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Martin Thorborg was kind enough to join the Startupdenmark network and I immediately asked if he would do an interview.
Warning: very poor audio quality (sorry about that). On the other hand, Martin is so full of energy and inspiration that the sound quality is not important. We had an informal chat about his life in the US, the differences he's noticed with Denmark (in particular how much easier it is to run a start up in Denmark compared to the US), the impact of the crisis on his car dealer and many other topics.
"A lot of Danes think Denmark is slow and not optimised and you have to pay a lot of taxes. You should try it here in the US! Denmark is one of the best places on earth to run a start up."
-Martin Thorborg
[the transcipt below has been edited for readability]
Alex Farcet (Q): What does it change for you to be in the US and start from scratch, not have your network, to be kind of unknown?
Martin Thorborg (A): Well, first of all I moved to the US mainly because of the weather and the whole experience. It wasn’t really founded in doing business, it was a personal thing for me and my family. I’ve been here a year now, and I've gotten used to the climate and the people. And the big issue for me right now is mainly to find out if I want to still continue working with my Danish companies or I should do more with the American thing. It's hard very hard for me, because the easiest thing would be to approach the Danish market with my products and my energy, because I’m a well-known brand, I’m quite trusted and I have a large e-mail list. Everytime I launch a product in Denmark I get a good success and then I earn good money I have a lot of fun with it. And the problem is that usually Americans they think if you want to do business then you have to travel a lot, you have to meet a lot of people and to be honest I don’t want to travel. I don’t want to go to different states, I don’t want to leave my family and my life here. So it’s a very big challenge for me to see because it could be really interesting do more here, but then again I’m not sure I want to put in the work that it requires and leave my family as much as it would be required. So I’m very in the middle of should I do more with Amino in Denmark or should I introduce Amino into other countries and that’s a big thing. And of course I work with Spamfighter over here, but I could do the work from Greenland, it doesn’t require me to sit here.
(Q): How much was the culture shock was it in a business form of you. What’s been different in US?
(A): I wasn’t that shocked because I’ve been traveling to the United states I think fifteen times, and I’ve met a lot of Americans. What surprised me is still the level of manual work here. It’s a lot of a lot bureaucracy. A lot of Danish people think that the Denmark is slow, Denmark is not optimized, and there’s a lot of bureaucracy, you have to pay a lot of tax. They should start out a business in the US and see its much much worse here! You have to pay a lot of different things that you wouldn’t suspect you would pay. The thing in Denmark, all the taxes are so high and it’s so complicated. But here you pay a lot of things to employee benefits, and a lot of different super small taxes, and a lot of small things to the county, to the states to the government and you have to fill a lot of papers, you have to talk to the lawyer all the time because of small issues. So if people think that its hard to do business in Denmark then just quit doing business. I mean you definitely not going to see anything more easier, that’s one hundred percent sure. So quit whining in Denmark that’s one thing. I think the best country in the world that’s definitely Denmark.
(Q): That was my next question. Has your perspective on Denmark changed?
(A): Well no. I’ve been an entrepreneur and speaker in Denmark for the last fifteen years and I’ve told the same message over and over again. I’ve done business in the US, I’ve done business in a lot of different countries. And if whenever I see entrepreneurs outside of Denmark, I always see [it as] harder, much much harder. Competition in the US is extremely tough. There’s a lot of competitors and they’re willing to work day and night to beat you [and if they don't beat you] they’ll just sue you. Doing business in Denmark is much more regulated. You don’t have any bribes [or] corruption, your competitors can’t just sue you for nothing. Yes, you have to pay some taxes and it’s maybe cheaper but hey you have to pay shit like that here also. So I don’t really see it’s so hard having a business in Denmark and outsourcing things to other countries. In my opinion it's the most efficient and cheapest [place] to do business in the whole world definitely. But the weather sucks in Denmark (laugh). That’s one thing that’s going to be hard to change. I love being here, I must say that, mostly because of the weather and I think people in general are more easy to talk to and are more easy going, you’ll feel more welcome. If you lived in United States and came to Denmark to do business, I think you will go into shock, you would feel that Danish people are very closed and unfriendly [...]. It’s much easier for a Danish person to come to America and make business than vice versa.
(Q): Do you think you find you can manage your Danish activities just as well, or even better, remotely.
