Business at the Edge Episode 3 - Trond Riiber Knudsen

hello everyone and welcome to business at the edge our video interview series with thought leaders and practitioners at the intersection of edge computing ai iot and other innovative technologies my name is blaine matthew and i'm ceo of protecso the edge computing platform as a service now let's get started our guest today is swan river knudsen founder of trk group uh thank you for the time tron i think we're gonna have fun today yeah thank you so much for inviting me i'm really looking forward always you know we're so interesting to discuss with you blaine absolutely so for full disclosure krond is on uh the advisory board of protecto and it goes without saying i always appreciate his wise advice i think you'll see why in a thank minute you're welcome so trond you're listed as the founder of trk group what is trk group what's it about and what are you up to these days well um i um i did spend 25 years as a senior partner with mckinsey and company i was a management consultant but six seven years ago i saw that so many of the best people around me the best talent in mckinsey my very best clients left to become entrepreneurs and this was a big shift particularly here in the nordics and i always wanted to be on the right side of driving change um and certainly i saw it was not happening as much in the large incumbents anymore but more in the startup ecosystem so my idea was to be part of that so i uh stopped being a consultant with mckinsey a bit earlier than people expected and full-time dedicated myself to support entrepreneurs who would like to deploy cutting-edge technology against some of the biggest challenges we're facing and opportunities for for for entrepreneurs so that's what we do with the rk group and i decided to primarily focus on nordic founders who would like to build something global and i could recognize that for my days in mckinsey when i helped the nordic companies grow globally and i always felt that was a good ambition and it's also about kind of making certain that the business community here particularly perhaps in norway are transitioning into a greener uh more technology-driven business environment to make certain that we're modernizing we have been very reliant on resources here as you know oil and gas and but also you know no electricity and so forth yes we needed to upgrade uh and i felt that someone kind of in my position who had kind of relationships and a certain kind of credibility could raise my hand and say this is very important behind it and how many uh startups has trk group involved with today well it's quite a few i guess we have something you could call the seed the boutique um that means that we we like to get engaged early uh and rather in in many companies uh so we have a portfolio close to 100 companies wow and they are in in different stages as you can imagine from a couple of people to companies that are listed on the largest stock exchanges uh and have become you know major unicorns and so forth so it's a good kind of array of companies and you do this all by yourself or do you have help well i i after mckinsey i had this idea that i would like to have independence to be able to help people like you as much as possible um and not do a lot of administration so it's something i do because i'm very passionate about this and the people around me are people that likes to co-invest likes to help out likes to be on boards uh sometimes getting consulting again engagements so yes we are a bigger group but i don't have employees interesting so you mentioned 25 years at mckinsey maybe tell us a little bit more about your backstory how did you get to this position where you could be helping over a hundred startups uh help you know pat chart their path well the back story uh started with me growing up in a family where my mother and father was having a consulting company in engineering and of course my idea was to do the same as they did so i went to you know engineering school and so forth but i realized that actually the world was changing so much you know bill gates and steve jobs created the i.t industry the wall came down in berlin you know then ping opened up china there was so much going on and i felt that that engineering bucket was too small for me so i had to find a nice escape from the family business and the escape for me was to go to harvard business school and my parents never liked it of course but i came to harvard and mckinsey found me because they wanted to build something in europe and after a short conversation i joined mckinsey so that was what's going on and for 25 years i served primarily nordic institutions who would like to become global players and upgrading i would say the the quality of the larger companies here now i understand you weren't just a mckinsey consultant but you actually were very involved in the leadership level in training new mckinsey consultants that is that correct yeah i always had a big passion for people mentorship and building capabilities and i would say diversifying mckinsey mckinsey was not particularly diverse back in the days and one of my biggest initiatives were diversification was actually building functional capabilities to get much deeper in in in functional capabilities and to do that for 10 years i led over marketing and sales practice globally which ended up being around 20 of mckinsey in total um but i also led the whole learning initiative which basically is the capability building initiative at every 10-year level in the firm in mckinsey from very young associates you know all the way up to senior partners you're always going to learn it's very important keep a learning mindset um and we created a learning staircase with lots of different initiatives and i was overseeing that which