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Rethinking Startups: Inside the Venture Studio Model with Thorbjørn Rønje

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01 JUL • 2025 1 hour 8 mins
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Thorbjørn started with a simple insight: traditional entrepreneurship is inefficient. Too much learning happens on the fly, wasting time and capital. In this conversation, he explains how the venture studio approach de-risks the early phases by codifying what works, from building teams to finding product-market fit.

We dig into Bifrost’s “Purple Ocean” framework for selecting ideas, their rapid product validation process, and why the studio hands off each project once it’s ready to scale. It’s a model designed for speed, clarity, and capital efficiency.

Thorbjørn also shares how these playbooks apply to acquisitions, reviving legacy businesses using the same systems and technology. Underpinning it all is a practical philosophy: build what users need, test quickly, and avoid unnecessary complexity.

We wrap up by looking ahead at how AI and post-labor economics might reshape company building, ownership, and income distribution.

Transcript

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[00:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
And over the years I've kind of come to the conclusion that entrepreneurship is kind of broken a little bit or let's say it has been evolving over the years that I've been involved with the startup scene at least.
[00:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I think that the kind of one of the.
[00:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
It will probably keep morphing.
[00:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
But one of the more final iterations of entrepreneurship in its role I think is within the venture studio model that can be done in many different ways.
[00:28] Viktor Petersson
Welcome back to another episode of Nerding Out.
[00:31] Viktor Petersson
Today I'm joined by my good friend Tobia Rodier.
[00:34] Viktor Petersson
Welcome to.
[00:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
Hello Victor.
[00:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
Good to be here.
[00:37] Viktor Petersson
It's good to have you.
[00:39] Viktor Petersson
Today's episode is going to be about something that we've been chatting about quite a lot over the last few years, which is venture studios.
[00:47] Viktor Petersson
You've taken this concept and kind of built something pretty big around this.
[00:52] Viktor Petersson
So I guess maybe we kick things off with a quick introduction as to who's Thorbjørn and what should the people know to kind of prefix the conversation.
[01:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, sure.
[01:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
So yeah, my name is Torbjorn of Thor.
[01:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
For anyone who doesn't reside in the Nordic countries, I think that's a little bit more easy.
[01:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
But yeah, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life.
[01:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
I built a bunch of businesses.
[01:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
I think I've maybe been involved with 20 businesses or something that I've been part of co founding, I've been the very first money in or pre idea or whatever and I have a portfolio of around 50 businesses.
[01:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
So there's been a bit, a lot of stuff going on and over the years I've kind of come to the conclusion that entrepreneurship is kind of broken a little bit or let's say it has been evolving over the years that I've been involved with the startup scene at least and I think that the kind of one of the.
[01:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
It will probably keep morphing but one of the more final iterations of entrepreneurship in its own I think is within the venture studio model.
[01:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
That can be done in many different ways.
[02:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
But this whole idea of like, yeah, let's be free friends and pick a problem and spend $5 million to somebody else's money to kind of figure out all kinds of things like I need to learn sales now or I need to learn how to fundraise, I need to learn how to hire, I need to learn all these kind of things within that kind of run rate that's probably not the most efficient way to build startups and that's probably also why let's.
[02:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
If you look at VCs and investors, they love to invest in exited founders even without them having an idea.
[02:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[02:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because it's a little bit like their micro venture studio because they went through the motions on everything and it's not always about having the best practice, but just having a practice on stuff.
[02:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[02:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
So that's kind of the learning that.
[02:50] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[02:51] Thorbjørn Rønje
So if you're an exited founder, right.
[02:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
You did hire people before and the right people probably you do know how to make a financial model.
[02:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
You do know how to run sales to some extent, or at least get the right salesperson involved, how to build product, find product, market fit, you know, all of the different components of building a business.
[03:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
And in the venture studio, that's really what you're doing, Right?
[03:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
That is codify exactly what does it take to get from 0 to 1 in the most efficient way, with the least resources spent and with the most learnings and just power through it.
[03:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[03:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
And yeah, sorry.
[03:28] Viktor Petersson
Yes.
[03:28] Viktor Petersson
Before we dive into the venture studio world, let's actually talk what is a venture studio?
[03:34] Viktor Petersson
Because I think it's a concept been thrown around a lot over the last few years on LinkedIn and whatnot.
[03:39] Viktor Petersson
But let's take a step back.
[03:42] Viktor Petersson
Like what's your definition of a venture studio?
[03:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, so I think there's a lot of confusion around because some people say startup, like a company factory, or it could be like a startup studio, a venture studio, an incubator, whatever.
[04:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[04:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
And probably I think that our friend Matt Burris, who is a pretty good voice in the venture studio kind of environment, he's been doing really championing that we should be calling it venture studios just because there's too many different.
[04:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
So were actually calling it startup studios and we changed back to venture studios just to kind of be with all the other venture studio people in the environment to say, okay, let's call it this, so that we can create an asset class around this.
[04:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[04:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
And just for people to understand.
[04:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
YC Combinator, for instance, is an incubator.
[04:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
Tech stars, these sort of things.
[04:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
And the difference is in an incubator, you bring your idea and then there will be a set program and they will buy 10% at a set price.
[04:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
And you will be okay with that price being a little bit lower than maybe what you could get because they will set you up with all the investors, run you through an insane program, mentors, all these kind of things.
[04:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[05:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
That's an incubator, a venture studio.
[05:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
On the other Hand, it takes some of the components of the incubator, you could say a very process oriented, playbook oriented kind of approach to startup building.
[05:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
But it will own 100% per default of whatever company that it creates and take entrepreneurs in and work with them or maybe have them on the team already and say like we are built, we are a company factory from the very beginning, from the idea level.
[05:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[05:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then obviously the founders will have Ekuchi and so forth and there will then be many versions of venture studios and probably we're going to talk a little bit about our kind of version of the venture studio model because they could go in many directions, but that's the kind of core of it, right?
[05:50] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[05:50] Viktor Petersson
I mean the first time I heard of this kind of concept, I guess it's been done internally quite a lot over the years.
[05:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[05:57] Viktor Petersson
In bigger companies.
[05:58] Viktor Petersson
But the first time I think I heard of the concept of this kind of startup factory was probably, I'm not sure you remember Kevin Rose had something called Milk like way back.
[06:06] Viktor Petersson
This must have been like 2008ish time area.
[06:11] Viktor Petersson
They've like they created the startup studio but they basically tried like there was something that this was in the.
[06:16] Viktor Petersson
When mobile first was like king and they started to spin up a bunch of these.
[06:20] Viktor Petersson
I think eventually they folded but.
[06:22] Viktor Petersson
But that was the first time like I heard somebody codify like the definition of this.
[06:25] Viktor Petersson
And then obviously I guess we kind of move from there into the YC dominated world and now we kind of see the next generation be bored in venture studios.
[06:37] Viktor Petersson
Right?
[06:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[06:39] Viktor Petersson
Or yeah.
[06:40] Viktor Petersson
Is that, is that how you see the market or is that how the development you've seen as well?
[06:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, just to kind of add a little bit for the audience.
[06:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
Like there is a lot of venture studios that have been very successful actually, but they have never had the same amount of cloud I think as some of the big startups and some of the big VCs like I don't know, Sequoia and Dries and these type of.
[06:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because.
[06:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
But they are actually have created insane amounts of value.
[07:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
So Bill Grass with Idealab is like they had 10 unicorns, 50 exits, something like that.
[07:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[07:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
That goes 25 years back.
[07:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
So they're like the real OGs of vintage studios.
[07:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then you have the rugged Internet guys, the.
[07:19] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah, of course.
[07:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
They created five unicorns I think and had five IPOs as well.
[07:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
And they were kind of just taking proven models mostly from the U.S.
[07:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
adapting them to their home turf, Germany region market and the dac and also scaling it beyond that, I think that was in Africa and everywhere.
[07:39] Thorbjørn Rønje
That was their model.
[07:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then you have something like Sutter Hill Ventures, which I'm very inspired by.
[07:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
Mike Spicer.
[07:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
They were building companies in house to build like Snowflake.
[07:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I think he personally was the CEO of something like three or five different unicorns.
[07:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
So like they just have the blueprint, right?
[07:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
They know all the best people in the world and they just follow their way of doing it, so.
