From the Classroom to the Real World: The Role of Universities in Accelerating Entrepreneurship

Tom Leonard 

I'm Tom Leonard. I'm the host of the Gamers Change Lives podcast where we talk about how eSports can create jobs anywhere in the world. Play games, create jobs, change lives. In season one, we talked about jobs. In season two, we talked about money. We called it Follow the Money. In season three, we talked about business basics. Now in season four, we're calling it Accelerating eSports Success. We're talking to entrepreneurs around the world talking to incubators, to accelerators, to other platforms to spread the word about what other resources are out there that entrepreneurs can use to hone their business skills. Now the goal of the conversation is to provide inspiration to eSports entrepreneurs, seek tools, training, mentorship, networking and more. Today, really, really glad to have Andreas Johansen as our guest. Welcome Andreas.

Andreas Johansson 

Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Tom Leonard 

And you're the CEO of SSE Business Lab, right?

Andreas Johansson 

Exactly. So we are a startup incubator based in Stockholm and we are part of the Stockholm School of Economics. So we support startups and entrepreneurs who are coming out of the school, so students, alumni and faculty from SSE.

Tom Leonard 

Great, we're gonna go into all kinds of detail there in just a second. But first I always have to ask because we have an eSports audience out there. Are you a gamer?

Andreas Johansson 

Every once in a while I play some Grand Theft Auto from FIFA, but not much more than that.

Tom Leonard 

One of the things that we've discovered over time is how Sweden really kind of punches above its weight when it comes to gaming and to eSports. I mean the industry there is really big. So it's always a fair question to ask.

Tom Leonard 

So can you talk a little bit about SSE labs? And I'm just going into a lot of detail here because there's just a great story to be told there about what it... how it is that you do... what you do there and how it started out. Can you talk a little bit about what SSE does in detail? Is it an incubator? Is it an accelerator?

Andreas Johansson 

So actually, we do both incubation and exploration of startups. But we've been around since 2001, the incubator, which kind of came up as this value added to the students and alumni from the school in that if you wanted to become an entrepreneur, this incubator was started to facilitate a lot of resources, network, and so on to help them on those journeys. But I mean, 2001 was a long time ago and kind of the ecosystem for entrepreneurs was not at all what it is today in Stockholm at least. So I would say there's been a lot of development in the ecosystem as a whole during these almost 25 years that we've been around and also a lot of developments in terms of what we do and the support we provide where we've really in the last five, six years or so, professionalized a lot and have a lot more to offer to the entrepreneurs and startups that we support.

Tom Leonard 

Could you talk a little bit about the difference between what an accelerator is and what an incubator is? How do they compare?

Andreas Johansson 

So there are a lot of definitions out there. And I would say we define it somewhat differently to what some other accelerators and incubators do. We have one acceleration program, which we say is intended to kickstart the company's journey. So it's a very quick but intense eight-week program, where you go from just an idea on paper and maybe you don't have much more than a team and a pitch deck. And then you, during these eight weeks, validate your idea, talk to your first customers, and hopefully get your first customers on board with the first iteration of a product. So that's what we call acceleration. And then incubation, we say that the companies have some initial traction. So they already have some customers, maybe some pilot projects. Ideally, they have some paying customers. And then they go from there kind of finding their product market fit and then growing, scaling, internationalizing as soon as possible. And then they can sit with us for up to 18 months. But some define it differently. They say that incubation is this very first initial stage and then acceleration is when you scale up the company. So it depends. I don't know if there's a distinct true definition out there. Maybe that's part of the challenge as an entrepreneur as well, to kind of know what these words mean and to know where to turn when you need support.

Tom Leonard 

Who are the participants in each of these? Because just for that exact point, it's like, so an entrepreneur, should they be looking for an accelerator? Should they be looking for an incubator? So who are the participants that you're seeing? What stage are they at for each of those categories?

Andreas Johansson 

So it differs a bit. I would say the very first program that we run, then you apply as an individual and then you kind of form your teams and come up with your business ideas during that program. So that's a program that we run specifically for students at the university. So most are in their early twenties, maybe even slightly younger than that, could be bachelor, master, or even PhD students, but they do that during the time that they're studying. But then the latter programs you apply with the company and with business ideas. So at least one of the co-founders has to have some connection to SSE, the university. But the rest can be from elsewhere. And about 30% of the teams that we admit are still students while they come in with their companies into the incubator. And about 70% are alumni of the school. And then every once in a while, we do meet with faculty coaches as well. That's a bit more rare since we're a business school and a lot of the kind of ideas that the faculty works with are more so consultancy firms than maybe you know scalable startups.

