Omer (00:14.240)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talk to Hampus Jacobsen, a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and venture capitalist.
He's currently a venture partner at Blueyard Capital, a VC firm based in Europe, and an angel who's invested in over 80 companies.
In 2002, Hampus Co founded Tat, a company that developed and and licensed mobile user interface software to companies such as Motorola, Samsung and Nokia.
TAT was acquired by BlackBerry in 2010 for $150 million.
In 2012, Hampus Co founded Brisk, a SaaS product designed to make sales sales teams more productive.
That startup failed and was shut down four years later.
In this interview we talk about how Hampus and his co founders built Tat and went on to sell it in just eight years for $150 million.
We also discussed the lessons Hampus learned from the failure of Brisk and what he wishes he'd done differently.
And we talk about life as an angel investor and vc and Hampus shares what types of companies and founders he likes to invest in.
You know, Hampus is a great guy.
I really enjoyed my conversation with him and I hope you enjoyed listening to interview Ampus.
Welcome to the show.
Hampus Jakobsson (01:56.300)
Thank you very much.
Happy to be here.
Omer (01:59.100)
So my icebreaker question, just try to get inside my guest head a little bit.
What gets you out of bed every day?
Hampus Jakobsson (02:04.220)
I have, I have three kids so that's very easy.
No, I think what I mean, I'm a very routine person.
I get out of bed because like my alarm clock rings, I go up, I just get to stuff.
I prefer waking, I prefer waking up as late as I can, honestly.
But with three kids it's pretty early.
I usually wake up around 6am in the morning and then I prefer working late because I just feel I have a lot more energy in the evening.
So if it wasn't for I had kids I think that I would probably live a very unhealthy lifestyle.
But thanks to my kids and my wife, I live a sort of structured life.
Omer (02:37.340)
How old are your kids?
Hampus Jakobsson (02:38.860)
I have two 7 year olds and a 10 year old.
So the time when actually they like to sleep so you know, they don't wake me up in the middle of the night.
But I know that if I'm not up, showered, finished and have made breakfast, then in half an hour it's going to Be hell on wheels.
Omer (02:52.760)
Now we have a lot of stuff to cover with you.
Let's start by talking a little bit about your current role at Blueyard Capital.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing there?
Hampus Jakobsson (03:06.200)
Yeah.
So Blueyard Capital is a venture capital firm in Berlin that is thesis driven.
And thesis driven firms are in Europe, it's super rare in the U.S. they're a couple.
But it's essentially a firm that doesn't invest in the geography or doesn't invest in like an industry.
It's not that we look for like B2B SaaS companies or whatever, marketplaces or something, but we have like we write a thesis about stuff like we believe that the world works a certain way.
And as we believe the world works that way, we look for certain kind of businesses within those beliefs.
So one of the things we think a lot about is that the world has been come very centralized in different ways.
Like the Internet is now run by eight players like, you know, like Gavin Bat.
Those are kind of like those people run the Internet nowadays.
And stuff like net neutrality, the way China is treating their citizens.
It's like things are monopolizing in different scary ways and interesting ways.
And our thesis essential that we think that these monopolies, they kind of won't hold financially.
We're betting against those monopolies.
And of course that's kind of a weird thesis because it's like, you know, like betting against the empire.
And it sounds cool.
I mean it sounds like a cool thing to do.
But we really fundamentally believe that it's a good business idea because of different reasons.
I think that if you go back 15 years ago, Microsoft was really big, but then they were like anti monopoly laws and everything, trying to change that.
And you know, now the wave is people are getting kind of aggressive against Facebook.
So I think that there definitely would be a counter movement and that's kind of our belief.
So we invest in essentially, I mean you could call it like anti monopolies.
It's kind of a weird way of pitching it, but stuff that frees up data, frees up markets and kind of changes the way the world looks and the way we believe in.
Omer (04:56.740)
So Blueyard is based in Berlin, but you are in Malvern, Sweden, correct?
Hampus Jakobsson (05:02.420)
Exactly, I'm in southern Sweden.
The thing is, I'm a very, very big believer in remote work.
I actually think that when I actually invest in companies not only as bluerd, but as an angel investor because I really enjoy angel invest, find stuff that I really passionate about, I really Recommend companies to try to work in a, in a remote decentralized fashion as much as they can, because then you can recruit the best people.
And I don't think, like, I'm not a big proponent of meeting people in like quote unquote meet space.
I mean, I enjoy meeting friends and stuff in like the quote unquote real world.
But I just feel like, you know, if you and I have a meeting about something, like, yeah, we could, you know, get on the car, drive somewhere, try to find a good place to meet and like find the conference room, order coffee, whatever, and then finally we get to talk and then the whole thing back.
Or we just save all the time and just do a call.
And so I live in like zoom.
I just like have zoom call after zoom call after zoom call.
I even now actually have a, like a walking belt in my office.
So I can just walk.
I just walk almost all day, drink coffee and have calls.
That's like my day.
It's like completely ridiculous.
Nice, but it's really nice, actually.
I really enjoy it.
Omer (06:12.520)
So as an angel investor, you've invested in over 80 companies.
What type of.
Do you look for similar companies as you do working at Blue Yard?
Or is there a different type of philosophy there?
Hampus Jakobsson (06:28.120)
It's different.
There's some overlap, but the overlap is always slightly complicated, of course.
So when there's an overlap, what happens is if I find a company that I feel, hey, this is a great company for the thesis, I pitch it inside and go like, hey, we should look at this company.
And I would say, you know, 80% of the companies I pitch is of course, it's like, nah.
I mean, we found a flaw or we don't believe it, or we do some vetting or we do some reference calls, we do due diligence, whatever, and we end up saying nah.
And some of those cases I just feel like this company has it.
It's just they need like nine more months to kind of show that they have it.
Or, you know, the founder comes off really unpolished and there's something there.
So then I just like inside say, hey, is it okay if I angel invest?
And essentially, like, it's not really a question.
