "The value of a company is the sum of all the 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.

David Senra: I keep saying you think like Bezos. So, there's a great line, same thing, where he says... I'm reading his shareholder letters for the fourth time. And it's like, these are so good and so clear and concise, I should read them every year. And I was like, "I feel like I just read them," and I looked it up, I haven't read them since the end of 2022. But there's all these stories in Bezos's early career where people in Amazon would come to him with a huge problem, they thought maybe they'd get fired, and then, you know, he got excited.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, yeah.

David Senra: Because he's like, "Oh, great. Like, we had a problem we didn't even know. If we solve this, our company gets even more valuable."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, exactly right.

David Senra: There's this guy named Henry Kaiser who was as famous in his day as maybe like an Elon is today, and he built 100 companies, one of them still exists, Kaiser Permanente. He built the Hoover Dam, he built the Liberty Ships in World War II, and he has this great maxim that... Like, people would come to him and they'd be all depressed and he'd be excited, and they're like, "What the hell's going on here, Henry?" And he goes, "Problems are just opportunities in work clothes."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: That's a great way to think about it.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's like, if I can solve this problem for other people, I make other people's lives better, I make the company more valuable, and like, then you also have to feel good about what you're creating into the world.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 100%. But I think it comes from solving problems. And so, yeah, I mean, like I get excited today. You sort of asked, like, about the other stuff that I get focused on. I don't focus so much about the solution, I focus on the problem. I try to find really interesting problems 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 that 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.

Daniel Ek: But, you know, I find this all the time. And you said it yourself, it's like sometimes they're really small, these problems, sometimes they're gigantic and sort of earth-shatteringly different. It's everything around, you know, life extension to, you know, just walking into a store, and you see things you don't like in the store. Well, those are problems. If you could do those things better, you could probably build a business.

Daniel Ek: And so, the biggest thing, however, is that people have this misconception about what innovation is, and they somehow think that they got to try to figure out something entirely new, but the history of the world is we build on other people's ideas. So, an innovation is actually taking two or more things that were already well known and putting it together in a new way. It's really what it is.

Daniel Ek: And so, for me, the most interesting thing, it's like laying a puzzle or anything else, is like I get to sit around and because of meeting so many brilliant people, I get to listen to problems all around me all the time, and I try to distill and figure out, "Okay, well, this person said this thing, but what if you actually articulate the problem like this instead?" Okay, well, what does that mean? What does that unlock? And that, for me, is just so much fun, and I couldn't imagine, you know, not spending every single day doing this.

Daniel Ek: And, you know, we started this journey by telling my story that I didn't have to work, and that's why I started Spotify, because I love music and I wanted to figure out a way where consumers got what they wanted and creators were able to get paid by doing what they love to do. Um, 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.

David Senra: I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night, and as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions, and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality of sleep for years is Eight Sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of Eight Sleep, Matteo, and we live in the same city.

David Senra: A few months after I started using Eight Sleep, I randomly ran into Matteo at a restaurant, and I was with some friends. So, I go over and say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me, who was I talking to? And I said, "That's Matteo, the founder of Eight Sleep." And my friend replied, "He looks like he gets good sleep." Matteo is living and breathing his product. I had never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep. I had no idea how much that would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my Eight Sleep ice cold.

David Senra: It's cold before I get into bed, so I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe Eight Sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use Eight Sleep. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is the newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place on top of your existing mattress, and it is next level sleep tech.

David Senra: It automatically regulates your body temperature throughout the night independently for each side of the bed. The result is you get up to a full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to EightSleep.com/Senra and use the code SENRA to get $350 off. You can try it for 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it, but I'm confident you will love it. I will never let anyone take my Eight Sleep from me. Make sure you get yours at EightSleep.com/Senra.

David Senra: You said something in the early days of Spotify that was very fascinating. You wanted to build, like, an enduring and impactful company that did something that no one else did, right?

