Host: Tim Ferris
Guest: Daniel Ek, Founder & CEO, Spotify
Category: Biz & Tech | 🏗️ Founder Stories
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[37:22] “[I]n general, I would say most people don’t stop enough and think hard enough about their priorities and focusing on the problems that are the most worthwhile for them to try to solve. And they more operate on a kind of first-come, first-serve basis when it comes to their time.”
[39:40] “[W]hen you survey people, they tend to, when you ask if the meeting was effective or not, most people actually say that meetings are wasteful. And yet we see more and more and more of it. And so I like to think that a huge point of optimization can be done by designing better meetings for people.”
[45:50] “[P]art of the reason why I’m still excited about the job I’m doing every day and not just the company is because I’m probably on my eighth job at Spotify. And what I came to realize is that part of the reason why the tenure of people at companies end up being relatively short, certainly in Silicon Valley and a lot of tech companies, is that this job journey when you deal with startups is [that] it doesn’t always confirm to better titles. Sometimes you retain the same title, but in reality, your job looks very different. And I don’t think we’re clear enough, especially in startup environments, which are incredibly fast growing.”
[48:29] “I feel like when people are disgruntled about the company changing, it’s because they haven’t realized that their job changed as well. And if it didn’t, that role and that person would hold back the entire company, which is obviously unacceptable.”
[51:47] “I think the leadership style that you ultimately have has to be authentic to who you are. And I think a lot of us take so much inspiration from leaders, including myself, by the way, where we often try to maybe copy someone specific thing that they’re doing without understanding all the underlying mechanics perfectly well.”
[53:13] “[W]hen you’re dealing with a larger company, the important part is we all get complacent. […] And I don’t know exactly why it is, but I just feel like we’re all built that way, that we want to take the easy way out. And so part of this is to do the right thing even if it’s not the easy way out, and consistently just kind of pushing the organization to do that, and raise the bar.”
[1:17:02] “[W]hen I evaluate success among a future leader at Spotify, or even someone who just joined the company, I look at the rate of their learning growth and I find that to be the best indicator for whether they will be long-term successful in their job at Spotify or not. And the gist of it is I think macro wise, first and foremost, that the world is changing just constantly and you have to adapt to that change. So I value agility and learning way more than I value the fact that you’re really good at your job and really good at doing a few things.”
Rating: 🍎🍎🍎
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 1 hr 39 min | 🗓️ 12/03/2020 | 🗄️ Archives
✅ Time saved: 1 hr 37 min
