Episode 08 - From Bricks to Breakthroughs with Matthias Ørum-Hansen - EIR Live

Episode Transcript
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Matthias Ørum-Hansen (00:00):
You're gonna put up all these

(00:01):
guidelines and rules forsomething that will never be a
true entrepreneurial, as I seeit, at least, founder ish kind
of style of building a company,which needs, as you said, to
have equity, not just equity,but also equity of mind. You
need to lean into it. You needto have this boldness, this
beyond the usual, oh, shit, Idon't wanna go to work. Like,

(00:21):
fuck it, I get up everywhere.That kind of emotion that
founders, at least when you lookat the successful ones, need to
have, it doesn't fit old schoolcompanies and how they're run.
I think there's a massivemanaging expectations that need
to be set up in the beginning.You need to define what are the
acceptable outcomes. Is it thatthey all need to spin out so
they are not making noises alongyour other product lines? Is it

(00:41):
that they are a satellite, butthey're fully funded, and these
are the ways they can kind ofuse the organization's
superpower or whatever it is?

Ilya Tabakh (00:49):
Welcome to EIR Live, where we into the lives
and lessons of entrepreneurs andresidents. I'm Ilya Tabakh,
together with my cohost,Terrance Orr, ready to bring you
closer to the heartbeat of theinnovation and entrepreneurial
spirit. Every episode, weexplore the real stories behind
the ideas, successes, setbacks,and everything in between. For
everyone from aspiring EIRs toseasoned pros, EIR Live is your

(01:13):
gateway to the depth of theentrepreneurial journey and
bringing innovative insightsinto the broader world. Check
out the full details in theepisode description.
Subscribe to stay updated, andjoin us as we uncover what it
takes to transform visions intoventures. Welcome aboard. Let's
grow together. Alright. Well,today, we're gonna continue our

(01:34):
theme of talking about kind ofinnovation at larger companies
and and really what role EIRscan play.
We've we've covered a little bitof, you know, kind of community.
We've covered some otherperspectives that EIR can play,
but we're really kind of goingback to, you know, the Terrance
is gonna make fun of me forthis, but the EIR as a

(01:56):
translator and really bringingin perspectives that don't exist
in sort of larger, moreestablished organization as a
general rule, at least. And sotoday for the episode, have
Matthias joining us, who has anawesome background. You know, as
as you've seen through a fewdifferent episodes now, EIRs

(02:17):
don't really have linear careerpaths, right? I think Matthias
is, you know, proudly holding upthat trend.
Really, really awesome kind ofpath through the video game
world, the product world, andthen ending up at, you know,
kind of a global designpowerhouse as an EIR. I'm gonna
ask him to, you know, reallyfill in a lot of those gaps and

(02:39):
get us started on, you know, howhe got started in the
professional world, and we'llkinda kick off the conversation
from there.

Sure. Thank you for having me. I'm
really curious as well and kindaasking you some questions, but
I'll I'll try to kick off. Yeah.So how I kind of ended up at the
end of the path in e r r wasthat I created a startup called
Game Analytics together withsome friends, which was this
software as a service analyzinggames.

(03:09):
It was at a time where Zynga hadpopularized more metrics driven
game development, made us allinsane with the newsfeed on
Facebook. And what that kind ofmade a foray into was a more
professional way of developinggames. And so we applied a very
Google Analytics way to how tomake games better and succeeded.

(03:29):
And we kind of rode some wavesof these game engines coming
out, the iPhone, of course, andjust mobile games becoming this
behemoth. And now it's kind ofsomething everyone does, but now
it also looking back for me isdefinitely something where when
we were making our early kind offoray into it, we were sometimes
seen as like idiots or likemoney makers versus artists who

(03:50):
just wanted to make beautifulgames.
But at the end of the day, cannow see that the ones who are
successful in the app store orwherever are the ones who are at
least making some choices basedon that. So that was kind of my
first product on its own, haddone something before, but this
was kind of the first as like aCPO and a startup and did that
for like four years.

And before we go there, maybe I I know that that
was around the time that yougraduated from high school, were
kinda going to college, youknow. Talk us through that a
little bit because in a Europeancontext, you know, everybody
always says college dropout tostartup thing. That's like the
Silicon Valley story. That'sprobably not the Central
European story or NorthernEuropean story as much. So I'd

(04:29):
love to hear a little bit moreabout kind of how you thought
about that and maybe what folkswere saying at the time.

So actually kind of the steps
before that was that my firststartup was I was supposed to
write my bachelor thesis and afriend of mine came back from
The US having seen Facebook prekind of world dominance. And
definitely we still had to havethe .edu account in The US. And
he showed me this thing and itwas like, we both had with this

(04:55):
golden light in our eyes andseeing like, okay, this is the
future of social networking.Before we all knew it would be
bad as well. And we started tobuild something in Denmark and
actually both of us becamedropouts and never came back to
school.
And so that kind of, after that,it just became, for me,
professional jobs, technicalproject management and worked on
the agency side for some yearsdoing motion graphics, stuff

(05:18):
like that, but like from aproject leader perspective. And
then kind of game analyticbecame the first thing. So I've
had a, you know, massive dropoutcareer as well. And the point
you're making of is it uncommon?I think definitely popularized
by kind of the Silicon Valleytropes, but also by people who
have been successful in Denmarkand Europe, made it visibly a

(05:41):
path versus something you wouldtalk about it like, you need to
be in Silicon Valley, or it'sonly possible in The US.
So I think more and more are atleast kind of accepting that
college or uni or whatever mightnot be the right path. And also
I think a lot of younger peopleare kind of more eager to do.
And then this kind of slowmoving university feel, at least

(06:02):
in Northern Europe whereentrepreneurship isn't taught or
like that kind of, you know,actually our startup was called
Campus because you don't havecampuses in a lot of places in
Northern Europe. The idea thatyou are kind of wearing,
Princeton, Harvard, whatever,like that pride is not very
common in Europe. We haveeducation for free.
So there's a lot of that drivethat comes with like your

(06:23):
parents gave you this or you gotsome kind of scholarship. And I
think kind of that leading intoalso startups is something where
Europe sometimes has this kindof complacency built in because
we have our social welfaresystems, which are great. I
wouldn't live without them. Butthis kind of drive that comes
naturally in The US, I thinkmore than anywhere else of like

(06:45):
there's no ceiling or you justgotta do it yourself, definitely
creates a different approach toentrepreneurship and kind of
also the paths that a lot ofpeople take. So that's probably
still the case, but I'm hopingthat a lot of people are just
more kind of daring their Ithink I also just didn't fit

(07:06):
into the university.
So it wasn't a very consciousthing. It was more like, I'd be
shut out of this if I don'tleave myself. But yeah, that's
kind of how I ended up being aclassical dropout.

And it's helpful. Like, even in The US, right,
it's funny when we talk to orwhen I've talked to EIRs in Asia
or in Europe, everybody knowssort of their local
microclimate, right? They knowkind of how the neighbors are,
they know roughly, but theydon't know sort of what's going
on on the other continent forthe most part. Right? Or or
often what I've seen is, youknow, what's normal in Silicon

(07:41):
Valley or maybe New York, that'sThe US or North America.
And it's, you know, I'm based inKansas City, and sort of
transitioned from academic lifeto entrepreneurial life. And it
was very different than, youknow, kind of some of the
stories that I know on the coastas well. And so it's really
interesting to sort of introducea little bit of that kind of

(08:02):
context. Awesome. Well, I cutyou off a little bit earlier
about sort of getting thatproduct role.
So let's keep going there, butI'm glad that we had an
opportunity to dive in a littlebit.