i thought was a great uh a great initiative and that has also brought me to after i left mckinsey still up to six weeks a year i trained a new young mckinsey partners globally on the transition from being a consultant to being an inspirational partner yeah which of course is a big big shift and i bet you're always watching out for the next startup founder or ceo right in these groups that's absolutely the case um and also connecting the startups in our portfolio to large corporations being served by the people i meet at these events you could say that a lot of the way i work with a very broad portfolio and know very many people tree mckinsey harvard and also serve on corporate boards i'm on six corporate boards is that i can connect and i can i can never you know i can never promise exactly what will happen uh but often good things are happening yeah no no don't well i'm sure your background and experience is very relevant to many of the people that are listening to this or watching this video so tell us what what particularly excites you these days about what's going on at the intersection of business and and technology what what what uh gets your blood going well um sitting here in norway um i i basically i'm quite excited about the uh enormous i think focus uh and capacity in terms of people and capital no going into building new strong businesses and we had a very big gap here so when i started 67 years ago amazingly we spent a hundred times more in oil and gas investments annually than we did on venture capital in norway one two hundred so we had you know 20 billion dollars having oil and gas investments and 200 million dollars into venture so this is this is shifting now it's more like a 10 15 times increase in venture capacity over this short period of time that means that i'm very excited then to see that around our industrial base there's so much going on and we have initiatives in areas of course like climate climate tech the whole shift to electrification we are quite early we have the biggest penetration of electric vehicles in the world which is pretty interesting when you're an oil and gas producing nation and we have that um we have some really interesting areas within food and ag tech not at least because we have the again the largest fish farming industry in the world and there's a lot of interesting tech development on ai robotics biotech you know around that industry which i find very interesting i know you know industrial software development around the energy business the oil and gas business like cognite arundo you know really really interesting so so um here sometimes i feel that we are just too few people we only 5 million people here in norway that's nothing um and we just need to reach out and create global companies like we do together on protect uh you know talent here talent in the us talent in asia working together to create the next the next generation of tech driven global champions that's i think super exciting in that in that interface uh plane and then i think if there's one other thing uh in that interface it would be of course how important it is for the large companies the large incumbents to be open and curious to what's happening in the innovation ecosystem around these companies and this has now become a core ceo capability a core top team capability to understand how you do that you know how do you value venture-backed companies yes yes how do you integrate or not integrate no how do you run multiple initiatives building on you know different technology bets at the same time kind of all of these things uh are new capabilities for large companies and for us who have been around for a while after the dot-com bubble we remember how corporate venture capital was auto fashion and many of these companies sold their portfolios today there's not one corporate who are not engaging and it's enduring that's not gonna end so uh so it's also interesting from that point of view to bring that kind of uh insight to the to the large companies i think yeah that's very very interesting and i absolutely see that as well by the way for those that are wondering partexo was born out of a venture incubator called north scalar in in norway which is i think how we got our our connection and and uh one of the reasons you're connected with protect so we're part of your your nordic theme as well even though i am based in the u.s so thank you again for for being part of our journey as well so uh are you seeing any theme in your the startups you work with that uh relates to edge computing specifically or processing more data at the edge are you seeing uh are you seeing more of that crop up i'm interested in your general thought on the topic no absolutely and um in many of the uh industry areas and applications that are not particularly i would say important here uh we see it so we have activities for example in proptech where we see edge becoming very important not the least because in many or proptech declines you get very specific iot solutions new sensors after very specific you know solutions uh become very complex and then you have the incumbency with the old equipment with sensors yeah and then you have all the types of data lack of integrated data platforms often yes yes um and you know you're coming into that with kind of a mindset of creating you know platforms availability but not at least processing capacity and capability locally and then you're into edge immediately um and uh so i think you know in proptech uh we see a huge growth yeah of edge uh just as an example and a lot a lot you must see a lot in the energy industry as well generally you know not only oil and gas but the electrification space where norway is so far ahead actually than many other countries we work with yeah and you know because um you