Daniel Ek, Spotify | David Senra

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

Right.

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

Wow.

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.

Wow.

It's very rare. This year, I'm going to hit over 400 biographies read for the podcast, right? Somebody asked me recently, “Do you ever uncover new ideas?”

Mm-hmm.

No, I feel like I'm telling the same story, the same personality type, over and over and over again. You'll get a new idea or novel idea every once in a while, but certainly not all the time.

Right. Yeah.

But you shared something at the dinner—

Mm-hmm.

—that was a truly novel idea. A few months later, I read this interview, and I thought, “I'm not the only one whose career Daniel's advice changed.”

Mm-hmm.

There was an interview with the CEO of Uber, who's a friend of yours, Dara.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I'm going to read this excerpt, which was absolutely perfect. He was talking about contemplating whether he should take this job or not. This was a huge opportunity, but also kind of scary. It's tied to your idea that you should optimize for impact over happiness.

Mm-hmm.

I haven't heard anybody else articulate that. 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.’”

Mm-hmm.

“But I had one particular conversation that really shifted me, which was with Daniel Ek, who's a good friend. I was talking to him about my career at Expedia and how happy I was, and he looked at me”—you did this to me, too—“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 explain how you think about optimizing for impact over happiness, and why?

Well, first off, it's incredibly kind of Dara to say that. I think about this: happiness is a trailing indicator of impact. You can feel happiness in small bursts, in small moments, and you can have a lot of variance in your life. You can have the ups and downs of life, so I'm not saying you can't have happiness. But I think truly sustained happiness comes from impact.

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.

Mm-hmm.

The way I would put it in this case is that, with someone like Dara, what was obvious to me was that he was content, but he wasn't happy. Knowing him for a while, he had gone through a phase where he had a lot of ups and downs with Expedia and all that stuff. He had mostly figured it out, and so he was content.

I think that, in his case, given where he was at in his life, it was such an obvious thing that he didn't even realize he had just grown content. For me, Uber is a very special company, and to even be asked to be the CEO of that company—and the impact I knew he could have on it—just felt like an obvious thing.

Mm-hmm.

So I advised him, “Hey, you should go for this. That's a far greater thing, and it's going to lead to much more happiness—not just for you, but also for other people.”

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

I think I self-motivate myself that way—to do the hard things. Like many other people, I'm quite lazy by nature. I try to take the simple road out often enough, but what I've learned has given me the greatest joys is overcoming the biggest adversities.

Overcoming the biggest adversities usually means solving a problem of some kind for someone or something that no one else has been able to figure out. For me, that's my definition of impact.

It's not necessarily right there in the moment that I feel it. Actually, in many cases, I feel it much later. But when I go back and reflect on accomplishments or moments of impact, I feel true happiness.

I've just grown to self-motivate myself constantly, and I think this comes from a much deeper thing. I came from what was pretty much the projects in Sweden, and I was not the normal kid. I was 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.

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

Oh, yeah.

Do you still today?

Yeah. Every moment of my life. Even among other fellow entrepreneurs, I sometimes feel like an outsider. Right now, for instance, you and I are in Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

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

Mm-hmm.

I've always felt that way. 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, and some of the ways and structures—even how to structure a company—you have to structure differently if you're a European company versus an American company.

You have to go back to first principles and find the principled answer to anything: what works for you. I've had to self-motivate myself for most of my life.

Only in the last maybe 5 years have I come to realize that, in a way, I may be a better coach than I am a player. I've understood more and more that this drive, this intensity, is something that can be taught. It's not entirely innate, and it's about almost letting people know that that's okay.

So much of that comes from those types of conversations. It's about almost reflecting back. It's not about projecting onto other people what I think they should do.

But in listening to Dara, it was just so obvious to me when he explained it. The conversation started with us talking about Uber, and I said, “I recommended you for the job.” He said, “Oh, really? Yeah, I just didn't take the call.”

Mm-hmm.

I said, “Well, why not?” He was like, “Well, I'm really happy about this thing,” and I just let him keep talking. The more he spoke, the more obvious it became that he was content. He had downshifted into the easy gear. Life was good.

Yeah.

It was really easy. But there was an element of him—you could hear it in his voice—where he was saying, “Okay, you've always been running in a higher gear. Do you want to gear up even more, to an extreme level? Why aren't you going to go for greatness? Why aren't you going to test yourself? Because if you succeed, this could be huge, and you really don't get many of these chances in your life.”

So much of the conversation was really about that. But with another person, I might have given a totally different piece of advice. I don't think it's a universal truth, but I do think the universal truth is that happiness trails impact, and impact is something that's highly unique.

It could be something innate in you. It could be having an impact on other people. It could be having an impact by being a great father to your kids. I don't pretend to know that there's one game to play or one universal truth to life.

But I certainly believe that, for entrepreneurial types who are probably more like myself, this is one of those key things: really consider impact.

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. 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.

You mentioned that you thought some people don't go for impact because they're content. You're definitely not content now, right? 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.

I was curious what you were going to say because I know you have this inner burning desire and fire inside of you. On the outside, you're very calm, articulate, and polite, but you have that same thing I read about in these books all the time: “This person had a burning desire to achieve mission success.”

Were you content after you sold your first company? You were 22 or 23.

Well, content is the right word. I wasn't happy. I was content for a moment in time. I was 22. I had never had much success with women because I was a computer geek, and back then, computers were not the coolest thing in the world.

So I was like, “Okay, well, now I've got all this money. I can go out in nightclubs, and I'm going to be the cool guy.” I had fun for a while, I'll tell you that. But it was also incredibly hollowing because I realized that these girls weren't with me because of me; they were with me because I had status, and I was able to use money to buy status and be a cool guy for a small moment in time.

That taught me a lot. I walked away for over a year, not doing anything at all, and just deeply reflecting on life and what I wanted to do. For me, I had a magic number, which was $10 million. If I got that number, I would retire. That was the goal.

How old were you when you came up with that number?

Probably 15.

Okay.

Someone gave me this book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, I think. I read it.

I think everybody gets it at the same age.

Yeah. I read it. It was really seminal for me, so I made that number. I figured if I worked really hard, I could get there when I was 40.

I was 22 when I got there.

Yeah. That wasn't really part of the plan. I was like, “Okay, well, what's next? What am I going to do?” I didn't have to work for money.

Were you depressed? You didn't have your company anymore. You'd sold it, and you had the number you thought it was going to take you until you were 40 to reach, but you reached it at 22. You were going to the clubs and realizing, “These people aren't even my friends. They don't care about me at all. There's no impact I'm making on the world. I'm just consuming; I'm not producing anything.”

This is something I talk about all the time. I think we sometimes have a sick culture where people, especially on social media, glorify consumption. I don't care what you consume; I care what you produce. You should be proud not that you have money to buy an expensive thing, but of what you made.

The way I think about this all the time—which is fascinating, because this comes up so many times in the biographies—is that for hundreds of years, people have constantly thought, “We've reached the end. There's no more opportunity.” Every single time, humans keep saying, “This is going to be the last company, the last technological shift, the last invention.”

The best description of a business I've ever heard came from Richard Branson. He said, “All a business is is an idea that makes somebody else's life better.” If you look at it like that, you have infinite possibilities and opportunities all the time, because there are infinite small and large ways to make other people's lives better.

You weren't, at that time, making anybody else's life better. You were just consuming. Would you consider yourself depressed? What would you consider yourself?

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

You were doing that when you were 14, right?

Yeah, but it started even earlier than that. I just didn't know it was called a company. I had no idea what finances were, or VC, or any of these things. But I was just building things, and I knew I loved computers, and I knew I wanted to do that, and I knew I would make a living doing that somehow.

This is another thing that drives me insane because I hear other people's advice to entrepreneurs, which I hate. I think it's terrible. We shouldn't have an entrepreneur ecosystem, especially because most of the media that entrepreneurs are consuming are actually from investors, and they have wildly different incentive structures and everything else.

It just conflicts with a lot of stuff that's in the biographies, and I'll go with those guys over anybody else. My belief is something that I repeat over and over again, this maxim: belief comes before ability. It's in these stories every single time.

You have somebody like—I just reread the autobiography of the founder of Sony. Akio Morita, at the time, was saying, “We're going to start this company in 1946 in Tokyo, which is occupied by the Americans and has been firebombed.”

He's going to work, passing just burned-out rubble and millions of Japanese homeless. 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 that they need to have umbrellas on their desks because when it rains, it comes through the roof. 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.”

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.” When did you know you were good?

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

I still feel that way, by the way, because the comparative sets have changed. It was 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 the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time that I'm constantly comparing myself to.

Obviously, I don't believe that I'm as good as them, but I believe I am slightly different from them in some ways, and I believe that if I work really, really hard on something, I can make something really great. That's the bar that I keep for myself.

For me, it stems also from this notion—going back to what you were talking about—about the realization that through computers, right? Steve Jobs has this saying, “It's the bicycle of our mind,” which was really how I felt about computers growing up. It's just this magic tool that allows me to solve so many other things and create things.

That's how I feel about podcasts.

Yeah. And so I knew I wanted to do that, and I also knew that my co-founder Martin has this thing he keeps saying: “The value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.”

What I keep doing is, essentially, I've got this toolbox called a computer, and I've got all these problems around the world. Which problems am I passionate about solving? Which problems can I spend the next decade of my life fixing?

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

This is something I'm super passionate about because, if you really think about it, they don't write biographies about people who start, scale, sell a company, and do it for five years. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in your startup. I'm interested in your last company.

I'm interested in something you're going to do for the rest of your life. This is what I draw inspiration from. It's going back to what you said earlier about impact and contentment, and how you're willing to go into an area where you know it's difficult.

