Martin Källström
knowledge / stories

Colorful socks and the peephole

Martin explains what a company is for, and what a life is for, with a small set of images he has reused for a decade: value instead of success, a pair of colorful socks, a camera that is really a peephole, a leap out of everyday life, a love that does not run out. They turn up in a London keynote in 2013, a Swedish startup podcast in 2014, a bankruptcy post-mortem in 2017, a founder webinar in 2021 and a polyamory podcast in 2022, and read together they are one creed restated for whatever audience was in front of him. This page collects the images and the moments they were said; the business arguments behind them live on Failure & resilience and Growth, strategy & risk, and the camera itself on Narrative.

Value, not success

The oldest of the images is the one he calls his mantra. His 2013 Webit speaker page says he strives "to create value rather than success" Webit ↗, and he closed his LeWeb London talk that June with the argument in full: "You should think about how to create value, not about how to create success", because "if you manage to create success without value, what have you really accomplished?" ▶ 19:46 The Swedish version, from a student audience in Linköping two months earlier, is blunter and more personal. "Framgång är ingenting. Det är värdefullt för min dotter att ha de här bilderna." (Success is nothing. It is valuable for my daughter to have these pictures.) He then reached for a reality-TV celebrity to make the point land: "Det är bara att titta på Robinson Robban. Han är framgångsrik, men vad är det värt?" (Just look at Robinson Robban. He is successful, but what is that worth?) ▶ 33:03

The same line did duty as a product defence. Asked at launch whether Narrative Clip was a gimmick, he answered that a novelty gadget was not who they were, and that they wanted to create value. AllThingsD ↗ Two years later, deflecting a Steve Jobs comparison, he put it as "Det jag brinner för är ju att skapa värde för andra." (What I burn for is creating value for others.) Breakit ↗

Colorful socks

At LeWeb the talk was built as a list of four things a business needs: an idea, a team, a market you create for yourself, and a fourth item nobody expected. ▶ 14:11 The first three were argued with numbers: nine tech blogs publishing the moment the Kickstarter page went live, a Facebook event with 2,500 people waiting for it. ▶ 18:03

Then the fourth item: "Lastly, what you need is colorful socks. You cannot go around the world with black or white socks or boring socks. You need to have some joy in your life as well." ▶ 18:54 A blogger in the room wrote it down as the takeaway: "you need something beyond black and white socks – you need joy in life." One Man & His Blog ↗ It is the one joke in a data-heavy talk, placed right before the value-not-success ending, as if joy were the precondition for the rest.

The peephole

For the camera itself he has two images, one about the past and one about the future. The past one is the family photo album that holds only the happy days. In 2014 he told Startuppodden's Mikael Zachrisson that after his mother died he looked at the albums and found "Det är bara de glada, roliga stunderna som blir dokumenterade" (it is only the happy, fun moments that get documented), and that "om man kan fånga helt vanliga vardagsstunder med sån här liten kamera så vore det så otroligt mycket värt" (if you can catch completely ordinary everyday moments with a little camera like this, it would be worth so incredibly much). ▶ 40:32 In 2017, to Breakit's Camilla Björkman, the album image had grown a weather report: "Livet är ju så extremt mycket mer än det. Ibland regnar det och man är nere eller så är det bara vardag och man äter frukost ihop." (Life is so extremely much more than that. Sometimes it rains and you are down, or it is just an ordinary day and you eat breakfast together.) ▶ 5:48 The point of Narrative, he said, was "att hitta ett sätt att fånga även de stunderna och göra dem till viktiga" (to find a way to capture those moments too and make them important) ▶ 6:14, because "minnena rinner som sand mellan fingrarna" (the memories run like sand between your fingers). ▶ 6:33 The full history of that origin story, telling by telling, is on The photo albums and the ninth birthday.

The future image he offered unprompted in 2014, when asked how big Narrative should get. "Jag ser ofta den här lilla kameran som ett titthål där framtida generationer tittar ut och plirar lite grann på att se vad man håller på med." (I often see this little camera as a peephole through which future generations look out and squint a little at what you are up to.) He wanted to be able to bequeath his lifelog, or selected parts of it, so that his children could feel they had been "med mig i det ögonblicket" (with me in that moment), looking out through the lens he carried. ▶ 60:24

The leap, and doing things to learn

When the subject is why anyone should start something, the image is a jump. His closing words in the 2017 bankruptcy interview were an exhortation rather than a warning: "lämna vardagen och ta det omtalade språnget, är min uppmaning" (leave everyday life and take the much-discussed leap, is my call) ▶ 31:18, preceded by the reason: "det är enormt lärorikt och roligt att få jobba med sina drömmar. Och det är värt att göra det." (it is enormously instructive and fun to get to work on your dreams. And it is worth doing.) ▶ 30:52 In 2021 he inverted the bravery question: "the worst thing that can happen to me is that I don't explore my dreams. So I think the brave thing is to not start a company." ▶ 6:41

The engine under the leap is a motive he states without embarrassment. "For me, I do things because I want to learn. It's not about making money. It's not about being successful. It's about I want to learn." ▶ 43:19 That is what lets him treat hard stretches as data: "I've come to associate pain with learning." ▶ 43:56 Problem solving, he says, is "not about asking, how should I solve this problem? It's about asking, who can solve this problem?" ▶ 35:23, and the way to get that person is simple: "If you talk from your heart, people will want to help you." He walked around with a 3D-printed prototype saying he was starting a camera company, and people reacted, in his telling, with "holy shit, he's actually doing this. He's jumping off the cliff." ▶ 36:49

Love is infinite

The last image comes from outside business entirely. On the Polyprat podcast in 2022, describing why he calls himself flersam rather than poly ▶ 35:36, he explained that he refuses to rank relationships by whether they include intimacy or a lot of shared time, because "kärlek är på något sätt oändlig. Även om jag har en till ytan vänskaplig relation så är kärleken oändligt mycket värd i den relationen." (love is in some way infinite. Even if I have a relationship that is friendly on the surface, the love in that relationship is worth infinitely much.) ▶ 36:01

It comes with an admission that the earlier images lacked. He describes himself as "den här lite konflikträdda personen" (this slightly conflict-averse person) who wants to be friends with everyone, and traces it to having kept his centre of gravity outside himself ▶ 34:17; the change he reports is placing "min trygghet och min bekräftelse i mig själv, i vem jag är" (my security and my validation in myself, in who I am) rather than in the state of his relationships. ▶ 29:07 Colorful socks, a decade on, with the joy relocated from the wardrobe to the person wearing it. More on that turn is at Vulnerability & masculinity.

Worth remembering