Daniel Ek, Co-Founder & CEO, Spo­tify and Loic Le Meur, Founder, LeWeb

Daniel started his first com­pany when he was 14. Swe­den was known for piracy, because of Kazaa and Pirate Bay. Because every­one had broad­band and it was super fast, con­sump­tion existed before ser­vices did, so pirate sites had lots of users. Spo­tify was a reac­tion to this. It was evi­dent that peo­ple loved Kazaa and Nap­ster, but these solu­tions did not sat­isfy the indus­try. There had to be a way to offer a ser­vice within the bounds of legal­ity. The idea was to cre­ate an iTunes with all the world’s music, avail­able on any device and not just the iPhone.

Daniel announces that the Spo­tify team has built a radio app on top of their own plat­form. It’s like Pan­dora, but with unlim­ited skip­ping. It ended up being really fast for them to develop this. The best part of the expe­ri­ence is being able to skip as many tracks as you want — as opposed to Pan­dora, which lim­its your skips and your num­ber of sta­tions. But users want to eas­ily add tracks from the radio into their own music library (and pay for it). Devel­op­ers are wel­come to build on top of this app as well.

Some advice for entrepreneurs:

1. Idea is 5% and the exe­cu­tion is 95%.
2. Peo­ple is every­thing. If you want to build a strong prod­uct, then be famil­iar with all aspects of it, includ­ing devel­op­ment. As an entre­pre­neur, you have to try every­thing. Also, the most impor­tant part is the early days, when you build the ini­tial team.
3. Focus. As an entre­pre­neur, you are an edi­tor, set­ting the con­text, choos­ing what not to do, what to do, and dis­till­ing every­thing to the most essential.

Spo­tify has 2.5 mil­lion sub­scribers pay­ing about $10 per month. How­ever, there is no IPO in sight. The Spo­tify team has a cul­ture of want­ing to build a really great com­pany. The objec­tive is not to sell the com­pany. What they want to do is to change the world (of music).

Mark Zucker­berg and Daniel both believe that music is the most social object there is.