I love what Jeff Bezos said about this. He used to tell people at Amazon in the very beginning, “We're trying to build something that we can be proud of, something that we can tell our grandkids about.” Anything that you're going to be proud to tell your grandkids about is not going to be easy.

Right.

So we're going into this with—he gave himself a 30% chance of success.

Yeah. Yep.

I think at the beginning of Spotify, you were like, “Hey, I might have to get a job after this, but I have to do this. It is inside of me.”

Yeah.

There are a bunch of people who say the reason they joined Spotify in the early days is because Daniel would teach us and tell us that he was building for the long term.

Yeah.

So there had to be acquisition offers early on.

Sure.

And did you ever consider them?

Well, I considered them, but not for money. I considered them because I already had the money that I thought I needed in my life, right? And that was an incredibly powerful position to be in. It freed me from a lot of constraints.

For me, it was more—as we got an approach, it was always about, “Can this thing further our mission?” If I truly believed there would have been a company that could further our mission and cared about what we cared about as much as we did, I probably would have sold. But I never found that. And because I didn't find that, we just kept going.

It wasn't obvious to me that this would be something I would do for 20 years, I'll tell you that. But what I did know is that I came from doing lots of projects beforehand. We talked about the one company I did sell, but that was my fourth or fifth one. So I'd been doing a bunch of other things, and I was doing many things in parallel.

Which you still do today.

Well, I started doing it again.

Which is a very different thing.

Okay.

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

Explain.

Well, again, I do believe that focusing all your time and effort on this one thing and obsessing over it almost to the point where you're not even aware of what's going on in the rest of the world is what creates greatness. And I know you can relate to this—

Yeah.

—but that's how Spotify came to be. I literally couldn't care about anything else for, at the very least, the first 15 years. Only now am I foolish enough to believe that, actually, you know what? I might be able to do multiple things at the same time again, which was sort of my spirit in my 20s.

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

Yeah, I certainly think so. And because my leadership style is so different from many of these entrepreneurs that most of us look up to and hail, whether it's Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, et cetera, I just don't feel like there's more than a vague resemblance with them. It's just not me. I'm a very different archetype of entrepreneur.

We were texting back and forth about this, so we should just talk about this now so we don't forget. We were talking about maybe discussing the different archetypes of entrepreneurs because there could be somebody, like a young Daniel Ek, out there, right? We just know that's going to happen.

I'm slightly obsessed with Michael Jordan. He's the lock screen on my phone and my contact card, so when people start texting me, it's Michael Jordan with his eyes—

Like this?

—like this, kind of—

Yeah.

—setting the tone. And he said this great thing because, at the end of his career, it was the rise of Kobe Bryant.

Yeah.

And everybody, toward the end of his career, was obsessed: “Oh, Tracy McGrady is going to be the next Michael Jordan, and this guy's going to be the next Michael Jordan, and this guy's the next Michael Jordan.”

Yeah.

And he's like, “You don't have to worry about finding the next Michael Jordan. First of all, you didn't find me.”

Mm-hmm.

“I just happened to come along.”

Mm-hmm, yeah.

“And that will happen again. You don't have to find the next person.”

Yeah.

“They will come along.”

Yep.

And I always say they will reveal themselves.

Yep.

So I do think this is fascinating, and no one else talks about this. The weird thing about talking to you—and I don't mean that in a pejorative way—is that you just say things no one else says.

Mm-hmm.

And then I'm like, “Why don't more people understand or know about Daniel's very unique ideas?”

Mm-hmm.

No one's concerned about the archetypes. Everybody's like, “You just have to be like Steve Jobs, or you just have to be like Elon.”

Yeah.

And your point is that there are multiple different archetypes. Obviously, I've studied this maybe more than anybody else in the world, and it's very clear that there are. And yet they're all narrowly focused on, “This is the one path.”

Yeah.

You and I went over this back and forth before. It's so ridiculous to say, “This is the way founders should run their company,” because, as you said back in 2021 in that series on Spotify—we've had conversations like this—it's something I always say: It's tied to the personality of the founder.

100%.

The advice is fucking useless—

Yeah.

—unless it's tied to who you are as a person.

100%.

Spotify is a reflection of you.

100%.

I also want to talk about this other great idea that you gave me, and that I heard Jeff Bezos echo recently, about the similarities between the way your child develops and the way a company develops. That was fascinating.

Yeah.

But explain why you would even want to broach the subject of talking more about the different founder archetypes.

Well, I think, again, as a young entrepreneur myself, I went through the book like so many of us, becoming enamored with an entrepreneur and looking up to them, in many cases because they had traits that I didn't have. So we read all these stories, whether they're biographies or articles about how they managed their company, how they lived their lives, and the routines they had.

Certainly, in my case, I tried to mimic Steve Jobs. I tried to mimic Bezos and Gates and all of the great ones—the very charismatic ones, like Howard Schultz of Starbucks. I've learned from all of them, and in a way, I've tried to imitate them, right? Because I thought they were so great at what they do.

But every single time, I've walked away being disillusioned because I realized that it didn't work for me. And so this sort of idea of the archetype is that I bet there are plenty of entrepreneurs out there who read about Mark Zuckerberg or Jensen Huang or any of these people, and they're like, “That's not me, so I guess I'm not as good as them.”

“And I can't do what they're doing, so clearly, I don't have it in me.”

I think you were spot on when you said that the hardest single thing for a founder and entrepreneur—in a much different way than for a normal person, though I think every normal person goes through this—is finding yourself.

That's literally what I just wrote down. Again, this is more of a conversation than an interview, because I'm a terrible interviewer and I love to talk. I could do a monologue show, for God's sake.

But I had this theory too, because it's obvious in the books: There's this myth of the genius young entrepreneur. If you go and read all their biographies, they weren't lying around doing nothing when they were younger. But it's very clear, if you look at all of them—Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Akio Morita, Sam Walton, Estée Lauder, Coco Chanel, Edwin Land—that they do their best work when they're much older.

Mm-hmm.

And so I thought a lot about that. I'm like, “Dang, this is a recurring thing over and over again.” In some cases, they're in their 40s or 50s, and they're at the top of their game.

Yep.

Then I was wondering, “What is this?” Obviously, there are some skill sets you can practice more. You have more experience, so you can make better decisions. You have a better network, resources, and all that.

But one thing that I believe, that I cannot prove—but I believe with every bone in my body—is that they knew themselves much more.

Yeah.

Think about the way you know yourself in your early 40s—

Yep.

—than you did when you were 23.

Oh, yeah.

It's like we thought when we were 23—

Yeah.

—you don't know anything.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

That comes from time and experience.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, 100%.

The way he says it is that they build a company that's natural to them.

Right.

And you can't build a company that's natural to you—

Right.

—if you don't know who you are.

100%.

And so I have this belief that—and I think your accomplishments are fucking crazy. I know you like to downplay them, and it's 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.” Your words were very polite, but your face—it was like somebody poked you. You were like, “Oh, I don't want to be this guy.”

Yeah.

But your response was like—I know that face. I know exactly what you said.

Yeah.

But this idea that you are the sum of your accumulated experiences.

Yeah.

Right? That is one form of education. But the form of education is—I know I went to your house and rummaged through your library, maybe rudely.

Go for it.

But I loved how you're obsessed with history and philosophy, too.

Yeah.

I was like, “Oh, this is a person who's curious about the external world, but he also wants to know who he is, what's important to him—”

Oh, yeah.

—and then build a business and an apparatus around that. So I just wanted to get that out because you mentioned something that I don't think I talk about frequently enough, but it's something I definitely believe: you're going to get better at entrepreneurship when you get better at knowing who you are and what you actually want to do.

100%. And as you say, I think the game I'm playing now is just being the best version of myself. 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.

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

No, I don't know, which is why I was asking you, because I figured, who's the person in the world who probably has a better idea of all the different archetypes? I can still learn how to do the game better, if that makes sense.

I would say there's a very interesting idea that I've noticed. Obviously, I say this maxim over and over again: all of history's greatest entrepreneurs study history's greatest entrepreneurs. If you make a podcast on that, you get to meet the living versions of that now.

What I'm struck by—and I'm like this myself—is that I have all kinds of blind spots, which you picked away at the first time we had dinner.

Mm-hmm.

You were just like, “You're doing this wrong.”

Yeah.

You were very polite, but you were just like, “You're lying to yourself. You're obsessed with this, and you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back.” I'm so amazed. It's exactly what you said.

Mm-hmm.

It's almost like they need a mirror.

Yeah.

There's another great idea that I've seen a few times. One of the truly novel ideas is this idea of hiring a paid critic.

Mm-hmm.

Sony was making audio equipment in the 1950s, and the devices were very primitive.

Yep.

What they realized was that they could hire a young vocal arts student. I don't know how to pronounce his name—it was Norio Ohga or something like that. The reason they did that was because he was a fan of early Sony products—

Yeah.

—but he also had very fine, refined taste and everything else.

Right.

So he would just light them up: “I'm a big fan of Sony, but your products aren't good enough. You have all these deficiencies.”

Yeah.

Akio Morita, being the genius that he was, said, “We hired him as a paid critic. His job was to attack the deficiencies in our product because, if we don't even see them, we can't fix them.”

Right.

The paid critic's point was, “Hey, if you're a ballet dancer, you have a mirror, right?”

100%.

“Your mirror tells you what you're doing right, what you can fix, and what you need to do.” He's like, “I'm your oral mirror.”

Yep.

Fast-forward to when the book was published in 1986, and that paid critic was now the president of Sony.

Mm-hmm.

I feel exactly that way. We need a mirror.

Yeah.