[08:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
Oh, he was not actually the CEO.
[08:07] Thorbjørn Rønje
There's another CEO that has written a great book.
[08:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
I forgot his name.
[08:10] Viktor Petersson
Oh, yeah, no, I know what I mean.
[08:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
But anyways, the point is that there is.
[08:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
There is, there is exactly.
[08:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yes, it's great.
[08:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
This little CEO book.
[08:22] Thorbjørn Rønje
And he said like, I'm gonna write this book because not because I want to write a book, but because people keep asking me stupid questions about how to.
[08:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
So now I'm gonna write this little book and you can all go read that.
[08:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's a really good book.
[08:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
So yeah, definitely recommend that one.
[08:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
Anyways, it has been done for a while and I think that what people are kind of starting to realize is just that it's a, it's a superior model because you can build just as much value, you can own more equity and you can do it in a much more capital efficient way.
[08:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[08:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
And especially with the sort of.
[08:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
In this new era of company creation where the kind of the cost of building startups is plummeting maybe a few, maybe five, ten years ago, it'll cost you, I don't know, two to five million dollars to really build a startup, right?
[09:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
Just to kind of test it out and de risk that kind of first phase that maybe cost you like 100 to $500,000 now, right?
[09:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
So that's a factor.
[09:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's factor 10 less.
[09:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[09:22] Thorbjørn Rønje
And, and profitability is also interesting again because of interest rate, because of macro, because of a lot of different things that, that kind of makes the unit economics of the VC model a little bit wonky, which is also one of the big reasons, I think, that this model then becomes interesting again.
[09:43] Thorbjørn Rønje
It has always been interesting, but why it's becoming more in vogue and why we also see it as the final boss of entrepreneurship to really kind of nail the model.
[09:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because VC has been.
[09:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
Been struggling, I think.
[09:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
And this is not to say we are not anti vc.
[10:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
We were VCS ourselves.
[10:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
We've been on both sides of the equation, raised a lot of money for our previous startups and they're Great people in the VCBC world.
[10:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's just that they were so good at branding or something that 10 out of 10 companies felt like they needed VC money when in reality it's maybe more like 9 out of 10 companies that should go for that model and the rest should just be great companies that make money.
[10:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I think that the sort of studio model that can kind of lie a little bit in between and there's a lot of founders that won't get diluted that much and run for the next funding round and where they don't get xxx liquidation preference problem later on and all of this bullshit that also follows this model a bit and they get a little bit more just kind of build.
[10:51] Viktor Petersson
But that's.
[10:51] Viktor Petersson
That that has always fundamentally been the problem with why with VC money.
[10:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[10:55] Viktor Petersson
And well, I've.
[10:56] Viktor Petersson
I mean I've been always very reluctant to.
[10:58] Viktor Petersson
That is because it sets up the strategy that your only success criteria is to have a unicorn exit essentially because anything short of that is a failure in the book of a VC in general.
[11:12] Viktor Petersson
Generally speaking, right.
[11:13] Viktor Petersson
There are people without a thesis that.
[11:15] Viktor Petersson
But generally speaking that's thesis, right?
[11:17] Viktor Petersson
And, and just removes so much value from the market because there are so many businesses out there that are very good business, a very cash generated business, but there is no path to unicorn and nor does it need to be a path there.
[11:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[11:34] Viktor Petersson
So this is kind of why I am intrigued by this concept.
[11:37] Viktor Petersson
Like how do you short circuit that loop, right.
[11:40] Viktor Petersson
And not going back to like bank loans in the old school, but like finding a model that is somewhere more modern.
[11:47] Viktor Petersson
And that's why like the venture studio model is intriguing to me in general.
[11:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
We have a specific take on this cash flow side of it in Bifrost.
[11:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
So Bifrost Studios is our venture studio mother company.
[12:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I will talk a little bit more about that.
[12:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
But just to kind of touch on what you're saying there, we have something we call the Purple Ocean filter.
[12:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
And for those who don't know, I think that in the US they use like Brownfield and Whitefield or something.
[12:17] Viktor Petersson
Brownfield, Greenfield.
[12:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, so it's something similar to that concept where you have like, you know, on the one side you have the red ocean that's like shark infested waters with very low gross margins and it's like basically selling rice or some commodity, something like that, right?
[12:31] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[12:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then on the other hand you have the Facebooks of the world, but also the graveyard of startups, right.
[12:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
Where it's like 99% of seemingly good ideas go to die because you needed to convince that you educate the market.
[12:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
You had long sales cycles, huge R and D cost and complexity and all of that.
[12:49] Thorbjørn Rønje
But in between lies an interesting sort of space where one of our companies that we built, that we co founded, Scala Finance, where we got like a million $ARR in nine months, lies within this kind of mix.
[13:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
There is a kind of the Venn diagram overlap if you will, where you say let's take a market that is proven, which is big, where there's clearly a problem, but you want to say we don't want the long sales cycle, we don't want the long rd.
[13:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
We want to always be able to know who the ICP is almost immediately and the capex is lower and you can test out faster.
[13:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that is the purple ocean filter for us.
[13:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
So for Scalar Finance, for instance, which is a CFO company, fractional CFO company, but with a heavy amount of kind of systems and software component on top that makes it so the customer can the kind of.
[13:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
We knew that people were needed, you know that they needed everything from accounting, bookkeeping, financial modeling, everything that a startup is like.
[13:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
Most startup founders are not very interested in that sort of stuff.
[13:54] Thorbjørn Rønje
I know that you're also looking into the AICFO that we are now.
[13:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's going to be very interesting.
[13:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
We're very hyped about that.
[14:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
But, but anyways the point is just there will be markets where you know that there is a huge need and a huge.
[14:07] Thorbjørn Rønje
But nobody made the fractional model or made it with a brand like this.
[14:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
You just need a little bit of a different attack vector and that's.
[14:15] Viktor Petersson
And it's kind of like it's the uber thesis, right?
[14:18] Viktor Petersson
Like how do you make something that's accessible only to the 1%?
[14:22] Viktor Petersson
In this case it's the 1% of the companies out there to the rest of the segment.
[14:27] Viktor Petersson
Whereas Uber made black cars available for the average person where and here you're making a service that's generally speaking only accessible to larger Fortune 500 and so on, or maybe not Fortune 500s, but larger companies and not startups, right?
[14:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, exactly.
[14:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
But I don't know, maybe if just to kind of round out the kind of introduction to Ventus Studios, it would be meaningful to.
[14:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
I brought this one slide at least that we could maybe just to kind of just show what does a normal or not a normal vintage studio, but at least how we see a venture studio, like what is the process?
[15:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
How do we work in a Venture studio.
[15:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because maybe some of your audience also thinking about maybe we should create a venture studio and what does it actually look like?
[15:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
So just.
[15:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, absolutely.
[15:14] Viktor Petersson
I think in the era of AI code.
[15:19] Viktor Petersson
Gen.
[15:20] Viktor Petersson
Gen AI, I think every nerd out there has been thinking like, how can I create more startups?
[15:27] Viktor Petersson
All right, perfect.
[15:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
This is your blueprint.
[15:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
So yeah, this is.
[15:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
So Bifrost actually built Ventus Studios, but within the individual Ventus studio there will be a process and depending a little bit on thesis of the studio.
[15:43] Thorbjørn Rønje
And it's great to have a thesis of the studio.
[15:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
For instance, we just had our Bifrost defense studio go through our investment committee.
[15:51] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's going to be super exciting.
[15:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
That's a very specific kind of vertical.
[15:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
It will come with its own problems, pros and cons, but.
[15:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we will have to adjust it.
[16:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
But in general it goes something like you have idea generation and within the idea generation, that's just like kind of a continuous thing.
[16:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
So for us, for instance, we have a Slack channel where we just put in ideas, all kinds of ideas also not purple ocean ideas.
[16:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then you kind of have a.
[16:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
You build up a bank of ideas and if you have a strong thesis, then you know it will be within thesis probably.
[16:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[16:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you have ongoing idea mapping.
[16:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then you have.
[16:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
For us, we use the purple ocean assessment and we have kind of small investment committees and sometimes we take some people from the community and also say, hey, let's try to look at these three very promising ideas and choose one of them.
[16:39] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then.
[16:40] Viktor Petersson
Let me, let me pause there real quick.
