A Man with His Successful Business

Daniel EK
It is a Swedish billionaire entrepreneur and technologist. Ek is best known as the co-founder and
CEO of the music streaming service.

Early Ventures
Ek's first attack into the business world started at age 13 when he began a business making sites
for customers from his home. He charged the primary customer $100, however then charged the
following customer who asked $200. In the end, he began charging $5,000 per site. 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 profit inevitably came to $50,000
every month and by age 18 he was dealing with a group of 25.

At age 14, Ek was making webpages in his high school computer room. He sold them for cheap.
Making use of his leadership, he recruited his friends to help him and, with his small
business, Daniel was earning $15,000 a month, which he mostly invested in video games.
Later, he invested in servers where he hosted the webpages. This way, he increased his profits
even more.

Not settling for this, at age 16, he tried to get hired at Google because he was obsessed with
the platform’s speed. He was rejected because he didn’t have a diploma. So, he tried to create
his own search engine, but his attempt was unsuccessful.
Then came to university. It was probably too boring for Daniel, who dropped out in his first year.
He didn’t really need it much, because soon after, he came up with a system that made him 2
million dollars.

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. After selling Advertigo, Ek briefly became
the CEO of μTorrent. This ended when μTorrent was sold to BitTorrent on December 7 of 2006.
Strigeus would later join Ek as a Spotify developer.

Spotify
Spotify Technology S.A. is a media-services provider founded in 2006 in Sweden and now
incorporated in Luxembourg. The company's primary business is its audio streaming platform
that provides DRM-protected music and podcasts from record labels and media companies.
According to Statista, Spotify has nearly 160 million active users around the world. 8 million
people pay to use it.
In 2017, Daniel Ek was named as the most powerful person in the music industry by Billboard.

Daniel gave his two passions:

 Music
 Technology

Spotify’s Vision Statement

“a cultural platform where professional creators can break free of their

medium’s constraints

Spotify’s Mission Statement

“to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the
opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be
inspired by these creators.”

Net Worth
It was reported in 2016 that Ek owns approximately $825 million of Spotify, when it was valued
at $8 billion.[20] Spotify has since been valued at $16 billion which would put Ek's share at $1.6
billion assuming he has not sold any of his stake.