I'm curious about you because I remember I had just had dinner with Mike Ovitz, and I think his autobiography is one of the best entrepreneur autobiographies ever written because he tells you about the bad shit: the fact that he didn't like who he was, that he was depressed, and that he was making bad decisions based on the opinions of other people, which entrepreneurs cannot do.

Mm-hmm.

I was struck by the fact that he didn't know himself at 25 or 20. I think he was 27 when he started CA. He sure as hell knows himself as an almost 80-year-old man.

Some people I know have been friends with him for 25 years, so I asked him, “What do you think has enabled you to maintain those relationships?”

Mm-hmm.

He said, “He tells me the truth.”

Yeah.

He said, “You get into my position, where you're famous and wealthy, and most of the people you interact with are on your staff, and it's very dangerous. There aren't many people in my life who tell me the truth.”

Who tells you the truth?

Many people, which is the good news for me. It starts with my family—my mom. My mom is the most normal person you would meet. She's proud of my accomplishments, but in this standoffish way. She couldn't care less about the impact of it. It's more that I've overcome obstacles for myself that she knows matter to me.

So often, when I bring an issue home, because she doesn't really know what's going on in the business world and doesn't really care, she gives me this mirror back where most of life actually doesn't revolve around technology or the business world. It's like, this is life. 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 realistic person there is. My wife is another one. Gustav, whom you met, is another person. He will tell me the truth even when I don't want to hear it.

I've been incredibly fortunate that many of the people I just talked about have been around me for 20 years. My mom, obviously, has been around me my entire life, but many of these people have been around for a very, very long time.

And I think that's— you know, I really believe trust is one of the most under-talked-about things because it's not easy to scale. It's incredibly hard. It's the number 1 reason 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.

It's crazy. Munger—I literally get emails every week saying, “Why do you mention Charlie Munger on every episode?”

Mm-hmm.

I'm like, “Because he's the wisest person I've ever come across. What do you want me to do?” I'm sorry he has so many good ideas. [Laughs]

He's another person who points things out that, once he says it, are obvious, but no one else does it. He goes, “Trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world.”

And when I actually got to have dinner with him, he said, “Your job is to build a seamless web of deserved trust with great people.”

100%.

He was telling stories: “Everybody knows that I met Buffett when he was 28 and I was 35. They don't understand—there were all these other guys around us, and we built friendships and did deals forever.” Most of them had passed away by the time I met him.

But that idea—that trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world—

It truly is. And if you think about it, why is that so rare? It's because it doesn't scale, right? Trust is this notion that you'll keep doing actions that ladder up over time. It really compounds.

You're going to add maybe 1% of trust for each positive interaction, but it takes 1 bad interaction to ruin all of it. The moment you even start doubting whether you can trust someone, you have no trust.

Mm-hmm. Good point.

The point is that absolute trust, if you really think about it, has this sort of final gradient. Most people define it as a binary thing, but it really isn't. Most people will say, “Either I trust someone or I don't.” But even if you do trust someone, there are degrees of trust.

How many people do you trust with your life? How many people do you trust with your bank account—just handing it over?

Are you a trusting person, though?

To a certain degree.

People who know me would say that I'm not a trusting person. I had breakfast with a good friend of mine who's slightly older. He tells me the truth, and he's very nice, but he'll point out the problems that are going to stop me from getting where I want to go.

One of his points was that, if I ask myself that question, my answer is, “I don't trust anybody.” I think I'm getting a little better with that, but I'm concerned that I'm going to be one of my own worst enemies because of this. I can't let go.

But look, you talked about it yourself. It started in your childhood. In my case, I grew up without a father, for sure, but I had the most loving mother. She gave me everything.

Having that start in my life, I've always felt that whatever I do, whatever the failure is, she will always love me.

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?

My approach to life is, again, I'm not saying I have absolute trust in every person, but I choose to believe that trusting people makes for a much more fun, rich, and rewarding life than one that doesn't. And I believe that—

I think you're definitely right about that.

Yeah. And I believe that life is more fun when you do the journey with other people around you than when you do it in single-player mode.

And that doesn't mean that I'm not also a person who likes my own spare time, my own comfort, and my own solitude. I have that part, and that's the duality of my personality. But I really do believe—and this goes back to philosophy—that the more I give away, the more I get back. So I just keep focused on doing that.

For me, the ultimate impact at this point—why I said I'd like to be the best coach there ever was, the best entrepreneur coach—maybe that's my archetype.

Yeah.

Rather than a player, because I've come to see that the people 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 has given me the most pride at this point. It really isn't anything else.

Financially, I couldn't care. It's not that important. It's great to have a lot of money as a currency to then have more impact. It's more chips on the table to do new, more cool, interesting stuff.

Yeah.

But the real thing for me will be the friendships that I built, the trust that other people placed in me to allow me to help them on this journey, help me on my journey, and us doing it together. I've just seen it so many times. I've been burned by it, for sure, sometimes when people have broken that trust that I put in them. But I will honestly say that's been 1% or 2% negative experience relative to all the positive things that have come out of it.

The sad part of this is, I can't think of anybody who's betrayed me in two decades.

Yeah.

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. This is where I think it's really helpful. Again, I don't need a bunch of friends. I don't believe that.

There's a great quote from the founder of Red Bull, who I became slightly obsessed with. I'm really proud of the episode I made on him because we had to literally translate a biography from German. There were no biographies in English.

Yeah.

And his point was just like, "I don't need 50 friends. I believe in much fewer, better, and deeper friendships."

Yeah.

As long as you make those choices correctly, I can't think of a single person who I feel is in my life who doesn't want the best for me.

Yeah.

And yet I still have this feeling of, "I'll just do it all myself."

Yeah.

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

Mm-hmm.

"I know everything going on. But why do you talk about him so much?" I mention you on the podcast, and I'm like, "Oh, because I learn a lot from you."

You're very, very careful with what you want in life. I get to meet pretty crazy people, and most of the time they're great, but then you see that there's a lot of negativity to them. One, there's a shocking number who have very few, if any, friends.

Yeah.

Which is scary to me. And then they interact with you as if you're an asset.

Mm-hmm.

Once I get everything out of that asset—

Yeah.

—then you will be disposed of. And I feel like those same people have almost no intellectual humility, right? I always say that every single person I read about is smarter and more productive than I am.

The way I look at the world in general is very much the same way. Like Thomas Edison has this great quote. He's like, "We don't know 1/1000 percent of anything."

Yeah.

That's the way I feel, because every day I learn something new.

Yep.

I'm like, "I was so stupid back then."

Yeah.

You have extreme levels of intellectual humility. I don't even know if many people know this, but you would go and shadow and spend time with people. I don't know if you have a term for this. You just call up somebody who's running a company—

Mm-hmm.

—and say, "What? I'm going to come and sit in on every single one of your meetings?"

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

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

Yep.

"I don't care."

Yep.

"I'm there to learn from them."

Yep.

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

Yep.

Do you understand? That's insane. I think that's the right mindset.

Yeah.

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

Yeah. Well, I just realized it sort of started from this thing where you and I have both read all the books. Actually, many of the entrepreneurs we've read about have read the big ones—not as many books about all the greatest entrepreneurs as you have—but they've read the big ones.

Certainly the biographies of Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and all that kind of stuff. But there's a certain thing around reading it and internalizing it, and seeing the culture up front. 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.

In a way, what I realized as we hired people from these other companies is that there were all these things they were doing that they kept telling us about, and I didn't really understand how they worked. I'll mention one. For instance, I do really well in 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. It just doesn't work.

Then you have someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who literally has this thing called "large group," where he has 20 to 25 people that he runs every week. For me, it sounded absolutely awful. How did he get anything done in that meeting?

Yeah.

And so, lo and behold, I asked him, "Hey, can I come and learn from you?" He was incredibly gracious, and we've obviously been friends for a long time. He said, "Sure." So I spent the better part of a week—I believe the first time was a week—literally in pretty much all of his meetings from start to finish.

The big question for me was, "Okay, what does he get out of it, and can I make myself useful while doing it?" So I took meeting notes. If I could get him coffee, I would. It was literally these types of things.

But at the end of it, the most interesting thing was trying to distill what surprised me about the culture. It wasn't really about Meta, or what was then Facebook. It's a world-class company. It wasn't like I miraculously thought I'd do a lot of things differently or better, but there were things that surprised me around how he managed the company.

Seeing that and hearing that from another founder—hopefully one that he respects, too—may lead to insights and breakthroughs. During that week, it's not just that I follow people around. I actually meet with their entire executive team and interview them, too. So I 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. There were lots of other things that I shamelessly copied from that experience. It just turned out, for me, to be an amazing way to learn by seeing the culture up front that enables certain practices to work.

It almost comes back to these 2 things we talked about already. One is this mirror of reflecting it back. Then there's the second notion, I think, which is, "It's got to be true to you." There are many things where you can copy a specific way, for instance, that 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.

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.

Now, he was able to collaborate.

Yeah.

But at the end, it was kind of like, "I'm making all the decisions."

There's actually an interesting story that I'm curious how you think about this.

Mm.

How do you balance the decisions you make, specifically on product, with your own personal taste and intuition versus being metrics-driven?

Mm-hmm.

There's this hilarious story. It's in 2 different books. One's in a book called Creative Selection, which is excellent. I read it 3 times. It's from this guy named Ken Kocienda, who was a programmer, and he demoed to Steve many, many times when they were building their best products.

Then there's another story in Jony Ive's biography. They talked about and compared the way Google would make products versus how Apple did when Steve Jobs was in charge. The guy says, "At Google, we have to decide between blue and light blue, and we run 200 tests of all the different shades in between that."

Mm-hmm.

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

Yep.

Do you remember? You are old enough to remember this. They created the iMac, the big, fat bubble one.

Yep. Sure.

