Daniel Ek is a Swedish billionaire entrepreneur and a technologist who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14, founded Spotify in 2006 together with Martin Lorentzon. As of June 2017, Spotify has 140 million active users and has raised over $2.5 billion in venture funding.
In 2017, Daniel Ek was named as the most powerful person in the music industry by Billboard.
As the CEO and Founder of Spotify, Daniel’s role is to guide the vision and strategy of the company as it grows. Leading the management team, Daniel is also responsible for nurturing a passionate working environment for everyone at Spotify.
Spotify was founded as a reaction to the decline of the music industry. People listen to more music than ever, from a bigger diversity of artists. The underlying business has changed from being about ownership to an access model. Spotify facilitates that by offering a service in the cloud.
Prior to Spotify, Daniel Ek was the initial CTO of Stardoll, the fashion & entertainment community for tweens. He was also the CEO of Torrent, the worlds most popular BitTorrent client with more than 100 million downloads. Daniel has also founded Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler, as well as been a part of the nordic auction company Tradera (acquired by Ebay).
In his conferences, Daniel Ek shares his journey, from starting his first company at 14, to bootstrapping Spotify with his own money, to dealing with competitors, to what’s next for the industry leader.
It’s a fascinating discussion on music (and the joy and pain of innovating in this most challenging space), Spotify’s early dark days and hard lessons, startup transparency, thoughts on the Google Apple YouTube Tidal Taylor Swift potpourri, Daniel’s strategy for handling competition (hint: making Spotify better), Europe’s awesome and crazy cheap bandwidth (get with the program, America), breaking the music biz stranglehold, the future of streaming — and much more.