Start-ups in Sweden

 

I am working in a government-invested company. The company is in a nearly monopoly status, and is considered as a very stable and non-risky company. I am also accustomed to the stable circumstances on working in the company for about ten years. However, I am awakened to the entrepreneurship spirit today in Swedish small cities.

Fortlax was founded in 2014, and its business field is colocation, cloud, and consulting. Fortlax data center located in Piteå offers a wide range of digital storage services such as online backup, VPS and colocation.

At first, the company had no customers, and its founder, Anders Berglund, didn’t know what he should do. The turning point of the company was to attract BMW as its main customer. But the procedures were very dramatic. He wrote one e-mail per week to BMW for five months with photos of its datacenter. But there was no response from BMW. After that he wrote two e-mails per week for a month, at last BMW contacted to Fortlax. Fortlax appealed its geographic benefits for test driving in cold weather, political reliability and its sustainable power system. After long-lasting discussion, BMW chose Fortlax as its partner.

 

Concert Hall for employee in Compodium

Another Start-up company, Compodium is an-internet based video conference provider located in Luleå. It specializes in health care and secured conference. Like South Korea, Sweden has very good internet coverage, the company makes good use of the internet-infra.

Piteå Science Park

The most impressive thing about Swedish start-up groups was that they don’t fear mistakes and failures. They didn’t know everything about the business, but they started. And non-profit institutions like Petiå Science Park and Luleå Science Park, help the start-ups having only non-mature ideas. These are good examples of cooperation between business and municipalities, and could be considered to accept as benchmark cases in South Korea.

 

Entrepreneurship spirit is crucial to healthy industry. If nothing is done, nothing happens.

Team #17-8