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And it's remarkable also, like, when I'm listening to the series that was created in 2021, how much you guys were talking about AI and how early you were and you understood the impact, which is, like, you kind of saw clearly, like, where we're going. But you said something that I didn't actually understand, because the way I think about technology is, like, technology is just a better way to do something, right?

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And you were like, at Spotify, though, like, at the very beginning, it's like,  yeah, I think you nailed it, you were like, "The decisions that were made have to do with the DNA of the founder," because we're the only ones there, right?

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But you said, "I like technology for technology's sake."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: What does that mean?

Daniel Ek: 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.

Daniel Ek: But I'm equally interested in solving problems, and when you're curious about both of those two angles, you can end up finding these sort of connection points where those two things meet, where it's obvious that there is something over there that no one's really kind of applied in this way before. And maybe there's not one idea, but two ideas over there. It's quite interesting. And I think you have to love technology in order to go through 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-

David Senra: Yeah, to break them.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. And so, like, what are the greatest entrepreneurs, really? Well, the greatest founders are the people that kind of have this one idea of, like, what the... they can almost internalize the consumer, right? Like, what is someone willing? What do they need? Even if they can't articulate it themselves. And then have this entire field of amazing, brilliant engineers and scientists and mathematicians and all these groups of people that are doing various things, and then sort of figure out the intersection, and then you actually have to make it viable too, which is, you have to have some sort of business model, because if you don't have that, eventually this thing won't be sustainable.

Daniel Ek: 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.

Daniel Ek: 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 pave 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, you know, very few people that, I think, can do and is really, really world-class at doing it.

David Senra: I think most of this, you can't even describe why you're doing what you're doing at the time. And what I mean by that is, like, you hinted on this earlier, it was like, it's so easy to kill new ideas, right? And to err on the side of, no, we can't do this. It's amazing to me how many times this comes up in all these biographies, where it's just like, this is a skill you have to learn, and a lot of it is, like, being comfortable with the messiness of the creative process, but it's also entrepreneurs by definition. Impatient. Patient.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, they have this, what looks like a paradox, where, like, they want shit done now.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I love what Jeff Bezos says about this "step by step, ferociously."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And, you know, that's the I'm willing to plan, you know, if we take two decades or three decades to solve the problem that I'm trying to go after, maybe in some cases, the stuff that he's working on might even outlive his lifetime, but that doesn't mean I'm, like, dilly-dallying on a day-to-day basis.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I heard you say something one time, you were like, "I promise you, I don't think I'm the smartest. I don't think I'm the most talented. If I have one superpower," it was like, "I just have super patience."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I think Neko is, like, an example of this.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I met your co-founder on it.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And I got to see this, too, and I was like, "Oh." Like, "This is cool." Like, "Who made the machines?"

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's just like, "We did."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then I didn't know it was like... I don't know if stealth is the right word, but from the idea to the first time the customer happened to us, what, like, six years or something, or four years. It was like-

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: No, the company's eight years old, and we barely began. Yeah.

David Senra: Yeah. And it's like, okay, that's an insane love, that's an understanding of like, we're tackling, one, something that's...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I like the way you just said it, like, innovation and creativity is actually a combination of things that occurred before that we're combining.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Right? And when you mentioned that, I thought of, like, you know, James Dyson's one of my entrepreneur heroes, and what I love about... one of the hidden things that people don't know is he wrote a book called "The History of Great Inventions."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And it's such a... like, it's kind of a bland read.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: God bless his heart, but like, it's just him going through, like, little Wikipedia pages, or like, his version, like Wikipedia pages about, like, what this inventor did how he did it and what the result was.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then you see him take these ideas from, like, 1700 or whatever, and it's like, "Oh, I'll just take, like, that little piece out here, and I'll combine it with this piece."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then what's the new technology today that enables me to solve this problem that didn't exist a few years ago?

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: So, you have this patience, right?

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: You have this desire to solve problems. It's almost like, it sounded like to me, and maybe you could disagree with me, like, you're sounding like you see a giant puzzle that you're trying to figure out.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah, 100%.

