We are happy about our 2014. We got off to a good start with our new co-investors by consolidating Trustly, Phoniro, Gardio and Proactive into the new structure through a buy-out of Bengt Ågerup’s holdings. We thank you Bengt and your team for all the valuable inspiration, support and learnings that you have given us.
2014 also saw our biggest investment to date, in Quinyx, with Erik Fjellborg and his great team joining our family. We welcomed Bridgepoint on board with new energy and perspectives in our valuable investee company Trustly and we did a spin-off of Glue from Phoniro to enable more focus on the consumer market. We also grew our own team in 2014, with Maria taking the helm.
Two new students, Victoria and Adrian, started working with us and Emil flew off to London and Morgan Stanley. Our previous star students Linus and Tiyam both landed top jobs in great investment firms in Stockholm. That makes us proud.
As you probably know we are in it for the long term. And in order to progress we need to learn along the way. The most valuable learnings for us come from working with our investee companies, without them we would amount to nothing. In fact, we try to run our investment business like a start-up ourselves.
The most important learning for us this year has been to fear less and love more:
We are risk takers and from risk taking we can reap rewards (or lose money!). We must not be afraid of taking calculated risk and we cannot sit idle. We need to actively and frequently help make decisions: Decisions that make a difference. With that follows numerous bad decisions – that we have to help to correct.
We must not fear change and we must embrace diversity. Business is a team effort and teams need constant improvements on all positions. Spurred by our new co-investor and co-founder of EQT, Conni Jonsson, we continuously strive to progress our own team and the teams of our investee companies. This year we worked actively to upgrade on all fronts — not the least our own team!
We love what we do. We are religious about our core values: We love to have fun with all our partners and friends. We want to make sure what we do is meaningful and that it makes us proud. And very importantly, we cannot survive unless our activity is very profitable.
In all of this we try to stay humble and sensitive to the fact that all interaction with our investee companies is a two way street. And as long as we can add as much value to our companies as they can add to us, we have a perfect fit.
To our new co-investors: Thank you for your trust and your keen interest in what we do. Thank you for inspiring us to improve. We strive to deliver on the demands of one of you; our new co-investor AP4: “Always more, never enough”.
To all the management teams and employees throughout our investee companies: Thank you for your strong will, your passion, your desire to improve. Thank you for adding value to the lives of your customers and thus ultimately to yourselves, us and our co-investors. We cannot thank you enough.
This year we have continued our support of Lilla Barnets Fond, the charity that helps research on helping newborns to survive. We also kept supporting the the Swedish foundation for Nature Conservation to help preserve our planet. Finally, we started supporting Fistula Foundation, an organization that supports women’s surgery in war torn areas of Africa. We hope these efforts can contribute a little bit towards creating a better world.
We wish you a great holiday period and a fun, meaningful and profitable 2015.
With passion,
Maria, Måns and Hjalmar
