Hi, everyone. y name is Christopher Vonheim , and you're listening to the BYNN Podcast . Simply the podcast for those who want to learn from the very best in business, tech, and entrepreneurship. Let's start the show. Johan Lind started Vertiseit with the vision of shaping the future of retail. Their job is to support and challenge their clients in their in-store transformation, and bridging digital experience with the physical in a seamless customer journey. In this episode, Johan explains why he decided with his co-founders to start Vertiseit, and the impact of the financial crisis in 2008. How they have managed to stay profitable all the way and grow every quarter. Their business model and the evolution behind it. His best advice on scaling a company abroad. And the future of retail and its impact on global brands and businesses. Let's start the show.
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Welcome back, everyone. I'm super excited to be joined by Johan. Johan, thank you so much for taking the time.
Thank you so much for having me.
Let's go all the way back. You were brought up in a small Swedish town. Tell me a bit about your home place and what's the best part of growing up there?
Yeah. Actually, I grown up outside Varberg on the west coast of Sweden. It's south of Gothenburg. It takes 35 minutes by train. It's actually a town where, like, the majority of all ships passing into Sweden goes from our hometown. It has a heritage from a lot of small tech companies and also retail companies. Also the access to Gothenburg within 35 minutes, I think it's very advantageous for us. If you look at the size of the city, it's 100,000 people. It's a place where most people come during the summer for their holiday.
How early did you find an interest in either business or entrepreneurship? Was it growing up or did it come later in life?
It was actually during my school period, I think. It was a topic that we used to discuss a lot among friends. I actually was on a path going to, like, being a software engineer and studying at the Chalmers University. I changed path during, like, the last year and I decided to go for marketing and business instead. I actually didn't finish it off. I just did one year, and after that I was recruited to a company that scaled the retail business from, like, five stores to 15. It was a really good start in my career because we had huge freedom to do what we believed in during that journey.
Four years after that, me and one of the store managers there actually started Vertiseit ourselves. We wanted to do our own journey at that point.
Tell us about that moment when you decided to change the path of going the other way and you said, "Okay, I'm gonna try this route instead." Was it anything in particular that made you decide to change path, or was it just a combination of many things?
I think it was a combination of many things, but the fundamental was that we had a very interesting period in this 3-year scaling that business. Actually, the business was in better shape when it was, like, 2, 3 stores than it was after 15 stores because the scaling of the business was when it started to scale, it was never profitable again. Also at that point, the founder that was really, like, the energy in the company become sick. These 2 things that we didn't really saw that it had a bright future, and also that the founder, Benny there, that was the, like, great entrepreneur was out of the picture. That was the 2 main things.
When you have this idea for Vertiseit, is it one particular moment where you have the sort of aha moment or is it an idea that sort of grows over time, and then it's like the timing aspect that you say, "Okay, now is the right time to try this idea," or how did it that look like?
Actually, it was, I was the purchasing manager in this company, and we had this store manager for one of the stores. It was close to the headquarters, so we had breakfast every day at the cafeteria.
Mm.
We were both mutually interested in business, and so we discussed a lot of business ideas at the time. The first thing we decided upon was that we need to do something ourselves. We had a lot of ideas we discussed during the year, I think. It was one thing that like sticks with us. That was the digital transformation that just started. We said that this needs to affect things that are outside the computer. You know, in 2007, it was like people didn't have iPhones in Sweden. We really saw that this will have an effect.
We started to work, and for half a year to do the planning, like, write the business plan, go to the bank, and try to find financing. Then we just came to a point that we said, "This is not the thing we could do during the weekends. This is 100% or not." We took as big a loan as we could from the bank. I sold my car. We quit our jobs, and just went from there, three guys in my apartment.
That's very, very interesting. I mean, during this time, we also have the financial crisis coming to us as well. Did that have an impact at all or not? Because you guys are in Sweden, and you are not really that, you know, affected by the financial crisis that generally started in U.S.
It definitely had. It could be a long story. The good thing was that we secured, like, financing before, like, end 2007. We took a loan of SEK 1 million from Almi. It's like a state-backed. And one million from the local bank, where we took 100% guarantee ourselves private. If that would have been, like, six months later, it wouldn't have been possible at that time. That was a good timing. Also, after a year when we started to get business, then it was hard to get finance at that stage.
