EP 67: Daniel Ek (CEO, Spotify) on the Creation of Wrapped, How Apple Blocks Innovation & Growing Up in the Projects

Daniel Ek is the CEO and Co-Founder of Spotify and an overall legendary entrepreneur. Daniel grew up in Sweden and after selling a few businesses went on to found Spotify and disrupt the music industry against all odds. On this episode Daniel shares his entrepreneurial journey, stories from the earliest days of founding Spotify, his beef with Apple's app store policies, his views on enabling free speech, and more.

(0:00) Intro

(0:50) Welcome Daniel Ek

(4:05) The Entrepreneurial Journey to Spotify

(10:05) Making millions but feeling aimless

(19:12) The roots of Spotify

(21:17) Constraints as a benefit

(25:34) Defining your market narrowly

(27:33) Sleeping outside record label offices

(35:39) Being Vilified in the music industry

(45:16) Taking elements from iconic CEOs to mode

(50:59) Natural Biases

(55:35) Reevaluating what you need for your mission

(1:02:14) Being outspoken against Apple

(1:07:10) Responsibility as a platform in free speech and censorship

Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky

Produced: Rashad Assir

Executive Producer: Josh Machiz

Music: Griff Lawson

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About the Show

Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes.

Executive Producer: Rashad Assir

Producer: Leah Clapper

Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky

Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA

🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1

Follow on Socials

📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow

📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow

🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow

About the Show

Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member.

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