Webinar: StartupTalks - In the Mind of a Successful Entrepreneur with Martin Källström

[00:00:04] Speaker A: A warm welcome everybody to this Startup Talk, and today we are gonna enter the mind of a successful entrepreneur. We have invited Martin Källström. He is here with us today. He is a purpose-driven entrepreneur spanning from New York, Silicon Valley, Europe, Asia, and he has founded and run multiple companies since 2006, and we will soon get to know him a bit better.

[00:00:30] Speaker A: But first, for you who don't know anything about Lead, I'm just gonna sum it up for you a bit before we get started. Lead is a business incubator. Then you might wonder, what is a business incubator? As a business incubator, we help innovative companies grow faster and safer, basically accelerating the development of startups with high growth potential to to become scalable and sustainable growth companies. So

[00:00:56] Speaker A: how do we do that? We provide idea owners and entrepreneurs a wide range of directed resources and services, such as business coaching, skill training within sales, leadership, HR, for example. We offer networks to business contacts, potential customers, and support to attract finance. And much, much more. So

[00:01:23] Speaker A: during this webinar, we will meet Martin Källström, and I would like for everybody to put any questions you have in the Q&A below. You can find it here below, and I will try to integrate them into the conversation. And in the end, we will also have an open session for questions. So please Enter them as we go along, and I will try to do my

[00:01:48] Speaker A: best to integrate so you get all your answers. Because I hope that you, as well as me, is very curious. So Martin founded his first company Twiggly back in 2006, which was a revolution in the European blogosphere when it was launched. He was stepping down in 2000. Well, to pursue

[00:02:13] Speaker A: a new project called Narrative, the world's smallest wearable lifelogging camera, which was launched with the help of a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $500,000 in one month. The journey with Narrative ended in 2016, and that opened up opportunities to work in Asia as an entrepreneurial resident at

[00:02:38] Speaker A: Exploria. Which gave a lot of experience, for example within blockchain. During his time in Asia, he also started preparing for a new project to launch a service within the fintech segment, but due to legislation, the project ran into some difficulties. In 2019, he co-founded Hayware, a startup with a global democratic

[00:03:06] Speaker A: vision of making quality eyewear that was based in New York. Now Martin is back in Linköping and is the founder and CPO at Fluent. So this skilled and innovative entrepreneur has plenty of irons in the fire, as you can hear. That's to say the least, and I hope that Martin can inspire you with his journey and his experience today. So

[00:03:33] Speaker A: warm welcome, Martin. Are you with us?

[00:03:39] Speaker B: I am.

[00:03:40] Speaker A: Yeah, great. So nice to see you and a big thank you for being here today. How are you?

[00:03:46] Speaker B: Thanks, Martina. I'm great today.

[00:03:48] Speaker A: Yeah, great.

[00:03:51] Speaker B: How are you?

[00:03:53] Speaker A: I tried to sum up your 15 years of entrepreneurship and experiences in Quite quickly, as I said, you have many of— plenty of irons in the fire. Is there something you want to add or something that I missed during this?

[00:04:09] Speaker B: No, I think that you covered most of it. Fluent is the 5th company that I found, where I'm a founder, and I started my first company in 2003. So it's been a quite a long journey with a lot of learnings along the way. I'm super happy to share. So thanks for inviting me.

[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah, so nice to have you here. So I would like to start with, it's your 5th company. Why do you do this over and over again? What is it that drives you?

[00:04:50] Speaker B: I think it is exploration, to explore new topics. Like every company I start is because there's an urge to me to do either something different or try something new. And what is the difference between different and new? Many of the companies I've started have been because I felt the urge to do something

[00:05:15] Speaker B: different from the last company. So after Twingly, I was really tired of B2B sales and 9-month or 12-month long sales cycles, and I wanted to work in consumer technology. So that's part of why I started Narrative. And it's also about doing something new that no one has seen before, that no one has done before. And I think it's so much fun

[00:05:40] Speaker B: to do something that is right on the edge of our social behavior or of technology, or hopefully both, because then people are— they have to really understand what you're doing, and that generates a lot of interest.

[00:05:57] Speaker A: Yeah. What made you an entrepreneur, you would say?

[00:06:02] Speaker B: I think it comes back to my parents. They were not tech entrepreneurs, they were farmers, but they made an equally adventurous journey starting a farm in Småland, in a super small village without knowing anyone there. And from them I learned that you're supposed to do whatever

[00:06:27] Speaker B: you want in life and not postpone your happiness until pension or something like that.

[00:06:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it's really brave to explore your dreams?

[00:06:41] Speaker B: Well, I don't see it like— 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. Like, that's to me, that's the worst case if I had to take a normal job. And actually, that's a big part of me being what you call

[00:07:06] Speaker B: brave, that I always try to define what is the worst case here. And if my company will crash and burn, what is the worst case? And it very often is like, I make sure that the worst case is always to, okay, maybe I have to take a normal job if this doesn't work out. And then I think, why would I choose the worst case by taking a normal job in the first place?

