Business in Norway, Stian Rustad, 24SevenOffice, tips to entrepreneurs

and now we are evaluated more than two billion uh norwegian crowns or were sick you came by the bike yeah yes uh but uh this is your mountain bike yeah that's my mountain bike when you a new toy what are the difference between having business here in norway and also in the united states yeah the fails it's super important for me when i fail i have to admit it it's so risky that i have to focus on the actual things that i'm doing right there because if i'm out jogging i start to think about business uh so that's uh that's a problem and we have a one division in ukraine where we have developers as well yeah i know where is there they're good at focusing when it comes to the us i would say that on the larger clients it's microsoft sap [Music] hi stan it's nice to meet you here in your new i would say office here in vulnerable thank you likewise i thank you that you had a time to to meet and tell about your story how you started 20 years ago even more how you started the business it's very fascinating story yeah um yeah it's uh more than 20 years it's 23 years now so we started in 1997. and we started with this kind of crazy idea at that time that we should deliver accounting erp software just by a browser and through internet and at that time it seemed for most people even you know our large competitor at that time but i was uh they thought it was actually impossible to do for all practical purposes but we gathered a group of very smart people and we started programming it and after a couple of years we knew that we were on the right track and start started to actually get some first customers and for a long time it was you know actually quite hard to get new customers because at that time most people were afraid of internet was it safe they didn't really know what it was so actually when we had presenting the software and we we had a good meeting and the customer said okay we'd like to buy this software and after the when we're leaving they you send us the cd-rom or how do we install it right but how did you get the first customer um actually i don't even remember the first customer uh because it was you know we started to marketing and sales widely and we started to get you know several customers quite quite fast but you know even though if you get like 100 customers in a month it's kind of nothing in this business because you have to have thousands to to be a profitable business and we spent like uh several years let's say maybe as much as 15 years before uh it really took off and everybody suddenly wanted to have a cloud-based software and then the opposite happened now everyone you know wanted to be cloud-based but we saw that change as late as like seven eight years ago then the different bids had as a demand that the software should be cloud-based so it was a kind of it was quite a rapid change uh seven eight nine years ago yeah because it's very difficult to start in 97 especially on the cloud base or you was integrating and you was developing according to that now everything was like 100 cloud-based at that time as well so it's definitely difficult because you know the the browser was wasn't mature enough uh most people had nothing more than a isdn internet line uh so it was slow and stable and also the servers were not mature enough so it was quite difficult to make things work properly to run such a complex and important service for for the businesses so yeah it was really difficult but we managed to make it work just after a couple of years good enough so we had a pro that we can sail but did you start your business in the university or after the finishing bi uh yeah so so i started to think about it at the university so i started right after i finished university then i went and worked for at a nato headquarters for one year and when i came back from from that service i started the company so actually never worked for anyone else myself you're locating in the silicon valley of oslo and does it help to cooperate within other companies um i don't think it helps that much anymore but i would say when we started the company we started to cooperate with the local companies in shen where we actually started the company and that was quite useful so we cooperated through organization called the ecotech grenland at that time it's called ecote telemark now and that was you know actually useful in several ways you get advice uh you could just you have someone to talk to and discuss different problems maybe talk to someone who really believed in what you're doing that was that was useful so i would say now we just do our magic and i think it's more useful for us our new york office and uh to be present in the us uh i think this is actually another story how you expand because you started from the sheen then you move to the to oslo yeah and you take the market in norway and then you go abroad yeah so three years ago approximately we a little less a little less we started in stockholm and we listed the company in stockholm uh that has been a great success uh we like almost a year ago we signed a large customer called hsb uh which has like four thousand it's one of the biggest banks actually no it's you know it's more like um ubus in norway all right real estate managed real estate uh and they have like 4 000 real estates that they manage that was a you know amazing customers to get and now we are evaluated more than two billion norwegian crowns or were sick or swedish transfer so it's been a great success and three years ago i also moved to new york to establish the the american operation and now we're up and running uh we're like 15 16 people there now and we have uh a ceo who takes care of that business while i'm here and that works super fine so so we're up and running there as well what are the difference between having business here in norway and also in the united states you know the differences between norway and us is it's so big in so many ways um so yeah i could talk about that for for days what the most okay let's uh let's say let's take three main things the differences between having business