Probably the late '90s.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

He's like, “You know how we chose the colors?” He's like, “Steve and I went to where the Apple Design Center is, and we talked about it. Thirty minutes later, the colors you saw, we shipped.”

Yep. Yep.

That was it.

Yep. Yep.

Where are you on that spectrum?

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

Mm-hmm.

It's not 100% one way or the other. Because, again, I remember early on, people talking about that sort of dichotomy of how Google does things and how Apple does things. Many founders then tended to gravitate, when Apple was at the peak of Steve Jobs, to, “No, I run the product review. It's only my opinion that matters. It's my taste, and I've got this articulation, all these things.” And lo and behold, some terrible decisions ended up coming out of this.

I think where people 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 universally had the answer to everything, that he didn't listen to anyone else's opinions, or that he didn't try things out. Sometimes he may have tried things out by testing his ideas on multiple people, inside and outside, et cetera. But of course he did that, right?

I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant and doesn't get talked about. He actually called up journalists sometimes and tested ideas on them.

Yeah.

He'd say, “We might do this kind of thing,” and then hear the journalists react to it. It was like, “Okay, that was a bad idea,” and then he'd go back.

They described this as sonar, how dolphins throw things out, and then—

Yeah.

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

But the hilarious one is that they couldn't figure out what they were going to call what turned into the iMac. Steve Jobs was obsessed with Akio Morita at Sony. He goes, “I have the name for this computer. It's going to be the MacMan,” because of the Walkman. People around him were like, “No, please don't do that. It can't be that.”

Yeah.

“This is a terrible name.”

They kept meeting after meeting, and people would say, “Steve, this name sucks.”

Yeah.

They'd give him a bunch of lists, and the first time he heard “iMac,” he was like, “I don't like it at all.”

Yeah.

They were like, “Well, we really like it, so we'll put it in the next group, and then we'll move the third one down.”

Yeah.

And then he goes, “Now I don't hate it.”

Yeah.

And then one day, he's walking down the hall, and he's like, “I came up with a name. It's iMac.”

Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. That's the way, right?

I feel that's truly the case. I think the realization is that you tend to overgravitate to one or the other. Certainly, in Spotify's case, we did the same. Early on, we were very much so—I mean, the first user interface was pretty much designed by this guy called Rasmus and me. Much of that, you could describe as 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.

Mm-hmm.

Then you need to get to a point where you start incorporating some feedback mechanism. For me, taste is judgment plus curiosity. The more you can extend the curiosity branch, the more that improves your judgment, which then builds your taste. So, for me, it's really a question 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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Are there any product updates that get pushed live that you didn't like?

Oh, plenty. And this may be a little bit unique, but coming back to it, 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 0-to-1 stage.

But what a lot of people don't talk about is the fact that there isn't one stage of this journey. You're oscillating between 0-to-1, 1-to-100, and then the last stage, which is more of an optimization stage. You have to constantly do that, and you're going to need different skills at different places.

This is why I believe it's so important for entrepreneurs to realize when to apply which tools in this journey. What ended up happening with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom: I don't really run product anymore. What happened was I got this guy called Gustav Söderström, whom you've now met, and he runs product. He's actually way better than me at doing it.

Speaking about being truthful, what ended up happening many years ago was that I was running these product meetings. He was sort of running them, but I wanted to run them, so I interjected myself over him. I didn't have the time to really spend on all of this, so he was sort of running it for me, but I still insisted on having product reviews. This goes back to the importance of having people who give you candid feedback.

He took me aside after one of these product sessions, and he said, “You know, you're not really that good at doing these things, and you're not really that helpful. Most of the time, the team and I were looking at each other, trying to appease you in the meeting, but you're not really adding as much value as you think.”

Not surprisingly, my first instinct was to be really pissed off. I went home and thought, “I'm going to have to fire this guy. It's horrible. How could he say this?” But I also realized that was an emotional response.

So, again, I wasn't fully convinced that this was true, but I went back and said, “Okay, you know what? I'm going to give you 3 months during which I don't do the product reviews, and then we'll evaluate how this worked.”

Lo and behold, he actually did a great job.

Yeah.

The product team was much happier. He was making more of the decisions without me. I wasn't meddling. There weren't 2 different people deciding what worked; it was really him.

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.

I say that because what happened for me was a real setback—not just in that moment, but also in the sense of, “Oh, wait a minute. What's my value-add, then, in this company?” It took me a while, and I realized, “Hmm, actually, you know what? That won't be it, but maybe I can add value in this place.”

I 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. My product feedback ended up being—and this is the dynamic that's quite unique to Spotify—we have these 2 stakeholders. We have consumers on the one end, and we have creators on the other.

I made it my effort to understand and know the creator much better than anyone else in the company. My product feedback to them comes from that lens.

Mm-hmm.

That became my value-add because, again, that's a very different thing. It's an outward-facing thing. You actually have to sit down and meet with creators. It's so much more about innately understanding their needs, talking to them, and understanding not just how they use the product, but their business. What problems are they facing that aren't just about how they leverage the product, but are actually holistic problems around them?

That was just one of those things. Subsequently, what ended up happening is I got this guy we call Alex Norström, and he's now doing that part better than me, too. So I was like, “Okay, well, now I need to find a different way to add value.”

Now it turns out that my value-add is the space in between the two, where businesses or creators meet consumers, and where there's maybe a third stakeholder we have to consider in all of this.

My whole experience in all of this has really been about figuring out who I am and what I'm innately good at. This has been a learning journey for 20 years.

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

I would say the first 10 years were the 0-to-1 journey.

Mm-hmm.

The last 10 have been the journey where we're not 0-to-1 anymore as a company, holistically. But there are elements of the company where we're 0-to-1, and I'm absolutely 100% involved.

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, so I would take a transcript of his interviews and treat it like a book and just go through it.

He said something like, “From day 1, he knew he wanted to build a company that could outlast him.”

Yeah.

Right? And he still loves it. He'll love it forever. 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.

Yeah.

When I heard him say that, it was a few months after you had beautifully articulated this idea. I think there’s a rather clear analogy between the way your child, when they’re first born, is essentially a product of you. They’re going to mimic their parents and the environment they’re in. But as they grow older and older—I just went through this; I have a 13-year-old—when she was much smaller, she was much like me and her mom.

Yep.

Right. And now she’s got traits that I don’t even have.

Yep. One hundred percent.

And her own decisions, doing things maybe I would do or would not do. And you’re like, “It’s kind of the same for the company.”

Yeah.

And you had this idea when, I think, at the time, Spotify was 19 years old.

Yeah.

Or it was 19 or 20 years old.

Yep.

Year 1 or 2, it is me. It’s the same way you have a 2-year-old. Anybody knows this.

Yeah.

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

Yep, yep.

That’s a fascinating insight.

Yeah. I mean, look, there are clearly 3 distinct stages of parenthood, right? The first one is that you’re literally the person who keeps them alive, and you’re 100% there. You pretty much make every decision for them because they can’t make them themselves.

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

I’m somewhat simplifying it, but I think that, as with everything, you shouldn’t take it literally. The gist of the idea is certainly that a larger company, and an older company, becomes more and more of that. So much of what I do today is literally that. I try to be there for people when they need me in various fields, which happens, but it’s not as often as every day, all the time.

What I deeply care about today, and what I spend a lot of my time on, is this notion around the first seed of a new idea and protecting that idea. I think it’s probably the most underreported and least talked-about question: “How do you do that?” How do you consistently find lightning in a bottle? It’s also theoretical in any strategy book talking about how you do it.

The other day, I was with Hamilton Helmer.

Who wrote 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy.

Yeah.

Which is an amazing book on strategy, by the way. But one of the most interesting ideas that I learned after, again, overfitting the concepts in the book and teaching people about it is that you can only tell that you have power when it’s there. It doesn’t tell you how to get there.

This is the criticism of founders, podcasts, and books: “But he’s not telling me what to do.”

Yeah.

It’s like, this is not a podcast for people who want to be told what to do.

Yeah.

It’s, “Here’s how this guy or this woman thought about their company. This is what they experienced.” You pull out these ideas.

I love how you 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. When I hear you, I think of a message I sent you where you reminded me of James J. Hill, which might be the only time anyone’s ever texted you that.

Mm-hmm.

James J. Hill was the most successful railroad baron of all time. I thought about the way you described how he built: he was essentially laying railroad tracks, right? The goal of the company was obviously to have goods and people on the tracks.

Right.

But the question was, “How do I make what I’m doing more valuable?” He’s the only railroad founder in American history who didn’t go bankrupt.

Mm-hmm.

They all went bankrupt. It’s crazy. What he realized was that he had to spend just as much, if not more, time developing and nurturing the communities that were springing up around the railroad.

Yeah.

And if he built these communities around it—

Yeah.

—that made his railroad more valuable.

More valuable.

Yeah. But I love this criticism because it’s like, “Oh, you have to find a different show or a different thing.”

“Because entrepreneurs don’t want to be told what to do.”

Right.

“I’ve never met an entrepreneur.”

Yeah.

“Give me a list.”

Yeah.

It’s a profession for people who don’t take direction very well.

Yeah. Exactly. You’re exactly right.

It’s hilarious. I think this is tied to something else that’s fascinating about you. Most people—again, I think the more control you have over your life and the more success you have, the more people make the mistake of eliminating anyone who tells them the truth and any inconvenience. They become really brittle.

You have an insanely high tolerance for crazy people.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Somebody told me—somebody who works closely with you—that you judge people on their best idea, not their worst.

Mm.

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.

Yeah.

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, I’ll find it.”

Yeah.

He’ll go through all of it. All he cares about is the very best ideas.

Yeah.