often get into that challenge of course in addition that you have lack of connectivity in certain situations like in mobility we all know about that you know and we have that also offshore i mean in many situations where just you cannot totally trust the connectivity at every point in time and edge is important you have latency issues uh in many applications where basically edge you know takes out the risk on latency and so i think i think what we find is whether you are in mobility you are in oil and gas and energy applications you are in in proptech um we are seeing edge all over the place we are even uh currently developing i would say a next generation hearing aid which is somewhere in between a traditional you know on-prem old hearing aid which has been the same for 30 years and an airport the thing that none of them are are connected to kind of cloud ai and edge computing so you're bringing edge into this and that opens up functionality that you only could dream about so um you know if you're if you're a creative technology innovator today i think you can even take kind of an edge mindset to many challenges that have not been fully resolved and at least we're trying partly with edge to do that in hearing aids and i thought that was pretty novel absolutely very interesting example and and i think it is a lot of these newer technologies are combining edge in other words processing close to where the data is being generated and cloud right it's about processing the data where it's most appropriate a lot of the last 15 years as you know was all about taking everything and putting it in the cloud and that makes sense for some type of applications but your hearing aid example is a perfect example of yes you have to process some data locally in real time you don't want your hearing aids to stop running because they don't have a connection to the cloud right but there are some things that it probably does make for some reasons that it doesn't make sense for them to be connected i i can't wait i can't wait yeah very very interesting well this is one of my favorite parts of the conversation where i often ask uh our guests uh maybe to dispute some aspect of conventional wisdom is there is there some area where you know most uh most folks are saying x but you might say why what would that be well uh blaine that feels like my full life in norway for the last seven years [Music] and i think perhaps the one area where i'm spending most time on this is the perception of let's say financial risk where um here it's been kind of the convention that if you have something built that is steel or concrete it could be an oil rig it could be a ship it could be a building road then you have something which is low risk it's low risk and you can use loan and you have collateral low risk then on the other side if you have something digital you know something in the cloud or whatever you don't even know where that cloud is you can't even see the code it's seen as very risky so what's happening today well what's happening is that concrete and steel are stranded assets and value in many cases of that is plummeting like they did for oil rigs here and suddenly the companies that were built on that wonderful companies like sidril for example that was worth up to eight billion dollars and owned by the richest man in norway it doesn't get safe ram went bankrupt and was taken out to bankruptcy court you know re-capitalized and then bankrupt again well wow you know and then on the digital side bickering unicorns like crazy yeah so so and here in the in in norway's daily the state and government is still very focused on protecting the old protecting the old steel concrete jobs in the old industry and not focused on the new because you know every lobbyist it's of course working for the old because that's where the money is yep and sometimes in norway i'm saying that together with my friend the ceo of innovation norway i you know he and i are the only two you know all the time spending time on the new yeah uh and we need to be more people there so i think that kind of dichotomy because between what is perceived to be risky and what exactly very risk sits is shifting rapidly very very interesting perspective tron very very interesting and that's something that hadn't occurred to me before but i think thank goodness for to norway and to the world that you are focused on on uh shifting that perception right and actually speaking of the world i did neglect to mention earlier that you are actually doing some very interesting work in africa right now do you want to tell us briefly what you're doing in africa fawn yeah thank you so uh i was i i was born in africa i was born in azerbaija in ethiopia and when you're born in africa you always carry africa with you as you know so i was always very close to the continent also in mckinsey and when i left and started my my company providing you know support entrepreneurship uh job creation and working on climate changes in africa became very natural so uh we have launched a number of companies particularly then in east africa where and i'm from um and a couple of examples that i think you know uh shows what we're trying to do and here we work very closely also with norwegian government uh in many of these initiatives um one one of them is that we brought antler to nairobi antler is a talent incubator that we started in singapore with a four novice you know three friends of mine from mckinsey and myself and some other people started antler in singapore it's where you bring people in who have perhaps 10 years work experience they would like to become entrepreneurs but she's never really doing it because the risk is perceived to be too high you don't find the complementary co-founders with different skills and so forth might not have