Velkommen til LØRN.TECH - en læringsdugnad om teknologi og samfunn, med Silvija Seres og venner.

Silvija Seres: Hello, and welcome to LØRN. My name is Silvija Seres, and our topic today could be video technology, but I think it's going to be technology and society. My guest is Sean Percival, the chief marketing officer of Appear In. Welcome, Sean.

Sean Percival: Yes, thank you for having me.

Silvija: The way I think of you, is an ecosystem builder for startups in Norway and the Nordics. And Appear In is your latest gig. I've wanted to talk with you here in LØRN for a long time, because I think what you did for our collective identity as an entrepreneurship nation, has been very important and positive.

Sean: Thank you so much. Because many people said I was crazy to spend any time in Norway, but I don't listen to those people. So I was glad to be in an early part of what's happening now. 

Silvija: You have your second round in Norway now, in a way. You came here five years ago?

Sean: Yup.

Silvija: To fund 500 startups, which is a very successful concept in Silicon Valley. Turned out that the Nordics were a bit immune to angel investment, that kind of pay it forward-mentality, at the time. And then you came back again, and this time to go more individually, maybe company by company. You let us know. But in the meantime, you have also written positively about Norway as an ecosystem for startups in places like Financial Times and really big places, which I think was a super important boost of confidence for us. So thank you for that. So, we'll talk about two things. One is your view of the Norwegian startup eco system and investment space, and the other is Appear In, which is a wonderful company that I'm a big fan of. And before we do that, I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about who Sean is, and what drives him?

Sean: Yeah. Touch question to answer, and a bit multifaceted in the sense that I've been a marketer, a CEO, an investor myself. I've kind of worn every hat. I grew up very technical, my dad used to joke that I was setting the VCR when I was five years old. Obviously before we had Netflix and it was way more difficult. Always been very deep into technology. I really found a vain, though, in marketing. I tried to be a programmer, and I was just not very good at it. I tried to be a designer, and I was OK at it. But marketing is what I really sort of love and enjoy.

Silvija: You like selling good technology?

Sean: I love selling, and I love reaching people. And I love the fact that especially early in my career, I had no resources, no money, and I was building these companies that were reaching sometimes millions of people, from my tiny, very crappy apartment. I was building websites that had millions of visitors a month. So to me, it was very empowering. No schooling, no education. I dropped out of college three different times, and basically just learned from trial and error. That's how I really got started in this industry.

Silvija: So what brought you to Norway first time around?

Sean: It was a big fluke. A friend of mine was working in Sweden, and he had an inc called Stockholm Tech, which is a big tech conference out there. And he said I had to come, and I think it was October/November, and I said that it looks very cold, and I don't want to go. I was in California at the time. And he actually sent me a plane ticket, and I actually have Norwegian heritage, so my grandparents and my great grandparents are Norwegian. They were very Norwegian in the sense that they never talked, so they're very quiet. So the stories were never passed down, and I was in Sweden, so I said that I have to go to Norway. And through a fluke of events, I met Maja and Stine, in Startup Norway at the time, and they said "yes, if you're in Sweden, you must come to Norway". And they had a great dinner for us, and I lated understood that that's a big thing, Norwegians don't typically invite a stranger into dinner before they know them. And I had a great dinner, they made it into a very Norwegian nachspiel experience as well, and we drank and talked until 5-6 in the morning. So a lot of the credit is really due to them, and Stine Liland especially. And it sort of opened my eyes that Norway was lacking early stage capital and mentorship. And that's exactly what (? 04:40) does. So I literally came home from the nachspiel slightly intoxicated, and I wrote to my boss that I want to expand to Norway and to Sweden, and sure enough he actually wrote back within minutes, and said "you know what, Sean, go for it." And that started it. I had no idea what it was all about. I didn't understand the nuances-

Silvija: You saw the pretty girls.

Sean: Ehm. A lot of people joke about that, and I usually say that love didn't bring be to Norway like it does with a lot of people, I was more interesting in business. Love may be helping me stay in Norway, in some degree, but at the time it was purely opportunistic, I saw the raw talent. I knew there was so much talent here, but it needed a little bit of help.

Silvija: Norway has great technical talent, and sometimes I wonder why they don't know it themselves. I think some of the engineering talent that has to do with heavy duty industrial amplifications from oil ans shipping, to sea and ocean resources and energy and sun, they are so good at it. 

Sean: Yeah, but let's face it, too much modesty here. Norwegians are pulling oil off the bottom of the ocean, that's the hardest place to pull it out. So they engineer the feet that go on there, and from my own personal experience the engineers are as good as Silicon Valley, they're half the price and they're incredibly loyal. Those are two things we don't have in the valley, so the talent it here, no question.