He’s willing to go through 99 shitty ideas to get the very best because he understands how powerful those are. Can you explain how you developed this tolerance? Most people, especially as companies age, usually have a lot of variance in the beginning. Then they get more successful, and corporations make the mistake of saying, “No, we need all the edges—the highs and the lows—out of there.”

You embrace that.

The way you put it to me when we were talking about this was “high-temperature people?”

Yeah. Yeah.

In training AI.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I actually think LLMs and the latest advancements in AI have created an excellent framing for this high-temperature notion.

In LLMs, you can basically tune up the temperature. If you tune up the temperature, it starts hallucinating. The bad thing with hallucinations, of course, is that 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.

The criticism of the current-generation LLMs is that they’re not very creative, and that’s ultimately because we’ve turned down the temperature on them. We’ve safety-trained them to the point where we keep them within the guardrails. There is a way, when you train these things, to make them highly creative but batshit crazy, and that’s just by turning up the temperature.

Yeah.

And I believe that one of the things—and this is, by the way, something that I intend to focus a lot more on in the next decade—is that I’m very reflective at the moment because I’m in my 19th year.

I think it’s interesting that you talked about big companies. Before I ran a big company myself, I used to think they were bad, period. What I’ve revised my view to is that I now 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 gets better and better at doing what it already does. The way to do that is obviously to minimize mistakes. That also means minimizing brilliance, minimizing waste, and minimizing all these other things.

Naturally, what you end up having is more and more capitalism, public markets, and all of these things driving you toward one thing: optimizing what you’re doing to the point where it’s the most efficient thing it can possibly be. But that is not conducive to getting the best ideas.

What I’m greatly satisfied and happy with—and I’ve been fortunate enough that I don’t run Spotify as much day to day as I used to—is that I’m still very involved, but I’m not involved in all the team meetings and doing all the things I used to do. I used to be 90% internally focused on just getting the machine to run.

Instead, I’ve been more and more able not only to have the free time to think, but also to meet more people. Part of the beauty of that is that it brought me back to music again and to the creative process of music.

There’s something remarkable in a studio, where you have a bunch of people just throwing ideas at each other. Musicians actually, in many ways, know more about the entrepreneurial process than most people give them credit for.

I think it’s the same thing with filmmakers and athletes.

One hundred percent the same thing.

Yeah.

One hundred percent. So the point is that what I truly believe the very best musicians and the most creative people do is that they’re not afraid of throwing out ideas, even terrible ones. Even in the most terrible idea, there may be a nugget.

You and I talked about this over breakfast, where there was a person who gave you some bad advice. But sometimes even the insight behind the advice, or the question behind the question, can lead to some really interesting things.

What I’ve come to realize is that most people want conformity. They value a reliable consistency of giving a certain amount of impact per second or minute, or a certain level of truthfulness. They have some sort of heuristics for what makes a valuable person from a business context, or whatever context they’re judging it on. But certainly, in a business context, it’s conformity.

You want to put people in a box: “This person is good, and they’re always good.” But what I’m more interested in these days is an idea I had never heard about before. I find it with some people that, even in an hours-long conversation with the best people in the world, where I’ve learned the most, 55 minutes of that conversation may honestly be completely worthless and not that interesting to me. But then there’s a spur-of-the-moment 2 or 3 minutes of brilliance that I had never heard before, which will deeply and profoundly impact my life.

Those are my people. That’s what I’m interested in. I’ve come to learn that most people don’t like to be around those people, but I love it, and I think it’s such a rewarding and interesting thing. I’m looking forward to spending more time with those people in the coming decade. It’s one of those things that I’ve wanted to do more of and learn more from.

I think this is related. One of your oldest friends texted me the other day with a screenshot of this episode I did on Chung Ju-yung, the founder of Hyundai. I think it’s the most inspiring autobiography I’ve read, because the guy writes the book when he’s 90, and he grew up the son of a poor farmer. They had to eat tree bark to survive. He dies as 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.

Yeah.

He did all the construction and built some of the biggest ships in the world. His nickname was “The Bulldozer.” The reason he sent me the screenshot was a specific part of the podcast. He said, “This is just like Daniel.”

One thing that Chung would talk about is that the more you progress in your career and the bigger the company gets, the more rigid it gets.

Yeah.

They go from being default optimistic and default risk-taking to, “Any new idea? No, no, no, no, no.”

Yeah.

Like, “No, we’re not doing that. That’s too risky. You can’t build a car. We’re a tiny little island.”

Yeah.

He said, “Daniel gives me the same exact advice. He will say something, I will say, ‘No,’ and he goes, ‘But did you even try?’”

Yeah.

And then he goes, “It’s related to his ability, if you actually analyze his willingness to go into all these different industries where he doesn’t know anything about the industry.”

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that sort of comes back to the Georges Bernard Shaw quote, right? “The unreasonable man.”

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.”

I have it painted on my wall at home.

Yeah.

I’m reminded of that because I think the reality is that it’s really, really tough not to conform and not to be part of a group. It’s so easy, and there are so many temptations in life that draw us back to that conformity.

Money is another one. When you make a lot of money, you tend to make life more comfortable. You tend to spend more time golfing and doing all these other things. But the reality is that you become distracted, and you’re not going to be on your A-game anymore.

The hard thing, then, is to keep going, keep improving, and keep doing these things. But you’re going to have to sacrifice a lot to do so. You’re going to sacrifice people’s birthdays and social commitments. You’re not going to show up for a lot of things.

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

Yeah.

That is unreasonable.

Yeah.

People are like, “Oh, I can’t do that. It’s social etiquette.”

Yeah.

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 felt like, “Oh, this is a prestigious group dinner. This person is really successful. People would love this opportunity.”

At the beginning, when I first started doing this, I started going, and I was like, “This sucks. I don’t…” I remember one time it was in a private room, and they shut the doors. Within 5 minutes, I knew I had to get out of there.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

I was like, “Don’t worry, I’m going to pretend to go to the bathroom and just never go back.”

So, sneak out.

So I stood up and said, “Oh, where’s the restroom?”

Yeah.

It was right in the room. I thought, “Oh, no.”

Oh, no. Oh.

What I did, which I wouldn’t do today, was sit down and waste an hour and a half of my time.

Yeah.

Instead of just being the unreasonable man.

Yeah.

I’m now going to ask, “What would Daniel Ek do?”

Yeah.

He would get out or avoid the dinner in the first place.

Yeah. Yeah. I would say, “You know, I’m not proud of our sneaking out sometimes, but look, at the end of the day, I think that’s less about protecting my time and more about protecting unique and novel ideas, and how rare they are.”

By the way, we’ll hopefully get into that, but I think less about how a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be obsessed about time. I’m really not. I’m more obsessed about energy management.

Wait, wait. Yeah, let’s get to it now. What do you mean?

You constantly hear this thing about how you’re supposed to wake up at 4:00 in the morning and do all these things. First and foremost, there’s no rule. I know a lot of successful people in business, as I’m sure you do, too. Some of them wake up at noon, and some of them wake up at 4:00 in the morning. You can do a lot of different things.

The obsession with morning rituals is stupid. The other thing is that you’re supposed to have meetings every 15 minutes, and 15-minute increments are better than 30-minute increments, and so on and so forth. It might work for you, and for some people it might be the absolute best thing.

I’ve become more obsessed with managing my energy, because if you have time but no energy, you’re not going to accomplish anything anyway.

So how do you manage your energy, then?

It’s about finding out what gives you energy to begin with and what drains your energy. It’s about finding out which time during the day you’re most productive. Again, it’s innately about understanding yourself.

What the whole world tries to do is get you to conform to their schedule: “We have an 8:00 a.m. morning meeting because that’s when you get into the office,” or, “You’re supposed to do this and that.” All these other things, again, in big corporations, are about conformity to the average or to an okay standard instead of going for excellence and what truly, truly is unique.

I think the truly, truly unique thing is that you have to figure out what works for you, and you have to do more of that. That’s more about energy management, I believe.

Even before this, I think both you and I went and worked out.

Right?

Yeah. You know, that gives me energy.

Yeah.

It’s what’s going to sustain the rest of my day. I used to not work out at all because I thought, “I don’t have time. There’s no productivity.”

The worst productivity thing I did was that, at one point, I was doing these 15-minute naps. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this exercise.

No.

It’s a really bad idea, by the way, so don’t try this. I learned that you can chain sleep together by doing these 15-minute increments.

Oh, it’s like polyphasic sleep?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

The basic gist is that you’re supposed to be able to last on 4 hours of sleep. I was like, “Oh, this is great.” So I did that, and the interesting side part is that it worked for about 3 weeks.

Then I missed one of these 15-minute increments, and holy shit, I was completely suicidal for weeks afterward. It was not a great thing at all.

The point is that it’s about finding that energy management for yourself. Certainly, there’s common wisdom around what an average good night’s sleep should look like, but the reality is that there are some people who will work on 6 hours of sleep and do just fine, and may even be more productive that way.

I wish I were like that. If I could have a superpower, I always say I would like to fly like Superman. If I can’t do that, I just want sustained, high energy levels 24/7, because I need a ton of sleep.

I felt bad about this for the same exact reason you’re describing. People are like, “No, you have to get up at 4:30,” or, “Just sleep less or sleep faster.”

Yeah.

Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, “You have to sleep faster.” Then I’m reading James Dyson’s first autobiography, and the guy made one of the most successful companies of all time. He’s still doing it at 76 years old, and he says, “I need a hell of a lot of sleep—10 hours a night—or my entire next day is ruined.”

Yeah.

I’m like, wait a minute. This guy built a multibillion-dollar company. He’s the sole shareholder. He built some of the best products in the world, and he’s sleeping 10 hours a day.

Yeah.