Tom Leonard 

Is it common for universities in Sweden, in Europe, to have a business development program as well developed as yours?

Andreas Johansson 

I mean, I would say most universities have some support for entrepreneurs and innovation. I would say ours is probably one of the better ones in Sweden, at least if you look at our track records. We have Klarna, which is probably our most famous alumni company, which is a unicorn and has become a huge international success case. But something that's interesting with Sweden, which is quite unique, is that we have something called professors privilege. So any research that's being created by professors or faculty is actually owned by the researchers themselves, not the university, which on the one hand, you know, maybe incentivizes those researchers to really commercialize that and, you know, start companies based on their research.

Tom Leonard 

Oh wow, wow.

Andreas Johansson 

But on the other hand, now the universities don't have really any financial incentives to support those entrepreneurs or researchers that want to become entrepreneurs. So in a lot of other countries, it's very common that the universities have what's called tech transfer offices. And what they do is just look at the research being conducted, see what has commercial potential, and then help out in commercializing that research which is not really the case in Sweden. Instead, we have a lot of these accelerators, incubators, which need to be financed in other ways than through the equity in that IP.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, that would make a huge difference. What makes me want to think back to when I went to Stanford to the business school there, it's like back when I was graduating, everyone wanted to be a management consultant. That was the big thing. And then in talking to the Dean here a couple of years ago, he was like, no, everyone wants to have a startup. It's just like, you know, completely a different outlook than it was when I was there. And you know, just part of the culture. That's really interesting that on the ownership side of things, I mean, that could make a big deal to a faculty member out there. So can you describe a little bit about what SSE, the school is now? Is SSE the name of the business school as well?

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah, so it's the name of the entire university and it's a business school. It's been around for, uh, it's about 120 years now. So started in the beginning of the 20th century. And it was really this school founded by the kind of prominent people in the business sector of Sweden, uh, to, you know, educate people so that they could continue staffing their really, you know, successful international companies and kind of upskill the entire population within this area. So it's quite often kind of part of these top rankings of universities in Europe and in the world, at least when it comes to business, finance, management, those types of programs. And it's seen as one of these schools in Sweden that's really hard to get into. And it's a very, very small school, about 2000 students at any given point. So it has kind of a very prominent position in Sweden and also very close ties still to the kind of business sector at large here in Sweden, but also internationally. So a lot of people, students, think of it as a really good kind of stepping stone into a career like management consulting, also investment banking, of course, or just finance in general. But especially in the last like 10 years or so, there's been a really big surge in the interest of entrepreneurship as well. And I think that has to do with the success cases that we've seen out of Sweden, like Klarna, like Spotify, like Skype, and those types of companies as well. They can both serve as inspiration for younger people, for students, but also a lot of those founders and early employees, like part of the stock option programs and so on, they've decided to then reinvest that back into the ecosystem by becoming angel investors or starting VC firms. So I think the success in the early 21st century of these types of companies, the fact that those founders and early employees decided to contribute back to the ecosystem by really building that up, making sure that capital was available, making sure that they could share their insights as advisors or as board members in new companies that were founded, I think has contributed a lot to the interest in entrepreneurship in general and to the kind of, you know, punching above our weight as we do here in Sweden in terms of startups.

Tom Leonard 

Is the instruction in English? Or is it in Swedish at the school? Is the instruction in English or Swedish at the school?

Andreas Johansson 

Sorry, it's time.

Andreas Johansson 

Oh, everything is in English, which is actually quite a recent development. I think they switched everything from Swedish to English like three, four years ago, something like that.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, that's it. Do you know, just for my own curiosity, do you know how much it costs to go there as a student, what the tuition is?

Andreas Johansson 

So for EU citizens, it's totally free. And then I actually don't know. Yeah, for non-EU citizens, compared to US universities, it's a very, very small tuition fee. But that's the beauty of Sweden. All higher education is totally free.

Tom Leonard 

It's just a concept that we have no experience with at all here. What are you talking about? Especially someone today, the kind of investment that they have to make to go to Stanford is just astronomical. It's just unbelievable that people are able to figure out that it's worth the investment, but it appears to be. What do you think the most important thing that the participants of the program would do?

Tom Leonard 

What's the most important thing they come away with, do you think?