and have entrepreneur and entrepreneurial things there in new york and here in oslo i think the biggest difference um which i like a lot about the american market is that they have this kind of pay forward culture uh so when we move there with my family and you hardly knew anyone you always meet people who wants to help you they want to always give you tips and advice and introduce you to to people that can be useful so i had so many meetings and people were so welcoming and want to introduce you to people and help you and that's completely different than the norwegian culture where we try to you know keep our network more tightly you're afraid maybe to to introduce something in case he's not a good introduction as a trumpet in the in the us they really work hard to to actually introduce people uh they're open for the collaboration and they talk and meeting they're open yeah they're very open um and they're i think they're also very welcoming to new ideas uh and new ventures and as an entrepreneur you're more like a kind of an entrepreneur has more kind of status in the us they like it and they like people taking chances and they know how riskful and hard it is and how much hard work so that so they i feel like that kind of wants to help you as an entrepreneur so so that's that's probably the biggest difference which i hope will change here in norway as well i think it's an amazing smart things thing to do to develop businesses better and faster and help the startup community here in norway as well but living in new york and living in oslo it's totally different i think that as well the good thing is that there's so much going on you have like as much potential customers just like a few you know subway stations uh so subway station stops uh away from where you live uh you have more customers there than you have in in norway of course um and and and it's the tempo in the business life in in new york it's so much more intense so you can go into a meeting and normally in norway a meeting would last maybe like two hours you drink some coffee and talk about a lot of different stuff but they're they're so much more efficient a meeting can be like 20 30 minutes and they've also decided uh next step in the meeting so it's you can do a lot more on a lot shorter time in in new york so i like that in comparison they work faster they make decisions one two three go yeah they skip you know less of all the small talk uh kind of they're they're very efficient in their small talk they do small talk but it's like kind of efficient and then let's let's get into the the to the hardcore business uh uh the more interesting more directly yeah because the more entrepreneurial people i meet also not only in norway they are more fast to making decisions yeah and it's also one of the thing that is the difference between the business personal entrepreneur i would say yeah for making different deals because just maybe when we start interviewing we also made one deal that was very successful uh successful yeah uh [Music] and isn't it yeah yeah um yeah that's true so i think entrepreneurs if i understood you right that they take faster decisions and i think that's something that recognize entrepreneurs they have to take faster decisions because they have to take so many of them all the time um and my uh uh that's one of my mantras when i do business i try to to make a lot of decisions i try to make them quite fast based on my kind of stomach feeling kind of intuition intuition yeah and my idea is that if i make eighty percent decisions uh right we move forward and we move forward quite fast and i try to not you know the 20 that i uh fail on i try to make sure that they are not uh you know the the major ones that i fail on so i try to think a little bit more when i see that there's something really important i should think about but day to day i try to make a lot of decisions very fast spend as little time on them as possible and and so my goal is not to be a 100 correct on every uh decision that would take too much time and how you work with the fails yeah the fails it's super important for me when i fail i have to admit it and i like to fail fast uh as and as soon as i realize i fail admit it try to do something about it fix it and move on and don't you know think about all the things that you could do um which you can't do anything about just learn from it and make sure you don't make a similar mistake again and can you tell two fails or if you remember them or if you can't tell them yeah i've been quite lucky so i have as i told you i try to think quite a lot when i see a decision that i can make which is really can make a big impact on something negatively so most of my fails are you know they're more more like small small uh fails um so i don't remember really one fails but i know i do a lot of them you know it's like more like a constantly stream of failure every week uh decisions uh that you know i was wrong so fails is good i think fail somewhere you have to fail because if you don't uh fail you don't make decisions fast enough and you don't move forward with your business fast enough so i think failing is important the the other thing as long as you fail learn from them and correct them as fast as possible you have a son and daughter yes do you have time for them um my wife would probably say that i don't have enough time for them and she's probably right but at the same time i'm quite good at you know when i'm actually at home and with them i'm trying to be there with them so i try to you know be quite intense when i'm working and quite you know off when i'm off so i think that helps at least but i'm probably too little with them you like sports uh yeah i love to do sports uh i have a new favorite sport now we said it started this summer and that's downhill mountain bike mountain bike yeah it's so much fun there's a lot of nice roads here especially in this region in oscar also in the drama there is a lot of downhill yeah it is and you know i live quite close to normalca so i just like three minutes you know bike and i'm in the forest and we have a lot of you know downhills there uh so that's