#484: Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify — The Art of Seeing Around Corners, Two-Year Missions, Top Books, and the Essence of Fire Soul

A lot of knowledge workers that work in companies, most of the work that they're doing is done in meetings ... It's surprising to me that we spend as little time as we do on actually thinking about the meetings we're having, if they're productive, if they're worthwhile, and if they're delivering on what the ambition was.

When I evaluate success among a future leader at Spotify or even someone who just joined the company, I look at the rate of their learning growth. I find that to be the best indicator for whether they will be long-term successful in their job at Spotify or not.

Most people don't stop enough and think hard enough about their priorities and focusing on the problems that are the most worthwhile for them to try to solve, and they more operate on a kind of first come, first served basis when it comes to their time.

The interesting thing, for me, when you think about creativity is most people associate it with unstructured thinking and... they do whatever they feel like doing, but some of the most creative people that I know are actually, incredibly, almost scripted in their creativity and their approach.

I think many people always think that if you're the CEO, your job is always to be the approver in the meeting, but I find, if you have a great team, that's not at all the roll you should have; you should be, sometimes, the person who's only consulted about what they're doing as an FYI.

I'm not sure I would have done so well if I was forced by society to, early on, prove my worth. I've been more of a tinkerer, a wanderer ... I've always, because I felt the safety, felt that I could think bigger and try new things because, honestly, the consequences of failing were minimal.

The leadership style that you ultimately have has to be authentic to who you are, and I think a lot of us take so much inspiration from leaders, including myself by the way, where we often try to maybe copy someone's specific thing that they're doing without understanding all the underlying mechanics perfectly well.

Part of the reason why I believe Spotify came to be was I saw the need for it probably earlier than others because I had 100Mb broadband in 1998. Because there was nothing for me to do, I could only use file sharing services, and I realized that it was wrong, but it was a lot better than the alternative of going down to the video store, which only had about half of the things that I actually wanted to see.

What I do think my parents gave me that was incredibly important—and I think it's certainly been a trait that I've been able to find with a lot of the entrepreneurs that are in my generation, too—is a lot of psychological safety.

I read, probably, north of 60 or 70 books a year.