[00:07:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I was thinking a bit about the different companies are quite different. And you said that you wanted something else, you were tired of the B2B. How does that process look like for you when you are deciding to go with an idea or a case? Or can— because I can imagine that you have a lot of ideas. Yes.

[00:07:54] Speaker B: And for Twingly and Narrative, both of them were a lot of iteration around ideas. And I promised when we talked earlier this week that I would bring some tips for entrepreneurs, and I think we're gonna get to those later. But actually, one of them is don't bet on your first idea. And so I can take that right now, that you cannot know if an idea is

[00:08:20] Speaker B: good or bad before you try it, but you don't wanna try bad ideas. So that's a catch-22 that you have to solve.

[00:08:27] Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:29] Speaker B: And you cannot ask anyone else, is this a good idea? Because they can't see inside your mind. So what you have to do is actually to have a lot of ideas inside your own mind and compare them. That's the only way to make sure that you're not betting on the wrong thing. And there's gonna be so many moments during your startup life where you think, should

[00:08:54] Speaker B: I do something else? If you haven't done thorough work figuring out, is this really what I want to do?

[00:09:02] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:09:03] Speaker B: So both with starting Twingly and Narrative, I had spreadsheets of 60 or 70 business ideas that I explored. And, but since then, actually what has happened is that people have come to me and asked me to do things. And so that was the reason why I went to Asia, and it was the reason why I went to New York. And this is the reason why I

[00:09:28] Speaker B: now work with Fluent. And that's a different experience for me. And that has led to, in the case of Bangkok and New York, to a bit shorter journeys perhaps. With Fluent, I'm much more part of defining the company so that this is gonna be, even though we're very early stage, I'm

[00:09:54] Speaker B: very— I have a very long-term horizon on Fluent.

[00:10:01] Speaker A: So if you look at all your different journeys, has it been the same challenges in the companies?

[00:10:12] Speaker B: It depends on how you define it, because some challenges always come back. For example, solving catch-22s. Is like the everyday life of an entrepreneur. Because you have, in order to have, in order to do something, you need money. But in order to get the financing, you need to have done something. And in order to have a really great developer,

[00:10:38] Speaker B: find them and hire them, they, what developers really want is to work with other great developers. And that goes for everybody else as well. So Building a team is solving a lot of catch-22s. And that's, that's something like figuring out how, how do I— okay, I can get the commitment from this person, and then with that commitment, I can go to this other person and say, like, should

[00:11:03] Speaker B: we all work together? And finding solutions to catch-22s is really the most common challenge. But then what it actually entails is, is really different every time. Another thing that you always encounter is knowing when you're supposed to go fast

[00:11:29] Speaker B: and when you're supposed to go slow, because you can always— like, you always have a certain amount of money in the bank, and that can be— maybe it's not money, maybe it's just how much you can invest of your own time. But you have some kind of resource that is scarce. So do you invest a lot of money to go fast, or do you invest little money to

[00:11:54] Speaker B: extend your time as much as possible? And that's actually one of the hardest challenges of starting a company, because at times it's really good to go fast, and sometimes it's good to go slow. And I know this from like from Twingly and Narrative. Twingly was an experiment in like, how can we make our money last as long as possible? I was like

[00:12:19] Speaker B: super beginner when I started out doing that, and we raised 10 million kronor when there was actually very little money available in 2006, 2007. And I thought like, what kind of strategy should we do? Like, making money last as long as possible, that, that must be right, right? So, so that meant that Twingly got a very slow growth curve,

[00:12:45] Speaker B: and it's— but it's a super stable company that is still producing value, like, I don't know, 17 years later, still producing value for their customers.

[00:12:55] Speaker A: If you look at that journey now, do you feel that was the right decision?

[00:12:59] Speaker B: Of course, you can't know when you're, you're in it, but So yeah, when I exited Twingly, I felt it had been the wrong decision at that time. So, and with Narrative, I thought, let's just go at the fastest speed we can from the start and let's make the market tell us if the company

[00:13:24] Speaker B: should survive or not instead of us focusing on survival.

[00:13:27] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:13:27] Speaker B: Let's focus on speed. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. And then like it, that brought us very close to, we had very small margins because of that. So that's why I'm saying that now my learning is that the hardest challenge is to know when to go fast and when to go slow.

[00:13:50] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:13:50] Speaker B: Because I've tried both of them, like without making decisions, just one decision to do Or the other, and neither of those was right. So I'm guessing it's something in between.

[00:14:03] Speaker A: So you mentioned Twiggly and the journey there, how you decided to leave in 2012. How, how did that decision— how does that process look like? When is the right time to leave, or why was it the right time to leave?