Even though we actually were profitable the first year, we had a hard time, like, financing the company after that, because it was still really, like, frozen when it comes to the opportunity to take up loans. We managed to solve that as well.
Let's talk about product market fit. Obviously, you were going in the retail industry. You had this, okay, digitalization. Obviously, that's a massive trend, and it's the famous saying of that you need to have a niche, target a niche first, and then you can grow the market with that niche. How did that journey look for you guys?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. We actually, the only thing that we saw that was the, like, digital communication will impact how we interact with each other and how we communicate in the public space. From the beginning, we were looking at so many different verticals. The first thing we went into to take a niche was Digital Out of Home, is outdoor advertising. It was good because people started to put up, like, LED screens that they imported from Asia. We said we want to do the backbone. We want to do the booking system. How to price campaign, how to schedule based on share of voice, how to calculate the reach, all of this. How to, like, configure in quotes.
After three years, we said we have 80% market share. What we didn't tell was that the market was only 150 screens in Sweden. It was, like, the worst market to be, like, the number one in. At that point, we needed to decide, should we go international with Digital Out of Home business or should we broaden into other verticals? For many reasons, we choose to broaden because we were too small, and it was too big differences between the market how you work with, like, measure those type of campaigns. We did a lot of verticals. Public, corporate, retail, advertising.
Five years later, we actually have 85% of our revenue from a customer meeting, then we focused on the retail, where we are today. Now we do digital in-store solutions to really enhance the customer experience in store, to bridge the customer journey from online to, like, in person in store.
Is there any lessons from landing those first few clients? Because obviously that's a very hard task to do when you're just starting out, I guess.
Yeah. Like, we really built the company from, like, stone by stone. We like been profitable the whole journey. We like really bootstrapped strategy. We took, like, the local pizzeria as one of our first customers. We went from, like, the local pizzeria to Porsche globally and everything in between. Well, and also, like, I was 24 years old when I started the company. I think it's also a journey where you need to grow the business, where you grow yourself as an entrepreneur and grow the team and your skills. I think it's a lot of good things with growing a company over time and also to always try to be profitable.
Of course, there are arguments where you need to invest a lot of money, take the market, like Spotify, for example. You know, in most cases, at least, I think it's better to do business that are profitable, because in so many cases, it's really hard to change from, like, not being profitable and only focus on market share and try to change that back to a model where you are profitable would be really hard.
I agree. I know this is a very hard question to answer, but so many companies that start fail after two or three years and don't exist anymore. On the one hand, I guess that's a good thing because it's a bit bad being stuck in a business that isn't going nowhere, right? Spending 10 years of your life sort of trying to make it survive year by year. Of course, some businesses should stop. Do you have any specific insight into why you believe so many companies can't survive those first few years?
Obviously, there are many things. Of course, you need to reach a certain size where you can carry your own costs. I think that's almost, like, the hardest thing is, like, to get your first and your second employee. That's, in my opinion, I think, companies that have, like, reached, like, five employees are the heroes. It's so much work until you reach that level. If you look from a strategic perspective, I think one thing that we agreed on was, like, have a clear path where do we want to be. Like, clear view on vision, clear view on, like, the business models, but not to have a recipe for, like, the next quarter.
You need to know, like, maybe we need to do this consultancy work that is not core in our business model now, but we need to know that we're driving a little bit, like, outside the road, the main road. We know that we're doing it because it will actually benefit us. Like, we will get the cash from that business. You can allow yourself to drive outside the road if you know you're doing it. If I look to many companies that I've, like, helped in different ways, they, like, change their whole business idea twice a year. I think that's really tough.
If you change your business idea, if you change your vision, business model too often, then you will have, like, a problem. Also, if you have, like, this is my business idea, this is the plan, this is exactly the step that I will take, then most likely you don't take enough feedback from the customers. I think be, like, strict on the long-term path, be strict on, like, business model, but be flexible and adaptive to the market where you're acting and listen to your customers is sort of the concept that we try to use. It has been beneficial for us.
