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Morten Lund

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29
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2016-01-04
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2016-01-04
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1
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  1. “Yeah, yeah, I'll send you a link to the promotion video. There's no We've done already, I think 15 deals in there where different people who want to do something helps somebody, but they're in a big corporate job, they don't know how to do it, and we take care that they get a little cut of the company if they perform or if they raise some money or if they introduce to the right people. That seems to be very, very working really well. It's like a O-Desk or ELANS for deal making, yeah.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Where placeholder deals, because I've tried so many times to help somebody or ask somebody for help, and then there was no way to compensate them. Somebody did, you know, three months of work or helped out and did a lot of intros. So we made a placeholder where if you have an interesting deal that your friend is doing, then you can become the producer or like the executor from Hippocorn side. And there's a reference. It's not a unicorn.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I think one of the career highlights right now is an invention I've done within a new factoring company that we've launched. But if you're creative, I think whenever you invent something that gets adopted or if you're an inventor, somebody starts using your stuff, that's an unbeatable feeling.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's the whole idea. I mean, I'm a little bit sad on my kids' behalf that they're not seeing the blossoming middle class that I grew up in in Denmark. Here in Scandinavia, the middle class is not super happy because there's no growth. They just have what they have, but there's a pretty dark future. I mean, anywhere else, if I go to Colombia, to Bangladesh, India, most of Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, there's a blossoming middle class. They're having fun. They're inviting each other over to see the new car, the new computer, the new stuff that they're getting into their lives.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, so then they pay back the loan and we're trying to deploy aid, the government aid that the big countries, the wealthy countries are giving away anyway, normally in stupid projects. To direct it into super trackable solutions like Codist Trust, and I'm doing a couple of others also with extreme poverty eradication. Yeah, that's the big thing, but again, it's with money included. You're tracking money or you're spending money and you're getting them back in some way. It's profitable and you can have the best people running it.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So basically, just to put the bar really high, I really like before I'm 100 years old to have a Nobel Prize and we're working really hard with CODIS Trust to try to use education and student loans in the third world for people who are on freelance portals. Get in that direction, and I think we're educating 500, 700 people per month now on this scheme. So they get a loan, they can stop working at $1 per hour because that's what they do. A lot of people in Bangladesh and India. We give them a six month education and a loan for those six months. They don't need a lot of money, but they only make them $1 per hour anyway. So a hundred bucks per month for six to nine months, then they can go basically from $1 per hour to seven, eight, nine dollars per hour. And I mean, imagine if you could do that, if you could $67X your salary.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “It becomes nearly an obsession for many founders to reach that billion dollar level. Including myself. I mean, it's a fun goal to have, but the consequence should not be that you take any wrong decisions. And I think a lot of companies forget that one day the billion dollar valuation is not justified unless you have an equivalent revenue.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You have to take a plane to San Francisco because nobody can swallow a company in Europe over a billion dollars. So if you have a unicorn, God forbid it, then you have to go to the US. But if you want to sell earlier or you want to build a massive business, you can easily do it here. But the exit route is mostly in Silicon Valley. But now, I mean, remember, there's a big change in the last two, three years where Alibaba, Tencent, a lot of these companies are the largest companies in the world. So they're going to also be able to buy stuff, but they're probably going to put up their M&A teams in San Francisco.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think it's very equivalent to all the early 90s from the browser came in 94, 95. Nobody really knew what to do, how to handle it. And it's the same with the banking. Legislation is getting more easy to play with, more handable. I think the easiest way is to see it from the other side. I mean, you've been in your internet bank more times this week than you've been watching BBC. If you look at it from the other, it's like the internet bank, the web bank, is a media and nobody's using it as a media. And it could do a lot of interesting things from accounting to all kind of interesting things. And the banks are just sleeping and they're locked in in stupid contracts with IPM managing their whole technology. All of that is going to unwind. And it's just one big opportunity.