Carl Fritjofsson is with me today in Venice. Carl is a Partner at Creandum, where he has been for seven years, but only more recently in LA. Creandum is known as one of Europe's best VC funds with investments in Spotify, Klarna, Bolt, Trade Republic, and many others. Carl was a founder before venture and we go back quite a ways when I was just starting Shift.

Carl. You moved to LA and you saw a big opportunity for a Series A fund?

Well, I should give a brief history of Creandum, which is, we've been around for about 20 years. Started in Sweden of all random places in the world. No one did venture in Scandinavia / Nordics at the time, and we then had the good fortune to be one of the local players that came into some of the biggest companies that were created there. So, you mentioned Spotify and Klarna, two of the most prominent ones. And then slowly but surely, we've kind of expanded our footprint out into the world.

And though our core bread and butter is early-stage Seed and Series A investing in Europe, we've actually been present in the US for the last 10 years. And initially we set up shop in the US to basically help our European portfolio companies expand into the US and raise capital in the US. And at that point of time for European startups to raise money from the top growth investors in Silicon Valley, generally speaking, you had to kind of be there, you had to move there.

But then throughout the last 10-ish years that we've been in the US we've also stumbled upon companies. But we've been a little cautious, I would say, in terms of what opportunities we've been pursuing because we have a very strong brand in Europe and a less strong brand and recognition in the US. So why would we see a deal in the US was the obvious question we always asked ourselves. And we ended up justifying the type of companies that we were pursuing being companies where we could see there was a real reason why they met with us. And a lot of the times that meant it was a European founder based in the US.
And then I moved down to LA partly driven because my wife, uh, has a startup that has its center of gravity here. It's an e-commerce play. She's backed by Upfront
Company is called Marty, by the way. They are like a deep discount online grocer.
And, you know, I've been going in and out of LA for a long time. I've been in the Bay Area close to 10 years, So as I came here, got to know you or reconnected with you and your local peers here, I really learned like that there's a void in the LA scene around, I would say like, Series A capable firms.
So I think there's like a little bit of an opportunity for a firm which invests in the stages where we do, which is kind of late Seed to Series A to have a certain impact in this ecosystem and, and try to be, become one of the local players that are welcomed by the local community.
That's great. You know, a lot of the seed funds here are very excited to see another, you know, lead Series A fund in town.

And tell me about what you guys invest in.
Yeah, so, this is the unfortunate part that we kind of invest in everything. So a lot of people obviously want to bucket up somewhere because that makes it more clear what type of deals to, kind of forward our way. But we are very much a generalist firm that invests across six major buckets, which is FinTech, health climate, SaaS infrastructure, and consumer internet.
So if you add all those six together, it's kind of everything, right?
Mm-hmm.
So, and then as you pointed out, generally speaking, Korean is the lead investor, so we didn't rather. Be part of fewer companies where we deploy more capital than the opposite of that.
And the firm also likes to build ownership over time. So we come in usually at Seed / Series A and then we try to actually expand our ownership in the following rounds.
But, so we should send you all our good deals.
I love to see good deals.
Okay, great. But then didn't you also tell me, I, I really liked it, but I'm not gonna do it justice, but sort of maybe your thesis, one of your thesis that things just like keep repeating themselves.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. My underlying belief about the broader kind of software world is that there are only so many kinds of large software categories that exist in the world. And each one of them are to some extent, reinvented every x number of years. And the reason why they are being reinvented is because the underlying core infrastructure has innovated and, and it kind of came into a next generation.
There's tech debt. That means the winners of the last cohort within a certain category start becoming slow and do not innovate as fast as the market expects them to do and that kind of thing. So you know, Like, what are those categories, right? So like managing your customers, managing your employees, managing your underlying operations, managing the data processing, managing the threats that you have. I mean, these are some examples, right? So if you go down to the very fundamentals, I actually don't believe that there are that many opportunities.
But what I like to do is I'd like to look at those big categories and then try to see which are the dominant players in any of these categories right now, and what would be the reason why they are disrupted soon?
