“Teaching entrepreneurship, I have a high bar for what entrepreneurs should use to educate themselves and use as a reference. This book is an invaluable resource in its rigor, accessibility and comprehensiveness. I plan to have this book readily accessible at all times for myself and highly recommend it to serious entrepreneurs everywhere.”
Bill Aulet, Professor and Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship
“Becoming an entrepreneur is a great way to make a difference in the world, and this book shows you how.”
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Founder and CEO of Rasmussen Global, Former Secretary General of NATO and Prime Minister of Denmark
“Entrepreneurs are essential for our world, as they develop new solutions to key problems. This book tells you how to be successful as an entrepreneur.”
Taavi Roivas, former Prime Minister of Estonia and youngest Prime Minister in the EU
“To all the entrepreneurial minds out there: this book is a must read!”
Oliver Samwer, Founder and CEO of Rocket Internet
“Even though technology will keep changing the world, there is no certain recipe for success. All companies are unique and at the end of the day, it's the entrepreneurial people behind the companies, their approach and leadership that makes the difference. Lars and Mads make an absolute stunner of a team, giving hands-on and valuable advice allowing start-ups to leverage these into great opportunities.”
Preben Damgaard, Member of the Danish Research and Development Ministry's Board, co-founder and former CEO of Damgaard Data, former VP of Microsoft.
“Entrepreneur is a great practical guide on how to build a company and become inspired to make things happen, from guys who have done exactly that, many times over. You can learn to be an entrepreneur. You can have a go at making your dreams reality. You can learn a lot from this encouraging, fun and accessible book.”
Hugo Burge, former CEO of Momondo Group
“A great practical guide by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs on the power of execution, stamina and how to unlock the full potential of your ideas.”
Jimmy Maymann, Entrepreneur, Investor, former CEO of Huffington Post
“It is surprising how much useful guidance and information Lars and Mads have managed to squeeze into this book. I would definitely recommend it strongly to any ambitious entrepreneur.”
Christian M. Motzfeldt, CEO Danish Growth Fund
“This is an excellent book with lots of great hands-on advice for ambitious entrepreneurs. Very practical and highly recommendable.”
Brian Mikkelsen, Danish Minister of Industry, Business and Financial Affairs
“Finally an entrepreneurship book that is based on first hand experiences! The reality of having a start-up is really captured here - from strategy to the ‘street smarts' one accumulates along the way.”
Sophie Trelles-Tvede, Entrepreneur, winner of Forbes 30 under 30 Europe and Nordic Business Forum 25 and Under in Northern Europe
“The book provides a comprehensive scope of practical decision-making tools and philosophies to overcome all the unavoidable obstacles and challenges every start-up founder faces on the journey. A must read for any aspiring entrepreneur.”
Mads Fibiger, CEO & Co-founder, Organic Basics
“This book covers in depth how to build a company whether you are dreaming about starting one, have already started or are running a larger organization.”
Peter Holten Muhlmann, Founder and CEO of Trustpilot
“Mads and Lars explain all aspects and considerations of a business in thorough and precise detail. If you read this book and add your own naive persistence, you will succeed. Moreover, funny enough I never really saw myself as an entrepreneur, having read Entrepreneur, I now do, and I’m proud of it! - Thank you for that Mads & Lars!”
Kaspar Basse, Founder and CEO of Joe and Juice
This edition first published 2018
© 2018 Lars Tvede and Mads Faurholt
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tvede, Lars, 1957- author. | Faurholt, Mads, author. | Faurholt, Mads. Iværksætter. English.
Title: Entrepreneur : building your business from start to success / Lars Tvede, Mads Faurholt.
Description: Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom : John Wiley & Sons, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Originally published in Denmark in 2017 by Gyldendal as: Iværksætter / Mads Faurholt Lars Tvede. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018023716 (print) | LCCN 2018025759 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119521280 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119521259 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119521235 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: New business enterprises. | Entrepreneurship.
