Is The Norwegian Startup Scene Hot Or Not? | Hacker News Reader

Is The Norwegian Startup Scene Hot Or Not?

arcticstartup.com

46 pointsSemetric31 comments

Right by the end of the article, he hits on one of the big pain points of starting a company in Norway, Sweden or any other small sized country compared to the US: The comparative lack of a home market. It's basically impossible to make it big in Sweden alone, a country with a population just slightly bigger than NYC. Expansion of course means grappling with international governance, international law, wildly differing cultures etc.

It seems to me that the large home market is probably the biggest advantage US startups have (together with comparatively easy capital and a healthier attitude towards new ventures).

To a certain extent you are right. But there are still very successful businesses only based on local markets in both Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

In Denmark for instance JustEat and Trendsales were pretty successful. Both have a heave part of logistics involved though.

If you are making something digital then always think of your home market as a market of 6Billion people.

Successful startups out of Denmark 100% digital but none of them choose to stay there.

Tommy Ahlers Zyb (aquired by vodafone) and Podio (acquired by citrix). TrustPilot.com, Zendesk (moved to the US), Unity (moved to the US)

Yeah, good point. I think it's vital to distinguish between local success and global success though; Sweden has a number of companies that have made it big locally but with a non-existent international footprint (Adlibris, to name one), and a select few lobal players, like Spotify.

I agree that you should look at the world as your home market, but in practice there's more to it than that. Just opening shop in another country usually means incorporating for example. Our founder has mentioned a few times that his biggest regret was setting up shop in England after Sweden, instead of going after the US directly. In hindsight, the gain/pain ratio would've been a lot better.

I agree. JustEat is making it global though.

Cool! I've never heard of them before, probably due to me not following the scene enough and them not being available in Stockholm, but I'll keep an eye on them from now.

Just-Eat is huge in Toronto now.

The tech scene in Norway is definitely nowhere near as good as Silicon Valley's. I live in Bergen, the second-biggest city in Norway, and the parts of the tech scene I have seen here seem very old-fashioned compared to the US. There are a couple of companies exploiting web technology for all it's worth, but much of what is going on is just old-fashioned consulting related to Microsoft's platform. Opportunities for real start-up work with equity and the whole shebang seem pretty slim.

Also, as dagw hinted at, the Norwegian oil industry has a tendency to suck in pretty much every talented engineer in the country. The oil industry is currently desperate for engineers and is importing skilled and ambitious people from all over the Northern hemisphere (Italy, France, Finland, even Thailand). I know people with degrees in applied mathematics who work with offshore oil drilling. The salaries and benefits you can get in this industry have a tendency to dwarf what you can expect as a salaried IT consultant. (For instance, the average salary for offshore oil workers in Stavanger is now more than 170,000 USD/year. Granted, offshore work pays better than land work, but many on-shore workers also have salaries in this range).

It stands to reason that tech will attract less talented people with a competitor like this. However, I would love to hear it if someone could disprove my theory. I don't have extended contact with the Norwegian CS crowd outside of my own university.

Similar to you I can only speak from my somewhat limited experience and group of friends, but since moving here (Bergen) in January from Australia I've met a ton of very well educated, up to date and motivated people working on interesting things.

On the other hand, it seems everyone else is working in Consultancies. I don't know what to make of that.

As a Norwegian IT Professional and Hackernews junkie, I have to suggest that the startup scene in Norway is not as hot as it could be. I am very aware of several Swedish sucesses (Spotify on top of that list), but I can't think of a single Norwegian startup that anyone outside of the business wouldn know of. It's actually surprising that the high level of education combined with the obscene amounts of oil-money floating around has not spurred more startups. I think it boils down to a lack of entrepeneurial spirit - you can basically make a very comfortable living in Norway without investing too much time and effort into creating a career for yourself. As any swede that has worked in Norway will tell you, at 16:01 the office is pretty much empty. Life's pretty good in Norway

Somewhat OT :

I'm a Norwegian-American dual citizen and have often thought of spending a few years working in Norway. I would like to establish rapport with with interesting people and companies, particularly in the startup community.

Would you have any thoughts as to how I could go about getting introduced and involved?

FWIW I'm fully bilingual, although having never actually lived in Norway or attended school there, my writing is probably slightly below college level.

I live in Stavanger, the Norwegian "oil capital". There are lots of tech companies here who make a living from serving the oil industry. I would recommend that you start out working for one of the bigger consultancy firms (Bouvet, Evry) - you get in touch with lots of people and you'll have some time to come up with the next big idea or team up with someone who beat you too it.

