Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential

Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the All In interview show where we, the All In podcast, dedicate an hour to just some of the great, thinkers, creators of our time. And today, we'll be no different. Daniel Ek is with us. You know him, the cofounder of Spotify, which he started twenty years ago, and he ran it for those two decades to an extraordinary state of affairs today. Well over 700,000,000 active users, over 300,000,000 premium subscribers. But on January first this year, he shifted and became the executive chairman with me and David Friedberg today, Daniel Mack. How are you, sir? Welc

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's good to be on.

Yeah. It's good to see you. We've known each other for twenty years. I remember the first, 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, nobody had a subscription service. So we're gonna talk today about your new startup, just incredible in the health care space. But take us back to the launch of Spotify and and how that crazy idea got started and then 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 grow

Well, 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 ended up being bald. So 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 2006, I was 23 at the time and and the world looked a little bit different. So this is pre iPhone, pre I mean, Facebook existed but it was college only, YouTube didn't exist, so just like that kind of dates me but this is before all the things we now take for granted. And a

I mean, isn't that amazing, Freiberg? Five years in the laboratory just to get to the to the to The US market is quite a quite a journey. That's a lot of pain and suffering.

Yeah. But but you know you know the crazy thing is I'm on the same journey now again.

Yeah. Here we are.

NECO actually, as crazy as it is, we started the company eight years ago in 2018. And we started it in Sweden in 2023. So it took us five years to develop the product, try it out in Sweden, and then once we've proven it in Sweden, we took it to The UK and did it there. And then from there on, now we're launching in The US. So it's an exact Spotify playbook again but this time in healthcare.

One of the afflictions of great entrepreneurs is you're entrepreneurial. Right? I mean, you just can't stop.