I think people are just like, yeah, sure.
And then sometimes I.
A lot of things I've angel invest have not at all been thesis.
But if you like, if I look at the 85 plus companies I've invested in, they're all, almost all of them are pretty heavy tech companies, like deep tech, complex technology.
I don't like investing in things that I would say are improving something that already kind of works.
So like, like quote unquote lubricants.
Like, and if somebody comes in, it's like, oh, we found a thing that there's no really good used market for whatever sweaters.
And you look at it, it's like, no, there isn't.
But is that really a big thing?
And because there are kind of used clothing markets, but no, no, we're making a specialized market for used sweaters.
I really feel, I don't think this is a big headache.
Like, I think you can build a great company maybe, but.
But it's not that I'm going, wow.
But then if somebody comes in and they tell me a problem where I just go, what if this works?
It like fundamentally changes like stuff, like really, it just sort of changes things.
And I don't think we can unsee that change those I really love.
Omer (08:16.520)
Is there an example of a company you've invested in that you think is.
Hampus Jakobsson (08:21.560)
Yeah, I mean there are definitely a couple of examples that I really like.
So I can just bring up three, for example.
So I invested in a company called lifx and what LIFX do is that they rent huge off huge apartments in inner cities and they split them up and they turned into co working.
It's not co working, sorry, co living.
And the thing they're actually doing is they're essentially kind of like a fintech company.
They're taking up a complex, big asset, big apartments in central city.
They're splitting it up and making it easy to use for people who just want to live in an apartment.
They target Henry's high earners, not rich yet.
So people who relocate for work, mostly for the McKinseys and the apples and the Microsoft and Facebook of the world, they come to London, they come to Paris, they come to Copenhagen, whatever, Berlin, and they need an apartment.
They don't know if they need it for six months or two years, but they just want get it out of the way and fix it.
And LIFX has done a lot of super interesting software around this to help build really amazing tenant and tenant communities.
So a problem I've had is like when I, when I worked in Paris, Munich, London, like moved around these places and worked, you know, I spent massive amount of time trying to find a place to live.
I got there, I lived with people.
There was like a roll of dice if there was good or bad, just lots of hassle.
And I think what LIFX has figured out is you come in, you love the place because it's really well done.
But then the people are like, wow, how could they match me with these people?
So they've worked a lot on the back end and the user interface and experience on trying to make sure that people come in and these are the people they want to hang out with when they come up from work, which is kind of magical.
And the thing I love about them is that what I see in cities is cities are not designed for this new kind of hunter tribe.
Cities are designed for settlers, people who want to stay in a city.
And I think that's the thing that if LIFX works, I think it's going to fundamentally empower cities and change the way we see living, which I really like.
If you take another company, Ola, out of the uk, they're kind of like Slack for universities.
Sounds kind of lame when you think about it.
It's like, yeah, university queue, Slack, right?
What's super cool is they've done this very, very specialized internal system for universities.
And it's not really.
If you start thinking about the problem, you realize that it's not just Slack, it's a lot more and it's sort of for all the students.
And what they're essentially doing is they're kind of a digital transformation tool for universities to actually turn universities into like digital campuses, completely different.
And the reason I invested is because the famous are stellar and all that.
But one of the things I believe in that is I think in the future, some of the peers in your life will not be born.
I think that you will have colleagues and fellow students in the future that are going to be immortal, like bots and code.
So I think you're going to be doing, or your kids are going to be a Math class in 2040 and they're going to start chatting to their colleague Julie, like another student in the class.
And Julie's super nice.
Helping out why this math problem is tricky.
You're chatting to her.
What you don't know, or maybe you know, is that Julie doesn't have a body like Julie is code.
You're trying to learn math, Julie is trying to understand empathy.
She's going to.
She's doing the empathy for robots class.
And I think you're just like, she's a peer, she's not a master, she's not a slave, she's a peer.
And then the last company just bring up is minute, which is Home Watch System, an audio company.
They're a sensor you put up in your home.
It listens to your whole home and figures out if the door is open, alarm is off, left your fridge.
And it's a super complex technical product, but essentially what they're selling you is peace of mind.
And what I like about it is that this super complex combination of really, really, really complex technology, but then wrapped into something where it's just so simple and that, I mean, I can say from painful experiences, it's very hard to take a technical, complex problem and turn it into something which feels like a click of a button and peace of mind.
So Those are just three different examples.
Omer (12:23.370)
Now in 2002 you co founded a company called Tat.
Hampus Jakobsson (12:29.480)
Yeah, the astonishing Tribe, actually.
Omer (12:31.480)
That's right, yeah.
I was like, I didn't know what that stood for.
And I looked it up and I thought that's not what I expected that it would stand for.
Hampus Jakobsson (12:37.960)
That was the worst name.
Like we went, we like, we left, you know, we left like, you know, the Apples and Googles and Sonys and Motorolas in the world when like realized they had typed us in as the Estonian tribe and like, you know, the Astonishing Tribe.
So we realized, okay, let's simplify this tat.
Omer (12:54.590)
Okay, so you co founded that in 2002 and then I believe in 2010 you sold the company to BlackBerry for 150 million.
Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about that and I know it's not specifically a SaaS business, but it's a kind of an important part of your story.
So tell us a little like about like how many co founders were there.
How did you guys come up with the idea for this product?
Hampus Jakobsson (13:22.030)
Yeah, so like the story is like almost the strangest way to create a company ever.
So we were six friends, we had worked with Computer Arts.
There's in the Nordics.
I'm in the Nordics.
There used to be this massive scene on Computer Arts where you bought like an Xbox or Nintendo machine or even like a Commodore 64 and you just like, you hack the crazy thing out of it to make it do stuff that the people who built it didn't intend.
And then you competed in that.
So you met in huge Isock arenas and like you demoed these things and there were prices and stuff.
Started back in the late 80s, early 90s.
That was the thing.
We did that when we were kids.
We really enjoyed it.
