Sverre Dueholm On Raising $200 Million To Start A Local-First Premium Audio Entertainment Subscription Service And Building A Tool For Accessing Reliable Energy Data

Sverre Dueholm’s entrepreneurial journey traces his remarkable successes and resilience in building and scaling not just the company but also the product and people. He talks about flying solo and prioritizing work over a social life, eventually learning to create the optimum balance.

Sverre’s latest venture is Comundo, where he successfully instituted a four-day workweek, achieving higher productivity and creativity levels. It has attracted funding from top-tier investors like People Ventures and Likeminded.vc.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Sverre emphasizes bridging the gap between creative ideas and their practical implementation, highlighting the importance of surrounding yourself with a capable team.
• Introducing a four-day workweek at Comundo boosted productivity and employee well-being, demonstrating the value of balancing efficiency with employee health.
• Sverre stresses the importance of selecting investors who share your vision and complement your team, prioritizing strategic alignment over financial backing alone.
• Early entrepreneurial setbacks, like a failed music platform, taught Sverre the importance of understanding technical execution and effective communication with engineers.
• Growing Podimo rapidly taught Sverre the difficulties of managing a large, distributed team and the need for robust HR and organizational foundations.
• Sverre’s experience managing technical failures, user feedback, and imposter syndrome underscores the value of perseverance and adaptability in entrepreneurship.
• Sverre advocates for structured downtime, arguing that sustained performance requires rest, similar to how athletes recover between intense training sessions.

 

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About Sverre Dueholm:

Sverre Dueholm has a diverse work experience spanning multiple roles and industries. Sverre is currently the CEO and co-founder of Comundo, a position they have held since May 2022.

Prior to this, they were a co-owner and co-founder of Podimo, where they served as the Chief Product Officer until December 2021. Sverre also founded My Heart Beats For in 2011.

Sverre has extensive experience as a CEO and co-founder, having previously co-founded and served as the CEO of WakieWakie from 2015 to 2019, and MusicGeek from 2009 to 2014.

Notably, MusicGeek was a mobile application that offered music quizzes and served as an innovative PR strategy for the music industry.

Additionally, Sverre has worked at Substanz A/S, where they held roles as a project manager and a text and scriptwriter from 2006 to 2008.

Overall, Sverre’s work experience highlights their entrepreneurial spirit and leadership skills, with a focus on co-founding and leading various companies in diverse industries.

Sverre Dueholm pursued their education at IT-Universitetet i København from 2012 to 2015, where they completed their Cand.it. degree in E-business. Prior to that, they attended Roskilde University from 2007 to 2010, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Dansk & Kommunikation.

Connect with Sverre Dueholm:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: alrighty Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. so do Today, we have an amazing guest. you know I guess that they has done it you know a few times. you know Again, the building, the scaling, the financing, you name it. you know All of that good stuff that I would like to hear. and Right now, you know he just started his latest baby. We’re going to talk about that. you know The previous one is flying too. so you know He’s had remarkable success. um And again, we’re going to be talking about other topics like scaling a company, not just the product, but also think about the people. Also saying they’re saying goodbye to the social life, you know which is the—I think that a lot of people have alluded to this in the startup world. And I think that there’s always a balance. And if you don’t take care of yourself, then nothing else you know is really going to matter, right?

Alejandro Cremades: I think there was a Harvard study that talked about happiness being tied to the relationships that you have, the degree of relationships that you have. So again, you know super inspiring conversation. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Zvere Duoham. Welcome to the show.

Sverre Dueholm: Thank you so much, Alejandro. Thanks for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born and raised in Copenhagen in Denmark. Give us a walk through memory lane. How’s life growing up for you?

Sverre Dueholm: Well, pretty good, actually. I mean, i’m i’m I’m incredibly lucky being born in Copenhagen, I think, because growing up as a kid, I mean, it was easy. I could go to school wherever I wanted to. I had parents who um were quite entrepreneurial as well. so they they I grew up in a place where we had would have construction workers all the time because they you know my my my and my my room would never be finished. There was always something going on. We had a lot of guests. so I had a great yeah i had great time when I was a kid um and had a hard time leaving in Copenhagen actually. I sometimes envy other people who’ve traveled the world more than I have, but but but say you should come here. it’s ah yeah Copenhagen is ah it’s it’s it’s a neat little place, definitely.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, in your case, um you came from a family of entrepreneurs. So you saw early on the ups and downs you know of building something from nothing and scaling it.