[16:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
So.
[16:44] Viktor Petersson
When do you kind of assemble a team for this?
[16:49] Viktor Petersson
Do you start with a theme and a better theme, sorry, team and then a theme?
[16:55] Viktor Petersson
Or do you start with that idea and then assemble a team?
[17:00] Viktor Petersson
How do you go about that?
[17:01] Viktor Petersson
Or is it a bit of both?
[17:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, so for us, we have something we call the Apollo framework and it has some different dimensions.
[17:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
One of them is the crew.
[17:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
So especially like the people.
[17:14] Thorbjørn Rønje
So for each individual studio, we believe there are like at least five things that you need.
[17:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
You need leadership, you need go to market person like hit of go to market, if you will.
[17:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
You need product.
[17:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it could be like either cto, cpo, gtpo.
[17:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
You need what we call muscle, which is really just kind of gets it done kind of people.
[17:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
We really like this founders associate type role where it's a little bit younger guys that really maybe they've had like three years at McKinsey or something like that, or it doesn't really matter what it Is, but they' proven themselves and they work like, you know, really hard and a lot and just move things along.
[17:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[17:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
But it could also be a more classical CEO type person.
[17:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[17:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then the last thing that you need, which is more like it's not a person, but it's more like you need the main expertise across that fits the thesis.
[18:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
If you have that, then a lot of the other things that you need to do, which is also within the Apollo framework.
[18:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
I don't know if we will have time to go over it, but at least just to suffice to say we bring.
[18:14] Thorbjørn Rønje
We built out the team first and then the team will build the idea bank and they will then be the ones that look at that does the product validation, the GGM validation that launch and then go further out and spin out the company and get maybe a new team to take over.
[18:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
But if we, let's take, let's go through the process really kind of methodically and then people, they're kind of can understand it.
[18:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you build up the ideas, you have the team then that can at least look at what is.
[18:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then you take it through the purple ocean assessment and you make a research paper.
[18:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
And this process will probably take, you know, a few weeks.
[18:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then when you kind of did the kind of feasibility study, if you will, you go to the idea validation board.
[18:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that could also be, if you have a small venture studio, could also just be whoever is in the venture studio so far.
[19:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
And they say like, okay, we have these three ideas.
[19:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
Which one is the best?
[19:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
And you will.
[19:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
We have some workshops that we go through where we score things and we do things.
[19:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then after that you start the product validation.
[19:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[19:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
And it's very much about understanding your icp going out talking to whoever this idea there always be some kind of type of customer, client or whatever that you need to speak to.
[19:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then you just dig into the problem and you try to.
[19:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
We love this Charlie Munger approach where we inverse invert our thinking.
[19:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[19:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
So, so he said, Charlie Munger said invert always invert.
[19:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[19:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because so we asked like, what is 15 reasons this is going to fail?
[19:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[19:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because if everybody can come up with those, then you can pretty much make a solution for it as well from the beginning instead of realizing that later.
[19:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[19:49] Thorbjørn Rønje
But you kind of go out and you test your idea with the icp, understand the idea and build out the first prototype.
[19:56] Viktor Petersson
And this is before.
[19:57] Viktor Petersson
So you've done this before, you write a single line of code.
[20:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yes.
[20:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's like we call it simple, lovable and complete.
[20:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
And it's basically the same as an mvp.
[20:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
And a lot of people have a lot of opinions on what you should call this.
[20:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
I like it because it signifies something and that is you want a clean signal to what you're actually building.
[20:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that's not always about building the perfect product.
[20:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's also about building the brand.
[20:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
And a slice of.
[20:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
So the simple level will complete, will have more a slice of all of the dimension in a pyramid where the minimum or the minimum viable product would be a little bit more just the back of the envelope solution.
[20:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we tried to see if the one feature that is very core to this thing, can we also build a kind of a startup brand around it.
[20:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
And also because if you make a solution that is not branded the same way as what you're going to make, maybe that's also.
[20:50] Thorbjørn Rønje
That was what they were reacting to in the first place.
[20:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[20:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you want to make it as close to what you're actually going to build without spending too much resources.
[20:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
And this is kind of, that is the crux of getting really good capital efficiency in the studio is to understand this.
[21:07] Thorbjørn Rønje
How fast can I go from idea to give the user some sort of perceived value at least so I can get the signal that I get to some sort of validation, but that's sort of the next step.
[21:20] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, this is really interesting because this is where I certainly done this myself and this is hardly something unique to me in the startup world.
[21:29] Viktor Petersson
It's like you're spending a lot of time building things that you do not know if they matter.
[21:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[21:34] Viktor Petersson
Because you have a theory, they have a thesis like we're solving for X, but you don't know what part of X that actually customers will care about.
[21:41] Viktor Petersson
And that quick validation is really interesting.
[21:44] Viktor Petersson
And building a framework around that, like zooming in and being able to pinpoint that exact problem and the branding offset problem is key here.
[21:54] Viktor Petersson
I think that's an elegant way of expressing that, right?
[21:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, yeah.
[21:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
And you're very correct.
[22:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I think the more mature I've become in my kind of entrepreneur's journey, the more I just realized that everything is about icp.
[22:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
Like you can never talk too much to your customers, you can never spend too much time understanding what the real problem is, you know, and so that's why we are very much in this ICP discovery kind of thing.
[22:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then we try to build out something for them again with the high speed, low cost of resources, but still high signal for what the final product will be.
[22:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then what will happen is that you get some kind of product.
[22:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
You say like, did we validate this?
[22:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
Did we get a good enough response from let's say the design partner cohort or whatever you might beta tester cohort or whatever you might call it and say like, and you probably put some targets to how many do we need to kind of care about this or engage and what kind of metric it might be?
[22:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
Like a pre revenue metric.
[22:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
Like how much value are they getting from this?
[22:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
Get some signals from that, say, okay, that was good, we did that.
[23:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
We built the whatever landing page and thesis and the kind of thing.
[23:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
And there's a lot of people who wanted this.
[23:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then you go into the TGM validation after that where we kind of try to sell it as well.
[23:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[23:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you also want people to actually swing their card.
[23:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
And this is of course a little bit like a gray zone area.
[23:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
But you should try to sell your product even if you don't have it.
[23:22] Thorbjørn Rønje
You can always come back and say, bro, here's your money back or whatever.
[23:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[23:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
But the point is just you want to see that they actually care enough, right?
[23:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
And it's just a good way to kind of get high signal to noise because maybe people are a little bit, you know, they can say many times that and depending on cultures as well, like, yeah, we want this.
[23:43] Thorbjørn Rønje
But then at the end they don't.
[23:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[23:45] Viktor Petersson
Well, I mean, it's a very good point, right?
[23:48] Viktor Petersson
Because people say they want a lot of things and I'm sure we've both seen this a lot over the years.
[23:52] Viktor Petersson
Like people say they want this, but do they actually care enough to swipe their card?
[23:55] Viktor Petersson
Like, it's the same thing with feature development.
[23:57] Viktor Petersson
I mean you could, like a feature development is sub project, sub product of of this whole problem.
[24:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[24:03] Viktor Petersson
Because it's like people say they want all, but in reality it's only there's 1 out of 10 things that you really care about because that's really what solves the problem.
[24:11] Viktor Petersson
The other nine things are nice to have.
[24:13] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[24:13] Viktor Petersson
So zooming in on that is super interesting.
[24:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
[24:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
And, and what you're really doing here is you're de risking.
[24:22] Thorbjørn Rønje
And if you look at the old VC kind of de risking graph level, so like pre seed, you're de risking the team seed, you are de risking the product series A, you're de risking the kind of product market fit and maybe see it also the Go to market.
[24:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
And what we're actually trying to do is we're trying to de risk all the way up to series A.
[24:43] Thorbjørn Rønje
But like in two months.
[24:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, because.
[24:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that is the power of the Ventus Studio model, I think where you say like okay, now we go, we know the product or maybe we built some prototype, now you can vibe code, all of these things.
[24:54] Thorbjørn Rønje
I know you have some opinions of that, but for many of the products that are not like deep check or hardware or whatever, it's enough that you can get a good response and see like, okay, what's this idea that were working on to have the product ready in this very 0.1 sense.
[25:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
And the idea is then if we can sell that to a hundred people and that's a shitty product, we know we can do much better.