I was working at an arts company in London as an internship thing for university.
I got back, I pitched the idea to a friend.
Hey, shouldn't you do an arts company?
That's super cool.
One thing led to another.
We Ended up six friends.
One other friend had another idea.
So we just said, hey, let's start the company together.
Let's not make this complicated.
We did a big arts exhibition.
We got, we got paid lots of money to do arts, which is crazy.
We got paid.
This is like 99, 2000 times, you know, 2002, 2001 it was, we were paid 40,000 Euros.
So like 50, 50, 60,000 bucks dollars to build this arts thing.
And then we had not thought, we had no idea what we were doing.
Like we were like last year university, we were doing this as hobby project.
But we felt this was really fun.
This was the time in life I felt like if I have an idea, I can just start working on it.
I don't have to ask the teacher.
I don't like.
There's no professor, there's no TAs, there are no grown ups.
We just do it.
It just felt crazy.
And this is before like startups became like also kind of popular thing in Europe as well a bit.
So it was a weird thing we did.
And then out of nowhere, Sony calls us.
A friend of us has started working at Sony and Sony had just merged with Ericsson.
So start building mobile phones.
Contacted us nowhere and said, hey, we got color screens.
We know that you did like computer arts when you were kids.
You know everything about this.
Can you help us?
And you remember your phone from 2001?
It just looked like crap.
So we were like, no, we don't want to do it.
It sounds silly.
Like phones, color screens, that's just stupid.
And my friend, or like our friends were like, come on, come on.
Like save my ass.
I promised my boss, please, please, please.
We're like, okay, come over and we'll see what we can do.
So over the weekend, we bought the first open phone in the world where you can build stuff that you had to be the manufacturer to build it on.
You could like download apps on it.
So we built a thing for that 2001 during the weekend.
And then the Sony managers came over, they looked at our phone and they were like, holy cow.
This is.
You built this?
We were like, yes.
So we'd love to license this or maybe acquire you.
I don't know how much.
What's the license fee for this?
And we just said the biggest number we've ever heard.
So we just like €40,000.
And they were like, oh, per phone model.
And we just, yeah, exactly, per phone model.
They were like, what's that?
Just crazy money.
And they're like, oh, that's great.
Let's draft the agreement.
And do you charge like NRE on top?
And we just.
Yep, exactly.
We charge NRA on top.
Standard rates.
Standard rates.
They walked out of the building.
We just checked on Wikipedia, nre.
We're like, oh, consultancy money.
Oh, we get paid per hour as well.
This is crazy.
And then one thing led to another.
That company just spun from the six of us, the six friends, the six we doubled every year, double employees, double revenue.
We hadn't have any extra money because, hey, I mean, this is an arts project that turned into a crazy project.
Just scale and scale and scale and scale.
And I mean, we ended up like, we designed Android for Google.
Like, it was just completely crazy.
We shipped like the 2010, we were acquired.
We shipped in more than 12% of all the world's phones that year from Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Ericsson and Nokia.
So that's like that year we shipped like the world shipped.
We don't know exact numbers, but the world shipped a bit more than 1.2 billion phones and we were in 12% of those phones.
So it's completely crazy.
And then Blackbook comes from nowhere.
We had never met them.
They came from nowhere and were saying, hey, we'd like to acquire the company.
And we just felt, nah, I mean, they're not going to acquire us.
We had got some asks from some other people before and we just thought, nah, it's never going to happen.
We were not super keen.
We were building our company.
We had a good time.
The thing that happened during 2010 is the world had really changed.
Like we had been part of designing Android.
I had been at Google for a long time there.
I'd really felt that systems are going to change, the world is going to change on that.
The phone founders were kind of tired.
We built it for eight years.
We had all our, almost all of our personal economy built in this company that we couldn't get any money out of.
Some of the people just like, hey, I want to, like, I want to move to la, I want to take it easy, I want to move to Iceland, whatever.
Like, you know, just random stuff.
So I was really stressed, feeling we have this opportunity, but we're in a burning platform world.
The world is changing and the founders are not super keen on working that much.
And then BlackBerry comes in and say, you want to acquire us?
So I just felt it's probably not going to happen.
They're probably going to turn into customer.
We can go and meet them.
So me and one of the co founders, we actually called in sick and flew to BlackBerry to meet them.
We were just like, I mean, it's never going to happen.
Why worry?
The company flew over there, met the founder.
We just completely filled up.
We were just like, this is the coolest thing ever.
And they actually tricked us in a really fun way.
We came there and they just essentially, as we landed, they were super nice, but they brought us to this super big meeting.
20 people kind of.
And they said.
So the CEO just said, I don't understand why you're here.
We've decided we're going to use Adobe Flash.
And we just looked at him and going, what?
Like, we flew to Canada.
So here's somebody saying the most stupid thing because, like, everybody in the inside of the industry knew that this is not going to work with flashbacks.
But people still had say.
We're still saying that because Adobe were really good at marketing.
So we just looked at him and said, that's ridiculous.
It's just stupid.
And he wasn't used to being told that, so he just said, yeah, tell me why it's stupid.
And then Michael and me, one of the co founders, we just started.
We were like, there's nothing to lose.
This guy's not going to hit this.
We're going to be polite, but we're going to tell him exactly, right?
Wrong.
So we just started this long, like half an hour rant where I think he interrupted us once or twice, but essentially just filled us with more rage.
And then after 30, 40 minutes, he just said, I think this is great, guys.
Could you walk into my office before, like, we continue this meeting?
We were just like, yeah, sure.
This.
We were super impressed.
This guy, Michael Azerrides, he was super smart, but I'm obviously wrong about Flash, right?
Walked into his office, he talked a couple of different things.
We were like, oh, he seems to be super, super smart.
Super smart and nice.
And he just said, great, you did a little theater.
Some people in my management still think Adobe is a good idea.
I want to acquire you.
How much is your turnover now?
And we just like, I just kind of made up a number because I didn't know exactly.