[00:14:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's both hard and easy. It's really hard because you never want to give up on anything. So my mindset is to never give up, but it's also like, I also want to have fun doing what I do. I want to learn new things all the time. So

[00:14:48] Speaker B: what happened with Twingly is that I, I go through a winter depression where I felt like, oh, this was a really shitty winter. The winter is so dark. And then when spring came, like, and all the sun and the birds came out, like, I was still depressed. And I realized that this, this is not just winter, there's something else going on. So then I had to just clear my mind and get my head around that this company

[00:15:13] Speaker B: that I'm running is not, not the same phase as I am, because I really wanted to innovate, to do new things. I'd spent 6 years at Twingly and I just wanted to, like, I spent a lot of time thinking about new ideas and the company was not at all in that stage. The Twingly as a company needed to focus on sales and just refine the existing product,

[00:15:38] Speaker B: not do new things. So it was like As soon as I realized that there was a gap between what I needed and what the company needed, that made this decision actually quite easy to see that it was the right decision. And so the decision was not as much I need to leave as I need to recruit someone else. And then what

[00:16:04] Speaker B: do I do? Should I stay in another role in the company or should I do something else or? It's just like, I thought about the company first. The company needs a new CEO, but what should I do instead?

[00:16:17] Speaker A: So you had a— you felt like you needed to ensure that business continued? Yes.

[00:16:24] Speaker B: So what I did was that I told the board, like, I can stay on for as long as it takes to recruit a new CEO. And it took 9 months. Like, that's a long time to stay on a company where you decided to leave. But—

[00:16:40] Speaker A: I hope you weren't depressed during the—

[00:16:43] Speaker B: No, because no, that cleared out when I made the decision. But what I asked about was that I can stay 9 months on the— and if I can spend 1 day per week starting a new company. So I made what was a challenge, I made it into an opportunity instead.

[00:17:06] Speaker A: So if you look at Narrative, how is that process when you realize that this is a big potential, but it's not gonna fly? It's not—

[00:17:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So there it was not me deciding anything. We were doing a lot of great things, achieving a lot of great things. We had delays with the hardware, both generations were delayed for almost a year each, but of the hardware product. But we had a lot of fun, built offices in Sweden and in San

[00:17:44] Speaker B: Francisco, and I got to work with really amazing people. We built the company up to 55 employees and then some like 10 extra at each, like at all times on top of that. And But what happened was that the market sort of told us that we were in the wrong stage at the wrong time.

[00:18:09] Speaker B: We needed money to sustain the company from external financing. What happened was that I didn't make sure to put enough margin on the product. As a CEO, that's very much my decision. I had investors that said, no, you don't need to make money on the product, we finance you. Just make the product as affordable

[00:18:35] Speaker B: as you can, just take as much market as you can. So they wanted the price to go down. And I had really great engineers that wanted to make as good product as possible, put as many magical components into the hardware. And that made it very expensive. So that's— I was not strong enough, or I didn't have the strong vision

[00:19:01] Speaker B: enough to really like push those aside and create a financial margin on the product.

[00:19:06] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:19:06] Speaker B: So when it turned out that we needed more money because we— selling more product didn't give us more— sorry, more more revenue because it— or big enough contribution margin.

[00:19:23] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:19:23] Speaker B: So it turned out that that was the wrong time to raise money. GoPro had a— which is also like, which is, which was at the time the other camera company doing a similar thing. They had a catastrophic year and we tried to fundraise in the middle of that, where they're just like the same day, literally the same day we started

[00:19:49] Speaker B: 2 weeks of fundraising, they had, uh, they, they released a report about that, that their, their bad year. And Silicon Valley decided that wearable technology was dead. So, um, uh, they said that, yeah, they said that If Apple Watch is a failure, then how could Narrative

[00:20:14] Speaker B: succeed? So we spent the entire, like, time talking about other companies and why we are not— we don't have to be relying on their success or failure for our own progress forward. But so your question is how— what was the decision there?

[00:20:37] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:20:37] Speaker B: And I thought a lot about that. Like, we are struggling now. We went from financing the company to talking with a lot of companies about selling the company. I went to visit Logitech and Amazon and Apple and Google and Snapchat and a lot of companies. And that was a lot of work. And I was thinking like, how much time

[00:21:03] Speaker B: do I spend on this? What do I ever give up? And I realized I don't have to make that decision. This is a process that will have either we have success or failure in itself. I will, I can just work and then the outcome will tell me like what will happen. And so I did everything, like literally everything that an entire team stepped up and we had like

[00:21:30] Speaker B: maybe 5 or 6 things that could have saved the company that didn't work out, and each of those were a journey in itself. But in the end, I felt when, when we— when none of those worked out, I knew that I had, I had done everything that I could.

[00:21:48] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:21:48] Speaker B: So I could actually move on quite quickly because I didn't have that— I didn't have any residue from thinking about what could I have done different, because I know that we did everything we could.

[00:22:03] Speaker A: What would you say are your biggest learnings from that journey?

