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Carl Waldekranz

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32
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2015-08-28
most recent
2015-08-28
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1
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  1. “That's probably like the hardest question. I think for tick tail, it's all about sort of like transitioning to becoming a consumer destination, like really becoming the home to the world's greatest independent brands from all over the world. It's about global expansion, increasing our presence in more and more markets, and everything is, of course, driven by mobile. For me personally, I'd love to just continue develop with this exciting company with my fantastic team and just follow as TikTok goes from being kind of like a back end a tool for sellers to becoming this sort of like fantastic community of creativity and entrepreneurship. It's a really exciting journey to be on”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, I'm becoming an increasingly big fan of the latest software coming out from Google. I wasn't able to live without Google Inbox or Google Photos for that matter.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think that this first round capital newsletter, the email isn't out It's really amazing. They bring together different entrepreneurs that they write newsletters on completely different topics, but they're always really, really on point.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I don't think I actively tried to emulate any founder, but from what I read and understand, I think the approach that Mark Zuckerberg has taken to really build an organization where innovation can come from anyone is something that I'm deeply inspired by.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think that your taste in books and your favorite book changes fast because it's like they mean different things to you at different times. One of my most recent favorites is the score takes care of itself by Bill Walsh and it's actually a book about one of sort of the NFL's greatest coaches and kind of the things that he learned about coaching teams. And as it turns out, there's a lot of similarities to the things that he learned.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “A half, or we just like spent time workshopping in teams and talking about the future of the company. And then we had a day and a half where we just discovered Iceland and saw all of these really cool, really cool destinations.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You're 100% up to speed on everything that has happened, that is happening, and where we're planning to go. The second part, of course, is that we put in place this sort of knowledge or transfer program between the offices. So if anyone in the Stockholm or New York office wants to go to the other office to work, we will sponsor that trip entirely, whenever they want for whichever reason. We also plan to have two company-wide off sites every year. So the entire company twice a year goes on this trip to different destinations where we get to have 50% of work and 50% of just sort of fun and games. So, for instance, the last trip we did was to Iceland. And we had a day in”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “That's a generous question. Well, thank you for complimenting on our company culture. I think that one of the key parts of it has been to, one, make sure that communications is prioritized and invested in. That means that every new hire in the New York office is onboarded for one or two weeks in the Stockholm office so that they can really kind of like understand our culture, our history, our vision, what the company is based upon. During these onboarding weeks, we have like a packed schedule of different key stakeholders within the company that do a full presentation and story about what they work on within pigtail, how the scope of their work has changed over time, why they started a company, what they're excited about in the company. So after that, kind of like onboarding course.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We started off. Yeah, we started off The way back to when we started the company, we started off by going over to Silicon Valley and we spent about a month there only to decide to move the operations back to Stockholm. We simply realized that the advantages of being in Silicon Valley close to all of these investors were outweighed by the advantages of being in a city where we have an amazing network and we have access to this incredible pool of really talented engineers and designers. So we kind of like decided to opt for people versus locations.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, if I would know what ICT would become, I mean, the easiest answer is that I would have moved faster. I would have been braver. I would have been more aggressive.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Are they different? Very different. Well, they're different in the way that you're pitching completely different things. Like when we went out and raised the series seed, we had a 10 slide long pitch stick. And it was all about the team, the product, and the vision. As you go on to raise the series B and you go out and raise twenty times as much as you did in your series C, Then the pitch state changes. It's much more about the data points, how they've been changing over time, certain initiatives on the product development side that have immediately had a positive or negative impact on your KPIs. The story you're telling still has a foundation in the vision and the long-term opportunity, but it's much, much, much more based on data.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Find like 30 minutes or 40 minutes from your busy schedule and give us some feedback on our pitch. And then once we pitch them and they were giving some feedback, if they seemed excited about our opportunity, we would also ask them to introduce us to their investors. It's pretty good because once you get those introductions, you actually get introductions from startups that these VCs have already invested in. And of course, for that reason, already trust and believe in. And I think it's one of the most relevant introductions you can get to two of ECs.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, I feel extremely lucky to have come to know some really great entrepreneurs and people that work at other startups that were able to give us advice and support and mentorship as needed to kind of develop our pitch and develop the presentation of Tick Tail to better reflect the opportunity and how we would actually be running the business. And it was actually also through these people that we were introduced to these great investors, people like the partnership at Bulleton or Klaus Holmels. So what we did when we started pitching and we were supposed to go out and raise our seed round, we started by pitching other startups. We would just contact other startups and their founders and say like, hey, we're a startup as well. We have this pitch.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And I think that's like the first advice. Like whenever you think that you've made the deck smaller or more condensed, like remove another two slides. Because as it turns out, the purpose of a deck is not to answer all questions about a business. It's to create ground for interesting discussions to come. Like VCs in general are interested people and they want to be curious at the end of a presentation. They want to have some questions to ask. They want to engage in conversation. And I think the best pitch techs do that. They trigger excitement, but they leave things for the discussions to come.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Sure. The first pitch that we had was terrible. It was like 60 slides. It took like an hour to go through and it talked about All of the things that Ticktail could become. It was just like, it was such a visionary, like naive were going to take over the world type of deck, but it completely lost the sense of sort of like identifying the smallest possible problem and showing diligence and focus in how we approach that problem. So as sort of like the weeks went by and we did like a lot of practice pitching with friends, the people in the industry and people that worked at other companies, the presentation was cut down for maybe 60 slides to only 10 slides when we started doing like live VC pitching.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Only to have it be like criticized or judged by this really, in my mind, important person that seemed to know everything about startups and technology.