Thread by @polina_marinova

Meet Daniel Ek (@eldsjal), the Swedish no-nonsense founder who built Spotify into a creative empire.

Here's how he did it:

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In 2006, he was asking himself this seemingly impossible question: "What is better than free?"

At the time, online music piracy was thriving in Sweden.

The country had one of the fastest internet speeds in the world, which allowed people to download music in seconds.

The second that Ek tried Napster, he was hooked. The world's music was suddenly at his fingertips — for free.

Napster eventually got shut down, but Ek knew that it would be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

Something needed to exist that could be legal AND free.

“I had this idea of the kind of product I wanted to see in the world: What if we can build something that makes it feel like you had all the world’s music on your hard drive? If we can create that feeling, we’ll have built something much better than piracy," he says.

He began thinking.

In Sweden, internet was fast, but in the rest of the world, downloading illegal music could take sometimes up to an hour.

What if he could offer something fast?

He wanted the user to be able to press play and access the song immediately.

It needed to be fast, and it needed to be reliable.

Ek knew he had to simultaneously earn the trust of listeners, musicians, & the entire embattled record industry.

"At the end of the day, if you say what you’re going to do and then keep on doing that, you will do pretty well."

Over the last 14 years, Ek has built Spotify into the world's leading audio platform.

Here's a glimpse into the mind of a founder who built a tiny startup into a music streaming behemoth with 320 million users across 92 markets.

This @ProfileRead Dossier is jam-packed with lessons around harnessing your creativity, managing your schedule, becoming a better leader, and solving impossible problems.

theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-…