Sverre Dueholm: yeah

Sverre Dueholm: Yes.

Alejandro Cremades: So how was that like for you?

Sverre Dueholm: Well, I certainly saw the the risk it comes with up close because it wasn’t unusual for us that ah that that my parents would have a kind conversation with me when I was as young as 10 that we might not be able to stay in the apartment because, well, the business wasn’t going that great and and sometimes It was pretty similar to when in an early stage startup, I think you talk about how how little how short your runway is. That was a bit how it was at home when when I grew up.

Alejandro Cremades: So in your case, I mean, it’s like um you know you had it in your blood. You knew that it was it was going to happen eventually. And in fact, you um went at it you know in your 20s, early 20s.

Alejandro Cremades: So how was that journey like all the way to, let’s let’s go let’s let’s give it this a shot.

Sverre Dueholm: here

Sverre Dueholm: but I think i was I was a part of a group of friends where you know whenever we would have a beer, we would come up with this new venture that we would do when we we started dreaming about building this and that. and It was a bit of everything. so there was no kind of everything that they The one project didn’t have anything in common with the next one, so it’s just it was just random ideas.

Sverre Dueholm: And at some point, I felt that a few of my friends were starting laughing about it, because I talked a lot, but I didn’t do anything about it. And then I sat down with one of my friends and we agreed, we can’t we can’t become the joke of the of of the group. So now we actually need to do it. ah so So we really took the step in my late 20s, where we just Jumped on a project that we’ve been working with in theory for a couple of years. We both came out of the music industry and and wanted to do something at the time that could help.

Sverre Dueholm: amongst others, some of our friends who were struggling to make money with music. So that was really the opening for us to begin with. We did really poorly. We didn’t know anything about digital. So we we we started start it with a website and then turned it into an app once the app store came around.

Sverre Dueholm: um pretty quickly realizing that token to ah talking to engineers is very, very different than talking to one another. So we hadn’t done anything like that before. And what we experienced was that when talking if if you if you’re not able to articulate what it is that you want to do, then you get exactly what you asked for, but not what you wanted. So we pretty much just crashed and burned that thing within a couple of years. But it was a very it was It was meaningful and we learned a lot and then I went to the IT university.

Alejandro Cremades: Well, well what what what you say we learned a lot.

Sverre Dueholm: but

Alejandro Cremades: but What was the lesson that you took away from that journey? One.

Sverre Dueholm: was Well, first yeah first of all, ah I wanted to do something digital again, I knew that, but but the fact that I just couldn’t articulate what it was that I wanted to do, that I saw that the gap between someone who’s creative And the ones who will be able to turn that into something is just enormous. If you don’t have anyone who can speak both languages or translate what it is that someone like I would say to something that an engineer would be able to turn into something substantial, then you’re screwed. Which was very much what I told them at the IT University where I applied and said,

Sverre Dueholm: um I’m i’m ah about to start my second venture. I crashed my first one. I really don’t know what I’m doing. Would you please help me i understand? ah So I just laid my cards on the table and then went went to school ready to learn.

Alejandro Cremades: So then what happened next?

Sverre Dueholm: Well, the next thing was then while I was there, um i I then had this this, it was a very small idea with my younger brother actually. We’ve been talking for years about ah feeling that being woken up by an alarm clock in the morning was just super annoying. So we wanted, we imagined that if if someone would say something nice to us in the morning, you know, we imagine that someone would just say Alejandro,

Sverre Dueholm: Good morning, coffee is ready and you have a meeting in half an hour so you might want to get it into the shower. Just make it more pleasant. That was the idea, nothing else. And then we started building that app and initially it was friends being able to wake each other up. So you would still be in control of your alarm clock but I could send you a message and wake you up in the morning. That was it.

Sverre Dueholm: But we then changed it after a year or so into something different. And then came, somehow we merged it with podcasts. So we had users who said, well, couldn’t you get some celebrity to say something? Well, we could try. And then it started with comedians making jokes in the morning. That became a bit too aggressive for users. Then they said, could could it be a bit longer? Could you maybe?

