Micke Paqvalén – TALKS WITH PETRI
Micke Paqvalén talks about building award winning companies, rough times, and almost dying while working too hard. He also reveals his first startup at early age, and founding of a flying boat company.
Bio
Lars-Michaël (Micke) Paqvalén, M.Sc. (Econ.), is a company builder who has lived and worked internationally for over 25 years and exited four major software companies. He is the founder & chairman of TRÄ Group and Buildbite, co-founder of Brandbassador, Learning Intelligence Group (Claned & GraphoGame), Kiosked, Telepo, HansaWorld and an active early-stage investor in many disruptive companies, such as Proof Analytics among others. He is also on the Advisory Board of Nordic Innovation and Nordic Scalers, a pan-Nordic initiative to find and accelerate next-generation unicorns in the Nordics. During his tenure as an entrepreneur, he has been awarded the European ICT Grand Prize, the award for Best Enterprise Software solution at the Mobile World Congress, the growth entrepreneur of the year in both Finland and Sweden, the American and European Business Awards etc. Micke is a proud father of four children.
Episode notes
- desert walk
- corporate governance
- culture and sound values
- Hotsip
- Telepo
- When VCs join your cash-flow positive company
- losing 50% of your revenues for years to come
- what happens when you remove the founder CEO
- how you get diluted and losing the voting power
- risks with highly scaling up
- cost-control and efficiency
- founders look after money differently than VCs
- The founding of AaltoES
- Yousician, Wolt
- Kiosked
- Contextual tagging, one-click ecommerce
- Google and Facebook taking over the online advertising marketing
- debt instruments as a means of startup funding (e.g. EIB)
- the fastest growing company in Finland
- take care of your health
- near-death by working and stress
- Candela
- dealership rights for Apple in Finland
- Hansaworld
- Wallenbergs and Investor
- leaving the secure corporate job
- peer pressure in the startup boom times
- you can fight gravity but cannot beat it (make your calls quick)
- it’s really easy to make easy things complicated and really hard to make complex things simple
- KPIs to focus
- the cheapest way of financing, and the most expensive
- old wooden buildings
- Buildbite
- Finnish archipelago
Episode links
- https://www.telepo.com/
- https://yousician.com/
- https://wolt.com/
- https://candela.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYdpEYWa5Lk (Candela C-8)
- https://www.kiosked.com/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh
- https://www.hansaworld.com/en
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family
- https://www.investorab.com/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliel_Saarinen
- https://trahus.fi
- https://buildbite.com/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archipelago_Sea