I mean, I couldn't agree more. I think it all goes back to that. I think it's Andreessen saying that, "Be stubborn on the vision and flexible in the details." I definitely agree with you. If you go over to the retail industry, can you just quickly explain where you believe retail is today? Because obviously it's changed a lot during COVID, and also, like, how do you view the retail market going forward as well?
Yeah. It's a super interesting topic, and it's a lot of trends going on. If you look before COVID, we really saw a pattern where more and more business went into, like, the online channels. What retailers struggled with was that their model and how their offering to the market really didn't match with how consumer behaved. We also, like, treated every channel specially. It was like you have the online store, and we have the physical store. The most important thing to have in mind is that a customer never see themself as a online customer or a brick-and-mortar customer. They see themself as a customer for a brand. Different channels really support different needs.
If we take a like really simple example, if you order food from your favorite restaurant at home, it might be the same dish, but it offers you something else than like visiting the restaurant and eating there with your friends, you know? That's the way you should look at retail. That maybe I need to go to the store to have someone that could help me find the right running shoes. But when I have found my right running shoes, maybe I make the repeat order online, you know? The customer you need to look at what are the real purpose and offering with your different channels. Our aim there is, of course, making it all work together.
You can say on the big trends, if we come back to that, the stores are moving from transaction to service and inspiration and a way of experiencing brand in many ways. You could also see another big trend that is direct to consumer, that the multi-channel retailers suffer and the one that take advantage and the one that grows now are brands moving in with their own online channels and their own retail facilities. Nike is a great example. They went from 10% direct sell to consumer to 40% direct sales to consumer in just three years.
They have left like the big online platforms and they focus purely on their own online channels, and they have terminated 80% of their resellers in the physical world and invested in like Nike stores on global scale. Also new car brands, if you look at Polestar, for example, they go like they have a online model and they build brand stores. That's a huge trend as well. What do we see? We still see in trend reports that five years from now brick and mortar will have 75% of the turnover.
For me it doesn't matter if it's 75 or 50% of the turnover, because the important thing for us is that the online and the physical are still two important channels that needs to work together. It's because that's where we are. If it also have an effect that the stores are getting smaller, it also means that you need to have digital solutions to be able to offer your full range through like digital touch points. For some fashion brands that we work with now, J.Lindeberg , for example, 10% of their in-store sales is from the online assortment. Maybe you try a black jacket and order a blue one in your size.
Interesting. Maybe it's easier to use a concrete example that you've seen, but is it possible to sort of define the ultimate customer experience from a brand perspective?
Really interesting. I think it's you need to look at it from like brand to brand. If we look at Volvo now, for example, they want you to buy the Volvo car from Volvo, not the dealer. That's based on how they look on the customer journey and how people behave. It's I think it's a good example if you map it like most likely you start in the sofa to like explore and maybe you start to configure a new car in sofa at home. When you come to the dealership, you don't want to go to a desk to a salesperson that and you.
Because you maybe are not ready to like buy a car, and if you sit at a desk that's the expectation. In that case, we want to have places where you can stand to really continue to configure the car and explore the car that you built at home. You can do it manually because you have, you might have seen the experience where you sit at a desk and they show you something and ask you questions, and you need to restart the customer journey because you already invested two hours at home. You need to be able to continue the journey yourself or with a sales associate and together like finalize the car in this case.
After that, you need to have the right tools for the sales staff to be relevant for you in that customer meeting. Maybe they need to have digital tools to be able to answer questions on environmental questions, financing, related services or how add on the car add value in your life. After that, we also in this journey implemented like accessory sales that was really weak before. You could like find the right accessories to your car based on the car that you configure and your lifestyle. After that, during the period where you wait on your car, you get emails, information where you can start to explore and learn more about the features you have in the car.
You have a point of delivery where we have a personalized experience where you really have an agenda that is based on you as a customer and the car. We know what we should show you because if you have features that you paid for and we don't introduce you to them, that is a really bad experience. Also if they try to show you features that you don't have, it's also really bad. That's one example. I think if you take the new car customer journey and take it from start to finish, it's logical. Like, if you can take on the customer's eyes, see that some things you do at home. You start browsing at home.
You continue to talk to the brand when you wait for your car at home, and when you visit the dealership, for example, you need to be able to continue the journey and, of course, the delivery moment is really interesting. After that, you continue the life with the relationship to Volvo with all the services that they offer. Yeah.
