Welcome to Foo Café

Summer is almost over but don’t worry…Foo Cafe is back and we aim to brighten your day with some cool meet ups! Bring your shades…the future is bright.

Come and join us for educational and entertaining tech and events that will inspire.

Some of the upcoming events  …

17.15 Tuesday, October 10
Azure Skåne delivers another interesting event: Walkthrough of the Azure Arc Wonderland

17.45 Monday, October 16
Join Malmö Toastmasters and learn to become a better public presenter.
How to become a better speaker

17.30 Wednesday, October 18
Erik Meijer is back (thanks to factor10) with The Programmers  Apprentice Season 2: Advancements and Future Directions in AI-Assisted Coding

17.30 Thursday, October 19
Boozt will share their experience with a series of talks this fall, here is the fourth one:
Boozt, a prominent online retailer in the Nordics, chose to shift from a third-party payment gateway to its own payment processing service: A full payment gateway inside a database

17.30 Onsdagen den 25:e Oktober 
Skatteverket är tillbaka med ytterligare en lärorik presentation om En Systemarkitekts Vardag i en Komplex Miljö (presentationen är på Svenska) 

17.30 Tuesday, October 31
Data Alliance presents Two Talks About Data: The Quest for Evidence-Based Technical Debt Management and A Hobbyist’s Approach to Automated Highlight Detection in E-Sports

17.00 Friday, November 3
Monthly meet-up with 2600 takes place the first Friday every month. You are welcome to share your experience on security with friends (or soon to be) at 2600 Unplugged.

17.15 Tuesday, November 7
.NET 8 and C# 12 are just around the corner and in this talk we will look at some of the highlights that we as .NET developers on Azure can take advantage. Join Azure Skåne this evening.

Take the opportunity to see some good presentations on our youtube channel.

Remember to keep an eye on our brand new website for more events. They are constantly being published and things don’t always make it for the newsletters.

See you soon
The Foo Team

The post 2023 Continues to Offer Amazing Tech Events at Foo Café appeared first on Øresund Startups.

This week I’d like to talk about some of the very core buidling blocks that are required to make anyone succeed in building a company.

The two most important qualities for me are passion and grit.

Passion

Passion is defined as “a very strong feeling of liking something; a hobby, an activity, etc. that you like very much” by the Oxford Learner’s dictionary.

To me it’s the absolute core of starting anything. If you don’t feel intrigued, challenged, if you don’t buy into the vision and the impact, then there’s no way you can put 100% of yourself into it, and persevere through the tough times.

I’ve met many people who started a company because it’s so cool, it’s a “quick” way to become wealthy, and wanting all the fame and glory of becoming the next Steve Jobs. Looking at where they are after a few years, pretty much none of them achieved their goal. Not only because the odds are so low that you’d hit that kind of a success, but also because their motivation was completely wrong.

Personally, I’ve also bumped into projects that sounded interesting and fun, but the thought of spending the next 5-10 years on it didn’t excite me, and that was a clear sign that while it may be very cool, innovative and beneficial for some target group, it just doesn’t lie within my passion.

On the flip side, when I started writing the first pieces of code for Airtame back in early 2010, it was pure passion driving that project. I didn’t really set off to think that it would ever be commercialized, let alone build a 10 year old company around it.

It was purely some SW, a “toy project”, that was solving my immediate need, with some cool, up and coming technology.

That passion for building something great was only amplified when I met my co-founders, and when we found a broader audience for it. Seeing happy customers and real life users being impacted positively by your product, and in Airtame’s case also future generations, is something really magical that gives the whole journey a new meaning.

So the question is. Should you be passionate about the vision? The product? The team? The challenge?

Grit

Ok, so passion is important. But it’s only one side of the story. The other is grit or perseverance.

Grit is defined as “the courage and strength of mind that makes it possible for somebody to continue doing something difficult or unpleasant” by the Oxford Learner’s dictionary.

Grit is what separates the dreamers from the doers. It’s the unwavering determination to keep going, even when faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges and setbacks. Passion might get you started, but it’s grit that will keep you going when the going gets tough.

Building a company is not a sprint; it’s a marathon, often filled with hurdles, roadblocks, and moments of self-doubt. It’s easy to be enthusiastic when everything is going smoothly, but the true test of your commitment comes when you encounter adversity. And trust me, you will encounter adversity. A lot.

Grit means being able to weather the storms, adapt to changing circumstances, and stay focused on your goals, even when the odds are stacked against you. It’s about pushing through late nights, countless rejections, and the constant fear of failure. It’s the ability to pick yourself up after a setback, learn from your mistakes, and keep moving forward.

I’ve seen several startups and entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas and boundless passion fizzle out because they lacked grit. They couldn’t handle the pressure, the long hours, the uncertainty, and the inevitable disappointments that come with the entrepreneurial journey. They gave up when the going got tough, and their dreams remained just that—dreams.

On the other hand, those who possess grit are the ones who eventually achieve success. They are the ones who persist, adapt, and find solutions to the most challenging problems. They are the ones who turn setbacks into opportunities and failures into valuable lessons.

Passion and grit are not mutually exclusive; they often go hand in hand. When you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it becomes easier to summon the grit needed to overcome obstacles. Passion fuels your determination, and grit ensures you keep moving forward, no matter how steep the climb.

In conclusion, if you aspire to build a successful company, remember that passion and grit are your indispensable companions on this journey. Passion will light the initial spark, but it’s grit that will keep the fire burning. So, find something you’re truly passionate about, something that excites you, challenges you, and makes you want to get out of bed every morning. And then, arm yourself with grit—the unyielding resolve to pursue your vision relentlessly, no matter what lies ahead.

Stay tuned for more insights on entrepreneurship, and as always, I appreciate your continued support and engagement.

