Daniel Ek

Daniel Ek (born 21 February 1983) is a Swedish billionaire entrepreneur and technologist. Ek is known for being the co-founder and CEO of music streaming service Spotify.[3]

Daniel Ek
Daniel Ek in 2011
Born (1983-02-21) 21 February 1983[1]
Stockholm, Sweden
NationalitySwedish
OccupationCEO and co-founder, Spotify
Net worthUS$4.5 billion (July 2020)[2]
Children2

Early life

Ek grew up in the Rågsved district of Stockholm, Sweden.

Education

Ek graduated high school from IT-Gymnasiet in Sundbyberg in 2002, and subsequently studied engineering at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology before dropping out to focus on his IT career.[4]

Business career

Early ventures

Ek's first foray into the business world began at age 13 when he started a business making websites for clients from his home. He charged the first client $100, but then charged the next client who asked $200. Eventually, he started charging $5,000 per website. To help expand the business, Ek recruited students from his class to work on the websites from the school computer lab by bribing them with video games. His earnings eventually reached $50,000 per month and by age 18 he was managing a team of 25. Ek's parents started to notice his earnings once he started bringing home large TVs.[5]

Ek later served in a senior role at Nordic auction company Tradera which was acquired by eBay in 2006. Ek also served as the CTO of browser based game and fashion community Stardoll. Ek later started another company Advertigo, an online advertising company. Advertigo sold to TradeDoubler in 2006.[6] After selling Advertigo, Ek briefly became the CEO of μTorrent, working with μTorrent founder Ludvig Strigeus. This ended when μTorrent was sold to BitTorrent on December 7 of 2006. Strigeus would later join Ek as a Spotify developer.[7]

Spotify

The sale of Advertigo as well as his previous work made Ek wealthy enough that he decided to retire. However, after a few months Ek realized that money was meaningless without a project he was passionate about which led to the founding of Spotify.[5] Ek first had the idea for Spotify in 2002 when peer-to-peer music service Napster shut down and another illegal site Kazaa took over. Ek said he "realised that you can never legislate away from piracy. Laws can definitely help, but it doesn't take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry – that gave us Spotify."[6]

Ek incorporated Spotify AB with Martin Lorentzon in Stockholm, Sweden in 2006.[8] Lorentzon had previously worked at and co-founded TradeDoubler which had acquired Ek's previous company Advertigo.[9] In October 2008, the company launched its legal music streaming service Spotify. Initially, Spotify ran on a peer-to-peer distribution model, similar to uTorrent, but switched to a server-client model in 2014.[10] Ek serves as CEO of Spotify.[11] In October 2015, Spotify Co-Founder Martin Lorentzon announced he would be stepping down as Chairman and Ek would be taking over alongside his current role as CEO.[12] As of April 2019, Spotify has 217 million active users[13] and as of June 2017 had raised over $2.5 billion in venture funding.[14][15]

In 2017, Daniel Ek was named as the most powerful person in the music industry by Billboard.[16]

Political positions

In 2016, Ek and fellow Spotify co-founder Martin Lorentzon wrote an open letter on the blogging platform Medium to the Swedish government saying that if certain changes to Swedish law regarding housing, taxation, and education are not made Spotify will be forced to re-locate from the country.[17] More specifically, Ek claims that the high taxes in Sweden on stock options makes it difficult to incentivize programmers to work at startups when startups have trouble competing with larger companies on salary. Moreover, Ek claims Swedish permitting policy is overly restrictive limiting the supply of affordable housing.[18]

Personal life

In 2016, Ek married Sofia Levander, his longtime partner, at Lake Como. At Ek's wedding, Bruno Mars was invited to perform and Chris Rock officiated; he invited numerous guests, including Mark Zuckerberg.[19] Ek and his wife have two children together.

Net worth

It was reported in 2016 that Ek owns approximately $825 million of Spotify (10.3%), when it was valued at $8 billion.[20] As of 2017 Spotify was valued at $16 billion, which would put Ek's share at over $1.6 billion assuming he did not sell any of his stake.[21] Since 2017 the Spotify Enterprise Value has risen to over $58 billion.[22]

References
  1. Will Schmidt (21 February 2014). "Happy Birthday Daniel Ek!". Tech.Co. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
  2. "Forbes profile: Daniel Ek". Forbes. Retrieved July 20, 2020.
  3. Brendan Greeley (14 Jul 2011). "Spotify's Ek Wins Over Music Pirates With Labels' Approval". Bloomberg. Retrieved 3 Sep 2016.
  4. "Spotify's Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music"..
  5. "Daniel Ek's "impossible thinking" started at age 13 with a Web development mini-empire". 9 November 2012. Retrieved 2017-12-06..
  6. Neate, Rupert (17 February 2010). "Daniel Ek profile: 'Spotify will be worth tens of billions'". Retrieved 6 Dec 2017..
  7. Andy (12 Nov 2014). "Spotify Reminded of uTorrent Past After Branding Grooveshark 'Pirates'". Torrent Freak. Retrieved 3 Sep 2016.
  8. "Spotify Subscriptions Boost Revenue But Operating Loss Widens". Fortune. Reuters. 24 May 2016. Retrieved 3 Sep 2016.
  9. Robert Levine (5 Jun 2015). "Billboard Cover: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek on Taylor Swift, His 'Freemium' Business Model and Why He's Saving the Music Industry". Billboard. Retrieved 3 Sep 2016.
  10. Janko Roettgers (16 Apr 2014). "Spotify gives up on P2P technology for music streaming". GigaOm. Retrieved 3 Sep 2016.
  11. "Spotify Information". Retrieved 2009-09-19.
  12. Lunden, Ingrid. "Spotify co-founder Martin Lorentzon steps down as chairman, CEO Daniel Ek steps up". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2016-10-14.
  13. "Spotify Reports First Quarter 2019 Earnings". Spotify. 2019-04-29. Retrieved 2019-04-30.
  14. Micah Singleton (15 June 2017). "Spotify now has 140 million active users".
  15. "Spotify - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding". Crunchbase.
  16. music, Guardian (2017-02-10). "Spotify's Daniel Ek named most powerful person in the music business". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-03-29.
  17. Wong, Joon Ian. ""Sweden must change quickly": Spotify threatens to leave the country". Quartz.
  18. "DANIEL EK". POLITICO. December 7, 2016.
  19. "Billboard Power 100's New No. 1: Spotify Streaming Pioneer Daniel Ek". Billboard. Retrieved 2017-05-27.
  20. "Spotify co-founders own an estimated $1.8bn stake in company". Music Business Worldwide. November 18, 2016.
  21. Swahnberg, Sophie Sassard, Helena Soderpalm, Olof (September 27, 2017). "Exclusive: Spotify's valuation turned up to $16 billion in private trades - sources" – via www.reuters.com.
  22. "Spotify Technology S.A. (SPOT) Valuation Measures & Financial Statistics". finance.yahoo.com.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.