And so, that's kind of the underlying thesis that I really like to invest into kind of proven markets and large categories.
so you're looking at, you know, the big incumbents, what might lead them to get disrupted. But is it a platform shift? And that means that everyone gets disrupted at the same time because all of a sudden mobile comes along
I think those microwaves, they kind of really. Shake things up radically, but those only happen every 10th year or so, and they happen kind of horizontally across everything.
So we may stand in front of one of those right now with LLMs and generative ai, right? There may be and I actually like to believe that it is. But you know, I can share an example with a portfolio company that Korean invested in. So, in the world of observability, there is a company called Datadog, which is an incredibly powerful business that is amazing in a lot of regards. But when you scratch the surface a little bit on this, first of all, you see that it's a must have software category. It's huge. Secondly, you will come to learn that Datadog has a very clunky kind of experience of how you consume that product that is starting to cause friction within the developer community.
But because it's a must have category, people are still. Investing into that product and spending a lot of money on that. But you could see there is an inherent friction. And then you add on top of that, that since the creation of Datadog, there's been a lot of innovation on the underlying infrastructure that can power the observability products out in the world, for example, in databases.
So we ended up stumbling upon a company called Better Stack and uh, we ended up leading the Series A there. And in that, the company's basically built on a completely different type of database and specifically it's chosen a certain database called Click House that comes with a lot of benefits in terms of speed and cost and performance and things like that.
So in that instance, it was much more looking at a specific category of software companies and the leading one in that category, realizing that they've been around for 10 plus years.
And, you know, what are the challenges that exist there? And is this an opportunity to pursue?
Right. So infrastructure components could change that doesn't necessarily affect you know, social networks because there's different databases and the like.
I gotcha. But I wanna come back because it's too hard not to come back to generative AI. And you think maybe it's a platform shift? How are you or the Creandum team thinking about AI right now?
Yeah. So we think of it as, kind of a horizontal. Wave that is happening across those six buckets that I previously, uh, mentioned.
I mean, I think we've all been wowed by OpenAI ChatGPT and Bard now that it is also on par with it, if not even better. You know, from my perspective, I think what we have seen with those products is like a truly new and innovative way to engage and interact with software that we hadn't haven't done in the past.
And now we have this much more kind of language intuitive interface and much more free form interface.
And if you believe in the power of an interface enabling new use cases, then I actually think that more or less every software category. Can be rewritten with a generative AI first approach. Now the question is, of course, if you do, how much better does that experience become? And, and I'm not necessarily convinced that it'll disrupt every software category in the world, but I can at least build excitement around the potential that you could rethink really a software category from the ground up.
And that makes me really excited because that doesn't happen that often.

And then, you know, more specifically, there's obviously the underlying infrastructure such as open AI and the likes. at least at Cian, that's not necessarily an area which we are pursuing from an investment hypothesis.
There, it seems to be like really large scale initiatives that are dominating that market. And then we're looking at kind of the middleware layer. We're connecting a lot of these LLMs into potential applications.
And that's an interesting space. If you can build a really user-friendly horizontal product that kind of unlocks the power of the aggregate LLMs of the world and generative AI models of the world. So that's interesting, but then, uh, on top of that, you have many more kinds of vertical solutions, right?
and that goes back to some of these like, broader software categories that I mentioned. So let's say it would be like, what does a CRM experience look like with a generative AI first approach? Right? And suddenly it won't be tables where you enter data manually based upon a phone call that you had, right?
It is a much more fluid interface that understands what you're doing, predicts what you should be doing next, pushes information proactively to you instead of you reactively entering it. And I mean, that sounds pretty
cool. Yes. So I like to invest in the CRM, generative AI first Salesforce killer.
Have you been doing a lot? I mean, just have you been doing a lot of series A lately, period?
You know, I think the bar has gone up quite a bit from the last couple of years. I would say the norm these days is kind of the 2 million ARR mark seems to be rather than one in the past. And, and the firm. Have recently done two series A investments.
One of them actually did 4 million ARR, the other one did close to six. Yeah.
So, completely different world in terms of the maturity of the companies. But I, what I would say, Why maybe the pace is slightly slower than it has been in the past is that there are significantly less companies that are out in the market racing series, right?
