Nordic Notes - Issue #3
27. June 2021 - remote work & founder categorisation
Hey all,
I hope you all enjoyed your Midsummer celebrations, be it with friends, family or enjoying some alone time. This week we have an amazing guest writer in the Opinion section where Nicolas Dolenc talks about his framework on categorising different founder types.
As always, happy to hear from you, let me know what I missed, what I can improve & what you’d like to read about!
Funding Rounds
Adway raised 3.2m€ to reshape recruiting by finding passive candidates.
Doctrin raised 13m€ for supplying digital solutions to healthcare.
Tesseract raised 25m€ for their digital asset lending company.
Memory raised 14m$ for their time tracking app.
Robocorp raised 21m$ for its open source robotic process automation company.
GamerzClass raised 2.5m$ for their esports training provider company.
Layerise raised 3m€ to replace user manuals with digital assistants.
BonBot raised 2m€ to develop an ice cream service robot.
Quick Notes
BackingMinds, a Swedish VC fund, launched their 60m$ second fund to invest in underrepresented founders.
Sparkmind.vc launched their 55m€ fund to invest in edtech companies.
Tink, a Swedish open banking platform, acquired by Visa for 1.8b€.
Eleanor Warnock shifted to Sifted, and will be looking after their opinion section.
Lastly, a shameless self brag, EU-startups text by yours truly on early-stage startup finances.
Longer Notes
Remote work, hybrid models, getting back to the office. The conversation is current and very active on the topic. I found an interesting twitter thread on hybrid work and when we’ll get there. The thought provoking part for me though was the mention of “mixed mode” meetings, as I don’t think we have tools for that yet. We can do remote & we can do office, but mixing the two effectively still doesn’t have efficient tools. How do you manage a hybrid meeting with a chat field in zoom / teams for the remote workers only, and people raising their hand at the office and virtually by clicking a button? The etiquette for remote and in person are also clear, but not so for the mixed world.
How to get a Silicon Valley style ecosystem to Europe? Well, the answer is Unicorn founders angel investing, at least according to Mike Butcher. He was calling for a list of all Unicorn founders who’ve started angel investing. While I agree with him, I think it’s essential to increase the amount of active angel investors in general, be they Unicorn founders or not. Having more angel investors with a background of building successful startups does do good for the ecosystem, but you don’t need the founder title to bring value to the table.
Opinion - written by Nicolas Dolenc
Nicolas Dolenc strives to help individuals, teams, and organizations to be the best they can be by inspiring action. He draws his knowledge from many different sources, including working at organizations like Smartly and Slush. You can read more of his thoughts from his Medium blog.
Ben Horowitz is known for establishing CEO founders who are 1's and those who are 2's in his book Hard Things About Hard Things. 1's being the type that enjoys setting the direction of the company and 2's being the type that enjoys getting the company to perform. CEOs need both skills, but they rarely come in the same package, which yields Co-founders or Executive team members dealing with the part that the CEO founder doesn't like or is a weakness.
Horowitz's model is simple, but one could use a slightly more nuanced model than that. Why would there be a need for something more elaborate? The white paper Slush released last year, "entrepreneurship redefined," discusses the need for companies and founders that drive purpose-driven change. Combine this notion with Fredrik Laloux's qualitative studies of organizations that have not only been driving purpose-driven change for decades but also chosen to operate very differently from conventional means. Laloux dictates that the only common denominator for an organization to work in such a way is the CEO or owners' belief that it is possible to create such organizations. Hence, Horowitz's one & two model doesn't help us identify the founders that can build such organizations.
After watching a Slush 2019 interview with Kristo Ovaska (CEO & founder of Smartly.io) and Miki Kuusi (CEO & founder of Wolt), I got the inspiration for the model discussed above. During the interview, the CEO's elaborate on their approaches to building your product: building it to serve your own needs (and those like you), making it to suit the needs of others, and building it to realize a vision for (hopefully) what you think is a better future. As someone who has worked closely with these Juggernauts and their teams, I felt the discussion still lacked what I like to call the "ego drivers." Ego drivers are something Derek Lido (author of Startup Leadership) covers well in his HBR article "Before you start your business, listen to your ego.". To simplify what Derek discusses, you could categorize the ego drivers in the following way; the desire to be rich, the desire to be king (appreciate the model needs a more gender-neutral label here, need help, so please suggest), and the desire to make a change. Here's my proposition:
This model intends not to judge or say you wouldn't be able to build a financially sound business or a product that wouldn't be successful if you aren't in the top right corner. It's an initial step to create a framework to discuss what the company and the founders need to do to move themselves and their team towards the top right. Startup stakeholders could also use it to have an honest discussion about the founders' reasons for creating their product and company. Additionally, this model may help find the suitable types of intervention for founders syndrome or even prevent it from manifesting. Furthermore, it may also serve as a model for discussing what talent you can attract to the company or should try to recruit. In other words, with whom does the founder's true intent and source of inspiration resonate for them to be willing to join the founders' journey.
However, this model is simply a matter of combining a series of thoughts after spending almost a decade surrounded by startup founders and their companies in the cradle of the Helsinki startup scene. It has little scientific backing like Spiral Dynamics, a model for the evolutionary development of individuals, teams, and organizations. Spiral Dynamics may be better suited to identifying the type of founders that can create purpose-driven companies or just generally “system thinkers” as Harry Stebbings (podcaster turned VC) said when describing what kind of founders he is looking for in his newly raised record breaking fund. Additionally, Spiral dynamics may help founders evolve their thinking and the organization to the highest level of beneficial impact the organization can make.
What do you think of this 9-grid model? Would you be able to categorize the founders you know based on this model?
All the best,
Josefiina