Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential

The dermatology AI catch most doctors can't make, why chronic disease is preventable if caught early, and the Spotify playbook rerun inside healthcare.

With Daniel Ek

Daniel Ek spent two decades building Spotify into the dominant music platform before stepping back to executive chairman. Years before that transition, he had already started quietly obsessing over a different problem: healthcare spending keeps climbing while outcomes get worse. Ek's bet, built into his company Neko, is that the fix isn't a new drug or a new insurance scheme, it's data, specifically more of it, gathered across more modalities, over longer timeframes, so disease gets caught before it becomes expensive and irreversible. He's running the exact playbook he ran with Spotify: prove it in Sweden, prove it in the UK, then bring it to the US. This conversation pulls the operating mechanics of that bet, from how the diagnostic visit actually works to what the early data is already showing.