Yeah. So, I think what I'm expecting is that kind of come Q4 this year, Q1 next year, that that's gonna be a very busy period for Series A, series B, those stages, which are companies that had raised in let's say 2021, maybe early 22, and then have done everything they can to prolong their runway and cut down burn and things like that.
But eventually these companies have to come to market, right?
But I think q4, Q1 is gonna be pretty bloody to be honest. I think that's gonna be the moment of truth within the world of startups where there's gonna be a lot of bodies in the wake because a lot of firms have slowed down.
There will be a lot of firms that have managed to increase their runway, but that has had an impact on growth and I'm not sure, series A, series B investors, generally speaking, want to lower their bar even though they haven't deployed as much capital in the last year or so. So I think it's gonna be hard.
Yeah, me too. It's been busy at seed though because everyone's doing another round or runway extensions, like the good companies.
Yep.
How is California different from what the firm sees in Stockholm? Or like how are ecosystems really different?
I think what's noteworthy here is to talk a little bit about how our firm has grown up in the last 20 years. You know, initially started in Sweden in a non-existing ecosystem of technology, right.
Yes. Okay.
Although when they got listed at the stock exchange in New York, they first raised a Switzerland flag. And then someone panicked internally there and eventually swapped it over to Sweden. So Sweden is the country north of Europe. Kind of old Viking style, blue and yellow flag.
Switzerland is the one in the middle of Europe, Alps, chocolate, nice watches. So like, just so we set the record straight. But anyway, when we got started in Sweden I mean, this was before my time as well, so I'm not trying to throw my colleagues under the bus, but I, I would say it's fair to say that Crayon didn't really know what we were doing at that point of time, nor did anyone in, kind of that region, right.
So we were inspired a lot looking towards Silicon Valley and maybe even London to some extent, which was ahead of us trying to understand how to do venture, how to actually support a startup
And as we were lucky enough to see a couple of portfolio companies become pretty big you know, we started to build our own confidence that what we were doing was actually pretty good.
Right. and eventually I think we've come now to a position where we've seen enough high quality companies throughout the years. We know what good looks like and we've also seen. You know, the best of the best firms have invested in some of our companies, and we've sat along boards with them, so we come to learn from them as well.
And that has allowed us the ability to innovate on how to do venture ourselves and look at our own processes and own structure in our own way to assess how we can actually compete with them. And I think in some regards, we have also innovated in the broader kind of art of venture.
And as part of that, you, so you asked the question between kind of California and, and Europe. I think Europe a macro ecosystem have gone through precisely the same thing where there was this, like, this insecurity in Europe towards California for many years of like, okay, that's where they actually know what they're doing.
But then it turned out that Europe was starting to create global winners,
right? Spotify being one of them that truly, truly changed a global industry from the ground up. more and more of those examples came out into play, I think Europe as a startup ecosystem, broadly speaking, started to also build confidence and trust their own intuition , and believing in their own skillsets.
So, there used to be this thing where, All the best practices in terms of go-to-market processes and things like that. Were basically exported from Silicon Valley into Europe. And so we were always behind in Europe trying to implement all those things. But these days, I think, I mean, Silicon Valley especially right, is still the one place, it's the mecca for technology.
There's no question about that. Right? and that is still the major source of inspiration. But I still think that Europe right now has proven itself enough times that , it is also innovating. It is also part of like contributing to the collective wisdom of how to build startups grow them.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, so I think I see a lot of similarities to where LA is and where Europe is.
Do you think ecosystems have very distinct cultures that you can point to?
I do. And I mean, if you, if you're asking about Europe, then, you know, I'm referring to Europe as this collective ecosystem, which is, it isn't, right?
It is a number of smaller ecosystems and if you are super deep in one, that doesn't mean you know anything about another one.
Broadly speaking, right? In Europe, I would say like Scandinavia is kind of known for, we have had quite a bit of, consumer success in that region, and we're known for like beautiful products and, like nice design. I think Eastern Europe has a lot of pockets of like really technical. They, generated a lot of, engineers through their education system. And there's been a history of, you know, outsourcing for lack of better words in that ecosystem. But that has also created a breed of, professionals who have been part of building product, even if, if they, the companies weren't created there, but they've been part of building a lot of global products and now you're starting to see kind of that they're taking that talent to themself, right?
