Daniel Ek: Don't Say Yes to Everything

Well, you know, I've done a lot of mistakes. I've probably done every mistake in the book. But I think some of the more important lessons I've had actually is it's so easy to say yes to things because you think that as the company kind of evolves and even as you have more people, it's like, well, this sounds like a reasonable idea. Well, even if you in your head say this sounds like a reasonable idea, that means no. Unless you're dead sure that this is the one thing we should do, it's probably better to say no. So I'd say my dumbest mistake is just taking on too much, doing too much at the same time, which never ever works. Be really, really focused, be obsessed about the few things that matter and say no to everything else. It's really, really hard to do that. But if you focus on that, if you get that right, you're eventually going to be able to do more things because you know that this kind of works. And I think another one which is insanely important, especially as we move on, is again, it's this notion that hire fast and fire fast. And I know this sounds incredibly tough, but in so many regards, as you meet people and you're working through these companies, the life cycle of a company to go from 0 users to 10 million users, as we've seen, the last couple of weeks with Vidi and socialcam can be the matter of weeks. If you then don't have the right team in place and you try to kind of learn as you go. And also the team isn't optimized for what you're doing, it's never going to work. And especially not if you're a small company. Every single person needs to carry their weight. And then more so again, I've, in many cases, just because this is a nice person and they're doing all right, I've kind of given people too much slack. And that's a mistake that I've done so many times. And I'd say the third one, which I also learned, is that don't sort of over promise. I did this thing a couple of years ago, again, being a bit naive, I said, well, surely we're going to launch in the US pretty soon. And it ended up taking us about two years to launch. From that point, I didn't know how hard it would actually be and I had to kind of eat that up, especially with TechCrunch for a very, very long period of time. They even have, like, I think, you know, April Fool's joke, April fool joke about it. They had like a countdown on New Year's Eve about it. And I'm like, oh, man, it just got more people waiting for it, which is good. Yeah. I mean, in some way, I guess it was all press is good press. But it was stupid on my behalf to kind of promise something that we weren't sure that we're going to deliver. So these days I try to under promise and over deliver.