Silvija: I just want to go back for one second. You mentioned Maja and Stine. We are now at Startup Extreme in Voss. I know Maja and her husband Knut are working on this for the fifth year, where they are trying to attract heavy duty international investors to Norway, by basically showing off something Norway is very unique at, which is the opportunity for extreme sports here in Voss. I love Maja, and I love Stine, and I love Knut. And I think what they do for the startup ecosystem in Norway, has been a little under appreciated, to be perfectly honest. 

Sean: Agree.

Silvija: Maja and Stine and their startup weekend was the first time I met them. For 48 hours, they gather a bunch of complete unknowns. These people self organize into small teams that within a weekend are mentored enough to create a shell of a startup. With a complete business plan-idea, and some sketches of a design or product, and it's an incredible weekend. And later they had this Oslo house of innovations and several things-

Sean: Angle challenge.

Silvija: Angle challenge, focus on female investors and entrepreneur that I think was very positive. And now Startup Extreme. First time I met them, I thought they were a little too playful... I had this feeling of them being childish.

Sean: They have more passion than experience, it's probably different now, but that was the case-

Silvija: But they got things done in a way that I think is very impressive. And they brought you here.

Sean: The reason I'm in Norway, is because of them, no doubt. And after that nachspiel experience, Startup Extreme was a few months later, and same deal, they were both like "you have to come, we need you here", and that's what they really did well, and I was an international investor, and they brought me here, and they continue to do that. We're at startup extreme and I just had a meeting with a London VC. And that's very important, because Silicon Valley is not great because of people like me that are from there, Silicon Valley is great because the international world of talent and capital comes there. So this is the one thing, and there was a debate about this earlier today, like the international diversity is important, Norway is great about gender equality, but it's hard to come here as a foreigner, it's a lot of other challenges too, and that's what they really try to do. And yeah, I agree, they probably don't get as much credit, and look at how much they're doing. Especially Maja and Knut now, like it's still a small team, and I'm amazed at how many things they have running, and they keep it all going, so yeah, much credit to them. 

Silvija: Very good. Tell us about 500 Startups, what's the idea?

Sean: The idea is that talent is everywhere in the world. 500 startups was one of the few silicon valley funds that was going international from day one. We were setting up micro funds, which is what I was trying to establish here in Norway.

Silvija: What is a micro fund?

Sean: It's basically a small fund. It's 10-25 million dollars, which is a pretty big fund here, but in Silicon Valley that is kind of a small fund. So it allows people to have operations in different parts of the world, invest indirectly there, and also helping those companies go to Silicon Valley to get more funding, more expertise as well.

Silvija: So how do you set up a fund. You go to big companies, do you go to private investors, do you do all of the above?

Sean: It's a little bit different with each market, but typically you have som corporates involved. You're not going to institutions, because they only invest in funds that have been around for 10-20 years. You go to family offices, you're going to private individuals. A lot of the earliest, like fund no. 1, is supported by individuals and corporations who have a strategic interest in the region or the technology you're working on. So a lot og the LP, which is limited partner in adventure fund, it's like people like Samsung or different telco companies. I was in a lot of discussions with Telenor. They didn't end up investing, but that was kind of the target I was going after.

Silvija: And is there a specific focus of these 500 startup companies that then get the money, or how do you select them?

Sean: No, it's very broad. I would say the only focus is software aided innovations, so not a lot of hardware or biotech, or other things. Mostly because they are too capital intensive. 500 startups was investing early stage and 100.000 dollars roughly, so it's not gonna support the med tech companies that need a lot of funding over a long period of time. The best examples are probably the SAS-companies, you know, software as a service. Meaning it can grow ans scale fast, and it is very capital efficient.

Silvija: Something like sales force.

Sean: Sales force, exactly.

Silvija: So would you be looking for companies in a region that would be funded by the part of the fund that is in the region?

Sean: Exactly. So like local partners would invest and support and help, and then also try to be that bridge to other regions or to Silicon Valley, if it makes sense. 

Silvija: Is there always mentoring and incubation and acceleration involved, or?

Sean: Most of the time. I would say it's like 80% acceleration, 20% as pure seed investments. But yeah, early stage companies need a lot of help! And I've run accelerators and they need a lot of mentorship. They need to be told what to do, but what is more important is to tell them what not to do. "Don't make this mistake. I'm a founder myself, I've raised money, I've built companies, I've crashed companies, I've made all the mistakes". So what I do is I try to help the founders not go down the wrong paths that take cost, time and money.