Andreas Johansson 

I mean, we do provide a lot of support, a lot of resources. We have coaches that sit down with the companies on a recurring basis. We have a huge partner network so they can get like legal services or cloud services or PR help consulting services. A lot of different things completely for free. And we're heavily subsidized. And we do workshops, we do a lot of individual coaching with the teams. So there is a lot of value to be had, but I would say by far the biggest value that they get is just the community that we have here. So we have an office space where all of the companies that are part of these programs sit together with us. So not only can they come and kind of tap us on the shoulder and ask questions, whether it's be like, we're fundraising right now, we're talking to investors. Can you sit down with us and coach us a bit about that? But also they can go to each other because I mean, a lot of the challenges you have as an early stage entrepreneur or an early stage startup for that matter are kind of very common, regardless of which industry you're working in or what the specific business idea is. So just the fact that they can share their learnings and their insights with each other and both in more formal settings like recurring weekly meetings with all of the teams, but also more informally like taking a coffee with someone who just did the fundraise when you're about to start your fundraising for instance.

Tom Leonard 

Yes, why reinvent the wheel if someone has already figured it out? And the other thing that I have always found is how willing to collaborate with people are. People don't feel, for the most part, competitive unless you're talking to someone that's going after the exact same market with the same product, which is really unusual. Helping others, aren't they?

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah, I would definitely say so. I think that's almost inherent to running a small company because you're such a small team. There's so much that you need to do. There's probably a lot of competencies that you don't have yet in-house because you're, you know, the people that you are and you are quite a small team. So inherently you will need to get a lot of help from advisors, from accelerators, incubators, from the board, if you have a professional board and from just other people in the ecosystem. And in order to get help, of course, you have to have a giving mentality and give back whenever you can. So I think inherent to running a small company is this giving mentality, pay it forward type of mentality, which I really appreciate. I see that a lot among our companies, the fact that they take their own time to sit down with another entrepreneur. For us, in terms of having this community as something that we can provide as value, it's, of course, very important to us to evaluate that when we bring in companies, are they going to be part of this community? And do they have this coachability that they want to get input from others, but also a paid-forward mentality? So that's a huge part of the evaluation when we look at teams that apply to us.

Tom Leonard 

“Coachability” is a strange word, but it's so important because the founders know that they don't know everything and are curious to find out what it is that they don't know. That's super valuable out there. So it is everyone that goes through the program that participates in the program, is it more than just students of SSE or are they all students of SSE?

Andreas Johansson 

So at least one co-founder has to be either a student, alumni, or faculty or staff member from SSE. But usually we're looking for teams where, OK, maybe one or two people have that connection to the university. But we want diversity, both in terms of gender identity and ethnic identity, but also in terms of backgrounds. So if it's a team of five really similar people from SSE, that's probably a less strong team than someone with a tech background, someone with a business background, someone maybe with a design background, and maybe, you know, different age ranges, different gender identities and so on. So diversity is part of the criteria that we evaluate when teams apply to us. And I would say you have a stronger team if you don't only have people with the same type of academic background.

Tom Leonard 

What's the difference that you say that you describe in coaching versus mentoring?

Andreas Johansson 

So that's also an interesting question. I would say mentoring is more so offering advice based on experience and guiding startups in this case, based on their challenges that they have. Coaching is more so maybe asking the right type of questions, holding someone in their hand while you lead them to their own conclusions. Just being that sounding board and being that other person who can help them navigate in their own ideas and their own thoughts. I would say the coaching that we do together with the companies, it can differ quite a bit. Sometimes it's very business focused. How do we get this client? How do we convince this investor? Sometimes it's much more like coaching, so to speak. There might be co-founders that have differences or there might be issues with work-life balance or just the mentality overall, if things are going a bit rough at the moment. And then the coaches are much more personable and ask a lot of questions and so on. Whereas sometimes it's more of this mentoring, offering advice and guidance in terms of business questions.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, yeah, I mean mentoring is so important out there. So also part of the program that I think you probably offer is networking and I'm kind of curious about how you create that networking opportunities or networking skills because networking is so important to success for all kinds of entrepreneurs. But when you were talking about developing these networks, any thoughts on how that's actually done with your program?