it's easy accessible for me it's so much fun you came by the bike yeah yes uh but this is your mountain bike yeah that's my mountain bike when you're a new toy i love it it's it's an electric bike so you can have a lot of fun and you can go up and down you know some so many more times and you have this help and it's super stable when you're going down yeah so it's yeah it's it's over my favorite thing to do these days so your hobby is biking mountain biking that's that's my new hobby uh you know i like to do a lot of things hiking is probably my number two at least after the the new hobby did you find places in new york to go for hiking that was one of the biggest problem with new york i think it's it's difficult to to get out of the city it takes a little at least a couple of hours before you find a nice place to go hiking so i think that's uh what i missed the most when i were in new york that was actually the the nature access to nature that we have in here norway is amazing especially where i live it's like three minutes um in the forest you have been in lofoten couple of you said weeks ago yeah already this summer no yeah this summer just a few weeks ago it was amazing and for the first time you're living in norway for many years i mean why are you born here but that's crazy and we we plan to go there so many times and every time something has happened you know there's a wedding somewhere you know something happened every time but finally we made it and everybody has told me how beautiful it is it is and i've seen picture of course but when i came there i just fell in love it was amazing and we had this amazing weather uh the sun was shining every day uh yeah it's it's so beautiful do you plan to have office in future maybe yeah that's uh that should i think that's a good idea actually yeah some independable uh office that you can uh that you're making right now yeah it's probably would be a good uh investment as well because the if you buy the the office uh lofoten is booming and i think it will continue to be booming so that's a good idea how sports help to make business sports i think it's important to you know stay healthy stay focused and i think the reason why i like downing cycling and and sports because it's actually risky yes so then i don't have to it's so risky that i have to focus on the actual things that i'm doing right there because if i'm out jogging i start to think about business so that's uh that's a problem oh it's interesting so you need to make a risky sports in order to focus on the sport and not to think about other things yeah that's right that's that's uh that's the reason and i think it's fun of course but uh it's definitely what makes me more relaxed since i can you know really de-focus on the business yeah so this is our new office here in oslo and this is one of our four offices we have a office in stockholm and the developers are actually in shen where we started so we kept the development department there and we have a one division in ukraine where we have developers as well um and we actually have a small office in newton uh all places and that's where we're building our new hosting facilities so that will soon be finished as well not the cool thing about that part is that it will be a solar powered so we'll have solar cells on the roof and on the walls and it also has uh seven um waterfalls where they uh give a 100 uh renewable hydropower to to the server so that was great so it will be 100 independent it will be 100 in the tumble and renewable and super super cold and looking forward to launch that it's not large yet but it's on the is on its way it actually inspected the solar cells yesterday oh really and you work with innovation norway we work we we have done quite a lot of projects sponsored by innovation norway so i think we had at least four or five r d projects of different kinds with innovation norway so they have been a super important um supporter uh for you know making 200 reality yeah all right and who is sitting in the this office so in the oslo office it's most management and we also have consultants professional services and cst customer success team and um some uh marketing so it's a brain actually yeah kind of yeah i would say it's you know different brains so in shen we have super smart developers i would say it's probably the most brain of all of us but yeah we have yeah okay maybe it's heart and the brain yeah there could be all right and i thought that actually i thought that it was pizza first but yeah yeah it's some new furniture so we're trying to build up so we just moved in uh a month ago so it's it's quite new yeah so yeah sorry for disturbance because people are working here yeah nowhere is there they're good at focusing and i think there is not so much people right now because because what the me and that you have right yeah so we tried to uh we asked everyone who has the possibility to work efficiently from home we ask them to try to work from home as much as possible so that's why if not it would be crowded here yeah what do you think about the new concept after the kovite 19 everyone start to work from the online it's very good for the for the big corporations as well that they try to make their business uh outside of of the office yeah it's two things i think about that but first of all it's [Music] kind of good for us because now everyone demands and see the need to work from home and that's what 24 7 office is all about the ability to work anywhere from just any device as long as you have internet and a browser you have access to everything you need to do to do your job you know crm sales marketing accounting project management all in one place so for us it's been good were growing like 31 percent uh through the covered uh full covered 19 world really so you go up uh because of the because of the committee yeah we do um and and what i think about the fact that we have to work from home i think it's quite good you know for me it's been good and i think for a lot of employees it has been good to be able to work more from home but i also think it's not good to only work from home so i think in the future