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Tine Thygesen met with me at the Venture Cup headquarters next to Copenhagen Business School. She shared her outsider's perspective on Denmark, her best tip to succeed in Venture Cup, and what the first step is toward being an entrepreneur.
"The most important thing was fear. I had to come to a point where I was ready to fail; where I was going to be able to stand up afterwards and say 'OK that's not a reflection of me, that's a reflection of being an entrepreneur'. If you don't take the chance of failing, you don't take the chance of winning."
-Tine Thygesen
Transcript
My name is Tine Thygessen. I am from Aalborg originally; I grew up there and did most of my schooling. I left pretty early when I was 19, I moved to Italy and ended up staying 10 years away from them. I went to Australia where I started my own company which I sold last year and after that I moved back to Denmark. So, I am kind of a new dame or almost an immigrant if you would say. It’s been lot of years and I have not been speaking Danish and have not been around. When I was in Australia I started a company, I figured out quite early that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When I was in Australia finally I learned enough to be able to venture into it. So I started a small company which sold designed products to event and hospitality industry. It was just a small business but I managed to find a small niche where we had virtual monopoly and a system that was catching more positive because it was an online business, e-commerce we were serving massive companies, some of the very big ones, the top banks, the top event companies who were not so international when they came into Australia. As anyone who says transient desire tends to freak out when you get too committed. So I started I suppose voicing and considering what to do and what would be the right thing. I was so lucky that two companies approached me and said they were interested in buying it. One of my suppliers and one of my clients. So I was in the ideal position to make the decision. I started O’Beckelan Investment Banking in London, so my first real job was Fidelity Investment which had at that time 20,000 employees worldwide, so totally not a small startup. I was so lucky that after I moved on to that I got to work with international private banking where I was working with some totally amazing entrepreneurs. People had 100 companies, build up shipping companies and it was so inspiring to me to see these people how they crafted this. I never realized that it was possible for one person to create that much in the lifetime and that was drives me. Not that I am interested in money, I am interested in the phase of creation. I had decided at that point that I was done with big companies but of course I didn’t know anything about how to start a small one. So, I started this journey and over the coming five years I started taking jobs not for the money but where I could learn what I needed to learn. It took about five years, few different jobs New Zealand and jobs in Australia, started going to smaller companies trying to get into some different roles and in the end I thought I was ready to start on my own. Of course you never realize there are a million things that you don’t know before you actually do it but you can’t you just have to jump in to it.
Taking the Step
To me the most important thing was the fear. I had to come to a point where I was ready to fail that I was going to be able to stand up afterwards and say, it’s not a reflection of me it’s a reflection of being an entrepreneur. If you don’t take a chance of failing you don’t take a chance to winning. So when I started the company I knew 100 percent that if I run this into the ground I am fine, this is the part of the process. I think failing and allowing yourself to do mistake is a huge part of becoming better not just as an entrepreneur. That’s again in Denmark we are brought up to think like that we are brought up to play a little bit safe and I think people should just go out there and take some risks, do some stupid things because failing teaches you so much more than winning and doing everything right.
Returning to Denmark after 10 years
It’s mad it’s totally crazy because you don’t really feel you are coming home when, your home it’s been in all the places. For me it’s been London, New Zealand, Australia as far as I can more or less remember and I think I was quite open to the fact that this may not work. I was afraid that Denmark was going to be too small both geographically but also the mind set wasn’t ready for entrepreneurs, big movements, and for the drama that I think is important for doing any successfully. But it’s turned out really well, most of my friends and my associates here in Denmark are entrepreneurs who are really interesting and risky people who do lot of interesting things that isn’t standard.
Venture Cup
Venture Cup is the entrepreneurship competition in Denmark, if you are in university, you have an idea and you want to do something with it, Venture Cup is the place you need to go. We set some deadlines for you and we can help motivate you but most importantly we can facilitate the contact to investors, to people who have done it themselves, to important business people. All the people that you need to move on faster in your venture which would take years to establish by yourself. We have two goals in Venture cup, the first one is to spread the thought of entrepreneurship as a valid way of living and then we want to find the real companies with high growth potential. The main criteria is that one person in the team has to be connected to the University, that could be a student, a PhD or a scientist. It doesn’t have to be everyone in the team like most people believe and then you kind of raise more than 250,000 external capital.
The value of Venture Cup
We start quite easily in the autumn all you just need to send two to three page ideas. Just see if you can get some tweets for it, you can get some feedback and find out if it’s for you and then in spring we run another competition which is little bit harder, where you have to send a 220 pages plan. This is where we start seeing some of the serious entrepreneurs some of the companies and that’s when we can really start giving them some value and some feedback. In the end there is one lucky winner who wins a quarter of a million Danish kroner. So, that’s a pretty nice little startup capital especially these days where it’s really hard to raise external capital. Entrepreneurship should never be about the money, it’s about the passion. We know that what we really offer is the interaction with the real market. All of our ideas are evaluated by the juries and the juries are investors, serial entrepreneurs and really senior business people. I think the fact that we can put you in touch with people who are lawyers, entrepreneurs and patent advisors and guys from different companies. That’s where you really get the value and that’s what no one else can offer right now.
The evolution of Venture Cup
At the moment we are focusing a lot of Cleantech and we are definitely seeing a lack in the pipeline and there is a lot of hype about Cleantech at the moment in the media despite that we only got 6 percent of our ideas last year about Cleantech. If that has to go in and replace IT and Biotech like lot of people are thinking then we need up that because it is also the question of quantity in the beginning so we can find the best. We are working on creating new venture which is called the Cleantech cup, which would be the best Cleantech ideas typically into pre seat phase that compete on a Nordic level which means we are going to be able to get 25 best. We work on one in a million concept that’s 25 million inhabitants into the Nordics, therefore we take the 25 best companies and there is a really hot upgrade program where we put them in touch with the best of the best and then we make sure to expose them internationally.
No. 1 Tip to succeed in Venture Cup
To team up with someone who know something else than you, no doubt. That’s the best team; they are the ones who get to the furthest in invention probably they are the one to get to the furthest in real life, we can see that because we track our alumni. So if you are an engineer team up with someone who knows commerce and the other way around. It hugely important until you rise to a situation to sell something you don’t realize how important it is.