Andreas Johansson 

So I think part of this is of course opening up doors and allowing for interaction with the networks that we have. So for instance, we have a really big both angel network and venture capital network. So investors in different stages want to meet with our companies because they're looking for companies to invest in. They're looking for deal flow and they see a company being admitted into our programs as a kind of stamp of approval because we've already done some due diligence on the company by then. So allowing for interactions like demo days and other investor events where we invite the entire investor network and give opportunities for the companies to both, you know, pitch on stage and have their classic pitch deck and three minute pitch, but also like a mingle afterwards where they get to interact on a more informal basis. But I think part of it is also really preparing our entrepreneurs and our companies in terms of coaching them beforehand and providing workshops and other resources so that they know how to get the most out of those networks. So we especially focus a lot on them being in the driver's seat because there is kind of a slight imbalance, or can be at least, a slight imbalance in like the power dynamic between an investor and a startup feeling like they're coming there begging for their money or begging for their investment needing to prove themselves for the investor. And we try to remind our companies constantly that they're the ones adding the most value. They're the ones building this company. An investor who puts in some money and has their investment grow on the backs of your labor should be very thankful and grateful to be given that opportunity to invest in your company. And, you know, have that in the back of your mind and let that reflect the power balance as well. You need to make sure that you're happy with this investor. I mean, an investment is often compared to a marriage. It's very long-term. This person is potentially on your cap table for like five, 10, 15 years. And if you don't make sure on your end that you want this person on board, that they can provide some additional value, not just the cash.

Andreas Johansson 

I mean, then you haven't done your due diligence in terms of what you need to prepare before talking to someone. So I would say that the most important thing is that we remind our companies that you are in the drivers if you lead this interaction. If they get to invest that should be their privilege not their right.

Tom Leonard 

How strategic are most founders in selecting their investors? Because I recently had some experience here doing investing in companies in Italy, as an example. And the ones that I found to be most interesting were the founders that I found to be most interesting were some of the people that were very strategic in selecting their investors. And so they weren't the kind you did not have the feeling that they were there just for the money. They were there for the money and the expertise and the connections and networking and all that kind of stuff. So that sounds really like the right approach to doing it.

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah. And I would say it's a lot easier to be really strategic when things are going well and you can show a lot of traction. Maybe you meet the investor once and then a month later you meet again and then a bunch of stuff has happened and you have doubled your client list and doubled your revenue and so on. At the end of the day, there's a lot of psychology involved here. If the investor feels like there's scarcity, if they feel like others are tagging along and want to be part of this investment round. If they feel like others are talking about this company. I mean, there's a lot that's driven by just fear of missing out and them being, you know, part of the hype train, so to speak. So if all of that is working in your favor, you can be super strategic in picking the right ones. Whereas if you are, you know, running out of cash and you risk, you know bankruptcy or liquidating the company if you don't close this round within the next two months, then you're suddenly in a much worse position. You have lost all of the leverage and that will probably reflect in how strategic you can be and how high of a valuation you can get and how many investors you can get interested. So I think all of these things are working in interplay here. We of course always advise our companies to be quite strategic, to think in advance of you know who they want to contact, how frequently they want to update them. We usually say that closing an investment round you have to count on it taking at least six months. So if you have runway in the capital for another nine months, it's probably time to start fundraising soon. You can't wait until you have like a couple of months left because then you run the risk of not only having to shut down the company if you can't close that round, but also losing that leverage that you have once you do the fundraise because you're in the less powerful position now. You're the one begging for cash.

Tom Leonard 

All kinds of interesting things that tangents, I can go on. I just think the power dynamics conversation is really interesting because it's there in any negotiation but not everyone walks into it really having put some thought into it. But that's a conversation for another day here. Wanted to talk just about, not necessarily just with SSE Lab. But in general with incubators and accelerators, any kind of program like that, that an entrepreneur can look for, where do they go to find them? Is this a Google exercise? It's like if an entrepreneur knows that, hey, they would like to get some expertise in certain things, they wanna see what's out there, where do they find them? And then how do they vet them? How do they figure out which ones are good and which ones are better for them?

