Daniel Ek

You know, sometimes you're able to do incremental things.

And I think Daniel Ek would be another good example of that.

He's been doing really interesting things in Europe.

Yeah.

And he built a business around the early days of targeted ads.

And then Daniel Ek, who was the founder and CEO, sold his first targeted ads business to Lawrenson, who was so impressed by him, he said...

Come tell me your next idea, and his next idea was Spotify.

Yeah,

good idea.

Yeah, so Lawrenson basically left Daniel Ek to do all the tech, get the tech team to do the tech, but said, I'm going to do everything else.

He did the marketing, he did the legal guys, he built a whole business.

Perfect.

It's not about the product ever.

And then on the other hand, you have someone like Steve Jobs or Daniel Ek, who is the founder of Spotify, who are essentially artists and they obsess about a product.

And understanding this about yourself is incredibly important because this is what allows us in the next business to design our daily activity around something that actually will reliably drive us and the work is much more likely to feel like play.

So we don't need to take three or five years in between businesses.

was another big step.

Daniel Ek was a brilliant guy.

We came to the market, we had Beats Music at Interscope and we sold to Apple and then we worked with the guys up there and made Apple Music.

How do you think streaming changed music production or the decisions that musicians make? I've heard at least anecdotal evidence that albums got longer or there's more songs because that gives you more shots to go viral in the algorithm.

Same to music.

So, Daniel Ek, Spotify, fuck you.

That's what I'm saying.

And on that note, I should say

But that's another situation too.

Like, if you, if you're in a company, are you worried if, if a co-founder is leaving? Because it happened with Spotify too recently too, right? Um, Daniel Ek left Spotify.

Yep.

What, what are your thoughts on, like, co-founder transitions?

Again, always with a human in the loop.

I wanna go back to the conversation we had a few years ago when we, we were having, uh, dinner at Daniel Ek's house about-- essentially your, your proposition to me was, you know, you're just not gonna be able to have humans on the battlefield anymore because it's just gonna be about who can produce more material.

Do-- I think we discussed this book called Freedom's Forge that I've read like twice, and essentially it's about the United States converting their, you know, industrial and commercial, uh, industrial power from making products that people would buy to making war materials and just mass producing more than the opposition had.

Yeah.