The Northbound Show

In this episode of The Northbound Show, host Ken Villum Klausen sits down with Sophia Bendz — General Partner at Cherry Ventures and one of Spotify's earliest employees — and Marianne Vikkula, Head of Wolt and former CEO of Slush.The subject is conviction: how you find it, how you sell it, and why it's the one thing that doesn't get cheaper as everything else does.Sophia almost turned Daniel Ek down. She loved her job at a PR firm and tried to talk him into hiring her one day a week instead — until a Friday afternoon meeting ran until nine at night and she missed her dinner plans. Marianne walked into Slush as a 20-year-old volunteer with no idea what she'd signed up for, was handling budgets in the millions at 21, and later joined Wolt at Series B to lead an expansion into 20-plus markets — including the day a national bank turned up at the office to explain that what they were doing wasn't right.They go deep on hiring by listening to the pain rather than hiring ahead of it, why recruiting is a selling game and not a buying game, the difference between a builder and a manager, and what Sophia is actually reading in a room when she writes a first check into a company that doesn't have a name yet.Then the harder question: when anyone can put a full product live in a minute and land as one of a thousand, what still breaks through? Plus the Nordic advantages neither of them would trade — being too small to ever build for a single market, being safe enough to speak up at work, and why being slightly naive turns out to be a competitive edge.Hosted by Ken Villum Klausen, The Northbound Show brings together Nordic founders and leaders for long-form conversations about how small nations consistently build companies with outsized global impact. Because the Nordics' greatest export isn't a product. It's a mindset.

In this episode of The Northbound Show, host Ken Villum Klausen sits down with Sara Wimmercranz — General Partner at BackingMinds, Dragon in Dragons' Den, and co-founder of the XO Foundation — who built one of the region's biggest e-commerce players before crossing to the other side of the table as an investor.Sara has a mission: build Europe the Nordic way, not the American way. She's tired of the Nordics looking up to Silicon Valley and wants the region funding its own founders, keeping its own talent, and trusting a model built on low ego and flat hierarchy. Even Jante, she argues, might be a hidden asset — if no one thinks they're bigger than anyone else, the best ideas win.That thinking became BackingMinds, the fund she started with her partner Susanne after the two met at a poker table — a plan Sara hatched to break into the closed networks behind the capital that built the Swedish unicorns. Their thesis: the best returns are hiding in the ideas and founders others overlook or haven’t found yet.Ken and Sara also get into why capital is drying up for European funds, why Danish founders tend to sell and leave while Swedish ones reinvest, and what it'll actually take to turn the Nordics into one ecosystem that leads Europe instead of following it.Hosted by Ken Villum Klausen, The Northbound Show brings together Nordic founders and leaders for long-form conversations about how small nations consistently build companies with outsized global impact. Because the Nordics' greatest export isn't a product. It's a mindset.

In this episode of The Northbound Show, host Ken Villum Klausen sits down with Fredrik Hjelm, co-founder and CEO of Voi — and, as Ken puts it, if not the king of Swedish tech, then at least its crown prince.The two go deep on the question Ken keeps circling back to: why is Sweden exploding right now, and can Stockholm really become Europe's Silicon Valley? Fredrik makes the case that it all starts with culture — a builder mindset that runs from Sweden's industrial past through Skype, Spotify, and Klarna to today's wave of AI companies — backed by network density, risk-willing capital, and a healthier relationship with both success and failure.Along the way, Fredrik unpacks how Voi became one of the only scaled micro-mobility companies to make it through the brutal "scooter wars" without restructuring, bankruptcy, or wiping out its cap table — and why focus, frugality, and discipline are the boring details that compound. He also opens up about Pit, his new venture turning human business operations into digital labor, freshly backed by a $16M round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Plus a running campaign to reinstate the Kalmar Union.This episode is powered by Lunar.Hosted by Ken Villum Klausen, The Northbound Show brings together Nordic founders and leaders for long-form conversations about how small nations consistently build companies with outsized global impact. Because the Nordics' greatest export isn't a product. It's a mindset.

In this episode of The Northbound Show, host Ken Villum Klausen sits down with Oscar Höglund, co-founder of Epidemic Sound and Sander Janca-Jensen, co-founder of Flatpay.After 18 years building Epidemic Sound into a company that soundtracks the internet, Oscar Höglund made one of the hardest calls a founder can make — stepping back. Sander is in a different chapter entirely, heads down building Flatpay toward 100,000 customers and on the verge of opening a new market outside of Europe.Together, they go deep on the Nordic founder mindset, talking about why consensus isn't weakness, why under-promising and over-delivering is a philosophy worth living by, and how humility, when wielded right, becomes your sharpest competitive edge. And they get honest about what success truly demands: the responsibility to reach back, open doors, and make the path a little easier for whoever comes next.This is what Nordic entrepreneurship looks like from the inside.This episode is powered by Lunar.Hosted by Ken Villum Klausen, The Northbound Show brings together Nordic founders and leaders for long-form conversations about how small nations consistently build companies with outsized global impact. Because the Nordics' greatest export isn't a product. It's a mindset.

In the first episode of The Northbound Show, host Ken Villum Klausen sits down with Anko van der Werff, President and CEO of SAS. Anko shares how he led SAS through one of the most challenging periods in its history, and what it takes to drive bold, strategic transformation in a traditionally conservative industry. His leadership has helped secure SAS’s role in Nordic aviation while shaping a brand that truly feels like home across the Nordics.This episode is powered by Lunar.Hosted by Ken Villum Klausen, The Northbound Show brings together Nordic founders and leaders for long-form conversations about how small nations consistently build companies with outsized global impact. Because the Nordics' greatest export isn't a product. It's a mindset.