Daniel Ek: Entrepreneurship as Problem-Solving

Well, so first, to begin, I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I thought of myself as there was all these interesting problems around the world, and I kept being annoyed at them. You know, there was things around that happened around me in the world that was annoying me. And I was constantly talking to people about it, and I realized there was more people than me. I was annoyed by these things. So I asked them, what are we doing about it? And no one was really doing anything about it. So I eventually felt that, hey, I had to do something about it myself. So when I started my first company when I was 14, I never really thought of it as a company again. There was a need at that time, this is 1997, where a webpage was still. There was consulting firms charging 50 grand at least, you know, in Europe, where I'm from, to create a webpage. And I said, that's not really that hard. And I kept telling people that, so they're like, well, can you help me do it? So eventually I started doing that. And this is as I was pretty much in elementary school. And you know what I realized is I did one and I got a bit of money from it, and I was like, okay, this is pretty good. And I kept doing more and more. And eventually what ended up happening is everyone that was pretty good at math. I taught how to program HTML and all the ones that were really good at drawing. I taught Photoshop. So we ended up having the whole class pretty much producing work after school hours and building web pages for people. And that was my first company. Not that I really cared about the fact that it was a company. I cared about the fact that here's a problem and people were kept pinging me about that and I wanted to deliver great results. So that's kind of how it started. So my definition of an entrepreneur is someone that has an itch for a problem and that you're annoyed enough by that problem to actually go out and seek a solution for it.