Yeah. At the end of a failed acquisition,
I left game analytics and endedup in Bang and Olufsen, this old
electronics maker known forbeautiful, very expensive TVs
and audio systems. And at thetime I joined, they had kind of
at least realized that theyneeded to look at the world

(08:32):
differently, approach kind ofother audiences with different
products and definitely otherprice points and legal reasons
made them have to create likethis actual legal entity instead
of just kind of a new productline. And I was hired into it,
we were 40 people and my job wasa basic kind of product manager
thing of leading the charge onmaking our phones be able to

(08:55):
connect to headphones andspeakers. So very kind of, you
know, locked in kind of view.
But quickly, I kind of justshowed that I could do other
things. And within nine months Iwas asked to join the management
of this little group anddefinitely not only because of
me, but hopefully as well a bitabout me. We were then like

(09:16):
after four years, one hundredand fifty people and doing 51%
of the revenue in the company.So it was my kind of first
ninety year old companystruggling internal, a lot of
like just resentment of likedoing things differently and
pride. And a lot of the thingsyou expect from like almost like
a religious group of, you know,not in this house kind of

(09:40):
feeling.
Not that I've ever been in areligious group, just like the
tropes that are around it. Andwe were known as the cowboys
because we always came with newideas, but like slowly kind of
the organization where a lot ofpeople started to kind of really
get a sense that maybe we shouldbe making things differently and
maybe we didn't have to do allthe things. Maybe we could have
partners. And it was just amassive journey for me

(10:02):
personally in a company thateveryone has an opinion about in
Denmark. And it's like in thebase terms, not very big, but
still is like in the MoMA, isstill like was sold in Apple
stores and is known to a lot ofpeople who are kind of into
design, at least when it comesto electronics.
So yeah, I did that for likefour years and new management
came in. We talked about that inthe warmup a while ago, like how

(10:25):
it changes sometimes whensomebody comes in and it wasn't
their project and thatdefinitely happened here. So six
out of eight of us seniormanagers and part of the
leadership team left. I wasfortunate to get like a very
nice severance package, so Ialso spent some time not doing
anything afterwards. But yeah,that was like my first kind of

(10:46):
switch from software as aservice into consumer
electronics was the head ofproduct design, so also very
different than than, like,software.
Yeah. After that, little thingsinto the game industry, which
wasn't very good for me or forthem. So I'll leave it at that.
It's gonna be the beep in thispodcast. And then I met some

(11:07):
people from Switzerland who werethe family that owns Ricola,
this old herbal drop company andwas kind of asked if I would
maybe be interested in trying tohelp them innovate the way they
were producing products withkind of Amplified by My Story

(11:27):
and Bang and Olsen of course ofunderstanding legacy and values
and kind of throwing everythingaway, doing something new, but
having a respect and kind ofunderstanding of how
organisations work and howpeople think.
I spent a year building a littleteam, analyzing, interviewing,
designed a new stage gate modelfor them and new organization

(11:47):
around product innovation andlike a new way of work that was
approved. And then I was askedto move to Switzerland with my
family and lead the productinnovation team for a year and
then transition out again. Sokind of to implement the new
ways of work. Corona hit, wewere only there for like three
months and then moved back toDenmark. So that was like a

(12:09):
adventure that turned into justa Zoom adventure instead for
nine months, but it is what itis.
But it was great, again, aswitch from like consumer
electronics into FMCG. So forme, was also just another
learning journey of like howfood is regulated and OTC in The
US and how much X and Y can youput into it and what are the

(12:31):
promises you can make withproducts. So again, a thing that
I learned and probably you guyscan attest to that is like some
of the patterns you see withproducts just are the same
independent of like what it is,like do people understand it?
How is it made? Is it, know, allof these kinds of parameters
that turn a product into asuccess are at the base the

(12:51):
same, people need to understandthe value, they need to want to
pay for the value.
There's a ton of these thingsthat are the same, regardless if
it's a screwdriver or if it's achewing gum or herbal drop.

Terrance Orr (13:02):
So you touched on a few different things there and
I love to find these themes alittle bit and people's journey
and things that seem likethey're not alike, but related,
if you will. And, you know, youstarted your own company, raised
outside funding, right? Youcalled it a field acquisition. I
want you to tell our audienceswhat you learned along the way.

(13:22):
And in that acquisition, youdon't have to spill all the
beans, but the things youlearned that you took with you
to your roles as a VP ofcategory innovation, working
with a family owned brand andhelping them sort of get off the
ground.
And then I'm going to get intothe point of how we this podcast
around you making the transitioninto your first, you know, in
residence role. But talk to mefirst about what did you learn

(13:45):
from what you called a failedacquisition, right? Because in
many respects, even if it's alesson for you, right, along the
way, you still took thoselessons that were priceless to
other things. So talk to meabout the lessons you learned
from that acquisition that youtook with you.

So when I say failed, it was actually at
the day of closing that thebuyer decided to forego the
deal, sitting on a bench onChamps Elysees in Paris with my
wife, or now wife, not then, butbecame my wife. Buyer had
decided to kind of forego thedeal. So that was kind of at the
end of a six, seven month periodof, like, having eight potential
buyers and they're narrowing itdown, flying a lot to places

(14:24):
primarily in The US and then hadthis, you can say marriage
proposal from an Americancompany. Everything looked fine,
but they decided to forego thedeal. And I think what I learned
from that is, one, think youneed to be naive in those
situations because you need toconvey a hyper positive mindset
to the buyer.
Because otherwise, they're gonnabe like, are you for real? Do

(14:44):
you want this? At some point youhave to kind of, guessing with
old relationships, show like youare also willing to put
something on the line. But onthe other side, it's also hard
to have an organization thatstarts to navigate based on
this. Then when it fails, likehow do you pick it up again?
I I think we manage that partly,but I do think that there's some
kind of lost their, I don'tknow, motivation because they

(15:06):
also thought that they would bekind of working this now
successful sold company. And andI think I for sure had that
feeling. I was window buyinghouses and stuff like that,
because at some point it justfeels like it's gonna happen,
right? Like at some point youhave to just commit to it. But I
think the learning is definitelyto manage expectations.
In a weird way, I think that'sthe only situation where I would
have hoped I would have had abetter kind of two sidedness to

(15:30):
me of, like, one being hyperpositive in the situation with
these possible buyers, but thenon my personal side, be super
kind of just disconnected fromit. I think I was really
disappointed because I didn'thave that kind of distance to
it. So I think that's what Ilearned. But like
introspectively, it's definitelya massive compliment to what
you're building. So of courseit's, you know, it felt great,

(15:51):
but it was a bit of a punch inthe face on a I drank a lot that
night.
I could just attest to that.Like I was That bar in Paris was
hemorrhaging red wine and beers,I think, me. So that was how I
sold for that.

You know, the silver lining in this, Matthias,
is that one, your girlfriendbecame your wife anyway, despite
what happened. And you know,you're still happily, you know,
with her today. And on top ofthat, you know, you learn some
valuable lessons, right? Thatyou took with you to future
roles.