David Senra: Now you have, like, more resources, you can be patient. Like, you couldn't have done Neko when you were 23.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Right? But you have this great quote that I know is important to you, and it says, "Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: We haven't talked about quality at all, even though, like, Spotify is the high... like, if you compare your competitors, like, it's just in a class by itself.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: So, it's obviously very important to you.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, we have to talk about quality. So, like, do you want to, like, just pick up where that quote leaves off?

Daniel Ek: 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 amass more stuff. You try to do, you know, 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, trite thing, less is more.

Daniel Ek: 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?

Daniel Ek: 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 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.

Daniel Ek: 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 reference again, is diversification, right? And he calls it somewhat simplified diworsification, because the common wisdom, of course, is in theory, diversification is the best thing you can do, but the truly greatest people, financially, if that's the only yardstick you use, typically do completely the opposite of that, which is they have oftentimes only one asset.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Maybe they'll have two or three, but they certainly don't have more than that, and they just go for that.

David Senra: There's a realization you have, right? Because, like, I read something or you read a line, and you're like, "Okay, let me filter that through, like, how I would say it." So, I do this all the time where, like, I'll take notes on all the books that I read, and then I'll reread them. I'll just jot them down. It's like, "What's occurring there? Can I put it into one sentence?" And one thing I stumbled upon about this was that sometimes the... Nick Sleep has this great quote where he is like, "The best investors are not investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And me and you have talked about this, the fact that there's a lot of people that have, like, sold way too early, and they're, like, lauded, and it's like, well, if you just didn't do that, everything else you did, like, if you just didn't sell...

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: So, Nick Sleep talks about this, and it's been other books, it was like, if Sam Walton didn't give away the stock in Walmart to his kids before it appreciated, you know, you have one of the largest fortunes by a single person ever for their ownership, the concentration of ownership in Walmart.

Daniel Ek: Right.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And Sam talks about that. He's like, "Ah, I didn't really do investing in anything but Walmart," right? And it's like he wasn't waking up saying, "I need to diversify my portfolio."

Daniel Ek: No.

David Senra: "I need to worry about capital allocation." He was just like, "I believe in what I'm doing. I'm going to keep doing it. I'm going to throw all my money in there."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And he's just like, "I'm doing it because I love to do it, and spending time doing anything else would be an absolute distraction." And Nick Sleep talks about this, because he's a capital allocator.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: He's not building a product, but he's making capital allocation decisions, like, "Do I need to sell this stock, put it into another one? I'm weighing my opportunity costs." And he was haunted almost by this idea, if you look at financial history, it's like he talked about a financial firm one day, where they're like, "Okay, we owned IBM in the 1950s."

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And I didn't know until I read Michael Dell's autobiography, right? Because IBM, it's like they were the most powerful and wealthiest company in the world when me and you were born, okay?

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And Michael Dell's like, "You have to understand, like 1987, for me to, like, yell out to my dad, when he's like, 'What do you want to do for a living?'" And he's like, "I want to compete with IBM."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: "I'm a 19-year-old in my dorm room with $1,000."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, what kind of grandiose ambition do you have?

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I went and searched like, "Why is this so crazy?" And I started to learn, like, it was the most valuable company in the world by market cap at the time. It was the first company to go over $100 billion in market cap, right?

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And this little 19-year-old kid's like, "No, I think I can, like, have a go at them." But Nick Sleep talks about he came into this firm, and he's reading how they talk about their investments, and, like, "We made a massive mistake. We owned IBM in the 1950s, and we sold."

Daniel Ek: Mm.

Daniel Ek: Mm.

David Senra: And they're having this conversation in the 1970s.

Daniel Ek: Yep.

David Senra: And the leadership of the financial firm is like, "How do we avoid not doing this?" They said, "If we just held that, the gain would've been more than all the assets we have in our management."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: They're like, "We can't do this."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: That same year, they sold Walmart.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: They had Walmart in the 1970s.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Wow. Wow.