a good enough id so you don't do it so we try to get after that to create an environment a platform where you can come into antler you know get a scholarship for two months meet other people create a company then we have a fund investment committee and we invest into the best companies and you build for three more months that model we started in singapore and then we started in nairobi so now in nairobi we are building 10 companies every year uh and we created the fund the first fund is 15 million dollars pretty much family offices from norway which is supporting this and we want to take it into more countries in africa the good thing about this is that it brings international capital into entrepreneurship in africa it brings capability in to to build what is state of the art also from a global point of view because when you bring digital technology in there's no reason not to build uh at top level uh in the world so we see that happening all the time and a lot of people come back to the continent after being educated abroad having worked abroad going back to the continent to build with the antler so that's a good example you know we started the only really large paper recycler uh in azerbaija and there we have 4 800 people involved in the network and we know migrating into overall waste management for the municipality and then we get into a very interesting landfill challenge which is very much connected to the climate change with methamphetam coming out of the landfills as a very kind of contributor negatively we're trying to work on this by sorting waste and then being able to incinerate to work with the biological to create proteins prolifera and so forth and really modernize the whole thing we work with that actually is uh is setting up a big cement factory in azerbaijan to burn waste and not coal and it's a big positive uh effect on climate so we're moving that into overall waste management and i think if you can crack that in azerbaija then we'd like to take that across the continent and that could be a very big contributor and i think on that sorting side that's where we'd like to bring in computer vision uh sorting technology edge technology um so uh plain we have to talk more about that sounds great that's very interesting and and so great that you're applying your your skills and your network to uh bringing a lot a lot of this innovation to africa that's why i had to ask about it well maybe to wrap up do you have a key takeaway or a tip for a business or technology leader that wants to drive the transformation of their business using some combination of these interesting technologies that we've been talking about yeah um it's interesting i was asked that by uh my friend tude lardal who is the chairman and owner of lardon medical that's basically one of the biggest health education players in the world uh and they saw technology coming in in terms of ai machine learning vr a are always going to influence their business and what do we how do you what do we do uh i think number one of course is not to be overwhelmed by complexity there are things you can do there are things you can do um and you know typically one of the things you can do is to start to hire great talent uh because when you want to do this type of digital transformation you want to make things happen you just have to have the right capability the right talent so we built basically in that case we built from i think 50 to 100 tech people to 650 including in bangalore in copenhagen so capability became very important secondly we actually went through a very strict the process of buy versus build because typically these large corporations they are very much i would say in the pocket of the large i.t consultancies and they will always tell you to create a road map and build build build build but there are companies out there that already can deliver to you protects you can deliver you know i didn't look and deliver coconut can deliver you know so you need to have a more open mindset as to where do you actually tap into the you know wonderful ecosystem of innovation companies out there and where do you actually build and be careful with the large i.t consultancies they

have a very specific own interest in bringing on this very long road map so be careful about that then third level what i think we did in that case was that we actually um started our own venture fund called the lardon million lifespan we have no four partners in palo alto and that fund is focused on investing into technology companies that support our vision of saving lives so it's connected to our you know corporate vision uh and by having that vehicle we get a deal flow and we get much more insightful as to what is happening in the innovation ecosystem around our company and sometimes that can lead us to do an outright acquisition like we have done in other cases we invest and follow the company and anyway we get a lot smarter um so there are a number of things of course you can do but i think you know don't get overwhelmed by the complexity there are ways to get started well that was a lot more than a tip that was a complete plan for how to uh how to be successful that was incredible i think that uh wraps it for us tom thank you so much for joining us today for this conversation very and very insightful really appreciate it thank you blaine very much it's been such a great discussion and thank you very much for inviting me you're welcome for those interested in hearing more about tron's thoughts uh i think it's best to follow you on linkedin is that right quite a lot of your stuff there good excellent and of course you can reach out to me on linkedin as well or via email at edge protecso.com thank you gentron thank you you

2022-04-03 11:52

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