[00:22:10] Speaker B: I think, well, make sure you have profit margin on your product. There's a really great article written by Paul Graham called— it's about making your company being default alive instead of default dead, about how you can actually have a strategy that makes sure your company survives

[00:22:36] Speaker B: basically anything, except, I don't know, a total disaster. But make your company default alive. And that's what we, or I, failed to do with with putting a too low profit margin on my product. And, but then there's so many great learnings from the positive side as well, like how much it means to work with the best people and

[00:23:02] Speaker B: how a good, like how, if you're really honest about why you're starting a company, really great people will, will follow. They will come work with you if you like really show why this is your dream. And I was so amazed by when I started up Narrative and we started building the team, like I realized that I

[00:23:27] Speaker B: need to talk to the best people I know. Like I don't, and if they say no, then I can talk to someone else, but I really need to talk to the best person in each field. And building, like, building the first initial team, actually half the people I talked to quit their jobs to

[00:23:52] Speaker B: come to work for me when all I had was a PowerPoint.

[00:23:56] Speaker A: Wow.

[00:23:57] Speaker B: And that's building this crazy product, which is the camera without buttons. And that's completely amazing. It speaks so much to the, to the how much How much stronger you are if you're showing your true passion about something. Yeah.

[00:24:17] Speaker A: And what is your passion today?

[00:24:21] Speaker B: Oh, my passion today, from— I have a much more balanced passion now between my private life and my work life. I really believe in building purpose for other people. And that's what we're completely— what we're doing with Fluent, where there's so much stress in the workplace today from hundreds

[00:24:46] Speaker B: of digital tools. So what we're doing is sort of an all-in-one platform where you can model any workflow. So instead of buying a new subscription to Trello or Jira or wherever, you can just model the workflow you need inside Fluent. And, and to do that in a beautiful way with really nice UX, uh, it's, it's, it's, uh, uh, something

[00:25:12] Speaker B: that I believe in because we are— because it really is really stressful for people.

[00:25:18] Speaker A: It's—

[00:25:19] Speaker B: people spend 2 hours, 2 hours per day that are wasted on bad tools that lock their data into silos. And that's— and to give people purpose and meaning and like feel that they are flying instead of being dragged down.

[00:25:42] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:25:42] Speaker B: That's like one of my purposes. And the other one is to truly, really— like the other passion is to truly, really take care of myself now, which is something that I've not been prioritizing before in my work life, that, that I realized how much more genuine and loving and connected I can be with other people if I'm

[00:26:09] Speaker B: functioning well myself. If I'm not tired, if I'm not exhausted, if I'm not stressed, if I've eaten well, if I've slept well, then I'm so much more available to other people. Like, I can be with them and see them for, for what they need and who they are and show them the love that they deserve. And that's really like, it's such a game changer when you do it like 100%

[00:26:35] Speaker B: instead of just doing like half of what you know that you should do to feel well. So how would you describe that it has affected your Yeah, so it means that I can, I can lead much more from my heart and my intuition, not so much from, from, from making plans and relying on checklists

[00:27:02] Speaker B: and documents. And I've always felt that I'm— I want to be truly connected with people.

[00:27:11] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:27:13] Speaker B: And the people that I have as my best friends now, many of them were people I worked with in the past. And it's not because I like what— or we like what each other— what we did at work more, as much as we really felt a strong connection.

[00:27:34] Speaker A: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:35] Speaker B: And so now when I'm feeling well all the time, or as much as I can, then, then it makes it more, more— it makes it easier to connect with people, tell my vision, and hear what they are saying, and, and not have

[00:28:00] Speaker B: that disconnection where I have my agenda and you have your agenda and we just talk to each other. But that's to be— to make myself available much more to other people.

[00:28:14] Speaker A: I think it's time for the tips.

[00:28:18] Speaker B: Oh, really? Okay. So my first tip is don't bet on your first idea. Yeah, but I already talked about that. Yeah, but I actually had a bonus tip, so I still have 3 to go to talk about. So The first tip, and so you can talk so much about like entrepreneurship is so broad. What I want to do is to talk

[00:28:43] Speaker B: about small things that make a huge impact if you do them consistently. So that's the sort of the category of tips I chose to bring. So the first one is to base all your communication. like 100%, everything of all of your communication on storytelling. Don't talk about so much about facts as

[00:29:09] Speaker B: you do about the story of what you're going through. And that goes to both internal communication and when you're in one-on-one meetings, and also when you do PR or when you talk to investors, when you talk to customers. If you tell a story, then people are going to get engaged. And if there's no story, then they are not. And

[00:29:34] Speaker B: then you can think about what is a story? How— what is that exactly? And what is the difference is that there needs to be some kind of friction in what you're saying for there to be a story. You can see like the difference is like If, if you take the story, the shortest possible story, it's like the cat sat on the mat,

