Month: May 2024

Three great business books (+ the book I’m currently reading)

Over lunch today I got the question what I’ve read recently. The truth is that I haven’t read a lot of relatively new business books. However, I came up with a few favorite business books from the last 25 years.

The Nudist on The Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley by Po Bronson (1999). From the dot.com boom.

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone by David Carey and John E. Morris (2012). The history of Blackstone and Steve Schwarzman.

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer (2008). By the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group (Union Square Café and other restaurants) and Shake Shack.

I’m currently reading Skyscraper Dreams: The Great Real Estate Dynasties of New York by Tom Shachtman (2001). It has been taking a long time to read, but now I think I’m pushing through to the end. Found it via Moses Kagan and I find the history of New York real estate quite fascinating.

Moonfire’s framework for thinking about seed rounds

The names of funding rounds, e.g. pre-seed, seed, seed+, Series As, Bs and Cs, have become marketing terms as much as a narrowly and clearly defined type of financing.

Mattias Ljungman of Moonfire has written the article Seed is broken. Here is how to fix it to add clearer thinking to this.

His slicing of seed into Seed Inception (with the subsets of Discovery, Classic and Jumbo) and Seed Expansion (subsets Classic and Jumbo) is a good framework to think (and talk) more clearly about the different types of seed rounds.

Nordic SaaS company benchmarks for 2024

Swedish SaaS investor Monterro has shared its Nordic B2B software growth benchmark report for 2024. It’s based on data from 298 Nordic software companies and has data around CAC payback (it is going up), salary increases (about 4.5 % planned for 2024), pricing increases (almost 7 %), churn and many other things a founder, executive or investor would be interested in.

Looking at the data it seems like the companies reporting are mainly bootstrapped and backed by lower risk type of investors (family offices, private equity etc as opposed to venture capital), as profitability is quite high from very small to €25+ million revenue companies.

Norwegian startup ecosystem and the most exciting Norwegian startups

My colleague Arne Tonning and myself were guests on the podcast Dagens Tech to talk about the Norwegian startup ecosystem and Norwegian startups.

We talked about 1X (humanoid robots), Strise (anti money laundering), Enode (energy integration platform), Oda (world leading online grocery), Two (B2B BNPL), Tana (knowledge management), Remarkable (“the paper tablet”), Dune Analytics (crypto analytics and more) and a bunch of other great companies.

Two takeaways from a Swedish perspective:

From a founder perspective. Norwegian founders and startups are quite similar to Swedish (small home market, expanding internationally, funding works the same), so don’t let the border stop you from reaching out for peer advice or to talk with a startup that has gotten one or two steps further than you.

From an investor perspective: The Nordic countries are quite similar, but there are also differences, e.g. which sectors are the most popular among startups. That gives a broader range of startups to invest in, and the potential of a stronger and better balanced portfolio.