Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
All right, everybody, welcome back to the All-in Interview Show, where we the All In Podcasts dedicate an hour to. just some of the great uh thinkers, creators of our time. And today will be no different. Daniel Eck is with us. You know him, the co-founder of Spotify, which he started twenty years ago and he ran it for those two decades to an extraordinary uh state of affairs today. Well over seven hundred million active users, over three hundred million premium subscribers, but On January first this year, he uh shifted and became the executive chairman. With me. And David Freeberg today. Daniel Mac, how are you, sir? Welcome to the program.
Well, thank you so much
for
having
me. It's good to be on. Yeah, it's good to see you. Uh we've known each other for twenty years. I remember The first uh Shaq, your partner, leaned into me at a internet summit or something and said, Hey, check this out and he showed me Spotify. But this was at a time When Uh, nobody had a subscription service. So we're gonna talk today about your new startup, which is incredible in the healthcare space. But take us back to the launch of Spotify and and how that crazy idea got started. And then uh how hard it was to break through with the music industry, which are also known as the hardest partners in the world. As your wealth grows, have you noticed how much more complex things get between investments, tax strategy, and estate planning?
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Yeah.
How did Daniel Ek build Spotify by turning music piracy into legal streaming?
Well, um I I usually start off by sort of saying whenever anyone asks me about the story, it's like, well, I had hair when I began this and by the end of this I obviously uh ended up being bald. So uh you you can see that it wasn't an easy journey. All jokes aside, I mean, just to kind of set the scene, I mean I started Spotify in two thousand and six. I was twenty three at the time, um, and the world looked a little bit different. So this is pre-uh iPhone, pre-uh, I mean Facebook existed, but it was college only. YouTube uh didn't exist. Uh so just like that kind of dates me, but this is before all the things we now take for granted. And um And and the world at that time, uh and the music industry at that time was in free fall because uh music piracy was kind of rampant.
So we had uh Napster, we had Kazaw, we had all these things, and there was an organization called the RIAA that went around and actually sued individual consumers in the US for illegally downloading music. And so I was sitting in Sweden and I was thinking to myself, you know, this is this is wild and this is crazy. There's no way to put the genie back in the bottle. And me and my co-founder, Martin, um, we were kind of sitting and spitballing startup ideas at the time. And and you know, Martin asked me, like, well, you know, if you could do anything you'd like to do, what would you do? And I said, Well, you know, my my real passion is music, but that that seems Like a really stupid idea. And it's like, well, why is that a stupid idea?
And I kind of told him about, you know, it's really hard because uh you have to do all these deals with the record companies, you have to then figure out how to do licensing and copyright, and you have to do all of these different things. And they said, Well What if you did this? And then he kept asking these what if questions. And eventually I ran out of reasons to say it. So I said, Well, I guess you could do something. And if you did something, it would feel like you had all the world's music at your fingertips. And he's like, well, that sounds pretty good. And I said, well, okay, well, let's give it a try. We started trying to license music. Originally, the idea was to try to go global from day one.
And everyone was just laughing at us when we were originally saying that.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:01
2
How did Daniel Ek build Spotify by turning music piracy into legal streaming?
2:01–6:29
3
Why did Daniel Ek bring Spotify’s playbook to preventive healthcare with Neko Health?
6:29–10:18
4
How can better health data help doctors detect chronic disease earlier?
10:18–15:38
5
What happens during Neko Health’s $499 preventive health scan?
15:38–27:11
6
Why do U.S. healthcare incentives favor treating illness over prevention?
27:11–36:09
7
How could AI improve healthcare and create more personalized music experiences?
36:09–39:58
8
Why does Daniel Ek support open-source AI and measuring compute for safety?
39:58–51:12
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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