The post The Art of Starting Up: Passion and Grit appeared first on Øresund Startups.

Last week I’ve made a bold promise that I’ll share my biggest failures and the learnings from them, once a week, until the end of 2023. So this is week 1 out of 17, and the focus is on building a great team.

I’m super thankful to have been able to work with some of the most inspiring individuals at my company, Airtame. The joint passion, ambition and love for the craft has united us greatly to build something truely awesome, have fun together, and help each other through some difficult times.

Reflecting on this, a large part of it was sheer luck, right place at the right time, but also some hard work from various people, including my cofounders Jonas Gyalokay, Brian Kyed for instilling the right work cuture and countless Airtamers, including Alexandra Protsenko, Mark Gray, Verena Gutheim and Victoria Andrews and more.

But we didn’t always get it right, and I’m sharing these mistakes, so YOU don’t have to make them!

Let’s see 4 specific misses we had:

1. The Arshole: Once upon a time we’ve hired an engineer, he had super great qualifications, very skilled, good communicator. He passed the technical test with flying colors. Maybe his test was actually one of the best ones we’ve ever seen. We had minor concerns as part of the interview review with his attitude. He seemed a bit too strong willed and opinionated, but he passed everything else so well that we’ve decided to give it a go. After only 4-5 weeks in the job, it became very obvious that it was not a match. He was not easy to collaborate with. He has managed to insult and piss off multiple people in his short time, both within his own team and outside. We ended up quickly saying good bye, and have learnt an important lesson that day. Collaboration, working together and enjoying the process (good culture fit) by far outweighs the technical skills.
2. The Senior Commercial Leader: At some point in the life of the company, we’ve realized that we’re all a young bunch, we make a lot of mistakes by failing and learning, and it would be great to bring someone who has “tried it before”, so we can gain momentum quicker. So we started looking for people with lots of experience. We’ve also found some with a really good CV, lots of industry experience in high profile companies. We’ve ran them through the interview process, they passed with flying colors. Super high IQ/EQ, good references from the network, and the whole lot. We quickly closed them, got them in and started onboarding a full speed. However 3 months passed, then 6, then 9 and 12 but we were still at the same places as before they joined… Ultimately the learning was that, even though all of them were very professional, undoubtedly had a lot of skills, it was just the wrong skills needed for the job. The type of work they have done before was so vastly different, that they were back to where we were: lots of trial and error.
3. The P.h.D: We were hiring a lot of engineers to work on our core streaming protocol. We had an applicant who has been working in a related field in academia. He was super skilled, great at research, published a bunch of papers. He was psyched to join, and we were psyched to get him on board. Once he started getting into things, and he joined the engineering team’s regular sprints, it became obvious that what he was passionate about (research) isn’t neccesarily what he got to do at the job, at least for the most part. And when it was time for him to deliver production ready code, he couldn’t, because although he was hired as a senior given his special expertise in the field, as an engineer to develop production code, he was still very much a junior. Learning: Spend enough time to understand what are the expectations for the role, and be critical on if the person is actually the right fit.
4. The overqualified (aka. wrong place at the wrong time): Once upon a time, we hired a great engineer. Super productive, amazing to work with, ambitious, happy to help others, etc. Unfortunately, the challenge was just not big enough, and although we have tried to work with him to find new sets of challenges, move him around the organization, he ended up leaving. The learning here was similar to #3. We needed to hire for the role that we currently have, someone who is willing to take that on, and not overpromise/oversell the role to the candidates.

For all the individuals above, they were all very professional, super skilled in their own way, so I really can’t put any blame on them. The mistakes were purely ours. We failed to screen them properly, and they were just the wrong fit for the type and stage of the company we were at that point. And that’s the big learning in the end.

To sum up:

• Value culture/team fit above tech skills
• Spend time to be clear on what do you really expect out of the specific role
• Don’t oversell the role
• Find people who have tried the same or similar journey before, not people who have been super successful in a completely different setup
• We spend large parts of our lives with people we work together with. So do yourself a favour and hire people you can have fun with!

The post The Art of Starting Up: The importance of the RIGHT team appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“I co-founded two startups with only-guys and not able to get above 10% non-men in the company. The first time, we were all-male friends from high-school, and the second time, we just didn’t get how important it was. We ended up having to post a job ad requiring the applicant to be a woman and ended up in the borderline of the law.”, Hampus Jakobsson writes in his blog.

Read the full blog post at hajak.se.

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The post How to Build a Diverse Organisation – a blog post by Hampus Jakobsson appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“Keep a “Jar of Awesomeness” to track all your successes big or small. Keep it to give yourself a confidence boost anytime, anywhere”, Alex Esser writes.

Read about how to create your own “Jar of Awesomeness” on Alex Esser’s blog.

The post Confidence hack: The Jar of Awesomeness appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“Have you ever thought of the Toy Story films as sci fi? I think they have many interesting themes that could apply to the Internet of Things. When people start bringing more “smart” devices to their homes, they will create a setting for Toy Story behaviours, such as addictive personalities and leadership conflicts”  Gärdenfors starts.

Daniel Gärdenfors runs the design studio Nobiz within the Øresund region, and also coach innovation projects at Sony, E.ON, and Verisure.

Read his full blog post here. 

The post Toy Story lessons for the Internet of Things appeared first on Øresund Startups.

“Being a founder is horrible. There, I said it. We are supposed to be visionaries and rebels, while being pragmatic and concrete, while being good leaders. Those features don’t fit one body, who isn’t about to explode. I have founded two companies and both times I have been in agony and pain. Why?”, Hampus Jakobsson writes in his blogpost. 

Read his blog post at hajak.se. 

The post The Hells of Being a Founder appeared first on Øresund Startups.