[00:30:00] Speaker B: and that's a really boring— it's not the story because it's so boring. But if I say the cat sat on the dog's mat, then immediately there's friction there because you know that dog, the dog is gonna hate that. And you're like, yeah, tell me more, what's gonna happen now? And so the way you do— you, for anyone that wants to be good at storytelling, read

[00:30:25] Speaker B: up about 2 things: the hero's journey, which is sort of the monomyth, the one structure for all stories, and then just do the monomyth, like that hero's journey structure on everything you write— every blog post, every press release, every email. Every employee interview, hiring interview, both if you want to be hired and if you want to are hiring

[00:30:50] Speaker B: someone. And the other one is the classical ethos, pathos, and logos—the the Greek foundation of rhetoric. Like when you are conveying a message, do it with emotion, with facts, and with telling about who you are, who— why should we listen to this person talking. So

[00:31:16] Speaker B: ethos, pathos, and logos is a super great tool for storytelling as well. So that's my, that's my first tip. Do you have any follow-up questions on that, or should I just go on, move on?

[00:31:28] Speaker A: No, I liked all what you said. I also like the classic, uh, works. Yeah.

[00:31:34] Speaker B: Yes. So my second tip is—

[00:31:38] Speaker A: If I just— I know that we have some listeners that are joining our bootcamp, our business development program, and they are doing their rehearsal pitch tomorrow. So I hope that all of you listen really closely to Martin's tip number 1.

[00:31:57] Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you. So the second tip is that there is— when you start a company, There's very few things with as high ROI, so return on investment, as design. Any money or time you spend on design will come back tenfold or a hundredfold. I can promise you that. And that has been one of the best learnings from everything I did, that in

[00:32:22] Speaker B: order for people to, to understand what you're doing or take it in, it needs to look beautiful because otherwise they will ignore it. And design is such a powerful tool. And actually, it's sort of cheating because I believe that good design is also good storytelling, that people just can see the design of something and understand the story behind it. And

[00:32:49] Speaker B: so that goes to UX and pitch decks and communication and homepages, everything. If everything you do speaks the same language, that will become a very powerful, like, holistic thing around your company. And like, I've done this both when I started Narrative and when I started Heyware. I've

[00:33:14] Speaker B: spent enormous amount of money on design. On, on, on it. When starting Narrative, we, we got a grant of 300,000 kronor from from Innovations Systemet, and we spent all of that on design. And then we made a deal with industrial designers to

[00:33:41] Speaker B: do revenue share on the industrial design of the camera, and we paid almost a million in that that we didn't have yet. And it was a great bet from them that they wanted to believe in us so much. So like before even starting work full-time myself, I had spent 1.3 million kronor only on design. And it turned out that the

[00:34:07] Speaker B: ROI was so huge, like we've got it back, that within 9 months we had raised 10 million kronor from the product of that design.

[00:34:17] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:34:18] Speaker B: We didn't have— like, they take so much time to build hardware. There was no other way to show our vision than to invest in the design that was telling the story about what we wanted to do and exactly how it should work.

[00:34:30] Speaker A: Do you see a difference there between business to business and business to consumers?

[00:34:37] Speaker B: No, no, there's no difference there. Like, there's a lot of differences, but in communication, no matter who— like, you, you are communicating with people. A big company is just a bigger bunch of people, so you need to convey your message to each of them.

[00:34:59] Speaker A: Great. Yeah, I was like, it just popped up. Apple is also a good example of the design and also telling stories with when it's really it's ages ago, but when they started with the white headphones. Before that, every headphone was black. So it's also a great example of actually putting storytelling into design decisions.

[00:35:23] Speaker B: Definitely. Yeah, I love that example. So, and my 4th tip is about problem solving, that my— what has worked beautifully throughout all the years where I've been an entrepreneur is that problem solving is not about asking, how should I solve this problem? It's about asking, who can solve this problem? Like,

[00:35:48] Speaker B: whatever you want to do, almost no matter how small it is, if you want to solve a problem, talk to the person that knows best how to solve it.

[00:35:58] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:35:58] Speaker B: And the thing is that once you realize the power in that, you realize that you can do anything. There's like, if you, if that's your way of thinking, who, who can do this, who can help me with this, you erase all limits to what you can achieve. And that, and that realization is, is something that no

[00:36:24] Speaker B: one can take away from you after you realize that I can actually do whatever the hell I want. There's no limits to what I can achieve. And that's Because it's not about what I can do. I'm, I'm just a normal person. But if I just have the power to, to talk to someone and actually get them to understand what I'm trying to achieve, and then, and then they— it's not

[00:36:49] Speaker B: about, it's not about making it worthwhile for them. If you talk from your heart, people will want to help you. And especially if you are in, in Like what I realized with Narrative is that you cannot be— when you ask someone for help, you cannot be like, you cannot talk like you know how things is going to work out. That's sort of an entrepreneur

[00:37:14] Speaker B: sickness that you always need to stay on top of what you are trying to achieve. Like we, we're doing this and this and everything is going so well. But in order to get people's help, you actually need to show vulnerability. Like they, like what I was doing was walking, going around when I started Narrative, going around talking to people about me starting a camera company with manufacturing in Asia, and I had a 3D-printed

[00:37:40] Speaker B: prototype and so on. And I was talking, I realized that I have to believe in it to achieve it. And so I talked about this like, yeah, I'm starting a camera company. talking to factories in Taiwan now, and they seem really excited. So we're going to start up this thing. And they were like, holy shit, he's actually doing this. He's jumping off the cliff. I need to help him right now in order for this to work out.

