“You don’t start a music company if you think you’re going to be filthy rich,” Daniel Ek once told the Financial Times.
But it happened anyway. Ek founded the music streaming platform Spotify in 2006 when he was 23, at the time a software engineer working out of a “small makeshift office” in Stockholm. It would take him five years to convince American music executives to allow him to launch the product in the US, a move that transformed the business. Today, the Spotify co-founder is worth $9.6bn, according to Bloomberg.
This week, Spotify announced that Ek would step down as chief executive in January next year. He will be replaced by two longtime lieutenants, Alex Norstr?m and Gustav S?derstr?m, who have worked at the company for around 15 years.