I mean, it's a very good example because obviously there's a huge difference between the needs of a family of five worried about safety versus a guy that wants to ski all over Norway and Sweden.
Yeah
... have, like, a car to use that for. The other question I would love to ask is that obviously you're positioning your company in a field where many companies can say the same to clients because you also say that you want to increase sales, you want to increase the margin, and you want to increase loyalty. Obviously, that pitch can come from a lot of different companies, and those companies can be competitors or they can have synergies to each other. Talk a bit about that market in general because having worked for those companies that get pitched by those type of companies, there are many companies saying that we can increase your sales, and we can increase loyalty.
Yeah. I think it's really weak, the pitch that we will increase. If you buy this, you will increase your sales with this, is almost always a lie because if you go back to, like, the basics in retail. You always know that it's of course the sign, even if a printed sign. Of course it has an impact on the size of the sign and how it visually looks. It's also like where is it in, if you go the journey in the store, and how the products are exposed and what product it is and what price it is and so on. It's always a combination of so many factors. There is not like one single answer on that one.
The things I don't like consultants going into the companies and saying, "Change or die and with our offering you will increase sales or loyalty with 15%." That goes away. Our way is like, more or less, let's take a look on how your business looks now, how the customer journey looks, your value proposition, your offering, and we could together see, like, what digital touch points could enhance the customer experience and add value in your business. We do that together with the customer because they know their business best. For each and every touch points we design, like, what is the purpose? What is the situation where the customer are? What is the communication? What technology do we need?
What is the KPI to measure? To come back to the measurement point, I think we need to try and then measure. I think people start sometimes to look at, like, the measurement points instead of believing in something. I think have an idea, trust that idea, and measure the result. That said, if you look at things that are related to the brand experience, it's really hard to measure on one end. If it comes to tactical communication, like, in the Burger King case, people think about Whopper, but you want to sell the campaign meal, it's easy to, like, measure how you can convert people by upselling. It's easy, it's also easy to see if you have, for example,
Mm-hmm.
like e-commerce sales in store is easy to measure. When it's transaction oriented, it's easy to measure touchpoint by touchpoint. When it's brand experience, you need to measure it on the concept as a whole. It's also hard to measure, like the sofa or the premium lighting system.
Definitely. That's a perfect segue to your business model because obviously it's become a big business model, but maybe one of the key aspect is this SaaS offering. How can you describe that model?
Yeah. What we have talked about now is really, like what digital solutions can create the value in the customer's business. If you look at from our perspective, like what is our business model is it's three parts. Because we come from a path where we have been like a full service provider in Sweden. Obviously now we change this when we go on the international. I will come back to that. It start with a consultancy work, and the consultancy work is project based or we can have retainers to enhance the solution over time. And then we need to deliver like the equipment needed, the displays and the technology, to make it happen in reality.
We charge like a license for every touch point per month for license and support. It's quite simple. If we can have happy customers that grow with our solution over time, we keep the customers, then we will grow the recurring revenue all the time. Actually this has been our focus all the time, to keep customers happy like adding real business value to them. Because if we do that, we know that they will expand the solution. The proof point of this is that we have grown the ARR in 39 quarters in a row. One more quarter, and it's a 10-year streak. That's really good.
Our mindset is always, like, we don't want to do, like, the fireworks because after a year, they want to do new fireworks in the flagship stores. We will be, like, moving away, so we want to do the things that are, like, scalable for 400 stores. Maybe not always that cool, but we know that the things that they scale for 400 stores, it's applications that really add value for the customer and that will last over time.
I mean, that's a super interesting point because there's a big difference between getting one flagship store super nice versus having the whole portfolio of stores working together. Obviously, serving that problem is a much better solution. Looking at sort of just the customer experience, last question. It's obviously easy to be fascinated by Apple and Tesla, and you can pretty easily make an argument that they have cracked, you know, the code of creating big brands, and especially Apple is well known for their stores. Are you inspired by those brands as well, or are there other brands that you're more inspired by?