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah, that's a really good and interesting question. I would say, to a large extent, I empathize a lot with entrepreneurs who find it kind of messy to navigate in the different support structures and resources that are out there. I mean, there are some incubators focusing on things like Sweden and Stockholm now that support any company that just meets their criteria. You don't have to have a specific connection to a university or some other organization. There's one quite big called Sting, for instance. So of course, that's something that you can find by Googling, but I would say a lot of these accelerators and incubators are also quite prominent in the ecosystem. People are generally quite aware of them, and you might get the tip from another entrepreneur or an investor or someone else that you speak to. And for our sake, we want to do the most to be really visible towards the students while they are students so that if they form a company while they're studying or even are just interested in entrepreneurship and want to form a company at some point, they know about us and know what support and resources that we can provide. And if they, you know, have a different career, but then maybe 10, 15 years after graduating suddenly start their company, we want to have been such a large of a presence while the time that they were students, that they remember us and think back that, okay, this resource is available even though I'm not a student still, but as an alumni of the school I can always turn to SSE Business Lab and get support. So we work a lot with how visible we are towards the student while they're studying, but also towards the alumni.

Tom Leonard 

When, let's say someone has identified a program and some of the programs you're talking about, they are competitive to be accepted to, what kinds of advice can you give someone that wants to look good to get accepted to a program that they want to be a part of? And I know that's kind of nebulous, but it's because each one is gonna be different or different organization, but in general, what are the kinds of advice you could give to an aggressive entrepreneur that's looking for the best program for themselves?

Andreas Johansson 

So a big part of what we evaluate is the pitch deck that the company puts together, where they summarize the problem that they're solving, the solution to the problem, the market size, the business model, the team, competition, and so on. And if you're a first-time founder and you've never put together a pitch deck for a startup, I would advise people to look at how others have done it before, to get inspiration from that there is kind of a formula to it. So I would say work within those frameworks, but then try to put your own unique touch on it still. And then I would say at the end of the day, especially when it comes to early companies, they might not even have launched a product yet. A lot of what we try to evaluate and what any investor or jury or anyone evaluating a company would look at is mostly the team. So we know when looking at this early of a company that the business model is probably going to change. The whole idea might even change. They might pivot into a totally different type of product or a totally different target market or totally different type of problem that they want to solve even. But as long as you can show that there's something unique about this team, that you have some kind of unfair competitive edge towards other teams, whether that be experience from the problem yourselves or having shown, you know, your ability to accomplish things and ability to show like grit and termination in previous endeavors in previous companies or previous roles. That's something that I would emphasize a lot when talking to like an incubator or accelerator or an investor. I think at the end of the day, what any investor or anyone evaluating is looking at is like, okay, if this succeeds, how big is that success? So are there any bottlenecks here in terms of scalability? Is the market big enough to not imply a ceiling to their growth? And that's a lot about communicating what the problem is and who is experiencing this problem. How big is that market? How can we build a product that is scalable?

Andreas Johansson

But then you also want to look at, okay, if that is the success case, how likely is that success? So then you also want to evaluate, you know, the team and their ability to execute. You want to evaluate the competitive landscape and, you know, the founder's ability to understand what their competitive edge is or what modes that they can, you know, bring to the table. Uh, you want to look at other risks involved that might, you know, increase the likelihood that you don't have a successful outcome. And it's not that we want all the risks to have been mitigated, but we want the founders to be aware of this risk and have some type of plan for how to handle them. So if there is a really competitive market, then as long as you're aware of that, you can communicate what your competitive edge is. And maybe even emphasize that, you know, there's a reason that there are so many competitors on this market, because it's a really attractive market to be in. And there's a lot of willingness to pay among the target audience, you know, then we can see that, okay, there is a risk here, but this entrepreneur or this team is very aware of that risk and knows how to mitigate that going forward. So it's not about having a perfect case. It's about knowing what the risks are and being able to present them yourself.

Tom Leonard 

One of the things I always remember people talking about is like the founders, you're the founders are the key to the success. It's like, if you have, if you have good founders and it's not such a great idea, there's a better chance of success than if you have bad founders and a really good idea. So it's like the founders are the key to the success. Can you talk a little bit about, go ahead.

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah, well actually so I was just going to tell this fun anecdote. So part of our process when we admit companies is the final stage in that process is we have an external board of admissions. And these are like, super successful and former entrepreneurs, investors and other people from the ecosystem. One of them, for instance, is Sebastian Knutsson, the founder of King, which is this, you know, mobile gaming company, created Candy Crush, for instance. So a lot of what they valued.

Tom Leonard 

Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. See, that is eSports.