Sverre Dueholm: ah do yoga sessions or whatever and And before we knew we had this platform with so much ah very very different content and then we really merged into turning it into this podcast service where we also created very very short form format just because you don’t have an hour in the morning to listen to content so we started creating content that was three to five minutes long.

Sverre Dueholm: And that pretty much just propelled into becoming this service. We just didn’t really know how to make money of it because the users wouldn’t pay for it. And and and the people creating the content, ah they obviously wouldn’t either. So it was it was kind of hard for us to figure out how to how to make money of it. At the time,

Sverre Dueholm: I then had i had a very, I would call it a one-man advisory board. So there was this entrepreneur here in and in in Denmark who’s, he he’s he’s been a household name in the Starlok community for years and i he was nice enough to spend, ah say, a few hours every other month with me to to talk about how to get and get on with the project and what should I do? What should I add? What should I change?

Sverre Dueholm: um And then he called me late in 2018 and said, well, ah’ I’ve actually been listening listening to podcasts now. He’d he’ done it on another service and he said it was a really crappy experience. I’m i’m sure we can do better than that. um And in about two, three weeks, we just Right before Christmas in 18, we then talked about, okay, we we can actually build something that would be different and better than the other services, and then founded in 2019 Polymer.

Alejandro Cremades: which became a smashing, smashing success and it happened literally in a kitchen.

Sverre Dueholm: Yeah, a podcast.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, so, so, so what, what, what, what goes through, through how, because I mean that it’s a crazy story, right?

Sverre Dueholm: thank Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: So you guys are hearing a kitchen, you’re not cooking food, you’re cooking a startup, right? And, and then all of a sudden that goes from like people in the kitchen, just like sitting around thinking about it, working on it to all of a sudden, like a hundred people in like 18 months.

Alejandro Cremades: And this is, this is crazy.

Sverre Dueholm: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it it is. And it was completely new for me as well, because I had only done these classic bootstrap startups, you know, sitting in the basement, a couple of guys, we had some employees, but we never, we never became more than six or seven people.

Sverre Dueholm: and So when Morden and I sat at his place up to Christmas in 18, I had my little service and and his his basic idea was, you know we he’d listen to a show on another service where when he finished one episode, he didn’t it didn’t just continue to episode two. And he didn’t get any recommendations for new content. So his his his thinking was,

Sverre Dueholm: There’s so much great content out there. How can we, could could we create a service where that makes it easier to discover great content? Could we add to that original format? But none of us have created content like that before, so pretty quickly we need to bring in another co-founder if we are to do this, someone who knows something about content, and then call another guy. Negolizers his name, and then there was the three of us. and And over the next weeks,

Sverre Dueholm: it the idea The idea just grew and and then we decided to do it but early 19 we had my little service and my my little product team ah to go with and then we started going out and raising money pretty much on 10 slides and big dreams.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. So so what ended up being the business model of Podimo for people that listen you know to to get it?

Sverre Dueholm: It’s a subscription service. It still is. and the and And the kind of the grand vision that we had for it was that we wanted to create an ecosystem where all these great content creators like yourselves and others would be able to make money of it. But traditionally, um it would be a public radio that put their ah shows on demand. And then it was a selected few here at home in Denmark that would get some and sponsor deals but in generally it was public radio and enthusiasts creating the content. So we set up we set up deals where we would split subscriptions 50-50 with creators and paying per minute. So we thought that was a pretty fair model. We realized pretty quickly though that it takes so many subscribers

Sverre Dueholm: that not only use the service but that listen to that specific show and no other ah for it to ever become a substantial payout because it would just be split between so many different shows and we just couldn’t get to that critical mass and in in in terms of making any meaningful revenue. So after a year We changed the model and then started bringing in household names from Public Radio, from other services that had a big following, a big audience, ah because they would drive in users themselves and then ah pretty much yeah bring bring in what whatever it was we had to pay for for them to join. um And though we grew quickly and it went really well, it lost a bit of its magic because this this vision that we had at the the outset was lost in the process, which was

Sverre Dueholm: yeah which Which was really sad because we didn’t succeed with what we initially set out to do.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, one what one one thing that happens, too, when you go through that type of of crazy growth, it’s like it feels like things are breaking all the time.

