I grew up in very much a working class family. My mom worked in a daycare center. My stepdad was a car mechanic. No one I knew was an entrepreneur around me, so that certainly wasn’t something to aspire to.

But what I do think my parents gave me that it was incredibly important, and I think it’s certainly been a trait that I’ve been able to find with a lot of the entrepreneurs that are in my generation too, is a lot of psychological safety.

I actually come from a music family and my grandfather was an opera singer. For him, one of the biggest things was that I learn music properly and he was the old school of classically trained, you needed to do that, you needed to read, do all that stuff and it was incredibly tedious. I spent hours and hours per day doing it and I had to struggle for a few years, really, really struggle, and I hated it. I didn't enjoy it at all.

Then for some reason, I just passed a bump where I got over that initial hardship of learning that thing and I started enjoying it. Then as I got into my teens, I got into rock music and played in bands and I started enjoying it for real, in a massive way.

For me, music has been that left brain, right brain thing and it's a lot more almost mathematical than most people realize, it's got more formulas and more patterns... It's taught me a ton.

But the most important lesson I think he taught me is don't be afraid of the struggle. It would've been so easy for him to kind of give in and settle, "Well, he clearly doesn't enjoy this," but I've learned so much now about putting myself in situations where I don't know anything at all and just endure it for a period of time, because I know that I'll come to that hump where I'm going to start enjoying it. I don't know how long it will take and it's going to be very uncomfortable in the meantime, but he taught me that, and that was super valuable.

I think I’m naive enough to think that things will always work out.

Fast forward, I’m now like in later stages in elementary school. I had all the people in my class that were good at math and I taught them how to do HTML for me and the people that were really good at design, I taught them Photoshop. I was basically running an illegal sweatshop, when I was 14. That was the start of my entrepreneurial career.

None of that money mattered, it didn’t make me happier. In fact, it was kinda sad to think the thing I strived for didn’t mean anything in the end. So I started thinking about what truly mattered to me and I realized that there was two things in my life that had always been really present, which was music and technology.

It came back to me constantly that Napster was such an amazing consumer experience, and I wanted to see if it could be a viable business.

We said, “The problem with the music industry is piracy. Great consumer product, not a great business model. But you can’t beat technology. Technology always wins. But what if you can make a better product than piracy?”

Piracy was kind of hard. It took a few minutes to download a song, it was kind of cumbersome, you had to worry about viruses. It’s not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience. So we started sketching what that would look like.

I told him from the beginning that hey this is probably gonna lose us a lot of money. I have a hard time seeing this ever being a sustainable business but I'm in, let's do this and he said, “Great, let's do it.”

I wanted to do something where in the end, the artists, and the labels, and everyone in the ecosystem was part of the development.

It was about a year when I was going through this transition of just having fun being retired. First month was fun. Six months in, depressing. Nine months in, am I ever gonna get out of this depression, to then kind of a year in finding something else that I truly look forward to that felt crazy and I honestly did not think we would succeed but if we succeeded I knew it was going to be a big thing.

If you looked at Sweden, at that time, I think, it had lost more than 80% of its entire revenue base. It was really in shambles.

Going from the beginning where I tried to get everything in all markets and realizing that that wasn’t going to work, I decided to shift strategy and instead take a very narrow market where they lost most of it and said, “Look, why don’t I prove this to you and take it to my own home country?” I essentially told them like, “I guarantee you one year’s worth of revenue in that market if you enable this business model.”

Through it all my co-founder, Martin, probably a factor of just who he is as an individual but also probably because he didn't participate in these meetings, kept being really upbeat, kept being amazingingly supportortive… and then he also said a few times when that wasn't enough, “Don't worry about it, we'll figure out something else if this doesn't work out.”

It felt to me like I always had a safety net and it was just the push that I needed to do this and again talking about not giving advice but to the advice that I do give to other people is to share the burden with someone, it is so important.

I read in this book that the human brain takes about 200 milliseconds to perceive anything, like at all. I said to the engineering team, we gotta get this down to 200 milliseconds. At that time, that was 2006, that was considered crazy.

I think one of the things that we did that was amazing was we were really really adamant about people trying our product.

So during this process, the two and a half years, we did all sorts of things to get them to use it and in the cases where they didn't want to use it we managed to figure out ways where their kids went to school and infiltrated their schools so that everyone in the school was using the product.

That's, by the way, a great marketing tactic. If you want to reach parents, go through their kids. So we just got everyone around them to start using this and eventually started building peer pressure about this product.

He thinks much bigger than most people…

The guy is just purely brilliant. You always leave thinking about the world in a slightly different way after you’ve met him.

I'd book a week a flight to New York with no meeting booked with basically an open calendar and about 20 phone calls a day just trying to figure out a time to get on the schedule of a senior VP or a CEO.

That certainly happened and that taught me another thing too which is that these assistants, you better befriend them because they are the keys to the kingdom and most people don't care about them at all but they're very influential, they're very powerful, and that was hard in the beginning, but then I realized that they got to see me as an individual, I saw them as an individual, and we tend to believe the world is more logical than what it is but a lot of it is based on relationships.