And like owning that, experience and creating their own products from there. So definitely more on the technical side there. Less of kind of the go to market side of things.
I think London is the most mature ecosystem in Europe that has kind of, a lot of everything. And, uh, Germany is interesting because Germany, what you had there in Berlin in particular is that you had rocket internet for a number of years, which was this clone machine, right?
That predominantly looked at successful companies in the consumer space from the US and then said, let's roll that out at scale super fast. So they copied Groupon and they copied, , Airbnb and a bunch of companies, right? and they were headquartered in, Berlin and, their model was hiring a lot of very smart and ambitious young professionals.
A lot of times, Adam, McKinsey on the likes, right?
Yeah. No, I had Don Salter on the you know, the blueprint and these are like amazing people, right? And what they got an opportunity to do through Rocket Internet was like to try the execution game of like just how do you scale super fast?
They didn't have to innovate on, product necessarily, but like, let's take an idea and just scale it as hard as we can, right?
And then after a while of, breeding these, type of founders execution machines, you started to see them spin out on their own then thinking about their own unique ideas and trying to like innovate within a space instead of copying a space.
Yeah, so one of the things you mentioned was like, looking at what works in what Silicon Valleys for the playbooks have developed and saying, you know what, we'll copy that and now we can innovate on it.
But like something like go to market, go to market I would think is very different in a place like Europe where there're maybe smaller economies, but there's so many of them close together.
Yeah, so I think what a lot of companies in Europe tend to do is, to start with kind of a PLG approach where it's low touch kind of, sales processes and, and the reason is because it is a fragmented ecosystem with different languages , and that kind of thing, right?
So as, soon as you move up to enterprise, you actually need quite a diverse sales machine in order to cater to the various needs between a, an enterprise in Germany
but wouldn't you need that in appealing approach too? Or, or less so I
Less so, right? I mean, there is obviously some localization in terms of maybe payment methods and languages and stuff like that, but in the PLG approach, it's much more bottoms up driven.
And like you don't need to necessarily spend that much time with each customer. So, but once you get into enterprise space, , yeah, you definitely need that. Um, but. What is obvious is that Europe is trailing the US when it comes to like a native DNA of loving kind of sales and go to market like us is, definitely still the source of inspiration when it comes to that.
And I think it's, it's something that is ingrained in, in the American culture from a very early on, you know, debate class and all these things, right, that people go through school and do. and I also think that sales as a profession is much more respected in the US than in a lot of pockets in Europe.
So we encourage a lot of our portfolio companies in Europe to kind of acquire the US mindset of sales early on in their journey because we think that regardless if that person is, catering towards the US market or towards European market, we think that there is like an inherent different mentality that is advantageous to the Americans.
Definitely.
Is there anything specific about Sweden? You're Swedish.
I am.
Uh, where, you know, the Swedish market is very different or the, the mindset is different. The values are different.
So, there was a time during the arc of history where Stockholm had like a higher ratio of unicorns than Silicon Valley, or it was like, maybe it was the second after, after Silicon Valley.
It was like, something like that. You know, the reason for that is that it's a tiny country and we had a couple of really big companies that were created there early on. So some of the reasons why Sweden was fairly successful early on in this journey was that there was a government initiative in the nineties where they really embraced the internet and saw the potential and power of that.
So there was, number one, there was government incentives for people to buy PCs. So the kind of PC adoption happened much faster in Sweden than in a lot of other countries. And in addition to that, there was publicly funded infrastructure build out of broadband internet
very early on. functioning government is what you're saying. Wow, to some extent, at
least this, this function very, very well. So what this meant is that Swedes, we had the highest broadband penetration in the world for many years. and we got accustomed to kind of fast internet much faster than the rest of the world. So if you go back in history and you remember piracy was huge in Sweden, and a lot of the big.
Piracy platforms came outta
Sweden, for example, pirate Bay and some
others. Mm-hmm.
And the reason was that we were innovating just because we had broadband access that no one else had. And so we were like, well, of course you should download a movie,
Uh, and so there's no consensus why I think Spotify also originated outta Sweden because, it was the legal version of, this mass market behavioral that existed in Sweden. Everybody was a pirate in
Sweden.
