[ 00:00:00 ]I didn’t really see anything happening on the sustainability side of consumption. How will it look if we decided to make logistics but for a sustainable consumption, for circular consumption? What were they thinking? The stories behind Europe’s most promising clean mobility startups. Hello, my name is Dan Sobovitz and in this new podcast I’ll be talking to some very successful startup entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, women and men who are disrupting mobility as we know it. They’re making it more sustainable and more inclusive, both for their passengers and for their employees. In this podcast, I won’t be asking them about their pitch decks or their growth rates or their shareholder models. I’m much more interested in what were they thinking. How did it feel to go the lonely road of an entrepreneur?

 

[ 00:00:45 ] Did people follow them easily or did they think they were crazy? Was it fun all along or mostly frustrating? And deep down, did they really believe they were going to make it this far? We’re still in the Nordics. In the previous episode, I spoke with Vappaus from Finland. And now I have Wanda from Norway. And with me in the studio is Lars Syse Christiansen, CEO of Wanda, a company which enables circular logistics. Hey Lars, good to have you in the studio. Hi, it’s great to be here too. So let me start with a grandmother question. Explain to me circular logistics in a way that my grandmother can understand. And this is not to downplay my grandmother. She’s a very intelligent woman, but she’s not in the innovation world.

 

[ 00:01:21 ] So explain it the way that she could follow. Well, circular logistics is simply about taking care of old, old things that already exists. As you know, most logistics today is focused around moving new stuff around from a warehouse or manufacturing plant in China to maybe a port in Europe, to a warehouse in the Nordic city, and then the last mile home to you with a logistics carrier. That value chain is extremely standardized with standards and processes and technology, which have been developed over decades. What we do is to develop the same kind of solutions, processes, and technology to manage all the things that already exist in your homes, in your daily lives, and that we need to find ways to use for longer, if we’re going to succeed in reducing the material footprint from our consumption.

 

[ 00:02:13 ] So how does it work? I have something at home that I don’t need. I want to get rid of it. I post it. It’s some kind of a barter. If you have something in your home, so for instance, a sofa that maybe you want to have repaired or you want to sell it, we will come home to you. You will book a pickup at our portal in our app. We’ll come home to your home. We take care of the sofa. We will take photographs of it and document its state, pack it carefully, and take it with us in our electric vehicle. Then we’ll take it to our warehouse. And if you’re going to sell it, we will take some nice pictures and post the ad on marketplaces.

 

[ 00:02:47 ] So buyers can then interact with the sofa on the marketplaces. Look at it, look at the pictures, and then if they want to, they can make the transaction online and then get the sofa. And then they can also deliver it home to them. So it is an e-commerce experience, but it’s just for stuff that already exists. Okay, let’s rewind. So now you explained to me how it already works and it’s apparently successful. But bring me back to the moment when you’re walking down the street, probably snows because you’re in Norway, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘this is what’s missing in the world.’ This is what I’m going to invent. This is what the world needs me to do right now. I used to work in a solar energy platform company based out of the Nordics.

 

[ 00:03:25 ] So I worked with sustainable and renewable energy for a long time. At the same time, I live in Oslo, a city, and I’m the father of three girls, so there’s plenty of you know interest in shopping going around, and I didn’t really see anything happening on the sustainability side of consumption. I have to interrupt you. Boys shop as well. They do. Absolutely. But I think at least my girls are in the top quartile. Okay, fair. So I became curious. And also, you know, as a family, you have lots of different sporting equipment and different things that your family uses, and I didn’t really see any, you know, progress on the sustainability side that made it easy for me to choose a sustainable option. When something was broken, it was hard to figure out how to fix it.

 

[ 00:04:16 ] If I wanted to buy something second-hand, because maybe it was something I knew we wouldn’t use for very long, it was super cumbersome to use the existing second-hand options. So it just felt like there was something missing, and we became curious about what’s missing. Why is it so easy to buy new stuff, but so hard to take care of things that already exist? And what it boiled down to for us was the logistical part. So logistics is the wonder behind modern e-commerce. If you look at Amazon, and if you look at the big e-commerce companies, it’s really their logistics that makes this purchasing experience so simple. That’s when we decided that, okay, how will we do this? How will it look if we decide to make logistics, but for a sustainable consumption, for circular consumption?

