SAFFO: You begin to wonder: is it something in the water? It really feels like Silicon Valley–though to be exactly like the Valley, the business cards have to have something out of date on them. If you stay put long enough to have completely current cards, you really aren’t a player.
Entrepreneur’s disease is rampant in Stockholm. It is still somewhat puzzling why this burst of Internet innovation took off there, but it is definitely the most vibrant hotbed of Internet innovation anywhere outside of the United States. There is a growing sense that for dot-com companies moving into Europe, Sweden is a much more important portal than anywhere else, including England and Germany. Stockholm in particular and Sweden in general have several crucial factors in common with Silicon Valley. It is a small place, and people know each other and are always bumping into each other. In Sweden everyone graduates from one of a relatively small number of schools, and lives and works in close proximity. Sweden also has high computer usage and a technology-inclined populace. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, it seemed that more than any group of Europeans, the Swedes were coming to Silicon Valley. This contrasted starkly with others who almost seemed hostile to anything in Silicon Valley because it was “American.”
But Sweden is also quite unlike Silicon Valley in some ways. The biggest is that Swedes are very uncomfortable with new money, and especially conspicuous consumption. Of course, even if they wanted to consume, the Swedish tax structure would make it hard to have enough left over to be conspicuous with. I think the motivations are much like Silicon Valley in its early days–the desire to achieve what the establishment says is impossible, and to change the world.
My experience is that Swedish dot-com entrepreneurs are much more respectful of their elders than entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The real reason that Sweden took off has much more to do with initial conditions. Its citizens have always been open to trying new technologies. It has always had comparatively low-cost telecommunications even back in the monopoly days, and those costs got even cheaper when deregulation began in the late ’80s. And as Mattias Soderhielm (an exec at Framfab) observed to me, Sweden also benefited enormously from the fact that Swedish universities adopted TCP/IP (the protocol at the heart of the Internet) early on, when the rest of European institutions were standardizing on OSI [another protocol]. This meant that unlike the rest of Europe, Sweden was turning out a very large number of graduates who understood the Internet at a deep technical level–and, by virtue of hanging out on the Net, also understood itsculture.
Sweden’s “show no chrome” philosophy runs deep. I don’t expect to see Swedish dot-com CEOs riding around Stockholm in BMWs, Ferraris and Harleys any time soon. But there may be a change as the dot-com generation comes into its own. The company heads certainly are as restrained as their elders, but some of the new money at the fringes may be getting a bit flashy.
