Sweden

“If you look at all the angel investments that the Frederick did, he's pretty much in all the relevant companies that came out of Sweden.”

“So this was a high school dropout from Sweden, came to the U.S. With no education, got a job on MidJourney, then became one of the youngest researchers at OpenAI, and now he started a company.”

“Ryan, who joined from Canada, we have a team of people joining from Canada, they're all moving to Sweden, and he vibe coded an app to help everyone migrate. So like very specifically, if you're Canadian, these are like all the laws and all the steps you take, …”

“It's actually something that we had to sort of educate people on in Sweden. And in Europe, I think it's, people are just not used to the venture thing. They don't know how to value equity the same way.”

“Up until 2007, they had a wealth tax, and as part of the wealth tax, Sweden basically tracked every citizen's entire financial portfolio. So they looked at which stocks you owned, The mutual funds that you owned, every dollar of savings, they basically tracked…”

“There are a couple of places that have great technology entrepreneurship. Sweden is one. Israel's one. But it's pretty rare around the world.”

“French AI startup Mistral is investing 1.4 billion US dollars to build AI infrastructure in Sweden as it pushes to become the go-to AI supplier for governments and enterprises in Europe.”

“The termination period in the US versus in, let's say, Sweden is actually one of the structural benefits of having a big office in the US.”

“Yeah, it's the law of janta. It's the worst part of Sweden, and part of the reason why I could never move back there. But it's basically the notion that no one is allowed to be better than anyone else. And it is, it's similar to a tall poppy syndrome. And it c…”

“So we see that from people who could shop in Sweden, about 10% actually check out”

“At that time, the penetration of the usership in, in, in Sweden was like, 25% of the population used it. I mean, that's amazing. 25% of the population used the product.”

“One is that the drug costs 10 times more than it does in Germany or Sweden.”

“Intelligence is for everyone, and it is not just a few companies in the world who should build it. Everybody should build it. Nobody's gonna care more about the Swedish culture and the Swedish language and the Swedish people and the Swedish ecosystem more than…”

“I think it was, I really think that was part of the reason why you look at why Sweden is punching above its weights in terms of kind of unicorn companies is part of that is because a lot of those founders, if you look at”

“We have a commercial agreement with a major EV charging company in Sweden, and so we're raising 1.5 million to get there.”

“Sweden's electric vehicle market is a 120% year-on-year growth right now. It's at around forty-something percent of all vehicles being sold today are electric, and they're gonna going to have three million vehicles sold before 2030.”

“The core of their business empire centers around Investor AB. This is what I mentioned earlier. It's the second most valuable public company in Sweden right now behind Spotify.”

“MW's impact on Swedish industry was so substantial that during the 19 seventies, Wallenberg family businesses employed about 40%, a single family, employed about 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the stock market in…”

“Sweden, at the time, had high and rising wealth and inheritance taxes. So, inheritance taxes for large estates, of which The comp rad and estate and Ikea as an asset would definitely be one was over 60%. And on top of that, there was an annual wealth tax in Sw…”

“Now maybe we can claim that there are six, kind of, Serious, large-scale hydrogen DRI projects that are underdeveloped development, underdevelopment development around the world. There's two in Sweden, two in Germany, and two in the U.S.”

“Word of mouth works in a very small, tight-knit community. So it works in a liberal arts college of 5000 people. It works in a country like Sweden, you know, at a giant university or somewhere else it doesn't.”

“Way more women go into STEM in like Kazakhstan than in Sweden.”

“We use more energy for our cold chain than countries like Switzerland and Sweden use combined for all purposes.”

“20% of homes in Sweden use geothermal heat pumps.”

“Pretty much all new homes going in use them.”

“We've imported most of that back to the United States and really adopted the same rigs they use over there.”

“They had a spokesman who tweeted out an image of a helicopter spraying a liquid onto a wind turbine, and the caption was, a fossil fuel powered helicopter sprays fossil fuels on a clean energy device to generate electricity. Now, of course, the image was not f…”

“The most roboticized companies in the countries in the world that have the highest penetration of robotics are South Korea, Sweden, Germany, which have the lowest unemployment.”

“One could argue Nordic, Scandinavian countries have experimented the most by taking taxation to 50% plus level and giving free education, hospitalization, housing, all of that. It hasn't worked for them in a capitalistic world. So if you look at like a Sweden,…”

“Some kind of critical mass has been reached where two years ago, a strongly worded letter from indigenous groups and Greenpeace and other environmental organizations was enough to dissuade the researchers at the time from Doing this kind of thing from, in that…”

“If you own a piece of property in Sweden, people are allowed to walk your property. If the property is large enough, they're actually even allowed to tent at your property for 24 hours.”