So he was asking for next year's turnover.
So I was like giving him an aggressive number.
And then he said, we'll pay you four times that in cash.
Is that okay?
And I just like, I can speak for the whole company, but, like, I think so.
Cool.
We'd love you to have BlackBerry business cards in six weeks.
Does that sound like a good timeline?
And we just said, wow, that sounds fast.
He was like, yeah, we like to do stuff fast.
We walked back into the meeting room and he pointed at the head of M and A and saying, so I want to acquire these guys 150 mil.
Can we do that within six weeks?
And yes, six weeks later, we signed the papers and they paid us $150 million in cash.
Omer (20:37.060)
So wait, this whole thing about Adobe,
Hampus Jakobsson (20:39.900)
he was just wanting us to kind of.
It was just theater.
I think it was like partly theater, but partly.
I think that he.
I think that actually like, I really liked Mike.
He was super smart and super interesting as a person.
I think he wanted to see a couple things.
One, I think he wanted to see can you fit the BlackBerry culture.
This is like a super open culture.
We get a speaker minds, no politics.
And then secondly, I think that he did have a point that some people really believed that you killed could use Adobe.
And I think he just wanted somebody to just speak their heart out on why that was a bad idea.
In a way, they had nothing to lose.
I think if he brought in somebody from Adobe or us as a contractor, if he brought us in as a contractor, we would have said, hey, you're looking to license this thing, this is way better.
But here we were just feeling.
We flew to Canada for this, so we'll just tell you the truth and then we'll go home.
So I think he used the opportunity really well.
It was super smart.
I really, I was so impressed by it.
So, yeah, and then, I mean, we just.
The six coming weeks were just massive diligence.
The last week we lived at a lawyer's office on top of a burger place, ate burgers and sat with the lawyers for 10 days straight until our, actually our head of the board fainted and was needed to be carried out.
Like, seriously, it was, it was entertaining, but so it's funny in some ways
Omer (21:54.360)
it's like, you know, you ended up selling for 150 million because you went to this meeting and thought, well, not really sure anything's going to come out of this, so let's just got nothing to lose.
Let's just tell them what we really think.
Hampus Jakobsson (22:12.700)
I think that that's kind of always how we did sales.
I think that.
And I flew to Korea and when the Koreans told their stuff from Samsung lg, we just told them the truth.
We just, I don't know, we were Swedish about it.
We just told them, no, that's a bad way to build it.
We wouldn't build it that way, we would build it this way.
And I think that in a one wonderful manner I think we started the Anthony when we were young.
I mean, 21, 22, 23 were the founders.
And I think we had this youthful arrogance, but wrapped in this Scandinavian humbleness and nice way of presenting it.
But we were definitely still young and arrogant about that.
We thought that we were right, which I think was super useful.
We just, we didn't put up with if somebody told us, oh, we can build this way, do you want to participate in this project and license it to us?
We just said no.
If we didn't think it would work, we just felt, no, we can probably charge money for this, but why build something that's going to be bad now?
Omer (23:00.280)
So after the acquisition, you stayed at BlackBerry for two years almost.
So two years at BlackBerry and then you co founded another company in 2012 called Brisk and things didn't go as well with that.
I mean, four years later that startup failed and you shut it down.
Hampus Jakobsson (23:26.820)
Exactly.
No, it's funny because I think that on one end, I think it was a very un.
I mean, financially it was super unsuccessful.
Raised $2 million because I really wanted to learn how to raise money.
I had Angelus, a lot of companies and it was hard for me to advise them raising money because I'd never done it on my own.
So then it was great.
I was out there raising angel runs and seed rounds and everything else, which of course I'd been promoted as an angel investor on the other side.
But suddenly I was on the inside, which was very, very educational.
And the other thing was super educational.
It's like, I think when we did, when I was doing my first company, it's kind of like learning how to swim or learning how to bike.
I think we just did stuff.
We worked really hard and we didn't have a tutor.
We didn't have a teacher.
We just did stuff.
A lot of stupid stuff.
We compensated time with intelligence with time.
We just worked hard.
And I think the difference when we real brisk is that I was a lot wiser.
So we were working completely differently.
Also, the world was very different.
Of course.
It's like starting something in 2012 where actually the tech crunch of the world exists.
And even YouTube and Facebook and Twitter is a big thing.
So it's super good.
I think that I learned a lot more, in a way from the riskier journey than I did from the tat journey.
But financially it was definitely a worse idea, of course.
Omer (24:43.970)
So can you explain what Brisk was like?
Hampus Jakobsson (24:47.410)
What was the product?
Omer (24:48.450)
What problem were you trying to solve?
For who?
Hampus Jakobsson (24:50.850)
Yeah, the problem was it actually came from partly from the first company tat.
So the problem we had was so we were building a layer on top of the CRM system and figured out what you had forgot or neglected as an organization.
For example, if we saw that you had an open opportunity, but you had no meetings booked with that opportunity and no email conversations or recent calls, we notified you and asked should these opportunities be closed or should you contact them?
And the target group were inside sales organizations.
So a lot of companies in the world, and there were a couple of companies in the world trying to solve this.
And I would say that most of them looking, in hindsight, I think most of them were feeble attempts.
And then they're the big CRM players and these startups.
And I think that it wasn't really competition that killed us.
I think what killed us is that we didn't really understand how hard it is to kind of do, to change the culture of a company.
Because it's not only a software thing, of course, because if you suddenly had software that changed how people sell, it changes everything.
But the idea came from like when we started my first company, I just felt so frustrated that salespeople, it's black magic.
You know, you can't learn sales, you're born a salesperson, yada yada yada.
So I really felt that there must be a way to create more of an engineering process around sales.
And we had built that internally with like spreadsheets and stuff at my first company.
So it just felt like there must be a way of doing this.
And when we started brisk, we just realized, wow, Salesforce is just a goldmine of data.
And then of course, on top of that, we have your email, your calendar, you have Marketo.
