Daniel Ek

And oftentimes today, what I see with younger entrepreneurs is that they're unintentional about what type of culture they are.

So they flip-flop between them.

So as an example, we all, many years ago, I was certainly enamored with Google, right?

Like the 20% projects and all these different things.

Those are cultural expressions.

It's not the culture itself, but it's the cultural expressions.

So that's where the early innings of Spotify's culture was like, I'm sure, almost every Silicon Valley company of that era.

And then we all switched, maybe became Facebook for a while.

And we all kind of took that of like moving fast and breaking things and so on and so forth.

And then you had like an Amazon kind of model where on the one end it was incredibly long term, but also maybe a little bit more bottoms up innovation than top down.

And then you see another cultural expression with like a Tesla where incredibly top down, incredibly focused company actually for this type of scale that they're doing.

And my point is, I think the most important thing is to really, really think through and be really, really diligent about the culture you create.

And we certainly were victims of that at Spotify because we had taken all these different things.

There were certainly things that were Spotify.

But we kept talking about all these other companies and we're like, well, we like this thing that Amazon's doing, so we should copy that.

And then, oh, we like this thing that Google's doing, so we should copy that.

And actually what ended up happening was we were at one point in time, almost like a little bit of a Frankenstein monster because we had...

some of the stuff from everyone, and we had some of the bad stuff from everyone too, instead of sort of really leaning into that.

And then sort of without really being intentional about it, we started iterating and improving on that culture.

And I often get this question.