Classification: LCC HD62.5 (ebook) | LCC HD62.5 .T94 2018 (print) | DDC 658.1/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023716
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © iStock.com/RobinOlimb
I don't know how many times I have heard these words from Lars Tvede, co-author of this book – but it's many. For instance, once when we were three couples sailing his boat along the Italian coast, he suddenly asked:
I guess I didn't, but Lars soon became quite insistent and before I knew it, we were three guys in scuba gear deep down drinking beer. (You hold it upside down, blow air in and swallow, as beer comes out. I have it on video.)
Another example: in 2017, Lars was invited as speaker for the Danish Growth Fund's annual meeting, a yearly flagship event in Danish venture business attended by government ministers, leading investors and entrepreneurs, etc. However, about half an hour before he went on stage, he pulled me aside in a hallway and asked with a smirky grin: ‘Peter, do you think I can end my speech by saying “Fuck you”?’
I thought he was joking, so I laughed it off. OK, mistake, because when he later jumped on stage, he immediately pointed me out in front of the 1900 delegates and proclaimed that I didn't believe that he would end this speech by saying ‘Fuck you’. ‘Just watch me’, he continued while staring at me from the stage. OMG!
Towards the end of his speech, he called me up on stage, put his arms around my shoulders and then pulled up a PowerPoint slide of a now famous email from Marc Andreessen to Ben Horowitz, which ended with the words ‘Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you’. I am not sure I would have done this, but people actually laughed.
Two years before that, in April 2015, Lars called me and said, ‘Peter, I met the craziest guy at a TEDx event. His name is Mads Faurholt’. He then rambled on and on about how clever Mads apparently was. Next thing I knew, Lars had invited Mads and his girlfriend to go sailing in Greece. That became the beginning of a great friendship leading, among many other things, to the production of this book.
Today, I know Mads very well privately and as a businessman. Personally, I don't think ‘crazy’ is the right word to describe Mads. ‘Impressive’ would come closer, but also ‘efficient’ and indeed ‘very fast’. About the latter – as a student, Mads set a speed record by completing his Bachelor's degree at CBS (Copenhagen Business School) within one year and nine months against a norm of three years, and amazingly, he achieved this while having two demanding jobs on the side – one of them managing 50 sales people. He then went to MIT where he graduated with his Master's at age 23, after which he became one of the youngest associates ever in McKinsey & Co. This is what I mean by very fast.
Working at McKinsey sounds like a great job, but Mads soon – pretty fast again – moved on to Rocket Internet, where he quickly became CEO of 3500 employees in Asia at Groupon. This was when he was still only 26 years of age. While living in Asia, he also co-founded numerous web companies, including Zalora, Lazada, Zanui, The Iconic, Airizu, GlassesOnline, HelloFresh and Foodpanda. In 2017 he raised $50 million for his company CompareAsiaGroup. As I write this, his other businesses include CompareEuropeGroup, CompareLatAmGroup, Startech Asia, Private Equity Insights and others.
Like Mads, Lars is also fast, even though this might not be the first impression you get of him. In fact, he typically appears calm, if not even slightly absent and perhaps nerdy. But then take a look at his career: after dropping out of college for a year to travel in South America, he returned to Copenhagen to graduate and then completed a Graduate Diploma in Business Administration at CBS within three years – it normally takes four – while in parallel taking a Master's degree in engineering. Oh, and while also in parallel co-founding several companies. Aged 19, he and a friend bought a summer house in Spain with money they had earned in their spare time during their studies.
Then he had a hectic career in marketing and finance while also being part-time professor and censor at a university and writing the first few of his by now 15 books. Eventually, he ended up as chief corporate dealer trading bonds, forex and futures for what is now the dairy giant Arla Food, after which he became a serial entrepreneur within tech, lifestyle, property and finance.
One of my personal observations about Lars is an amazing tendency to get things done and deliver on his plans, even though he does the latter partly by often having, say, 10 alternative plans, out of which one (almost) always works.
