Startup Campus founding partner Erling Magnus Solheim on watching Norway’s ecosystem grow
The serial founder Erling Magnus Solheim wants to spend his time at Startup Campus by learning more about how to plan for success and build an organisation.
Below, you can read about Erling Magnus Solheim — a serial founder behind the startups Playpulse, Douchebags, and Cesura. He is one of our interviewees for our column — where we focus on founding partners and their journeys, and why they have decided on joining in on the Startup Campus.
Tell me a little bit about yourself — who are you and what are you doing in the startup world?
I have a background from NTNU and the School of Entrepreneurship. So 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.
We were part of MESH from the very beginning and witnessed the eco-system 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.
I had a pretty severe accident in september 2016, breaking my back downhill cycling, which 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.
I worked as a freelance consultant for NTNU and TTO where I was fortunate to meet Kristoffer (Hagen), inventor of Playpulse, and Elina (Willert), project manager for TTO for Playpulse which was then a commercialization project. 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!
We were originally located in Trondheim as a spin-off from NTNU, then Startuplab in Oslo and now also with a satellite in China as we’re focusing efforts here these days.
Why did you decide to be a founding partner of Startup Campus?
I know Maja from way back, as we went to secondary school together. We were snowboarding a lot when we were about 14–15 years old. Then we didn’t have so much contact for a while, but a few years ago it turned out we were both in the startup community.
Followingly, I have actually been to Startup Extreme every year. By attending the festival, I get to meet a lot of old friends from the community and making new connections in a refreshing environment with some activities involved. So for me personally, going to Startup Extreme has always been a good fit. The first year we supported the festival with Douchebags backpacks for the speakers and so on, and last year I brought four Playpulse bikes for a demo.
As a startup, we won Angel Challenge with Playpulse during the fall of 2017. I have also been an investor in the Angel Challenge program twice. I am impressed by all the people who are involved — which Maja and Knut have managed to attract and the Angel Challenge program.
The job that all the people of Startup Norway are doing for the community is hugely important. Maja mentioned that Startup Norway wanted to bring in some entrepreneurs as investors in the new space, and I’m very glad I get to be part of that as a founding partner. I think it is important to show that you support the many good efforts. Although I’m not contributing with any significant amounts of capital, it is very nice to be part of the whole Startup Campus community.
If you can share some advice for how Startup Campus can succeed in the best possible way — what would that be?
I’m always careful about giving out advice: I think they know best what to do. If I’m to say something about playing a role as an “ecosystem actor”, it is to know what one is good at and what one should be good at, and that you shouldn’t try to be good at everything. This is pretty generic advice, but with so many players popping up on the Oslo scene I think it’s all the more crucial that the different organisations carve out a niche they can serve well and maintain somewhat a focus there.
Startup Campus is set to become a meeting point and arena for learning for entrepreneurs, investors and everyone else at different stages. What do you want to learn more about — and who do you hope to meet here?
Startup Campus have the potential of creating some truly valuable contexts that are effective when it comes to people’s experiences and responding to people’s needs.
There are many themes that could be developed further. Like teaching people how to do sales — what would be the most effective way to do this? A startup community needs to have many different organisations that will grow together. For my own part, I think learning more about planning for success and building an organization is very relevant: Effective recruitment and organisational building should be knowledge that is passed around to more people.
Kindness is generally underrated: But who has helped you in your career and what did they do for you?
There’s a vast number of people who have helped me in some way. I will have to mention the NTNU School of Entrepreneurship and the incredible alumni community that has been built from that. Staying at Mesh the very first years, learning and being inspired by Anders (Mjåset) and the team there. Douchebags’ first external investor was actually landed after a pitching competition at Mesh. For Playpulse specifically, there’s been such a massive number of helpful people, but I’ll point out the Startuplab team and Kjetil (Holmefjord) especially, supporting us in challenging times. Startup Norway with the Angel Challenge team has also been very important for us. Innovation Norway has always been a strong supporter, both financially and with their number of incredibly helpful people all over the world. And of course I have to thank my co-founders for letting me part of these journeys together, and all our investors and advisors for their invaluable support as we try to make a dent in the universe.