Silvija: So we are now in a very different place, 5 years later. At the time, you said that Norway is a little too conservative when it comes to technology investments. And I think you were right in the sense that it was too easy to put money into oil, shipping or real estate, and that would kind of siphon all the opportunities out of tech. But something has happened in 5 years, and you're saying it's different now, and you wrote also these positive articles about what were your main points about what's good.

Sean: Yeah, so it is night and day difference now. But I think oil and gas, yes, but real estate is so reliable, so profitable. Norwegians have a little bit of risk appetite issues. I always that joke that a Norwegian will go up the biggest mountain, they will hang out the fjord, no problem with that. Take a chance at an early stage company, and they just can't take that risk. So I understand why most the money went to real estate. What's happened now is that we're starting to see some success. I think Kolonial is a really good example. The early bird investors in Kolonial got 50 times their money back. You will never do that in real estate. But it is all about the cycles, which we haven't seen in Norway. We've seen some scale ups, we need to see the final point witch is the exit, which creates a lot more wealth and more investors. In Silicon Valley, that cycle is very fast and it's happening all the time, and money and talent is recycled very efficiently. Here, everything happen much slower. The companies take longer to succeed and longer to fail, and we haven't had the big exits. The last big exit in tech, was Fast technologies to Bing, Microsoft, and that was quite a long time ago. So we need to see it. I think we have companies that are close, Kahoot and Huddly. I imagine that they will sell, or something will happen in the next one to two years, but we haven't seen it yet. But the positives are that it's easy to do business here. It's a country of high trust. The engineering talents is incredibly strong, the design talent is incredibly strong. Everyone coming into NTNU, they're not going into oil companies anymore. That used to be a little pipeline, that they would go right from NTNU to Equinor or these other oil companies, and that's not happening as much now, and they're excited and energized. 

Silvija: Even McKinsey guys are leaving to go to entrepreneurship, so that is interesting.

Sean: Yes, we see it all the time. But also, the cultural thing, janteloven, this is going away in the younger generation. So they're not as held back by it. It's a big reason why Sweden has done so well, they're not held back as much, they're less modest, they're better at selling. The next generations of Norwegians coming out of school, have similar attributes. So it's a generational thing, and that shift has started to happen now, so that's why we're seeing this night and day change. 

Silvija: Can you tell us a little but about AppearIn? Because you now chose to join Scaleup. Tell us what a Scaleup is, and tell us why you like it so much that you actually joined it.

Sean: Yeah, we make video meetings, much like Zoom or Skype. I knew the founder for quite a while, and was giving her some kind of light mentorship and advice. And then I started getting more involved. And to me, I wanted to get out of investing and be in an operational marketing role. So I started stalking to a few of the scaleups, like Kahoot and Remarkables and these kind of companies as well, and was having discussions, but I was just realizing that there was so much untapped potential in AppearIn. It's a great marked, it's a large marked that is growing, it's a high margin business. The fact that they got to the point they were at, without being very aggressive about marketing, meant that there was a lot of opportunities for me. So while I had been there for almost a year, really what's happening now is that I have mostly been doing low hanging fruit, and the results are already there. When I joined there was about 700.000 dollars in revenue, now we are about 2 million dollars in revenue. So more than a doubling in a rather short period of time, less than a year, actually. So I just knew that there was so much untapped potential, and that had the opportunity also to be a great story for Norway in terms of success. But I knew I would be selling a product internationally and globally. So there are very few companies in Norway where you can be truly global. So that was a big reason why I joined.

Silvija: You mentioned the CEO Ingrid Ødegaard. She's an interesting story, because she worked for Telenor, and was a part of the team that built (? 16:05). Got kind of taken out as a separate company with huge product potential. Why is Norway good at this kind of video technology? Do you have any perspectives on that?

Sean: Yeah, I think it's the Tandberg, and I kind of joke that they are the Tandberg mafia. It's a technology that for some reason Norway does very well. We have Huddly and a few other examples too, so there's a joke about clim bing up the video valley instead of Silicon Valley. But I don't know, but when I first came to Norway, I remember struggling to see what is the strength of this country, what are they great at. Is it fine tech, is it that, and I never got a really great answer. And then I started understanding that yes, the video technology is here, and people have now seen that cycle I talked about. They have started, they have built, they have scaled, they have excited. So that experience is so valuable. And it's okay that most of those people have left Sisco and left Tandberg. That's a good thing, because they go back into the marked and infuse it with their talent as well. So I don't know, it's something we should be thinking more about, and perhaps further investing, and look at that as a strength, and if Norway is known for video technology, that is not a bad thing.