the best would be a mix where you can work from home and you know maybe skip the rush hours work shorter hours and then go back home and maybe work later on you know be more flexible on when you're working and where you're working i think that's definitely the future and a good thing uh especially for um it's more time efficient more less stressful and it's good for the environment it's a shame that we all you know stand in a queue polluting so much unnecessary just to get in here at nine o'clock everyone yeah there was a nice memo about that everyone is working from home there is a person usually it's uh that he's in the jacket and when he just go down he's just sitting in the shores but he's in the meeting and yeah right yeah this was very popular and also one of the meeting there was one person that he's working on the pc and the dog the daughter the son they just stepped with the tape and everyone should be silent because i'm working yeah right a lot of interesting so that's important point because if you want to work from home and if that you should have a good place to work from home you know it should be efficient place a quiet place if you have to work you know together with your entire family i don't think that's very efficient so that's that's one of the things that we try to prioritize the people who who finds it better to work from the office and also important thing in norway and i i don't know how it is in europe in united states but here's everything is transparent everyone is one level that we can see that it doesn't matter if you are a head of the office or you are a manager or you're responsible for some everyone is sitting in one office yeah that's right it's a complete difference and uh i think uh 247 office has always been particularly flat organized so we have a hierarchy when we need to but if you don't need to have a hierarchy we will try to work as a team and try to work together and solve problems so it's also good to solve uh problems or issues very fast so they can come directly to the ceo or the person who is responsible exactly exactly yeah try to make the the management should always be available easily available but especially important is to to you know know about problems very fast and if you're easy accessible it's easy for them to come with a something they think is a minor problem but it might be a very important problem and it's it's very good to to get that connection and learn learn about problems very fast and how do you connect your offices in different parts of the country yeah we do it it's very easy to have video meetings video quality and sound everything is very good it's stable but you also have like a robot so we have like one of the robots over there we can drive around and actually you can robot or what ah it's a robot where a camera and you can drive it around and look at it over there okay yeah yeah so uh you can actually just connect it to it and drive it wherever you want and then you can you know like i want to talk to someone you can drive the robot and see if it's available and this is quite one of the it's actually yeah that was uh actually another question about the digitalization innovation here in the office that is alright this is the robot that you're using here in the office so you just connect to it and then it drives around and you can actually talk to people and kind of be a part of the the office can it follow you or you just talk it's like when you have a zoom meetings or skype it can drive around and you can control it yourself so it's just like me i could you could actually have this into you i could be in the shane office and i can walk next to you and turn around and look at you and race it up and down and everything in every office you have this uh these type of machines yeah it says it's just can i go there yeah of course yeah let's look yeah just there was a meeting and it's just finished okay this is your meeting and playing rooms yeah it's a playing room it's uh sorry multiple purpose room kind of yeah so it's a nice place yeah so you can play tennis here yeah we can we can try to play good no i'm not good uh but uh it's quite fun though we can for one part or you don't play i i haven't played for many many years i don't have too much time actually me too but oh no you're playing let's see you see you know playing much more better good thank you so i don't have time unfortunately you'll play that much during the race yeah the russian style yeah okay it's it's very good to have this especially uh we say when you're doing co-working it's becoming more closer we you can play together and uh yeah it's very nice yeah and here you also have a chest yes it's important yeah cause it's a brain we say and chess it's also very important do you play chess i play chess uh i love to play chess but uh the same goes i you know i think i never played during the working hours i'm too too busy unfortunately yeah because it takes time i think that someone is playing here and they just stop here yeah but it's good for good for the people you know work long hours to have you know something to something else to think about and also about the how you bring in what you about the innovations into the company you tell me that you're making one of the offices that will be 100 percent uh dependable and also how you also work with the digitalizations of the of the office so they do use papers or you try to do everything sustainable as well yeah everything we do in 24 7 office and in all my investments as well has to be sustainable if it's not sustainable i don't believe in it so it's it's both kind of is important for me because i think it's necessary of course and i think it's important like in the larger picture for the world but it's also very important that if you want to have a business that you want to keep it and wants to grow it in the future i think you will have big problems if you don't uh you know put the environmental very very high much higher than we've been used to in the hierarchy of priority so yeah um and maybe the one of the questions how do you find the balance between everything between work between