I have spent several hours this week, re-listening to this episode. I highlighted this conversation over 70 times. Here are 43 of my favourite ideas from this podcast: 1. Happiness is a trailing indicator of impact. “Truly sustained happiness comes from impact. And impact is something that’s deeply personal to you. Only you can define what impact means for you” (Daniel Ek) 2. The Value of a company is the sum of all the problems solved” (Martin Lorentzon) 3. Focusing produces greatness. It’s that simple “Focusing all your time and effort on this one thing and obsessing about it almost to the point where you're not even aware of the rest of the world, is what creates greatness…. that's how Spotify came to be. I literally couldn't care about anything else for at the very least the first 15 years. (Daniel Ek) 4. You must build a company true to your natural drift. Everyone's like, "Oh, you just have to be like Steve Jobs. You just have to be like Elon." And your point is like, "No, there's multiple different archetypes…. It's so ridiculous to say there is (this one) way founders should run their company… (that) advice is fucking useless unless it's tied to who you are as a person. (David Senra) 5. The game that never stops in life is becoming the best version of yourself. 6. Founders cannot base their decisions based on the opinions of other people. 7. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" (Bernard Shaw) 8. Trust is one of the greatest economic forces in the world” And it’s your job to build a seamless web of deserved trust with great people. (Charlie Munger) The moment where you where you even start doubting whether you can trust someone or not, you have no trust…. I’m not saying I have absolute trust in every person but I choose to believe that trusting people makes for a much more fun rich life. “It's the number one thing why most organizations break down, and why you need processes and all the other bureaucracies. Ultimately because there's no trust. If you had 100% trust, you wouldn't need any of this stuff and you would move much faster.” (Daniel Ek) 9. Follow your natural drift. Or face the consequences “There are many things where you can copy a specific way for instance Elon does things but if it's not truly innate to you and your personality I promise you it will not have the same impact as when Elon does it. (Daniel Ek)” 10. Have relentless humility and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Daniel Ek on shadowing Mark Zuckerberg: “Spotify is the largest company I have ever built. So I'm learning on the job and I don't know what I don't know because I don't I've never really worked at a company, right? … I asked him hey can I come and learn from you? ….So hence I took meeting notes you know if I could get him coffee I would” 11. “Taste is judgement + curiosity” (Daniel Ekl) 12. At the zero to one stage of a startup, the founder must be the chief product person. Daniel mentions that companies oscillate between various stages, and you need to know which tools to use at which stage. Which reminded me of this quote from Ed Catmull, Co-Founder of Pixar: “Healthy cultures and healthy companies are not stable. They are ever-changing. And that change requires that leaders need to remain vigilant and nimble and, above all, that they make sure that core values are protected” 13. Companies grow in three stages, similar to the stages of parenthood. -- ‘100% involved’, you are the person keeping them alive. -- ‘Quite’ involved, you only step in to prevent something terrible from happening. -- You are simply just “‘there” and the job is to be there if you are needed. 14. You need to have people who tell you the truth in your life. Daniel Ek tells a great story about this: “Gustav took me aside after one of these product sessions and he's like “you know you're not really that good at doing these things. And you're not really that helpful. Most of the time me and the team we’re kind of like looking and we're trying to basically 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. It's horrible. like how could he say this? But I also realized that that was an emotional response. So, again, I wasn't fully convinced that this was true, but I sort of went back and said, "Okay, well, you know what? I'm going to give you three months , where I don't do the product reviews." And then we evaluate how this worked. And lo and behold, he actually did a great job. And so, the product team was much happier, you know, he was making more of the decisions without me. There weren't two different people deciding what worked. 15. Having an internal person represent, as their sole role, an outside stakeholder at a meeting can be insanely valuable. 16. A single great idea in a pile of horse manure, is still a great idea. “If there's a single good idea in your pile of force manure, like he'll find it. He is willing to go through 99 shitty ideas to get the very best because he understands how powerful those are” (David Senra) 17. Large scale corporations get better and better at what they are already doing. And they do so by minimizing mistakes, minimizing waste. 