Why I moved to San Francisco

Leaving the fish and the fjords for bigger opportunities. This is the second post in the Megacool Series about what brought us start our company in the startup Mecca: San Francisco.

Photo by Kellen Riggin on Unsplash

Being from Norway, one of the happiest countries on Earth, I often get this question: "Why did you move to San Francisco?" Why would you leave clean streets and a functioning welfare system for the complete opposite?

My usual response is: 

"What Norwegian companies do you know of?"

"Eh..."

I've yet to meet someone who can name one! It's not like there are no Norwegian companies, but too few have caught the eyes of the broader world.

Why is that?

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This is the second part of my Megacool startup journey. Here’s an overview:

• Part 1: How the Megacool journey began

• 👉Part 2: Why we chose San Francisco to start our new company👈 YOU ARE HERE

• Part 3: Embracing Failure – How we tested 10 different startup ideas over 10 weeks

• Part 4: Hackathon 1-3: From AI travel agent to photo management adventures

• Part 5: Hackathon 4-7: The messy middle

• Part 6: Hackathon 8-10: Wow, that's megacool!

• Part 7: How we validated the Megacool SDK

• Part 8: How we built our co-founder team

• Part 9: From idea to live product

• Part 10: Our bootstrapping hustle

• Part 11: How we raised $1.6m in funding

• Part 12: How we got acquired

• Part 13: From Alpha to Acquired: The product, growth, and business model journey

• Part 14: The emotional founder roller coaster

• Part 15: The epilogue: Reflections on the whole journey

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Eight years ago, my colleague Nicolaj and I decided to start a company together.

We had been grinding together at Dirtybit, one of the few Norwegian global breakthrough successes. Dirtybit had launched its mobile game Fun Run a few years earlier. The game is best described as Mario Kart on mobile, and people couldn't get enough of it! We had over 65m organic downloads, reaching over 15% of the US population as our player base. Several Middle Eastern countries almost made it a national game!

At one point, we learned of a sheik who made all his seven wives play back-to-back for a week to win a digital golden fox… 

1: Someone rebranded a jetski with Fun Run. 2: A wedding in Kuwait where everyone is playing Fun Run. 3: Someone’s Fun Run birthday cake

That said, we were a small but mighty team of 8 who managed to find our way despite the lack of experienced Norwegian entrepreneurs to learn from. At the time, only Telenor and Opera Software had similar experiences handling millions of users.

It was only during business trips to San Francisco that we met savvy and experienced entrepreneurs and VCs who advised us on how to grow big.

Why was that? 

Nicolaj and I had discussed why Norway wasn't a hotbed of startups: there were not enough entrepreneurs to look up to. We thought too few trailblazers had shown us how to dream big and go beyond the fish and the fjords. We needed more champions who could inspire through action and say: "You can do it too!"

"Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don’t believe it. I think the problem with Europe is not that they lack balls, but that they lack examples." (Randall Stross, The Launch Pad)

We decided to take matters into our own hands. Our mission became to fill the gap the Norwegian startup ecosystem needed:

Create future role models. Either by becoming them or by learning enough to help others become them!

The Norwegian mentality, at least back in 2015, was also that failure is bad. When you fail, people will encourage you to get a real job instead of getting back up on the horse and trying again. 

Failure would also feel tied to your identity: "I failed, vs. my company failed."

But in the US, investors prefer founders who have tried and learned from their mistakes. They expect you to have tried multiple times and encourage it. So then, what does this have to do with me being in San Francisco, arguably the most expensive and dirtiest place to live?

Claire Hughes Johnson writes in her new book Scaling People:

"to make a breakthrough performance improvement (...), you need to set an uncomfortable pace for yourself."

When we left Dirtybit to start our new Megacool venture (pun intended), we knew that the best chances for success would come from surrounding ourselves with the most experienced entrepreneurs and learning from them. We wanted to have the opportunity to meet trailblazers we wouldn't otherwise meet. We wanted that uncomfortable pace Claire talks about to push us out of our comfort zone to learn as much as possible. And most of all, we didn't want to look back and think: "What if"? So we jumped in with both feet and moved to San Francisco during the summer of 2015.

Two young and naive entrepreneurs ready to conquer the world.

San Francisco is a magical place — so much serendipity. You never really know who you'll bump into on the street. It's probably the only place where you might mistake a millionaire for a homeless person! My early San Francisco experience taught me to constantly challenge myself to say hello and strike up conversations with strangers whenever possible. 

Just within the first few months, we were fortunate to make so many incredible and life-changing connections:

• Andrew Chen (now a partner at a16z) hosted a few intimate invite-only events with ~10 other people. The conversations were like no other and challenged me to think bigger.

• Tiago Forte, now the creator of Building a Second Brain (BASB), hosted a Design Thinking workshop. I ended up on his newsletter following his workshop. I eventually became an avid BASB supporter, and it's been instrumental in changing how I work today.

• I met Veronica Mittal, an inspiring female investor who started her fund only at the age of 23, at a TechCrunch Disrupt Female Founder event. She would organize intimate hikes with other founders and make new friends. Some had several M&As under their belts, and others have unicorn status today. I learned a lot from our conversations, and their focus and dedication inspired me.

So, eight years later, what do people answer when I ask them what Norwegian companies they know of?

Unfortunately, the answer is still none.

Although the Norwegian startup scene has reached adolescence since 2015, fostering successes such as Kahoot, Spacemaker AI, and Dune Analytics, it's unclear to most where these successes originated. Reflecting on this, I don't think a company's origin country matters to others than a country's aspiring entrepreneurs. As the Norwegian startup scene is still relatively small in comparison to similar-sized entrepreneurial thriving neighbors; Finland, Denmark, and Sweden, the need for role models is still strong.

So what am I doing about it? I've been so focused on leading by example through my Megacool and later Medal journeys that I've not been as proactively helping others as I had hoped.

After stepping down as COO from Medal earlier this year to spend time with family and recharge, I finally have more time to pay it forward.

Returning to the reason for moving in the first place, I believe I can contribute more by staying tuned in to San Francisco's entrepreneurial ecosystem and sharing my learnings with the Norwegian entrepreneurs through advice, investments, writing here, opening our home to scrappy founders, and hopefully through leading by example in whatever I do next.

To me, San Francisco remains the global hub for startup minds. Residents and visitors alike. I would love to meet you if you're in the area or next time you're visiting. Please remember to name at least one Norwegian startup by then ;)

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Continue reading the next part here: Embracing Failure – How we tested 10 different startup ideas over 10 weeks