family between sports yeah that's a good question um actually i try to you know kind of work hard play hard so i try to be very efficient in everything i do so when i'm working i'm working trying to be in a sufficient possible focus so i actually get time to do you know have some fun sports be with the family so it's easier for me now that i have a big organization i have a lot of managers in my different investments good managers things are getting more autonomous um but of course if you asked me 15 years ago i had had a terrible balance you know it was working you know we could be working 24 hours uh with a problem we had to do it kind of you know you came to the office oh you're early at the office no i never went home kind of because it was solving problems for your clients for for clients or within our system we had a big customer that we needed to deliver that you know the day after it was uh a project with a with a due time that was uh more than due so um so it's it was really really hard in the beginning to have a balance but i think i have a much better balance now i would say even even my family is quite quite pleased still work too much probably but i think they're quite pleased so now it's much more better because at the beginning maybe 20 years ago it was you were giving more time for the work and now you try to give more more time for the family to the sport so it will be absolutely absolutely more balanced now if like 20 years was crazy 15 years ago it was still crazy i would say even 10 years ago we're working so much so just to start up a company with software which is so competitive we compete with the microsoft you compete with sap visma all the large players so uh so that's uh that takes a lot of uh effort yeah the the visma um i forgot his name uh the ceo of the uh yeah he's not the ceo actually anymore i think he's now he's more like the chairman of the board yeah there's a new there's a woman which is uh the and i don't remember her name because we've been talking to him as well and he was uh telling about the he is in the kin and he's in the digitalization of norway yeah and they are trying to work with the government and try to make norway one of the it's actually one of the number one uh country that tried to be um digital yeah so we we've been working very hard with that for many years as well so you work with the government to promote to make everything digital so yeah actually we've developed one of the on our own central for electronic invoices so we can distribute uh invoices efficiently for our customers 100 electronically and we have a module where you can actually prove them electronically on your phone you know you when you get them in you don't have to need to print them to view them and improve them you can send them easily on approval flow that's important so normally have in the old days or many people still have papers print them out send them around people sign them off but all this is done electronically in twenty percent office so we definitely try to as much as we can to to make every business paperless and it's not necessary to use paper at all if you use 20 office and do you use outsourced teams or you mostly use with your uh team well so mostly our own team so even in ukraine we have dedicated people that's 100 hours so you have a company that uh for 24 7. yeah and it is not outsourced company right it's kind of a something between because it's an outsourced company that manage it but the team has been the same people for several years they they're our team 100 percent working for us so we just have outsourced the management of the kind of the the company yeah and how works the ukrainian office because i'm uh i live i'm from ukraine and uh we also have offices in ukraine and russia yeah and right now there are also people they're using bill russia as well yeah but because the last uh things that are happening right now about russia some of the companies i.t companies move out from the bel russia because of the government stuff and the political things and in ukraine office how do you use the do you send people from norway or there is a mostly people who lives in ukraine so it's all managed independently in ukraine and we we have product owners in norway who uh communicate with them online with meetings online meetings and all the online tools that we have so i don't think even any of today's product managers have ever been down there physically but we've used the same people for almost 10 years so uh so it works very very well why are you crying ukraine several reasons i think there's a lot of really talented people there and i think culture-wise we found the people much more the same as norwegians compared to a lot of other alternatives um and um we thought that the combination between um time difference cost loyalty culture had the best mix of all the alternatives that we looked into so so it was uh i think it was a really good choice and i think we'll it's more likely that we expand the team in ukraine and that will uh cut down yeah and what's your future projects uh in 24 7 office or in in general in first we talk about 24 7 office yep and then there will be next question about the projects that you have because you also investor yeah so uh what uh i think the most important project that i'm you know working hard with now is to integrate embedded uh banking within 24 7 of his erp system so i want to make it uh you know really embedded one click to make all the banking things that are used to do in your bank or in the internet bank double punch information etc i want to make that accessible within 24 7 office so for instance opening a bank account should be a one click and sign it off with the bank id and and you're up and running uh all kinds of payments so you want to i just want to clarify you want to integrate the bank into the 24 7 office yeah not to make it for 24 7 bank it will probably be 24 7 bank so it's public now that we bought the the majority of a bank called optim bank and if we acquire the next uh part of the the the bank which we probably will do then it will be 24 7 office bank all right it's a new step and