18. “In many ways artists know more about the entrepreneurial process than most people give them credit… the most creative people are not afraid of throwing out ideas even terrible ones (Daniel Ek) 19. Build systems that work FOR YOU. “You're supposed to do all these things, etc. It's like first and foremost there are no rules. The reality is it's about knowing yourself which is really hard and as you get to know more and it's about building a system that works for you.” (Daniel Ek) 20. What Video-Games you liked as a young child, reveal a lot about you. For example, Daniel played world builder games, sim city, business tycoon more than the shooter games. 21. Founder: “I just sold my company…”, David: : “I’m sorry to hear that…. I'm like why would you get out of the game and then go be a VC?... This is the best game in the world. It's never ending. It's not like sports, you can get better with time. You can solve problems. You can build your own world.” 22 Problems are just opportunities in work clothes (Henry Kaiser). “There's all these stories in Bezos's early career where people in Amazon would come to him with a huge problem. They thought maybe they would get fired. But he got excited. It’s because he’s like, "Oh, great. Like we had a problem we didn't even know. If we solve this, our company gets even more valuable." (David) 23. Money comes naturally as a result of service (Henry Ford) “I focus on the problem. I try to find really interesting problems, even if there's like a five or 10% chance of solving that problem, I know that (it) would be huge for humanity or society if we figure it out then it's amazing” (Daniel Ek) 24. Innovation is not figuring out something entirely new. It is about taking two, or more, things that are well known and putting them together in a new way. 25. “Technology for technologies sake” 26. The greatest ideas come from truly innately understanding something and breaking constraints around that something. 27. “What are the greatest entrepreneurs really? Well, they can almost internalize the consumer. What do they need?” (Daniel Ek) 28. “Creativity itself is this really really powerful thing… it’s the thing that makes us unique as humans” (Daniel Ek) 29. The paradox of long-term patience mixed with short term impatience. “Jeff Bezos talks about this (getting there) "step by step ferociously’ you know, that's the I'm willing to take two decades or three decades to solve the problem that I'm trying to solve. Maybe in some cases stuff that he's working on which might even outlive his lifetime, but it doesn't mean I'm dillydallying on a day-to-day basis. (David)” 30. “I met your co-founder (for Neko Health) and I got to see this too and I was like, "Oh, like this is cool……… like who made the machines? It's just like… we did.” 31. Differentiation and retention of total control (Dyson) 32. If you start your day with a full calendar. You’ve already lost “You got to just figure out what works for you and you got to do more of that and that's more about energy management” (Daniel) There are no rules. James Dyson is the single shareholder of a multi, multi, multi-billion dollar company that builds some of the best products in the world. He goes “I need a hell of a lot of sleep. 10 hours a night or my entire next day is ruined” There are no rules. 33. My whole journey is one of selfmastery and and finding out how I can become the best version of myself. (Daniel) 34 The greatest ideas I've had come from the most weird and wonderful places where I expected nothing out of it. (Daniel) 35. Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort. “Quality for me is less. Quality for me is focus. Quality for me is improving day by day. All of these things build quality and quality is rare. quality in people is rare, quality in ideas is rare, and we tend to make these things binary.” (Daniel Ek) 36. The best investors are not investors at all. The best investors are entrepreneurs that never sold (Nick Sleep) 37. Diversification is for those with no conviction. “Sam Walton talks about he's like I didn't really do investing in anything but Walmart. He wasn't waking up saying I need to diversify my portfolio, I need to worry about capital allocation, he's just like ‘I believe in what I'm doing I'm going to keep doing it I'm going to throw all my money in there because I love to do it and spending time doing anything else would be an absolute distraction’” (David) 38. The best financial decisions. Are not financial decisions at all. 39. Greatness evaporates when you lose focus. 40. The difference between successful people and and really successful people is really successful people say no (Warren Buffet) 41. “In life the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game. The challenge is to figure out what game you're playing.” (Kwame Appiah) 42. Be careful what you want in life. 43. "A business is an idea to make somebody else's life better." (Richard Branson) 44. What would Daniel Ek want on his tombstone? “He lived” Highly recomend you listen to this conversation for yourself.