Free You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane Page B

big spending attracted the wrong ones. “I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be,” Ek said. “I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than what I was.”
    Miserable, he sold the Ferrari and moved into a cabin near his parents, where he played guitar and meditated. Ek had already started three tech companies, but he now toyed with the idea of getting by as a professional musician. (Ek plays guitar, bass, drums, piano, and harmonica; he doesn’t sing.) “I wouldn’t be rich, but I could have made a living.” There in the woods Ek finally decided he’d somehow marry music and tech, the two passions that drove him. During this time Ek started hanging out with Tradedoubler’s chairman, Martin Lorentzon, who had fifteen years on him, but similar stamina (he works out twice a day). A Silicon Valley veteran (AltaVista), Lorentzon took Tradedoubler public in 2005, netting himself $70 million. No longer involved in the day-to-day operations, he too was bored and adrift. The first time Ek visited Lorentzon’s Stockholm apartment he found only a mattress and a laptop balancing on an IKEA chair. “I asked him when he had moved in,” says Ek. “When he said it had been more than a year ago, I knew he wasn’t happy.”
    The pair bonded over marathons of gangster films like the
Godfather
trilogy and
Carlito’s Way
(a ritual they repeat each year). “I got a very strong feeling when I met Daniel,” said Lorentzon. “To partner up I have to like the person like a brother, because we’ll face so many problems. The value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve together.”
    Ek doubted Lorentzon would leave Tradedoubler, so later in 2006 he set a one-week deadline. Before they committed to partnering, Lorentzon would have to publicly resign as chairman and transfer a million euros of seed money into Ek’s account. The next Monday Tradedoubler sent out a press release announcing Martin Lorentzon’s resignation. Later that day he told Ek to check his bank account. The money was there. The two men had yet to decide the type of business they would start.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    LORENTZON AND EK WERE in a unique place: The former no longer needed the money, and the latter no longer cared about it. So they decided to ignore the dollars and aim for disruption. Their target: music. “It disturbed me that the music industry had gone down the drain, even though people were listening to more music than ever and from a greater diversity of artists,” said Ek.
    Sitting in two different rooms at Ek’s apartment, the pair yelled out possible titles for a music site—without even yet knowing what it would do—when Ek misheard one of Lorentzon’s suggestions. He typed the word “Spotify” into Google. There were zero hits (today: 23 million). Ek and Lorentzon registered the name, and started working on the ad-based plan. Once that gelled, they recruited a handful of engineers and took the new team to Barcelona to party and listen to what Ek calls “weird German electro-pop.” Then they got to work.
    Back in Stockholm they built a prototype based on the interface of Apple’s iTunes and the sleek black styling of Ek’s Samsung flat-screen TV. Unlike music sites that had launched with pirated music, Ek wouldn’t debut Spotify until he signed deals with the labels. “We wanted to show that we were not in it to use their content to flip the company like others have done,” Ek said.
    Ek, with the help of industry lawyer Fred Davis, initially tried to get global music rights and was quickly turned down. So he aimed for European licenses, which he figured would take three months—it took two years. Ek and his team hounded label execs, pitching them that their free, ad-based model would eventually lead to more sales. No one bit. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, this sounds