Daniel Ek: From Spotify to Healthcare — The Same Playbook, A Bigger Problem

Daniel Ek spent his twenties and thirties building Spotify from a contrarian idea in Stockholm into a global platform with over 700 million users. On January 1, 2025, he stepped back from the CEO role to become executive chairman. But he did not retire. He had already been quietly building his next company for eight years: Neko, a vertically integrated preventative healthcare business that follows the exact same playbook he used to break the music industry.

The Spotify Playbook, Applied to Healthcare

Ek started Spotify in 2006, when he was 23. The music industry was in freefall from piracy — Napster, Kazaa, the RIAA suing individual consumers. His co-founder Martin asked what he would build if he could do anything. Ek said music, but dismissed it as a stupid idea because licensing deals with record labels were impossibly hard. Martin kept asking "what if" until Ek ran out of objections. The result: a guarantee to the labels that they would hit their bonus targets for one year even if the service failed, which made the deal risk-free for them. "If this really is as bad as you think it is, then you just shut it down after a year, but you still made the bonus," Ek explained. The labels agreed after years of negotiation. Spotify launched in Sweden in 2008, then the UK, then the US in 2011 — five yea