[25:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
When we spend the real resources and time on building out the code and doing a much better job on that, then we can sell it to 10,000 as well.
[25:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[25:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[25:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
But what you actually now want to do, want to de risk is the GTM side of it, like the go to marketer.
[25:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[25:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
So, so you do the GTM validation as soon as you can.
[25:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
Kind of.
[25:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because that's also just as big as a problem.
[25:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
And especially in a world where you have a hugely saturated marketplace where because of also vibe coding and people are getting smarter and just, you know, like there's so many ideas coming to market, there's so much competition for attention that it might not only be that you created a great product, you also need to find the right channel.
[25:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
Channel model fit as we call it.
[25:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[25:59] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[26:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
So, so that's what you're also trying to prove out with the GTM validation that okay, now we have the product and seemingly the people in the studio or in the kind of design code they wanted it.
[26:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
But can we also get it out there and can somebody swing the card and actually buy it?
[26:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
So that's sort of the next point there.
[26:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
Do you want me to just finish it?
[26:21] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[26:22] Viktor Petersson
One question that I like.
[26:23] Viktor Petersson
So, so you're basically ruling out a lot of possible cohorts, right?
[26:27] Viktor Petersson
Like you're basically saying no slow sales cycles, basically like no enterprise software like where there needs to be multi stakeholder sign offs.
[26:35] Viktor Petersson
Like you're focusing on like what if you, because if you try to do enterprise stuff like they will.
[26:42] Viktor Petersson
You're not going to validate anything.
[26:44] Viktor Petersson
If you.
[26:44] Viktor Petersson
In like a month, I mean you might validate something in a year, but it's going to be that level of sales cycle.
[26:50] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[26:51] Viktor Petersson
So, so I guess that's.
[26:53] Viktor Petersson
How do you view that from a.
[26:56] Viktor Petersson
Is that's part of like you filter that out earlier in the process.
[26:59] Viktor Petersson
I guess you like we're not going touch anything with low sales, slow sales cycles essentially.
[27:03] Viktor Petersson
And like even if it's a massively.
[27:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
Interesting problem space at least then there would have to be some very, some other parts of that being build and that whole research and that whole architecture within some sort of B2B product that it could offset it.
[27:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's not the only dimension and it's not like binary as such where it's like oh yeah, we could never do an enterprise product, but maybe what we would rather do and what I've also seen happen many times when we build businesses start with smaller customers anyways and then as the roadmap matures, as your feature kind of set also matures and you have a full suite of things, you can also move up the ladder and start to sell to bigger but then you could start out smaller.
[27:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
You can validate or maybe just find a very novel way to go to market on that idea where you kind of get, you know, you get 10% of the money because they really want it.
[27:54] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[27:54] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we had a good example right now.
[27:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we built a.
[27:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
Within the finance and maybe like kind of wealth management space in London.
[28:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
We built out Leopard Labs and within three months we built the studio, we built a team, we built the first product and we got like 50 to 100,000 pounds worth of ARR in three months.
[28:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[28:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that was with enterprise type clients, right.
[28:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
So some of the biggest banks and some of the biggest wealth managers in the world are buying our signal product.
[28:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
We have a hedge fund on the side that, where we kind of get, get some of these leads and we can, can kind of understand that ICP really well.
[28:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
But it's just to say it's not impossible to, to sell to people.
[28:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
We just need to find a way where I can then hack it.
[28:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[28:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
So that's also.
[28:43] Viktor Petersson
You basically need to sell relationships, right?
[28:45] Viktor Petersson
That's the only way you can actually hack that.
[28:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, and we had that.
[28:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we said like let's build a studio around the fact that we have an unfair advantage.
[28:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that's actually how we always think with mouse studios.
[28:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
We say if we are to build something within some kind of thesis who has an absolutely unfair advantage that we can build that around.
[29:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we have distribution already or we have very deep product knowledge or we have some.
[29:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I would recommend that anybody who's looking into this model, that they don't just build a venture studio, but that they think about who am I, what is the founder model fit for me, or find somebody, then if they're, it's okay to start something new.
[29:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
We all interpret as well curious, that's fine.
[29:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
But then just find a team that could then have the domain expertise across.
[29:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
But anyways, just to finish this off, I'd say like to do the GGM validation.
[29:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
Let's say you get your 100 sales or whatever it is.
[29:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you say, yeah, we validated the idea it was people wanted, they want to pay for it, they like it, they love it.
[29:43] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then we go ahead and create the founding document, we call it.
[29:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
So the idea of this is doing all of this.
[29:49] Thorbjørn Rønje
There'll be a lot of workshops, there'll be a lot of artifacts, there'll be a lot of things kind of created that we can now collect into one big document or probably be something like 10 to 25 pages, let's say.
[30:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
And what that allows us is that everybody has a shared sense of what actually happened, what went right, what went wrong, when did we pivot, when did we try something new?
[30:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then when we then say, okay, we want to actually spit this out and launch it, we now can get a team from outside that will immediately understand what happened, how it came about and all of that.
[30:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[30:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
So they will be kind of feeling like they were part of the team from the beginning and were part of all these.
[30:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's a ratio so they don't make the same mistakes as we just did.
[30:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then our model is then to kind of, you know, get, assemble a team.
[30:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
You can either then invest the money from the studio into the idea.
[30:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
You might always already be near cash flow positive at this point because the, let's say the validation went beyond your dreams or whatever.
[30:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
But oh, you can also go out and say, okay, let's make a small fundraise for a small team.
[30:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
Let's say two to five people probably something like that.
[31:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
Probably use the same dimensions from the Apollo framework of who we want to hire.
[31:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
You want leadership, you want pgm, you want product, you want muscle and domain expertise.
[31:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then you assemble the team and then you make a big ship off workshop where it's like typically a couple of days where we then use another, we call it the liftoff phase where we have like kind of 100,000, 100 days sort of thing where we, you know, you go through the motions and then it's really off to the races.
[31:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
Back to the drawing board.
[31:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
Take the next idea, create more equity.
[31:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you're kind of creating an equity printer of sorts.
[31:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
This is so superior to a venture approach because they're going to buy in at a much higher valuation.
[31:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
So they both pay more and they get less equity.
[31:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[31:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
Where we can have considerably more equity, less risk, and spend many less resources on it.
[31:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[31:56] Viktor Petersson
But talk to me more about this because I think that's where you do things differently than, I guess, most other studios is this concept of that the initial team that builds and scopes this is not the team that kind of executes on the actual project.
[32:14] Viktor Petersson
They go back to a drawing board.
[32:17] Viktor Petersson
What's the thinking around that?
[32:18] Viktor Petersson
Because I think that's somewhat controversial.
[32:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[32:21] Viktor Petersson
Because normally they are the one that runs the team and then maybe they run like five projects in parallel.
[32:30] Viktor Petersson
So walk me through the logic of completely spitting that out versus just recycling a team and why, I guess is the question.
[32:39] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, so this is a great question.
[32:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's something that we've been thinking a lot about because on the one hand, if you're so successful with a build within the studio that the whole studio transform into one company, that's actually a good outcome because that means that you have product market fit and that's what startup people dream about having.
[33:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right, Right.
[33:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's.
[33:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
So first of all, it's not the worst thing that can happen, but we would still try to not have it happen and rather say, because we want these people to be the core, kind of absorb all of that knowledge that make them really efficient in going through this process over and over again.
[33:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then maybe once in a while, you lose a person to a project because they fell in love with it.
[33:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
They're like, they're indispensable or there's something that just makes sense in them going there.
[33:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then you will get, you say, like I just brought up the slide here.
[33:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
Like you lose your kind of product guy.
[33:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[33:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then you have to go out and hire a new product guy for the core.
[33:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
For the core team because he will now be the, I don't know, the CEO, maybe even CTO of this project.
[33:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because he's just.
[33:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
That kind of makes sense for him.
[33:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[33:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
But in order to.
[33:49] Thorbjørn Rønje
So there's also some, you could say there's some.
[33:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
What are the bad things about the venture studio model?
[33:54] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[33:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
To your question.
[33:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
And there is, in the venture environment, at least we want to go that route because I also mentioned venture studios that go there's a build an idea, then we go to VCs.
[34:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
That's like after the validation basically, right?
[34:07] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that's perfectly fair and reasonable to do.