And

I think in itself, some people would call that a
win and and number three,somebody wanted to buy it, which
means you created some value youand your co founder and team.
You guys created some value thatgot somebody interested, right?
That they wanted to buy it,whether it's failed or not, you
know, at this point, but youknow, so that happened

(16:43):
acquisition. You know, youstarted talking to Racola family
owned brand. You became the VPof category innovation.
Talk to us about our favoritepart of the podcast. Tell us
about the transition and ingetting your first in residence
role as a founding residence atthe LEGO Group and give us all
the give us the details alongthe journey. How did you get the

(17:04):
role? All of that good stuff.

As a boy growing up in Denmark, LEGO was
always kind of part of play.Kind of knowing that I wanted to
transition out of the role inSwitzerland, I saw randomly
somebody posting that, you know,the family that owns LEGO was
kind of creating this LEGOinnovation under their LEGO

(17:27):
Ventures kind of brand name.What they were looking for was
this entrepreneur residence orfounder residence, I think they
call it. And it was the firsttime I saw a job where I didn't
have to relocate to the middleof nowhere, which is still like
in The US terms, like veryclose. It's like three hours
away, but feels like it, youknow, it's a, you know, you're
journeying into the unknown inDenmark.
And I applied for it. First jobapplication I think I ever sent

(17:52):
in my life. That was the firstone. And started, like, I I got
some replies back, and it wasthis back and forth, and, you
you're too expensive. You might,like, you might not like this.
It's like maybe, you know, wewant something more youthful.

They're trying to convince you not to take the
job, They wanted you, but thenthey were like, hey, I don't
know, you're too I

don't I don't mean too good. Probably
more like the rules that we'llbe applying to this might not
fit somebody who's donesomething on their own before,
the guided nature of it. Well, Imean, at the end of the day, I
did convince them that I was theright one, so I got the job. And
I'll get into like the nittygritty of like what this thing
was, but I think kind of zoomingout, there was the idea of

(18:33):
taking this tremendous brandLego, you know, extracting what
it is, it's learning throughplay, it's twenty first century
skills, and then applying thisto kind of new projects that
wasn't brick based, that wasn'tkind of what they already did,
but into new fields and my fieldwas audio with the intention of
creating something new, but likestepping up kind of on the

(18:55):
shoulders of this massive brand.And the way they sold it to me
was this like, you have theAvengers, this is Lego, then you
come in as the new guy on theteam.
What they didn't tell me waslike, but you don't get any
powers and you can't tell anyonethat you're in the group. But I
think a lot of the things werevery kind of positive in their

(19:15):
nature. Like it came out of thiskind of family kind of
revisiting the roots ofentrepreneurship. It's a company
that was born out of like woodentoys and then became plastic and
then through the war, likethere's a lot of adversity that
kind of made it what it is,which is really beautiful. But
when you now have, like, a24,000 people massive global

(19:36):
threat, it's also verydifferent.
So I think what they had wasalmost like a family rebirth of
like the idea of it. And thenthey gave it, you know, a place.
And that place changed prettyquickly in the sense of, you
know, let's do this for fiveyears. And then suddenly it was
like, let's do it less. And youshould be one and we should have

(20:01):
many entrepreneurs.
I never saw any colleaguescoming in on my position. On the
investment side, it felt now andhaving been around a lot of
investors, it felt like they hadpeople who had the right
intentions, but probably didn'thave the right profiles to kind
of really be fast at sourcingdeals or have this network. And
so a lot of these efforts justfell a bit short in, you know, a

(20:26):
% intention and just not enoughreal experience. They didn't
hire anyone from existingaccelerators. They didn't have
anyone who would like run abatch at YC.
Like they just, it was justreally fun, interesting people
who all wanted to be the rightpeople. But I think in hindsight
to have been successful withthis as a program, as something

(20:49):
that would be still running,they would have needed to be
kind of far more kind of, to behonest, cynical in what they
wanted to have, because you'renot YC just because you're a
huge company. Like how do youget this flow? Like it needed to
be people who want to dosomething with kids. It needed
to be people who respected likethe rules.
Like there's a ton of thesethings where YC is just like
this huge open net and you canget in and you need to have a

(21:11):
great idea and all of that'skind of true, but it's still not
like, it's not a value basedkind of decision making, right?
It's like more can this float islike the basic need that this
startup needs to fulfill. Andcoming into it, which is like
really great, but then soon Istarted not to see like the, you
know, wasn't holes in the cheeseor problems per se for me, I
just could see like, they're notgonna be able to move fast with

(21:34):
this. They're not gonna be ableto like get 10 new entrepreneurs
in and fail fast, a hundredspeed boats in the water. Like a
lot of that kind of thing thatsometimes needed to get it to
some kind of a volume thatdrives significance, I could
just see that that wouldn'thappen.
So I focused one, a lot of myown. I tried to build this
sensibility to like, where canthis be heading? Because when

(21:57):
you have standups with the team,the wider team, and in the first
two ones you get, like,mentioned, and then the the next
and suddenly don't getmentioned. And then suddenly the
group you're part of doesn't getmentioned. Like, you kinda know
what where this could beheading.
Unless you're very naive, itjust feels like, oh, it's just
coincidental. A new kind of headof everything came in, and and,
you know, she probably had rightvalues for a lot of things, but

(22:18):
she felt very much like a trophyhunter to some extent, like a
big game hunter on biggeracquisitions or bigger
investments. And the gap betweenlike my tiny or potentially
other tiny companies that theywould be building and these
massive, highly publicized dealswas just it's not super sexy to
have like a ton of kind of preseed companies versus going out

(22:41):
and saying, I just invested$2,000,000,000 in Epic Games. So
I saw the writing on the wall,that's kind of when I started to
work towards being able tonegotiate a spinout. But I also
also knew, of course, that thatspinout would necessitate me
being able to raise outsidefunding.
And so I wasn't allowed to, butI kind of did poke a bit around
like under the rightcircumstances, if I can spin

(23:04):
this out, could this idea thatI'm building on and where we are
be fundable? And I think I gotenough kind of just pretraction
that I felt it could be done. Itwas also before the massive
cooldown of venture capital. Andthen started negotiating units
and succeeded, and Lego Ventureswent from these kind of 80% down
to 2% instead through the spinout. And so I was able to raise

(23:28):
a bit more than a milliondollars from outside capital.
And then what I needed to do wasto kind of provide at least two
years of funding for me to beallowed to spin it out.

And before we dive into that, you sort of pointed
out a couple really interestingdynamics, and I think it's
pretty easy to gloss over themunless you've sort of been in
the room or at the table forthose discussions. But I think
the sort of the expectation, youknow, you mentioned sort of big
game hunter, you know, movingthe needle, whatever, and having
maybe a different profile thansomebody that's doing something

(23:59):
earlier. One of the things inour conversations in sort of EIR
is being effective in their roleis is kind of that
intentionality and both sides,you know, having some visibility
into kind of what theperspective of the other side
looks like. Would be great ifyou could spend a little bit
more about, you know, youmentioned that you sort of saw

(24:21):
saw the writing of the wall, ifyou will, you know, kind of
unless, you know but but I thinkthat that that shows that you
had some, you know,understanding for kind of the
larger organizational dynamics,right? Where sort of time,
visibility, leadership time,those things, budget ultimately
are indications of where thepriorities of the organization

(24:43):
are.
Are there sort of other thingsand kind of those perspectives
that could have been helpful,maybe would have led to a
different outcome. Because Ithink that's where a lot of the,
you know, I describe an EIR andTerrance and I both have used
the word translator for, youknow, kind of having that role.
You had that background comingin. And so you knew that, hey,

(25:04):
some of your colleagues thatyou're working with weren't, you
know, kind of familiar or maybewere thinking had a different
thing in mind for how some ofthese should work. Maybe talk
about that a little bit beforewe kind of go into the spin out
piece.