We are super nerdy when it comes to retail, of course. I think we spend a lot of time, like, discussing all new brands that are coming into the market and different approaches that they have. The brands that you point at right now with Tesla and Apple, it's, I think, that's where things are heading right now, that you really have like a clear value proposition, a clear brand offering, and that the people can relate to. I think it will continue on the path where brands really gain in comparison to, like, multi-brand retailers. That said, I think there will be a comeback because not many brands can offer you the full solution.
Maybe Nike can offer you everything when it comes to running and baseball and football and so on, but many brands are too small. There are also huge opportunities for being like the niche player for running or for skiing or for where you really could like build a portfolio of brands to present. I think that might be the next thing that will happen in the market. You have new, better positioned full service provider that let the brands talk to themselves, but in the place where they strengthen each other.
We haven't talked about demographics at all. Is there anything very interesting that you would like to just talk about? Because there is a big difference between Gen Z and millennials and baby boomers, et cetera. Are you seeing anything that makes you really curious?
Yeah. Actually, I think it's in different part of your life also. Because you can also see that people that've grown up with, like, internet and being, like, doing the majority of their purchase online, when they become a little bit older, they have more money to spend, they start to work and so on, they also prefer to spending less time and also invest more in products that they really love. Actually, I don't think the differences are that big as when you read reports about it. I think it's more individual, and I think it's more about what market you're in.
I get it. Let's talk about the journey or the time where you had the sort of epiphany that we need to scale in Europe because we are in the market where maybe there will be few winners, and now is the time to really scale. Because we touched upon the product market fit and having a very nice growth trajectory, but there is a point here where you say that, "Okay, we need to scale for real now." Can you just go through that process?
Yeah. Absolutely. What we saw that there was a very a new market, a lot of players went into the field, and I think I have a PowerPoint presentation with 30 competitors in Sweden only. The companies were, like, 0-5 people. We saw that it was really not many of them made it, as always, in the market, and it was really a lot of acquisitions going on to consolidate the market. We were actually in a good position where we were profitable and had the opportunity to acquire companies that actually didn't make it at that time. We bought actually the customer base. It was not strategic acquisitions.
It was not the people, not the product, but actually what we want was the customer base. We figured out that this market had really high barriers to change supplier, because you have a platform that is integrated to data, you have customer-specific applications, and then you have also physical devices that are with software that are connected to the cloud. After some acquisitions, we saw that, yeah, we always grow even on the acquired customer base. That makes. Of course, it has to do with our offering, but to be honest, this has really much to do with the barriers also.
What we have seen now in the market is that it's the same pattern in Europe, especially when it comes to the full service provider that do strategy, that do hardware, and also offer software of their own or another independent software vendors. We looked at other industries, what has happened there, and you could see that all markets that become mature get category winners, and they get more and more specialized. We said that if you look at e-commerce, for example, if you have WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, then after a while they have like 75% of the market share or so, the big five.
Also you can look at iGaming or whatever market that you have specialized vendors in different fields of the value chain. We say, "Where do we want to be in this value chain? We can't be like a full service provider globally." We said, "We want to be the platform. We want to be the category winner within In-store Experience Management." We looked at the market, and we also said that the acquisitions will be bigger than they are today. That was the decision why we went public. We did an IPO two years ago on Nasdaq First North in Stockholm.
The purpose of that was to be able to access capital to continue to acquire companies because we saw that acquisitions become bigger and bigger, and we will not have the capacity with our own cash flow to manage that. Then we identified, like, the best competitor when it comes to the platform side of the business. We did a big acquisition before the summer of Grassfish in Vienna. They were the number one in the DACH region. We went from 65 people to 130 people overnight.
What's the hardest part of scaling in your opinion? I know it's a lot of things, but you have hiring, you have culture, you have acquisition. What do you think is the hardest part of scaling in the right way?
It's a really good question. I think as long as you can, like, have a really good culture in place and you can find like, you could say middle management with, like, a handful of people that when you go from yourself being involved in any new business, being involved in all operational decisions that need to be taken on a daily basis, the best thing you could achieve is to have like a set of people that could act as middle management and really like, duplicate that. I think that's the most important step to achieve.
How would you describe your culture, and how have you tried to enforce it or make the whole organization act in a similar way?