We can just siphon all this data.
And it's not a quote unquote, big data problem.
It's actually a small data problem.
It's much more like, you know, when Google Assistance pings you and says you should leave for the meeting now, it's not a big data problem.
It just uses the three things they know and let's tell you how to leave.
So we just thought that feels like a natural idea.
It was a couple of pivots getting into that thing.
We sort of had different ways of thinking about it first, but that's kind of what we're getting into.
And we signed some great customers, so obviously we had some things right.
But we didn't understand how hard it was to change culture.
Omer (26:59.990)
Did you kind of go out there and do some validation or was this just kind of like you saw you're kind of scratching your own itch and
Hampus Jakobsson (27:07.910)
it was like, no, no, no.
I think that, I think that I've actually thought a lot about the two kinds of founders you can have.
I think that you can have, you can be a founder who is like visionary, evangelical, like, you know, has a reality distortion field so big that they trick themselves.
And then you can have much more.
The other type, which is like anthropologists and process people.
And I'm, I'm a, I'm a process person.
Like, I believe in thinking of how to think.
I spend a lot of time thinking how to think.
So when we started the idea, we ping pong between what do we believe and how do we figure out if that's a good idea?
So we build a process for that naturally, because I like processes and it was great.
I really, really enjoyed it.
So first we had like segments we wanted to go into.
Like, how do we create engineering structures around sales?
Like, was like, we started, we thought about like, can we visualize it?
Can we processize it?
Can we couple of different ideas.
Then I just went out on LinkedIn, I upgraded to LinkedIn Premium or something.
I remember, yes, I did.
And then I just emailed 40 LinkedIn emailed, sorry, 40 kind of sales managers and you know, chief revenue officers and sales operation managers, every week ping them and said like, I have a new idea.
I have nothing to sell you.
I'm not like, I don't have a product, nothing.
But I want to talk to you about how you organize sales.
Here are a couple of questions in my head.
Question one, question two, and questions that I think everybody still in the industry looks at and go, yeah, like, how do you get salespeople to update the serum system?
How do you know the truth?
And like, you know, how can you visualize the data?
Trust it.
Like, questions where like every person who read them were like, that's great questions, I don't know.
And then I just asked, do you have time for a 20 minute call?
I'd love to talk to you.
Every week, I think it was eight to 10 people replied and said yes.
And then we ended up having four calls per week.
Because the people who said yes didn't end up always coming to the meeting.
Four people every week where I just talked to them and just really just very like, anthropologically I didn't sell them anything.
I just asked them, so how do you solve it today?
What have you tried?
Why do you think it's a problem?
I recorded it and made like an internal mini podcast.
Not released for the world, but all of us that worked in the company, just listen to these people explain how they did it.
And, you know, every week I learned more.
I could ask better questions.
I didn't lead them anywhere, but I could definitely remove a question if I think it didn't give us data.
And then just like, work.
And, you know, at the same time, one of my co founders, they were building a prototype, and in the calls, after a couple of weeks, we could say, hey, we got a little prototype.
Can I show it to you?
I'm not going to sell it to you.
It's like super early.
But I'd love to show it to you and just hear like, do you think this is a silly idea?
Show it to people?
And we definitely, when you had a good call, we always ask people, should we get back to you with what other people said and if we find anything?
And I would say one or two people every week said, yeah, this is a super interesting problem.
If you solve this problem, I'd love to talk to you again.
So after three or four weeks, we could usually call people back and we could demo something for them.
Got a lot of great feedback.
And I think that's when we kind of knew or knew Renew, but that's when we felt, wow, this is something.
So then we kind of graduated ourselves from, like, the discovery phase, when we kind of felt, we know what the problem is, we know what the alternative is, we know the context of the user and what's valuable for them.
And then we just sat down and built something for, I think, two months.
And then we had, okay, we have a beta.
Now let's onboard a couple of customers and see what happens.
And, you know, that's kind of when we went into the stage where I think most people start in, like, you know what you want and you build it.
But we had this, I think, almost two months of just like, interrogating people instead of, like, we didn't, you know, it's not that we looked at a lot of competitors.
It's not that we, you know, bought analyst reports or anything silly or wrote like a business plan.
We just felt if people talk about problems and say they're huge problems, they're probably huge problems.
And, you know, if you talk to Dropbox and LinkedIn and Hootsuite and stuff, these are smart companies.
I mean, sometimes these people just told us, hampus.
I think you're kind of in a weird area.
Isn't that what people use Marketo for?
And I could just go, marketo.
I Don't know what's his name?
Is there Marketo?
And I wrote it.
I was like, oh, I've never seen this company.
And they were just laughed on the other end.
It's like, oh, that's funny.
That's so cute of you.
And then it's like, you know, oh, I've never seen this.
This is super cool.
And then I realized that, okay, the question.
I just said that scenario we shouldn't be in because obviously there's.
There's a legit company in that area and people don't find it to be a problem.
But it was so funny.
We had a lot of conversations where some company said, oh, we looked at using tableau for this.
So then I could just bring it up with the next customer.
Have you looked at using Tableau?
And they were like, that's a great idea.
That's a great idea.
How would you do that?
Interesting.
Did you talk to somebody who did it?
And I was like, yeah, introduce those two.
And they were like, thanks.
This is super useful.
And then usually people came back after a couple weeks saying, I mean, new findings.
And it's like, we kind of figure out, okay, let's not visualize the data.
Let's do this.
And we kind of the same approach as, like, we did at tat.
We're just super helpful and felt, yeah, let's figure out what the problem is before we start building it.
And let's build the best, like the.
The.
Let's build a company which is.
Solves the.
The real problem, not like something we can sell, which is not actually the problem.
Omer (32:26.240)
So you ship the product or the platform and you started closing some great deals.
But that's when you also started getting into trouble because you were doing a lot of customization for every customer.
Hampus Jakobsson (32:41.650)
Yeah.
What.