[00:38:05] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:38:06] Speaker B: There's so many people that I talk to that come to me and say that I'm thinking about maybe if everything goes right, then I could think about doing this thing that That would be cool, right? And when you talk like this, people hear that, well, maybe this happening, maybe it's not happening. So the message you get back is often like, this sounds super cool. Tell me

[00:38:31] Speaker B: when you're about to get started and we can talk then. And you come from like, what did I do wrong there? Like I talked about my vision and they didn't respond. They didn't want to help. What was wrong with me? And it's just that you're not conveying that you're on your way, like falling off the cliff right now. That's the story you need to show, that vulnerability to get people like really engaged.

[00:38:57] Speaker A: Great tip. Thank you so much. We had a question from the audience, a bit related to it. How do you organize all these things that you need to do at the same time?

[00:39:09] Speaker B: Yes.

[00:39:09] Speaker A: As a startup, you know, you had to concentrate on multiple things at the same time. And how, how do you tackle that?

[00:39:16] Speaker B: Yes, so I— there's 2 ways, um, or 3 ways. First, that's a problem. Problems are solved by thinking about who can help me with this. Like, I need— I'm not an organized person. I need to have people around me that are organized. So that's the first thing. Like, I, I make sure that I have someone on a team that is working closely with

[00:39:41] Speaker B: me that is an organized person. And so that's the first thing. And the other solution to that is that I'm very— I feel like the things that are important will give me the energy to do those things.

[00:39:59] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:40:00] Speaker B: So that means that I often procrastinate, like I do things last minute, but half of the things that I postpone until last minute turns out that I didn't have to do. That something else happens that made that redundant. So, so that's actually a time saver sometimes to do things last minute. It's a great time saver. And the third thing I do is that sometimes when

[00:40:25] Speaker B: my head is too full of things, I write down like everything I need, I have in my head. And that's a good tool. And the thing is that after I've written it down, I never look at that list again. I never— I've never been able to take a checklist and like go, I did that, I did that, and then do something else and go back and say, oh, now I did that. I'm not that person. But writing down the list is

[00:40:50] Speaker B: super helpful when your head is like exploding over the things that you need to do.

[00:40:57] Speaker A: Thank you. How do you become more patient? We have someone in the audience that gets really tired of his or her idea.

[00:41:11] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:41:12] Speaker A: And want to do it quickly.

[00:41:14] Speaker B: Yes.

[00:41:15] Speaker A: Always looking for the new thing.

[00:41:17] Speaker B: Yes. So this is my, this is my solution. It's not theory. This is what I have practiced in the past. And if you have, if you're getting tired of your ideas, it's not because you're not too patient. patient enough. It's because you didn't go fast enough on finding new ideas. Like, it's because you only

[00:41:42] Speaker B: had 10— this is your 10th idea. That's why you're giving up. It needs to be your 40th or 50th or 100th idea. And it's not until all the ideas you have suddenly become so boring in comparison to this great passion that fills you that you will do something sustainable. There's

[00:42:09] Speaker B: such a power in iteration. So if you feel yourself impatient, it's because you're not going fast enough. You should go through more, more, more ideas. You only spend 3 days on one idea. If you spend 3 months, you will never get to 100 ideas before you die. So spend 3 days on every idea, and then after 3 months, then

[00:42:34] Speaker B: you will know what to do and you will know what to stick with it. But, and then you need to just tell yourself, like, this is what I do now. I'm investing my life in this. And you need to believe that you're doing it. You need to tell everyone so that, that if it's nothing else, it's the shame of failure or the shame of giving up. that is keeping you in line when nothing else is there.

[00:43:00] Speaker A: Yeah, you're really deeply connected to the value of passion. Can you tell, do you have some, tell something, and do you have any methods or strategies to handle when it gets tough or when the work is hard?

[00:43:19] Speaker B: Yeah, so it really goes back to this There's this beautiful book by Simon Sinek called Start with Why. You need to know why you're doing something. 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. And that means that when I end up in pain or I'm

[00:43:44] Speaker B: struggling, I can go back to thinking, am I learning now? Or am I not learning? And because I know that as long as I'm learning, I'm in the zone I want to be.