that's very that's a new step and and we'll provide our customers with so much useful and interesting financial services let's just think about we have all the accounts in 247 office so we can actually do a credit check on live new fresh data so that means that we can give a credit faster and we could probably give it a lower interest rate because we have more information about the customers we can give the right pricing and we could give it we just won't click they don't have to enter the information another time print out you know we just do it from the live data so there's a lot of exciting stuff around the embedded bank way of thinking yeah actually yes and you plan to start here in norway first in scandinavia and then uh you plan to move into the united states yeah so first it will be scandinavia uh banking in in in the us is a whole different ballgame so i probably do the same with partners i would guess in the us but you know you never know you get a word uh from the seed forum yeah entrepreneur as the best entrepreneur of the year yeah that's it's yeah that was interesting um it's always you know good to have recognition uh it's good for business and i think it's fun myself um so yeah that was a great honor uh uh i appreciate it yeah can you also give some advices for the entrepreneurs how to make a business here in norway i i think um [Music] i have some favorite tips which i always talk about to entrepreneurs and one of the things i like the most is first of all it's super important that they have a good system for everything you know like they have i see too many uh when we when we go into a discussion with with startup and we go in and look into their systems everything is a mess i like them to have a good system for everything from how they develop to the to the papers to the economy to their sales process so my advice is start very early to have processes and systems in place so it's easier for an investor to actually you know look into it um and um but it's a maybe at the beginning or maybe in the middle it's okay you create the system that works like make your bet in the morning yeah i think more is more like to have um good routines on everything good documentation on everything have uh good routines on papers accounting you know sales processes everything and it's so easy to have systems uh for all those things today there's so many tools that you can use to make um the the business really really professional from day one so i think it's such a shame when i see entrepreneurs uh have a business which is a complete chaos just after a few years of running their operations so so that's uh that's one of the most important things and a lot of people just skip that because they're so eager just to get things up and running and and they think it's they save time not to have everything in place and system and routines for everything but i think it's a bad idea okay number one it's a system make your system from the beginning if you're a startup or a middle or you already grown up make a system it's very important number one and the second one is uh start selling as soon as possible try to you know sell do you mean make money not only to make money but when you start selling then you learn from your customers what's wrong with your product what you should improve how you you you learn very early how you actually should pivot your product maybe or your service so i think most people or most startups focus too little on actually selling to customers uh the first customers they wait you know too long they should have started the sales process uh much much sooner then they would learn a lot sooner and might have the opportunity to pivot the product or adjust the services uh just a little bit that made it much more easy to sell uh they would have a more market product fit so number two start making sales yeah and uh the third one is not like uh just make the first sales but focus a lot more on scaling up sales and marketing uh much more you know earlier so i see the most common mistake i've seen on entrepreneurs is that they have uh uh focused too much on product development on or on everything else than actually building a sales and marketing engine um so that's more like the scale-up of the sales so the the number two is actually just get get it out there and learn uh to get feedback from the customers and if it works and it works you know you just push on selling and scaling up sales and and marketing uh so at least that's the three most important things where we see people fail when we look into the the businesses and the reason for the number one is also that when we look into the business uh we feel that the appetite is a little bit less when everything is a mess kind of you know they can't find papers they can't find documentation they can't find they can't document the process or anything even document the sales or pipeline you know if the pipeline is just in the head of the sales rep it's not very easy for a investor to evaluate the actual value of the company kind of right so yeah well back to your company 20 24 7. yeah you have everything you have system uh you have sales and you have a very big clients yeah uh who are your major clients uh we have a lot of different clients most of our clients are knowledge based companies like we have everything from small i.t companies to big companies like pwc accounting they're making almost all their accounts on 24 7 office so there's a we have a very you know broad span of of companies from smaller to to quite large some of them have billions in revenue so um so it's a is a really big mix but most of them are knowledge based companies uh but you also have other companies production based companies uh you know that you can change your stores that use our system but they used it together with the uh integrations and third-party integration that we have and that's a good thing about 24 7 office uh since we're a cloud-based system it's so easy for us to have a lot of standard integrations with other cloud systems so the services works as one even with single sign-on you wouldn't even know which system you're actually working