Alumni reflections: Huddly

StartupLab
Jul 27, 2017 · 6 min read

We’re accepting applications to our accelerator, where we invest 1MNOK in great technology entrepreneurs building something exciting out of Norway. Building up to that, we’ve caught up with some of the entrepreneurs we’ve worked with in the past to hear what learnings they can share with younger companies.

Anders Eikenes, CTO and co-founder of Huddly

A few years ago, Anders Eikenes (AE) left a comfortable job at Cisco to start Huddly and disrupt the videoconferencing industry together with Stein Ove Eriksen. Together with the rest of the Huddly team, they successfully raised an over-subscribed Series B this spring, and are currently going to market with Huddly GO, their next generation collaboration camera.

SL: So, what’s the status of your business right now in two sentences?

AE: I can do it in two words: Delivery. Mode.

SL: Could you elaborate a little on that?

AE: Well, everything we’re doing these days has to do with delivery. We have just appointed a new CEO, specifically to better prepare for delivering in the market, and we are looking forward to reaping the rewards for all the work we’ve done since fall 2013. For a very long time we’ve been advancing the business while being very open and opportunistic, expanding our perspectives and trying to learn how our product fits the market.

But these days we are tidying up all those loose ends. Our focus is very concentrated — to ensure that we are able to deliver a high quality product in high volume: Delivery mode!

SL: So, how did it all start?

AE: There are two important reasons that we decided to start a company. The first important reason comes from our time in Tandberg. That experience was invaluable. We were conditioned to always use video for internal communication. Video was all over the place, and every meeting room was fully equipped. When you went into a meeting, you never knew if the other attendees would show up in person or on video. And it all just worked so well.

But then I heard the price of the these systems… Wow, they were expensive. And we started thinking there has to be a way to produce systems like these a lot cheaper.

The other important thing was inspiration from other companies, companies like GoPro. We saw what they were able to do with wide-angle lenses, high quality video, consumer-type cameras. And we were thinking that we could bring the same kind of equipment to the enterprise.

Current videoconferencing systems were, as I said, expensive and very complicated. Motors and stuff. But Moore’s law has worked to our advantage, so we were suddenly able to remove these motors from the camera and rather do everything with software.

These two things together made it possible. The camera technology experience of our world-class technical team has obviously helped, and our geographical location too. If you’re into video-conferencing, you want to work in either Silicon Valley or Oslo. Oslo Video Valley is known all over the world, and the Tandberg heritage is very important.

SL: When you started, what did you expect to be the most difficult?

AE: I didn’t really think too much about that when we started. I had saved up enough to work on this for a year, and I wanted to try. Some chances in life you just have to take. From a personal perspective, it wasn’t that I felt I desperately had to succeed with this. I figured it would be a good learning experience, and not that dangerous.

When it comes to what I expected to be most difficult, it was probably the things we didn’t know how to do. The commercial stuff. Go-to-market strategy, fundraising and so on.

The Huddly camera

SL: In retrospect, has this been true? How have you overcome these challenges?

AE: Yes, at least until we realized that we had to complement our team with more diverse experience. Having Thomas and Heidi join was very very important. They knew finance, sales and marketing, and brought new dimensions to the team. We went from being a technical team to a company-building team.

Thinking back, we probably should have done this earlier. Not necessarily to hire people, but to involve people with different backgrounds and mindsets. Naturally you have to gather around a common vision, but getting a diverse team together early on — that I believe is very important.

SL: And that team has really grown — in the beginning there was only 2 of you, now there’s 42. How do you go about doing this right?

AE: We have tried to always hire people that are better than us. People that know things that we don’t know, experts within their fields. Many of our employees are involved in the interview process to make sure a candidate is a good fit. And that has created some sort of ripple effect. Because these great people that we take in, they then bring in more great people. We’ve found a lot of people through personal networks, and that makes it easier to communicate the vision that we all unite around.

Having an open culture, where we share and help each other has possibly been even more important. It not only makes it a much nicer place to work, but it’s also a lot easier to onboard new team members. I saw this when I worked in Silicon Valley, how everyone was so open, how beneficial it was for them. Paying it forward.

And it has been important to mix different types of people. When it comes to everything — from gender to competencies to appetite for risk. As I said, everyone needs to share the same vision. But we can’t all be alike — then we’d make bad decisions.

SL: Is this also about mirroring your market?

AE: Yes, definitely. Especially important for us is how young people communicate, how they work together remotely. Because they bring these habits to work. There are so many enterprise trends that you can trace back to consumer markets, and we want to be in the forefront here. We shouldn’t go out asking Fortune 100-managers what they want. That would be like trying to walk backwards into the future.

SL: Looking back at the first years of building a company, what’s been your biggest unexpected learning so far?

AE: The importance of not giving up. Being extremely stubborn, and continuing to push forward. Objectively, there have been a lot of good reasons to give up along the way, but through persistence we have managed to overcome every hurdle to date.

Another thing is how important it was for us to bring in investors. When StartupLab/FoundersFund invested in Huddly, we were suddenly responsible for something that other people also owned parts of. That made it even harder to give up. We said to ourselves, “we’re not going to lose these people’s money. That’s embarrassing”. There’s a psychological aspect when you take in investors which makes it harder to give up.

SL: Is there anything you’d say you’ve been very good at so far, that you continue to?

AE: I think we have been good at always moving forward. We try hard not to deliberate too long on our decisions because it slows us down, especially on smaller issues. If you are given the choice between two options and fail to choose one, then you’re actually making a third choice: nothing at all.

We always believed that it was a lot better to just start moving forward and learn as fast as we can until we develop a better plan. Of course, that’s not to say you should do it with the big things! But when you are a smaller company, your agility and adaptability can be your competitive advantage, not to mention the benefits of a sense of momentum.

SL: What’s the status of your business in two sentences, if asked in five years?

AE: 5 years from now? We want Huddly products to be helping people all over the world to collaborate through video in amazing new ways that empower them to work better, together.

As a company, we’d like to be on-the-radar globally, with sales in every continent and close partnerships with all the major IT players.

Best of luck going forward — we're continuing to root for you! If you reading this are working on a problem and looking for funding, network and top-end support that gets you off the ground, check out or upcoming accelerator.

    StartupLab

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    StartupLab is an incubator and early stage investor for Norwegian tech startups.

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