All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Monday, September 28, 2026
Daniel Ek recounted the challenging origins of Spotify, which he co-founded at age 23 in 2006. He explained that at the time, the music industry was in freefall due to widespread piracy, with no viable legal alternatives like iTunes available in many markets. Ek and his co-founder Martin leveraged their prior startup earnings to convince record labels to try their subscription model, guaranteeing them their annual bonuses.
“Well, I I usually start off by sort of saying whenever anyone asks me about the story is like, well, I had hair when I began this, and by the end of this, I obviously, uh, ended up bald. So, uh, you can see that it wasn't an easy journey.”
“So I was sitting in Sweden and I was thinking to myself, you know, this is this is wild and this is crazy. There's no way to put the genie back in the bottle.”
“And then eventually after a few years of negotiation, agreed to it. So we launched in late 2008.”