My experience of how we as co-founders worked together is one of the things that has taught me the most, and that’s why I wanted to write something about building a cohesive founding team.

Being a founder myself, and now an early-stage investor with node.vc, many founders I meet are curious about:

1: How did you come up with the idea for allabolag.se and Retriever Business?

2: What was it like to sell the company that you worked with every day for 7 years?

3: How did you in the founding team decide who would do what and would you do anything differently today?

I will come back to 1 and 2 in a later post, as each question deserves a whole article.

This article is also very much a tribute to my two co-founders, Johan Waldén and Niklas Boström, who have not gotten the same attention as me. It is all too common that those who sit endless days/evenings/nights with system development do not gain as much attention as those of us who are on the “front end”, meeting customers and media, and speaking at various events. Many often called us Three Amigos.

How do you choose your co-founders?

I wish I could say it’s simple… Just “gather a bunch of cool friends” and start a company and you’ll solve what needs to be solved along the way.

I´m fully aware that many great companies have been started over a few beers with friends in a fun bar, but in general, these companies, or the friendship, do not last the whole way. My definition of “the whole way” is a company that is sustainably profitable and has a culture where colleagues who have joined the journey feel good and develop in a positive direction. 🙌

Starting a company together is a big decision that will affect your life for a long time and should be treated accordingly. I’m not writing this to scare anyone from pursuing their dream of starting a company. On the contrary, I hope more people realize how important it is that we continue to innovate and build companies even in difficult times.
The approach of starting by thinking ‘We’re starting a company, because we have so many great skills, and then we’ll figure out what to do’ is not particularly smart, I believe. Always start from the other end by figuring out which problem your service/product is going to solve and why. Only then do you start putting together the puzzle with a rockstar founding team. If it happens to be among your closest friends, then congratulations… But unfortunately, the likelihood of finding this perfect match is probably small.

My co-founders and I worked together at Bisnode (formerly Bonnier Business Information) for about 5 years and knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses well. With extensive experience in the business information industry, we chose to challenge an oligopoly where a few actors dominated and only those who paid had access to this business-critical information. As a team, we had everything we needed to challenge a giant market with a completely new business model.

During our 7–8 years together building allabolag.se and Retriever Business, from start to exit, our ability to cooperate was tested in various ways during different phases. But what was always 100% certain was that no matter what happened……

• Sales successes 🥳
• Skyrocketing user metrics (from 0 to 2 500 000 active users) 🚀
• Server crashes 👿
• Personal threats from criminals 👮 (yes we had a lot of that..)
• Majority owners who wanted to sell the company too early… 🤷‍♂️

…we backed each other up.

The list can be made long with both positive and negative events, but regardless, we agreed that we celebrate together and fight together, with complete confidence that each one of us always did our best.

It was our collective strength and power that enabled us to weather the various storms.

The top 3 most important parts of why our team was “bulletproof”

1: We were curious about each other’s tasks and had the willingness to learn new things. I distinctly remember plowing through thick books about PHP and HTML development just to be able to keep up with Johan and Niklas’ thoughts.. 😴

2: Priorities 1, 2, and 3 were always the business and the customer and the understanding of what problems we were solving for our users. Even if we gave away the information for free.. 100% consensus that we always had to meet customers and listen to them.

3: Respect for each other’s private lives, and full support when one of us had a tough time. The journey was long and as usual, on long journeys, things happen that require you to pause and refocus. When someone needed to temporarily step back, the other two were always ready to fight a little extra. For example, my wife and I struggled to have children through IVF just when everything took off the most with allabolag.se. That process was very tough (but eventually succeeded 👶) and without their support, it would probably not have been possible to juggle the IVF process and build a company.

We did not hang out directly outside of work. It may sound strange, but we spent so much time together building the company that the little time we had outside of work, we chose to spend with friends and family.

Some advice that I would like to give to new company builders is:

• Don’t wait too long to address things that feel wrong. Bring them to the surface and solve the problem. Then move on.
• Dare to say ‘I was wrong’ early on when you realize that what you argued so strongly for might not have been the right path after all.
• As mentioned before, support each other no matter what. It’s the ‘we against the world’ feeling you should have!
• Any conflicts should not be resolved in front of colleagues. Go outside the office, grab a coffee, and talk it out.
• If you bring in external capital: Find good investors who have experience in building companies and understand your motivations as founders. With the right ‘sparring partners’ on the journey, many mistakes will likely be avoided.
• Lift your colleagues and share your knowledge. The company will never grow big if you don’t dare to let more people outside the founding team join the journey
• Avoid micromanaging your colleagues and share your knowledge and vision with them so that the company can grow faster. 🧠

What happened to us as a founding team after we made our exit from our joint venture?

Starting and running a company together is damn fun, but at some point, the journey often ends, and what happens then to the team you have worked with 24/7 for many years? For us, we continued together for a while and made some minority investments together. We started by taking a little, much-needed physical break from each other before eventually getting a small, cozy office in Gamla Stan where we were based. But in the end, it was as if what had previously been so obvious for us to work on, where we had a 100% agreement on how/what we wanted to build, had disappeared. Our different interests and views on investments began to show more clearly, and we decided to part ways. It was a wise decision.

Johan and Niklas continued together and have, among other things, built a journal system for psychologists and psychotherapists (CT Notes). 👏

The photo above is from when we just signed the final agreements and handed over the “keys” to allabolag.se. We often celebrated small wins at Irish pubs along the road.. 🍻

I was more interested in continuing to invest in startup companies and since 2015 have had the privilege of angel investing in many companies started by awesome entrepreneurs. Now a new chapter in life has begun at node.vc with 100% focus on finding and backing 24–26 companies on their journey forward.

Entrepreneurs who want to know more about how we at node.vc work are more than welcome to email me at henrik@node.vc

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