Silvija: I think it's a really cool example of this expansion, you know, when Tandberg, or that part of Tandberg, was sold to Sisco, some of these brilliant minds that then later made Huddly and Videxio and things like AppearIn etc. were suddenly kind of reformed into new teams. Very good people. What are you excited about when it comes to Norway and the future?

Sean: I mean, I think Norway is the future, in terms of a model that is sustainable and that people have a good life. Coming from California, I didn't understand quality of life. I worked too much, I was stressed out and I was driven by money and greed, to be super candid. The Norwegian model is incredibly interesting. In fact, you have a country of trust, I can leave my wallet on the table and come back an hour or two later, and it would still be there. All these things that are normal to Norwegians, to the rest of the world this is quite unique. So I think that the model works incredibly well with 5 million people, and I wonder how it would work in larger... You know, Americans, we listen to Bernie Sanders talking about the model and does it work in that type of large country, and I don't know. Norway really is the future, and Norway has so much opportunity because of how safe it is. I wish Norwegians would take more risk, because if you fail, if you go bankrupt, you're not going to be homeless. In America, you're typically one paycheck away from going homeless, and you don't have a support system to help you if you get in that situation. So it's like Norway is the future.

Silvija: So we should be able to exploit that into taking more right kind of risks.

Sean: Absolutely. So i'd love to see that where it's like you do have the safety net. You have some cultural things that hold you back, I think. But this is where something great could happen. If there was an electronic aircraft created, I feel like it would be built here, you know, and challenging all these Co2-issues we have too. But also, like generationally, think about all these people coming out of school, they're so driven by doing good in the world. When you come out of an American business school, it's pure greed - how do I make more money and get more power and influence. But talking to people and seeing, I mean, look at the rush in sustainability, and I worked in the catapult accelerator, which is a good example of that. But there's many more, so yeah. I have much faith in the next generation. I don't know what they will do, but my hope is that they will propell us into a better future. It appears as if they are going in that direction. So setting the standard for the rest of the world, and that will be a tough standard to follow, especially in a country like India, perhaps. 

Silvija: That's how you show the way.

Sean: Yeah, exactly. So maybe more people are hesitant to be a leader in Norway. They are already leading the way in terms of future society, and I hope the rest of the world follows. 

Silvija: The concept of LØRN is that we try to bridge the gap between these huge knowledge gap and non existent life long learning institutions at the moment. And much of it is storytelling that inspires, but I also ask everybody to recommend some further reading. It could be very technical, or it could be a good book recommendation that will make you think. And you recommended a really good old science fiction book called Snow Crash, one of my favorites. Why?

Sean: It's a tough question to answer, but it is not a great future when you think about the story, although he was so ahead of his time in the things that he predicted. What's interesting is talking about these ideas of, like, the metaphors, and how future people will connect to each other and interact and change, and how economy will change. We see the beginning of that with future reality and social networks and so forth, so I say to read it both to be inspired about how the future will connect and collaborate in the future, but additionally I would like to think about how that may be challenging and create even more social issues as well. So it's kind of like both sides of the coin. But really, he was so ahead of his time, and it's such a riveting story. It will be made into a movie really soon. I think that if you're interested in technology and where it might be in 50 years, that's a great guide to be there.

Silvija: Read Neal Stephenson. Do you have a quote that you would like to leave as a little gift to the listeners? 

Sean: Yeah, in Norway I say this quote a lot because we need to move faster, and your product will never be perfect when you first ship it, and if you wait till it's perfect, it's gonna take too long. And the quote I love is from Reid Hoffman, he's the founder of LinkedIn, and he says that if you're not horribly embarrassed by the first version of your product, you waited too long. So I would love to see the Norwegians gain a little bit of confidence there and say "you know what, I'm gonna push something out fast, I'm gonna learn quick". It's not gonna be perfect, and that's okay.

Silvija: If people were to remember one thing from our conversation, what would you like it to be?

Sean: This is a great conversation, we talked about a lot of different things too. I think it is to have more confidence. I've given some praise to the Norwegian system and Norwegians themselves, I would love to see more confidence. There are so many great attributes of Norwegians, but this janteloven, law of jante, is holding you back. You have a lot to do, and there is so much ability to be more confident, take those chances, get out there, challenge yourself and make a change. You're literally in the best country to do that from. 

Silvija: Sean Percival, our international mentor, thank you so much for joining us in LØRN and telling us about more sense of ergency, but also perhaps even greater pride in our opportunity in Norway.

Sean: Thank you so much.

Silvija: Thank you for listening.

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