You just said there are no rules.

No. There really aren’t. You just have to find that thing, right? 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. It's about building a system that works for you.

I know hanging out with crazy people gives you energy.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

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

That one lifeline: phone a friend.

Yeah, exactly. And he's a good mirror, too, because it's almost like a therapy session. He's very quiet, doesn't like attention to himself, and yet he'll hit you with a question.

I didn't even think about that.

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

Yep.

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

Mm-hmm.

And this was actually related to a conversation that we had at your house, which was fascinating. 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, because it's not really talked about, there's also all this other success that you're having outside of this, too.

Mm-hmm.

You're very curious about things.

Mm-hmm.

And now you have a network, knowledge, and resources that you can actually use to 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.

Yeah.

And so we're talking about this, and I'm like, "Were you..." Because usually, true interest is revealed early. So if we go and look at your life story, people are just like, "Oh, what hobbies do you have?"

I'm like, "I like to read."

Yeah.

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

Yeah. Read. Yeah. That's it.

I was like that when I was 5. I wasn't, at 5 years old, "What's a good hobby for my future self-development?" It's like, no, I just like reading. I like books better than people in general.

And so you see that in your early life, like you're starting companies, and you didn't even know they were companies.

Yeah.

It's just trying to do something.

So I was like, "Oh, you must have been interested in investing forever."

No, I never even thought about it until 2018.

Yeah. And you said the funniest thing. You go, "How did you learn about it?"

I started listening to Patrick's podcast.

Yeah.

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." And then I'd start reading books.

And then you literally taught yourself. You weren't interested at all.

Yeah.

And now you're essentially world-class at it in a very short amount of time. And this is the face again. You just did the same face.

Yeah, yeah.

But explain how you think about this. I always say learning is not memorizing information. Learning is changing your behavior.

Mm-hmm.

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

Yeah.

I'm not reading this book.

Yeah.

Even if you find it enjoyable.

Yeah.

I'm looking to apply this.

Yeah. Well, I think it's back to these 2 concepts we talked about. My whole journey is one of self-mastery and finding out how I can become the best version of myself. Meanwhile, what gives me energy is solving problems. And as you say, I think this is revealed early.

I didn't know they were companies, but I loved sorting out problems for other people. I've been doing it my entire life, whether it's relationship advice or all these other things.

This is why I think these conversations are important to have, because you're the personality type that I've read about. It's just that 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.

Most people aren't like, "I'm starting a company for company's sake." They're just like what you said: "I like solving problems."

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 thinking, too. I wasn't playing any kind of first-person shooter games or anything like that—some of it, but not much. Most of what I was playing was strategy games. You know, Civilization.

Yeah.

A business strategy game.

I played every tycoon game on how to run businesses better.

Of course you did.

Those were sort of my favorite games growing up. I love SimCity.

SimCity was amazing.

This is what I always say about entrepreneurs: 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 2 in the Senra family, right, is what I teach my kids: mind your own business.

So I think you're very similar. I don't have any suggestions on how you should live your life. If we're friends, we can talk and go back and forth, but I just mind my own business.

Yeah.

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."

Yeah, yeah.

They're like, "What?" I'm like, "Why would you get out of the game?" And then they sell their company and go be a VC. I'm like, "Oh my God."

Yeah, yeah.

This is the best game in the world. It's never-ending. It's not like sports, where you can't get better with time. You can solve problems. 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." We're world builders. You get to control who's around you, what the rules are in the world that happens, and what's the outcome for the people in the world. Hopefully, you're doing it for benevolent and good reasons.

One of my favorite maxims from the history of entrepreneurship comes from Henry Ford, where he's like, "Money comes naturally as a result of service."

Yeah.

The crazy thing about Henry Ford is that by 1919, he owned 100% of one of the most valuable companies in the world, because he bought out the investors. And he didn't do it to start a company. He had 1 idea.

I've read 10 books on this guy, and people have known him forever. He had 1 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. He started on a farm. He's just like, "I want to build a car for the everyman."

Yep.

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. And you said at the very beginning, "I don't know how I'm going to do it."

He said the same thing.

Yeah. "But I learned how to do it." He's like, "Oh, well, how can I make a car cheaper? Sure as hell can't put it in by hand. So we have to learn how to mass-produce something we don't know how to do yet." And that took him a decade and a half of failure or whatever.

Yep.

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. And as a result, money came naturally as a result of service.

That's 100% how I think about it, and I think this is the beauty of capitalism, right? Because ultimately, 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 solve that problem—or the bigger the problem is that you're solving for people—the more valuable it becomes.

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." Was that the...?

Well, these are 2 different ideas, but closely related. It was actually my co-founder who 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. I tell this to the team because when we face very difficult problems, it is great, because again, if we solve these problems, we will create a lot of value.

I keep saying you think like Bezos. There's a great line, same thing, where he says... I'm reading his shareholder letters for the 4th time. They're so good and so clear and concise that I should read them every year. 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 are all these stories in Bezos's early career where people at Amazon would come to him with a huge problem, and they thought maybe they'd get fired.

Mm-hmm.

And then he got excited. Because he's like, “Oh, great. We had a problem we didn't even know. If we solve this—

Yeah.

Our company gets even more valuable.

Yeah, exactly right.

There's this guy named Henry Kaiser, who was as famous in his day as maybe Elon is today. He built 100 companies, one of which still exists: Kaiser Permanente. He built the Hoover Dam, and he built the Liberty Ships in World War II.

Mm-hmm.

And he goes, “Problems are just opportunities in work clothes.”

Right.

That's a great way to think about it.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like, if I can solve this problem—

Yeah.

For other people—

Yeah.

I make other people's lives better—

Yeah. I make the company more valuable—

Yeah, and then you also have to feel good about what you're creating in the world.

100%. But I think it comes from solving problems. I get excited today. You asked about the other stuff that I get focused on. I don't focus so much on the solution; I focus on the problem.

I try to find really interesting problems and figure out if there's even a 5% or 10% chance of solving that problem. If I know that would be huge for humanity or society if we figure it out, then it's amazing. That gets me fired up. The intricacies of solving that problem are often very, very complex, because it's not as if other people don't know that this problem exists.

There's probably even a lot of people who would agree that if we could figure it out, that would be really valuable. But I find this all the time. You said it yourself: sometimes these problems are really small, and sometimes they're gigantic and earth-shatteringly different.

It's everything from life extension to just walking into a store and seeing things you don't like in the store. Those are problems. If you could do those things better, you could probably build a business.

The biggest thing, however, is that people have this misconception about what innovation is. They somehow think that they have to try to figure out something entirely new. But the history of the world is that we build on other people's ideas. An innovation is actually taking 2 or more things that were already well known and putting them together in a new way. That's really what it is.

For me, the most interesting thing is like laying a puzzle. Because I meet so many brilliant people, I get to listen to problems all around me all the time. I try to distill and figure out, “Okay, this person said this thing, but what if you actually articulate the problem like this instead?”

What does that mean? What does that unlock? That, for me, is just so much fun, and I couldn't imagine not spending every single day doing this.

We started this journey by telling my story: 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. That's really the genesis of the story.

Even today, I'm thinking about this, and I said, even if you remove all the money—from the beginning, in the middle, and even now—there's no way I wouldn't do this and spend much of my waking time thinking about this stuff. For me, this is impact, and this is what leads to happiness in my life story.

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

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

Mm-hmm.

And it's remarkable, when I'm listening to the series that was created in 2021, how much you guys were talking about AI, how early you were, and how clearly you understood the impact. You saw clearly where we're going.

But you said something that I didn't actually understand, because the way I think about technology is that technology is just a better way to do something, right?

Mm-hmm.

And you were like, at Spotify, though, at the very beginning—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?

Yeah.

But you said, “I like technology for technology's sake.”

Yeah.

What does that mean?

I like the process of science. I like the process of discovery. I like the process of understanding how things work. I've been wired this way all my life. I've been pulling apart computers. I've been trying to understand why a semiconductor works the way it works, all these things, and I'm intrigued by that.

It's just this thing about understanding everything—understanding life, where we come from, and all these different things. But I'm equally interested in solving problems. When you're curious about both of those 2 angles, you can end up finding these connection points where those 2 things meet, where it's obvious that there is something over there that no one's really applied in this way before.

Maybe there's not 1 idea, but 2 ideas over there. It's quite interesting. I think you have to love technology in order to go through the depth of understanding what's possible, because oftentimes the greatest ideas are truly, innately understanding something and truly, innately breaking constraints around that something by understanding the rules and knowing when you can—

Yeah, to break them.

Yeah. And so, what are the greatest entrepreneurs, really? Well, the greatest founders are the people who have this 1 idea of—they can almost internalize the consumer, right? What is someone willing to do? What do they need, even if they can't articulate it themselves?

And then they have this entire field of amazing, brilliant engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and all these groups of people who are doing various things. Then they figure out the intersection. You actually have to make it viable too, which means you have to have some sort of business model, because if you don't have that, eventually this thing won't be sustainable.

It's the trifecta of those 3 things. That makes it even more interesting, because now we're talking about a really complex equation, trying to get these things together with multiple unknowns. You're trying to configure these things by locking down constraints on one side and then trying another side.

The amazing thing about early-stage entrepreneurship is that we talked about this Google example of trying 200 different colors. You can't do that early on. That's the amazing thing: every decision you make is life or death.

That makes the stakes even higher, because you may literally try 1 thing and then run out of money. You have to make sure that is the right thing. It's such a fascinating process, but it comes back to a process of creativity and a process of trying things out.

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 with going deeper and deeper into creativity itself.