David Senra: So, they made the same mistake. And Buffett, obviously greatest investor of all time, he met Walt Disney.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: He went and talked to Walt Disney in, like, the '60s.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And then I think he bought the stock at like 62 cents or something.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: And he had like a 2X or a 4X game.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: He's like, "Well, I sold Disney."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: So, that's why I was like, oh, the best financial decisions are not financial decisions at all. You're doing it for another reason, which is exactly what you said. It's like, all Sam had to do was just keep doing Walmart, which is exactly what he did.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: I remember, I obviously live in Miami, on a friend's boat in the marina there, and there's like the boat, like, bigger than anything else around there. And you can Google, like, who owns it? And it was, like, Sam Walton's brother's daughter.

Daniel Ek: Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. But I think you're onto something important, which is this notion around just innately focusing and solving problems day by day builds quality, right? And so, quality, for me, is less. Quality for me is focus. Quality for me is improving day by day. All of these things build quality, and quality is rare. Quality in people is rare. Quality in ideas is rare. And we tend to make these things binary. And we talked about it with people. Like, I'd rather have that person that has one good idea in an entire hour and the rest is crap than someone who has, you know, 10 decent ideas but nothing is amazing.

Daniel Ek: 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. And 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.

Daniel Ek: The whole universe is this thing where the only thing we've learned, we keep debating all these things about the universe, but the only thing we know is it's not static. It moves. It cannot, by definition, be like this one thing. It's just constantly expanding or contrasting or it's moving. So, perfection just doesn't exist, but the aspiration towards perfection is a remarkable thing.

Daniel Ek: 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... I've asked him, for the past 34 years is perfecting how to make tea. That's it. Nothing else. And yes, the tea is amazing, but it's not just that. It's just seeing that obsession about quality, seeing that obsession about being not even 1%, but like 0.1% or 0.01% in something.

Daniel Ek: And I think 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 gonna be possible to do with AI.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: But that sort of thing about this guy doing this for 30 years, just becoming the very, very best about what they do, or even what I find incredibly inspiring about you is just the relentlessness every single day towards the long term. It's like as you say, it's the paradox about the long-term 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?

David Senra: Nobody.

Daniel Ek: Nobody, right? And so, the competition for your time, there was none, so you could probably sit for six hours or eight hours, et cetera. But today, it's much harder, because there's many other things. There's people like myself and other people, and you're like, "Oh, wait a minute. Maybe this is a good idea to meet this person." Or there's, you know, a business opportunity that shows up, and maybe people are asking, like, 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: That's a great line. Greatness gets evaporated. A lot of the stuff, like, when I talk on the podcast or everything I say on social media is, like, reminders to myself, because I just reread past highlights, because, like, we forget that we forget, and so I need a reminder. And I just came across one, it's just like, I have them presented to me in a random order, so it's like I never know what I'm going to read that day. And it was Buffett, it's like, "The difference between successful people and really successful people is really successful people say no to everything."

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And this is exactly the constant thing where like... I do have a question for you. One, going back to that, it's like, I can't even explain why I did what I did, because, like, I had close to no traction for five and a half-... years.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And now I look back, it's like, there's no way I would do that today.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But somehow, that person, who I now greatly appreciate and love that he... it feels like a different person that I cannot believe.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: That is, like, what I'm most proud of, is not, like, trying to make something that's great, which I think is a selfish thing for us, is, like, yes, when you release it to the world, you release Spotify, you do all these things, it's an act of service to other people, but you're also doing it because, like, you have to.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: It has to come out.

Daniel Ek: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: But I just cannot believe that I did that, and I'm just like, that's the thing I'm most proud of than anything else, just, like, I had to do this. I was willing to, like, drive Uber if I had to, tend bar, do literally whatever.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: I was like, just give me enough time, I'll figure it out. Now, I didn't think it was going to take half a decade to figure out.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Right.