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah, a lot of what they evaluate is of course the team. So I remember this one time a company had applied to us. The board of admissions were super hesitant about the business idea. They said that this is a really difficult idea to execute on. It's really difficult to charge customers based on this product. There's probably not a lot of willingness to pay, but they really believed in these founders. They thought that this farming team had something special about them. So they said ‘We don't think this company with this idea is going to be successful, but we think this team is going to be successful. So we'll admit this team.’ They're probably within like six months, they're going to come back to you and say, okay, we're scrapping this old idea. We're pivoting into a new idea. And we want to be part of that journey once they figure out that new idea. So the board of admissions decided to admit this team. And like clockwork, almost exactly six months after admitting the team, they came and tapped me on the shoulders and said, you know, Andreas, we have something to tell you. We're scrapping the old idea. We have this new idea now that we're going to build instead. And I acted surprised and said, Oh, okay. I had no idea this would happen, but sometimes you can just feel with certain teams that no matter the journey that they have to go through to get to that finally successful idea we believe in their ability to get there. And this was really the case with this team.

Tom Leonard 

Were they able to be successful with their new idea?

Andreas Johansson 

They are actually semi successful, I would say. They actually sold that company to a larger player in the same space. They didn't become financially independent based on that sale, but they made a good buck and now are founding new companies separately. Not as a team together now, but they are really these types of serial entrepreneurs that really, once they leave the old company, they have to start up something new almost instantly. So they really have it in their blood.

Tom Leonard 

Yes, yes. So let's say someone gets into one of your programs and is a participant. Any advice on the best way to get the most out of the opportunity that you've been handed other than just work hard?

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah, I mean, work hard is of course part of it. I would say, so in our case, we say that we provide almost this, you know, buffet of support and resources that's available to the companies, but we have a lot of expectations on the companies and entrepreneurs themselves. We're not going to hold you in the hand and tell you what to do. You need to be aware of how to make the most of, you know, the partners and the free product and services that they offer and the coaching sessions that we do together with companies asking the right types of questions, making the most out of that time, attending the right workshops for you and so on. So being really proactive and thinking about how to make the most of all of the resources available to you, I think benefits you a lot. And of course, being very proactive in terms of the community and the network. Who should we speak with? Who can open doors for us? Who can give us inspiration? Who can give us guidance? Who has the right type of experience? And then I would say of course, I mentioned earlier that ‘coachability’ is really important. If you're like super set in your ways and you don't want to take input from anyone else, then it doesn't make sense for you to be part of a program where you're being coached by others, where you're getting input from others, but you probably shouldn't be too coachable as well. I mean, if you're just doing what others are telling you to do, not being in the driver's seat yourselves and making active decisions on, okay, I got this piece of advice, I got that piece of advice. I heard their perspectives. I heard their kind of rationale. Now this is my decision. If you're just doing what the latest person you met is telling you to do, I think that's, you know, running full sermons. I think that's no way to run a company either. So kind of finding that balance between being in the driver's seat, making these decisions yourselves based on input and data from others, but still being open to input and data from others. I think that balance is tricky to strike, but once you do it, I've seen it accelerate the growth of companies in massive ways.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, I think that's a really good point that, yeah, you're not there just to do what other people think you should be doing otherwise. It's like, yeah. What about, what about after the program? So we're talking about, you know, getting in, talking a little bit about the program itself. What about after the people have left the program? What kinds of things should they be doing to have gotten the best out of the opportunity there of running, of going through the program?

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah. So I would say, in our final program, the companies can be with us for up to 18 months. And our goal is that once those 18 months are up, the company has progressed so much that they don't really need our support anymore. Hopefully they've grown the team. Hopefully they've kind of grown out of the suit or the costume that we provide. They may need their own office space. They have their own professional board or at least advisory board. And, you know that's the goal at least. And then we often advise our companies to still be part of the community, even though you've maybe left the programs. I mean, we have Slack channels and we have, you know, informal afterworks and other activities that our alumni companies can come to as well. So still making the most and being proactive in the resources that you can still get from an incubator or accelerator that you've been part of. Because I mean, even though you've left our programs, we still are super incentivized in your success. And we of course want to make sure that even our alumni companies continue to do really well once they've left us. And something that's quite new to us is that a little more than a year ago, we actually started our own VC fund. So prior to that, we really didn't have any financial incentives to support the companies. It was just, you know, a service offered to students and alumni of the school. But now all of the teams that are admitted into our final program are offered an investment from this VC fund. So you can still say no if you don't want to take that investment. But for anyone who wants to take an investment, now we're going to be an investor on their cap table even after they leave the startup program. So our goal with that is to find ways to work with the companies on a more long term basis not in the same kind of maybe hands-on way that we do in the programs, but you know, connecting them with other investors, connecting them with the right people that we have in our networks and giving them more resources once they're at a later stage in their company's growth. Maybe they want international context once they start moving out of Sweden and finding new markets and so on.

