Five founders on the process of starting a company: — Be humble and listen to believable people
No founders were born into the positions they have today, but that’s a detail easy to forget for many of us. And so, here are five stories about how some of Norway’s founders started their successes.
A startup founder is something like a rockstar of the business world: A founder is a risk-taker, a creative and visionary person, someone wanting to build a company that might become bigger than anyone ever imagined. The dream of becoming a founder is something many can relate to: Even those who might not be sure exactly what a ‘startup’ or a ‘founder’ is, can have the dream of creating a company. The important thing, after all, is the idea — and how you want to make that idea a reality.
In the previous article on this blog, Startup Norway announced the new program Founder Challenge. The ambition — and vision — of the program is to help people take that first step into the startup world: We are encouraging people to really get started with their company. How? By creating an actionable plan on how to get that first funding — and not just pitch on a stage (although that is an important aspect as well). Founder Challenge is after all not solely a “pitching event” — you participate in order to get help on how to start your startup. The crowd is possibly the kindest crowd they will ever meet in the startup world, as the intention is to help each participant validate and kickstart their idea. Over the course of two weeks of evening sessions, participants will get valuable advice on how to take their ideas further.
The process of iterating your idea should not be done in solitude — especially not when so much of the valuable creative thinking happens in conversation and collaboration with others. Below, we have gathered information about several startup founders that have taken the risk — and who now have become the rockstars so many of us look up to, wondering if we ever will get to their level.
Founder stories from Norway’s startup ecosystem
Maja Adriaensen: Startup Norway
Maja Adriaensen is the CEO and Founder of Startup Norway — an umbrella organisation for several startup ecosystem initiatives: Angel Challenge, Startup Campus, and Startup Extreme. A commonality between all of them is the desire to share knowledge, skills, and valuable advice. So whether you attend an Angel Challenge program, come to Startup Campus for an event, or go to the Startup Extreme conference at Voss: The primary intention is to teach you something valuable that will help you on your startup journey — or teach you about the process of investing.
In August 2019, Adriaensen was interviewed by the Norwegian newspaper E24. She explained that after studying Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of California, she returned to Norway — hoping to find a community.
I had not been a part of a founder community before, but when I got back from San Francisco, I assumed there would be a similar community in Oslo, but smaller, Adriaensen said to E24.
But to her surprise, such a community did not exist. Sure, there were some founders scattered all around Norway, but no real community where they could gather and learn from each other. Adriaensen also noticed people’s fear of sharing ideas — stemming from the old (and wrong) assumption that people are more likely to steal the idea rather than help you along. A solution for the missing startup community eventually became her startup idea: She wanted to help founders succeed by making a community that would support and guide them.
Adriaensen founded Startup Norway in 2011, and is now running the company of more than 20 employees alongside her Chief Visionary Officer and husband, Knut Wien.
Currently, she is also a Board Member at SIVA — a governmental corporation owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry. In 2018, Adriaensen was a finalist at the Entrepreneur of the Year award at SHE Conference.
Erling Magnus Solheim: Playpulse
Another familiar founder from the Norwegian startup ecosystem — and one of the founders Maja Adriaensen got to know early on, is Erling Magnus Solheim from Playpulse. The company “provides entertainment-based workouts on our stationary gaming bike”. The faster you pedal, the faster you move in the games, and with our handlebar game controllers you steer and play real video games.
In an interview he did as a founding partner of Startup Campus, Solheim said he has a background from the NTNU, and the School of Entrepreneurship.
That’s where I got into the startup world the first time, and as you might know there’s been a number of successful cases coming out of there eventually. At that time, I joined Truls Brataas as a co-founder of Douchebags where I stayed for 5 years until 2016.
Douchebags were part of the office space and community MESH from the very beginning — and witnessed the ecosystem grow and mature significantly in those early years.
In 2016 I joined my classmate from NTNU, Kristian Kannelønning, on a journey to New York to start a new venture. Cesura was the company name, with a mission to make it easier for the automation industry to keep track of their component’s lifecycle status. A completely different business than Douchebags, B2B software instead of B2C consumer goods, and it was an intense learning experience that unfortunately lasted less than a year.
Solheim’s journey with Cesura ended abruptly, and not because he chose it himself: While doing downhill cycling in september 2016, he had a severe accident and broke his back.
This naturally meant I couldn’t be part of Cesura any more. It also meant a return to home base, living at my parents’ place for a year, recovering, reading a lot, and figuring out my next steps.
After recovering from the accident, Solheim went on to work as a freelance consultant for NTNU and TTO, where he was fortunate to meet Kristoffer Hagen — the inventor of Playpulse, and Elina Willert, project manager of TTO for Playpulse.
We joined forces as founders of Playpulse in the summer of 2017. We have been running Playpulse for 2,5 years now, and it’s been an amazing and intense journey so far — looking forward to the time ahead for us!
Marie Mostad: Inzpire.me
Marie Mostad is a co-founder of Inzpire.me, a platform to scale influencer marketing. The service provides tools so you can “easily target your audience, match with curated creators, generate high-quality content, and optimize your future campaigns.” Like several other names in this article, she has been interviewed on the basis of her being a founding partner of Startup Campus.
Mostad traveled to Boston in 2013, at a time when there was very little activity around startups in Norway.
Before I co-founded Inzpire.me, I was creative director for the Boston startup Rest Devices. When I came back to Norway in 2016 to start inzpire.me, I arrived to a landscape that was completely changed from what I left behind three years earlier. Places such as OHOI (now: Startup Campus) and MESH had arrived to the scene, along with several angel investors, and a wave of startups. I wanted to come back with what I had learned from Boston about a very well-developed startup ecosystem and startups in general, so I was very excited to contribute towards Norwegian startups.