David Senra: And you have a ton of stories with Spotify with that. There is no line, I feel, between, like, your work and your life. Like, they're one and the same.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: The issue that I'm having now, and in general, is that I feel a lot of pressure, because, like, I'm trying to change not just my life, but, like, literally the trajectory of, like, my entire family.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And I feel very guilty when I don't work, to the point where, like, you know, I just got back from a crazy trip that people would love to go on, and, like, I just felt guilty for, like, taking time out and off and not working.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And I feel like this is, like, almost like a compulsion. Like, I don't have control over it.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Do you have anything like that?

Daniel Ek: Sure. I do feel the same thing, of course. But I'm back to sort of time versus energy management.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: And, um, 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 entirely new insights that just wouldn't have come if I just kept grinding it, I think, by 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Which is amazing, right? But some songs are the ones you, like, work on it, you put it in a drawer, and six months later, totally unbeknownst to you, it clicks. You're not even working on that thing. It just sort of like, "Oh, that's it." And they go back, and they do the song, and it's, like, the greatest song ever. There is not one path to greatness. There's many. And I feel like that's why I'm so obsessively focused on energy.

David Senra: So, you mean energy is like you just let that guide you?

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: It's like, hey, if I need a break right now, if I need to go for a walk, or if I need to go spend time with my wife and kids, or like...

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: Is that what you mean?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, 100%. And I try to feel that. 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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. My 10-year-old daughter told me about that 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, how it's based on the sun. Sometimes it could be six hours, or sometimes it could be 12 hours.

Daniel Ek: So, it used to be that sleep was actually in two periods. So, you didn't sleep one consecutive thing. You sort of had a, three, four hours' 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.

Daniel Ek: 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.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: So, we keep thinking it's this 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 as someone, I've gained, in periods of my life, like, 40 pounds in my worst negotiations, et cetera. And one of the problems I have now is that I literally don't know when I'm hungry, because I ruined that sort of natural feeling in my body of understanding when I'm hungry and when I'm not hungry.

Daniel Ek: So, you know, a huge part of losing weight for me over the past few years was just really kind of innately starting to listen 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.

Daniel Ek: 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, um, by this guy called Kwame Appiah that is another one of those things to sort of guide me.

David Senra: I just circled it.

Daniel Ek: All right.

David Senra: Perfect timing. No, we're in perfect alignment. Go ahead.

Daniel Ek: Well, I'm probably going to ruin the exact one, so maybe you can read it.

David Senra: Okay, I'll read it. It's, "In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game. The challenge is to figure out what game you're playing."

Daniel Ek: Yeah. And for me, realizing that, it's just been eye-opening, right? It's another one that's on my wall. Because I feel like quite often when I'm talking to people, and they're talking and trying to get life advice, they're not playing their game. They're playing someone else's game. They're certainly not playing the game they want to be playing, but they somehow think that life is just one game, where actually so much is about choosing the game for you.

Daniel Ek: And so, yeah, I keep coming back to that. Like, energy management is the same thing. You got to, like, create the environment around you that you want to do. You have 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.

David Senra: Do you have more or less negative self-talk today than you did 20 years ago?

Daniel Ek: 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 everything. I went to Hare Krishna centers. I went to, you know, Jewish centers, you know, mosques. I went to everything. And I tried 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.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: But I think they're really important. So, I've always been a searcher, and I think that naturally 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-

David Senra: And so your inner monologue gets less harsh?

Daniel Ek: Yeah, 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 circle 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. Now, I didn't. So, that obviously, naturally gets you to question yourself, and, you know, against many others, as an entrepreneur, I'm not the most eloquent person. I'm not the smartest.

David Senra: You're pretty damn eloquent.

Daniel Ek: Well, I had to work on it.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: That's like the hard thing. I've really, really... I'm not-

David Senra: Listen, I've listened to all your interviews, and I did this before we were friends, and every time something comes out, it's like, "Oh, I got to watch that." You're not giving yourself enough credit. Like, you are a very clear communicator.

Daniel Ek: Thank you.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: But it's really a work product. Like, I wish there was more recorded stuff on myself when I was, like, 20 and 21, because I'll tell you, I was not great.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: Not me.

