Founder syndrome!

Friday’s Fiasco

"I'm ready to go from a player to a coach," says Daniel Ek. After twenty years as CEO, Ek is moving to executive chairman whilst two deputies become co-CEOs. Sounds like succession planning, right? Except both CEOs report to him. He'll still make all major strategic decisions and capital allocation calls. He's basically outsourcing operations whilst keeping control. Spotify shares dropped 4% on the news suggesting shareholders don’t like the direction of Spotify’s governance. 

Our suspicions:

1. Founder syndrome. Even after twenty years, Ek apparently still believes nobody else should make Spotify's big strategic calls. He's spent years preparing Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström (both fifteen-year Spotify veterans who've been running most operations since 2023). If you can't trust your successors after two decades, when exactly will you be ready?

2. In the firing line. Spotify insists the transition was planned before the artist boycott relating to Ek’s investment in Helsing, which makes AI-powered weapons systems, where he is also executive chairman. The market isn't convinced. Moving from CEO to chairman right when your ethical choices are under fire looks like distancing yourself from accountability whilst maintaining control and sounds a lot like PR. 

3. Founder privilege is a thing. Spotify is a publicly listed company (NYSE since 2018), but it has a dual-class share structure. Ek and co-founder Martin Lorentzon control the majority of voting rights despite owning a minority of shares. This means Ek can essentially do whatever he wants including appointing himself to whatever role suits him regardless of what ordinary shareholders or governance best practice might suggest. Yes, chairs should typically be independent. No, that doesn't apply when you control the voting shares. 

4. Nobody cares about good governance until a scandal. Good governance requires clear lines of authority. This structure creates confusion about who's actually accountable. If Norström and Söderström make bold strategic moves that feel distinctly different from OG Ek in the next 18 months, maybe this transition is real. If everything still feels like Daniel Ek's Spotify with different names on the announcements, we'll know this was just clever positioning whilst in the hot seat.

Our advice to Spotify

• Appoint an independent chair. Yes, dual-class shares mean Ek can ignore this. But good governance isn't about what you can get away with; it’s about what actually works.

• Set clear boundaries. This halfway house serves nobody except Ek's ego. Define precisely which decisions belong to the CEOs and which require board approval. "Ek handles strategy whilst they execute" guarantees constant interference and confusion.

• Put people around Ek who'll say no. When founders control the votes, boards must push back even harder. Just because dual-class shares let Ek ignore governance best practice doesn't mean the board should enable it. 

Twenty years should be long enough to trust someone else with your life's work.

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Dear Leah,

I'm Chief Technology Officer at a scale-up that's grown from 20 to 200 people in two years. Our founder is brilliant but increasingly becoming the company's biggest bottleneck. She insists on approving every technical decision, reviewing all code personally, and sits in on client calls that don't require her input. Last week, she overruled our entire engineering team's recommendation because "it doesn't feel right to me." The team is getting frustrated - our best developers are starting to look elsewhere, and we're missing crucial product deadlines because everything gets stuck in the "founder approval" queue. She says she's "maintaining quality standards," but she's actually slowing us down. When I suggested delegation, she said I "don't understand the vision like she does." How do I help her transition from hands-on founder to strategic leader without crushing her spirit or triggering a defensive response?

— Caught between Genius and Gridlock

Dear Caught between Genius and Gridlock,
You're watching a classic founder evolution crisis where someone who built the company is now accidentally strangling it. The good news is she cares deeply about quality. The bad news is she's confusing control with leadership.

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Sara Ahmed on new book, “No is not a lonely utterance” (Allen Lane, 2025), interviewed at Foyles in conversation with Heidi Safia Mirza on 22 September 2025.

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