(A): Of course having a team sitting in Denmark is always hard when you are five thousand miles away. You can skype, email, text, and all that makes it much easier that it would’ve been five years ago. But hands on management is still an issue. That’s why in Amino, I have a good CEO that can make the hands on management, talk to people, etc. Because you can’t have five to ten people sitting in Denmark without a buzz, [...] there has to be somebody sitting there. But apart from that, I think it’s fantastic. I travel to Denmark four to five times a year, I attend meetings, I give speeches, I do a bit of consulting and I spend time on Amino. I talk to the people there and try to inspire them and help them, but apart from that I can do 90% of the work from here with skype, and text, and email. The best thing is actually that when I go home from work here Denmark is asleep so I have some beautiful nights where I really really can work hard. So being six hours behind is fantastic. And when you wake in the morning at 6:30, I mean it’s like waking up to 3-4 hours of email and a lot of going on, that’s so perfect for me I mean because you get out of the bed very fast.
(Q): I guess it’s like coming getting to work at mid-day here and sleeping in late...
(A): Yeah but when I do that in Denmark I feel bad because then the guys are working for four more hours. But here it’s 6:30 so I don’t feel bad about it, I feel alive, I feel my world is really in a fast pace! I mean it’s like been dropped in New York. I love that, that’s been things going on for the last five hours, there’s a lot to do and when I find all those things, I can get focusing on the harder jobs and I think that’s fantastic. And that’s why it’s so good to be in Florida and not in California because I mean six hours is fantastic. But if I lived in Silicon Valley I would miss the whole day, so Florida is fantastic.
(Q): What do you miss about Denmark?
(A): To be honest my friends and my family that’s it. It’s a hard thing to say and that’s maybe because I’ve only been away for a year and I get back four or five times a year. I mean on a daily basis [I miss] nothing. We have everything here. My car is four times as nice - my 2002 Chevrolet has now transformed into Porsche 9-11 and I have change for my wife. All that's what I got from my 6 year old Chevrolet in Denmark. And I have a 400sq. meter house by the canals and a great boat and the price is 50% of my house in Denmark and the weather is super. I skype with my friends, they come over a week or two so I have a much closer relationship with my family and friends. One of my best friends was here for a week and I took a week off and we were out fishing. I don’t remember the last time I had a whole week with him, I don’t. And I had two weeks with my parents, how often do you have two weeks with your parents, that’s fantastic. So if I look at that picture I can’t really see the downside, I can’t. But maybe in two years I’ll feel like I have to go home but I’m still looking forward to see what will get me, because I can’t really see it.
(Q): Back to business, how is Spamfighter doing in the US?
(A): Pretty well now. In October 2008 we had a catastrophe. We were hit with the credit crunch like hell, it was 30-40% down in revenue from one day to another. The amount of new PC's sold was half and we sell a lot to new PC owners because the think "I'm not going to fuck it up like the old one, I need anti spam " and so on. So our revenue dropped 40% from one day to another and that is of course pretty hard. We had to lay people off and I had to move to cheaper offices and we had to cut costs all over the place. We were driving like a rock, that was really really bad. But then Henrik my partner found a new product and we introduced it in April - it’s a tool that cleans up your PC registry - and that is taking off like hell, I've never seen anything like it. The first month we sold for one and a half million dollars, so you could say that what we lost in the spam field we gained with new product. So we cut costs and are now back to normal revenue. Right now we are making a lot of money and we never had as good a business, this is the best time I ever had. Thank you so much to my partner Henrik for the idea of the new product. If we didn’t have that this office here would have definitely have been closed and we would have been in a really bad shape. But now it’s good, really good, so I can’t complain.
(Q): I presume you didn’t lose any market because everybody else's business crashed.
(A): Oh yeah all our competitors are in ridiculous bad shape. They’re firing people, trying to raise new capital, it's a blood bath. You can see now in almost every business over here, it's brutal. The only businesses that run well are McDonalds and Dunkin Doughnuts. If you have a business that’s just a little bit about luxury, you are fucked. You can see businesses close all the time. If you go to the shopping mall, at least every tenth shop is closed now. I was in the Porsche dealership the other day, it’s the world’s largest car dealership here in Pompano beach. They had to sell the Audi dealership just to get liquidity to continue. And when I bought the Porsche about 2 months ago they didn’t have cash to put gas in my car, I mean can you imagine that? The sales guy for 911 Porsche told me, “I'm very sorry Mr. Thorborg, I realise that you spent a lot of money with us but our gas card is closed, I can’t fill up your new porsche. Come in two months and I’ll fill that up and wash it for you, and you can go into our souvenir shop and pick something for your children, Im so sorry but we are out of cash.” And when I visited the shop a couple of weeks ago they had two hundred porsches standing outside, all of them has corrosion on the breaks, not one single porsche had been driving on the street for whole month and the sales guy told me that they have not sold one single porsche for weeks now and they usually sell a hundred a month. So the US market is so brutal.
