The Stockholm College of Economics (SSE) has lengthy been a stomping floor for college kids searching for a profession in banking and administration consulting.
However previously 10 years, increasingly of its college students have been seeking to take an alternate profession path: that of startup founder.
Maybe it’s the Klarna impact. The fintech’s three founders all attended SSE — and began their firm there.
“Eight years in the past, after I attended SSE, it was a standing joke that you just had been both going to develop into an funding banker or a administration marketing consultant. However there was already numerous speak about Klarna and the way cool the Klarna founders had been,” says Andreas Johansson, CEO of SSE Enterprise Labs, the college’s incubator, which helps and invests in startups.
“5 years later, and following the success of Voi, there’s been a brand new wave of scholars wanting to begin their very own corporations.”
Within the Klarna days
The Klarna cofounders — Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson — didn’t at all times have such an enormous fan membership, although.
Johansson tells the story of them as college students at SSE within the early 2000s.
“They’d simply provide you with the concept behind Kreditor [now Klarna] and had been invited to pitch in entrance of the [university’s corporate] accomplice community in a dragon den-style competitors. After the pitch, the Klarna founders had been harshly dismissed and instructed they’d by no means make any cash out of it.”
That didn’t cease the three founders from making use of to the then-relatively new SSE Enterprise Lab incubator in 2004 — they usually had been, maybe surprisingly, admitted.
“They acquired an workplace house, a community and a few PR and enterprise teaching,” says Johansson. “It wasn’t that a lot nevertheless it was sufficient to present them confidence that somebody believed in them.”
The Klarna founders didn’t know program however due to an early funding from angel investor Jane Walerud — when everybody else turned them down — they had been in a position to rent tech folks and begin engaged on the product.
“In the present day, no one desires to confess that they stated no to Klarna in these early days,” says Johansson.
Occasions have now most undoubtedly modified: Klarna has raised a complete of $4.5bn because the begin of 2018.
Others had a better begin to their journey.
Voi’s early billionaire funding
Micromobility startup Voi’s cofounder Fredrik Hjelm is one other alum of SSE — and his story has additionally helped encourage SSE college students to consider beginning up a enterprise, says Johansson.
Hjelm joined SSE Enterprise Lab with a totally completely different firm — Guestit, a platform for short-term leases.
“Guestit was bootstrapped from day one and Enterprise Lab gave us entry to the startup ecosystem in Stockholm and the arrogance to go all-in,” Hjelm says.
Nonetheless, he turned associates with the previous CEO of SSE Enterprise Lab, Douglas Stark, they usually then based Voi with two different cofounders.
When Hjelm pitched to be admitted to SSE Enterprise Labs (for a second time) with Voi, the jury consisted of Swedish billionaire businesswomen Cristina Stenbeck and Katarina Martinson, Klarna founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski and sport firm King’s cofounder Sebastian Knutsson. Stenbeck turned considered one of Voi’s very first traders.
Voi has now raised about $500m in whole from traders comparable to VNV International, Balderton and Creandum.
From incubator to investor
The SSE Enterprise lab’s incubator is eighteen months lengthy, with pitch occasions each six months.
The incubator, a non-profit organisation, has run on donations — from the H&M household’s Erling Persson basis particularly — for many of its historical past. However, final yr, it additionally started investing in corporations, by way of its enterprise capital community.
Firms at the moment are granted a €30k convertible notice from the SSE Enterprise Lab, which turns into shares when the corporate raises its first spherical of funding not exceeding an organization valuation of €5m.
The incubator can now additionally do follow-on investments.
Different traders — together with these exterior of Sweden — now additionally know to concentrate to the businesses coming by means of the incubator. “Within the final 5 years, we’ve seen a rise in VCs with a neighborhood presence, like Berlin-based Cherry and Amsterdam-based Peak, that aren’t simply coming to our occasions however take the chance to fulfill with the businesses at different occasions,” says Johansson.
“We often get one to a few corporations a yr that get these worldwide traders,” he provides.
One other firm that managed to get some heavyweight angels after collaborating within the programme was the last-mile supply startup Budbee, now Instabee. The angels that invested in its seed spherical again in 2015 included two of the Klarna founders, in addition to H&M billionaire Karl-Johan Persson.
“To me, it provided that further push to dare strive my wings alone within the large world. I feel these sorts of establishments are necessary for a thriving panorama of recent concepts,” Budbee’s founder Fredrik Hamilton says.
The founder takes all of it
College spinouts can have a tough time engaging VCs to speculate if the college takes an enormous possession stake.
However in Sweden, it’s the scholar or the particular person behind an organization concept who owns all of it. That is good for startups — however maybe additionally disincentivises universities from serving to commercialise concepts, says Johansson.
“Till final autumn, after we launched the convertible notice, we [at SSE Business Lab] had no financial incentives to assist the founders and researchers commercialise their merchandise, much like different Swedish universities. That’s most likely the rationale why Sweden, from a global perspective, is unhealthy at commercialising college analysis.”
SSE Enterprise Lab noticed an enormous enhance in functions through the pandemic — and even the financial downturn hasn’t put wannabe founders off.
“I assumed that the upper price of residing and the need for much less threat would trigger a decrease variety of functions,” says Johansson. “However we’ve had extra functions this yr than final.”
10 corporations which have handed by means of the SSE Enterprise Lab
Klarna (fintech)
Voi (mobility)
Budbee (now Instabee) (last-mile supply)
Quinyx (SaaS)
Froda (fintech)
Lassie (insurtech)
Insurello (insurtech)
Ripe (no-code platform)
Leya (femtech)
Flow into (sustainable packaging)