What we completely underestimated what we.
What we knew.
What we learned the first three months is that people.
I mean, Salesforce.
I mean, Salesforce is a strange thing.
We realized how badly people customize Salesforce.
Salesforce is not even a platform.
It's almost a programming language.
It's like there was no way for us to kind of know how a Salesforce instance looked.
It was just crazy.
But what we didn't understand is that even, like, people use Salesforce differently.
Like, you know, even if a Salesforce instance is set up in a very good way, salespeople don't use it that way.
We had customers who we looked at their tasks and their Salesforce tasks, and they were like, why are some of the tasks called Star Star?
Star in front of the task.
Why are some tasks called Star Star?
That's super strange.
We don't know.
So we pinged one of the salespeople and asked them, and he said, yeah, that's just how I use priorities.
Like, the more stars, the more important.
We just asked him, why don't you use the priorities flag on tasks?
And he said, ah.
You said, I didn't like it, but there is a flag.
There's a thing in the UI when you use it.
I don't like it.
But that means it's impossible to use your data.
Because how could the sales operation team know that you've decided to use stars?
He's like, I don't care.
Okay, okay, sure, I get that.
And you're like, this is just one of the many, many, many, many examples.
I think that we found more than, like, literally.
I think we had a list of more than 200 weird stuff people did systematically.
And some organizations even had their own ideas of, oh, we don't use opportunities, we only use leads.
We're like, but how do you seek a close one?
Oh, we convert it to an opportunity.
So we're like, so a converted lead is a closed opportunity?
We're like, yes, but why don't use the opportunity object?
I don't know, but that's stupid.
It's just super strange.
This thing is built for another way.
And they're like, yeah, this works.
So it's just super surprising.
So that's the thing.
We were completely underestimated.
And when that happened, I don't know if we should have.
I think there were three choices.
I think we could have pivoted, which I think would be a bad idea because we already were.
Then, like, one year into the company, we'd spent quite a lot of money.
We knew the space pretty well.
We thought we had a good idea and we had great customers.
I mean, we had customers who love the product.
So it felt like we have something, right.
I think what we should have done, I think would have been to say, let's only sell to the customers who we think will get a great experience and then kind of go our way or the highway and just remove a lot of options from the product.
Just make the product saying, this is how it works.
And then even maybe tell people, like, you know, we can do an onboarding workshop to help you to use it, or we can figure out great sales trainers that can help you to learn how CRM works or whatever.
But we didn't.
Omer (35:37.020)
And instead you decide to focus on flexibility and making the product even more flexible.
Hampus Jakobsson (35:41.980)
Yeah, exactly.
And I think it's like the problem for us was that also that some of these customers, they were so smart, they were like, I mean, LinkedIn and these huge companies, they were just saying, we know we use it a weird way, but can you add this thing for us?
And if we were like, this is like 2000 salespeople, they're going to roll it out in a couple of months.
Of course we can fix that thing.
And it just felt we should probably.
And I think part of the problem was I think we hadn't found a perfect product market fit, because if we had, I think we could have seen these people.
Now, in hindsight, it's obvious that, okay, maybe we should take in LinkedIn as we did.
That was a great deal.
But I think in so many other cases, we just said, nah, this is not a deal.
I mean, because the problem is when you're in it, it's hard to see.
I think it's like when you're in bad relationship.
I think when you're a bad relationship, afterwards you just go, huh, that was a bad relationship.
In the midst of it, you're like, I don't know, is this normal?
Is this okay?
I don't know.
And I think that's, I think, was the problem we had.
We couldn't really understand that the customer you signed, they're not going to have a great experience or we will have a horrible experience with them getting back to us with like weird questions constantly.
So I think it's like, you know, culture eats tech for breakfast.
And I think we didn't really get that.
We just thought that, you know, the best product wins.
We didn't understand that.
Nah, people are still people.
Omer (37:03.300)
So you'd said that in hindsight you should have focused more.
What does that mean?
Like, how would Brisk have looked if you had done that?
Hampus Jakobsson (37:17.460)
I think there were multiple ways I think we could have turned it into almost like B2C product, both for salespeople, like a prosumer, you know, $7 a user.
Because we had crazy amount of leads.
We just had, we, we figured out marketing.
That's what we did.
It was just completely crazy.
I think we should have just said, okay, this is a $9 per user product.
You can use it.
You don't have to care about your colleagues.
We'll get, we'll make you the best salesperson in the team.
And if you have custom objects and weird stuff, I don't care.
Just like, we'll help you perform.
I think that we could probably have built a great company on that, but we weren't.
I think the problem back to I think who we are and who we were is like what I said about DAT and that meeting with BlackBerry is that we didn't want to do something where we felt it's not the right way.
And I think that was definitely something that hindered our mindset.
We should have just said, the right way is the holy Grail.
It doesn't exist.
Just give up.
I mean, not give up, but just give up on the.
I think that we kind of had the.
I really believe that great is the enemy of good.
So we just stared at great and was like, there's a perfect solution.
I think we could have just gone, hey, there's a good solution.
Just go for the good solution.
It's going to work.
I still think we did the right thing of actually chasing the greats because I think we would have been miserable settling for the good solution.
But it was sad.
It worked.
Or I think we could have focused on.
We could have focused on just saying we only take this kind of customer.
And we said the kind of customers that work this way, we'd work with them and only work with them.
But I think we were a bit newbies also to.
I mean, even if we knew a lot about inside sales teams and had onboard a lot of people, we were not native in it.
So I think that it took a while until we could separate the wheat from the chaff.
And I think that when we finally did like the six, six, eight months before we folded, I think we were very, very knowledgeable, but we were also very, very tired of the idea.
So we just kind of felt.
And like our investors were like, oh, let's do a bridge round.
We'd love to continue this.
And we just felt if we sign this bridge round, we have to do this for like 18 more months and we don't like it anymore.
Like, I'm not enthusiastic about the idea.
Like, the customers that love it, we don't think they're using it the right way.