It appears to me that Lars sees business partly as a sport. For instance, some years ago, he had a portfolio of investments in global top quartile hedge funds. However, as they failed to deliver his expected 15% annual return, he set up his own investment company to see whether he could beat them. During the following six years, he grew an initial investment of CHF 20 000 plus a private pledge into approximately CHF 50 million in cool cash, after which he rather abruptly stopped trading, cashed out most of the money and spent it on charity, a villa in Mallorca, a Learjet, a collection of sports cars and his ever-since beloved boat.
Lars is convinced that he cannot sell, and as he also doesn't like to manage people, he typically starts his companies with one or several partners for those challenges. However, apart from that, he is very flexible in the challenges he takes on. For instance, he has built up businesses dealing within anything from satellite communication to mobile information services, property development, financial trading, wholesale food trading, IT supplies and more.
His latest and probably last and thus lasting adventure is within venture capital, which of course is an ideal way to combine his two favourite playgrounds: serial entrepreneurship and finance. To be more specific, he co-founded Nordic Eye Venture Capital with me in 2016.
Being who he is, he subsequently virtually disappeared for four months, ploughing through mountains of literature about venture business, after which he reappeared and declared that the venture sector had been lousy in Europe for decades but that there were several ways to do much better, out of which the most important, funny enough, was helping portfolio companies very actively with the one and only discipline he believes himself to be incapable of – sales.
Fortunately, this is my home ground, and together with our great team, we proceeded to produce 203% return (IRR) within our first full year, where we also returned more than the entire investor commitments in the fund in the form of a single distribution (dividend).
As I read the manuscript for this book, it struck me that there is nothing in it that at least one of the two authors hasn't done hands-on, and for the most part, they both master what they write about here to near-perfection.
Take, for instance, raising money for start-ups. Mads has done this from numerous investors, including Summit Partners, JPMorgan, Kinnevik, Goldman Sachs, The World Bank, Alibaba and SoftBank, and Lars has raised capital from various venture funds plus Intel, Deutsche Telekom, Reuters, Loral, BT, Telecom Italia, Lucent, Kirch Group and Singapore Press Holdings.
Another example: the book describes media activities and marketing via social media. This is also home ground for the authors – between them, Mads and Lars have probably done more than 1000 interviews and public speeches. Moreover, Mads was a radio host as an 11-year-old child and again in a TV series about start-ups when he was 31. Lars has been a guest host on Danish radio and TV plus CNBC. Furthermore, between them, Mads and Lars now have more than 50 000 friends and followers on social media.
In other words: these guys are rather experienced, including from the famous School of Hard Knocks, and both have closed down failing operations, hired the wrong people, failed to close vital contracts and messed up stuff like the rest of us. However, they have also created spectacular successes and made profitable exits, ranging from trade sales to asset sales and public listing. Furthermore, Lars has won numerous international awards for entrepreneurship and technology, including the Wall Street Journal Europe Innovation Award, the Red Herring Global 100 Award, the Bulli Award (twice) and the IMD Swiss Start-up Award. In The Guru Guide to Marketing, he is listed as one of the world's leading thinkers in marketing strategy.
I guess what I mean to say is that they really do know what they are talking about. And I should add that even though I personally have been an entrepreneur since I was 23, there was much in this book that I actually didn't know.
I hope and trust that any reader will enjoy this manuscript as much as I did.
Peter Warnoe
CEO, Nordic Eye Venture Capital
Do you want to own your own business? Become an entrepreneur? In this section, we describe the many alternative roles as self-employed and/or entrepreneur: why and how to learn from practice before possibly taking on the harder and more ambitious tasks.
We also look at how entrepreneurs can tackle the huge workload and a high risk of stress and health problems. It is all about efficiency – ‘work smart, not hard’, as one might say. Or at least smart if hard.
But how do you do that?
In the third chapter, we move on to study aspects of your ability to make a personal impact and break through when it really matters. People who work in large, well-renowned companies do not always have a big personal impact – they work well within the shelter of a powerful and well-known organization which can sometimes make the impact for them. But in start-ups you often need to get noticed and force your will through, even though your business is small and perhaps rather rickety. So how do you make an impact in everything from sales meetings and negotiations to public speeches, media interviews, on social media and more? We share some practical tips that can help you with this.