on yeah if it wasn't because they have slightly different user interface in all my investments and in all the businesses that we run uh i think sustainability is key uh so we don't believe in any businesses that is not actually good for the world and we think you both have a responsibility to actually improve yourself and your company when it comes to all kinds of environmental impacts it's not only like reducing co2 emissions but there's so much other things which is not um good for the world and in in 24 7 office we are very proud of that we actually every time we get a new customer that has had a on-premise system they actually have a server or two or maybe three maybe four servers that they run themselves and what we do is actually we replace them with our saw solution that sas solution is of course much more efficient because we don't have any um we have all the servers that we use are used hundred percent we don't have anyone just uh running on 20 30 40 etc so you actually replace i think we'll place like 100 000 servers on your replacements with with less than a thousand servers in our hosting uh facility and if you think about it you will replace with the more sustainable servers yeah the thing is that we fewer server servers because are uh both because internet uh software it works more efficiently than traditional software but it's also the fact that we use a hundred percent of the capacity of the servers all the time and then we add servers and ad servers since all customers is running on one system it's so much more efficient so uh by doing that we replace the need for a hundred thousand servers but most people uh you know switch to new servers every three or four years so we actually make that saving every every three or fourth year and when you think about it you i think you need approximately like one ton of material that has to be refined to down to actually creating a computer it takes it's such a big process a lot of mining a lot of uh you know co2 just producing the servers so it's a very important thing that we solve with 24 7 office and other cloud-based softwares and of course it's better to have a thousand servers servers running using electricity than 100 000 uh so so that's one thing that we're really proud of with with 24 7 office so small stuff like that we try to think about uh how we can improve processes uh in all companies that we're we're investing in and and where we're a part of the startup ourself clients like when you're sustainable they do that too and i think employees like it most people would like to to work with a company or be customers with a company that thinks about the environment and we see that we we've always been like that since the start but lately we see that people are more and more find it more and more important in their decision making and that's good that's good for the world good for us yeah who are biggest competitors here in norway i think by far we have vismas our biggest competitor i think they have like 70 market share or something in our way um so they're a gigantic software machine here in um in in norway and scandinavia so um i think that's the company that we meet the most when we compete here in here in norway but the fun fact is that we actually win 60 of the cases that were actually invited to the table so for us uh we still have the edge since we were the first company who created cloud-based software so so we tried to keep our keeper edge working hard to do that why are you better than others i think one of the reason is that we have more experience it takes a lot of effort to create a scalable comprehensive and solid saw system if you look at the there's a lot of erp systems started like 30 years ago etc and they're still not cloud-based and the reason for that even though they have hundreds of some of them have actually thousands of engineers it takes a lot of effort to rewrite the software and make it scalable you have so many new challenges when you when you create a sas software which you don't have when you have on-premise software because in on premise software you have every customer has their own server or servers but if you want to make a cloud-based software efficient everything runs in one system so the scalability of everything you do has to be completely different and of course you have the security issues since you are on internet you have to make it secure and and you have to make it fast since your everything is online people want it to be responsive and that takes a lot of effort and knowledge and since we've done this for 23 years we've been good at it actually yeah you know training practice making it right yeah of course that many years 23 years it's it's a whole life yeah it is and what about the sweden in the united states um in um in uh sweden uh i think we still have um we still have um visma as a major competitor but we also see competitors like salesforce and netsuite and sap on the larger clients and of course on the smaller clients and we see fort knox when it comes to the us i would say that on the larger clients it's microsoft sap netsuite salesforce of course and on smaller clients we don't see that too much because we focus on the larger clients in the us because the syst there there's a crowded space when it comes to small small uh market yeah uh for small business so we focus on the larger one so i think it's uh salesforce in the united states and san francisco they have their big office do you plan to have office in san francisco yeah of course we plan to have offices all over the world just give us some uh some time and hopefully we're we're all over the world now we're starting to have all the uh all the funding needed to actually take new countries etc so i think it's i think we'll move uh much faster the next 10 years than we've done the last 10. you're also an investor and you invest in different projects except this yes can you tell a bit more about the projects that you're working right now we do invest in a lot of things i think basically we invest in knowledge based industries so it's normally we invest in something that you know it's learning platforms