20VC: Spotify Founder Daniel Ek on Optimising Decision-Making, Structuring Effective Learning Processes, The Trials and Tribulations in The Transition From Founder To CEO & The Future of Building Prima Materia with Shakil Khan
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2021
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Daniel Ek is the founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of the board of directors of Spotify, the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 345m users, including 155m subscribers, across 170 markets.
In Today’s Episode With Daniel Ek You Will Learn:
1.) How Daniel made his way into the world of startups and came to found the most popular audio streaming subscription service in the world in the form of Spotify?
2.) How does Daniel approach effective decision-making today? What is his core process? How does Daniel determine between reversible and irreversible decisions? What does Daniel's learning process look like for new topics and material? How does this differ from topic to topic? What does Daniel mean when he says "I look to become the Chief of X Officer" for a time?
3.) How does Daniel think about the transition from Founder to CEO? Why is the topic not discussed enough? Where does Daniel see many founders struggle to make the transition? Which elements did Daniel find the most challenging? How has he scaled into them over time? Is it possible to change who you are as a person with this transition?
4.) How does Daniel think about what it takes to create an environment of safety where everybody can feel free to express their ideas, thoughts and concerns? What sort of failure does Daniel accept? What sort of failure does Daniel not accept? How does good news flow through an organisation differently to bad news? How does Daniel determine when to quit a project vs when to persist and stick to it?
5.) Prima Materia: Why is Prima not just another fund? How is Prima fundamentally different? What does Daniel believe Shak is world-class at? A walkthrough of Shak and Daniel's decision-making process for choosing to partner with each other on Prima? What has been their first investment? Why gave them the conviction to write this check as their first?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Daniel Ek
Daniel’s Favourite Book: Shantaram
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and this individual is probably going to hate me for shining a spotlight on him in this way, |
| 0:05.5 | but he's played the most instrumental role in my journey, and this episode simply would not have happened without him. |
| 0:10.6 | Shaq, I thank you for your friendship, and I thank you for this episode. |
| 0:13.7 | And so with that, I could not be proud of to release today's episode with one of the great entrepreneurs of our time, an individual who's revolutionized his industry, |
| 0:24.9 | and with that I'm so thrilled to welcome Daniel Eck. Daniel is the founder, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors of Spotify, the world's most popular audio |
| 0:29.1 | streaming subscription service with 345 million users, including 155 million subscribers across 170 markets, |
| 0:37.4 | and the schedule to stay was a huge team effort. |
| 0:39.5 | Woody at TCV, Christina Stenbeck, Shachir at Coda, Bill Gurley, Alex Nordstrom and Gussab Sodestrum at Spotify. |
| 0:46.5 | I so appreciate all you did to make this schedule so special. |
| 0:49.3 | It really does mean a lot. |
| 0:50.6 | But before we move into the show today, I have to say, I just love using AngelList's fund admin platform to manage my investments. The team platform at AngelList takes care of all my |
| 0:58.9 | back office needs so that I can focus on working with great founders. Leading fund managers |
| 1:03.2 | have made over 10,000 investments into 6,000 startups via AngelList, all online and all in one |
| 1:09.2 | place. And with recently announced rolling funds, |
| 1:11.7 | you can easily find and invest in these top fund managers on AngelList.com forward slash rolling. |
| 1:17.2 | And speaking of amazing products there with AngelList, last month I had Jeff Seiber and Wayne |
| 1:21.1 | Chang on the show from Digits. Simply put, they're two of the best founders I've met, |
| 1:24.9 | and they're creating the most intuitive financial software you've ever used, automatically analyzing your company's spend and visualizing it for you as it |
| 1:32.2 | happens, hone in on recent activities, trends, anomalies, or any question you have in just a few clicks. |
| 1:38.3 | And unlike every other financial software, their integration is not weeks, it is just a few clicks. |
| 1:43.2 | I have to say the product is just beautiful, and you have to to check it out and so you can do that on digits.com. |
| 1:48.0 | And finally, I've always been a big history man and so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. |
... |
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