[00:43:55] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:43:56] Speaker B: And when I'm struggling, it means something is hard. When it's hard, it's because I'm learning. So, like, I've come to associate pain with learning. And there's so many different ways to explain that. But one example is that when you get— when you build a product and you launch it and

[00:44:22] Speaker B: some people give you bad reviews, why does that hurt so much when you put your heart and soul in something and they complain about it? And what I have realized, or the way I manage that, that pain, is that I think about why did they write this? It's because they care about the product. They care enough that they want me to make

[00:44:47] Speaker B: it good. They want me to learn something. The pain I'm feeling is actually me learning or me resisting the learning. So, uh, that, that's always how I connect back to the why. And everybody can have their own why, but make sure that is something that can drive you Through the hardship, because

[00:45:12] Speaker B: otherwise maybe you haven't dug deep enough to get to the core of who you are and why you're doing this.

[00:45:20] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you so much. So we had a question dropping in. You always try to find the best people and the right people, and but how do you find the right people?

[00:45:36] Speaker B: Oh yeah.

[00:45:36] Speaker A: You are— we heard that you really managed to get them once you get them hooked, but how do you find them?

[00:45:44] Speaker B: Yes.

[00:45:45] Speaker A: Do you have any tips there?

[00:45:48] Speaker B: Yeah, so for example, like, especially when you are looking for co-founders, that's the most difficult thing in the world because people are great people, They're not— they're never out of a job. They're always on doing something. You have to have the courage to pull people out of something they are super

[00:46:13] Speaker B: passionate about and convey them to come work with you on something even more, uh, passionable, if that's a word. And maybe— or you can catch them when they are like in, uh, in a downward slope and they're feeling like, is this really the best thing for me? But that's such a short gap, like from people, like good people, great people

[00:46:38] Speaker B: that you want to work with, they never announce that they are looking for a job, almost never, until they already have a job. They're like, I'm doing a new thing now. And you're like, well, we could have worked together. Why didn't you say anything? And so What I do is I talk to people and I ask them, like, I need— I'm building a camera. Do

[00:47:03] Speaker B: you know someone that knows anything about cameras? And when I did that, when I did the CTO for Narrative, I thought I only knew one person that could build hardware. So Johan Rissmyr, who's now the CEO of Castor.io. I talked to Johan. Because he came from Axis, a camera company, and I asked him, so who, who should I get as a co-founder

[00:47:29] Speaker B: in my hardware company since you know hardware? Like, do you have an idea of who I should talk to? And he said, I have no idea, but someone who might know is Björn Westin, the R&D, head of R&D at Axis. He knows the best people. He will not come work with you, but But he might know someone, and because he's the best, he really knows who is good. So

[00:47:55] Speaker B: I went to— I talked to— I contacted Björn Westin, and I went to Lund, and I met him. We had coffee, and I showed him my prototype that I was always walking around with, and I talked to him about everything I tried to do, and he was like, oh, sounds great, I will think about this. And then I went home to Linköping again, and he called the day after and he said, so I talked to

[00:48:20] Speaker B: my brother and I'm— yeah, let's do this. I'm coming on board. So that was just like a super fluke. I didn't even imagine I could get him as a co-founder. And I think that it speaks to Both like the— you need to talk to the best people, not

[00:48:46] Speaker B: the second best, and you need to have a lot of luck. But luck doesn't exist. Luck is about having all your tentacles out all the time. Some people think that they need to keep their startup idea secret so that people will not steal it.

[00:49:08] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:49:09] Speaker B: That might be true for super like deep tech or something, but actually like for the 99.9% of the rest of the companies, that's how you kill your company. You will never achieve anything if you keep it secret. You need to talk about— talk to the best people. You need to be super excited to everyone you meet because you never know where

[00:49:36] Speaker B: the small glimpse of, well, let's call it luck, will happen, or coincidence, or whatever happens, where universe just aligns and you all of a sudden end up in a much better position than you could ever expect.

[00:49:53] Speaker A: Do you have any other thoughts about developing teams? I know that it's really hard, both finding finding the best, but growing and creating the team that complements each other, I would say.

[00:50:12] Speaker B: Yeah. It's really— you need to work with really good people, like great people, because if you— there's this saying that Good people have high— they want to work with people that are better than them. If you work with someone who has not—

[00:50:38] Speaker B: who is not in the right place, they might feel insecure, and that insecurity might lead to them hiring other people that also end up in the wrong place. And So that means that you need to be really conscious about who you bring in early in the team and make sure that they are as excited about the project as

[00:51:03] Speaker B: you are. But then after that, it's like I hire people that I like, and I hire everyone on the team. Like, I make— I decide on everyone. No one can be hired without me meeting them first. And that means that people meet me,

[00:51:28] Speaker B: and if they don't like me, they will not come work for me.