[34:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
The problem is VCs, they have this kind of.
[34:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
I find it to be quite poor thinking, to be honest.
[34:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
I don't think clears wealth when you reason from first principle.
[34:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
But their argument is like, yeah, back in the day there was like a rule of thumb that the founders should own at least 50% at the service a blah, blah.
[34:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
And it's like it doesn't really take into consideration that it's like okay, but what if they're like they're going to stay if they have 8% or 12% and it's like that's not what they're doing.
[34:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
They have a great salary and they're still going to make like $10 million here or whatever, right?
[34:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's like that's not why they're here.
[34:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
But.
[34:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
But anyways that's like there's these rule of thumbs and this herd mentality a little bit in vc.
[34:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you kind of have to say okay, what do we do there?
[34:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because they're not going to put in money if the cap table is kind of wonky from their perspective because they will see the venture studio maybe as a silent partner even though maybe they don't just get how much work the venture studio actually is doing within each individual business.
[35:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
But either way it is what it is, right?
[35:14] Thorbjørn Rønje
So what we say is if we have this sort of venture case scenario, which is not we like to go default alive.
[35:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we want to get cash flow as fast as possible and be a little bit on a sort of vin, you could say like you're a bootstrapper, right?
[35:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
And we want to be venture bootstrappers, let's say.
[35:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we like this one and done mentality, right?
[35:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
Where we invest enough that because we already derisked all of the things that would normally be the reason why you would get a pre seed round, a seed round or whatever, right?
[35:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then we can do a little bit larger round.
[35:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
Let's say it could be $1 million, it could be a little bit more.
[35:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
But then you say okay, that's enough to kind of at least here on the capabilities, the crew side say like that's leadership, that's execution muscle.
[35:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
We have ggm, we have domain, we have product, that's it.
[36:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
We don't need more.
[36:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
We have AI, we have tech, we have frameworks, we have everything.
[36:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
We have all these other things now that we can solve the rest of the.
[36:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I saw yesterday there was a guy who exited his one man company for $80 million.
[36:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[36:14] Thorbjørn Rønje
So kind of leveraging that thing and then say and we go to the default alive.
[36:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
But if it is like we put in $1 and you get 5, that's a venture case, right?
[36:26] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[36:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then you say okay fine, dilute us, whatever, we'll just figure it out.
[36:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[36:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
It becomes an optionality thing for us then to say if it's worth that much to get in, I don't know, some big VC that cannot live with us owning more, then we just give more equity to the team and then just take it from there.
[36:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
So of course it's a loss from a nominal perspective.
[36:51] Thorbjørn Rønje
But if that means that then we have $25 million that we can pump into a money machine then it's like that's not the worst.
[36:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then we could go back, build a new one.
[37:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[37:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's like that's how thinking on disruptor getting waste.
[37:04] Viktor Petersson
There's a lot to unpack here.
[37:05] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[37:05] Viktor Petersson
So the one obvious thing that I think anybody's been in the startup world would immediately jump to here is like equity distribution.
[37:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[37:12] Viktor Petersson
Like what does that look like when particularly in a complex framework like this where you have like bitfrost on top and then you have this team and then another team like in my head it's just like this is very messy.
[37:26] Viktor Petersson
Like you're breaking the mold from like you were saying with like here's what you're expected to get at end milestone as a CEO, right.
[37:38] Viktor Petersson
Like you kind of if you're a founder of a company you want to have, you don't want to end up with like oh you sell your company and then you're like oh, you walk back, you walked out with peanuts.
[37:49] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[37:49] Viktor Petersson
So like walk me through like what you're thinking about equity structures across this for both initial team that then walks off and hands it off.
[37:59] Viktor Petersson
But then for the team that's coming online like what does those dimensions look like?
[38:04] Viktor Petersson
I mean obviously they vary from, from team to team but like ballpark.
[38:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[38:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
So as you say I think it's very, it depends on the capex building a defense studio and gonna, you know probably had to fundraise more than you do if you are doing a venture studio within marketing products or something like that.
[38:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[38:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yes.
[38:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
Where it's like where I can build smaller solutions.
[38:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
But anyways the core team will own a lot of the equity of the studio obviously typically probably 100%.
[38:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[38:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then you say now we have validated this product.
[38:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
We now need to go out and find a person who is the perfect, I don't know, sort of CEO refounder or just.
[38:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
We would just probably call them founders actually of each because it just, it's just better.
[38:50] Thorbjørn Rønje
And it'll be up to them to then say how much, but how much equity should they have?
[38:54] Thorbjørn Rønje
But I would say that probably person be more than this person would get if he joined a startup that would have a smaller percentage chance of succeeding because they are not de risked as much as we are de risk when we do the product market, when we do the validation and the GTM and ballpark.
[39:14] Thorbjørn Rønje
I would say 10, 20%, something like that for a person like this.
[39:22] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I would probably think that.
[39:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
And now I had a lot of venture cases as well.
[39:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[39:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
Where it's like, it's very typical that you join, you get like 1%.
[39:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[39:32] Viktor Petersson
I guess the controversy is that you call them founders but you're giving them first employee equity, I guess.
[39:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[39:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's in between kind of thing.
[39:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[39:43] Thorbjørn Rønje
A little bit like with the one and done, it's between bootstrapping and venture.
[39:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's between founder and employee.
[39:49] Thorbjørn Rønje
But there is a lot of these founders that we found that has, like, we mostly want to work with exited founders for the same reason that we talked about earlier, that they kind of get it right.
[40:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
So they very instantly understand the model.
[40:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
But it is up to the venture studio, it's up to us as a venture studio and as a venture studio creator to really get the best talent.
[40:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
And it's very kind of from good to great.
[40:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
If anybody read that book, right.
[40:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's about, if you get the right people on the bus, they'll do great things.
[40:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
They can help themselves.
[40:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[40:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, but of course, so.
[40:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
But there's a lot of entrepreneurs who also tried all the other ways.
[40:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
And they're like, they're, they like this kind of thing where they're, they are heavily compensated and if it becomes big, they'll still make like tens of millions of dollars, but they also have a salary.
[40:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
But it's like this kind of.
[40:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
We need to find this.
[40:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because there's also a lot of these corporate venture studios that yes, does not do well.
[40:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
They do very poorly.
[40:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
Corporate, I don't know, incubators or whatever they are.
[40:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[40:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
And the problem with them as I see it is they don't give much equity and they have too much compliance and all of that and they attract.
[40:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
I don't want to.
[40:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
There are good people everywhere.
[40:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
So I don't take this wrong way but, but like one Treponers, let's say they're not really entrepreneurs.
[41:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
They're more like they've worked in some other corporate and now they want to be founders and then they go to these corporate kind of places.
[41:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
And being very, let's say hardcore die hard entrepreneurs, we know what a real entrepreneur look like.
[41:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that's the one, that's the people that we want to recruit to put into this kind of situation.
[41:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
And maybe also if you find like a super superstar, it's like yeah, got a 50% of the company if that's what it takes, you know.
[41:32] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[41:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
To, to.
[41:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
But, but I think it's, it would be something like that normally per person.
[41:39] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right, right.
[41:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
So in between the models.
[41:43] Viktor Petersson
Okay.
[41:43] Viktor Petersson
And the other question I have here is you're talking about a one off founder foundraising event which is rare like because that's you kind of again you breaking the mold here because that's not how normally fundraising is done.
[41:59] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[41:59] Viktor Petersson
Like people like this is a, excuse me, this is the first out of many.
[42:06] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[42:07] Viktor Petersson
Until you either IPO or you go bust.
[42:10] Viktor Petersson
Like those are generally speaking like the two dimensions of fundraising.
[42:15] Viktor Petersson
Like you keep going until you.
[42:17] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, some event happens.
[42:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[42:20] Viktor Petersson
What has the appetite been for that and how does that resonate with I guess traditional VC or are you going into like family offices instead?
[42:31] Viktor Petersson
Which slightly more I guess flexible investment thesis or like have you seen that?
[42:38] Viktor Petersson
Like because that's an interesting one.
[42:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[42:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
So for the investor type, just to take that question first, I definitely say that there's a lot of family offices, a lot of kind of super angels or high net worth that are probably easier in the beginning if you want to create a venture studio to talk to because they kind of get it a little bit more.
