Erik Bergman – Keep Empathy in the Start-Up War Room

Erik Bergman started his career as a professional poker player while still a teenager. At the same time, he founded his first companies. At age 24 he started in 2012 Catena Media, a company that only three and a half years later would be listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange with a US$200-million valuation. He left Catena Media a few years ago and today is just starting up his latest project, Great.com, a company where the name alone cost $900,000. But this time around, he wants to do everything differently, which means giving away 100% of the profits to charity.    “We invested so much emotions and so much pride and ego into not failing, something that should have failed long time ago.”  Erik Bergman    Worst investment ever  Cash losses were never as bad as this   In thinking about his worst investment, Erik said he had lost a lot of money in a variety of ways. He did a lot of damage with a raid into crypto almost. He has done quite a few “shitty” start-up investments. But he realized that his worst investment cost a lot more than money, and that was when he lost his health, harmed his friends, and lost relationships.   First mistake was thinking ‘it’s gonna be easy’  In 2012-2013, he was busy starting several different companies at the same time, including that of a venture capital firm. One company was working with payday loans. His team were running a marketing company that had a lot of payday-loan clients. So they decided that if they could do the marketing, they could do it all. Of course it turned out to be much harder than they had ever anticipated it would be, and that was the first mistake they made: thinking it will be easy and then jumping into a business area with almost no understanding and with far too little research.    ‘It’s never easy’  So they started building the company and hiring people to run it. However, very early they realized that it was so much harder than they had predicted. Nevertheless, they soldiered on, and Erik hired one of his closest friends and a few others to help run the company and a couple of others. But this company just never found any traction. They had many technical issues and many struggles. Erik’s old friend was in charge of the technical side, which kept facing major challenges due to the size and complexity of the big system they built. By the time the system was up and running, they ran into troubles with the bank, which didn’t want to co-operate because they were competing with them. Thus, they couldn’t finance the operations and they needed to find other ways to fund it. Whenever they managed to solve one snag, they would be hit by the next one. It took a year before the venture became somewhat sustainable.   Legal environment changes, adding huge workload  Having already lost a lot in time and having spent a lot of money, there was then a change in the legal requirements that forced Erik and his team to change all of their back-ups, all the systems behind their sites and they had big problems...