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I think that trade shift is now in a phase where it's what most people refer to. It's an operational company. I mean, they have to keep developing their product. The whole idea is to become a network business so that if you are supplying to Nike and you're supplying to NHS, it's easy that you have to send your invoices in the same format to those two. But maybe you will even start asking other of your clients if you can deliver in this format. There's a huge network effect, and when a huge collaboration rolls out tradeshift to all their suppliers, a lot of the suppliers are huge companies, and then they will start seeing, hey, wow, if we do it like this. So there's an adoption sales network.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The ability to close huge clients because the whole equation wouldn't work unless you had some really, really large companies who would buy into this vision even though it was a very unstable young company. and that I think was the founder's Achievement that they were able to convince extremely large organizations from DHL to Nike to the British NHS to actually subscribe to this concept and roll it up. within themselves that is the key driver I think in most companies that you get usage”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “As you know, today every company gets thousands of invoices in different PDFs, but you can't read them. And they come from a computer, but you can't read them when they arrive to you, yeah? So setting all of that up and raising a crazy amount of plus $200 million and seeing Christian becoming a super rock star in his field and being part of that was incredible. And it was a good product.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “But that was so easy to go in and say, okay, we want a chunk of that. So where do we start? And then these brilliant guys, Kristen and his partners, came to me and said that they built the digital invoicing infrastructure for the Danish government and they thought it would be interesting to be consultants and I was not super interested in being a consultant or building a consulting business but we kept bouncing until we found we agreed on an idea that we could build a cloud-based platform so that governments and large corporations could get this electronic invoicing infrastructure so they could force all their suppliers to deliver their invoices in one format.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, so Tritchif was, you know, when I was in this mood of being empty on cash and they picked up my art in my house and I just barely survived staying in my house. And the financial crisis was all over. I did a bigger view of the world and looked at, so what am I going to do now? And it was fairly obvious that if you looked at the internet as a media business, it was fairly large. something that was like 10 15 times larger was financial technologies because every bank just to simplify every bank has a budget of a billion a year in technology spend yeah mostly because they have an immense amount of stupid people running around doing nothing”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I would say David Hilkison from Unity is one of them. Really, a guy who took it all the way through many phases. And then, of course, Reed Hoffman, I mean, the superstars, but I think there are many where you have to say, okay, the guy took something all the way. I really like that.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think it's always curiosity and stamina. I mean, you have to be endlessly curious, you know, and be able to absorb endless amounts of input because that's the new thing with the internet. Remember, I grew up with my Bible was the encyclopedia of my parents. And it was, I mean, I got through it pretty fast in my life. And then I of course started reading some books. But now you have all information at the tip of your fingers. So being able to digest that information is extremely important. And then at the same time, being able to have the stamina because things take forever, you know. There's this rule of thumb that any project will take you three times more time than you expected and also three, four times more cost than you expected. And that point at stamina that you really need to want to do this, yeah?”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, it's very hard for me to say right now because everything I do is financial technology and financial products. And there it's everything. I really hope that my kids will at least take a half a year on the finance studies to be able to break down numbers in every way, shape and form. I regret a little bit that I didn't understand it earlier, but then probably I wouldn't have had my full creativity”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I'm probably hard to get back to Earth, but. But it did put me in a, I mean, I had to refocus. I had to, you know, understand a whole new business area, find out what I wanted to do with my life. I mean, until then, I just, I went into this kind of boiling frock syndrome. I mean, it was nice and hot water, and it got hotter and hotter, and I could do more or less what I wanted. But I was not deep into anything. I was just in helping starting or co-founding or investing in, I think, 80, 70, 80 companies. Had no background from that. I didn't understand finance because my family is not from finance, so I had no idea about finance.