[43:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
You do where if you talk to institutionals, they might, it might be a true new model for them or something like that.
[43:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
And if you talk to venture then there's also cap table issue and also there's a little bit of animosity between venture and venture studios because sort of eating their lunch a little bit and they don't like it much and so, but there are also great people in the VC space that kind of totally recognizes and actually very interestingly Sequoia became like Andreessen became kind of a hybrid fund.
[43:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
Now that is like this Everlasting vehicles.
[43:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
They're going into pe.
[43:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
These kind of, there's a lot of changes happening in this.
[43:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
So I think this view is also changing.
[43:43] Thorbjørn Rønje
But I would definitely say that to get that first one and done and probably wanna more go for these sort of family office type because they also like, at least for our model, which is a little bit more cash flow heavy.
[43:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
We, they like that.
[44:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
They, they want to see dividends.
[44:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
They wanna, you know, they come from GAAP accounting, right?
[44:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
They're like, they want to see EBITDA and so but if you then have a venture case or you are in a space that is a little bit more venture friendly, maybe more deep tech or maybe very high octane somehow, or you just simply hit the right kind of product market fit with the right channel model fit, then definitely go to VC and then you just negotiate.
[44:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's always like that with fundraising.
[44:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
I think that the better your case, the more you can kind of more leverage, right?
[44:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
I mean, so at the end of the day if you have something right, you can get them to invest.
[44:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
For sure.
[44:42] Viktor Petersson
It's like the old saying goes, right?
[44:44] Viktor Petersson
Like raise money when you don't need it, right?
[44:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
[44:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
And, but in the end of the day if you do that, then you're just in that race and that's fine because that's also a way to get to the exit.
[44:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's just, it's not our default model, it's our optional model.
[45:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
That's how she, yeah.
[45:06] Viktor Petersson
Okay.
[45:06] Viktor Petersson
That, okay.
[45:08] Viktor Petersson
The other thing I wanted to cover.
[45:10] Viktor Petersson
So we covered a bit of how you're thinking about this, how you kind of evaluate ideas, how you go to market, all that stuff.
[45:14] Viktor Petersson
That's super interesting.
[45:16] Viktor Petersson
The other thing that I guess I spoke a bit about with my, on my podcast with Kevin Henriksen about micro pe.
[45:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[45:26] Viktor Petersson
Because you have also a thesis around buying business as well.
[45:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[45:30] Viktor Petersson
Because, and I, I, I've heard this from more than one friend by now.
[45:35] Viktor Petersson
Like people who are getting into this kind of like, I guess buying boomer business is one way to put it.
[45:40] Viktor Petersson
Right.
[45:40] Viktor Petersson
And you, I think you put it similar terms before when we've chatted about this, right.
[45:45] Viktor Petersson
Buying businesses with a thes of people that there could be a lot more efficiencies gained.
[45:50] Viktor Petersson
Like talk me about your thes around that.
[45:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, so thinking if you bring up something here so it would be a little bit easier to understand.
[46:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
But let's just try to take it without any slides.
[46:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
But so basically what we discovered was that okay, we can build companies really fast or at least we can de risk the kind of.
[46:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
We could de risk the process really fast.
[46:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
So get from just from zero to one, right?
[46:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
But what I also found, because we took over a couple of companies more or less for free that had revenue product market fit.
[46:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
But maybe they were in a situation where the founder kind of was burned out or maybe they were, you know, they only had some dimensions of the crew that you'd need and therefore they didn't build the right brand, they didn't have the right go to market motion or whatever it might be, but they're so profitable or break even, right?
[46:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
And we took over this company and say like, hey, if we can run it from 0 to 1 through the process, we can also just run it through from one to two and just kind of upgrade the company, right?
[46:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because it's very much, it's a craft, right?
[46:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
And if you have the right processes, frameworks and all these playbooks, then you can do the same with a bigger company as well.
[47:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
And so that's why we found that.
[47:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
Oh shit, it's such a layup for us also as we did it, that we found out, oh, okay, we can make a turnaround happen in three to six months, right?
[47:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it kind of dawned on us that what we've been doing on the acquisition front, which was a little bit more in the beginning, was more an opportunistic thing and kind of dabbling in it, that it became like a real thesis around what we call venture roll up.
[47:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we say that we build and buy profitable companies.
[47:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
That's kind of what we do, right?
[47:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
And our thesis now have become much more whole and it's going to be within the financial services kind of company.
[47:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we're talking about accountancies, tech advisory, all of salary budgeting, all of these bookkeeping companies.
[47:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because there is a huge sort of wealth kind of transfer happening at the moment.
[48:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's probably the biggest wealth transfer that ever happened in the history of the world.
[48:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because the baby boomer generation is the biggest one.
[48:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
They have the most assets and they are getting old and they need to go on pension or they are dying off also.
[48:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that is within thesis that we have in this space, in the financial services space just in the US where we'll be operating this specific strategy.
[48:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
There is 88,000 companies that need to kind of transition, I think like well 3, 50% or something of that kind of cohort needs to transition within the next five years.
[48:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
And these are all companies with say an enterprise value between $1 million and $5 million.
[48:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that is the micro private equity space.
[48:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
And the reason why this is interesting in the first place for us is that, and maybe for a lot of other people, there are search funders and there's boring businesses.
[48:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
There's a lot of people talking about these kind of things, right?
[49:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
But, but for us it is private equity.
[49:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's too small for them because typically they raise like let's say $500 million, billions of dollars.
[49:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then they say like, we're going to diversify, but mostly we have to, you know, we cannot buy a thousand small companies, right?
[49:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
Like the operations of it.
[49:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
And also, so they're more like if you look at it on a traffic light, right, it'll be like there'll be some dimensions like whatever, sales, brand people, whatever, that some of it is green, some is red and some are yellow and some is red, right?
[49:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
And for private equity, normally it'll be more like green, green, green, yellow, green.
[49:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because it's such big transactions that they will have some strategic advantage where they can roll up the revenue into an even bigger company.
[49:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
And it has to work because else is catastrophic.
[49:51] Thorbjørn Rønje
So, so they do a lot of due diligence and they put a lot of McKinsey people on it and they really make sure that it's going to work.
[49:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[49:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
But we are entrepreneurs, we're like craftsmen, right?
[50:01] Thorbjørn Rønje
Where like we can go in and say like as long as it's not a negative cash flow situation or like that we're losing money.
[50:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
Well, okay, well actually the more red we have, the better, right?
[50:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because then we can put that through the process, create a new brand, create a new go to market funnel, create a new whatever, work with the company and make it better.
[50:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[50:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
And just.
[50:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
I know this is a little bit long, but just stay.
[50:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
The economics of it is super interesting because for the people who want to sell their companies, there are not any buyers in this space really.
[50:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
Which means that the multiples and revenue is nowhere near the stock market or near the whatever.
[50:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
When you talk with VCs on how much multiple would they give you on your ARR, whatever, right?
[50:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
So they are more like 2, 3, 4.
[50:49] Thorbjørn Rønje
We talk.
[50:50] Viktor Petersson
It's EBITDA multipliers, not ARR multipliers.
[50:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
No, no.
[50:54] Viktor Petersson
Huge difference, right?
[50:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
Gigantic difference.
[50:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's actually on the profit, right?
[51:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
But within our thesis, right, this is what we're discovering that is probably.
[51:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
And a lot of them, their alternative is just closed down because they're like, I need to go and pension now to all, you know, like, or whatever.
[51:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
But they have like, I have a thousand customers, I'm making $500,000 a year.
[51:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
And they're like, okay, you can buy it out for three and a half times ebitda.
[51:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then it's like when you bought that and then you say, holy shit, there's a lot of problems with the company, but they're still making $500,000 a year, right?
[51:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
They say, like, even if I don't do anything, I will make my money back in three years.
[51:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[51:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because this is literally the profits, right?
[51:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
And when you then.
[51:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I don't know how much people know about it depends on the listeners.
[51:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
But like the, in private equity, you have this thing called a roll up, right?
[51:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you have a platform company and then you take companies that are smaller and then you buy them and put them into.
[51:53] Thorbjørn Rønje
This is how most of big mergers and acquisitions actually work.
[51:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
You check that revenue, you put it into the platform company.