Daniel Ek: I was quite terrible. And so, I've just learned that it's a superpower and something I have to work on, is getting my message across to other people to believe what I'm believing and see what I'm seeing in order to get them to want to come and join whatever thing we're trying to will into this world.

David Senra: I have two more questions that I'm personally curious about. One is going to be a very weird question, but the first one is, do you feel different? Okay, so like most of the people watching this or listening to this, like, so few people are going to be born in the projects in a tiny little... We didn't even... We'll have to do, like, this every year, if you're fine with it. Because, like, the idea that you even, like, come from this tiny little island, which I was like, you know, like, got to visit, and then you're like competing with the biggest companies in the world and you win. It just doesn't... Like, we didn't even get there.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But like, you grow up, you have a great mom, you know, you're single family, not a lot of money, and then now what I'm curious about is like your lived experience, there's so few people alive that can actually empathize with that because they also had it. So, I'm very curious, do you feel different? And what I mean by that is, like, as you've grown from, you know, a kid in the projects, even if you had early success, to now being, you know, one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet, which I know, don't do the face.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: But it's an undeniable fact. Like, do you feel different?

Daniel Ek: I think yes and no. So, I feel different in the same way a 40-year-old would feel different than a 10-year-old would do.

David Senra: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: 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.

Daniel Ek: I don't feel different, because innately, many of the things, the drive, the longterm-ness, 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, has always been there, 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.

Daniel Ek: I can feel the same way about young Daniel. I can feel myself about the young Daniel that worked every weekend, 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 that either one of us are doing, right?

David Senra: No. Goes back to impact to happiness. So, I think I texted this to you, but one of the roles you play, and I'm very grateful that you allowed us to, like, record this conversation, because essentially what I texted you is, like, you seem to have no self-imposed ceiling on what you can learn or achieve, and that spending time with you then transfers that belief to other people. And so, like, every single time, you know, I obviously, like, I take notes of, like, what I learned from the conversation we have after the fact, and I interpret it. It's, like, obviously not verbatim. I'm saying, like, "What did I just learn from Daniel and what does it apply to me?" It's like, oh, you have all these... So, you think you don't... I thought, like, I was ambitious and, like, I didn't even realize until you kind of pulled the scales off my eyes, like, you have this, like, limiting belief that you have no limits.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: There is no limits in life.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And so, like, you're hell of inspiring. One other question for you. Um, I'm obsessed with "Game of Thrones" to an unhealthy degree. I rewatch the series all the time, I've read all the books, I read the encyclopedia, I'll read the family histories because I do think, like, you can learn a lot from human nature in fiction.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And my job and my obsession requires me to... 99% of my reading is non-fiction, and I want to read more fiction.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And I came across something recently, because I'm going through Jeff Bezos' shareholders again, and then I read, like, what was my interpretation of this in the past? And then I came across something that was fascinating.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: There's a story in the prequels to "Game of Thrones" where two brothers are fighting in this war. One of the brothers was pulled into the war that did not want to be there.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And he made the sacrifice because it was for the good of his family.

Daniel Ek: Mm-hmm.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: He wound up dying in the war that he didn't want to fight in in the first place.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

Daniel Ek: Yeah.

David Senra: And his brother that survived, got his remains, buried him, and then put him in a grave with only one word on his tombstone, and that one word was "loyal."

Daniel Ek: Hmm.

David Senra: So, hopefully, you know, 100 years from now when you do have a tombstone, if there was only going to be one word on that tombstone, what would you want it to be?

Daniel Ek: 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."

David Senra: That's a great one. That's a great way to end it. Daniel, I'm thankful for your time, thankful for your friendship. You're one of the people I most admire, and I really appreciate you doing this.

Daniel Ek: Well, thank you so much, and it's such a huge honor to be your first guest in this series.

David Senra: Yeah, of course.

Daniel Ek: Thank you so much.

David Senra: Wouldn't have it any other way.

David Senra: I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, "Founders." For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through "Founders."