Daniel Ek

having you know so so the typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person right um by the way it's 100 true i i totally believe that i think it's the most important thing in the zero to one stage

But what a lot of people don't talk about is the fact that there isn't one stage of this journey.

It's like you're oscillating between zero to one, one to a hundred.

And then, you know, the last stage was more like optimization stage.

And you have to like constantly do that.

And you're going to need different skills at different places.

And this is why, by the way, I believe it's so important for entrepreneurs to realize when to apply what tools in this journey.

So what happened with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom and wealth, which is I don't really run product anymore.

Because what happened was I got this guy called Gustav that you've now met, and he runs product.

And he's actually way better than me at doing it.

And so speaking about sort of being truthful, what ended up happening many years ago was I was running these product meetings

He was sort of running it, but I wanted to run it.

So I kind of interjected myself over him, but I didn't have the time to like really spend all this time.

So he was sort of like running it for me, but I still insisted on having product reviews.

And sort of talking again about the importance of having people who give you candid feedback.

He took me aside after one of these product sessions and he's like, you know, you're not really that good in doing these things and you're not really that helpful.

So most of the time, me and the team, we're kind of like looking and we're trying to basically, you know, appease you in the meeting, but you're not really adding as much value as you think.

And not surprisingly, my first instinct was to be really pissed off.

I sort of went home.

I was like, man, I'm going to have to fire this guy.