[51:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
And because that company is in the stock exchange or something like that revenue will now be recognized at a much higher multiple on the EBITDA.
[52:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
So, so might go from 7 to 10.
[52:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
So they instantly make 30% on the valuation that way.
[52:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[52:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
We could just do that even more because we are so low down.
[52:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
So if we roll up enough of the companies and we also build the brands out, we do a lot of different things, then we both move the total revenue and we also move the multiple.
[52:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that's the case.
[52:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
That's the case that we are working on.
[52:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's a bit long, but it's a complicated subject.
[52:34] Viktor Petersson
No, but I think it's interesting, right, Because I think there's a lot of lessons here for both existing entrepreneurs and people looking to do things.
[52:40] Viktor Petersson
Right?
[52:40] Viktor Petersson
Because I think one thing that really was interesting because I had a offline chat with Kevin about this stuff and we're talking about the innovations that you can apply to these companies.
[52:51] Viktor Petersson
And as tech entrepreneurs we're thinking like, oh, you need to rewrite code, you need to do some complicated process.
[52:58] Viktor Petersson
Innovation.
[52:58] Viktor Petersson
No, no, innovation could literally be like, oh, you moved electronic signatures rather than like and like the receptionist going and give papers to this.
[53:07] Viktor Petersson
Like, like the innovation is so trivial in our mind that we don't even consider it tech innovation, but it actually has a real implication in these businesses.
[53:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[53:20] Viktor Petersson
If you could actually like apply this as I thought that was an interesting one, right?
[53:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, that's a, it's a very interesting point touch upon because entrepreneurs as a cohort deliver very much in the future.
[53:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[53:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
So they are very leading cohort.
[53:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
And sometimes when you know, you have, sorry, somebody calling me, when you are surrounded by this group of people, then you're kind of like, aren't everybody investing in bitcoins and using AI and doing all these things?
[53:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then when in the real economy, that's not really the truth.
[53:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[53:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
So when you go into this kind of companies and you realize, holy shit, they're using fax machines and stuff like that, Right.
[54:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
And you're like, there's some efficiency to be had here, right?
[54:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[54:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
And we are building.
[54:07] Thorbjørn Rønje
And one of the reasons then also why we think that this specific thesis makes a lot of sense other than being a lot of targets and to kind of look at is that we have built this type of company already with scale up and so kind of, let's say 2.0 tech enabled service company that is now where we are now very soon to release the first true really big AICFO.
[54:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we spent like 20, 30 million dollars on kind of getting to that point where we could develop, to develop this technology and it's going to be completely awesome.
[54:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
So when we take that into these type of businesses and they basically just become clients of Scala, Right.
[54:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
Or new Messageware, then we think that we could probably take their gross margin from 20% to 50%.
[54:54] Thorbjørn Rønje
So if you think about that doubles the amount of EBITDA that is there and we then also double the multiple or maybe triple the multiple on that ebitda.
[55:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that's not even touching the top funnel.
[55:07] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[55:07] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then you have a very explosive sort of case, but very low risk.
[55:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's an asymmetric opportunity.
[55:12] Viktor Petersson
Yeah, because you've de risked because you already have a customer base and then you kind of transition them from a service company to product company almost, which is like a huge difference in valuation between those two.
[55:25] Viktor Petersson
Right?
[55:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah, that's what Jonathan, our head of this division, like our micro private equity division in New York, that he is very interested in that whole transformation, which is also very brand heavy, but it's also just implementing a lot of these technologies that we actually know how to do.
[55:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
And for many, probably many entrepreneurs, there's a lot of these sort of opportunities where they could go in and old boring space and take something that is trivial to them, as you say, and really knock it out the park in that sector.
[55:59] Viktor Petersson
Yeah.
[56:00] Viktor Petersson
And I think that leads me to a pretty good last talking point, which is we can't have a podcast in this day and age.
[56:06] Viktor Petersson
We are talking about AI and you was talking a bit about things that kind of ties into the whole thesis of bitfrost around the future outlook.
[56:17] Viktor Petersson
Like if, I mean let's put aside the tool, the gen AI tools we have today, all that stuff because there are a lot of like where we would.
[56:25] Viktor Petersson
How the rate of innovation and all those, the rate of how much they get better.
[56:28] Viktor Petersson
We can talk about how good they are today versus what they can potentially be.
[56:31] Viktor Petersson
That's, that's a separate discussion.
[56:32] Viktor Petersson
But, but what I was curious about your conversation about that was your future outlook of where would we go 5, 10, 15, 20 years out.
[56:41] Viktor Petersson
Like you had some interesting takes on that.
[56:43] Viktor Petersson
I thought that was actually something that's interesting to take on air as well.
[56:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yes.
[56:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
Okay.
[56:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[56:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
So yeah, well I think this, everybody should care about this.
[56:51] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[56:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because it's like probably the biggest transformation that have ever happened in human history or something like that.
[56:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[56:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's like at least on par with the Internet and probably bigger really because it has many wider ramifications.
[57:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
Maybe more like the industrial revolution, maybe even more than that as well.
[57:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
So my outlook is probably.
[57:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
So I've been trying to kind of study this problem and seem like a lot of people, they're kind of making the, you know like putting their head in the sand a little bit because they kind of, it's an uncomfortable subject also.
[57:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[57:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
And, and I've been delving a lot into these post labor economics.
[57:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's like a kind of emergent school of economics.
[57:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
You could kind of say shout out to David Shapiro who is kind of leading a lot of this.
[57:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
What, what is kind of talking about is that the sort of heterodoxy of other economic schools like whatever you have Keynesianism or Chicago School or classical or Austrian economics, whatever it is though none of these economics that take into consideration what happens when you have another apex species basically like and, and what the post labor economics is talking about is like the four dimensions, right.
[58:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
When automations and robots and in kind of a.
[58:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I'm not so much trying to predict is this happening in three years, in five years, in nine years or for 30 years?
[58:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's more just everybody agrees it gonna happen.
[58:18] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's just a question of when do robots and automation become better?
[58:22] Thorbjørn Rønje
They're already arguably better.
[58:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
Faster.
[58:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
They're faster on some things, they're very slow on other things.
[58:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
Robotics are not very good at everything yet.
[58:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that's probably like an optimus thing, right?
[58:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
They're cheaper, they're cheaper on some things.
[58:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
Now they are very much expensive on other parts.
[58:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
It still makes sense to use labor in a lot of things.
[58:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
But maybe one when Optimus Robot cost $1 to operate an hour.
[58:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
And they are safer as well, right?
[58:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because they don't mind crawling up in the top of the Empire State Building and fixing the whatever thing.
[58:54] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[58:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
They're just going to do whatever they want and can work 24 hours.
[58:59] Thorbjørn Rønje
So you have this better, faster, cheaper, safer sort of outlook.
[59:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
And if you look at the economy just kind of from a western globalish kind of outlook, you probably say that 60 to 80% of all the consumption and demand of the economy comes from wages.
[59:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's like basically employees getting paid, right.
[59:19] Thorbjørn Rønje
Then you have maybe 20% depending on the country.
[59:23] Thorbjørn Rønje
The debt market is probably like 40% or something.
[59:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
Very high is transfers from the government.
[59:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
So kind of redistribution of wealth.
[59:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then you have probably something like 10 to 20% as well.
[59:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
That is property based.
[59:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
So that means you have stocks that give you dividend.
[59:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
You have a second apartment that you rent out.
[59:41] Thorbjørn Rønje
These sort of things.
[59:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[59:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
And what's interesting to think about I think and that this is a question that everybody should be asking themselves is what happens when that.
[59:51] Thorbjørn Rønje
And this is the research that I'm.
[59:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
That I've seen when this over whatever time span it is.
[59:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
But it's probably more.
[59:58] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's probably more seven years than 15 years.
[01:00:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
I would say that these 60 to 80% wages goes to 20% of the economy.
[01:00:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
That is a huge delta like difference between these numbers is huge.
[01:00:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that's a lot of unemployment, right.
[01:00:12] Thorbjørn Rønje
Where there will be a transition phase to a new economy.
[01:00:15] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I'm not saying that then everything will collapse or something like that, but it's just to say it's going to be very kind of hard birthing phase of a new potentially super abundant society.
[01:00:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because the distribution of that new GDP maybe we go to growth rates of 7% and you're going to get 100x the global economy over 50 years.