[00:51:31] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:51:32] Speaker B: That's super important that I show myself and show my heart so that people can reject me if they are not the right person. And also, there are other way around that I meet them And, and then I become this filter that attracts— like, I'm— people always say that I seem like a kind person and I'm calm and patient and so on. So

[00:51:57] Speaker B: I attract people to me that like that kind of style of a person. And then so in the companies I build, it becomes teams of that kind of people. Doesn't mean that everyone is calm and patient, but it means that everyone likes calm and patient people. And then everyone is different, but at least everybody is happy together. And that goes a really long way of building a

[00:52:23] Speaker B: good team. I'm on it. I really strongly believe in something called AMP, which is like autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Like, that's, that's the way we thrive in a workplace. Like, if we, we need to have autonomy to choose something about our work— where are we, what tools do we have, uh, who do I work with— I don't have to choose

[00:52:48] Speaker B: all of that, but I need to have autonomy over some aspects of my, my workday.

[00:52:53] Speaker A: Hmm.

[00:52:53] Speaker B: And then mastery is about learning all the time. And I think that's not only me, I think everyone wants to feel that they are in control. And purpose is about knowing why am I doing this? Who is gaining from this? And everything has purpose. If you're building the most boring product in the world, which might be like some kind of invoicing system or account— I, maybe it's just me, I think accounting

[00:53:18] Speaker B: is boring. But so if you're building an accounting system, make it your purpose to make it to achieve happy users, because then it's not just an accounting system. You're making the world better with your accounting system if you have happy users that are like, wow, I feel so much better using this tool than I was before. And so, so that's something that

[00:53:44] Speaker B: I think about when, when, when creating good teams. And it's actually a great way to talk about with someone about how you want to Why you want them to come aboard and what can you offer them. If you have this autonomy, mastery, and purpose, you talk about how— what kind of autonomy will they have, what kind of mastery will they achieve, and what kind of purpose is it in what you do. Then

[00:54:09] Speaker B: people— that goes a super long way to talk about what— can I become my best self if I work for this company?

[00:54:19] Speaker A: Thank you. We are running out of time. Time flies when you're enjoying yourself. Just to the audience, we— some last questions and then we will wrap it up. I have one question here from somebody who is finishing their studies in engineering and they are debating with themselves to take a normal

[00:54:44] Speaker A: job in order to have an income or— and the sacrifice will be not focusing on building the company. Well, do you have any tips on how to start if you are fresh, a fresh graduate?

[00:54:58] Speaker B: Yes, I do. I think that where he or she is right now is actually a really great place to start a company. You will become complacent and bored and die inside if you go to your normal job first. You will actually not Get out of there. You will die bored. That's what will happen. So what

[00:55:23] Speaker B: I what I suggest is to finish your engineering degree, but don't finish being a student. Go into something else that like philosophy or or design or whatever you need, and then start your company because you since you're still a student, you still your your your habits are super affordable. You live in a way that where you can sustain yourself on just CSN bidrag. Keep doing that

[00:55:48] Speaker B: while you start your company. So there's so much interesting stuff to learn. You don't have— it doesn't have to be within engineering. It can be. Maybe you can take some AI course or something that you, that you're interested in. But being a student is, is great if you want to start your company. Stay a student and, and build your company from there. But

[00:56:15] Speaker B: of course you can take, you can take a normal job. But what you can also do is that you can, since you're an engineer, you, you have the power in this arbetsmarknad. You are the one calling the shots. And, and so put requirements on your employer if you take a normal job. Tell them, I

[00:56:40] Speaker B: don't want to work five days per week. I want to work four days per week, and I want to be able to start my company the the fifth day, and that's my own company when it's when it's done. Or say tell them that I'm available as a consultant. I work out from my own company, and you can I will invoice you every month. You will not pay me a salary, and that that then you have started your company already. So just think about

[00:57:05] Speaker B: ways to. achieve what you want to achieve. Don't postpone your happiness because you might be dead tomorrow. Like, you don't want to die and, and like an entrepreneur that never happened. There's nothing wrong with having a job. That's, that's a beautiful thing, and you can work with great people. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, then there's

[00:57:31] Speaker B: no day like Like today to start.

[00:57:36] Speaker A: Great final words. So to sum it up, try all your ideas, not 10, not 20, not 30, 40 at least, I think we learned today. And focus on why and storytelling and telling that why to everybody out there. Design and the potential. of design and problem solving. Is

[00:58:02] Speaker A: that a good wrap-up?

[00:58:05] Speaker B: Yes, definitely.

[00:58:06] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Martin, for being here today. Really interesting talking to you. I just want to give a short heads up. The next Startup Talk is on the 2nd of June. It's a Wednesday. And then we have invited Mikael Kiermitte to talk about why do startups fail. So more information will come soon, so keep your eyes open on our social media and/or at LEADdotse.

[00:58:31] Speaker A: Thank you so much for, for today.

[00:58:35] Speaker B: See ya! Thank you so much.