Sverre Dueholm: question

Alejandro Cremades: now It’s like driving a Formula One car where all the pieces are wobbly to a certain degree.

Sverre Dueholm: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: um How did it feel for you guys and how did you go about making sure that they you know you were able to do to do damage control with ah with everything that was breaking around you as you were continuing to scale this thing?

Sverre Dueholm: But yeah, very much so.

Sverre Dueholm: it It was difficult for us, like for anyone else. And it was, like you say, there were so many parts that were breaking. One being we started actually building the the service and what we built was we had two apps. So one for ah one for the App Store, one for the Play Store. We then had a full back office system where all our concrete content creators could upload and handle other all the content. And then we had our own.

Sverre Dueholm: ah handling subscriptions and and everything else. so Basically, full products. We built all that in less than seven months before we released it ah with a team of six engineers, which was crazy, really. and ah The one thing that broke first was the Android app. so Once we launched, we could see that we had we done about, I think it was about 50 50 iterations and tests with the with with the the app for for the iOS, ah but only half of half as many on the on the Android side. And with so many different ah phones to to develop for, it just broke apart. So one week in after the launch, our rating in the Play Store was 1.3.

Sverre Dueholm: and We were just hammered and advantage you know completely torn apart for the for the for the crappy quality of the app, which for me, i was I didn’t say that before, but I was the CPO and I managed managed to tech him as well. So everything tech and product was my responsibility.

Sverre Dueholm: and it was i didn’t I didn’t sleep those first weeks and and I sat personally in the Play Store and in the App Store and answered every every single review there was and just started engaging with all the all the users that we had to just understand what is it that isn’t working and then report that back to to the product and the and and and the engineering team. so And over time It took us about six, seven months to get it up to ah to scratch and then to ah raise that level. So that was one of the one of the places where it broke immediately when we when we when we launched, which was that was tough.

Alejandro Cremades: And then also, what about the people breaking down right and and people burning out?

Sverre Dueholm: so

Alejandro Cremades: Because one of the things that they you learned too with Podimo was that working culture and and and and people getting sick and and and things like that that.

Sverre Dueholm: happy

Alejandro Cremades: I think that was a really big lesson on for you that, hey, it’s not only about you know ah saying goodbye to your social life. You need to also take care of yourself kind of thing.

Sverre Dueholm: Yes. And I mean, one one thing is yourself, but once once you then become a manager of of of of of other people, that responsibility just changes completely. And i didn’t I didn’t live a healthy life in the startups I ran before I got to polymer one. I certainly didn’t do it while I was there.

Sverre Dueholm: ah because the pressure was just intense. From the expectations to the service when we launched it, just because I was surrounded by people who are very high profile in in Denmark, I was kind of a no name in the group. ah So i ah I felt that I had a lot to live up to ah to and and I really struggled with my with my imposter syndrome during ah during that time just because I was i was i was the unknown ah but I was responsible for for everything product and tech. um But also what I realized pretty quickly was the more my teams grew, I had one in Copenhagen where the product a team was based and then our tech team was and is still based in Vilnius in Lithuania.

Sverre Dueholm: So having a team of seven that go to fifteen they grew to that grew to 20, the responsibility that came with was just was just enormous. and And especially because I had employees that were very far away from me, so I couldn’t see them on a daily basis. um That was something that I hadn’t done before. and and to and and And that comes with its own set of challenges. Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, the company has also raised quite a bit of money, as we’re talking about people now. And you know we’re talking about over $200 million.

Sverre Dueholm: Yes.

Alejandro Cremades: So how has it been the journey, too, of of going through the motions and seeing you know the transactional side of things? you know Because you were used to the bootstrapping way of doing things, but this this was different.

Sverre Dueholm: Yeah.

Sverre Dueholm: Yeah, it was. I remember the very first pitch we did to a BC as a group. So, Morten and Nicolaj, my two co-founders and I, we went to this meeting ah with a BC and Morten said, well, the two of you are just here for questions. So, if they ask you anything about the product or the content, you just answer the questions. I’ll do the i’ll do the talking.