[01:00:37] Thorbjørn Rønje
But if nobody is getting that GDP growth kind of distributed in the right way, we're going to have very social strife sort of revolutionary problems.
[01:00:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[01:00:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
So anyways, yeah, it's a very big topic but it's a really interesting one, right?
[01:00:51] Viktor Petersson
Because I mean not only do you have massive unemployment potentially then, but you also have far fewer.
[01:00:57] Viktor Petersson
I mean if you look at tax contribution, right.
[01:01:00] Viktor Petersson
Like that's a huge part of of where tax are collected from is.
[01:01:04] Viktor Petersson
Is from payroll.
[01:01:05] Viktor Petersson
So that is interesting.
[01:01:08] Viktor Petersson
So, so where do you see that are all Roads leading to UBI or where's your head out around that?
[01:01:17] Viktor Petersson
Because I thought it was interesting overlaying thesis around bitfrost and both configuration and also how you see that.
[01:01:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[01:01:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we just had a great event with Bifrost in the uk.
[01:01:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
We got all the founders together and we're trying to discuss this more from a sort of on a personal level, like what investments should you hold, how to protect your family in this situation, but also from a business perspective.
[01:01:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
And the venture studio model lends itself really well to this kind of environment, we think.
[01:01:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because when there is a lot of change, there'll be a lot of opportunity as well.
[01:01:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
And to kind of think about what businesses should we build, what will change?
[01:02:00] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because let's say that all roads do lead to UBI and for those who are not familiar with the concept Universal Basic Income, UBI is basically just a welfare kind of program where we give everyone, not depending on how much they make some amount of money, just to kind of baseline the economy.
[01:02:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
And the reason why this also is kind of makes sense and I'm talking from completely apolitical point of view here because I come from a very libertarian kind of tradition, let's say.
[01:02:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
But I can see that there is probably no other way because if you don't have the demand side of the economy, it's not very fun to be a Max 7 company either.
[01:02:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[01:02:40] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because if nobody's buying your AI or whatever thing, then there is some kind of collapse in the whole economic kind of paradigm that doesn't make any sense, especially in the depth, very highly leveraged society.
[01:02:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right?
[01:02:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's also in their interest.
[01:02:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
Also it's no fun being a millionaire when there is social strife and revolution and you cannot go out in the street, right?
[01:03:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
So it's in everybody's interest to kind of say, okay, we need some solution here, right?
[01:03:07] Thorbjørn Rønje
And UBI will probably be.
[01:03:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
Maybe we'll start with ubi.
[01:03:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
What I probably kind of foresee will happen is we'll go to some unsustainable amount of unemployment at some point in X amount of years.
[01:03:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
I don't want to guess because it's simply too hard.
[01:03:24] Thorbjørn Rønje
But somewhere after 27, 28 it will start to become very apparent for governments that.
[01:03:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
And some new parties will be like we are the UBI Party or we are the universal high income party or whatever, right?
[01:03:38] Thorbjørn Rønje
And they'll start to text shit out of these Mega Corp.
[01:03:42] Thorbjørn Rønje
So if you're in the top 100 companies, you'll get like some extra mega tags that probably they won't care.
[01:03:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
It'd be.
[01:03:50] Thorbjørn Rønje
I think that there is some game theory here where it is actually in everybody's interest, which can create some.
[01:03:57] Thorbjørn Rønje
There's of course a lot of problems with it, but let's just say that it is in everybody's interest to have also demand for your products.
[01:04:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[01:04:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
So I think that.
[01:04:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
But I think what will happen first is that we get some sort of economic problem.
[01:04:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[01:04:10] Thorbjørn Rønje
Where they kind of, they're not realized this in time.
[01:04:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
And I think what I've seen research wise is like if you had 14% unemployment, like on a structural level, then it's catastrophic.
[01:04:22] Thorbjørn Rønje
And if you look at the Great Depression, for instance, unemployment went to 25, 30% but for six months.
[01:04:28] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[01:04:29] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then it went sort of back.
[01:04:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that was very catastrophic.
[01:04:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[01:04:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
And they didn't have much depth compared to what we have now.
[01:04:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[01:04:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
So if you go to.
[01:04:36] Thorbjørn Rønje
If you had those levels at a sustained environment and like in a sustained kind of time frame, then.
[01:04:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
Well, then it's extremely problematic.
[01:04:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[01:04:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
So I think that the response will be something like that.
[01:04:50] Thorbjørn Rønje
And there's a lot of these other things they could do.
[01:04:52] Thorbjørn Rønje
So sovereign wealth funds will become a much bigger component, I think also like, so no fund, the Norwegian, all the.
[01:05:00] Viktor Petersson
Successful sovereign fund in the world.
[01:05:02] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[01:05:03] Thorbjørn Rønje
And there are all these, especially in the Middle east, have a lot of sovereign wealth funds and the US are creating sovereign wealth funds and these will all start to capture.
[01:05:11] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we need to go to basically a property based system where people also get ownership.
[01:05:17] Thorbjørn Rønje
Because from a very human perspective every.
[01:05:20] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's, it's.
[01:05:21] Thorbjørn Rønje
There will be a lot of kind of spiritual and emotional problems with no longer being able to kind of have a purpose.
[01:05:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
You could say, right.
[01:05:30] Thorbjørn Rønje
That is very obviously be given by your job right now.
[01:05:34] Thorbjørn Rønje
Not that I say that it should be like that, but, but it's just there will be some meaningless problem where people would then say okay, how can I get back into the.
[01:05:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
To be something.
[01:05:45] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that would probably be owning property in.
[01:05:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
It could be whatever.
[01:05:49] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[01:05:51] Thorbjørn Rønje
You used.
[01:05:51] Thorbjørn Rønje
I don't mean when I say property, I don't mean properties like real estate.
[01:05:55] Thorbjørn Rønje
It could also be that.
[01:05:56] Thorbjørn Rønje
But I just mean like that the lowest part of society will be on UBI and they'll probably as always hit the people who have the more menial jobs first.
[01:06:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
But.
[01:06:08] Thorbjørn Rønje
And then, and all of those transfers will then still kind of sustain the economy.
[01:06:13] Thorbjørn Rønje
But you will try to say, okay, can we go together in this DAO or collective to own something together and have the higher amount of income that will come from property generator, there will still be salaries, there will still be jobs, there will be much less.
[01:06:25] Thorbjørn Rønje
I'm not saying that everybody will be out of a job, actually.
[01:06:27] Thorbjørn Rønje
I'm just saying that it's a problem if 50% are going to be out of a job.
[01:06:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
Right.
[01:06:31] Thorbjørn Rønje
From an economic perspective.
[01:06:33] Thorbjørn Rønje
But yeah.
[01:06:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
So we need a lot of new sources of income for everyone that is relies more on property and less on transfers.
[01:06:44] Thorbjørn Rønje
And that will be the battle of the political future, I think.
[01:06:48] Viktor Petersson
I think that's fine.
[01:06:50] Viktor Petersson
Toby, this has been super interesting.
[01:06:53] Viktor Petersson
Anything closing notes on you want to get to the audience before we wrap up for today?
[01:07:04] Thorbjørn Rønje
I guess.
[01:07:05] Thorbjørn Rønje
Yeah.
[01:07:06] Thorbjørn Rønje
We are fundraising, of course, so that's interesting.
[01:07:09] Thorbjørn Rønje
I don't think I'm allowed to talk too much about it, but Biffrust is racing fun too.
[01:07:16] Thorbjørn Rønje
So, yeah, it's always great to talk to anyone interested in what we're doing at Bifrost with founders who are thinking about this model.
[01:07:26] Thorbjørn Rønje
And, you know, we are always trying to create a great network around us.
[01:07:32] Thorbjørn Rønje
It's very much what one of the big parts of what we do.
[01:07:35] Thorbjørn Rønje
And yeah, so feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or whatever.
[01:07:42] Viktor Petersson
Good stuff.
[01:07:43] Viktor Petersson
Perfect.
[01:07:44] Viktor Petersson
Again, thanks so much for coming on the show, Tobyan.
[01:07:46] Thorbjørn Rønje
Thank you, Victor.
[01:07:47] Thorbjørn Rønje
It was a pleasure.
[01:07:48] Thorbjørn Rønje
Cheers.

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