 

[ 00:05:01 ] And who is ‘we’? It’s me and, you know, a group of first colleagues at other companies, people who are curious about logistics. So basically, how we started the company was to arrange a set of dinners and meetings where we just brought in people who were curious about this problem. All of them had some kind of passion that was relevant, either for, you know, logistics or for consumption or for just—just sustainability, in general. So, you were pitching over dinner? Pitching over dinner. Here in Finland, they like to pitch in the sauna. I thought it was a joke, but it’s actually a thing. Yeah, we can’t do that in Norway. So, for us, it’s over a bar. You do it over salmon. Over salmon and maybe a coffee or most likely a couple of beers.

 

[ 00:05:42 ] So, you’re meeting people for dinners. Who are these people that you’re pitching into at first? It’s typically people from my extended network. So maybe some people I’ve worked with in the past, and I remember, yeah, this girl, she was really passionate about sustainable consumption. And she’s a designer. So I’ll bring her in and I’ll ask her what she thinks about it. This guy, I know he’s a logistical expert, and he works at a home or a grocery delivery company. Brought him into the dinner and said, you know, we want to do something about this kind of logistics. Can it work? So at this point, you’re not asking them for seed money. You’re asking their feedback on the idea. Feedback on the idea and, to be honest, developing it. So you’re also recruiting them.

 

[ 00:06:19 ] Yeah, some of them ended up joining the company. And, of course, all of them had a smaller— bigger parts in creating the service as it became. So it wasn’t an idea that was really clearly shaped. It was more like concept and a frustration that we wanted to solve. And we discussed it with lots of different people to get help. How many dinners and beers and salmons? It was quite a lot of salmons and beers, but luckily it was a diverse group. So we had also a lot of Asian food, so we didn’t all have the fish. But I guess it was over a time of about a year, like 12 months period. So during this time, you’re still keeping your day job. Yes, everyone is still keeping their day job.

 

[ 00:06:56 ] You’re still developing it in the back of your mind, but knowing already that eventually you would like to leave your job and do this or not? No, I would say at the end of that process, because when you start out, you have this loose idea about a problem that you want to solve. And you don’t really know if it’s a problem that merits a company at that stage. Have you done it or had you done it before for other ideas? Or is it the first time you go into this process of meeting with lots of people and throwing an idea at them? It’s the first time I was the person who took the initiative to take it.

 

[ 00:07:26 ] But I’ve been a part of this as well in my previous company, Solar Platform, where we also had a period of – I guess – nine months where we really spent understanding the problem that we wanted to solve. And I think that’s a good thing because, of course, as an entrepreneur, you often feel you’re in a hurry, but it’s also important to spend time to meet people with different perspectives because that can help you to really get a good understanding of the problem that you want to solve. And you had the privilege of still having your day job while you were doing it, so you weren’t really in a rush. True. But it’s your first company that you’re founding. I was a co-founder of the first and this is the first where I can say I’m the founder.

 

[ 00:08:06 ] But in reality, I’m a co-founder here as well. So Wanda is the result of maybe ten people working and discussing together. And then at the end, five of them deciding to create a company. So the friends eating salmon and beer with you are convinced. How did the first investors react? The first investors were curious, and I think because we had a prototype of the service and we had a good problem description of what we wanted to do, and we had a very strong team that had the capabilities that you needed in order to do this. We had logistics people, we had product and technology people. So the investors spend a lot of time really understanding the potential in the market that we have seen and to understand, can this team really execute on their vision?

 

[ 00:08:50 ] Does this team have the competence and relationships that is required in order to come from an idea into something that will work in real life? So what did they think? The investors; they went for it. Eventually, they went for it. We had lots of meetings, and, of course, we had to meet more and more of them, not beers with them, only coffee, so unfortunately not. But a lot of coffees. And, but we spent around six months with discussing with different investors. But we were also very clear about what type of investors we wanted. So, we wanted investors who really understood our vision. And who had some kind of also domain competence that was relevant for us. So, we had investors from those who had built consumer platforms themselves.

 

[ 00:09:34 ] We had investors that came from the logistics side who had experience within logistics so that they could help us, but also challenge us in what we wanted to build. Fast forward today, where do you stand? Today, we are in two countries, Norway and Sweden. We have passed that magical one million euro revenue bar, which is an important milestone. We have done around 30,000 logistics transactions. So pickups, deliveries, secondhand sales, repairs. So we’ve come a long way. And now it’s all about proving that this can grow profitability. And that’s also the market we’re in these days. It’s important to show that. So now where we are, we want to make sure that our first market is profitable during next year, being Norway.

