Every two weeks, I have coffee with a different founder. We discuss our lives, our passions, what we’ve learned, … in an intimate interview, to get to know the person behind the company.
For this twenty-third episode, I spoke with Hampus Jakobsson, co-founder of Brisk.io and The Astonishing Tribe, and now partner at BlueYard.
Hampus started out with a group of friends in a dorm room and quickly embarked on an epic journey, sailing wherever the wind blew.
He’s built user interfaces for major phone makers, sold his uae whatsapp number data company to BlackBerry for $150 million, worked in M&A, started angel investing (in over 90 companies today), started a new software company to gain more experience raising money, and now finds himself on the other side of the table investing in technology companies that are about to change the world.
We theorize about how the world works, the two different stages of a startup, the state of venture capital, work-life balance, and why you shouldn’t start someone else’s company.
Welcome to Founder Coffee.
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Jeroen: Hello Hampus, it’s a pleasure to welcome you to Founder Coffee.
Hampus: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jeroen: You are currently a VC at smarketing, an approach that helps to get more customers and increase sales BlueYard, but you were previously the founder of The Astonishing Tribe and then Brisk.io. Normally I ask people to introduce the company or the place they are based, but maybe you could introduce all three very quickly, to give us an overview of your background?
Hampus: Sure. When I was young, in college, I started a company with five of my friends. Actually, there were six of us. I was working as an fb users intern at an art company in London. When I came back, one of my friends and I, because of the inspiration I had gotten there, we were able to build a big art installation. We thought, “Whoa, this is great, but we should probably start a company to charge for this.” Two other friends were starting a consulting company in the image recognition and video space. They wanted to start a company in that space. Another friend was working in special effects for movies, and we were all really close friends. We thought, “Hey, let’s start this company together,” even though we were doing three completely different things.
Jeroen: What was it exactly? Art?
Hampus: It was a completely crazy thing. Think of it as a dorm room, completely random stuff. It was all about experiments, like video compression technology, art, special effects for movies. Anything and everything. We started as a hobby project in college, and then we started having fun. We were doing great business and billing our clients, and we were spending a lot less time in college than we probably should have sometimes. Then a friend of mine contacted us and said, “Oh, I work at Sony, and Sony and Ericsson just merged. We’re building a cell phone.” We had actually worked in It was a completely crazy thing IT for quite a while, and that’s why we did these things.
Hampus: So he said, “Oh, can you help us build the first products for the mobile phone and get the software for it?” We said, “No way!” Because we had worked for a gaming startup before mobile gaming came along and we thought in 2001, mobile phones were never going to happen. Mobile phones and touchscreens were getting smaller and smaller. But this guy said, “Hey, save the day.” So we said, “Okay, sure. We’ll help you.” We started talking to them and in the first meeting, we built a prototype for them.
Hampus: They come, they look at what we’ve done and they say, “Wow, how much is that? Can we license it?” We had no idea what that was, so we said, “Yeah, it’s 40,000 euros.” And they said, “Yeah, per mobile phone model?” We said, “What? Yeah, yeah. Exactly.” And that was it. The company went from dorm-room madness to being very focused on one thing, which is mobile user interfaces and the software to implement them. Basically, everything you see on your phone, which is the menu system, the pop-ups, the notifications, and everything else – the operating system is the top layer of that.