Tom Leonard 

Is part of the deal to build in Sweden and sell to the world?

Andreas Johansson 

I mean, I think Sweden is such a small country. So inherently, if you want to build a big global international company, you can't stay in Sweden. It's not a big enough market. But Sweden is often talked about as this kind of really good test market. There are a lot of similarities with the rest of Europe and with the US, for instance. So if you can spend your time in Sweden experimenting a lot, really figuring out who your target audience is, really finding that product market fit, then you're in a really good position to scale that company to other markets once you kind of have your validated learnings from Sweden. So we advise our companies to not go into a market like the US, which is it's own kind of based too early, but probably not too late either to be somewhat daring and you know, somewhat brave in the timing there to really kind of find that optimal.

Tom Leonard 

I always remember people telling me that San Diego, here in the US, is such a representative population for the country that you can get a lot more out of your research if you concentrate on that particular market. And people who just learned this over time, I mean how it works out. Would you recommend people joining multiple programs, going through different accelerators, going through different incubators or is one enough?

Andreas Johansson 

I would say that depends, but you should probably not be part of multiple incubators or accelerators at the same point. I think you get the most out of any given accelerator incubator. If you can really dedicate time from your end in understanding what the value they can provide us and being a really integral part of the community that they have and really making the most out of the resources. But then of course there are accelerators and incubators for different stages. So you can, and that's quite frequent, at least in our case, that companies come to us from other incubators or accelerators that support them earlier than we do, and then leave us and go to later stage accelerators and incubators. I would say there's a lot of value in being part of that type of network or ecosystem. But like I said, ideally, after they've spent 18 months with us, they're probably at a point where they can kind of stand on their own two legs and don't really need a lot of hands-on support from the type of program that we provide. So we actually want as much as possible to prepare the company to be this, you know, successful independent company that once they leave us, know what to do and know how to execute on their big international global vision.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, it sounds like you're kind of one of the latter stage programs out there. Maybe one of the things we've when we've talked to others.

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah, maybe you can compare it to a career to an individual. I mean, you go to primary school and then you go to secondary school and then you go to high school and maybe college or university. But at some point, you know, you have to start your career and be kind of on your own in, you know, what you want to do as a person. You can't go to school forever. So that's maybe a way to think about running your company as well. You can of course go from one program to the next, but at some point you have to be ready to stand on your own two legs and really drive this company forward as a founding team.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, you don't want to be a professional. You don't want your core competency to go to the next accelerator or incubator. It's like you want to round it out a little more than that. One of the things that we were talking about to some people before, particularly people in Silicon Valley, was that they said that accelerators, incubators, those kinds of programs in the US are designed to make money. You're trying to get someone to be at a point where they're gonna make money from their operation. And they were telling us that in a lot of parts of the world, the goal is not to make money, but to create jobs. Do you find that in your program there, are you training people to make money? Or is it more of a job creation type of function? For you and for, do you see in the organizations that you observe there?

Andreas Johansson 

That's also a super interesting question. It's actually something that I've talked to like colleagues who also run incubators and accelerators. We ask those types of entities who should probably be better at communicating things like how many job opportunities the companies that we've supported have created. I would say, I mean, SSE Business Lab is a nonprofit organization, so we don't really have any financial incentives other than through this newly formed VC fund, but that's a separate entity. So our kind of, our goal or our mission has always been to strengthen Sweden's competitiveness. So we see that as being part of supporting these early stage companies so that they can become successful internationally. In the case of Klarna, which is our most successful company. I mean, they've employed a bunch of people, but they've also done a lot to like the brand of Sweden as a nation, really, you know, putting us on the map in terms of a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. And those more softer values are things that we emphasize a lot as well in terms of what we should contribute as an organization. So it's kind of vague and it's kind of fluffy if you work in a regular for-profit company, it's not that difficult to figure out. Because at the end of the day, you're optimizing for the financial outcomes of the company, right? Whereas for us, we don't really have that at all in our vocabulary. We talk about what we do that in some way through entrepreneurship strengthens our competitiveness on the international stage. So I think it's a really good question that you ask and something worth discussing, especially if you are part of running an accelerator or incubator. What is it that we're optimizing for and what should we measure in order to know what to optimize for.