So eventually some of them started taking a liking to me and so when there was the opportunity and they could prioritize 10 other things for that CEO to do but I was there I was friendly and easy to work with, showed up with no moments notice even if you know it was 20 minutes before finding out about it I would show up and so I was easy to deal with so take away all that complexity in order to achieve the outcome that I wanted and sometimes that is as simple as just be consistent, be the easiest person to deal with, and you'd be surprised how many problems it solves.

Such calm helps manage the chaos: Last year Ek was on the road 100 days—mostly a triangle between Europe, New York and California, a schedule that recently cost him his girlfriend of two years.

When he’s in Stockholm, Ek wakes around 8:30 a.m., answers e-mail for an hour, then takes the five-minute walk to Spotify. He spends about 25% of his time recruiting; otherwise he’s at his open desk or walking the floor. “Ek’s one of the few people,” says Parker, “who can handle the technology side, the strategic side and the deal side of the business.”

Ek works in the office until 8 p.m., eats dinner out and then returns home to unwind, either by playing guitar for a few hours or juggling a rotating trio of books (most recently, the Steve Jobs biography, a primer on typography and a guide to bonzai trees). Then he hops back on e-mail, before typically turning in around 2 a.m.

Lorentzon wants Ek to find a balance: more exercise, less junk food, more sleep, less work. The last goal will be tough to achieve for the foreseeable future.

So what we look at and when we benchmark ourself against other services that are out there, like Pirate Bay and Kazaa and what else might be out there, we actually look at ease-of-use as the biggest single competitive advantage.

We’ve been doing this for years and what we’ve built is the largest set of data of the most engaged music customers. I think it would be really hard for anyone to come in and do what we do better.

Maybe someone could lower the cost of a streaming service and make it hard for us to survive. But am I concerned that someone will build a better product? No, because they can’t.

We had this discussion before, we're specialized, we don't do anything other than our own service. Apple and Google does this and about 10,000 other things.

I think there's something huge in terms of that focus because it brings clarity. This is all I do every day I don't invest in other companies, I just focus on building this company, and you know we think by that focus in the thousands, if not millions of hours, that we produce in just creating that experience we will win.

The way you win in this fast-moving world where honestly it's moving faster and faster by the day and there's so much innovation around the world, the only way you can win is by being super focused on solving one problem better than anyone else and by moving faster than everyone else in solving that problem.

It's really simple if you think about it like that and I like to think that it doesn't matter how many smart Mensa people you have in your company, sooner or later you're gonna get defocused if you do 1,000 things and you can't do all thousand things super well.

The way we're thinking about this is really through the lens of music. The fundamental thing that we ask ourself at Spotify is how can we bring music into every moment of someone's life because our view is really I can't think of a single moment which wouldn't be better if we add music to it which is why we have music here.

With that lens we keep looking at the things that people are doing today where music is a huge part. One of those things is people commuting, whether it's by being in the car like the average American spends an hour and a half in the car every day if not more. The average European commutes for 30 minutes plus on a bus or subway or whatever it is so there's a lot of time there which today people are listening to music that honestly Spotify hasn't been a big part of.

FC: Did you celebrate the IPO?

DK: No. I’m always thinking about what’s next. It comes back to my psyche. I’m never content with where I am now.

FC: Does that mean you don’t enjoy any of this?

DK: I enjoy it, but I enjoyed it much earlier than when it happens. By the time it happens, I’m onto the next thing.

I think we sided in the end with where you do have a very different constituent than your core constituents and when the job to be done is materially different than the one you're providing, then it may make sense to break it up into a constellation.

So, in the case of Spotify, the two, maybe more obvious examples for us as we just launched just a few days ago, Spotify Kids, where the job to be done, even if it's listening to the content, it may seem very different.

So many modalities are so different when it comes to kids. You don't want the same signup flow as you have in a normal version, you don't want it probably to be available for free so that it has advertising towards kids in it. We actually don't want to gather any sensitive data obviously about it. Don't want kids ... In our case, you can choose an avatar, but you can't upload a picture or do any of that stuff. You can even change the color of how it looks like. There's all the ways to customizing it.

But maybe the most important thing is obviously it's a 100% curated experience. We don't let anything into our Kids product that isn't vetted by our editors. So, the job to be done on multiple dimensions, even if it's listening, content ended up being so vastly different because of these constituents.

The other example, obviously Spotify for artists where it's an artist constituent. So, it's not even about necessarily consuming content, but it's about how they market their content, present their content and edit tools and all of those things. That's sort of looking at example of stat.

At Spotify, we have something called “Company Bets.” These are large-scale initiatives that we believe will have a significant impact on the business within a relatively short period of time. I find that these bets are a much better use of my time.

Our Company Bets typically update every six months, so I'm not needed that much in between. This way, I can constantly be thinking: “Where are we headed in the next six months?” Right now, I am thinking more about H2 2021. From a timeline perspective, that's the earliest place where I focus most of my time.

It’s also my role to think far beyond that. For instance, I’m immersing myself in our 2025 plans. I trust my team to manage the day-to-day, shorter-term initiatives and iterate as needed based on data and insights. They’re the best at that and I appreciate that this then frees me up to think about the long term.