(Q): Do you have any plans or have you seen any oppurtunities for working with Danish companies - maybe acting like bridgehead for Danish companies in the US?
(A): Yeah, I mean most of all, I see a lot of American franchises that haven't yet been introduced in Denmark. I know that a lot of those franchises are based on cheap labors which is not common in Denmark but stil when the market goes up in Denmark I l see a lot of American products that could be intoduced. At the same time I don’t see that many opportunities for Danish companies going to the US right now unless it’s on the tech market of course, building iPhone apps and obvious things. Danish products are usually expensive and in a market like this it's definitely not the time to introduce foreign products into America. So unless you focus on I web as an application or cloud computing products, iphone apps, or something hi-tech, which obviously could be build in Denmark with Danish creativity then no problem. One of the things I see lacking on the iPhone platform is definitely children’s games. The amount of games for children is not huge. American parents have an iPhone and the children would love to sit there and play while you are in restaurants but the games are so dumb, not engaging. If you could take the Danish way of creating things, intelligent things, entertainment for kids like Lego, they could definitely build a lot of iPhone apps that could make millions. But appart from that, expensive Danish furniture, design and all that, I would definitely wait three to four years until the market is as stabilized.
(Q): Back to you, hoow do you decide what to on work everyday. How do you prioritize between the 10 different things you need to get done?
(A): I work on the things that interest me. I’m a passion driven man and that’s why I’m not hat wealthy. If I don’t have a passion in a product or project, I don’t work with it. And that’s definitely a big problem for me. In general it's a very good thing to work with projects that you have a passion for, but you also have to do some of the boring work, and that’s definitely why I have a problem. So I tried to outsource all the boring things and just do the good things and that is also good to some extent but if I was a little more clever, if my IQ was a little higher, I would go a little bit further with the projects and try to finish them. I run a marathon but after 38 kilometers I look at myself and say well do I really want to do this and I and say no. Well there’s only last 4-5km to achieve the very big goal. But then I realise the very big goal is actually not the goal for me. The goal for me is the path to the goal. At Jubii I was watching my bank account and I had for a hundred and twenty million kroner in Lycos and that stage I really thought that I could convert those shares into money, and that was the saddest stage in my life. I realised that sitting on top of all that money made my life meaningless. I know that sounds very harsh, but it’s like if you play monopoly with your friends the whole evening and at the end you break the bank, you have all the money in the game and all of your friends lost. Of course you have one second of joy, but when you look back at it, the whole game, it was the four hour playing, drinking whiskey with your friends and enjoy yourself teasing each other, the ups and downs, all that was the big thing. But breaking the bank at last and winning and ridiculing your friend at all that was fun like an orgasm for one second. But the four hours were definitely the fun thing or planning the game for your friends, buying them whiskey, all the things that lead to the victory. So the victory has no meaning for me at all, but I pursue it, because pursuing the victory, working to win, that carries all the joy in my life, my working life, and the winning in itself is meaningless for me.
(Q): In some ways your name Martin Thorborg is more visible than any of your businesses. Do you actually manage yourself like a brand?
(A): Oh yeah, definitely. My biggest asset today is definitely who I am, it’s not my companies. My companies could go broke and I could get a new company up and running and in a couple of months be profitable just because of my name. People know that if I'm behind a business it's honest, and it’s fun. That's my brand, I’m not a serious type of person but I’m not unserious in that way. I'm a serious business person, I keep my promises, I don’t lie to people and I'm very ambitious and I make sure that there’s enough for everybody. I don’t go into a business where I’m the winner who takes it all. That’s why I don’t like winning the monopoly game because what I really like is creating winners around me. Sitting at a party with all the champagne in the world must be the most boring party in the world. I want to make people's life rich, I want to get them rich as well because I want to party with a lot of happy people and that’s what makes me happy. if I can see that other people are rich, I made other people lives rich, that gives me a lot. I don’t say that to be Mother Theresa or anything, I know its 100% ego driven. I know when I make people rich and happy I’ll become so extremely happy with myself, it’s like giving a hundred kroner at Christmas to the Red Cross. Come on, you don’t give that to poor people to be nice, you give that to feel good about yourself. I know that much about other people, I know Mother Theresa didn’t do it for other people, she did it to make herself happy, that’s how people are in general. So that’s why do it, I love helping other people and why am I sitting here spending an hour with you. Because if I can help other people and people will email me after they say, 'hey Martin you gave me a lot of good advice I'm greatful for that' then I'll look myself in the mirror and say that's good thing I did today..
(Q): Great thank you Martin and I think that’s a great place to stop.
(A): Thank you for having me and I hope I gave people some good inspiration. If not, I’m sorry for wasting their time...
(Q): Not at all, thank you.