DING-DONG - It's been a while since I've posted last time, so here's an update. My plan in February was to do research on a couple of project ideas I had, and then to talk to all kinds of people to see where exciting things happened, especially in Denmark and London. The plan was also to move not too fast, since it is easy to become enthusiastic and commit to all kinds of interesting ventures, and then suddenly be fully booked up. And now, I have partly fallen into that trap - but for good reasons! What is it I want? The stuff that motivates me the very most, is to do great things with great teams. Everything flows from the people on the team, and if it is great people working together in the right, high-performance, entrepreneurial fun-loving way, then amazing things can happen. From these kind of teams flows great products, happy customers and oodles of respect from investors & partners. And that again attracts even more good people, and if the leadership continues to step up, then Nirvana can be maintained for a very long time. That is awesome to be part of, can't get enough of it. Many people with my background do one of two things:

1. Become a classic investor, building a large portfolio of angel- or VC investments. That is very exciting, and you get to help all kinds of entrepreneurs, but my issue is that I don't think I'm ready for such a passive role. Any investor would say that they "add value hands-on", etc., but the truth is that with a portfolio of 15-20 investments and spending most of the time chasing new deals, then they are not really close to the action (and typically doesn't have any real, hands-on experience related to your challenges, but that's another story). And I don't like being distanced to what I'm doing, and the people involved.
2. Become a CEO for a big company. Well, first of all, there are not really that many companies based in Copenhagen where it makes sense for me to get involved full time as CEO, and I'm not interested in moving my family to another country for a long period of time. Secondly, the reason why I enjoyed running JUST EAT even though it was a 1,000-man company was that I had been there from when it was a small 35-man Danish company, so I had directly or indirectly hired almost every single manager in the company, and I had skewed the company culture exactly in the direction that I felt was right for the company - and me! Chances are, that if I got on board another company that was already big, then I wouldn't be a great fit for the culture and all kinds of "culture wars" would have to take place (had enough of that in the initial phase, when I joined JUST EAT five years ago). Thirdly, working for one company only would not leverage all the knowledge I have today about leading, developing, internationalizing and scaling companies. That is a skill set that is still a scarce resource in Europe, so I might as well leverage it across several companies.

So, the sweet spot for me seems to be working with a handful of companies in a more integrated, intimate way. Obvious choice. So, that is what I have chosen to go for the last few months. To be more specific, I will spend most of my time the next many years being chairman for companies that are still small compared to their overall potential, and where 1) I believe in the team ("Entreprofessionals"), 2) there is a great chemistry fit with me and the team, and 3) good fit between me and the challenges in the coming years. Geographically my focus is Denmark and UK/London, but I might still do a bit in other places. And I will also be doing a little bit of angel investments with a hands-off approach, but it will be limited with clear expectation management around my involvement. So far, I have started working with 3-4 teams, mostly companies with a clear focus on a specific vertical, and dominated by SME's that are under utilizing technology. One company I'm co-founding and will spend a very big part of my time on, for the others I will be an active chairman. None has been announced yet, but it will happen in the coming months. All very exciting, especially the project where a team has found a way to integrate 3D pizza printing, crowd sourced drone swarms and big data customer analysis with a social CSR twist - that will change the world as we know it!