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think I got a little bit, you know, it was like a wake up call because everything I had done until seven years ago had gone through the roof, you know, in a positive sense, the technology companies, the consulting companies. We did a crazy mobile phone backup service that we sold to Vodafone. Things were a little bit crazy and there was no blocking, there was no end to what we thought what I thought I could do. So getting restarted and have nothing was very today, I mean, I thank God that it happened because I was losing it a little bit, you know?”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's so many things in one. Short, I think, becoming international. Because, I mean, my English was so bad in the beginning of Skype that they didn't want me to be in conference calls because my English was so crappy.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was definitely Nicholas and Janus who pulled that off. And the guys in Estonia, I mean, the ambient silent guys were definitely crucial to making all of this happen. They were technical Wonder Boys and they had all the leverage from understanding peer to peer from the very early days of Kazar. So that whole thing is just a good story. I mean, I'm super happy to have done what we have done. I was very involved with the brand that had to be clean and clear. If you remember ICQ, that was it was impossible to understand what was going on in ICQ. There were 700,000 buttons. But Skype is still fairly clean and cool, yeah?”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think it was when it took off and it actually worked because everything else was a little muddy with sewing and blah blah blah. And I think then the highlight is, of course, anytime today you see a movie or anything where Skype is referred to as a verb, I mean, should we Skype?”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Oh yeah, I'm not sure exactly how much I think actually it was a little bit more I put in their apartments, but I ended up getting a really sweet deal and everybody was... I was really happy and I mean the money was one thing another thing was suddenly to get invited to stuff that a normal guy from Denmark was never invited to you know”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And that was shut down by 10-15 investors who didn't want to invest. And then we moved on. Somebody said, you know, well, we have all these calls and we can't afford them. So why not make a desktop phone out of it now that the sound cards were suddenly working pretty well? And then, yeah, I helped on fundraising, on building the brand, and I basically paid the guys' apartments and got some stock out of that. And yeah, then the thing exploded as soon as it was launched, you know, it was $300,000, 400,000 users after 20 days. And the rest is more or less history.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And I was not really convinced that it would be a healthy business because it was actually a business plan one-to-one with iTunes, but they didn't have or we didn't have the negotiation power to make a deal with the record labels. And then when Kazar was in the most trouble, everybody was looking to do something else. I mean, it was the biggest lawsuit in history. Digital lawsuit at least, with all the record labels suing the crap out of Skype and the founders or of Kazar and the founders and everybody. But I was just helping on a business development level. And some guys came up with the idea of making something called Skyper, which should be a Wi-Fi sharing network.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So basically in our digital agency we work with TELA2, the challenger on the fixed line phone businesses in most of Europe and we've made a lot of their branding and a lot of their strategy work and a lot of their also the portals. We built pretty advanced stuff already in 1999-98 and there we met Nicholas and Janus. They became bosses of that project while they worked at TELA 2 and I build a good relationship with them and they You know, I ended up calling me whether I wanted to invest in Kaz”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “It was mostly because I was annoying. I kept asking questions about the relevance of whatever they were teaching us. Probably because of impatience.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Companies instead of building websites for others. I mean, it was obvious that you could build companies, but it was also, of course, very difficult because nothing worked by then. The web servers were really funky. There was no CPA we could advertise and then end up with a piece of the money that somebody would buy for. The whole affiliate was not really working, only in porn actually. Yeah, then I started looking around and I made a small incubator. got some money from a local bank.”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, well, so basically when I was visiting university before I got kicked out, I had a couple of friends we were playing with just the maximum capabilities of the computers in the early 90s was to do mail merge, do direct marketing. Use the computer basically to print, to make pre-made direct marketing, which was not possible before, yeah. And then we turn that into a digital advertising agency, which then became one of the largest in Scandinavia. And six years later, we sold it to Leo Burnett. The advertising company. as their first digital acquisition. And then I had a little bit of money in my pocket and I started looking at”

    2016-01-04 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC: Morten Lund on Skype, Bankruptcy, Fintech and Why "Banks Are Full Of Lots Of Stupid People Doing Nothing" · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source