One thing that unites us is that we are really, like, obsessed in, like, creating value for the customer, but a lot of companies can say. The other thing that we have a culture where you need to have a lot of, like, diversity when it comes to knowledge of people, and really to trust in that. That's easier than it sounds. We need to have strategists that could have a workshop with the best retailers there is. We need to have UX designers, developers, motion designers, art directors. We have support technicians. We have supply chain people. Of course, a sales organization with different profiles.
We have a huge variety of people. You need to embrace the diversity of people and that culture, but you also need to trust in each other. That's really at the core of what we see, and there is a huge trust. I never heard someone like raise their voice to another person at the office. It's never happened.
Interesting. If we look at retail, let's take Europe. What do you think is the biggest lesson Europe can learn from Asia? Because I remember when I was looking at trends in retail, there was always something crazy going on in Asia, and obviously they're so digital native that they have sort of almost feels like they have come further than Europeans when it comes to using digital products at least.
Yeah. I think it's curiosity, and they are brave to, like, try. It's too little talk and too little trying in Europe. We usually say that in the office. It's, like, core of what we need to solve for the retailers. Take the step from the strategy and from the PowerPoint into the reality and into the customer meeting where it happens. In China and Asia, they're much better on this. They try and try and try and try, like, where it happens. That's the biggest thing. I also used to travel a lot, especially into China, and that fascinates me all the time, that they really dare to try new things.
It's not so polished, but they dare to try, and I think they learn a lot from that. I think they will benefit so much 10 years from now from having the ability to try.
Agree. You set some very ambitious goals, and you managed to reach them, I don't know, one or two years ahead of time. Even, like, are you setting the bar too low or are you just, like, going over expectations? Talk to us about those goals you reached.
Yeah. When we went public, we said we had still a small company. We had SEK 25 million in ARR or so. We said that three years from now we will double it. We also want to have one of the largest retail brands in the global rollout. Actually, due to the acquisition of Grassfish we managed to achieve them one and a half year in advance. So now we're at SEK 66 million in ARR, and we aim for SEK 200 million in the end of 2024. 2026 we want to be the number one In-Store Experience Management platform on a global scale. It's ambitious goals, but definitely doable.
what we said when we went public, we said that we want to act as we do now. we want to communicate the same goals, like, to the market as we really believe in ourselves, and we want the goals to correlate with the way we do budgeting and stuff. that said, we want to have goals that we could overperform. because I don't want to put expectations in the market that I don't believe in myself. I'm happy to overdeliver on. I'm happy if I can deliver, like one year in advance, this time as well.
Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. If we, I mean, it's a good segue because a lot of people who are tuning in are investors in different scale and one of the question was from a very good investor in Sweden who asked the question, why should he own the stock? Or let's make it easy, why should he be owning this company for the next 3 to 5 to 10 years? I guess one way to answer that is also just tell us about the market opportunity and where you're going to position yourself.
I think of course, like, we definitely will benefit from the big mega trends in retail. Because the new consumer behavior, you really need to be able to meet your customer both online and in person, and it needs to work together. We are an enabler in this space, so the market is growing well in double digits. If you look at our company in particular, if we have, like, 10 straight years of ARR growth every quarter, it's 30, 39 quarters in a row. One more quarter and we are in 10 years. It makes it also really easy to follow the customer as an investor. You could, like, look at the quarterly report, the first page, and see if you are still growing according to plan.
The downside is really, really low, because you could always, like, measure the SaaS revenue at any specific point. Always profitable. That's our mantra. We want to grow with continued profitability. We don't need to have the highest profitability when we grow, but we want to grow with profitability. Our goal now is to reach SEK 200 million in ARR and be, like, the winner in this niche digital in-store. I think it's of, like, huge strategic value to be, like, the infrastructure for the physical retail. That's why you should be owner in Vertiseit.
If you had to highlight a risk factor or a black swan event, what would you say then?
It could be from the competitor side of the business, for example. If a lot of competitors that we have, if I ask them what they see as their risk, they look at what will happen when Amazon or when Google or when Adobe enter this space. We don't want to be a closed system, so we actually love to, like, integrate to Adobe, for example. I think that they will never go that deep in the tech stack, so they go to the endpoint and the playout. There might be, like, a squeeze here. It could happen that the layer that we have becomes a commodity.
