Daniel Ek

Oh yeah.

You still today?

Yeah.

Every moment of my life, even among other fellow entrepreneurs, I sometimes feel like an outsider because like right now, for instance, you and I were in Silicon Valley.

I'm not American.

So there's an element of myself where I don't belong to the club.

And I've always felt that way.

And because I've always felt that way, I've had to, I can't take lessons from other people 100% because some of my story, some of my conditions, some of the waves, the structures, even how to structure a company, you have to structure differently if you're

your European company versus an American company.

So you have to go back to sort of first principles and kind of find this sort of principled answer to anything and what works for you.

And so I've had to kind of self-motivate myself for most of my life.

And only, I would say, in the last maybe five years, I've come to realize that, you know, in a way, I may be a better coach than I am a player.

And so I've kind of understood more and more that actually that sort of drive, that intensity is actually something that can be taught.

It's not entirely innate.

And it's about almost letting people know that that's okay.

And so much of that comes from those types of conversations.

It's about almost reflecting back.

It's not about sort of me projecting onto other people what I think they should do.

But in listening to Dara, it was just so obvious to me when he kind of explained because, you know, the conversation started with us talking about Uber.

And I said, I recommended you to the job.