Henrik Torstensson's Weblog

In world where many people can work from anywhere, there is still a lot of value in being based in a geographic ecosystem like Silicon Valley or on a smaller scale Stockholm. Physical proximity to employees, peers, partners, experts, universities and investors increase access to knowledge, capital and talent. Which all are very valuable. Somewhat…

The fact that employee ownership is not a straightforward thing, even if it should be, can be seen that only 17 % of European employees at late-stage startups have employee ownership this year. A caveat that I haven’t checked if that is both options and shares or only shares, but regardless 17 % is a…

Sifted has an article about founder pay, based on data from the UK, France and Germany. According to the article pre-seed and seed founders’ median pay is €88,000. It is higher than the Nordics, as shown in the report by Creandum/Slush. The striking thing in the pay data from Creandum/Slush is the significant difference in…

A core part of building a company with venture capital and in the Silicon Valley tradition is employee stock ownership. Most often employee ownership in private startups happens via stock options (in Sweden most often QESO, ESOP or warrants). But using options is not straightforward way to get the results you want, as Carta’s latest…

There are many type of individuals and organisations that invest into startups. They share the same label, “investors”, but the way they think about how a startup should be financed, growth vs profit, acceptable levels of risk, if the startup should be aiming for a small or large outcome etcetera can differ a lot. I.e.…

Twitter has decided to remove the text message option for two-factor authentication for non-paying users, who will have to use an authentication app or a security key (like YubiKey by Yubico). The big difference to Twitter is that it costs money to send SMS, while the use of apps or keys are free to Twitter.…

Dan Rose was a senior business developer at Amazon and Facebook (VP Partnerships) from 1999 to 2019, and is now chairman for Coatue Ventures. He has an interesting conversation on the Invest Like The Best podcast. Among other things he talks about Jeff Bezos’ directive in 2004 to ‘let’s build Kindle to make sure we…

In the late 90’s General Electric’s then-CEO Jack Welch was considered the world’s best CEO (he retired before the crash of GE during the financial crisis in 2008). A big part of his management philosophy was ‘stack ranking’, where employees annually were put in brackets: A players (20 %), B players (70 %) and C…

There is now a second round of layoffs from U.S. technology companies like Twilio (1500 people or 17 % layoff, following 11 % in September 2022) and Docusign (700 people or 10 % layoff, following 9 % in September 2022). To me it signals that they are going from managing expenses to getting serious about…

One of my favorite quotes is: The future is already here – it is just not evenly distributed William Gibson It captures both the speed that new technology is being invented and adopted at, while at the same time acknowledging that there are very large pockets of society which are surprisingly untouched by technology. In…