Sverre Dueholm: Unfortunately, when I came into the room, I was the last one to enter. And I remember it was this very, very large ah you know conference desk and there was a big screen at the end, the biggest I’d ever seen. And I ended up sitting at the end of the table by myself with all the investors on one side and my co-founders on the other. On the screen were two other offices with the exact same big tables.

Sverre Dueholm: And I felt that everyone was looking at me and I didn’t know what to do with my hands and I wasjust sitting there and feeling really, really awkward. And then it felt like three minutes into the into the into the meeting, modern just looked at me and said, well, tell them about the product vision. I was like, we didn’t have a product vision as such at the time. It was just, it was so early, everything. And the first question I got asked by the investors was, so from a product perspective, how are you going to beat Spotify?

Sverre Dueholm: I was like, I knew they had just 300 million user services. How am I going to answer that? So I did the best I could. But when we got out of the room, I just punched more and said, but what the hell? And he just said, yeah, I just need to know if you could swim. um And you know from then on, i yeah I stepped up my game and i i I didn’t come unprepared to any meeting ever again. um and And luckily, I Yeah, I didn’t drown.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s incredible. And obviously, the rest is history. Now, the company you know has now hundreds of employees. In your case, ah you decided to turn page around the Series B. So how was that journey like hey you know like leaving or turning page in and after such a tremendous success of a chapter?

Sverre Dueholm: op

Alejandro Cremades: you know What got you to the point of, hey, you know maybe it’s time to explore other pastures?

Sverre Dueholm: Well, there are two things. First of all, i well ever ever since yeah ever since childhood with the upbringing I had, it was always about trying to do something that could make a difference for others, so something impactful. It was never about My motivation was never to make a lot of money. That that in itself, for me, money is a result, not not a goal. That’s how it’s always been. So once we got to a point where it was just about opening up another market or getting it another big name in and driving in more users and and help just doing small changes to lower the churn or increase retention,

Sverre Dueholm: I just didn’t love it anymore. so so that That was the one thing. um We just lost that certain purpose, I felt. That that was really my drive to begin with. and The second a thing was was what’s the people side of things. I felt that We grew much faster than we were ready to. ah We were hit by COVID, just like anyone else. At the time, we had we had people in four different locations. and More than 100 in total, and we just weren’t ready for it. We didn’t have anything resembling HR at the time. ah We didn’t have a safety net for our people. um And they just really started to struggle. and And I saw that up close, and they did so in in in all our locations.

Sverre Dueholm: And that’s when I started thinking that or I started realizing that scaling a company is about so much more than just having a product. You can sell in other markets. It’s fine that you have a service that they’ll pay for in other markets as well.

Sverre Dueholm: But if you if you’re not ready on if if you don’t have a strong foundation in place on the people’s side, it’s going to break at some point. And you’re going to see people starting to suffer. You’re going to see churn.

Sverre Dueholm: ah so and And in the beginning, I think I felt really uncomfortable with it. but and and and and it was I think some would consider me to be very empathetic and and and and and and sensible type. But I also realized it’s very much about the numbers as well. It’s it’s it’s super expensive to lose people and having to replace them. And around that time, we started to see people leave a just because they were burning out by the by by the you know the the high tempo that it was all going on in. um

Sverre Dueholm: And we didn’t have a safety net for them. um I feel we lacked that. So after I left, um everything is in place there now. It’s it’s gone great. The people operation at Polymer is is is a state of the art.

Sverre Dueholm: ah But when I left, we didn’t have it. um And the decision I made then afterwards was, I now want to figure out how to build and not so much what to build. So before I even choose or what the next thing could be, I need to figure out how to build a foundation that would be applicable, whether I would do something digital or would run a warehouse business. It it didn’t really matter. There must be some something that can go across that you could build basically anything on top of.

Sverre Dueholm: so I spent about six months doing that before then ah yeah meeting a couple of guys who tried their hands in the energy space and built this very scrappy product, which is what we also do today just and in in a better version.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. So, Comundo. So let’s talk about Comundo now. ah What is Comundo?

Sverre Dueholm: yeah

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, how are you guys making money with Comundo?