I think you can easily fall in love with
the idea of being allowed tofound something or be an
entrepreneur inside a, you know,possibly great organization and
be this kind of new beacon ofhope and light. I think it's
equally important to understandthe circumstances that you're
part of and to at least just bemindful to the extent that you
can of like, what will yourplace be in the system? As we've

(25:39):
talked about and probably alsohave experienced, like there is
this varying degree of likereality that sometimes it's very
kind of outspoken that this isthe new epiphany and everyone
loves it. And then you startlike looking at the details, oh,
they're actually not getting anyfunding or like limited. And
then like, okay, they're notallowed to express it outside of

(25:59):
the company that they're like,and then a ton of these can just
get a derivative and down tolike, oh, it's actually just
like a product line that mightget kind of, but since it's only
gonna make a fraction of therevenue that the other things in
the company are doing, thenprobably also never gonna get
launched.
But it's just this almost likegreenwashing, I call it
innovation washing. I thinkthat's kind of the same approach

(26:21):
sometimes. The foundation when Icame in was actually that. It
was that there was actually abig budget. Like it was a long
term budget.
It was like five years horizon.Like you don't need to do in
return. Like you just like becrazy, hire all these people.
And it's a family office andthey do a lot of investing in
long term positions and realestate and offshore wind farms.

(26:44):
You don't have to be smart, andI'm definitely not smart.
But I could see that that kindof complexity of having that as
your mindset of where you putall your money and then putting
your little tiny fraction intothis, it would never feel
natural for them to be a startupkind of incubator from the
family office point of view. Ofcourse, like the dynamic of like
not understanding it and notreally knowing what's going on

(27:06):
in this little weird kind ofcubicle and who are these weird
people coming in out with theircaps on and their North Face,
like not wearing ties. And sothere needed to be some champion
and I just couldn't find thatchampion who would kind of
protect us. And having seen itbefore in Bagn and Olufsen, we
had a champion who was the CEOwho kind of took upon him to
like, everyone said this wasstupid, like, don't fuck with

(27:29):
the heritage, like we're themost expensive brand in the
world, like never do this. Andit just became a success, right?
And not that everything shouldbe, but he took the risk. Not
seeing the same person in thisorganization just made it at
least abundantly clear to methat something else needed to
kind of be in the position ofthat. And when it wasn't our
leader and there wasn't somebodyon top, I could at least pretty
sensibly come to the conclusionthat it would be very difficult

(27:51):
no matter what I did. And thatkind of made me make those
decisions towards the spinout.And also because I just felt it
was really funny what we weredoing, and I just liked that.
So that was kind of the reasonwhy. So I think like looking
back, I don't think I could havedone anything, well, could have
done a ton of different things,but it wouldn't have changed the
outcome of it. It would neverhave stayed inside of this
organization. It would have beenlike, you know, leave us, child.

(28:13):
You are the broken one.
Almost like, you know, expelledfrom the flock. Yeah, you have
weird hair and a hat. Go out.Excommunicated.

You know, this is this is such a interesting topic
because I spent a lot of timetalking about this topic in the
work that I do at Mott fortynine, right? And helping large
organizations innovate. And wetalk a lot about what does it
take to recruit a Matias insideyour organization and what needs
to be in place once you recruitthem, essentially, you know,

(28:48):
what things move the needle fortrue entrepreneurs in the
marketplace, right? And we'venoticed a few different things,
a few of the things you'vealready called out, which is
support from one of the highestlevels in the company or some
champion or advocate, right?That we call growth advocates,
right?
People in the organization thatwould champion what you do. I
did not have that in my EIR roleat SAP, right? Where I felt like

(29:09):
I was a lone wolf just floatingaround the company. Nobody knew
who the hell I was, right? Andevery time I would reach out to
somebody, was like I have fourheads, right?
It was like, who are you and whywould I be sharing my road maps
and stuff with you again? It wasjust a very weird sort of no
champion, right? And you youfeel that instantly when you're

(29:29):
inside of a larger organization,whereas when you're in the wild
on your own, it's sort of thereis no hierarchy. You go do what
the hell you want to go and doand you throw things around
until you find a thing thatsticks, right? That's
directionally right, right?
But you keep iterating andthere's nobody to tell you we're
killing the budget. You're donenow, right? And unless you just
run out of cash, right? You ownthat. So I think the other thing

(29:53):
that I'm curious to know aboutis the aligning of incentives
inside of large organizations,which is the part where we see a
lot of gaps, right?
And in the larger companies thatwe work with. And what I mean by
that is entrepreneurs areusually motivated by equity.
Sure, they want something toshow up, right? So yeah, you can
give them a base salary, butthere are motivated by equity

(30:16):
right in the larger outcome togrow the thing to be a rocket
shipping. That's usually whatyou want and we don't see that
often inside of inside of largeorganizations.
So I don't know if somethinglike that was in place at all.
You know, inside of the LEGOgroup at the time, considering
you were the first FIR and theonly one to spin out a company
from this large company. And Ithink folks like Matthias, for

(30:37):
everybody listening, aresuperhuman, okay? Or lucky. When
they figure out a way, or lucky,right?
Superhuman and lucky, rightplace, right time, right
opportunity. But he also didn'ttake no for an answer. He turned
the no into not right now andspun the thing out anyway,
convinced him and went out andraised outside capital with its
own separate cap table. So talkto us about the process. You

(30:58):
spun the thing out, you're outraising capital.
Now you're running a companythat's called Audio for the
folks that's listening. Can youtell people a little bit more,
what is the company you spun outand that process?

Yeah, mean, the whole premise was to
do something with audio thatkids would enjoy, that would
feel different than like whatwas already there. It was kind
of the tale of COVID where audiobooks and podcasts had grown
tremendously from near zero anddefinitely accept screen time as
something that was needed, butalso of course find

(31:31):
alternatives. And so that hasdriven a lot of options for kids
on the audio book and podcastside. Having worked with voice
agents, mostly on speakers,like, you know, early days of
like Google voice assistant andstuff, felt that there was
something at least from atechnology perspective that left
audio in a place that feltweirdly old. Like, it was press

(31:53):
play, skip.
You couldn't search. Youcouldn't change anything. And
having seen, you know, dramaticchanges in game engines gone
from, like, shitty to incredibleon all aspects, like our our
computers, everything just feltlike, has nobody invaded on
audio? And and now, like, today,we're seeing a lot of these
things, you know, changinglanguages on the fly stuff. But

(32:14):
it felt like there was some roomand definitely also some room
that could kind of add someplayfulness to it.
So we started building veryhandheld interactive audio, tree
structures in narratives whereyou could go left, go right,
like very choose your ownadventure style and kids loved
it. Where we saw it going wassomething that would be
definitely something LEGO couldpay for, but also something that

(32:36):
would be difficult to make movefast enough in kind of the
markets. And I think what we hitwhen we raised the outside
capital was just enough of likean idea that was working, but
also enough of like a founderteam that had a background that
they felt could maybe dosomething with it. Around the
table also probably anacceptance of this, this is an
unlikely event, but let's try itanyways. And that led to the

(32:58):
spinout of it.
And then we started building andstarted spending the money that
we had raised and had actually afully functioning product, had a
lot of produced content thatworked well with the kids we
tested it with. But AI kind ofstarted knocking on the door.
The first part was syntheticvoices, so being able to change
into other languages and clonevoices and stuff like that. We

