Spotify founder Daniel Ek on the importance of betting on yourself

Did you invest your personal capital into starting Spotify? Because I read again that you'd spent pretty much all of your personal wealth to start the company.

Yeah, I did. So I invested not all of it, but quite substantial amounts of it. And my co founder invested even more, but he obviously had a much larger sum of money. All in all, I think we invested about $10 million by ourselves, which was also crazy. Doing that on a seed stage back in 2006, that just was unheard of.

What if it hadn't worked out? What would have been the personal implications for you financially?

The personal implications. I went from not having to have a job to then probably having to go back to having a job. So I basically took that security that I built up that 22 I'm set for life, and I gave that up. From a purely logical point of view, it was probably a terrible decision, but betting on myself and betting on yourself would probably be. Again, I say I shouldn't give advice, but it is probably the. The best advice I could give many people, especially those that want to invest in various startups, but they may not have a lot of money. And then I always say, well, why don't you just bet on yourself instead? Why don't you just try to, like, work for one of these startups and maybe take a little bit more equity and a little bit less pay and take out of your cash instead? Because that way you increase the likelihood, hopefully, if you know you're good, of the company being a success and it just feels like the more prudent thing to do. So I had a sneaky feeling that that was the right thing to do, but investing as much probably wasn't the smartest thing to do.