Why so many successful startups from Sweden?

Okay — every Swedish wannabe-entrepreneur get this question a lot. Here is an attempt to address it. Ray Gillenwater asked me the question on the Worksmart podcast and Daniel Ek suggested I’d write it down. Finally, I found the time to do it, so here is a rough transcript.

“You are calling us from Sweden and we’re speaking on Skype at least partly a Swedish product and this morning I used Spotify another Swedish innovation. What is it about Sweden that makes it such an innovative place?”

We have a very strong background in having home computers. A lot of us grew up in the homecomputer revolution with the VIC20 and the Commodore 64 followed by the Amiga. We even had our own national computer called ABC80 and ABC800.

So a lot of people grew up with those computers.

Adding that the weather here is mostly terrible. We don’t have a lot of sunlight. Today, the sun went down in Stockholm at around two or three o’clock. And then it’s pitch black. It is even worse if you travel further north. So the only comfort would be to find a fantastic Swedish girl or man, which we have a lot, so there is a lot of stock, but if you were like myself in my teens that didn’t quite happen. So then you have to warm yourself with something else, which turned out to be a computer screen.

So a lot of us spent a lot of time in front of computers, programming and so forth on these — I was going to say platforms — but it wasn’t really platforms — it was very simple computers that you tried to make things with that wasn’t supposed to be possible to do. You mentioned Spotify — the CTO of Spotify is an old Commodore 64 demo guy — he was on the demogroup Light. At the day a very successful one and today he’s running the tech operations of Spotify. Sebastian Knutsson whom is one of the founders of King.com — the company behind Candy Crush — is also an old Commodore 64 guy.

And so it goes.

“You have me wondering what would have happened if Happy Pancake did exist back in the day”

Mikael Pawlo