(33:21):
were very early adopters of oneof the leaders, now 11 Labs, and
just seeing if we could use thiskind of in an on the fly
situation. GPT started kind ofemerging as something useful,
and the API opened up.
And so building kind of thatcontext of generating text and
then producing content wassomething we wanted to figure
out, spent three months on it,and at the end of that, just
decided to discard the wholeproduct that we had actually

(33:43):
built for about a year and ahalf and focus 100% on AI. Now
having closed the company, wasthat a mistake? I have no idea.
But AI definitely pointed to apath where production wasn't
kind of hampered by human speedof how fast can writers write or
how fast can get voice artistsin the studio and how often do

(34:03):
they have a problem with theirvocal cords and then suddenly we
can't produce for a month,whatever it is, all of those
things suddenly kind ofvanished. And we could do things
where kids could be partaking inthe stories and make their own
narratives and with a lot ofguardrails and stuff like that,
still keeping in the kind of thethread of healthy entertainment,
that's kind of the company thatwe wanted to build and we're

(34:25):
trying to build.
And we hadn't built enough forthat to kind of raise new round,
unfortunately.

As it sits right now, that's my favorite thing
with a lot of the AI tools thatcome out is that incredibly
fast, like, iteration cycles,you know, where there isn't a
ping pong, the pong comes backimmediately. What's fun with
that is in many cases, you know,if I'm sort of working something
out or working with some folksthat have some good experience

(34:50):
in standing up products anddoing prototypes and things like
that, they're able to move, youknow, one person augmented with
these tools in an incredibleway. Recently, I've heard kind
of Anthropic and others talkabout, you know, we're talking
to like the most brilliantamnesiac in history. Right? And
is there sort of a way to changethat experience a little bit?

(35:12):
But I think as the tools sittoday, that reducing the
iteration cycle to zero to whereyou can go, you know, you still
have limitations as a human, butnow, you know, kind of that team
syncing dynamic collapsed almostto zero. And so I really enjoy
and even, you know, a little biton the podcast, we use tools
here and there. It's amazing howquickly we were able to get to

(35:34):
here's what it is, here's whatwe're gonna do, you know. And
then obviously focus on thehuman parts, right? Like the AI
is not doing this part, but it'sjust amazing to think about how
kind of changes your process alittle bit.
So I just wanted to kind of diginto that a little bit.

Matthias, let me ask you a question. Was that the
first time you ever heard oflike the in residence role? Was
that your first time?

I think I had kind of seen it floating
around. And to be honest with abit of sometimes it's like,
aren't you just looking for likea business developer? Like, is
it like the role kind of felt abit hollow and more like making
something SDR like sound a bitmore sexy? But it was the first
time I saw something that I feltreally compelled by. Yeah, sure.

I mean, that's a common thing. Most people when
they see the in residence role,whether it's operator in
residence, founder in residence,executive in residence, they're
like, this role looksinteresting. What the hell is
this? You know? And what is FIR?
You know, like I know whatfounders do. Like I know what
entrepreneurs do obviously, butwhat does it mean for them to be
in residence? And most of usfind that out the hard way by

(36:38):
taking those opportunities. Andsome of us find out, you know,
the good way and we get a spinout in there, even if we learn
hard lessons along the way. I'mreally curious about, you know,
what you would have donedifferently, right?
If you were the making it up thehead of new ventures at Lego at

(36:59):
the time and you wanted to buildthis FIR program. What would you
have done differently, right? Torecruit a portfolio of EIRs like
you who would in parallel bespending at multiple companies
and really make this a thingthat was still going today? How
would you have constructed theprogram differently?

A thread I've seen in these like, this is
like the third kind of eightyyear plus company I've been in
is that at some point therethere is this understanding of
who you are as a company thatbecomes very embedded in the way
people think and talk about thecompany. It sometimes is super
powerful because it it keeps thecompany in reigns. Like we

(37:38):
shouldn't be doing this becauseit would kind of not be what we
should be doing. And that'sgreat sometimes, but other times
it also becomes very limiting,right? And I think when you
have, if you have an idea thatyou wanna be entrepreneurial, I
think accepting that there's ahigh risk that there's usually a

(38:01):
ton of outcomes that are notpredictable, that you have to
have a lot of failures tosucceed.
A lot of the things that you seeplaying out in these programs
are very contrary to afunctioning organization,
product lines where you knoweverything about your
profitability and challenges toyour manufacturing or supply

(38:25):
chain, whatever it is. And Ithink having that idea that you
can just kind of, as acomplimentary thing, add this
group of insanity to this very,you know, well oiled machine, it
comes at a cost. It either comesat a cost for the old ship, and
somebody needs to adapt tosomething new, or that this new

(38:48):
thing just is this satellitethat will never be connected in
reality to it. Because if you atthe end of the day have freedom
as an entrepreneur and you wannacreate things and you will have
the craziness that you see insomething like YC or 500
Startups or elsewhere, thenarrow, tiny little hole that
things needs to fit into forthat to fit in a big

(39:10):
organization that has a lot ofrules, that does things in a
way, is a bit like buildingsomething that will technically
never fit, right? Because thekind of the direction of these
startups will be so multifacetedthat if they need to hit this
kind of tiny little spec, whichis, you know, fits the values,
fits the way we do it, fits theway we manufacture things, fits

(39:33):
the way we run businesses,you're gonna put up all these
guidelines and rules forsomething that will never kind
of be a true kind ofentrepreneurial, as I see it, at
least founder ish kind of styleof building a company, which
needs, as you said, to haveequity, not just equity, but
also equity of mind, right?
Like you need to lean into it.You need to have this boldness,

(39:54):
this beyond kind of the usual,ah, shit, like I don't wanna go
to work, like fuck it, I get upeverywhere. Like I, you know,
that kind of emotion thatfounders, at least when you look
at the successful ones need tohave, it doesn't fit like old
school companies and how they'rerun. And so I think, so a very
long way to answer yourquestion, I think there's a

(40:15):
massive kind of managingexpectations that needs to be
set up in the beginning thatlike, you know, you need to
define what are the acceptableoutcomes and you need to, is it
that they all need to spin outso they are not making noises,
you know, along your otherproduct lines? Is it that, you
know, they are a satellite, butthey're fully funded and these
are the ways they can kind ofuse the organization's

(40:37):
superpower or whatever it is?
Similar to your feelings ofbeing an SAP, like, I did have
access to everyone in LEGO. Ialso felt the same as you of,
who's this idiot? Like, he hasthe real email, so there's
something here, but, like, whois he? Right? And there was a
lot of kind of really, you know,good natured replies of like, I
think this sounds interesting,but I don't know what to do
because I don't know what we cando with you.

(40:58):
Like, there's a lot of that. Andnot defining like, what are the
rules of engagement before inreverse that needs to be there.
Like, what are you and where doyou want us to go? I think
that's probably one of the firststeps I would take would be
like, what are we willing to do?Like how crazy do we want to be?
Like, is it just a new, in the,you know, in the language of

(41:20):
Lego, a new red fire truck madeof bricks? Or is it something
completely different that we'venever seen before?