She credits several people with having gotten her back to Norway — and into the startup ecosystem.
Mats Lyngstad called me when I was working in Boston and asked if I wanted to co-found a company with him. And Thomas Falck was the first to say yes to investing in inzpire.me — this was of course a big moment for us, and absolutely crucial. And getting the first ‘yes’ is very redeeming in a fundraising process: Thomas is very good at managing his different roles, so he can go in and out of them with ease. During the early phase of inzpire.me, he would sit down with us to give us advice on how to make contracts that were startup friendly (rather than just investor friendly), while we were in a phase when we had no prior knowledge of these things at all.
Through the years, Mostad has also taken on several other roles in the Norwegian startup ecosystem.
Besides being very passionate about making inzpire.me succeed, I am also very interested in seeing the Norwegian startup ecosystem succeed. I have tried (with the time I have) to contribute in general. I have been a mentor at Katapult, I am a founding partner at Startup Campus, and I am an investor at the micro fund Unconventional Ventures. At Unconventional Ventures I help invest in “out of the ordinary” startups that need funding.
Murshid M. Ali: Huddlestock
Within the Norwegian startup ecosystem, Murshid M. Ali is perhaps most well known as the founder of Huddlestock. The company is an investment market with a base in London, Great Britain and Oslo, Norway. Late in 2019, Ali interviewed as a founding partner of Startup Campus, and told about his journey as an entrepreneur.
I was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Stavanger, and did my masters at Grenoble École de Management. I worked for a couple of years in the energy and finance industry, before I decided to start my first company at the end of 2010. It was a consultancy and taught me the ‘ins-and-outs’ of entrepreneurship.
In 2013, he sold his part of that business and embarked on a Phd in Economics, while founding the Fintech company Huddlestock.
Our vision with the company was to use new technology and build a platform where anyone, regardless of their investment amount, would be able to tap into investment ideas formerly only accessible to institutional investors.
In 2020, Huddlestock are rolling out their platform in Germany together with BNP Paribas — to fulfil this vision on a grander scale.
In 2017 I was one of the co-founders of Norsk Solar, a Norwegian renewable energy company within solar energy. In 2018 I left as CEO of Huddlestock and began as CIO in Norsk Solar. We have now built two solar parks, one in Pakistan and one in Ukraine. These parks power more than 65.000 homes with renewable energy every year. I fly a lot in my work, so I feel I have contributed somewhat to justify all the flights I embark on each year. The impact is profound for being a startup-up, founded by a few entrepreneurs with some ideas and capital.
Ali credits the people around him with having provided the knowledge and platforms necessary for learning about creating a business.
I have been very fortunate to learn from the very best executives and founders, whom have been mentors and taught me a great deal about business — from both large multinational corporations, to growing family enterprises, and technology entrepreneurs. Many of them have helped me getting introduced to clients, getting fundraising, advice on management, board compositions, and more.
Being open to new knowledge — but also critical to taking advice from ‘everyone’ — is something Ali also has insights on.
I have listened to advice, but I have also critically examined everything. I think one of the most important traits of early entrepreneurs is being humble and to listen to what Ray Dalio calls “believable people”. Believable people are individuals with proven knowledge and experience in certain domains, for example in starting and running a business. In entrepreneurship there is no truth, but it’s like the philosopher Arne Næss said “dialogue brings you to the closest thing to truth”, and I sincerely believe that.
Ali is still a board member and shareholder in Huddlestock.
Kim Humborstad: Zwipe
Kim Humborstad is the founder of Zwipe, a company enabling biometric identification through the use of fingerprints for payment and other purposes. Zwipe has been his work for the past decade — and so this was the topic when Humborstad was interviewed as a founding partner of Startup Campus.
I work within the field of payment, identification, and the like. I started Zwipe just as I completed my studies in innovation and entrepreneurship. So I have really gone the whole entrepreneurial journey: At first, I was working alone in a basement, and we are now a total of 40 people — and have been listed on Mercur Market. We’ve built a professional organization well positioned for the emerging biometric payments market.
A large part of the entrepreneurial journey is whoever you get to connect with, and how your network might help you build your product, or innovate it completely. Like many other founders, Humborstad knows the value of receiving help from a network of startups, investors, and others.
Many good forces have contributed to where Zwipe is today. So after a decade of working on Zwipe, picking one person would mean picking from a pool of names: We have of course had great help from the people who engaged in the startup phase, but also our teachers during our studies who supported, inspired, and allowed us to work quite freely on our idea.
And as your journey as a founder grows longer and more expansive — perhaps with ongoing journeys in several countries — your network of connections and helpers change, but also grow.
These days I’d like to highlight the team members who are contributing with far more than one would expect from employees, both through giving time and expertise. However, if I am to pick just one name, I would mention a mentor I had right from the beginning. Unfortunately, he is not among us anymore. His name was Bernt Kristiansen, and he had an incredible drive that I learned a lot from. Amongst other things he put us in touch with our angel investors, and he taught me a lot about team management.
The five founders presented in this article have all had different paths to where they are today but one thing is in common: They got started with a great idea, and a vision for how they could make a meaningful contribution for society. Another common aspect is that none of these founders made their startups alone: Just like “it takes a village to raise a child”, it takes a community to make a startup. With the Founder Challenge, we want to make it easier to take that first step into the world of startups and business.
