EK Daniel
Person
EK Daniel

EK
Daniel

CEO and co-founder of the Spotify

Organization: Spotify

Date of Birth: 22 February 1983
person_view.holiday: George Washington’s Birthday

Age: 42 years old

Zodiac sign: Pisces

Profession: Chief Executive Officer

Content

Biography

Daniel Ek is a Swedish billionaire entrepreneur and technologist. Ek is known for being the co-founder and CEO of music streaming service Spotify.

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.

Career

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.

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, 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.

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. 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."

Ek incorporated Spotify AB with Martin Lorentzon in Stockholm, Sweden in 2006. Lorentzon had previously worked at and co-founded TradeDoubler which had acquired Ek's previous company Advertigo. 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. Ek serves as CEO of Spotify. 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. As of April 2019, Spotify has 217 million active users and as of June 2017 had raised over $2.5 billion in venture funding.

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

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. Ek and his wife have two children together.

Rating GlobalNY.biz

Takes place
general
№4045
general
Takes place
area
№1308
In rating
Business
area
Takes place
№185
profession

Mentioned together

President of Lithium Americas
1 place
Chairman of Koch Strategic Platforms
2 place

Colleagues

Chief Executive Officer of Albemarle
1 place

Born in one day

Date of Birth: 22.02.1983. Age: 42. Zodiac sign: Pisces.
person_view.holiday: George Washington’s Birthday
(Pig) .
Horoscope Pisces: horoscope for today, horoscope for tomorrow, horoscope for week, horoscope for month, horoscope for year.
Days left until next birthday: 323 Days.
American actor
1 place
American politician
2 place
American rapper
3 place
President of Peloton
4 place
Founder and CEO of Binance
5 place
Co-founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group
6 place
General director of Fertitta Entertainment
7 place
Dominican professional baseball shortstop
8 place

Profile statistic

mentions
views
Companies rating
Major League Baseball (MLB)
70 Persons
National Football League (NFL)
42 Persons
National Basketball Association (NBA)
37 Persons
GlobalNY.biz pays special attention to the activities of famous people: politicians, officials, businessmen, bankers, cultural and sports figures. Their opinion largely determines the development of political, social and economic life in New York. The section is constantly edited by our journalists for the relevance of information. Here you can find information about CEOs and presidents of top New York companies, officials and public figures who play a key role in the development of the region.
The goal of the project is to create a comfortable information space for all market actors, as well as to acquaint the readership with business people in New York.
We have created an impressive database of people in New York, which contains information about a career path, education and other important information about a person.
Thanks to automatic counting of the number of mentions of a person in the news sections " New York News ”and“ New York Press Releases ”on the portal the rating of popularity and influence of persons is formed. The GlobalNY.biz team monitors rating changes and rewards project participants for their success. In general, the rating of participants is based on an in-depth analysis of the activity of PR services of famous people, and also reflects the qualitative state of the information field formed by the media and press services around the organization.
Business People of New York is a project about people who, through their ideas, words and deeds, have a great influence on the development and prosperity of New York.
Alena Potapova

Development Director
Population
8,201,017,247
Died this year
15,227,996
Born this year
37,463,564