From celebrating funding to celebrating having customers - via culture change

Many companies started by entrepreneurs who celebrate supporting entrepreneurship are corporates 2 layers below. The CEOs & Founders might not realize how their recently grown organizations with VPs & Directors etc are scared of doing decisions AND scared of buying from startups.

Sure, startups should go abroad quickly and get customers from US etc. But why is Sweden doing so well? Partly because their internal ecosystem is better from this perspective. Companies buy more from startups, rather than scarily ask for GDPR-compliancy, SOC2 certificates, proof of having existed for 3y+ etc.

A culture change is needed! If we want to get the ecosystem actually grow, let’s focus on providing opportunities for startups to help our scaleups and corporates. It starts from encouraging the decision makers: 1) Founders & C-level, 2) VPs, Directors and the “Corporate-people”, to buy from startups, give the right to use the logo, and prove their value.

If the startup service is shit, so be it, make sure to have the right to cancel at any point! But many times it may be surprisingly good and actually solve problems at a fraction of the price of an established alternative.

If we get 100 companies to try out services of 5 small startups each to solve their problems, we unleash the potential of 500 case studies that can easily lead to a total new customer count of 5000 for these small companies. Small way to contribute to a massive potential opportunity. No charity, pure business, win win win.