Helsing

“My, certainly my best angel investment so far.”

“Oh, we love them. Like, good relationship with them. I hope they succeed. We've talked about, talked with them a couple times about potential collaborations.”

“The pharma industry, if you think about innovators, they are basically a gigantic organization if it comes to distribution and regulation, but not invention. So, a big prime as Moloch in distributing because they have I have years and years of lobbying into th…”

“I used to do them religiously, by the way, I just stopped doing them. It hasn't had a negative impact.”

“You can achieve a lot in particular around software with three to four exceptional people. And so we'd rather have a team of four exceptional people than eight good people. It makes everything easier. It's also cheaper, by the way, even though you pay above ma…”

“The people I work with are usually senior and don't need that much guidance. If I need a one-to-one with them every week, I think something's probably gonna, is probably going wrong.”

“So the seed was eight and a half million euros, but then we were lucky to have Daniel Ek and Prima Materia invest a hundred million euros about four months later or so.”

“We would have focused all of our efforts on specific systems to deal with the problems in hand, which were, which are now the ones that I talked about earlier. It's electronic warfare resistance, GPS independence you know, being resilient to comms jamming.”

“I think it's less than one percent.”

“Well, I, I've seen actually quite a lot of people turn around, including at my previous company as well, in, on a performance management plan. So it's not a foregone conclusion.”

“I would say Helsing is a company that you can only co-found. You need to have multiple founders.”

“And the second thing that allowed us to do is, is to not go for innovation you know, projects in defense for incubators and, you know, little grants here and there, but because we were quite well funded, we could go for programs of record. So the official larg…”

“When we started Helsing in March, 2021, we actually put one of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China.”

“You need to basically always have pressure on the pipeline of good people coming in, in order to be able to manage other people out, and so that you end up with a pool of people that are amazing.”

“A lot of sectors where I think we're going to be living in a, It's a tripolar world. Is that a word? Did I make it up? So there's gonna be an American version. Let's call it Android. There is a European version, Helsing, a Chinese version. Defense, space, ener…”

“As a founder, the Investors you choose are so important. So of course it makes a huge difference. You know, if you're the founder of Helsing and you choose Daniel Eck, because Daniel Eck understands what long-term business building means, you know, and you don…”

“If you want to invest in the next Helsing, don't. Just invest in Helsing. I spend my life with investors who are like, oh, I'm trying to find the next OpenAI, the next Android. Don't. Just put your money in the winner.”

“Torsten is, is the best, but in five years time, we look back and say, of course, Torsten couldn't have done it all by himself. There will be more, there will be others.”

“I think we're the only firm that's invested in a defense prime in US, Europe, and India. We did Andrel, we did, you know, invested in Helsing, and we invested in a company called Rafi in India.”

“Helsing with this mission, its execution its access to capital, talent should be the company that gets disproportionate share of defense in Europe.”

“We invested in Helsing. You know, Jeanette has seeded that, if you remember before, and we've invested that in all the rounds that they've raised since then. If you look at Andrel, same thing. We seeded that, and we invested in every round that they've raised …”

“Daniel might well get there with one of his companies, you know, Spotify, Helsing. I think those are two good options.”