Tom Leonard 

And one of the complications that could come in place is that when you say, you know, you started launching this VC firm as part of the program, it's like, yeah, that can impact, you know, all kinds of things, who you put in and how you treat that. I mean, it's a bigger question. Want to wrap up here because I'm going to take too much of your time, but you're a podcaster for the Startup Syndrome podcast. What's the story there? Why did you start the podcast?

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah, so part of the story is that, so me and a colleague of mine actually have a friend who is a podcast editor. So that's part of the story that we had someone who could help us with this. But then mostly, I mean, we sit all day, every day, coaching our companies and supporting our companies. And we noticed that there are these common questions that always come up. And we, I mean, we've sat in hundreds and hundreds of meetings with these companies, kind of repeating ourselves, or at least providing the same types of insights and learnings. So we talked a lot about, okay, how can we kind of build some structural capital, maybe we should have some type of database with documents, maybe we should have, you know, some type of startup library or something like that. But then we kind of realized that a really fun way of, you know, collecting all of the knowledge that is in our team in the same place is just recording once a week on a different topic. So it's part of collecting all of the knowledge that we have for our companies. But then also, I mean, most of our listeners are not our own companies, other people thinking about becoming entrepreneurs or other people already running their companies, but elsewhere, or even investors have reached out and really appreciated some of the episodes. So it's part of sharing our insights and knowledge, not that we are some type of all-knowing experts, but we do see quite a lot of commonalities once you've met with hundreds and hundreds of startups throughout the years. And it's always fun to be able to share your own perspective on it. So that's part of the story behind.

Tom Leonard 

What a valuable knowledge base to have that not many people have access to and for you to be able to kind of distill it and share. One of the things I always tell people, if you wanna make connections, if you wanna network, start a podcast. People will talk to you so much easier if you have a podcast than if not out there. So that's another good thing. The other thing I completely agree with is figuring out ways to not keep repeating yourself. And if you're in any kind of training or mentoring in a program, a video is so good for that. It's like instead of explaining it one more time, it's like go watch the video and then let's talk about some sort of thing if that's the situation. So no, good for you. Good for you because that's, I mean, I'm obviously a big believer in this. So where can people find you online?

Andreas Johansson 

So I'm on LinkedIn. You can search for Andreas Johansson. It's a very, very common name in Sweden. So maybe you have to add SSE Business Lab. So I'm there. And feel free to follow SSE Business Lab on our social media, like LinkedIn and Instagram and so on. And please listen to the podcast. It's recorded in English, so anyone can listen. And we think it's really good. We think it's very fun to record those episodes with new topics every week related to entrepreneurship and running a startup called Startup Syndrome, which was one of the entrepreneurs in our programs that gave that suggestion. Stockholm Syndrome is maybe what people associate Stockholm with, so we put our own spin on it.

Tom Leonard 

Yes, yes, yeah, it makes it a little more memorable there. So thanks again for the conversation. This is good. It's like, it's one of the things we wanna talk to people, we wanna spread the word about. The chances of maybe someone in our audience being able to apply to your particular program is probably not all that great because we don't necessarily have a large following in your part of the world. We're more in emerging markets than other places, but just to put the idea in people's minds, hey, there are organizations out there that I should be investigating, is one of the things that we wanna do here. So really appreciate your time there, Andreas. What's your next topic on your podcast? That investors should not invest that way or that founders should not accept investment that way.

Andreas Johansson 

So let me think here. We talked about sweat equity and that episode is coming out this week. So when you get an investor who doesn't provide cash but instead provides advice or labor or something else than cash. And we had our opinions on that, mostly maybe negative ones, but we provided our perspective.

Tom Leonard 

Hahaha!

Tom Leonard 

Andreas Johansson 

Usually it leads to suboptimal outcomes for the startup. Very good outcomes for the investor. So we explain a bit why that's the case.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, it'd be so difficult to value what it is, what it's worth. It's like, yeah, it's a negotiation. You can see who's the better negotiator than anything else. So again, thanks again, Andreas.

Andreas Johansson 

Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate the invitation and had a lovely talk today. So thank you so much.

Tom Leonard 

Great, well this is the Gamers Change Lives podcast. Really encourage everyone to go out there and subscribe to the podcast, wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Follow us on social media. More importantly, engage with us. We do a lot of things on social media. And the best thing of all, is when people will engage with our content because we wanna create conversations more than anything else. So again, Gamers Change Lives podcast, play games, create jobs, change lives. See you in the next episode.