It doesn't conform, it doesn't scale, and it doesn't behave in any of these other ways. Then you have this other side, which is all about scale, all about conforming. Navigating that dynamism and the polarity between these 2 things is something very few people, I think, can do and be really, really world-class at doing.

I think most of this, you can't even describe why you're doing what you're doing at the time. What I mean by that is, you hinted at this earlier: 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. It's a skill you have to learn, and a lot of it is being comfortable with the messiness of the creative process. But entrepreneurs are, by definition, impatient and patient.

Yeah.

They have this paradox where they want things done now.

Yeah.

I love what Jeff Bezos says about this: “Step by step, ferociously.”

Yeah.

I'm willing to plan if it takes 2 decades or 3 decades to solve the problem that I'm trying to go after.

Yeah.

Maybe, in some cases, the stuff that he's working on might even outlive his lifetime.

Yeah.

But that doesn't mean I'm dilly-dallying on a day-to-day basis. 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 1 superpower, I just have super patience.”

Yeah.

I think Neko is an example of this.

Yeah.

I met your co-founder on it.

Yeah.

I got to see this, too, and I thought, “Oh, this is cool. Who made the machines?”

Yeah.

It was just like, “We did.”

Yeah.

And then I didn't know—I don't know if stealth is the right word—but from the idea to the first customer, it was 6 years or something.

Yeah.

Or 4 years.

No, the company's 8 years old, and we barely began.

Yeah. And it's like, okay, that's an insane level of love. That's an understanding that we're tackling something that's—

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

Right? And when you mentioned that, I thought of James Dyson, who's 1 of my entrepreneur heroes. One of the hidden things that people don't know is that he wrote a book called The History of Great Inventions.

Yeah.

It's kind of a bland read—God bless his heart—but it's just him going through little Wikipedia pages, or his version of Wikipedia pages, about what each inventor did—

Yeah.

how he did it—

Yeah. Yeah.

and what the result was. Then you see him take these ideas from 1700 or whatever.

Mm-hm.

It's like, “Oh, I'll just take that little piece out here—

Mm-hm.

and combine it with this piece.”

Yeah.

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

Yep.

So, you have this patience, right?

Mm-hm.

You have this desire to solve problems. It's almost like—and maybe you could disagree with me—you sound like you see a giant puzzle that you're trying to figure out.

Yeah. 100%.

Now you have more resources, so you can be patient. You couldn't have done Neko when you were 23.

Yeah.

Right? But you have this great quote that I know is important to you: “Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.”

Yeah.

We haven't talked about quality at all, even though Spotify, if you compare it with your competitors, is just in a class by itself.

Yeah.

So, it's obviously very important to you. We have to talk about quality. Do you want to pick up where that quote leaves off?

Well, there are so many strands of quality, right? It is both 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 that so much of your early life, certainly in my case, was the formulation of just trying to go for more. It's about everything, right? You amass more stuff. You try to do more things at the same time. You try to do all of these things at the same time.

The further you go, the more you realize that it really is about this very simplistic, trite thing: less is more. The older I get, the more I feel it. We talked about it with friends. I think most people start out thinking that having more friends is better, but I think more people are happier with fewer but better friends than with many friends.

And so, I think quality is ultimately this notion of focusing, distilling, and getting to the essence. We can even talk about quality in communication. It's often trimming things down and saying less, right? Why is it, for instance, that when we're talking about very hard things, most people's instant reaction is to try to add more complexity to the issue instead of simplifying it? They're just trying to be courageous and say the thing right out loud.

The older I get, the more my instinct is toward that. I'm reminded of it even if we go back to investing, because part of why I liked investing has nothing to do with money. It started with the fact that, all of a sudden, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and I didn't want to just hand it off to a bank without understanding anything about it.

What got me more deeply curious about it was realizing that investing is actually more about learning about your temperament than it is about the specific action that you're doing. Your temperament, actually, is more about being in line with your temperament than not. The game you're picking needs to be suited to you and your circumstances and how you want to play it, more than anything else.

And so, again, we come back to philosophy. One of the concepts that Munger talks about—coming back to a Munger reference again—is diversification, right? He calls it, somewhat simplistically, “diworsification,” because—

Yeah.

The common wisdom, of course, is that, 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 the complete opposite of that. Oftentimes, they have only 1 asset. Maybe they'll have 2 or 3, but they certainly don't have more than that. They just go for that.

There's a realization you have, right? You read a line, and you're like, “Okay, let me filter that through how I would say it.” I do this all the time. I'll take notes on all the books that I read, and then I'll reread them. I'll just jot them down and ask, “What's occurring there? Can I put it into 1 sentence?”

One thing I stumbled upon was that Nick Sleep has this great quote where he says, “The best investors are not investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold.”

Mm-hm.

You and I have talked about the fact that a lot of people have sold way too early, and they're lauded. It's like, well, if you just didn't do that, everything else you did—if you just didn't sell.

Yeah.

Nick Sleep talks about this, and it's been in other books. If Sam Walton hadn't given away the stock in Walmart to his kids before it appreciated, he would have had one of the largest fortunes ever held by a single person because of his ownership and concentration in Walmart.

Right.

Sam talks about that. He's like, “I didn't really invest in anything but Walmart,” right? He wasn't waking up saying, “I need to diversify my portfolio. 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.”

Yeah.

And he was doing it because he loved it, and spending time doing anything else would be an absolute distraction.

Nick Sleep talks about this because he's a capital allocator.

Mm-hm.

He's not building a product, but he's making capital-allocation decisions: “Do I need to sell this stock and put it into another one? I'm weighing my opportunity costs.” He was almost haunted by this idea. If you look at financial history, he talked about a financial firm where they said, “Okay, we owned IBM in the 1950s, and we sold.”

Mm.

They're having this conversation in the 1970s.

Yep.

The leadership of the financial firm asked, “How do we avoid not doing this?” They said, “If we had just held that, the gain would have been more than all the assets we have under management.”

Yeah.

They’re like, “We can’t do this.”

Yeah.

That same year,

Yeah, they sold Walmart.

Yeah.

They had Walmart in the 1970s.

Wow. Wow.

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

Mm-hmm.

He went and talked to Walt Disney in the ’60s.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then I think he bought the stock at around 62 cents or something.

Right.

And he had a 2x or a 4x gain.

Right. Yeah.

He’s like, “Well, I sold Disney.”

Yeah.

So that’s why I was like, “The best financial decisions are not financial decisions at all.” You’re doing it for another reason, which is exactly what you said. All Sam had to do was keep doing Walmart, which is exactly what he did.

Yeah. Yeah.

I remember—I obviously live in Miami—being on a friend’s boat in the marina there. There was a boat bigger than anything else around there, and you could Google who owned it. It was Sam Walton’s brother’s daughter.

Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s crazy. But I think you’re onto something important, which is this notion that intently focusing and solving problems day by day builds quality, right? 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.

We tend to make these things binary. We talked about it with people. I’d rather have that person who has 1 good idea in an entire hour and the rest is crap than someone who has 10 decent ideas but nothing is amazing.

Yeah.

That sort of differential between the 1% versus the rest is so important, and it’s so important to understand. I think we take it literally. We know about it because we can explain it in hindsight, but we don’t know when it’s happening.

So what is that qualitative process? What defines quality as it’s happening, before you can see it objectively from the outside? Those things are interesting, and I’m more and more drawn toward that.

For me, at least, it is very much about looking at the people in it and looking at how they build judgment over time, the feedback loop they create, the curiosity they have about this, and the obsession they have with trying to achieve the impossible. For me, the impossible is something that’s perfect. It’s never going to exist.

The whole universe is this thing where the only thing we’ve learned—we keep debating all these things about the universe—but the only thing we know is that it’s not static. It moves. It cannot, by definition, be this one thing. It’s constantly expanding or contracting; it’s moving. So perfection just doesn’t exist, but the aspiration toward perfection is a remarkable thing.

I love Japan for this reason, right? You find these amazing individuals who literally spend their entire lives perfecting one thing. I was in Japan maybe 10 days ago, and I was in one of these temples with a tea master who, literally, all he’s done for the past 34 years is perfect how to make tea. That’s it. Nothing else.

And yes, the tea is amazing, but it’s not just that. It’s seeing that obsession with quality, seeing that obsession with being not even 1%, but 0.1% or 0.01% better at something.

And I think you sort of asked about AI and all these things, and we can talk about art too, but for me, that is going to be even rarer. Average is going to be possible to do, even better than average is going to be possible—

Yeah.

—to do with AI. But that sort of thing about this guy doing this for 30 years, just becoming the very, very best at what they do, or even what I find incredibly inspiring about you is the relentlessness every single day toward the long term.

It’s, as you say, the paradox of long-term-mindedness, but the obsession on a daily basis, against conventional odds and against all these other things. I would imagine—I don’t know, but I would imagine—that when you started Founders, probably not many people knew who you were, right?

Nobody.

Nobody, right? And so the competition for your time, there was none, so you could probably sit for 6 hours—

Yeah.

—or 8 hours, et cetera. But today, it’s much harder, because there are many other things. There are people like myself and other people, and you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute. Maybe this is a good idea to meet this person.” Or there’s a business opportunity that shows up, and maybe people are asking, “Maybe you should invest,” and maybe you’re even tempted by it.

But this is the thing that happens all the time, and this is how greatness gets evaporated: You lose focus.

That’s a great line: “Greatness gets evaporated.” A lot of the stuff I talk about on the podcast, or everything I say on social media, is reminders to myself, because I just reread past highlights. We forget that we forget, so I need a reminder.

I came across one recently. I have them presented to me in a random order, so I never know what I’m going to read that day. It was Buffett: “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to everything.”

Yeah.

And this is exactly the constant thing where… I do have a question for you. Going back to that, I can’t even explain why I did what I did, because I had close to no traction for 5.5 years.