Like it was crazy.
and then what I would say, the other thing with Sweden is that Sweden is a tiny country. Sweden knows that we are a tiny country. We start learning English very early on in age. And this also means that if you start a company in Sweden, generally speaking, you start thinking international from day
one. Mm-hmm.
So like there's no reason to try to win Sweden because it'll be too small a company. So if you start to build your company from day one as a multinational company, that may come with advantages as you start scaling, right? Where if you started in I dunno, Germany, let's say, or the US clearly 340 million people, right?
It takes a long time before you see the needs of even thinking international.
Do you have thoughts on just that, which is especially US companies, and should they, when should they think about other markets?
I think it always comes at a cost, right? And what I would say is that if you are aspiring to be the global winner in any software internet category, you need to win the us, right?
So, to me, I'm, I'm like pulled between two directions here, which is one direction is like, no, just stay in the US and just win America. Because if you do, you've, started to win the world.
But the other dimension of this is of course, that. if You haven't even started thinking international and now you are a behemoth of a company, right?
is, it is a very slow and difficult path that you're embarking upon at that stage. But you know, the reverse here when we talk to European companies is that if you want to win the world, you, you have to go to the us.
So we actually encourage a lot of our companies to go to the US early.
Mm-hmm.
And, and rather than like, I don't know, you're in Germany, let's try to win France. We're like, why win France? Why don't, why don't we go for the big prize, which is the US
You also said one other thing about Uhum innovating and so , what have been sort of the active threads? We've said, Hey, we now feel are confident enough that we can innovate as
a firm?
Well, I can share an example of, uh, this company that I mentioned previously that is trying to disrupt Datadog in the observability space. And kind of the, the tricks and, and, and well, we pulled out of our pocket to kind of win the deal. It was a very competitive process.
gra was up against big names in the US as well as in Europe. And, um, it was a series A And the company operates in this observability space. So one of the products that the company has is, is this monitoring solution, which is basically, you know, it's a webpage where you come to see our system live or not.
And then you basically have like a timeline, of dates. And then you see, oh, here we went down. And then there's a little log of why that went down. So what we ended up doing is that we kinda ripped the front and experience of that and created a subpage on our website, which looked like we were using their product.
And then there was a secret key that you had to press, And then he would press, I can't remember, t for term
sheet or something like that, press T. And then what we saw, so instead of this date kind of green bar with various dates, it became like a percentage progress bar.
And we were like building our conviction for the company, the company called Better Stack. And then we had like quotes coming up on the website of like all the d diligence that we've done. We spoke to customers and other references in the market and why we like them. And eventually we're like the conviction came to a hundred percent.
And then with's like big heart emoji, things like that. We love you. And then do you wanna download our term sheet? And then you could like basically do that. So I don't know if we do, we do this on every deal that, that we're pursuing, but, again, just like. how can you innovate when you're competing at a very high level,
it's like to be creative, to think outside of the box and those kind of elements,
right?
And obviously the founder loved this. No one else did this. This was unique. His, he'll remember it for the rest of his life. and we ended up winning it. I'm not sure if he won it because of that, but it definitely played to our advantage,
So that's just one part of it where I guess we are, like, we've seen enough competitive processes that we dare to believe in our own capabilities of how we can kind of fight in those competitive processes by doing something different,
to, Yeah.
I don't know the rest of the people that you're firm, but you don't just look like the cookie cutter, you know, Sandhill road vest wear

Yeah. I avoid the, the puffy vest.
I, but the problem is I actually really like vests.
Like they, they work very well for keeping your core warm, they're functioning garment. Yeah, I know, I know.
Oh my goodness. Let's I haven't seen you in the vesto. Do you rock them?
Well, this is almost like a vest, but It's not it's a vest sweater. it's a vest.
Yeah. But that's that's different.
So let's stay on this like, personal aspect.
Okay.
One thing you told me is that venture's a horrible career.
Didn't you say something like that? And yet you and I are both happily, I think very happy in our careers.
Yeah.
So explain,
Yeah, I, I think, I mean, especially when I speak to younger people in, in their careers I think there's a really dangerous path when you get stuck in venture too early in your career because number one, it's very hard to climb the ranks in a venture firm. Most venture firms are small.