Sverre Dueholm: Well, we we work with energy data. ah and and And the reason we do that is because energy data is needed almost everywhere, but it’s very hard to get to. um so you will have all these different utility providers that a that that serve a lot of different clients. There’s no ah infrastructure that goes across the different energy sources. Usually, electricity is the one that’s pretty set accessible, whether you’re ah youre ah your your a business or or as a private person as well. Probably, you have an app at home where you can see your consumption on the electricity side, but more likely than not,

Sverre Dueholm: you won’t have that for the ah and the other energy sources and you certainly won’t have it have one service that goes across all of them. So that’s what we build and the reason why is because for one,

Sverre Dueholm: Starting with the biggest businesses, they have to report on ah their consumption and on their carbon emissions in the annual report. So there’s ah there’s a lot of regulation being rolled out as of this year and the next. Secondly, we’ve built a product where you can in real time monitor your consumption and you can actually start optimizing your your operations. So what you changed yesterday, you’ll be able to see the effect of today.

Sverre Dueholm: you can if you have a portfolio of more buildings you can start benchmarking them against each other so you can start looking for outliers if you have twenty twenty buildings what’s going on with this one over there in Connecticut it’s spending so much more electricity than the other ones you can start making the adjustments so it’s it’s It’s for the reporting purpose, ah but especially that what really drives the business is actually the optimization. The fact that you can make those small adjustments and see the effect of it as well.

Alejandro Cremades: What were you looking for? because i mean here you’ve also raised a you know i I think you’ve raised over $3 million today, but obviously, you know coming from a um success um like your previous business you know into this one, I’m sure that it was easier to raise money.

Alejandro Cremades: and Also, what were you looking for you know from those investors? How did you filter them to make sure that you had the right people for this journey, which you know was now the second time that you had raised money and now you had the experience of doing so?

Sverre Dueholm: Yeah. Yeah. so So to your point about it being easier, it it wasn’t a wasn’t easier to raise money, but it was easier to get the meetings because they could see that I’d done it before. So getting the first meeting was certainly easier than it was in earlier in my career.

Sverre Dueholm: um And when when looking for the right investors, for me it was very much finding someone who would understand my view of how you build the people foundation of things. So ah someone who buys into into my vision as to how how to build something like that. That was that was really important for me. um And then,

Sverre Dueholm: and What I would say about the whole fundraising thing and about and finding the right investors, for me it’s pretty similar to building any other team really. It’s about finding complementary skills, a soft skills as well, where you can bring in people that will work well together. So it’s’s it’s about much more than just the money for me.

Sverre Dueholm: A lot of people have some some some cash to spare, ah but but i need I need someone who will ah give me something I don’t already have and that can improve the group and and the team in order to achieve what it is that we want to go and do.

Alejandro Cremades: So talking about people here, let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s take on this one. and And most importantly, you know, vision, because people really are betting on the future that you’re living into here with, with Comundo. If I was to allow you to go to sleep tonight, and you wake up in a beautiful world, very beautiful, raise yourself for this one, where the vision of Comundo is fully realized.

Sverre Dueholm: yeah

Sverre Dueholm: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: What does that world look like?

Sverre Dueholm: Well, ah you would certainly have a lot fewer people that would be suffering from stress. And and I can say that because we’re definitely the first startup in Denmark that launched with a four day work week, which is completely unheard of in the startup community. I mean, the We’ve always been told that we need to work 60, 80, 100 hours a week to succeed. that you basically have to say goodbye to your social life and and and do nothing else that you’ll see your co-founders more than your spouses for at least five years and so on. You know all those punch lines. I don’t believe that at all. I’ve seen it up close what it does to people if they over-prolonged amount of time work for 80 hours. it It doesn’t last. It will do for a while, ah but it’ll break at some point.

Sverre Dueholm: And as a business owner, I think that we owe it to the people that we employ, that the number of that the contracts we agree with them, the employment contracts we have with them, that the number of hours it says that they’re supposed to work isn’t just something that we’ve, you know, it it it isn’t, it isn’t just something that we’re telling ourselves, it’s it’s the actual number. And some would say that this is, that it doesn’t make sense to see it that way. But I would say,

Sverre Dueholm: if you don’t well if you if if you If you start, say you agree on a contract for 40 hours with an employee, if that employee works for 60 and that’s how you raise your money with investors, then you show them that your capacity is actually 50% higher than it actually is. You can’t go back from that.