Just like we did in music we actually like working with the ecosystem to try to see if there's a win-win outcome where creators win and consumers win at the same time.

We took the same mindset that we had in music beforehand and applied it to audiobooks and we spent the better part of two years just trying to understand what their issues were fundamentally before we introduced the model and the big realization was, just like in music, there was one dominating player that was there before and it was kind of stagnant with innovation and just like in music it was actually a quite small number of people that were in this legal environment.

That's the amazing thing because it is the most scalable thing done right of a company and it's the hardest thing because it is everything and nothing.

It is every positive action that's happening in the company, every negative action, every person that's joining, every person that’s leaving is impacting culture.

So in its essence I believe culture is about rewarding the positive behaviors you want to see in the company and obviously dissuading the negative.

Look at Netflix. People think that because Netflix now owns more of their own content, it’s like a defensible moat. The premise is just very, very faulty.

I think that Netflix is winning for a different reason than what everyone else thinks. They’re winning because they’re simply moving faster than everyone else.

There’s nothing sustainable or unique about what Netflix is doing, and in fact, I would argue that if they kept doing what they’re already doing, they will start failing. Amazon, Apple, Google–you have a bunch of these people now entering the same arena. The pace of innovation is greater at Netflix than their competitors and therefore they’re winning.

I think long term, we at Spotify have some defensible moats, but success for us will be determined by our ability to move faster than everyone else in the space. And just keep on innovating.

This is something I've been thinking about for awhile. The success of companies out of Silicon Valley is well documented but the same cannot be said for Europe despite the incredible talent and ideas coming out of the region.

Europe needs more super companies for the ecosystem to develop and thrive. There are many things we can point to that have held Europe back but one of the greatest challenges to date for the growth of successful European companies is access to capital and this is why I’m devoting one billion euro of my personal resources to enable the ecosystem of builders who can build a new European Dream.

I’ll be looking to fund so-called moonshots — focusing on the deep technology necessary to make a significant positive dent and work with scientists, entrepreneurs, investors and governments to do so. There’s a lot of incredible talent in Europe and I want to do my part so that more great companies can be built here.

A great meeting has three key elements: the desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time; the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time; and the roles of the participants are clear at the time…

I think that's the single largest source of optimization for a company: the makeup of their meetings. To be clear, it's not about fewer meetings because meetings serve a purpose. Rather, it’s key to improve the meetings, themselves. A lot of my efforts focus on teaching people this framework. Ironically, I find that most people are just challenged by that stuff.

I’m really organized. I don’t do social calls. For so many people, you’re beholden to this social thing, if I don’t show up, someone is going to be sad. I’m just pretty ruthless in prioritizing. What I tell my friends is, I like to be invited, but I probably won’t come. The transparency helps. This is how I’m wired. It’s not a personal thing. It doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy your company. It’s just means that I’m focusing on something.

I also write out what my daily, weekly, monthly goals are, and every evening I check how I’m doing. And then I just over allocate my time [to match the goals].

People think that creativity is this free spirit that has no boundaries. No, actually the most creative people in the world schedule their creativity. That’s the irony. So I try to do the same.

I just don’t have as many meetings as you think. Instead I have a lot of me time where I’m just thinking; I’m at a white board drawing by myself. Occasionally I might have someone with me. If I have a call or another meeting, I’ll just block it out if I’m in the zone. That’s unorthodox because it means that you’re breaking social contracts, you’re disappointing someone because you didn’t show up. But if you’re really, really focused, those are the times when the breakthroughs come.

The single biggest indicator is their ability to learn. I don't think it's about skill or knowledge because if you solving problems you're going to end up inevitably getting into situations where you end up not knowing everything.

You can see very clearly you have to build all the processes, you have to build all the systems in anticipation of that growth because it's so hard for people to comprehend what exponential growth looks like or even see around corners and see where something three times the size of what it is today, what are some of the issues that you're going to run into at that point?

And so it was probably one of the most important management lessons I've ever learned because I realized that I would have to think differently about how I build my company on the basis of how quickly we were growing.

Spotify is a pretty big company, we're like 500 people, so it's a lot of people, but it's really been one of those things that we've always had across our company. We want to share as much information as possible. And even if you kind of look inside of Spotify, you'd find that pretty much all of our metrics are available to everyone, because we think that by empowering people with data, they're going to make much smarter decisions.

Whether you only have to do a little bit of code or whether you have to do a lot of work the first thing is to try to understand how do you create value and for whom.

I'm ambitious but I probably am ambitious in the way my mother taught me to be ambitious which is the inputs, right?

Which is if I see someone with incredible potential that squanders that potential I asked myself why are you doing this and why not strive for the great thing?

And in so many cases in life I found that the difference between aiming super high versus aiming just a little bit higher than where you are from an effort perspective it's about the same effort so you might just as well aim higher.

You know this saying of you shoot for the stars and you land on the Moon? That is very much kind of my life philosophy. Why not try to do it bigger? Why not try to do it even more interesting and maybe you have to settle for something less but isn't it more interesting and more fun to try to do the really big hairy audacious thing?