 

[ 00:10:18 ] Then set to scale this into larger urban regions in Europe, because it’s really a service which is made for, you know, the urban the urban regions where you have a lot of people living on a fairly dense space. So once everyone gets on stage. Vice president, let us think all right. So as everybody’s making their way to the stage, thank you. Jury member. And speaking of expanding across Europe, I should mention that startups participating in this podcast are those who won this year’s edition of the European Startup Prize for Mobility, which is Europe’s largest acceleration program for clean mobility startups. The Startup Prize for Mobility is a private-public initiative which brings together all major EU institutions, national authorities, philanthropies and multinational companies who jointly scout, rank and boost Europe’s most promising clean mobility startups.

 

[ 00:11:06 ] This year, the Startup Prize received over 700 applications from mobility startups all across Europe. You were one of the 10 who made it all the way until the end, but you did go through very rigorous selection process, both written and then in front of a jury who interviewed you. Eventually, the startup connects the winners with the partners for investment, for partnerships, it presents them with VCs and CVCs, and provides them with visibility all across Europe. We’re actually recording this episode in Helsinki as part of the winner’s tour, which brought us to Slush. So, to learn more about the Startup Prize visit Startupprize.eu. But, back to you, Lars, so you do have this European vision and that’s why I think you found interest in the prize; the prize found interest in you.

 

[ 00:11:57 ] The prize is also looking for startups that have a European perspective and could benefit from scanning across Europe. But, once again, if I understand correctly, you haven’t done something similar or you had not and you had not done something similar before. So, if you had to do it all over again, what would you have done differently when it came to Wanda? It’s a good question, I think. Maybe if we could like do it all over again, we would have paced ourselves a little bit better. Before we would have expanded into new cities, because- It didn’t sound from what you described that you went very fast. I mean, you took one year of discussions and then Sweden. I mean, but you still feel like it went a bit too fast?

 

[ 00:12:37 ] Well, you know, I think for us, we are a company that requires quite a lot of products and technology development. Even though it was important for us to prove that we could scale to other cities, scaling also takes focus and time away from product development in this case, because it’s a small team. So I think maybe if we would have waited another six to nine months, we could have had even a better or more mature product. It’s not like a huge mistake, but if I could do it again, I would say, yeah, pace ourselves a little bit, be a bit more patient to get the product even a little bit further. Are you slowing down now before you go into new markets?

 

[ 00:13:19 ] No, and that’s, I think, what we’ve learned now is that we want to prove that we can be profitable on a country level so that you can control the capital need in a company, which is important in today’s capital market. So now, what we want to do now is to have one country that generates cash flow, and then we are much more robust in entering into new markets without taking too much financial risk. Let’s go back a little bit to values and convictions. I thought it was interesting that both you and Mikko from Vapaus started off by telling me about your convictions, your children, the fact that you wanted to leave a positive impact. Specifically, the moment when my daughter was born in 2017 was like a pivotal moment in my personal life.

 

[ 00:14:02 ] I thought it was interesting in your case that when it came to your need to buy second-hand furniture or any equipment, it wasn’t even about the financial need to lower the cost, but really about the convictions of being more sustainable. It sounds almost like a Scandinavian cliche. We’re comfortable, we’re high in the Maslow pyramid, we want to do something right, but there’s another value which is very important for the European Startup Prize, which is inclusion, especially when it comes to women. Startups who apply to the prize even get extra points if they’re founded by a woman or if they have a gender-balanced leadership. And we were proud that 33% of our applicants this year were gender-balanced compared to a market of about 10%, according to a BCG study.

 

[ 00:14:43 ] But you told me that your company is made up 50% of women. So how did you manage to reach that kind of a gender balance? I think also, to be completely honest, we have done that over the past couple of years. But now, today, we have a completely balanced leadership team. I think what it’s a lot about is, of course, to have a foundational idea that they can relate to and that they can believe in, and that you have a group or a company where it’s already some level of diversity. If you have a big group of people, which is very homogeneous, that makes it harder to get the first one. And if you have a group of people, you have a group of people who are one in, which is different, whether that being a woman or a man or someone from a different culture.

 

[ 00:15:23 ] So I think having at least some level of diversity from the start makes it so much easier to expand on that. Because people recruit people who are similar to them? Yeah, because I think when you’re not necessarily similar, but if you have a completely homogeneous environment, if you’re different from that environment, you’re on the outside and you’re looking in. Is this a place for me? If everyone who you see there is completely the same, it’s a bigger bet. If you see an environment where people are at least maybe a bit different, maybe so they are from different parts of the country, maybe they have different educational backgrounds, or maybe they are from different cultures. Okay, this is an environment where they at least are used to, you know, dealing with different people and different people with different backgrounds.

