Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential

One of the afflictions of great entrepreneurs is you're entrepreneurial, [laughs] right? I mean, you just can't stop.

Or, or maybe I just have a high, uh, pain tolerance.

I'm not sure which one it is.

Yeah.

Once things got smooth, you had to get back into it.

But at what point did you start thinking about doing other things, Daniel? Were you, like, actively angel investing at Spotify over the years as CEO? The business is building hundreds of millions of users, public, successful.

Things are growing nicely.

You've got a great leadership team.

We've obviously met a lot of your team over the years.

How did you start to do these other projects, I know you've got a few others, and, and focus on Neko?

Yeah.

It, it, it's kind of crazy.

I, I'd forgotten about it, but, but, uh, my team now showed me very recently, like, I, I apparently did this lunch with the FT interview in, I think, 2012 or 2013 or something, just after the US, uh, launch of Spotify, uh, where I was talking about healthcare, uh, already back then.

So, uh, I've been thinking about healthcare specifically for a very, very long time.

Um, and it's just been, you know, I, I, I think a lot of people just talk about sort of all the stuff that's going bad in the world, but my view is that actually most things are going pretty well, and, uh, it's kind of up into the right on the technology curve and all the things that we're getting.

But I try to focus on the problems that aren't going that well.

Um, you know, one of those happens to be healthcare.

So I've been kind of interested about this as, like, you know, how is it that we're spending more and more money on healthcare, but getting worse and worse outcomes, um, and what can we do about it? And so that really kind of got me into the space.

I think healthcare is kind of unique and kind of special.

Um, I honestly didn't have any money until Spotify went public, so I wasn't a prolific angel investor.

What year was that?

That was 2018 we went public.

'18, right.

Yep.

Yeah.