Opening the Videoplaza archives
Tomorrow we are having a Videoplaza reunion in Stockholm with about 50 of us flying in from various parts of the world. This is a good time to reflect a bit and also open up some of the very early archives.
Videoplaza started with an idea in the shower May 2007 and together with Dante Buhay and Alfred Ruth we formed a company in October that year. This was after two pivots and some time with Fabian Bonnier. Exactly 7 years later, with almost 100 people in 8 offices and 26M USD of funding we sold the company to Ooyala who had very recently been sold to Australian telco Telstra.
The 7 years were an intense education in how to dream up an idea, build momentum with investors, colleagues and customers to eventually making it a reality. It was a constant battle for survival getting help from the great people around us, through patience, perseverance, working really hard and occasionally being lucky.
Starting the company 11 years ago I was a fearless 25 year old passionate to build something. There was a unique mixture of brutal confidence and extreme humbleness in myself and the early team that helped us forward. You can see some of this in my first ever keynote presentation here, VERY embarrassing.
Mastering the deck, here’s 3 of our early decks
Between 30–50% of my time as CEO of Videoplaza was somehow related to raising capital and managing investors so it was necessary to get good at it. We raised a total $26M over many rounds, loans and convertibles. I got a lot of help from others and I remember always being inspired by investment decks from other companies. So here are some of the decks that I’ve used to present our company over time.
The first Videoplaza idea 2007 (Swedish)
This is a good example of how big a pivot can be in an early phase of a company as you are exploring, learning, iterating etc.
The Seed Round Deck 2008
Things evolved quite a bit before we were ready to raise money. Here we had our first client, one of Sweden’s leading broadcasters Kanal5. We eventually raised €500k from Creandum and a number of angels.
The Series A deck 2009
On the back of the financial crisis we rasied €3.5M in our Series A from Northzone taking lead together with Creandum following.
Even though this stuff is ancient by now I hope it can give some inspiration and maybe even a good laugh.
And finally, I did a pretty extensive interview (1h 44min) with Mikael Zackrisson in 2015 about the entire Videoplaza journey. It’s in Swedish unfortunately but a pretty good review of the entire journey if there’s more interest.
Enjoy :)