“This notion of private versus public just doesn't exist to the same extent. Like all income is public in Sweden, like every single one.”

“And in Sweden, where I grew up, there's actually free music education, which I think explains a lot about how music is so big in that country, and why it's such a big export for us as well.”

“So about the third time the person asked, I decided to just take an absurd number that I could think of just to make sure I get rid of the person, so I said, well, sure, I'll do it, but I want 5000 dollars to do it, and the person said, done, and I'm like, oh,…”

“If you looked at Sweden at that time, I think it had lost more than 80% of its entire revenue base. So it was really in shambles.”

“So going from the beginning where I tried to get everything in all markets and realizing that that wasn't going to work, I decided to shift strategy and instead take a very narrow market where they lost most of it and said, look why, why don't I prove this to …”

“Some kind of critical mass has been reached where two years ago, a strongly worded letter from indigenous groups and Greenpeace and other environmental organizations was enough to dissuade the researchers at the time from Doing this kind of thing from, in that…”

“It's absolutely true. I actually gave an unconference talk about this topic. And the conference talk was all of the strange things that Swedish people do and why. And if it would summarize it like, yes, we do that. I actually experienced that. I went to a frie…”

“22% of the wind projects that were proposed in Sweden last year were permitted.”

“That four percent of national energy consumption in water heating is bigger than what Switzerland and Sweden use for all purposes combined in a year.”

“When I started to explain that we want to replace coal that we use, and we want to use electricity, it's going to take about 10% of Sweden's total electricity consumption.”

“He mentions that Sri Lanka has a near perfect score of 98, higher than Sweden, which is 96, and the U.S. Is a 51.”

“I think that basically where the country is at is that we're an undeclared Sweden. You know, we've basically, the virus has become endemic. It's everywhere. You know, we've basically given up on trying to contain or stop it. And so now we're just on this path …”

“So if you look at Swedish approach, it seems right this moment, and again, it might change in a week, so who knows, but right now it seems that they have found a good balance between Protecting, allowing those who need protection to be protected, those who hav…”

“During the UK elections, and Germany, and France, and Sweden, Mexico, all of those countries have much lower levels of junk news to professionally produced news shares than the US.”

“I have a JV kind of a partnership with a bank in Sweden To prove out the blockchain for mutual fund formation and mutual fund management. And then we have actually a specific use case in South Africa to implement the blockchain for proxy voting in South Africa…”

“When I went to Sweden, you know, as a cashless society, supposedly the only place that didn't accept a mobile app was Starbucks”

“Only 20% of the payments in Sweden are cash, whereas if you look in the U.S., that's actually 90%”

“Take a market like Sweden, the reason why Spotify partly has been successful was, from day one, the product was built to go global. The same thing with Skype, transfer-wise, a building for a global audience, because The local population is far too small to be …”

“Yeah, and we are, we have just taken in some capital in form of round two. It's a revenue-based loan, which is quite new here in Sweden, and we just took that money and putting it into R&D for us to take a bigger share of wallet from our customers, because the…”

“And I think Sweden as a sauce sauce market, we are not really as good as you are over there in the U S with the marketing and lowering the cost of customer acquisition.”

“So turns out in Sweden homeowners are paying one and a half percent if they want to sell their house. Even Canada, our northern neighbor has figured this out. They're only paying three percent and that keeps dropping. And the United States seems to be very stu…”

“The one in Sweden, we're investing over a hundred million US on both of the facilities there. So there'll, there'll be roughly 40 megawatts of capacity in, in a data center in, in, in Sweden there.”

“Especially from countries like Sweden and the UK, the money that they send on overseas development aid. You know, sometimes that's politically motivated, it's political gains, and different countries vary in how how much that's due with their foreign aid spend…”

“A Swedish round a could be basically 500,000 dollars.”

“But it needs to be converted typically within 12 months.”

“And unfortunately I wasn't able to stay in the U S with my visa. So I basically had to leave and I moved back and started the company here.”

“You know, we went into Spotify when they were still just in Sweden and just watched as it grew out. That's 2010.”

“The reason is, is because Swedes very similar to Israelis, very similar to Koreans work very hard, but have to go global. There's no real big home market. And I'm always like those type of markets because it forces the company to go global. It can't just sit o…”