Daniel Ek

Daniel Ek launched Spotify in 2008 and solved a problem the entire music industry had failed to crack: how to compete with piracy. By offering a freemium streaming model that was easier to use than stealing music, Ek convinced a generation of consumers to pay for music again — and convinced record labels that streaming was the future, not the enemy.

Spotify now has 600M+ users and 220M+ paying subscribers across 180+ markets, making it the largest music streaming platform in the world. Ek negotiated licensing deals with every major record label, built a recommendation engine (Discover Weekly) that became a cultural phenomenon, and expanded into podcasts with acquisitions of Gimlet, Anchor, and a $200M deal with Joe Rogan.

Born in Stockholm, Ek was a teenage entrepreneur who ran a web design business out of his bedroom. He made his first million by age 23, then became depressed and spent a year figuring out what he wanted to build. The answer was Spotify — a legal, frictionless alternative to piracy that would give artists a way to reach fans and get paid. The music industry initially fought him, but Ek outlasted the resistance and rebuilt the economics of recorded music.