When I talk about this topic, you know, I like to
talk about it from the EIRperspective, but I think there's
a couple of differentperspectives. But I think in
order for an EIR to really beeffective, you sort of need to
know what's the secret sauce youbring in. Like, what do you
actually bring to the table? Iactually think it's really
helpful for the organization tohave already done a lot of the

(41:47):
work that you're talking about,right? So to me, that's
leadership commitment, budget,spending time on this issue, and
then already kind of formalizingsome of this.
It's not always acceptableoutcome and things like that,
although I definitely hear whatyou're saying. But I think just
in their own mind, what doesinnovation mean to them, right?

(42:10):
And then how does it actuallysupport their overall strategy,
Right? And formalizing that alittle bit from their
perspective. Right?
Because if they don't do that,then when you show up, you're
going to be telling them aboutall these awesome pixie dust
things you can do. You know, wecan make teleporting machines
and all this other stuff. Right?But they haven't really figured
out what role does that play insort of all the other stuff.

(42:31):
Right?
And I think that's important.And what's interesting is I
think in this conversation,we've spent the most time
talking about the third part,which is sort of upskilling and
reskilling the EIR or thefounder to sort of appreciate
all the things that we'retalking about, right? Because a
lot of this is likeorganizational dynamics. It's
really understanding companyculture. And in many cases,

(42:52):
that's not where entrepreneursand founders came from.
For me, I spent probably toolong in academia. And so that
was a bit of a masterclass inorganizational dynamics. You
know, you had the kind ofopportunity to work in a couple
older established or a few olderestablished companies and you
got to sort of understand, learnand be able to compare. Terrance

(43:14):
spent some time at largerorganizations and being sort of
a change agent in that context.But I think it's really
important to think of this fromlike the EIR perspective, but
also the organizationperspective.
And I think the best roles thatI've seen is sort of a peer
relationship where it's kind ofconversational as opposed to one
side dictating to the otherside. And it's interesting to

(43:35):
sort of we've talked about it ina couple of different angles,
just wanted to kind of highlightthat a little bit because I
think it matches with some ofother conversations we've had on
this topic.

Yeah, pulling on the thread of, you know, both of
you guys, I think that, youknow, are like, I'm having like
this moment over here as youguys are talking because
everything Matias just describedcombined with what you just
said, Ilya, is literally how wetry to like coach, you know,
these larger organizations to beprepared to work with, right?

(44:08):
And how do you rediscover yourentrepreneur DNA, right? And try
things right and experimentbecause you know, naturally
large organizations are reallygood at managing things because
they've gotten big dismantlingthings right and moving fast. Is
not what they're really good at.Like learning agility, you know,
if you will, is not what they'rereally good at.

(44:28):
That's the skill set that anentrepreneur will bring to their
organization if, right, if andwhen, because they're likely
going to do it anyway and askyou for forgiveness later,
right? You know if they have thecapacity to actually have that
type of human being inside oftheir organization and usually
what we see the most successfulcorporates and bringing in FIRs

(44:49):
and spending these people outand having the right structures.
Have their own separate entitylike almost like you were
describing. It's a separateentity. It's a separate venture
studio that's attached to thecorporate or affiliated, but
they can go test wild ideas.
They can do a lot of crazythings. Their HR is different.
Their legal is different.Everything is different, right?

(45:11):
There's no marketing people tobe the brand police.
None of that, right? You go outand you go out and test the shit
out of whatever ideas you wantuntil you find product market
fit and talking to enough, youknow, customers. So I feel like,
you know, you started todescribe that sort of thing, if
you will, and the rules ofengagement with the larger
organization and so on and soforth, and we just need more of

(45:32):
that. Sadly, that's not the casein most large companies that
have grown to be very damn big,right? But they have to
rediscover their learningagility and their
entrepreneurial DNA again to beready for guys like Matthias and
so on and so forth.
So anyway, thank you for sharingyour experience inside the
organization and what you woulddo differently. Now, you gave us

(45:57):
a little bit of time machinewisdom just now, right? I'm
starting to like pick up somethemes in your background. Maybe
you already know them, butthere's this strong affinity for
somehow family owned brandsbeing attracted to you and your
skill set and helping theminnovate, whether that's Ricola,
whether that's the LEGO group,whether that's whatever, you've

(46:19):
built this trend line of how doyou deploy impact at scale for
family owned brands that havebrand equity in different ways
and helping them extend thatinto other channels of growth.
And I think that's a fascinatingjourney to have as a theme that
I'm starting to pick up on alittle bit in your background.

(46:39):
But I don't want to steal anymore thunder from Ilya, so I'm
going to pass it back over tohim.

No, it's awesome. I mean, what's cool is we're kind
of just describing a little bitof maybe what I'll editorialize
as a transition point from kindof startup to more of a
portfolio approach. And one ofthe things that we've seen a
couple of times is thisnonlinear career path ultimately
opens up a lot of optionalityafter a couple stops along the

(47:05):
way. So we'd love to kind ofhear about what you're focusing
on. And then, you know, one ofthe things that we're trying to
do generally is kind of connectthis broader EIR network for a
couple of reasons.
One, a lot of what we're talkingthrough right now, you know,
I've had to think through when Ishowed up as an EIR. I know
other EIRs I've talked to. Ididn't know other people had
sort of thought through this.Although normally it's like, oh,

(47:29):
I don't know why I didn't thinkabout sort of calling other
folks. So we're hoping to changethat a little bit, but maybe
that networking kind of supporta little bit of what you're up
to kind of post audio.

The threat that you talk about is
definitely true. It's also, Ithink when I concluded my work
in Ricola and it was kind ofstarted as a consultant and
ended up on like the inside as aVP, I also felt that like the
likelihood of me meetingsomebody who's like the third
generation owner family and themdrinking casually coffee with me

(48:03):
and offering me a crazy job inan industry I had never touched
before is like quite unlikely.Also, I'd be curious to hear
like how things are on a stateside, but definitely in Denmark,
the entrepreneur or the thefounder residence is is an
uncommon way to innovate. Ithink it's much more usually,

(48:24):
like, you know, NPD people and,like, very kind of core
innovation oriented. I don'tknow why it is.
We have tremendously successfulcompanies coming out of Denmark
that have been able to innovateconcurrently over decades, but
probably the same way you seeit, sometimes it is needed to
get this kind of outside weirdperspective to many, at least

(48:46):
this weird perspective of likehow you could do things
differently, especially inindustries or in companies that
kind of are facing like thesesupernatural changes in the
landscape that they're kind ofworking, whether it's
regulatory, environmental, orthat just like AI is either
going to lunch or whatever itis, right? And I think at that

(49:06):
point, usually, like you havecompanies that mostly probably
do things way too late, and thenyou have companies who are
willing to take the risk. Andvery few, or at least I'm seeing
quite few who are kind ofwilling to take that debt to do
things differently in Denmark,at least. So I would have loved
to continue and find anotherowner family, old school company

(49:27):
with tremendous success, butthey're just very far apart. But
I mean, I'm just like, whereverI end up, it's just been super
fun just to have this weirdmosaic of a career with these
weird brands that still have aspecial place in my heart.
I still get happy when I seesomebody wearing the headphones
that I was in charge of or seesomebody eating a Ricola or, you

(49:49):
know, seeing my kids love LEGOthat had nothing to do with, you
know, the bricks. Just wanted tomake that perfectly clear, but
still is a brand that I kind ofhold dear to my heart. I don't
know how you guys feel about thebrands that you've worked for,
but that's still a very greatfeeling to have to be able to
work for these companies. Yeah.