It's not a super clear path on how you become a partner and there's only so many partners in any, every firm. And then there is this other element of, being a venture investor where it's actually pretty comfortable job to have in the sense that.
You have access to a lot of interesting rooms and interesting conversations. People take your meetings , and you can meet with a lot of interesting people. And, uh, you are also sought after
You can give away money. Yeah. Yeah.
and that, somehow makes you interesting enough that people want to hear from
you. So you also start to kind of, Assume that what you have is really unique But I do think that practically speaking, being a venture investor, you are actually not learning many hard skills.
sure. You know, maybe how to read people and do some financial due diligence and market sizing and, and good at reference calls and, you know, hustling, network building. but when Company X is hiring their next growth leader, they're looking for someone who really understands growth and Sure.
You know, roughly what stack growth professionals are using and, you know, what the abbreviations means and that kind of stuff. But you're not like a growth hacker, right? So, I think it's hard to, get leverage of the years that you spend in venture. When you make the leap into an operational role, you almost have to start over.
So the longer you stay in venture, the bigger that Delta becomes when you, like, start over. So unless you choose to start a company,
right,
which is an obvious path, but it's not for everyone. Everyone shouldn't start a company.
I'd say you better start building the hard skills for whatever that function just you're expecting soon.
Because just because you've been a venture investor does not give you the right become, you know, a VP at a company X
I'm using only, you keep talking about not having hard skills, I would say you actually don't learn the soft skills, so you don't learn managing people at all.
True. That
that. You're missing that part
you really miss
Yeah.
And yet you started cr not as a partner and you're now
a partner.
Yeah. Lucky
me. Yeah.
Um, any, thoughts on sort of going from the, were you an associate when you started?
Yeah, so my, my history is, is pretty long with this firm and so, quick career story, right? I started as a management consultant, then I went into startups and I founded, uh, my own company, which was a bootstrap ad network.
I didn't know anything about venture. I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship. I didn't know anything about anything, but luckily enough, me and my co-founder started a business that gained kind of real traction from day one, uh, in terms of like proving new youth economics and then we could run a profitable business, growing it super slowly
And through that, I then got to know , the world of startups. This was in Stockholm, Sweden at the time,
And there was only two more or less firms that were active in, Sweden at that point in time. Creon being one of them.
And I, when I learned about venture, I, I I've always been an early adopter of tech. I always like trying to predict where the world is going and that kind of thing, right? So I, started going into Korean's offices as this young dude running my own little company, talking about things that I'd seen in the market, read about stuff online, heard about, about friends starting their businesses.
and I guess I showed enough curiosity about the world of venture that they then asked me if I wanted to join as an associate, which I did. But then I quite quickly realized that I had imposter syndrome in those corridors because
I came into the room where now we're putting like $5 million into a company to scale super fast, go international, like hit it outta the park.
And that was like a completely different entrepreneurial path than what I was accustomed to. So I had then ended up leaving quite quickly actually, , and was part of founding, uh, my second company, which, uh, was a company called wrap.
And we were building marketing solutions on top of payment rails and CRE ended up seed funding that business. So now I became a portfolio founder and this is then eventually the company that brought me from Sweden to the us Greylock led our series A and I moved over to the US and we scaled to 18 countries.
It was a hell of a journey, like the opposite of my first company.
It was
like going super aggressively. and then after that journey was done. The company was acquired after series B, not a major home run, to be honest. More of a soft landing. But, um, then I was starting to think, what should I do next?
And, uh, what happened for me was that , I became a venture partner at Cran, then working part-time, helping the portfolio predominantly on this international expansion journey
So then Luxo struck me in such a way where there was another guy that originally had set up CRMs US office at that point in time in San Francisco, and he decided to move back to Sweden, and then there was a void.
And then I got the offer if I wanted to kind of head up the US and be a full-time resource in the team. And that is now, I guess seven ish, maybe eight years ago or something like that, that I've been full-time.
So let's ask a few more questions about you.
So
can you share a failure or like, something you would've done differently in your career?