Thanks, I appreciate the advice. Truth be told, I hadn't actually considered Stavanger as I was working under the assumption that the majority of the tech scene was centered around Oslo.

Also OT - I thought Norway did not allow dual citizenship? http://www.udi.no/templates/tema.aspx?id=7397 - how did you pull it off?

That UD link actually does leave some wiggle room for dual citizenship :

"Although Norwegian law is based on the principle that dual citizenship is not acceptable, Norwegian authorities cannot answer for what legislation in your home country says about citizenship."

"In other respects than in the abovementioned No 1 and No 2 dual citizenship is allowed."

In my case, I was born and raised (mostly) in the US with a Norwegian father who is still a Norwegian citizen (permanent work visa). Therefore, I have held dual passports since I was a teenager and submitted the formal application for full citizenship when I turned 18.

While a lot of work was put into my application, including references from family and friend, I believe the most important element, from a legal standpoint and otherwise, was my immediate family.

Another aspect is that there is a very strong startup scene connected to the oil industry that competes for the attention of talented engineers. It is (or at least used to be) a lot easier to get funding and customers making specialized kit for the oil industry and related fields. I had a couple of friends working for small companies in this area and they paid much better than consumer software start ups and had really interesting problems for people with the relevant background.

On a related note, I was playing around with going to Norway to get a Masters in statistics. Does anyone have any insight on whether this would be a good idea or bad one? I suspect i'd want to move back to the US afterwards. Would the degree be marketable?

there's not many master students doing a pure stats degree at the university of Oslo, and as a consequence some courses are offered only periodically, but you can still "self-study" them for credits, and there anyways enough related courses in fields like computational finance, numerical analysis and machine learning.

https://www.uio.no/english/studies/mn-masters/modat-master/s...

regarding moving back to the US: you can always take a local job in the oil industry or perhaps in a global company like mckinsey and then move back when you have some real experience (it should be easy to get a job here)

He forgot to mention Artplant[1], who worked on Battlestar Galactica Online, and is also working on the Game of Thrones MMO.

Here's the "Jante Law", or Law of Jante, he mentions at the end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

"... a pattern of group behaviour towards individuals within Scandinavian communities, which negatively portrays and criticises individual success and achievement as unworthy and inappropriate."

[1]: http://artplant.no/

That is a somewhat misleading representation of the "Law of Jante". It is not specifically about achievement or success. It is rather a "small town syndrome" (Jante is a typical small provincial town) which says you shouldn't try to act as if you are different and better than other people. Outwardly flashy display of wealth is definitely breaking the law, but so is beeing indifferent to material possessions and living like a poor boheme or eccentic.

In typical protestant style, working hard and becoming wealthy and successful is concidered virtuous, as long as you dont "act different" but remain "one of the people".

Of course the opposite culture exist in big cities, were hipsters and celebrities try to be as flashy and individualistic as possible.

Anyway, I don't think The Law of Jante is a real impediment to startup culture, the real cultural issue is that Scandinavia doesn't have the same risk-taking culture of the US.

the real cultural issue is that Scandinavia doesn't have the same risk-taking culture of the US

Exactly. Courage is the biggest problem here.

Case in point:

The term "venture capital" doesn't exist in the Norwegian language. The closest translation is "risikokapital" which literally means risk capital.

This says a lot about our culture.

> This says a lot about our culture.

That's a big leap. In Danish we just say "venture kapital". There are thousands upon thousands of direct loanwords like this. I wouldn't read anything deeper into it.

Artplant is not really a consumer orientated startup, they are a game studio producing games that are then published by big publishing companies like bigpoint etc. So its more like a software consultancy/shop and i think there are many of those in Norway.

These guys at least are totally doing hot stuff - and global by the way:

http://highsoft.com/

does anyone know the status of data startups/jobs in norway?

I can't speak in general terms, but when looking for an internship for this summer I interviewed at five different companies.

They all seemed to be in desperate need of more technical employees, and some are forced to outsource parts of their software development, not because of high Norwegians wages, but due to a lack of demand on the Norwegian market.

Are there places where they advertise jobs you would advice?

You can look at www.finn.no where you will find alot of jobs. You can also check out http://skalar.no/?locale=en (where Im employeed) Oslo central RoR/mobile company - we are looking for talented developers. There also accours job listings for startups at www.irb.no

Thanks, very good info.

It is hard for startups in Norway to find technical talents, as the wages are to high in the large consulting firms. We in startupnorway.com (under dev.) are working on launching a job section there. In the meantime, feel free to tweet us at @Startup_Norway :)

I believe HighSoft is hiring:

http://highsoft.com/

EDIT: the deadline was in april; but not sure the position has been fulfilled yet

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