Isac Ottosson

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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RIP Tableau Tableau is a business intelligence tool owned by Salesforce. For years it was part of how we worked at Voi. In the beginning it felt powerful, but over time it turned into what many legacy SaaS tools become: expensive, clunky and slow. Every ad hoc request ended up in an analyst backlog. Local teams across our 100 plus cities were left waiting for insights, costs kept going up and speed disappeared. So we ripped it out, saved at least 500k EUR, potentially millions (from speed). The direct savings are hundreds of thousands of euros in licenses. The indirect savings are even bigger since analysts can now focus on high impact work instead of repetitive reporting. The biggest shift is speed. What once took weeks now happens in seconds. Here is how we made it possible: 1. We fixed the foundations. Years of work on data governance. Every metric has an owner, quality checks, semantics and definitions. Everyone in the company knows what a number means. With that in place, self serve became possible, which is essential when local teams in 100 plus cities need the right data at the right time. 2. We defined what we need, not what we paid for. A single source of truth, real time data streaming and self serve for non technical users. Analysts no longer spend their days on small one off requests. 3. We used LLMs as the bridge. Together with a design partner we built a UI that supports continuous business intelligence, and we created an AI data analyst that lives inside Slack and Sheets. LLMs translate natural language into SQL, query the warehouse and return insights or visuals in natural language again. This step is what unlocked true self serve at scale. But LLMs alone are not enough. In an enterprise setting you need strict guidelines and guardrails. Without governance you risk inconsistent answers, wrong definitions or even compliance issues. The combination of solid data governance with the power of LLMs is what makes this work. The results are clear: 1. Millions saved on SaaS and labor 2. One source of truth for all key metrics 3. Self serve for everyone in the company within clear constraints 4. Up to 100x faster time to insight and decision making LLMs made this shift possible. Strong governance made it safe. RIP Tableau. And it will not be the last legacy SaaS tool we replace.

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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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If I had to start a new business tomorrow, I’d still choose a Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) model even with rising ad costs and platform fees. Why? Because it’s still the fastest way to prove demand, build a loyal customer base, and control your brand narrative without burning millions upfront. When done right, D2C can take you from £0 to £500k in 12 months and I’ve seen brands hit £5M+ in 3 years just by nailing one hero product and owning their customer journey. Here’s what makes it powerful: ✅ Lower setup cost, faster learning curve You can launch lean, test pricing, creatives, and messaging directly with customers, and pivot instantly based on real feedback. ✅ Full control of the brand experience From ads to unboxing, every touchpoint screams you. That’s how brands create loyalty that can push repeat purchase rates above 40%. ✅ Goldmine of customer data You know exactly who buys, why they buy, and when they come back. That data isn’t just for ads; it shapes product development and inventory planning. ✅ Retail becomes an option, not a gamble Many D2C founders expand into retail only after proving demand which means stronger negotiations and higher margins. The real play? Use D2C to hit your first £1M–£2M in revenue, perfect your product-market fit, then scale into retail or wholesale once you’ve built a brand customers already love. If I were starting fresh, this would be my blueprint for success: Start D2C. Move fast. Learn faster. Build a brand customers can’t stop talking about. #d2c #startup

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🇪🇺 Everyone’s talking about Lovable—the European/Swedish $100m ARR success story. 🇺🇸 However, Lovable is incorporated in the US as a Delaware C-Corp (Lovable Inc.), so technically it’s a US company, not Swedish. It adds to the count of US unicorns, not European ones. The founders’ choice to incorporate in the US rather than the EU is obvious: 🗂️ Bureaucratic red tape makes setting up companies and doing financing rounds in Europe slow and painful. There are 27 different corporate regimes across the EU and some regulations date back to 1892(!). Take the German GmbH-Gesetz, for example. In a previous post, I told the story of German startup which had to pay €58k (this is not a typo) in notary fees for a Series A financing round. Gathering all(!) shareholders in one room for five hours to listen to a notary in an expensive suit read a 100-page contract, with a wall of books behind him, feels like an ancient ritual. But it’s still standard in some EU countries, including Germany. International investors might endure this once, but they won’t do it again (in the US/UK the whole process would have been a DocuSign PDF). That’s why many top European founders choose to incorporate outside the EU. 👉 The EU Inc initiative is trying to change this. 🙏 Let’s support Andreas Klinger, Philipp Herkelmann and their team to help to stop this bureaucratic insanity and reclaim Europe's competitiveness! #startups h/t to Alessandro Palombo

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What does it take to be an outlier founder in Europe today? Our Partner in Sweden, Tobias Bengtsdahl, sits down with Pär-Jörgen Pärson Partner at Northzone and an early backer of Spotify, to explore the mindset, strategies, and lessons that set exceptional founders apart. This conversation is packed with insights for anyone building something bold. Watch the full conversation here 👇 https://lnkd.in/dVZYhfjM

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