or it could be everything that you need brain power to do it could be you know professional services uh like we invested in an accounting firm which we sold to pwc we invest in software companies internet different concepts but we also invest in in other high-tech companies like we invested in a company who makes electronics for uh the military uh and we sold that company of to uh orcla fund uh several years ago uh one of the latest investments that we've done uh which is quite interesting i think it's a company that i wrote about on social media actually yesterday and we invested a company who take co2 out of the thin air and creates actual fuel which can be used by a normal car with without any adjustments and they can actually do that process and create fuel at the same price as normal gasoline but since they take the co2 out of the thin air it's of course 100 carbon neutral if you use uh carbon neutral uh power sources like the sun or hydropower or whatever of course so that's uh that's a super interesting thing and um bmw venture invested in in that company as well recently now so that's that's quite cool and another company we invested in is a company tried to make software uh for quantum computers and that's of course super quantum it's uh it's something crazy is you like gadgets is quantum it's we can talk about a lot but for most people it's like uh i'm impossible to understand uh but i think quantum computer will be the next frontier within computing for especially a lot of super important calculation based problems i think we'll see some breakthroughs that also a lot of the big problems that we have in the world today within medicine chemistry also artificial intelligence and robotics i think of course of course just ai i think and that's why one of the reasons that why we invested as well is we wanted to have that edge to be one of the first to implement uh quantum computing within our ai modules to make sure that we're in front in the future as well so we invest in so many things we we we invested early in netbill which we sold to shipstead we made a great uh journey there that company went from zero to 600 million in revenue just within a three three years or something so that was an amazing journey so looking for different cases within different things but it's all kind of knowledge based and mostly but you're looking mostly in the norway or also you're looking in the united states we have like seven eight eight investments now in the us and we have like 7 8 now in in norway which is worth focusing on and we have some small tickets in probably around another 20 companies so what's your free advices for the investment and for the investors so people who are interested into the investment yeah uh how to choose the right company yeah so what we do is that we focus a lot more on the team than the actual idea so we have invested in several companies where we don't think the idea is that great and sometimes we have the idea where they should pivot the idea we've done that with success as well and other times we think that the entrepreneurs the founders and the team they're so good i think they'll figure out a way to to make the idea work so pivot it to something that works um so first you need to look for the team that is behind the project yeah that's the absolutely most important that they have the grit the personality uh hardworking honest smart people and i believe that if you give that kind of people and a good team that works well together they could kind of solve any problem if you just give them resources and time so my philosophy is more about people finding right people and the idea and i think that's been quite successful because we haven't lost uh hardly on any case that we've invested in for the last like 23 years what's the right quantity of the team how do you think the right right quantity of the team uh how many yes depends on the case so a team could be like two two good people it could be uh but i think our best investments i think it will be somewhere where we find founders which is like between three and six people i guess i think that would be the right number where we have the most successful cases because sometimes uh something uh that they want to achieve is so advanced and takes so much work that you need a bigger team kind of and if you have like six persons it's more likely that you have good programmers but you also have good kind of one person which is a good marketing guy sales guy a good management guy and you know so you have a team where they can have a different uh knowledge bases and expertise which could uh fulfill each other team number one yep and two more uh criteria yeah so the next thing we start looking uh looking at is of course the idea and the idea has to be something that our favorite ideas is something that makes the world better obviously make it better at least something that is not making the world worse so if the idea is kind of scalable something that we understand something that we believe and of course you know let stuff that you need to to be convinced and if it's we think it's a good idea or if you think it could be pivoted into a good idea uh we look at the the opportunities for or the scalability of it and uh so how easily we can take it to different countries and make it an international project all right so an idea and scalability of the project right so i think that's basically everything else is just like different in every case yeah stan thank you very much that was really very interesting as i told before there is so much that so much knowledge that you have that you can share with us and uh that was really very interesting i wish you good luck and hopefully we're gonna see soon 24 7 bank and not only scandinavia but also and not only in united states and also in other countries as well in ukraine thank you thank you so much you

Channel: Albert Bright

Views: 657

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Stian rustad, albert bright, Business in Norway, norway and united states, 24SevenOffice

Id: s-60ni9eso8

Length: 63min 9sec (3789 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020