That's something that we always, like, work a lot to avoid. We need to add a lot of, like, intelligence where you can benefit from putting our software in your digital ecosystem, where it coexists with your CRM, your PIM system, and your e-commerce platform as well. We want to be on the same strategic level as the other platforms in the technology stack. Of course, there is a risk in that.
Makes sense. Finishing up scaling your company, we also need to talk a bit about scaling yourself as a leader and as a business person. How has that journey been, being so consistent, growing all the time? Has that been challenging privately, or has it just been a great journey for you as well as a leader, suddenly managing 2 people to 50 people, et cetera?
For me, it has been a really good journey. As I said, I was 24 years old when I started the company, and I'm happy that it took time for me to grow into this. Because obviously, when you work on the same thing in 10 years, all of a sudden you become pretty good at that. It's due to anything. If you like, spend 10 years of skiing, you become really good at skiing. So time is good, but it's also like, what, why are you into the business? It could be that if we were three people, we're really like the founders. Adrian was really a operational guy, also like a finance perspective on things.
He took care of, like, all internal, like, processes and routines and stuff. We had Oscar as the CTO, that have, like, made all the technology decision, and I've been more on the marketing and sales side. We always had, like, clear roles. You also need to see, like, is my core competence valuable in this stage for the company? Is this a place where I want to be? You need to be really open when it's not.
For example, Adrian, at one point he said, "I don't want to be the CFO when we go public." But he said, "I want to have a strategic say in the board." Then he moved from, like, operational management into the board, and we had a CFO that we recruited for that position. But for me, the most interesting thing for me is always, like, to build company. For me, when it becomes bigger and bigger, I still think it's more and more fun when it becomes larger and where...
As long as there are things to learn and as long as we deliver on plan, I think it's a great personal journey as well, and I'm never bored.
Yeah. It's great reflections because it isn't right for everyone to be sort of the Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, because companies that grows change a lot, right?
Yes
Certainly, when you have scale, and you can talk more about this than me, but something as easy or hard as internal politics or hiring or culture will take a large chunk of your time, because when you are five guys, I mean, the culture is the five persons involved, basically.
Yeah. I totally agree. I think it comes down to be honest to yourself. Like, am I right for the challenge at this particular time? It's also be true to yourself, like, is this really what I want? And in my case, I really like to build companies. I think I could build, like, any type of company. It's but building company is what I really love. And that, as we like reach certain steps where we could, like, It's achieving, like, taking the next step, that's what drives me. I think it's more fun now when we are 130 people than it ever been.
Do you have any leaders or entrepreneurs who inspires you? I mean, obviously this is a very Norwegian-ish question to ask, because you can always say that Daniel Ek is the innermost incredible founder from Sweden and is taking over the world. Do you have anyone that has inspired you, and you even have met and talked to and been mentored by?
Mia Brunell Livfors. She was the head of Kinnevik. She was my mentor for two years. Now she's at Axel Johnson. She's a fantastic leader. She actually inspired me a lot when it comes to really build things up on culture instead of, like, processes. I think I learned a lot from her. The good thing that she always had, like, the business, like the sales and the core of the business is always, like, sales. She managed to, like, have pure focus on how do we perform sales-wise, and how do we really, like, keep the culture in place. She have really been an inspiration.
Also, like, I also, as others, I'm super inspired by Steve Jobs, for example, where he just can have a, like, a very clear vision of what you want to achieve. Like, really start with why, what is the overall purpose, and take that down to a product in the end, and not the other way around.
Just closing off, any final or some great resources or books that you can recommend or something like that? Because there were also some questions on Twitter about that.
That was a good question. I might come back to you with that. There are obviously things that are really relevant in different sectors. I think I come back with the book recommendation.
Maybe we can put it in the show notes, so when the episode is released, we can have some resources if
Yeah
Johan has some great tips. I think that's it, Johan. Thank you so much for joining. It was a pleasure to having you on.
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's always interesting to, like, having a recap of what things that is passed. Yeah. Thank you so much.
Hi, everyone. Christopher here again. Just a few things before you leave the show. If you liked this episode, it would be great if you could give it a review and also share it with your professional network. If you want to get in touch with me, Twitter is the place. Just go to @chrisvondheim. You can also find this information in the show notes. I hope to see you tune in to the next episode, and take care.