The interesting thing to me about all this is
sort of digging into, you know,one thing you pointed out that I
didn't dig into earlier, want tohighlight now is that by taking
on sort of this new role andhaving kind of this innovation
and doing new things background,it's actually an amazing way for
the founder or entrepreneur towrap their head around and sort

(50:30):
of really get deeply immersed inkind of a new field. And as you
pointed out, a lot of the thingsare still, you know, the basic
business framework is prettyeasy. Sell something to somebody
that wants it for less than youpaid to make it and make sure
that they pay you, right? Like,it's a like the very basics are

(50:52):
pretty straightforward, but it'sreally interesting to think
about all the different things.And so you mentioned a couple
times learning about kind ofregulations and food and things
like that.
Today in kind of the climate ofinfrastructure and things like
that, there's all kinds ofcompanies being built that need

(51:12):
supply chain, that need energygeneration, and a lot of
innovation folks are sort ofused to they move fast and break
things ethos. But when thingsbreak and, you know, people get
hurt, that's not really a thingthat you can do. Right? And so
kind of adjusting and and reallytranslating some of those
sensibilities are reallyimportant. But what what's fun

(51:33):
is just to your point about theI won't call it sentimentality,
but just sort of the connectionto the spirit of the brand,
right?
A lot of these companies thathave been around for eighty
years or one hundred years orone hundred and fifty years in
some cases, building anddelivering something that
somebody wanted to buy for areally long period of time.
Right? And in some cases, theywere better at sort of iterating

(51:55):
and doing different things.Sometimes they were doing very
similar things. But there'salways some interesting In my
experience, I've actually foundit really useful to understand
how has kind of innovation anddoing new things played a role
in the history of the company,especially if the company is 80
or 100 years old, helping folksremember, right?
Because in many cases, theydon't remember what happened in

(52:17):
the 50s. They don't rememberwhat happened in the 30s. But in
many cases, the company wassaved, new things were invented,
new trends were driven. And alot of that is if you can sort
of shake a little bit of thedust off of it, can be really
inspiring for folks that arekind of connected to that
organization. And for me,honestly, the other part is one

(52:38):
of the reasons I'm reallyexcited about the EIR thing is
if you can take somebody thatcan do the new thing and connect
with folks that know how to dothe current thing and have them
work together, I think thatpotentially some of the good
that comes out of kind ofinnovation in the technology
sector and maybe avoiding someof the things that we know
aren't so good could be a reallybig unlock well beyond the few

(53:02):
sectors where innovation hasbeen so prevalent.
So definitely, I guess that's astrong yes to I've observed kind
of that sentimentality. And Istill get excited about utility
poles, which is something Inever thought in my entire life
that I would be literallypulling out my smartphone or
like, man, that's a complicateddouble pole. I still do that

(53:26):
after kind of supporting someinnovation work in that space.

But it's funny because I wanna sort of like
pull on this thread and go intothe next question that we have
for Matias around whether it'sfood or play or whatever the
next thing you're gonna do, itseems to be this theme of
impacting people, right? And thebrands and the things that you
find to be dear. And one of thefavorite questions that we love

(53:54):
to ask, one of our favoritequestions on the show, right, is
asking people, you know, what isyour dream EIR role? If you can
think about the next thing thatyou want to impact, right,
scale, you know, or the profileof a role that would be
interesting to you, what wouldthe dream EIR role be?

Like, topically, I would love for
whatever I end up doing to have,I almost hate myself for saying
it, but have a positive impacton the world. Sometimes it feels
like everyone has to say that asa precursor to whatever they
wanna say next. I don't wannasell guns or tobacco. The thing

(54:34):
is, that I also and probably,Ilya, you have that as well.
Like, when you've been inindustries where things are not
simple, like where things taketime or like implications are
really deep.
For example, doing something assimple as like a little heart
drop, you take it, you have asore throat, knowing that

(54:56):
certain ingredients can havehugely adverse effects on people
if they're allergic to it. Likeall of those things that go into
building product, like when youhave software, you can change it
in a matter of seconds, you canpull it down if there's a
whatever, something you'vewritten in a bad way. But when
you have these things that taketime to build, it takes time to

(55:18):
set up, it takes time to run it,it necessitates a different
mindset than necessarily theclassical kind of software guy
coming from Silicon Valley who'sjust angry at everything and
wants to build just everythingon his laptop. Like there's just
things that take time. And Ithink the high impact on the
world for positive, whether it'sclimate, whether it's food

(55:38):
supply, whatever it is, I'm notsure that everything needs to be
kind of with the softwaremindset.
I think there's a simplificationsometimes of like, oh, break, as
you said, Ilya, no, go fast andbreak things. I think there's
tons of things that could belearned. So finding something in
that space of moving the needlewith like meaningful innovation

(56:00):
in some of these hugelyimpactful areas, would find that
incredibly interesting to workwith. I have no idea if I would
be the right one for it. Whetherit's health care, whether it's
nutrition or, you know, energy,I'm super curious.
Like, I live in a flat country.Like, we will be impacted by the

(56:22):
rising seas, whether we like itor not, whether it's humans or
not doing it. Like, there isjust a rise in the seas and, you
know, bigger storms. And like, Ithink being able to just feel at
least that I'm pushing a bitagainst it with some business
decisions or things that arebeing built, I would love to be
able to do that. That's kind ofthe dream to be able to be in
that space.

(56:42):
But looking back at where I'veworked and what I've done, I
don't really care where it is.It's just like, that's the
feeling I get that I'm curiousevery day about like what I'm
working on, I'm learning, I'maround people who are smarter
than me in the topics that theykind of need to be smart with,
but I can apply my logic and myway of thinking to move them
forward, I think that would bejust tremendous. And that has

(57:04):
kind of led me to where I am,but also not led me anywhere in
the sense of like, it's not avery, like backtracking just
would look like a weird, likeGoogle Maps going completely
awry, right?

No, that's fair. I think that's fair. And, you
know, you're not alone, myfriend, in saying, I want to
have a positive impact on theworld. Almost every guest we
interview on the show, they'rein the era of their life where
they're looking to buildsomething, sure, but give
something that gives back tosociety and not just, you know,
themselves. So I I think you'respot on with that.

(57:38):
Thanks for sharing, man.

And honestly, the the thing that I love about it
is just that the intention.Right? You kind of by sort of
having that crazy Google Map,right, the rerouting and you
just decided to go with it path,right, which I've had, Terrance
has had. It's sort of the funnything is it connects where you
are today going backwards, butit would have made absolutely no

(57:59):
sense, you know, if you wouldhave went back with your past
self and is like, here's theroad map. It's like, there's
there's no road there.

Right? Career counselor would have said
like, no way. You're never like,stay in school. Like, read your
stuff. Go to uni.
That's the way to get ahead.

Yeah. No. Absolutely. But but but I think
what's what's cool is that thefolks that have actually have
had lots of different passes andlots of different experiences
are very intentional. Couplethings.
One is you know what you're goodat and what you're not good at
and what you wanna get better atand what you don't wanna get
better at. And two, sort ofunderstanding kinda what role do
you play in the organization andwhat role do you wanna play and

(58:36):
then what impact it has on theworld. Right? That actually
takes a lot of kinda context andperspective to appreciate and
then further be intentionalabout. And that was kinda my
point about pointing out thatlittle bit of a portfolio view
that, you know, you're kindadoing a couple different things.
But I think that intentionalityand sort of being able to have a
first person experience in thesewildly different settings is

(58:58):
what makes you kind of a goodtranslator. Right? Because if
you if you speak tech, but don'tspeak operations or speak tech,
don't speak big company, right?You're bound to have a learning
curve encounter at some point inthe near future, right? And
having encountered that before alittle bit is super helpful.
I just love the intentionality.Generally, I love intentionality

(59:19):
and investors loveintentionality from founders,
right? Because you want somebodywith a plan that they're
executing. We've gotten as we asis our tradition a little bit
over. But I always and we'vemade a tradition of asking the
question of what can kind of theEIR network do to be helpful to
what you're working on.
So maybe in the last kind of fewminutes, you can tell us a

(59:42):
little bit about what you'vebeen up to most recently and
then maybe how we can help.