We don't enjoy anything about this.
I mean, we enjoyed that the team really enjoyed working.
Of course there's like normal friction and stuff inside the team, but we just felt it was almost like we said, we have seven months left.
Should we just do something else?
But what we realized is that's a super responsible thing to do to the VCs.
It just felt the wrong.
And the Angelons even more who was like their personal money.
So we just said, nah, let's Try this Outlaws company and if we not succeed, let's fold it and hand out the money back.
And since I ran M and A, I kind of knew how to do that part.
So we spun up like, I think we had five different acquirers that were very interested, had good conversations.
Three dropped off.
Pretty much the first two weeks, we didn't have US visas, so they wanted us to relocate to the US and this was, what is it, 2014.
So the American visas had changed quite a lot, become a lot harder.
So a lot of these companies looked at us and said, it's really hard for us to get US visas now.
Right now we would not want you remotely.
We'd want to relocate.
So which ones do you have?
American visas or American citizens?
And we were just like, none.
They said, okay, I'm sorry, we won't do it.
Which was nice.
They told us straight off, like, you know, very quickly.
Good.
So then we had two left that were very interested, and one put an offer and said, we'd love to acquire you.
We want to do this.
And they had a super cool offer that we wanted to do.
It felt really great.
People in the team were super dressed up.
And then they emailed us.
We booked the tickets to meet their CEO and do first onboarding before we signed the term sheets.
But it felt like, this is great.
And since, again, since I'd run M and A, I kind of knew how an M and A process should look, which worked.
So I was like, this is like, we're on target, on time.
This is great.
And then the Friday, we were going to go there on the Wednesday, and on the Friday, late evening, one of the guys calls me and says, I'm sorry.
We had a management meeting all day, like a strategy session.
We've decided to not go on with your deal.
And it's not because of you.
It's.
We have just like, we realized that we need to focus on something right now internally.
And we like, if you think that you will live for another year, we would love to talk to you.
Maybe in a year.
Can't guarantee anything, but we won't acquire you now, but we'll reimburse your flights.
And it was like, thanks, that's amazing.
That was super expensive.
So thank you very much for those flights.
They rebursed our flights.
Actually, they were super nice.
They were like, just send us a bill.
I'm very sorry for all of this hassle.
Reimburse the flights.
And the day I sent that bill, which was like, no, on the Monday, I was like, okay, guys, let's meet Tuesday morning, take a whole day and discuss why we should discontinue the company.
And then let's meet Wednesday all day and give each other super honest feedback about how you can be the best person for your next job.
And let's meet Thursday and then just party all day.
And then let's meet Friday and like, get rid of this company.
And then we did that and just like had a week of just like really giving each other super honest feedback.
Like first, like the first day, the Tuesday was super good because we just talked.
Why do you think Risk failed?
And we walk through all the different reasons, all the things we went wrong, all the things we didn't understand for a whole day, like, you know, 15 hours and with drinks in the end, so like, even more creative.
And then the next day we just super honest personal feedback.
Like, okay, in your next job.
I think you're really hard to work with sometimes because you don't tell this, but you're, you know, you don't mean it and it comes off as arrogant.
People are like, what?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I told you a couple of times, but maybe not this straight, but now, like, I will not tell you.
And just like everybody gave to each other one on one feedback for a whole day.
Lots of hugs, lots of crying.
Then we went out for dinner.
And then the day after was like super practical.
It's like, okay, what do we do now?
Like, who runs the folding process?
Who runs the legal process?
Who wants to get another job?
Who will stay?
Who will handle the existing customers?
And then it's like me and one more co founder, he took all the tech stuff and then I took all the legal stuff and the admin stuff.
And then everyone else just signed for their job pretty much within a week.
And then during that process, we started folding it randomly.
A customer that had been like a partner ish company.
They called us from nowhere because they'd recruited one of our customers, the head of sales for that company.
And they called us up and said, oh, we'd love to use your product.
And we just said, no, sorry, we're folding the company.
And the sales guy who used to be our customer was like, no, this is the best idea ever.
You can't fold it.
Like, yeah, we're folding it.
Sorry, this is what we're doing.
We explained all to him.
I can tell you everything.
He's like, can we acquire it?
And I thought, this is super smart because then we get.
The legal process is going to be a lot easier.
Maybe and then they said, we can't acquire a Swedish entity.
It's complicated for us.
Can we acquire just the tech and then you help us use the tech and integrate our product?
So I turned around to my tech co founder, who sit next to me.
Do you want to run an integration project personally?
You can build them personally, get six months of good consultancy when you help them do this.
Because this is silly.
It's not gonna be crazy money, but why not?
And then she's like, sure, we can do some of the companies, build some for me.
No problem.
Let's do this.
So then we just turned around, sold all the tech to them, and funny enough, six months later they were acquired by Outbound Works for our product, which was really funny, but they executed a lot better on actually telling the story and really explaining that this is a custom.
This product needs to be heavily customized, where we were much more explaining it as like a package product.
So they just were very honest about, yep, this is a platform.
You can, you know, hide a lot of complexity in a CRM.
And then Outbound Works, we'd love to have this as an internal way of using Salesforce.
They didn't get hired for crazy money, but the people who saw that, they did the thing people should do, they were honest.
They just didn't speak in tons.
Omer (45:29.820)
What a story.
You are full of stories.
Hampus Jakobsson (45:33.580)
Yeah.
Omer (45:35.100)
All right, we should wrap up.
So I'm going to go into the lightning round and ask you seven questions.
So just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Hampus Jakobsson (45:44.300)
Yeah.
Omer (45:45.180)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Hampus Jakobsson (45:48.220)
Actually, that's none, I would say, because the crazy thing is whenever I received it, I didn't get it.
I always got them afterwards, like, you know, years after, it's like, ah, that was a good thing.
So I think that has just been too stupid.