Okay. So I mean, I'm very grateful for my career. so I, I, I will share some, failures that I very much have to own up to and that I would've done differently today. But at the same time, if I look at kind of the learnings that I gained and, and some of the wisdom that came out of it, still think it was valuable for me, right?
But, in terms of, real honest mistakes that I did is, especially with my, , this company rap I mentioned Rocket Internet previously, so they ended up cloning us.
because we gained a lot of traction early on and quite a lot of publicity to be honest. Early on we had Reid Hoffman on our board. So there was like some external validation that looked really compelling. And, uh, rocket Internet decided to go after us and roll out like a pixel by pixel copy of our product, more or less in, in a lot of places of the world.
So we then completely shifted strategy and went on this, you know, modern global warfare expansion journey where we went, uh, we scaled to 18 countries and expanded our team rapidly. And, we weren't ready for that, not at all.
And of course I was part of that decision making and I own up to that fully where we thought, we knew much more around our business than we did, and then we started burning money, we started building processes that were inefficient and that we were starting to make decisions that were wrong for the company.
And that was hard , to fully recover from. So I think, you know, the big learning there for me is, that
you don't win by just fighting your competitors. You win by like being true to yourself and your own product and your own innovations and your own customers and making sure that they love you. it was almost more important for us to win with these like vain metrics against our competitor than it was to service customers in our core markets.
Yeah.
But you also said you thought you knew your business, you thought you knew some things about your business, which is, it's tricky for a lot of entrepreneurs cuz you can look at your, you know,
cohorts
one way you can cut them another way.
You don't always know your business as well as you think you do.
True, true. And I mean, when, you know, it's, it's long enough. Since we did this business, that cohorts that you mentioned was kind of not a
thing, right?
So when we raised our seed and a and b. No one asked us about cohort
analysis. Uh, and I even remember we went, we met with data scientist at, Greylock at a certain point in time, and he explained cohort analysis to us.
It was kind of the first time we ever heard about it and we thought, oh, maybe we should look into this. And once we did, we realized we, we were bleeding users.
Right. but we, yeah, we realized that very late. Mm-hmm.
But
because we were growing so much in user acquisition, it still looked like we were growing exponentially.
So it was like, it looked great,
but
back to like, we didn't fully understand our business. So then we took those vantage metrics I would call 'em, and chose to expand heavily based upon our conviction around those. And what we should have done is like, let's actually go, and look at what we have here and understand that deeper, right.

Carl, how would your friends describe you?
Probably. High energy, but not as high energy as you. and, um, generally
happy and like
I want to be at least someone that people can feed from in terms of energy and positivity.
I also hope that my friends look at me as, as a happy person.
uhhuh.
And, um,
yeah,
I think that's about it.
Anything
Swedish about you? Like what do you take as like some Swedish values that are maybe different than just your traditional, you know, suburban LA person?
So I think I have, this is the typical Swedish answer in the us so it, may not be very insightful, but I think I come from a country where government has provided me with a lot of opportunities in life.
So
paying high taxes is not a problem for me because I know that I get something out of it. At the other end of
it. In the
US there's this inherent antitrust in government and bureaucracy and money just vanishes. So in Sweden there's high taxes, but you know, there's obviously free higher education and schooling and, and you know, a lot of benefits, healthcare and all that stuff, right? So I think comfort with paying high taxes, uh, and a belief that government can actually really support its citizens.

how about like on like
the family personal level,
Well,
I, yeah, I was gonna go towards that, that dimension. And this is where I'm actually not very typical Sweden where in Sweden is a very insular culture where to become friends with someone in Sweden, broadly speaking, you need to have a decent history.
So, childhood friends is still, you know, the predominant kind of social circle that, you hang with, especially if you've been living in the same city and you don't start inviting your colleagues to your birthday if you haven't really worked together for a number of years.
Like, it takes a while
to get to know a suite. So Swedes are generally pretty close, and I think I've been Americanized enough through my time in California that, that I actually thrive on the opposite end of that, of like meeting new people and, welcoming by the default. Connecting people and like bringing people together.
Uh, that's, kind of me and my wife's default mode of operating.
Well, I'm so stoked you're in LA Carl. It's great. I see it as big opportunity for you in Crandon. So
I love it. Thanks
for coming on the pod.
It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.