 

[ 00:16:09 ] And I think that lowers the barrier. So was it a conscious decision from the offset, or it just so happened that you were diverse and then it was easier to continue that level of diversity? No, I think it was a conscious decision. And I think that we were also conscious that any diversity is good, because we are building a new and innovative service. We need different perspectives in order to find the right solutions. So that was our starting point. So from a business sense, we always felt it made sense. But it doesn’t sound like it was a struggle. I mean, I know as a moderator that often times, I mean, I insist to sit on gender balance or avoiding manuals and ensuring that there’s a gender, you know, visibility of women.

 

[ 00:16:47 ] Sometimes it’s not easy to find the right person. It sounds like for you, it wasn’t even a struggle. Well, it’s been conscious, I think, over time. And we’ve been careful in our managing our recruitment processes on the founder and manager level. And I wouldn’t say, I wouldn’t go as far as calling it easy, because we have been conscious about it and we have spent time. But also, we were very lucky, to be fair, that you know the first female in the founder team, she’s heading up our growth and product. She is an extremely experienced and renowned leader in her within her area in our country. So the fact that she is related and working at the company makes it a lot easier to attract other skilled and talented women or people with different backgrounds.

 

[ 00:17:35 ] So having that one lighthouse is also important. If I can paraphrase, it wasn’t a struggle, but it didn’t happen by itself. You were conscious of it. You made sure that it happens. Yes. And you kind of had your finger on it to make sure that every round of recruitment remains diverse. And that allowed you to maintain that and other forms of diversity. I mean, as far as I’ve never been to Norway, but I hear it’s a fairly ethnically homogeneous society. So when you speak about diversity, other than gender, what other diversity criteria do you put in place? No, for sure. I mean, Norway is a fairly homogeneous cultural country, but it doesn’t mean that diversity doesn’t exist. You just know how to look for it.

 

[ 00:18:12 ] So, you know, we’re proud to say, we have developers from Nepal. We’ve had colleagues from Poland. One of our co-founders is Australian. So there are many ways of finding that diversity. Are they all based in Norway? Yes, they’re all based in Norway. But also, I think diversity out of an educational background is important to have. We have people who have a design background. We have people who have social science backgrounds, and then you have people like me who are like more a diverse mix of different educations. Who are you, Lars? I am, I think, you know, fairly normal middle-aged man. I’m not kind of boring 45-year-old white male. But I’m obviously creative in some aspects in terms of finding problems to solve. I have a fairly high risk tolerance so that I’m comfortable with insecurity.

 

[ 00:19:08 ] Is that cultural or is that individual? I think it’s individual in me. But also, I think Norwegians in general are risk-seekers. If you look at our history, Norwegians have always gotten a lot of their income from nature. And being fishermen, you went into the sea to catch that fish. And obviously, it’s a high-risk venture. So I think taking risk is a part of the Norwegian gene pool, so to say, whereas our dear neighbors from Sweden and Denmark and great company builders as they are, are more, I would say, industrial, more like process focused, whereas a Norwegian is maybe more impulsive. We do have a Swedish on the podcast. So I’ll check her reaction. Check her afterwards. But more importantly, are your daughters now proud of you for the impact that you’ve put in place?

 

[ 00:19:55 ]The power of sustainable consumption, to really being able to reach out to consumers who live busy everyday lives, where you really have to penetrate such a massive amount of non-sustainable consumption options. I mean, we’re just done with Black Week, you know, the blackest week in all of air, in terms of consumption, and to penetrate that noise and show people that there are sustainable options out there, which is now more and more, more easily available, I think that’s, that’s the most important thing for us to succeed in.

[ 00:20:47 ] Brilliant. It was great to have you. It’s great to have you as a winner of the European Startup Prize for Mobility in our fifth edition and a part of our tour. I think you made it to each and every stop of the tour. We’ve so far and very happy to be a part of it. We started in Lisbon, then went to Lucerne in Switzerland, and now here in Helsinki. This was Lars-Syse Christiansen, CEO of Wanda, a company which enables circular logistics. To learn more about any of the startups on our podcast, visit startupprize.com or startupprize.eu. ‘Startup Prize: What were they thinking? The stories behind Europe’s most promising clean mobility startups.’ You can find all episodes on your podcast platform. I’m Dan Sobovitz, and in the words of Lars, choose re-commerce rather than e-commerce. See you next time.