I've never actually felt like a good business advice, I think.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Omer (46:06.110)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Hampus Jakobsson (46:09.310)
The thing is, I can't recommend one book.
I'm going to recommend 100 books.
I think if you run a company.
I think my favorite books are the MOM Test and Never split the Difference.
The Mom Test helps you figure out how to talk to customers, to figure out what the product should be doing.
And Never Split the Difference is an amazing negotiation book.
I just love those two books.
I learned daring greatly for people who run teams and realize, like, how to actually work honestly and communicate with your teams.
I really like those.
Those three books.
But then I Think if you're a person who want to think about life.
I really enjoy like why Buddhism is True, how to Be a Stoic.
Finite and infinite games are really things I like.
I think if you're a person who thinks about like.
Want to read fiction?
Some of my favorite fiction books are A Little Life, the Golem and the Genie, the Classical Golden Compass, and then a very recent book which is called the Quantum Thief.
So that's the one book?
Omer (47:01.360)
That's the one book, yeah.
Hampus Jakobsson (47:02.640)
Thank you for that.
Omer (47:04.400)
Okay, I'm going to put.
I'll make sure we have a list of all of those in the show.
Hampus Jakobsson (47:07.120)
Notes.
Omer (47:08.880)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Hampus Jakobsson (47:13.440)
I find successful people to be ambitious, super focused and have a sense of urgency.
And I think that.
I feel that it doesn't mean like if it's one attribute or characteristic.
I think that usually like it's a team.
Right.
So I think you need these things in the founding team.
So I think you can have like super ambition person, super focused person, and a person with a lot of sense of urgency or all those things packaged in one person.
So I think those are the three for me.
If I think the founders don't have that, I actually don't think it's going to work.
Omer (47:43.470)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Hampus Jakobsson (47:48.750)
Write a to do list.
What I should do tomorrow and do only what says on that list.
That's definitely one of my favorite tricks.
Omer (47:57.630)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Hampus Jakobsson (48:02.110)
I don't have one right now.
I think that I have a lot of small ideas.
I'm super weird that nobody's built like payroll company for cryptocurrencies.
It's just an idea I've been irritated at.
Lastly, I've been read about that nobody built a good way to have decentralized teams.
But I don't want to start anything.
Omer (48:24.620)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Hampus Jakobsson (48:28.860)
I think I'm just too transparent.
I think tell everybody too much.
Not too much, but everything.
So I think.
I don't think that's.
I don't.
Nothing.
I think.
Omer (48:38.440)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Hampus Jakobsson (48:42.200)
I have a lot of passions.
And I mean I love listening to podcasts, I love playing board games, I love playing computer games.
I love reading fictions.
Fiction.
I love cooking.
I just, I have an easy time to get passions
Omer (48:55.080)
that's a good way to live life.
Hampus Jakobsson (48:57.000)
Yeah.
Omer (48:58.680)
Cool.
Hampers.
Thank you for joining me.
It's.
We've covered a lot of stuff here and, you know, thank you for one, sharing your.
Your story and, and kind of your experience and the lessons you've learned along the way.
Secondly, thank you for being so open and transparent with everything.
You know, I really enjoyed this conversation and I kind of feel like there's just so much more that we could talk about.
So I definitely like to invite you back at some point and kind of continue the conversation, and I'm sure we'll will be able to give the audience a lot more of your insights that hopefully people will find useful.
Hampus Jakobsson (49:43.150)
Thanks.
I actually really like when I listen to other people talk about stuff or read what other people have written in a very genuine fashion.
So I'm super happy to contribute to this.
I think a lot of things we read online or listen to, they're just too well produced, so it's hard to figure out what's actually the truth.
And I think it's just great having conversations with new people.
Omer (50:06.790)
Yeah, no, I totally agree.
And I thought this was a great conversation.
Hampus Jakobsson (50:10.550)
Thanks.
Omer (50:11.030)
All right, now, if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Hampus Jakobsson (50:19.670)
I think Twitter is probably the best.
I think I'm H A J A K on Twitter.
I mean, I think my blog has my email address if you go to www.hajk.se.
i think my.
I think my email address is like on the first page there or something, so you can easily find it.
I reply to all emails, but I mean, I'm.
If somebody sends me emails like, hey, do you want to Angelo Mess?
My idea?
I will usually just say no because I just don't have the time.
But I'm going to be nice and reply to people.
So I think it's really fun to meet new people.
Omer (50:53.230)
Yeah.
And you've been pretty clear about the criteria you're looking for for the types of companies, so that's.
That's very good.
Yeah.
And I would say, yeah, people should definitely check out the blog.
I think there's a ton of useful stuff that I found there.
And the more I read of your blog, it kind of just as I said to you before we started recording, it just kind of overwhelmed me with all of these potential topics that we could talk about.
I was like, how the heck are we going to kind of COVID all of this stuff in the time that we have?
So, yeah, there's plenty of food for thought and things we can talk about next time.
Hampus Jakobsson (51:29.760)
The blog is actually, funny enough.
The blog is.
I write the blog for myself.
It's really funny.
It's like, what it is for me is something that really bothers me.
It's like, you know, a founder that I invest in says something and I go, ah, that's a great idea.
Or it's a great problem.
And I just go to the rabbit hole and think about it.
I interview, like, 10 people on it, and I want to solve it for myself.
I tell the founder everything I find, of course, but then I just write a blog post for myself, but then I publish it, because if I wouldn't publish it, I would not finish it, right?
I would just, like.
I would just keep these, like, you know, snippets of information.
So the blog post is like, it's the best way for me to figure out things that I've realized and read them, like, three years down the line and go like, whoa, whoa.
That was well written of me.
That's smart.
I should read this again.
So that's kind of why I do it.
It's just like, to be able to save stuff.
I realized that's funny.
Omer (52:17.430)
Cool.
Thanks again for joining me, Hampus.
And I wish you all the best in the future.
Hampus Jakobsson (52:20.950)
Thanks a lot.
Talk to you soon.
Cheers.