Mm-hmm.

Now I look back and think, “There’s no way I would do that today.”

Yeah.

But somehow, that person, who I now greatly appreciate and love—it feels like a different person—I cannot believe that I was that person. That is what I’m most proud of. It’s not trying to make something that’s great, which I think is a selfish thing for us. Yes, when you release it to the world, when you release Spotify, you do all these things, it’s an act of service to other people, but you’re also doing it because you have to.

Oh, yeah.

It has to come out.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

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

Mm-hmm.

I was like, “Just give me enough time, I’ll figure it out.” Now, I didn’t think it was—

Yeah.

—going to take half a decade to figure out.

Right.

And you have a ton of stories with Spotify around that. There is no line, I feel, between your work and your life. They’re one and the same.

Yeah.

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

Mm-hmm.

And I feel very guilty when I don’t work—

Mm-hmm.

—to the point where I just got back from a crazy trip that people would love to go on,

Yeah.

—and I felt guilty for taking time off and not working.

Yeah.

And I feel like this is almost like a compulsion. I don’t have control over it.

Yeah.

Do you have anything like that?

Sure. I do feel the same thing, of course. But I’m back to time versus energy management. I don’t know about you, but I feel like the greatest ideas I’ve had have come from the most weird and wonderful places where I expected nothing from them.

So often, when I take some time off, I come back with 2 or 3 entirely new insights that just wouldn’t have come if I had kept grinding. I think it’s just changing scenery, being in a different frame of mind, pausing, giving… You know, it’s in the creative process. The greatest artists talk about how some of the greatest songs literally take 5 minutes to write.

Yeah.

Which is amazing, right? But some songs are the ones you work on, put in a drawer, and 6 months later, totally unbeknownst to you, it clicks. You’re not even working on that thing. It just goes, “Oh, that’s it.” They go back and do the song, and it’s the greatest song ever.

There is not 1 path to greatness. There are many. And I feel like that’s why I’m so obsessively focused on energy.

So you mean energy is like—you just let that guide you?

Yeah.

It’s like, “Hey, if I need a break right now, if I need to go for a walk, or if I need to go spend time with my wife and kids…” Is that what you mean?

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. It’s not like I don’t have a schedule. Of course, I do have one. But I feel so much of it should be more guided by trying to understand ourselves more intimately, right?

So I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but going back to sleep, there’s been this idea circulating more recently, which surprised me. My 10-year-old daughter told me about it. She said, “We have this idea of 8 hours.” And she mentioned instead that the real notion is that we did it almost like fasting. Ramadan, you know, is based on the sun. Sometimes it could be 6 hours, or sometimes it could be 12 hours.

It used to be that sleep was actually in 2 periods. So you didn’t sleep one consecutive thing. You sort of had a 3- or 4-hour sleep, and then you woke up, and then you had another 3- or 4-hour sleep again. And so much of that was based on light. Maybe it was driven by other things that were happening in our life too.

And for Nordic people, what it actually meant, going back as late as the 18th century, before we started having electric lights and candles and all these things—

Yeah.

We actually slept a lot less in the summers, and we slept a lot more in the winters, guided by light. We keep thinking it's this static thing, but it's actually, again, driven by the environment around us. So much of this innate knowledge—listening to ourselves, understanding our innate personality, understanding hunger—is something we lose.

I can tell you, as someone who's gained 40 pounds during the worst negotiations of my life, one of the problems I have now is that I literally don't know when I'm hungry, because I ruined that natural feeling in my body of understanding when I'm hungry and when I'm not hungry. A huge part of losing weight for me over the past few years was just starting to listen to my body again and figure out what satiation means.

For me, for instance, I don't feel it until 20 minutes afterward. If I didn't gauge what I should eat, I would just keep eating way more than I should. So much of it for me has been portion sizing—understanding, okay, that's probably going to be enough. It doesn't feel like enough at that moment because I ruined my body, but 20 minutes later, I understand it.

I'm just trying to convey this idea about understanding who you are, choosing the game you're playing, and realizing that life is not one game, but a thousand games. There's this brilliant quote by a guy called Kwame Anthony Appiah that's another one of those things to guide me.

I just circled it.

All right.

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

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

Okay, I'll read it. “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game. The challenge is to figure out what game you're playing.”

Yeah. For me, realizing that has just been eye-opening. It's another one that's on my wall. Quite often, when I'm talking to people and they're 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, when actually so much is about choosing the right game for you.

So, yeah, I keep coming back to that. Energy management is the same thing. You have to create the environment around you that you want to work in. You have to choose your game. When you do that and start understanding it, you start becoming superhuman in your ability to get things done.

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

I'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. When I was really young, in my teens, I went to every possible religious meetup I could. I went to everything. I went to Hare Krishna centers, Jewish centers, mosques. I went to everything.

I tried to learn as much as possible because I truly believe not enough people are interested in where we come from and what the purpose of life is. For me, those are some of the greatest questions that—

Mm-hmm.

I, like many others, obviously don't have any idea what will happen. But I think they're really important. So, I've always been a searcher, and I think that naturally led me to be a searcher about myself too, trying to find who I am.

But the older I've gotten, the more things have started clicking about myself.

And so your inner monologue gets less harsh?

Yeah, because not only do I stand out quite a lot as an entrepreneur, but my interests were widely different from my social circle growing up, and the second thing is that I'm an introvert. So that doesn't help.

Most people like being around a lot of people, and they get energy from it. I didn't. So that naturally gets you to question yourself. Unlike many other entrepreneurs, I'm not the most eloquent person. I'm not the smartest.

You're pretty damn eloquent.

Well, I had to work on it.

Yeah.

That's the hard thing.

Listen, I've listened to all your interviews, and I did this before we were friends. Every time something comes out, I'm like, “Oh, I have to watch that.” You're not giving yourself enough credit. You are a very clear communicator.

Thank you.

Yeah.

But it's really a work product.

Yeah. I wish there was more recorded stuff of myself when I was 20 and 21, because I'll tell you—

Not me.

I was not great.

I was quite terrible. And so, I've just learned that it's a superpower and something I have to work on: getting my message across to other people so they 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.

I have 2 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?

Most of the people watching or listening to this—so few people are going to be born in the projects in a tiny little— We didn't even get there. We'll have to do this every year, if you're fine with it, because the idea that you come from this tiny little island, which I got to visit, and then you're competing with the biggest companies in the world and you win—it just doesn't... We didn't even get there.

You grow up, you have a great mom, you're a single family, not a lot of money, and now what I'm curious about is your lived experience. There are so few people alive who can actually empathize with that because they also had it. So, I'm very curious: Do you feel different? What I mean by that is, as you've grown from a kid in the projects—

Yeah.

Even if you had early success, to now being one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet, which I know—don't do the face—

Yeah.

But it's an undeniable fact. Do you feel different?

I think yes and no. I feel different in the same way a 40-year-old would feel different from a 10-year-old.

Yeah.

I feel different in that I'm a product of all the experiences of my life. Obviously, I've been incredibly fortunate. I was counting the other day, and I've been to 130 countries or something in my life. I've seen so many cultures and so many people. I have friends all over the world. All of that has shaped me into who I am.

I don't feel different because, innately, many of the things—the drive, the long-term thinking, the obsession, this willingness to win on the one hand but also truly find a win-win and work with people to try to find a win-win—have always been there. They've always been part of me.

Like you said, you look back at yourself a few years after you started off and say, “Wow, how did I do this?” You're amazed at that. I can feel the same way about young Daniel. I can feel the same way about the young Daniel who worked every weekend, nonstop, 24/7, and sacrificed so many things, so many summers, so many other things.

I had a blast doing so, but I didn't have a normal upbringing because I was so obsessed with learning and so obsessed with making it. It put me in the position I'm in today. I actually feel like I owe that guy the responsibility to keep pushing myself.

There are so many demands on my time and so many things that tell me to downshift into an easier gear because life would be a lot more comfortable that way. This is not a comfortable thing that—

No.

either one of us is doing, right?

It goes back to impact versus happiness. I think I texted this to you, but one of the roles you play—and I'm very grateful that you allowed us to record this conversation—is that you seem to have no self-imposed ceiling on what you can learn or achieve, and spending time with you transfers that belief to other people.

Every time, I obviously take notes about what I learned from the conversation we have afterward, and I interpret it. It's obviously not verbatim. I'm asking, “What did I just learn from Daniel, and how does it apply to me?”

You think you don't— I thought I was ambitious, and I didn't even realize until you pulled the scales off my eyes that I have this limiting belief that I have limits.

Yeah.

There are no limits in life.

Yeah.

You're a hell of an inspiration. One other question for you. 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, and I'll read the family histories because I do think you can learn a lot from human nature in fiction.

Yeah.

My job and my obsession require me to—99% of my reading is nonfiction—and I want to read more fiction. I came across something recently. I'm going through Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters again, and then I read, “What was my interpretation of this in the past?” I came across something fascinating.

There's a story in the prequels to Game of Thrones where 2 brothers are fighting in a war. One of the brothers was pulled into a war he did not want to be in.

Mm-hmm.

And he made the sacrifice—

Mm-hmm.

Because it was for the good of his family.

Yeah.

He wound up dying in the war that he didn’t want to fight in the first place.

Yeah.

And his brother, who survived, got his remains, buried him, and then put him in a grave with only one word on his tombstone. That one word was “loyal.”

Hmm.

So, 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?

I don’t think too much about it 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. I would wish only one thing on my future tombstone. It feels absurd talking about it, but it would be: “He lived.”

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

Well, thank you so much. It’s such a huge honor to be your first guest in this series.

Yeah, of course.

Thank you so much.

Wouldn’t have it any other way.