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, that's a great question. I think it's different things were you in different ways. That moment was just incredibly nerve-wicking. And probably I've probably never felt as stressed out and excited. Just energized as I did when I walked up on that stage. But then there's been a lot of other moments like that one following the sort of like growth of pigtail. I remember pitching a VC for the first time and just how nervous I was to go into that room and present that deck and present my vision and this thing that I've been spending so much time working and thinking about”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “An incredibly tough deadline to reach. I think at the time we were six or seven people working at Dick Terrell and we all just brought air mattresses into the office and worked literally 24 hour shifts for two weeks just cranking out the first version of the platform. I remember going into the cab to go to the conference to go up on stage to present as William, one of our engineers, was still deploying code that was crucial for the site to work. Going up on stage, I hadn't yet received confirmation that the site would actually work when I was supposed to sort of like demo it live in front of this audience, 2,000 people. It's extremely nervous. But it all turned out really, really well.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “She agreed to have us on stage to present the service as it was going live. Then the second pitch I have to make was to my team members coming back from that meeting saying, look, guys, I have some good news and I have some bad news. We're allowed to present on stage for the Nordic e-commerce summit. We need to create a countdown on our website and we need to go live with the service on this specific time. What was that”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Oh, sure. So the launch event of Tigtail was actually this big e-commerce conference called the Nordic E-commerce Summit. And we were able to strike a deal with them. They bring together about 2,000 people in the industry to hear about sort of like the latest trends in e-commerce. And I went to the person organizing the event and I said, look, if you let us present, I'll make sure that we launch on the day of the event. In fact, I'm going to make sure that we set up a timer on our website counting down to the moment we go up on stage and present so that the service actually goes live at the same time that we go up on stage.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Wonderful. She sells this beautiful porcelain, it's traditional Chinese porcelain, but It's updated with sort of like artful design, actually with old school sailor tattoos painted on the force of it. It sounds a bit quirky, but I assure you it's worth the visit.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, that's how it should be, right? Absolutely. I often go with a team that the day my mother churns from the platform is today I should be fired as CEO of this company.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “We have more than 85,000 brands across 100. Yeah, no, it's incredible. Together they sell more than 2 million unique products. They're spread across 140 markets, although our growth is concentrated to five markets, Sweden, the UK, Germany, France, and of course the US are fastest growing markets”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I love the concept of just working a lot with post-it notes and just sort of like having different themes like let's output as many ideas as we can in less than five minutes and after that like let's output the worst ideas we can come up with in five minutes”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “That's a really interesting question I think I would say two things. One thing is that I think brainstorms work best when they're spread out over a time period. Find it really valuable that as you come up with different ideas or different directions to let those digest for a day or two and then come back and continue the brainstorm because as you're kind of not thinking about it, your brain is actually doing all of this work in the background and the ideas that you discuss of the moment, they're allowed to be developed and nurtured. And then the second thing I would just say is that create a structured form of brainstorming. And this is something you learn when you work at an agency for a few years.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “It doesn't have to happen that way. Like that creative process can be much more kind of like planned or defined and something that is like an activity that you schedule time to do. Because that was actually how we came up with the idea of Tigtail. I think one of those text messages ended up saying something like, let's create Tumblr for e-commerce.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So we started shooting text messages back and forth, and we did this exercise, you know, when you kind of take an existing company and you apply it to a new category. Like, let's create Facebook for dogs or let's create. You'll just take things that exist and apply it to something else. And I think there's this belief amongst people that building a startup or building a company is supposed to have this eureka moment, this idea that no one has ever thought of that just came to you. And that's when you can start a business. And I actually think that coming up with a company idea, something worth pursuing,”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Sure. Well, it started one night. We were working super late in the office. I think it was like 2 or 3 a.m. And I just told Kai, look, I want to do something else. I want to build a product. I want to invest my life into something that is longer term, a company where I can see myself work, not for the next year or two, but for the next 10 years. And I want to work on something that has this impact on the world around us. And I want to work together with you. And then that kind of started a conversation between the two of us where we didn't know exactly what tick tail was or what it was supposed to become. We just knew that we wanted to build a business and we wanted to build a company that had a long-term perspective”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Like as a designer, you create logotype and branding and things like that. And it all looks beautiful and you feel good about it. But it's really hard to see how it affects the bottom line, like how it really drives revenue or users for a company. And e-commerce is a bit different. Like you see how every change you make has this huge, incredible impact on the sales or the visitors and so forth. And that was really exciting.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And from that point then forward, we became this extremely startup tech focused company work with Spotify from the launch in Sweden all the way to the launch in the US five or six years later, started working with Rosetta Stone here in the US and with Nokia. That was still a cool company at the time. And then in 2009, we were acquired by this bigger agency called Identity Works. And that's really where I started thinking more about next steps and what I wanted to do. I've been working a bunch with different e-commerce clients. What's really excited about the e commerce space. As a designer, it's one of those few areas where kind of like your input and impact correlate.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “They hadn't quite launched yet. They had this really exciting vision, this really cool product, Beta product. Well, of course, like a really interesting future ahead of them. But they were looking for a small kind of scrappy startup agency that could be kind of their extended marketing department, help them out with things like videos and the website and things that they didn't have time to because time to think about because they were focusing on far more important things then. And that agency happened to become super strikers, our little boutique.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Oh sure, of course. Well, I started my career in design actually. I started a small little boutique agency together with one of my current co-founders, Kai. Back in, I guess that was 2006. We ran a pretty scrappy operation. We had a small office in a basement outside of the city center in Stockholm, where I'm from. But we ran into a fair amount of luck. One of our first customers was this tiny startup at the time, 12 people small, called Spotify.”

    2015-08-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · FF 010: Becoming Europe's Hottest Startup with Carl Waldekranz, Co-Founder and CEO @ Tictail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source