I had a long summer break and now kind
of just leaning into figuringout what to do next. Have a look
at corporate jobs. You know,they're kind of far and apart,
the ones that sound reallyinteresting and don't have a
thousand applicants. So I'mthinking kind of the whole swath
of it. Like the founderresidency would be great again.

(01:00:08):
I would love that. Orentrepreneur in residence. And
also looking at justconsidering, like, should I
start up something myself again?So that's kind of where I am. If
I had intention in my career,like right now, I'm trying to
find intention again.
But like I have three kids, so Ialso have a ton of intention
there.

Terrance Orr (01:00:28):
Absolutely, man. So I think it's the reality of
us having the itch or the urgeto want to do something, but the
reality of, yeah, I kind of sortof have a family now and all of
these other things going on. Sofinding what's the middle ground
between stretching the itch thatyou have of wanting to do
something interesting andinnovative, but also where

(01:00:48):
there's also security. But it'snot rigid like some massive
corporation with all the redtape because that's just gonna
kill us all on this screenbecause we all that is not
something that we like. So, Imean, I get it, man, but at
least you're honest about thatin your journey and what you

(01:01:08):
want to do next.
So, man, have a week of supportyou.

Matthias Ørum-Hansen (01:01:12):
I mean, I think the weird mapping to where
I am also gives me a bit ofconfidence that like, I'll
probably find something that Ifind fun and it doesn't like
have to pop up right now. Butyeah, that's kind of where I am.
And then to the question of likewhat you guys can do, I think
it's just super beneficial,especially for companies to
understand like what value theseroles can have in companies. And

(01:01:36):
also the circumstances thatneeds to be kind of there for
this to also be meaningful, notonly for them kind of top line
or bottom line at some point,internally, as well as like for
us as entrepreneurs or foundersof residence. So I think
highlighting these kind of pathsand the people that we are and
like why we're going into this,I think it's just hopefully

(01:01:57):
something that inspires one ortwo companies to do these bets,
because I do think that forsome, if not many, at least
challenging the way that they dothings and with innovation,
thinking a bit outside of justlike the next product on the
shelf, I do think that is like,when we all talk about Tesla
being great and Elon and likewhoever we kind of put up as

(01:02:20):
like the greatness, it's usuallyvery far from these old
companies and the way they dothings.
So I think committing to itsometimes probably is the right,
is the needed path for lot ofthese companies. And so I hope
that's kind of what you guys getinspired to do.

Well, you're helping us do it, my friend.
Thank you for coming on thepodcast.

Ilya Tabakh (01:02:36):
Of course,

it was great. Thank you.

Absolutely. Thanks for a great conversation and
look forward to getting this outinto the world.

Cool, thanks so much.

What another incredible episode. This time
looking at an entrepreneur who'sbeen in a while, went to go do
this inside of a corporation andtalking about the process,
right? Of spinning his companyout and raising outside capital.
This is a fascinating discussionand a story that we don't get to
hear quite often from folkswho've worked inside of a larger

(01:03:03):
company or a larger brand. Butthere's a few things that stick
out about Matthias in thisepisode in general.
One is adaptability and takingthe leap, moved his entire
family, not just himself, buthis entire family all the way to
Switzerland for one year, right?Only to come back and to get
into the FIR role. I mean, it'ssort of that sort of risk taking

(01:03:26):
and things that you need to bewilling to do, right? To go for
interesting opportunities tohelp different brands and
different companies innovate andtaking that leap and not knowing
what's going to be on the otherside. So looking at his risk
taking, you know, hisadaptability and frankly, the
family being all in with him andgoing, let's do this together.
I think it was just a great,great thing to hear. The other

(01:03:47):
thing is this sort of trainingin organizational dynamics,
right? And navigating the largeorganizational culture and
structures, right? And thingsthat exist, you know, long
before you got there, legacyprocesses, systems, how people
think and trying to navigatethat to get to the outcome
that's desirable. And lastly, isthis theme of him impacting

(01:04:07):
people through family ownedenterprises or brands, whether
that's through food, throughplay with Lego, through the
children, entertainment companyaudio.
I think there's multiple threadsthat Matteis has been able to
sort of like lean into in hisbackground. And I'm really,
really excited for our audienceto hear this next one. What do
you think, Yoyu?

For me, it was sort of almost an extension of your,
you know, the places where youlearned about organizational
dynamics. He also got infectedwith their, you know, kind of
culture and brand and, a littlebit of nostalgia and attachment
to some of the bigger brands indefinitely Denmark, but in
Europe. And so that was reallyinteresting to sort of see him

(01:04:49):
still kind of having attachmentyears after spending time there.
I get that a little bit as well.But it was just interesting to
sort of once you spend some timeat maybe a family, but generally
like 8,100 year oldorganizations, there's some
texture and some richness andsome history there.
And so it's funny how you getsort of attached and entangled

(01:05:11):
in that in some way. So Ithought that was kind of an
interesting thing that both ofus share. But yeah, no, lots of
what's fun is many of theseepisodes we're having to not cut
off, but ultimately there's somuch more that we can kind of
dig into. I think we scratchedthe surface, you know, dove a
foot or two under the water. Ithink there's a lot more depth

(01:05:31):
with Matthias for sure.
It's gonna be exciting to, youknow, sort of bring together
other kind of European, otherkind of hardware EIRs, other
kind of more traditionalindustry EIRs and continue to
kind of pull some of the threadsthat we started to pull on. That
was pretty exciting for me.

Absolutely. And people are starting to see the
variety that in residence peoplecan hold, whether you're expert
in residence, entrepreneur inresidence, or a founder in
residence thus far, you've heardon the show. And there's gonna
be many more that we're gonnaexpose our audience to. And
don't be shy about giving usconsenting in to give us
feedback people, never get achance.

Give us the feedback. And then also, you
know, if you have folks in yournetwork that you think should be
on the podcast and that we canlearn from and connect to the
community, send them our way.And, you know, we actually have
a few episodes out now. There'ssome really good stuff out
there. So if you haven't had achance to check out some of the
earlier episodes, some of theawesome EIRs and XIRs and all

(01:06:26):
IRs out there.
Take a listen and let us knowwhat you think.

Thanks for joining us on EIR Live. We hope today's
episode offered you valuableinsights into the
entrepreneurial journey.Remember to subscribe so you
don't miss out on futureepisodes and check out the
description for more details. Doyou have questions or
suggestions? Please reach out tous.
Connect with us on social media.We really value your input.
Catch us next time for moreinspiring stories and

(01:06:51):
strategies. Keep pushingboundaries and making your mark
on the world. I'm Terrance Orrwith my cohost Ilya Tabakh
signing off.
Let's keep building.

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Episode 08 - From Bricks to Breakthroughs with Matthias Ørum-Hansen

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 08 - From Bricks to Breakthroughs with Matthias Ørum-Hansen