Fredrik Bentlinger

Spotify is shuffling its leadership playlist. Founder Daniel Ek is stepping down as CEO of the music streaming giant after 19 years. Instead, he will become executive chair of the company. Alex Norstrom and Gustav Söderström will step up to fill his position, as co-CEOs – a leadership duo replacing the solo artist. Ek has said the change “simply matches titles to how we already operate”. It’s never easy for the founder to relinquish the CEO title, even if Ek says he will remain “deeply involved”, working on long-term strategy. On the one hand, Ek must be tired. Over the course of nearly two decades he has fought to build his global, billion-dollar business. He had to do it in the face of stiff competition from Apple. It was believed it had a near-monopoly on music streaming through iTunes. He waged a long campaign to challenge that assumption. It paid huge dividends. The final test of a great founder and leader, in many ways, is to choose his or her successor. Ben Francis MBE hired his replacement as CEO at Gymshark in 2015 after 3 years. I waited at Homeserve for 8 years before replacing myself as UK CEO. My success at Homeserve came from hiring great CEOs for each of our 10 countries and a great CEO for them to work for, when I ended up with too many direct reports. Founders are great at creating businesses, copying and pivoting until they get the right model and start growing. (Exactly what Ek did. Music streaming platforms were not a completely original idea. But he managed to make a standout product and executed it brilliantly.) My advice in these succession situations, when the founder steps away, is to hire a proven CEO with the right cultural fit to work with the founder to achieve exponential growth with fewer mistakes. It looks like Ek has built the right leadership playlist to do this. And he’s been CEO at the company he created for nearly two decades – few pop stars can sustain a career that long!

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First instinct is to look at VC or PE to raise capital. But there is another path → Family Offices And Denmark’s ecosystem is quite unique. It's home to Maersk, the world’s second-largest shipping company. Founded in 1904 and still family-controlled today. A living example of how Danish business culture values generational thinking and operational depth. So some of the most interesting conversations we’ve had in the Nordics weren’t with fund managers. They were with families who built shipping companies, clean energy platforms, or industrial tech. And now they want to back the next generation of entrepreneurs. But here’s the nuance: → Danish family offices often move slower than institutional capital → They care more about trust and relationship than your pitch deck → And they often want strategic proximity to the business they invest in Good news if you’re building in B2B tech, sustainability, industrial automation, or logistics… You might be closer to deep and patient capital than you think. Of course, you'll have to speak their language. They care less about multiples. And more about: Durability, efficiency, and long-term value creation. The upside is that they bring more to the table than just capital. ✔ Long time horizons (with no fund cycles) ✔ Deep operational experience ✔ Cross-border industrial roots Looking for a partner to secure strategic capital? Feel free to reach out: https://t2m.io/i5invest 𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐢𝐬 i5invest: We are a corporate development firm with access to 150K+ top decision-makers in Strategy, Business Development, and M&A. We provide innovative tech founders with insights, expertise, and access to our network to take their companies to the next level. #growth #tech #strategy #startups #artificialintelligence Sources: Dealroom.co, LinkedIn Company Pages, and Public Data

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Norway’s $1.8T sovereign wealth fund is saving 213,000 hours every year with AI. How? They tapped into their enterprise data on Snowflake, integrated Anthropic’s Claude, and made AI proficiency non-negotiable—backed by real training, enablement, and leadership conviction. This is what enterprise AI looks like in action. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gtFrcScv

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