Sverre Dueholm: so if you want to if if if

Sverre Dueholm: You’re messing with the numbers, basically, is what I’m saying. So so you you actually have to be pretty strict about this in order to ah be able to assess your actual capacity. Or you will end up in this this never-ending cycle where people work too much, where they’ll burn out, and where you will eventually don’t have to replace the people, which is much more expensive than just making sure that they yeah that that that that they’re doing well and that they’re thriving in the first place. So what we do here is our employees don’t work on Fridays, which is a to the startup community pretty unheard of. But what it does is now 18 months in,

Sverre Dueholm: We can see that productivity has go has gone up significantly. Creativity has gone up. The really amazing thing is now 18 months in, we have our well-being survey that we do quarterly. So to the one of the questions we ask is, are you ah ah you a better version of yourselves to the people that you care about in your private life that you have around you? That could be family and friends.

Sverre Dueholm: 100% of our 22 employees say yes. Does and the way we work at Commundo improve your mental health? 100% say yes. Even 81% say that their physical health has improved. So all these numbers are going up while we are actually increasing productivity. And the way that we can say that is because we’ve we’ve measured it from from from the outset. And we we have some very strict ah principles that people have to follow in order to be able to do in four days what others do in five, and even more than that. So one thing we’ve done is, in compared to the average in in in in in both the public and the private sector, in all countries it’s it’s the same, employees spend about 10 to 14 hours sitting in meetings every week.

Sverre Dueholm: We’ve cut that down by more than half ah and turned that into production time instead. and That gives you almost the fifth day that we’re losing. The next thing we’ve done is we have slashed the length of meetings from hourly meetings to only 15 minutes or max 30 minutes, and we don’t have any internal meetings in the morning. So we have dedicated time in the morning where people just get to do their work, and our engineering team do even more than that. they only have meetings once on one day a week. They have some very short standards in the morning and the rest of it is just production time. um And then we’ve measured, we’ve we’ve asked them to to to to keep a log on how much they get done a day. And on average, all our employees have now added ah two and a half hours per day in productivity.

Sverre Dueholm: times four you have the fifth day again and and ah all the while they’re all doing better we have people who have struggled with with with the depression we have when they came to us we have people who struggle being overweight so i have one of my teammates has lost a 50 kilos this year, all while b and ah managing a very large team and just being the best the best professional you could you you could imagine. So it’s pretty incredible that we are now seeing you can actually you can actually treat people well, work less hours, and get a better output at the same time. That’s what we’re really proud of.

Alejandro Cremades: So let’s say I bring you back in time and I bring you back in time to that moment, you know, where, you know, let’s say you were in your early twenties and you were about to launch your first business, you know, let’s say, you know, or 2008, 2009, you know, timeframe.

Sverre Dueholm: Yes. Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: And I’m able to give you the opportunity of sitting in front that younger’s there and giving the your younger self one piece of advice before launching a business.

Sverre Dueholm: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: What would that be and why, given what you know now?

Sverre Dueholm: What would that be?

Sverre Dueholm: Well, it certainly would be. It’s, it’s I mean.

Sverre Dueholm: it it might just It might just be that I would tell myself that breaks are important. you know ah because one of the things that One of the things that I think is connected to the whole ah to the whole dogma about having to work 80, 100 hours is that breaks are considered to be a waste of time.

Sverre Dueholm: And it just isn’t true. We have we have ah brought in researchers showing us exactly what it does for the brain to to do a break. So we were very disciplined about that as well. ah We treat breaks the same way that professional athletes would do it. They would tell you the same. you can’t just ah You’re not getting anywhere if you work out for 12 hours straight. It’s the exact same thing with the brain. um So I would probably tell myself that Working for 12 or 15 hours a day is not going to get me anywhere except ah crashing at some point, which I have done in the past.

Alejandro Cremades: It’s fair for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say, hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Sverre Dueholm: Oh, they can do so. They can definitely reach out on LinkedIn. I check it daily. I try to interact with as many people as I can. I i love engaging with others and listening to ah to to their stories. I like to share whatever it is that I do with them if they find it at all interesting. yeah Just shoot me a message and i I’ll be right there.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing was there. Thank you so much for being on the deal maker show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Sverre Dueholm: Alejandro, thank you so much for for for having me.

*****

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